The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dr. Steiner: Well, gentlemen, perhaps one of you has a question you would like to ask me today.

Question: I would like to know why people with blond hair are becoming increasingly scarce. Formerly, there were many fair-haired people in the region where I was born, but now there are far fewer. Why is this so?

Dr. Steiner: Your question fits quite well into our discussions, and I can consider it after I describe the human eye for you, as I promised to do earlier. We have already studied the ear; now we shall look at the eye. You may have noticed that blond hair is closely linked with blue eyes; as a rule, blonds have blue eyes. Your question relates to this matter, which you will understand fully when we examine the eye.

Eyes have great significance, indeed, for the human being. It might be assumed that people born blind do not benefit at all from the eyes; nevertheless, they are still part of them, and they have the function not only of seeing but also of influencing the entire nervous system, inasmuch as this originates in the brain. The eyes are still there in one who is born blind even though they cannot see. It is placed in the socket but something is wrong internally, especially with the optic nerve. In addition, the muscles that control eye movements exist also in a blind person, and actually continuously influence the nervous system. Thus, the eye is, indeed, one of the most important organs of our body.

The eye, which is really like a miniature world, is placed in a cavity formed by the skull bones. You might tell yourself that it is something like a tiny world. The optic nerve fills out the retina and terminates in the brain, which I shall outline here (sketching). So, if this is the eye seen in profile and sitting in the eye-socket, then here on the right is a canal through which the optic nerve passes. The eyeball lies buried in fatty tissue and is surrounded by bony walls. Attached to it are six ocular muscles that extend back into the bony walls of the socket. These bones are directly behind the upper jawbone.

In the anterior part of the eye is a completely transparent, clear tissue through which light passes. That the tissue looks black is an illusion; in reality, you see through the eye to its rear wall; you are looking through the transparent skin all the way to the back of the eye. The round blackness you see is the pupil, which looks black because the back of the eyeball is that colour. It is like looking through the window of a dark room; if you think the window itself is black, you are mistaken. The interior of the eye is completely transparent. This tissue is tough and opaque here and transparent in front. Within it and toward the rear is another layer of tissue possessing a network of fine, delicate blood vessels, which thicken here. Around the pupil is the iris, which in some people is blue and in others gray, green, brown or black.

Between the iris and the transparent tissue is a transparent fluid. Where you see the round blackness is the transparent skin, the cornea; behind that is the anterior chamber. It consists of living fluid and is shaped somewhat like a little glass lens. The actual lens of the eye is located here, where these delicate blood vessels come together and where the iris is formed. This structure, called the crystalline lens, also contains a living fluid. Its outer cover is transparent, permitting you to see the blackness behind it. Unlike a glass lens, it is mobile; it moves especially when you need to focus on something nearby. In that event, it is shaped like this (sketching), thick in the middle. When you need to look into the distance, it is bent like this, thin in the middle.

Next to the iris are delicate little muscles, which we tense to make the lens thicker when looking at something close up, or relax to make the lens thinner. A person's living habits also affect the lenses. If you often use your eyes for close work, like reading or writing, gradually the lenses become permanently thick in the middle, and you become near-sighted. If you are a hunter, however, frequently looking into the distance, then the lenses become thin in the middle and you will become far-sighted. Another thing to consider is that in youth the tiny muscles located in and around the iris are still strong and elastic, and we can accommodate to our field of vision. In old age they become slack. This explains why many people become far-sighted with age, but this problem can be corrected. If a person's lenses are too thick in the middle, glasses are prescribed with lenses that are concave. These will compensate for the thickness of the eye's lenses. Some people even have a twofold problem, needing one set of glasses for clear distance vision and another set for close up. If the lenses of the eyes are too thin, the glasses will have convex lenses. Their thickness is added to the lens of the eye and compensates for the defect. You could say that we are able to see because we can correct the defect of the lens. The lens in our eye is like that of our glasses: near- and far-sighted. But the lens in our glasses stays the same, while that in the eye is living and can adjust and accommodate itself.

Behind the lens is also something like a living fluid. It, too, is completely transparent, permitting light to pass through everywhere. This gelatinous and crystalline substance completely fills the interior of the eyeball. So here in front is something like transparent “hard water,” the aqueous humour; next comes the transparent lens, and then comes the vitreous humour, which is also transparent. The optic nerve enters the eye here, and reaches approximately to here.

This optic nerve is extremely complicated. I have drawn it as if the main nerve fibre simply divides here, but there's more to it than this. There are actually four layers of nerves surrounding the vitreous humour. This is the outer layer of the nerve (sketching), which acts like a strong mirror. When light enters the eye and hits the layers of the retina, it is reflected everywhere. It does not go into this (probably referring to the nerve canal) but stays in the eye. The outer layer acts like the wall of a mirror and reflects the light. A second layer of nerves intensifies this reflecting capacity. As we have said, the nerve that lines our eyeball consists of four layers. The outermost layer and the second outer layer reflect back all the light into the interior sphere. Thus, within the vitreous humour we have actually only reflected light. A third layer of nerves consists of the same substance that makes up the gray matter of our brain. The outer parts of our brain are gray matter, not white. Another “skin” constitutes the fourth layer. You see, the vitreous humour is placed within a complicated “sack.” This enables all the light that penetrates into the interior of the eyeball to be reflected within the vitreous humour and to live therein.

What we have in our eye is something that looks like a complicated physical apparatus. What is it for? Well, imagine that a man is standing somewhere. When you look at him, an inverted picture is produced in your eye because of the lens and vitreous humour. So, if a man stands there (sketching), you have a small image of him in the eye, but owing to this apparatus, it is an image that stands on its head. The eye is just like a camera in this respect; it is much like a photographic apparatus in which the object photographed appears in an image upside down. That also happens in the eye; since it is a mirroring device, when light enters, it is reflected. Thus, in the eye we have the image of a little man. Even with all our modern sophisticated machinery, something like the human eye can certainly not be manufactured. We must admit that it is altogether extraordinary and marvellous.

Now, picture to yourselves the starry heaven; form an image of the light-filled sphere around the earth, and then reduce this picture until it is quite small. What you then have is the interior of the human eye. The human eye is actually a world in miniature, and the reflections in the eye resemble myriad surrounding stars. You see, these outer walls do not reflect evenly. There are many tiny bodies, which, like miniature stars, radiate light toward the centre. If we were as small as the image of the human being in the eye and could examine it from inside, its interior would seem infinitely large. Our impression would be the same as when on earth we look up to the glittering stars at night. It is indeed so. It is interesting that the eye is like a miniature world and that the tiny human image produced in the eye by reflections would have the same feeling, if it were conscious, we have at night under a starry sky. It is really quite interesting!

Well, I said, “... if that image possessed consciousness.” But if we did not possess our eyes, we would not be able to view the starry night. We see the night sky and its brilliant stars only because we have eyes; if we close them, we do not see the stars. Nor could we see the starry firmament if the eye did not already contain within it a miniature world. We say to ourselves that this miniature universe really signifies a big world. This is something that must be clearly understood.

Imagine that a man shows you a small photograph of himself or another person. You will realize that even though it is small it was taken of a regular-sized man. You are not encountering the actual person in this picture and, likewise in the eye; in reality you have only this tiny miniature starry sky within you. You then say to yourself, “What I have here before me is the `photograph' of the immense starry sky.” You do this all the time. You have within you the little starry sky of the eye, and then you tell yourself, “This is the photograph of the great starry sky.” You actually always picture the real starry sky from the miniature firmament in your eye; you conceive of the universe by means of this picture within. What you really experience is the infinitesimal firmament in the eye.

Now you might say, “Yes, but this would be true only if we possessed just one eye like the cyclops, whereas we have two eyes.” Well, why do we have two? Try this: Look at something with only one eye. It will appear to be painted on a backdrop. We do not have two images of an object, which we see in proportion and in the right dimensions only because we possess two eyes. Seeing with both eyes is like grabbing your right hand with your left. We are conscious of ourselves because from childhood we have been used to saying “I” to ourselves. The little word, “I,” would not be in the language if our right side were not aware of our left. We would not be conscious of ourselves. We become so accustomed to the most important things that we take them as a matter of course. A hidebound philistine would say, “The question of why one says “I” to oneself does not interest me. It goes without saying that one says “I” to oneself!” Well, he is a narrow-minded and prosaic person. He does not realize that most subtle matters are based on the most complicated processes. He does not know that he became used to touching himself as a child, that is, touching his left hand with his right, and thus grew accustomed to saying “I” to himself.

This fact can be traced in human culture. If we go back to ancient times, to the days of the Old Testament, for instance, we find priests who—excuse me for voicing such a heretical opinion—often knew much more than the priests nowadays and who said, “We want to teach man self-awareness.” So they taught people to fold their hands. This is the origin of folding your hands. Man touched himself in order to find the strong ego within him and to develop his will. Things like this are not said today because they are not understood. Priests today simply tell members of the congregation to fold their hands in prayer; they do not give the meaning of this gesture because they themselves do not know it anymore.

When we see with our two eyes, we feel that what is there in the light is in fact spatial. If we had only one eye, everything would appear as if painted on the firmament. Our two eyes enable us to see things in three dimensions and to experience ourselves as standing within the centre of the world. In a good or bad sense, every man considers himself to be the centre of the world. Therefore, it is of great importance that we have two eyes.

Now, since it is so important for man to use his eyes for seeing, we overlook something else about them. We are not so ignorant in the case of the ear. I believe I have mentioned already that when we hear we also speak; that is, we ourselves produce what we hear. We can understand a spoken language only because of the Eustachian tube, which runs from the mouth into the ear. You surely know that children born deaf cannot speak either, and that people who are not taught to speak a language cannot understand it either. Special means must be used to gain an understanding of what has been heard.

It does indeed appear that seeing is the only purpose of the eye, but a child learns not only to see with its eyes but also to speak with them, even if we don't pay much attention to it. The language of the eyes is not as suitable for everyday use as is the language directed to the ears, but with it you can discover whether a person is telling a lie or the truth. If you are the least bit sensitive, you can discover in the way he looks at you whether or not he is telling you the truth. The eyes do speak, and the child learns to speak with them just as it does with its mouth.

In the language of the ear the larynx, with its function of uttering sounds is separated from it, and thus there are here two separate aspects. In the case of the language of the eye, there are muscles right within the organ and also around it. It is the muscles that make the eye into a kind of visible organ of speech. Whether we look somebody straight in the eye, or have a shifty look, depends on the muscles that surround the eyeball. In the case of the ear, it is as if it were contained within the larynx, as in fishes. In man the ear is separated from the larynx, but in fishes they are joined to form one organ. The act of speaking is separated from hearing, but with the eye it is as if the larynx with its muscles surrounded the ear. The eye is situated within its speech organ as if the ear were placed within the larynx. In humans it is like this (sketching). Here we have the larynx, the voice box, which goes down through the windpipe into the lungs and up into the palate. It enables us to speak. From the mouth we have a connection with the ear.

Now imagine that the larynx is not like it is in humans but that it spreads out much wider. Then we would have the broad larynx that Lucifer possesses in my wooden statue. The larynx is so large that the head fits in between, and it reaches up on both sides to surround the ear. With this organ we would both speak and hear. With the eye we do just that; we speak through the muscles that surround the eyeball, and through the eye we simultaneously see. So in some respects the eye is conceived like the ear, but in other respects it is, of course, quite different. This, then, is the purpose of the muscles I have drawn here.

We can say that we speak of what we know, and we consider those who say things of which they know nothing to be more or less fools. We say of such people that they are talking to themselves, shooting off their mouths. As a rule, however, sensible and rational people express what they know. We do not speak consciously with the eye, however, for we would have to be shrewd fellows, indeed, if we could consciously speak the language of the eyes. This process is unconscious and accompanies our other behaviour. The people in Southern Italy, for example, still speak of an “evil eye.” They still know that a person who has a certain look about him is false. They talk of an evil eye because they sense that the eye expresses the whole nature of a man without his being aware of it. This superstition in Southern Italy goes so far that some hang little charms or religious medals around their necks as protection from it.

So you see how marvellously the eye is formed. A person who studies the eye in this way simply cannot say that there is nothing of the soul in it. It is simply stupid and philistine to say that the eye has no element of the soul. People say that light penetrates through the pupil into the eye, passes through the lens into the vitreous humour, produces an image here on the retina, and then is transmitted into the brain. Modern science stops right there, or it might state further that the light in the brain is used to produce thoughts. This description gives rise to all sorts of nonsensical statements that lead to nothing.

In reality, the light does not reach the brain. I have explained how it is reflected in the eyeball as in a mirror. The light remains in the eye, and it is important to know that it stays there. The interior of the eyeball is like the illuminated starry expanse. The light remains within the eye and does not penetrate directly into the brain. If the light did enter the brain, we would not be able to see anything at all. We can see because it does not do so. Just imagine, gentlemen, that you are standing here in this room all by yourselves; there are no chairs, nothing but the walls. The room is completely illuminated within, but you see nothing. You know only that it is illuminated, but you can see no objects of any kind. If the brain were only filled with light, we would see nothing because it is not solely on account of light that we see. Everywhere the light is kept in the eye and illumines its interior. What does this mean? Well, imagine that we have a little box. I stand with my back to it; I have not seen it before. I must reach behind myself to be able to know that it is there. Likewise, when the eye is illuminated from within, I must first feel the light to know that it is there. I must first feel the light, and this is done with the soul. In other words, the apparatus of the eye produces something we can feel. The soul passes through the muscles and feels or senses the little man I have mentioned within the eye.

Every organ within the human being shows us that here we must say that the soul observes, feels or senses what is within. If we examine everything carefully, we discover the soul and the spirit everywhere, especially in the eye. After a while, we can get the feeling that we are sitting in front of a peephole here (referring to his eye). When I look at you, you appear within, but I form the conception that the image within is the person outside. This is how the eye works. Just imagine that it is a little peephole through which the soul forms the idea that what it observes is the vast world. We simply must recognize the soul's existence when we actually examine the matter.

Now, I said that here is the choroid (referring to his sketch of the eyeball). It contains tiny blood vessels and lies under the optic nerve and its network. The optic nerve does not reach all the way to the front of the eyeball but the choroid, with its muscles, does. It extends to the lens and actually holds it in place. Here, as I have mentioned, is the iris surrounding the black pupil, which is nothing but an aperture. The iris is quite complicated. I will draw it a little larger, as seen from the side. So here is the iris, attached to the ciliary muscle. The choroid and lens sit within, held in place by the iris. Seen from the front, the iris has a front wall and a back wall. On the back wall are little coloured granules, which are microscopically small sacks. In everyone they are filled with a blue substance, and this is what one sees in blue-eyed people. In their case, the front layer is transparent, so you see the back layer of the iris, which is filled with this blue substance. In a blue-eyed person you are really seeing the back wall of the iris; the front part is transparent. Brown-eyed people have the same blue substance in the back layer of their iris, but they possess also brown granules in front of it. These cover up the blue ones so that all you see are the brown. A black-eyed person has black granules. You see not the blue but the little black sacks. It is the iris that causes a person's eyes to be blue, brown or black. The iris is always blue in back, and in blue-eyed persons it possesses no coloured substance at all in front; in brown-eyed and black-eyed people, it contains coloured granules in front that obscure the blue granules in back. Why is that? Well, you see, these tiny little sacks are constantly being filled with blood and then emptied. The blood penetrates the tiny granules in minute amounts. In a blue-eyed person, they are constantly being filled with and emptied of a little blood. The same thing happens with brown- and black-eyed persons. The blood enters, deposits blue or black coloured substance, then leaves again and takes the coloured substance with it. This is a continual process.

Now, some people have a strong force in their blood that drives the substances from food all the way into the eyes. This gives them brown or black granules. Those with black granules are people whose organisms can drive the blood most strongly into the eyes; the substances from nourishment easily reach into the eyes. This is less the case with brown-eyed people. Their eyes are not so well-nourished, and a blue-eyed person's organism does not drive the nourishing substances far enough into the eyes to fill the front part of the iris with them. It remains transparent and all we can see is the back part. Thus, a person is blue-eyed because of the way all the substances circulate through his organism. If you observe such a blue-eyed person, you can say that he has less driving force in his circulation than one who is black-eyed.

Consider the Scandinavians. Much of the nourishment must be utilized in fighting off the surrounding cold. A Nordic man does not have enough energy left to drive the nourishment all the way into the eyes; his energy is needed to ward off the cold. Hence, he is blue-eyed. A man who is born in a warm, tropical climate has in his blood the driving force to push the nourishing substances into his eyes. In the temperate zones it is an individual matter whether a man possesses more or less inner energy.

This also affects the colour of hair. A person with strong forces drives food substances all the way into his hair, making it brown or black. A person with less driving force does not push these substances all the way into the hair, and thus it remains light. So we see that blue eyes and blond hair are related. The one who drives the food substances forcefully through his body gets dark hair and eyes; the one who does it less vigorously gets light hair and eyes. This can be understood from what I have told you.

When you take into consideration the most important aspects, you can find meaning for everything. The earth on which we live was young when it brought forth those giant megatheria and ichthyosauria that I have described for you. The earth was once young. Now it is past its prime; it is growing older and some day will perish from old age, though not in the way described by the materialists. We are already faced with some of the signs of the earth's old age. Therefore, the entire human race has been weakened in regard to the driving force that moves the food substances through the body. So what part of the population is going to be the first to disappear from the earth? Dark people can last longer, for they possess greater driving force; blonds have less and become extinct sooner. The earth is indeed already into its old age. The gentleman who asked the question pointed out that there are fewer blonds around than in his youth. Because the earth has less vitality, only the black and brown peoples attain sufficient driving force; blonds and blue-eyed people are already marked for extinction because they can no longer drive nourishment with the necessary force through their bodies.

We can say that fair people were actually always weaker physically and that they were only mentally stronger. In former times many people were blond, but they were strong in spirit and knew much of what many today can no longer know. This is why I called your attention to how much people knew in olden days. Look at ancient India, five thousand years before the birth of Christ. The original inhabitants were black; they were quite dark. Then people with blond hair migrated from the north to the south. The Brahmans descended from those who were especially revered, the fair Brahmans. In time, however, blondness will disappear because the human race is becoming weaker. In the end, only brown- and black-haired people will be able to survive if nothing is done to keep them from being bound to matter. The stronger the body's forces, the weaker the soul's. When fair people become extinct, the human race will face the danger of becoming dense if a spiritual science like anthroposophy is not accepted. Anthroposophy does not have to take the body into consideration but can bring forth intelligence from spiritual investigation itself.

You see, when we really study science and history, we must conclude that if people become increasingly strong, they will also become increasingly stupid. If the blonds and blue-eyed people die out, the human race will become increasingly dense if men do not arrive at a form of intelligence that is independent of blondness. Blond hair actually bestows intelligence. In the case of fair people, less nourishment is driven into the eyes and hair; it remains instead in the brain and endows it with intelligence. Brown- and dark-haired people drive the substances into their eyes and hair that the fair people retain in their brains. They then become materialistic and observe only what can immediately be seen. Spiritual science must compensate for this; we must have a spiritual science to the same degree that humanity loses its intelligence along with its fair people. We have not built the Goetheanum as a joke, for no reason at all; we have built it because we anticipated what would happen to the human race if there were not spiritual compensation for what will disappear from the natural world. The matter is so serious that we can say that mankind on this earth must once again attain something fruitful, though in a different form from what was produced in ancient times. It is indeed true that the more the fair individuals die out the more will the instinctive wisdom of humans vanish. Human beings are becoming denser, and they can regain a new wisdom only if they do not have to depend on their bodies, but possess, instead, a true spiritual science. It is really so, and if people today want to laugh about it, let them. But then they have always laughed about things that have brought about some great change.

In the age when those giant beasts existed that I have described—the ichthyosauria, plesiosauria and megatheria—cows certainly did not yet exist, cows from whom milk is taken for human consumption. Of course, neither did human beings exist then who would have required such milk. But just yesterday I read a statement by somebody who is really afraid of progress. He thinks people who express ideas today that should be formulated only after many centuries have passed ought to be persecuted, because the time is not ripe for their utterances. Gentlemen, it seems to me that if this had been the case in the period when cows were supposed to come into existence, no creature would have had the courage to become a cow! It is like saying, “What is taught today as anthroposophy should emerge only after many centuries.” Well, then it wouldn't appear at all, just as no cows would have come into being. In effect, it is like saying, “I would rather remain an old primeval hog than transform myself into a cow!”

The situation on earth is such that we must have the courage to change and to ascend from those periods when mankind knew things instinctively, to one in which everything is known consciously. This is why I present everything to you here in such a way that you can comprehend fully what is really going on and know in what direction the wind is blowing. When you read a book nowadays, or when you hear about what goes on in the great wide world, you cannot actually get to the bottom of what makes everything tick. But people don't know that. You can understand a phenomenon like the gradual extinction of blonds if you comprehend how nourishing substances penetrate into both the eyes and hair, the colouring of which is closely related.

If you go to Milan, you will find that the head of the lion there is depicted in such a way that its mane, that is, the largest accumulation of hair the lion possesses, looks like rays of light. This rendering is based on an ancient wisdom in which it was known that both the eyes and hair are related to light and its rays.

Hair is indeed like plants, which are placed in the ground and whose growth is subject to light. If light is unable to draw the nourishing substances all the way into the hair, it remains blond. If a person is more closely tied to matter, the food substances penetrate the hair completely and counteract the light; then he gets black hair. Sages of old were still aware of this, just as were men even a few centuries ago. Thus, they did not depict the lion's mane as being curly but instead they gave it a radiating, straight form, as if the sun had placed its beams right into the lion's head. It is most interesting to observe such things.

As you recall, gentlemen, last time we talked about the eye, and we were particularly impressed with its marvellous configuration. Even in regard to its external form, the eye reproduces a whole world. When we become acquainted with the interior of the eye, the way we did the last time, we discover that there is indeed a miniature world within. That I have explained to you, and thus we have become familiar with two senses of man, sight and hearing.

Now, in connection with other questions you have recently posed, we shall see that a particularly fascinating and interesting human sense is that of smell. This sense appears to be of minor importance in man but, as you know, it is of great significance in the dog. You could say that all the intelligence of the dog is, in fact, transferred to the sense of smell. You need only consider how much the animal can accomplish by smell. A dog recognizes people by smell long after it has been with them. Anyone who observes dogs knows that they recognize and identify somebody with whom they have been acquainted, not by the sense of sight, but by that of smell. If you have heard recently how dogs can become excellent detectives and search for lawbreakers or for people in general, you will say to yourselves that here the sense of smell accomplishes rare things that naturally appear simple but are in actuality not so simple at all. You need only consider these matters to realize that they are not so simple.

“Well,” you may say casually, “the dog merely follows the scent.” Yes, gentlemen, that is true, the dog does indeed follow the scent. But think about it. Police dogs are used to follow, say, first the track of thief X and then the track of thief Y, one right after the other. The two scents are completely different from each other; if they were alike the dog could naturally never be able to follow them. Imagine now that you had to point out the difference between these tracks that the dogs distinguish by smell; you would discover no significant difference. The dog, however, does detect differences. The point is not that the dog follows the tracks back and forth in general but that it is capable of distinguishing between the various traces of scent. That, indeed, indicates intelligence.

There is yet another extremely important consideration. Civilized men use their sense of smell for foods and other external things, but it doesn't inform them of much else. In contrast, primitive tribes in Africa can smell out their enemies at far range, just as a dog can detect a scent. They are warned of their foes by smell. Thus, the intelligence that is found in such great measure in the dog is also found to a certain degree among primitive people. The member of a primitive tribe in Africa can tell long before he has seen his adversary that he is approaching; he distinguishes him from other people with his nose. Imagine how delicate one's sense of discernment in the nose must be if by that one can know that an enemy is nearby. Also, Africans know how to utter a certain warning sound that Europeans cannot make at all. It is a clicking sound, somewhat like the cracking of a whip.

It can be said that the more civilized a man becomes, the more diminished is the importance of his sense of smell. We can use this sense to ascertain whether we are dealing with a less developed species like the canine family—and they are a lower species—or one more developed. If we were to follow up on this, we would probably make some priceless discoveries about hogs, which, of course, have an exceptionally strong sense of smell.

There is something else in regard to this that will interest you. The elephant is reputed to be one of the most intelligent animals, and it certainly is; the elephant is a highly intelligent animal. Well, what feature is particularly well-developed in the elephant? Look at the area above the teeth in the dog and the pig, the area that in man forms itself into the nose. When you picture an especially strong and pronounced development of this part, you arrive at the elephant's trunk. The elephant possesses what is nose in us to a particularly pronounced degree, and therefore it is the most intelligent animal. The extreme intelligence of the elephant does not depend on the size of the brain but on its extension straight into the nose.

All these facts challenge us to ask how matters stand in respect to the human nose, an organ that civilized man today does not really know too much about. Of course, he is familiar with its anatomy and structure, but basically, he does not know much more than the fact that it sits in the middle of his face. Yet, the nose, with its continuation into the brain, is actually a most interesting organ. If you will recall my descriptions of the ear and the eye, you will say to yourselves that they are complicated. The nose, however, is not so complicated, but it is quite ingenious.

Seen from the front, the nose has a wall in the middle, the septum. This can be felt when you hold your nose. The septum divides the nose into a left and a right side, and to the left and the right are the actual parts of this organ. From the front it looks like this (sketching). The cribriform plate is located in the skull bone up where the nose sits between the eyes. It is like a little sieve. In other words, it is a bone with many holes. It is intricate but in my drawing I shall simplify it. On the exterior, the nose has skin like the skin on the rest of the body; inside, it is completely lined and filled out with a mucous membrane. This is everywhere in the nose, a fact that you can readily confirm. This membrane secretes mucus; if you did not have it, you would not have to blow your nose. So, inside the nose is a membrane that secretes mucus, but the matter is more complicated. You will have noticed that children who cry secrete a lot of nasal mucus. A canal in the upper part of the nose leads to the tear glands, which are located on both sides in the interior. There the secretion, the tears, enters the nose and mixes with the nasal mucus. Thus, the nose has a kind of “fluidic connection” with the eyes. The secretion of the eyes flows into the mucous membrane and combines with the secretion of the nose. This connection shows us again that no organ in the body is isolated. The eyes are not only for seeing; they can also cry, and what they then discharge mixes with what is primarily secreted in the membrane of the nose.

The olfactory nerve, the actual nerve used for smelling, passes through the cribriform plate, which is located at the roof of the nose. This nerve has two fibres that pass from the brain through the sieve-like bone and spread out within the nose. The mucous membrane, which we can touch with our finger, is interlaced by the olfactory nerve, which reaches into the brain. We can easily discern that because the nose is constructed quite simply.

Now we come to something that can reveal much to one who thinks sensibly. You see, a thorough examination will show that no one has eyes of equally strong vision, and when we examine the two hands we readily discover that they are not of equal strength. The organs of the human being are never completely equal in strength on both the left and right side. So it is also with the nose. Generally, we simply do not smell as well with the left nostril as with the right, but it is the same here as it is with the hand; some individuals are better at smelling with the left nostril than with the right, just as some people are left-handed. As you know, some people in the world are screwed together the wrong way. I am not referring to those people whose heads are screwed on wrong [(A play on words. In German, a “Querkopf' is a person who is odd. Rudolf Steiner then uses the term “Querherz” to indicate the anatomical oddity of the heart.)] but to those whose hearts are screwed on the wrong way. In the average person, the heart is located slightly off-centre to the left, as are the rest of the internal organs. Now, in a person whose heart is screwed on the wrong way, as it were, whose heart is off-centre a bit to the right, the stomach is also pushed over slightly to the right. Such a person is all “screwed up,” but this phenomenon is indeed less noticeable than when one is screwed up in the head. The fact becomes apparent when a person has fallen ill or has been dissected. Autopsies first led to the discovery that there are such odd people whose hearts and stomachs are shifted to the right. Of course, since not everyone who is queer in the head is dissected after death, one often doesn't even know that there are many more such “odd people” than is normally assumed whose hearts are off-centre to the right.

A truly effective pedagogy must take this into consideration. When dealing with a child who does not have its heart in the right place, speaking strictly anatomically, this must be taken into account; otherwise, it can have awkward consequences for the youngster. Because man is not just a physical apparatus, he does not necessarily have to be educated in such a way that abnormalities like this have to become an obstacle. Taking such aspects into consideration is what truly makes pedagogy an art.

A Professor Benedikt has examined the brains of many criminals. In Austria this was frowned upon because the people there are Catholics and they see to it that such things are not done. Benedikt was a professor in Vienna. He got in touch with officials in Hungary, where at one time there were more Calvinists, and he was given permission to transport the heads of executed criminals to Vienna. Several things then happened to him. There was a really ruthless killer who had I don't know how many murders on his conscience and who also had religious faith. He was a devout Catholic. When a rumour broke out that the brains of criminals were being sent to Professor Benedikt in Vienna, this criminal who was a cold-blooded murderer protested. He did not want his head sent to the professor because he didn't know where he would look for it to piece it together with the rest of his body when the dead arise on Judgment Day. Even though he was a hardened criminal, he did believe in Judgment Day.

So what did Professor Benedikt find in the brains of criminals? In the back of our heads we have a “little brain,” the cerebellum, which I shall speak about later on. It is covered by a lobe of the “large brain,” the cerebrum. It looks like a small tree (drawing). On top it is covered by the cerebrum and the occipital lobe. Now, Professor Benedikt discovered that in people who have never committed murder or a theft—and there are such people—the occipital lobe extends down to here (drawing), whereas in those who had been murderers or other criminals the lobe did not extend so far; it did not cover the cerebellum below.

A malformation like that is naturally congenital; a person is born with it. And, gentlemen, there are a great many people born with an occipital lobe that is too small to properly cover the cerebellum! It can be made up for by education, however. Nobody has to become a killer because he has a shorter occipital lobe; he becomes a criminal only if he is not properly educated. From this you can see that if the body is not correctly developed one can compensate for it with the forces of the soul. Therefore, it is nonsense to say that a person cannot help becoming a criminal—which is what the otherwise brilliant professor stated—because as an embryo he was incorrectly positioned in the mother's womb and thus did not properly develop the occipital lobe. He might be quite well-educated by accepted standards, but he is not properly educated in regard to such an abnormality. Of course, he cannot help the inadequacies of education, but society can help it; society must see to it that the matter is handled correctly in education. I mention this so you may realize the great significance of the whole organization of man.

Let us return again to the subject of the dog. We must admit that in the dog the nose is especially well-developed. Now, gentlemen, what do we actually smell? What does a dog really smell? If you take a bit of substance like this piece of chalk, you will not smell it. You will be able to smell it only if the substance is set on fire, and the ingredients evaporate to be received into the nose as vapor. You cannot even smell liquid substances unless they first evaporate. We smell only what has first evaporated. Also, there must be air around us with which the vapours from substances can mix. Only when substances have become vaporous can we smell them; we cannot smell anything else. Of course, we do smell an apple or a lily, but it is nonsense to say that we smell the solid lily. We smell the fragrance arising from the lily. When the vapor-like scent of the lily wafts in our direction, then the nerve in the nose is able to experience it.

What a primitive tribesman smells of his enemy are his evaporations. You can conclude from this that a man's presence makes itself felt much farther than his hands can reach. If we were primitive people and one of us were down in Arlesheim, he would know if an adversary of his were up here among us. This would mean that his foe would have to make his being felt all the way down to Arlesheim! (Arlesheim is about 154 miles from Dornach.) Indeed, all of you extend to Arlesheim by virtue of what you evaporate. On account of a man's perspirations, something of himself extends a good distance around himself, and through that he is present to a greater degree than through what one can see externally.

Now, the dog does something interesting that man cannot do. All of you are quite familiar with it. If somewhere you meet a dog you know well and that is equally well-acquainted with you, the animal will wag its tail because it is glad to see you. Yes, gentlemen, why does it wag its tail? Because it experiences joy? A man cannot wag his tail when he is happy, because he does not have one anymore. In this regard man has become stunted, insofar as he has no way to immediately lend expression to his joy. The dog, however, smells the person and wags its tail. On account of the scent, the dog's whole body reaches a state of excitement that is expressed by the tail muscles receiving the experience of gladness. In this respect man has reached the stage where he lacks such an organ with which he could express his joy in this way.

We see that while man is more cultivated than dogs, he lacks the ability to drive the sensation of smell down his spinal cord. The dog can do this; the scent enters its nose and is transmitted down the spinal cord, and then the dog wags its tail. What enters its nose as scent travels down the spinal cord. The end of the spine is the tail, and so it wags it. Man cannot do that and I shall tell you why he cannot. Man also possesses a spinal cord, but he cannot transmit a scent through it. Now, I shall draw the whole head of the human being in profile (diagram). The spinal cord continues down on the left. In the case of the dog it becomes the tail, which the animal can wag. Man, however, turns the force of his spinal cord in the other direction. Indeed, he has the capacity to change many things around, something that the animals cannot do. Thus, animals walk on all fours, or if they do not, as in the case of some monkeys, it is all the worse for them. They are actually organized to walk on all fours. But the human being raises himself up. At first man too walks on all fours, but then he stands erect. The force through which he accomplishes this and that passes through the spinal cord is the same force that pushes the whole brain forward. It is actually quite interesting to see a dog wag its tail. If a human being compared himself to the dog, he can exclaim, “Isn't that something; it can wag its tail, and I cannot!”

The whole force that is contained in this wagging tail, however, has been dammed back by man, and it has pushed the brain forward. In the dog it grows backward, not forward. The force that the dog possesses in its tail we turn around and lead into the brain. You can picture to yourselves how this really works by realizing that at the end of the spine, where we have the so-called tail bone, is the coccyx, which consists of several atrophied vertebrae. In the dog they are well-formed and developed; in us they are a fused and completely stunted protrusion that we can no longer wag. It ends here and is covered by skin. Now, we are able to turn this whole “wagging ability” around, and if in fact the top of the skull were not up here (b), upon smelling a pleasant odour we could wag with our brain, as it were. If our skull bones did not hold it together, we would actually wag with our brain toward the front when we are glad to see somebody.

You see, this is what marks the human organization; it reverses that function found in the animals. This tail wagging ability is still developed but it is reversed. In reality, we too wag something, and some people have a sensitivity for perceiving it. Isn't it true that court officials fawn and cringe in the royal presence? Of course, theirs is not a wagging like that of a dog, but some people still get the feeling that they are really wagging their tails. This is because their wagging is on the soul level and indeed looks like tail wagging. If one has acquired clairvoyance—something that is easily misunderstood but that merely consists of being able to see some things better than others—then, gentlemen, one does not just have the feeling that a courtier is wagging his tail in front of a personage of high rank; one actually sees it. He does not wag something in the back, but he does indeed wag something in the front. Of course, the solid substances within the brain are held together by the skull bones, but what is developed there in the form of delicate substantiality, as warmth, wags when a courtier is standing before royalty. It fluctuates. Now it is warm, now a little cooler, warmer, cooler. Someone with a delicate sensitivity for this fluctuating warmth, who is standing in the presence of courtiers surrounding the Lords, sees something that looks like a fool's cap wagging back and forth in front. It is correct to say that the etheric body, the more delicate organization of man, is wagging in front. It is absolutely true that the etheric body wags.

In the dog or the elephant all this is utilized to form the spinal cord. What remains stunted in both these animals is reversed and pushed forward in man. How is that? In the brain two things meet: The “wagging organ,” which has been pushed forward and is present only in man, and the olfactory nerve, which is also present in man. In the case of the dog, the olfactory nerve enlarges considerably because nothing counteracts it; what would restrain it is wagging in the back. The human being turns this around. The whole “wagging force” comes forward to the nose, and thus the olfactory nerve is made as small as possible; as it penetrates into the brain it is compressed from all sides by what comes to meet it there. You see, man has within the head an organ that, on the one hand, forces back his faculty of smell but, on the other, makes him into a human being. This organ results from the forces that are pushed up and forward.

In the case of the dog and the elephant, much of the olfactory nerve is located in the forward part of the brain; a large olfactory nerve is present there. In man, this nerve is somewhat stunted. The nerves that were pushed upward from below spread out instead. As a result, in this spot where in the dog sensations of smell spread out much further, in the human being the noblest part of the brain is located. There, located in the forward part of the brain, is the sense for compassion, the sense for understanding other human beings, and that is something noble. What the dog expends in its tail wagging, man transforms into something noble. There, in the forward part of the brain, just at the spot where the lowly nose would otherwise transmit its olfactory nerve, man possesses an extraordinarily noble organ.

I have mentioned that we do not smell equally well with the left and the right nostrils. Now, try to recall someone who is in the habit of making pronounced gestures. What does he do when he is pondering something? I am sure you have seen it. He reaches up with his finger or his hand and touches his nose; his index finger comes to rest directly over the septum, the inner wall dividing the nasal passages. For right here, behind the nose and within the brain, the capacity for discrimination has its physical expression.

The septum of the dog enables it not only to follow a lead exactingly but also to distinguish carefully with the left and the right nostrils how the scents appear to either one or the other. The dog always has in its right nostril the scent of what it is pursuing at the moment, while in the left it has the scents of everything it has already pursued. The dog therefore becomes increasingly skilful in pursuit, just as we men become more and more intelligent when we learn more and commit facts to our memory. The dog has a particularly good memory for scents, and that is why he becomes such a keen tracker.

A trace of that still exists in human life. Man's sense of smell has become dulled, but Mozart, for example, was sometimes inspired with his best melodies when he smelled a flower in a garden. When he pondered the reason for this, he realized that it happened because he had already smelled this flower somewhere else and that he had especially liked it. Mozart would never have gone so far as to say, “Well, I was once in this beautiful garden in such and such a place, and there was this flower with a wonderful fragrance that pleased me immensely; now, here is the fragrance again, and it makes me almost want to, well—wag my tail.” Mozart would not have said that, but a beautiful melody entered his mind when he smelled this flower the second time. You can tell from this how closely linked are the senses of smell and memory.

This is caused not by what we human beings absorb as scents but rather by what we push forward in the brain and against it. Our power of discrimination is developed there. If a person can think especially logically, if he has the proper thought relationships, then we can say that he has pushed his brain forward against his olfactory nerve, that he has actually adjusted the brain to what otherwise would have also been the olfactory nerve. We can say, too, that the more intelligent a man is, the more he has overcome the dog nature in himself. If a person were born with a dog-like capability to smell especially well, and he was educated to learn to distinguish things other than smells, he would become an unusually clever person because he would be able to discriminate among these other things by virtue of what he had pushed up against the olfactory nerve.

Cleverness, the power of discrimination, is basically the result of man's overcoming his sense of smell. The elephant and the dog have their intelligence in their noses; in other words, it is quite outside themselves. Man has this cleverness inside himself, and that is what distinguishes him. Hence it is not enough just to check and see whether the human being possesses the same organs as the animals. Certainly, both dog and man have a nose, but what matters is how each nose is organized. You can see from this that something is at work in man that is not active in the dog, and if you perceive this you gradually work yourself up from the physical level to the soul level. In the dog the nose and the bushy end of the spine, which is only covered by skin permeated with bony matter, have no inclination to grow toward each other. This tendency originates only from the soul, which the dog does not have in the way a man does. So, then, I have described the nose and everything that belongs to it in such a way that you see its continuation into the brain and find that man's intelligence is connected with this organ.

There is another sense that is quite similar to the sense of smell but in other respects totally different: the sense of taste. It is so closely related that the people in the region where I was born never say “smell”; the word is not used there at all. They say instead, “It tastes good,” or “It tastes bad,” when they smell something. Where I was born they do not talk of smelling but only of tasting. (Someone in the audience calls out, “Here, too, in Switzerland!”) Yes, also here in Switzerland you don't talk of smelling; smelling and tasting appear so closely related to people that they don't distinguish between the two.

If we now investigate the sense of taste, we will find that here there is something strange. Again, it is somewhat like it was with the sense of smell. So, if you take the cavity of the mouth, here in the back is the so-called soft palate, in the front is the hard palate, and there are the teeth with the gums. If you examine all this you will find something strange. Just as a nerve runs down into the nose, so here, too, nerves run from the brain down into the mouth. But these nerves do not penetrate into the gums, nor do they extend into the hard palate in front. They reach only into the soft palate in the back, and they go only into the back part of the tongue, not its front part. So if you see how the nerves are distributed that lead to the sense of taste, you will find only a few in front, practically none. The tip of the tongue is not really an organ of taste but rather one of touch. Only the back part of the tongue and the soft palate can taste. The mouth is soft in the back and hard in the front; only the soft parts are capable of tasting. The gums also have no sensation of taste.

The peculiar thing is that these nerves that convey the sense of taste in man are also connected primarily with everything that makes up the intestinal organization. It is indeed true that first and foremost a food must taste good, although its chemical composition is also important. In his taste man has a regulator for the intake of his food. We should study much more carefully what a small child likes or does not like rather than examine the chemical ingredients of its food. If the child always rejects a food, we shall find that something is amiss with its lower abdominal organs, and then one must intervene there.

I have already sketched the “tail wagging ability” that is reversed in man and that in the dog extends all the way into the back. If we now move forward from the tail, we reach the abdomen, the intestines, and to these the taste nerves correspond. It is like this: When a dog abandons itself to smelling, it wags its tail, which signifies that it drives everything through its entire body. The effects of what it smells pass all the way through to the end, to the very tip end of the tail. The tip of the nose is the farthest in front, and the tail is the farthest behind. What is connected with smelling in the dog passes through the entire length of its body, but what it tastes does not; it remains in the abdominal area and does not go as far. We can see from this that the farther something related with the nerves is located within the organism, the less far-reaching is its effect in the body. This will teach us to understand even better than we know already that the whole form of man depends on his nerves. Man is formed after his nerves. In the case of the dog, its tail is formed after the nose. What are its intestines formed after? They are formed after the nerves of the muzzle. The nerves are situated on one end, and they bring about the form on the other end. This is something that you must take as a basis for further consideration. You will gain much from realizing that the dog owes its whole tail wagging ability to its nose, and that when it feels good in the abdominal area, this is due to the nerves of the mouth. We shall learn more about this later.

It is extraordinarily interesting how the nerves are related to form. This is why I said the other day that even a blind person benefits from his eyes; even though the eyes are useless for sight, their nerves still help shape the body. The way a person appears is caused by the nerves of his head and in part by the nerves of his eyes, as well as by many other nerves. Therefore, if we want to understand why the human being differs in form from the dog, we have to think of the nose! The nose plays an important part in the shape of a dog, but in the human being it is overcome and somewhat subdued in its functions. In the dog, the nose occupies a higher rung on the ladder; it is the head-master, so to speak. In man, the function of the nose is forced back. The eye and the ear are certainly more important for his formation than is the nose.

Gentlemen, this time let us finish answering a question raised the other day.

By virtue of his skin, man is an entire sense organ. The skin of the human being is something extraordinarily complicated and truly marvellous. When we trace it from the outside inward, we find first a transparent and horny layer called the epidermis. It is transparent only in us white Europeans; in Africans, Indonesians and Malayans, it is saturated with coloured granules and thus tinged with colour. It is called “horny” because it consists of the same substance, arranged a little differently, from which the horns of animals and our nails and hair are fashioned. Our nails actually grow out of the uppermost layer of the skin. Under this layer lies the dermis, which consists of an upper and a lower layer. So we are in fact covered and enclothed with a three-layered skin: the outer epidermis, the middle layer of the dermis and the lower part of the dermis.

The lowest layer of the dermis nourishes the whole skin; it stores the nourishing substances for the skin. The middle layer is filled with all kinds of things, but in particular it is filled with muscle fibres. Everywhere in this layer are myriad tiny onion-like things, one next to the other; we have thousands upon thousands in our skin. We can call them “onions” because the distinguishing feature of an onion is its many peels, and these little corpuscles have such “onion peels”; the onion skin is on the surface, and the other, thinner part is on the inside. They were discovered by the Italian Pacini and are therefore called “Pacinian corpuscles.”

Around these microscopic corpuscles are from twenty to sixty such peels, so you can imagine how small they are.

Man is constituted in such a way that he has these microscopic little bulbs over the whole surface of his body. The largest number is found—in snakes as well as in men—on the tip of the tongue. Yes, it is almost comical, but most are found on the tip of the tongue! There are many on the tips of the fingers, on the palms of the hands and on other parts of the body, but most are on the tip of the tongue. For example, there are seven times more such little nerve bulbs on the tip of the tongue than there are on the finger tips.

A nerve fibre originates from each of these corpuscles and finds its way into the brain via the spinal marrow. All these nerve fibres radiate from the brain, and everywhere in the body they form such nerve bulbs on its surface. So these nerve fibres in the brain go everywhere and eventually form the onions within the skin or dermis. It is interesting to realize that just as real onions grow in the ground and form onion blossoms above, so do these onions grow in the human body. There (pointing to his sketch) are the onions and the stem within. In those nerves of the tongue the stem is rather short, but in other nerves it is sometimes quite long. The nerve fibres going from the feet into the brain through the spinal marrow are extremely long. Everything that we have as onions in our skin actually has blossoms within our skull. You may imagine, then, that in regard to his skin man is a kind of soil; it is strangely formed, but it still is a kind of soil. On the surface is the epidermis, in which various crystal substances are deposited. Below are the solid masses of the body, and above is the layer of “humus.” Going from outside inward, beneath the hard, horny layer of the epidermis lies the dermis, which is the soil. From it grow all these onions that have blossoms in the brain. Their stems pass up into the brain and have blossoms there.

Well, gentlemen, in us older fellows things are such that only during sleep can we properly trace this network, but in a child it is still much in evidence. The child has a lively nerve bulb activity in the nerves as long as its intellect is unawakened; that is, throughout its first year, and just as the sun shines over the blossoms of the onions, so shines the light into the child that as yet does not translate with the intellect what it receives with its eyesight. This is indeed like the sun shedding its rays inside the head and opening up all the onion blossoms. In the nerves of the skin we carry a whole plant kingdom around within us. Later, however, when we enter grammar school this lively growing comes to an end, and then we use the forces from the nerves for thinking. We draw these forces out and use them for thinking. This is extremely interesting. Ordinarily, it is assumed that the nerves do the thinking, but the nerves do not think. We can employ the nerves for thinking only by stealing their light, so to speak. The human soul steals the light from the nerves, and it uses what it has taken away for thinking. It is really so. When we truly ponder the matter, we finally recognize at every point the independently active soul.

We have such inwardly growing onions in common with all animals. Even the lowest forms, which have slimy, primitive shapes, possess sensory nerves that end in a kind of onion on the surface. The higher we ascend toward man, the more are certain of these nerve onions transformed in a specific manner. The nerves of the taste buds, for example, are such transformed skin nerves.

Now, we possess these sensory bulbs at the tip of the tongue and that is why it is so sensitive. We taste on the back of the tongue and on the soft palate where such little onions are dispersed. Actually, they sit there in a little groove and within these grooves an onion penetrates into the nerves and pushes into the dermis as a nerve corpuscle. First, a tiny groove forms behind the tongue, and then an onion pushes itself into this groove. The root of the onion penetrates all the way to the surface of the tongue. On the base of the tongue are a tremendous number of tiny grooves, and in each little groove a “bulb” grows up from below. This accounts for our experience of taste.

We can be aware of everything with the sense of touch, or these onions located on our body's surface. Now, you know that what one feels one does not remember so well. I know with my feeling that a chair is hard because I feel its hardness with a certain number of nerve bulbs that constantly change, but my memory is not strained by this sensation. With the sense of taste it makes a little, though unconscious effort. Gourmets, however, always know beforehand what is good, not afterward when they have already tasted it, and that is why they order it.

So the nerve corpuscles pass through the spinal marrow directly into the brain and form blossoms there. Everything that we want to taste, however, must first be dissolved by the saliva in the mouth; we can taste nothing that hasn't first been transformed into fluid. But what is it that tastes? We would not be able to taste anything if we did not have fluid within us. Our solid human constitution, everything that is solid in the body, does not taste. Our inner fluid mixes with what is dissolved of the food. Thus, we can say that our own fluid mixes with the fluid from without. The solid part of the human organization does not taste anything. Our constitution is ninety percent water, and here, around the papillae of the tongue, it is in an especially fluid state. Just as water shoots out of a geyser, so do we have such a spurting forth of fluid on the tip of the tongue.

Saliva that has been spit out of the mouth is no longer part of me, but as long as that fluid is within the little gland of the tongue, it belongs to me as a human being, just as my muscles belong to me. I consist not only of solid muscles but also of water, and it is this fluid that actually does the tasting because it mixes with what comes as fluid from without. What does one do when one licks sugar? One drives saliva from within toward the taste buds. The dissolved sugar penetrates the fluid, and the “fluid man,” as it were, permeates himself with the sugar. The sugar is secreted delicately in the taste buds of the tongue and spreads out in one's own fluidity, giving him a feeling of well-being.

As human beings we can only taste, but why is this so? If we had fins and were fishes—which would be an interesting existence—every time we ate, the taste would penetrate right through our fins. But then we would have to swim in water, where we would find everything even the delicate substances well-dissolved. The fish tastes all the traces of substances that are in the water and follows the direction of its taste, which is constantly penetrating into the fins. If something pleasant flows in its direction, the fish will taste it, and its fins will immediately move toward it. We men cannot do what the fish can because we have no fins; in us they are completely lacking. But since we cannot use the sensation of taste to move around, we intensify it within. Fishes have a highly developed sense of taste, but they have no inward sense of it. We human beings have the taste within, we experience it; fishes exist in the totality of the water and experience taste together with the surrounding water. People have wondered why a fish swims far out into the ocean when it wants to lay its eggs. They swim far out, not only into the Atlantic Ocean, but also into other parts of the earth's oceans, and then the young slowly return to European waters. Why is this? Well, European fishes that swim around in our rivers are fresh-water fishes, but the eggs cannot mature in fresh water. Fishes sense by taste that a trace of salt flows toward the outlet of a river; they then swim out into the sea. If the sun shines differently on the other side of the earth, they taste that and by this sense swim halfway around the globe. Then the young taste their way back again to where the parent fishes have dwelt. So we see that fishes follow their taste in every way.

It is extremely interesting that the water that flows in the rivers and is contained in the seas is full of taste, and the fact that fishes swim around in them is really due to the water's taste. It is actually the taste of the water that makes them swim around; the taste of the water gives them their directions. Naturally, if the sun shines on a certain portion of water, everything that is in the water at that spot is thoroughly dissolved by the heat of the sun. It is changed into another taste, and that is why you see a lot of fishes swimming around there; it is the taste.

It is really a strange matter, gentlemen, because we would actually be swimming, too, if we went only by our taste. When I taste sugar the fluid man within me wants to swim toward it. The urge to swim is indeed there; we want to swim constantly according to our taste, but the solid body prevents us from doing so. From that element that continually would like to swim but cannot—we really have something like a fish within us that constantly wants to swim but is held back—we retain what our inner soul being makes out concerning taste. With taste we live completely within the etheric body, but the etheric body is held fast by the water in us, and that water in turn is held by our physical body. It is the most natural thing to say that man has an etheric body that is really not disposed to walking on the earth. It is suited only for swimming; it is in fact fish-like, but because man makes it stand erect it becomes something different. Man has within him this etheric body that is actually only in his fluid organization, and it is indeed so that he would constantly like to swim, swim in the elements of water that are contained even in the air. We would like to be always swimming there, but we transform this urge into the inner experience of taste.

You see, such aspects really lead one to comprehend the human being. You cannot find this in any modern scientific book because people examine not the living human being but only the corpse, which no longer wants to swim. Nor does it participate any longer in life. We participate in life because actually we are the sum of everything existing in the world. We are fishes, and the water vapor that is similar to us is something in which we would like to be constantly swimming about. The fact that we cannot do so results in our pouring it into us and tasting it. The fishes are really cold creatures. They could taste things marvellously well that are dissolved in the water, but they do not do so because they immediately move their fins. If the fins would disappear from the fishes, they would become higher animals and would begin to have sensations of taste.

The nerve bulbs that I told you about last time are differently transformed “onions.” They penetrate into the mucous membrane of the nose, but they do not sit within a groove from which fluid seeps out; they reach all the way to the surface. That is why these nerve bulbs can perceive only what comes close to them. This means that we have to let the fragrance of the rose come up to the nerve bulb of our nose before we can smell it. Thus, one part of the human body has the function of fashioning in a special way these nerve bulbs, which are spread out over the whole skin, in order to sense smells permeating the air.

Not only does the outer air waft toward man, but also the breath streams out from within him. The breath constantly passes through the nose, and within this breath lives the air being of man. We are water, and as I told you earlier, we are also air. We do not have the air within us just for the fun of it. Like the water within me, my breath is not solid. Just as when I reach out my hand and feel that I have stretched out something solid, so I stretch what I contain in my air organism into my nose. There I grasp the fragrance of the rose or carnation. Indeed, I am not only a solid being but continually a being of water and air as well. We are the air as long as it is within us and is alive. When we stretch our “air hands” through the nose and grasp the fragrance of a rose or carnation—bad odors, too, of course—we do not touch it with our hand but rather grasp it with the nerve bulbs, which attract the breath from within so that it can take hold of the fragrance.

This is something that is manifest also in the dog. I have told you that as soon as the nose smells, the tail wags. Just as with fishes the fins start to move about, so, too, with dogs the tail starts to move. But what does this tail that can only wag really want to do? This is most interesting. The tail can only wag, but what does it really want to do? You see, gentlemen, the dog would really like to do something quite different. If it were not a dog but a bird it would fly under the influence of smell. Just as fishes swim, a dog would fly if it were a bird. Well, of course, a dog has no wings, and so he uses the substituted organ and just wags his tail. It isn't enough for flying, but it involves the same expenditure of energy. In human beings it is the same. Because we always have delicate sensations of smell that we do not even notice, we would constantly like to fly.

Think now of the swallows that live here in summer. What arises as scents from the flowers is pleasing to them, and because it is pleasing to their organ of smell they remain here. But when autumn comes or is just approaching, the swallows, if they could communicate among themselves, would say, “Oh, it's beginning to smell bad!” The swallow has an extraordinarily delicate sense of smell. You remember that I told you that people are perceptible to savage tribes all the way to Arlesheim. Well, for swallows the odour arising in the south is perceptible when fall is approaching; it actually spreads out all the way to the north. While in the south it smells good, up north it begins to smell of decay. The swallows are attracted to the good odour and fly south.

Whole libraries have been written about the flight of birds, but the truth is that even during the great migrations in spring and autumn the birds follow the extremely delicate dispersion of odours in the whole atmosphere of the earth. The organ of smell in the swallows guides them to the south and then back again to the north. When spring arrives here in our lands, it starts to smell bad for the swallows down south. When the delicate fragrances of spring flow southward to them, they fly back north. It is really true that the whole earth is one living being and that the other beings belong to it.

In our body, things are so organized that the blood flows to the head and then away from it. On the earth, things are so arranged that the migratory birds fly to the equator and then back to their point of departure. We, too, are influenced by the air because the air we breathe drives the blood to the head. Insofar as we are beings of air, we are completely permeated with smell. For example, a person who walks across a field that has just been fertilized with manure is really going there together with his airy being. The solid man and the fluid man do not notice the manure, but the man of air does, and then there arises in him, understandably enough, the urge to fly away. When the manure's stinking odour rises from the field, he would actually like to fly off into the air. He cannot do so because he lacks the wings and thus reacts inwardly to what he cannot fly away from; it becomes an internal process of the soul. As a result, man inwardly becomes permeated with the manure odour, with the evaporations that have become gaseous and vapor-like. He becomes suffused with the bad odour and says that he loathes it. His loathing is a reaction of the soul.

In the fluid man there exists the more delicate airy form that, in a way, he takes from the fluid organization of himself. It is through this that he can taste. Likewise, something lives in this airy form that we constantly renew in us through inhaling and exhaling. Each moment it is expelled and reborn; it is born eighteen times a minute and dies eighteen times a minute. It takes years for the solid form to die, but the airy form dies during exhalation eighteen times a minute and is born during inhalation. It is a continuous process of dying and being born. What is extracted within is the astral body. As I told you the other day, it is the astral body that reverses the forces of tail-wagging that should really be down below. Because these forces are pushed up and against the sense of smell, we are able to think. The brain grows to meet the nose under the influence of the astral body, and no one can really understand the brain who does not look at the whole matter in the way I have just done. This understanding results from a correct observation of our senses.

On account of our sense of smell we would always like to be flying. The bird can fly but we cannot; at best we have these solid shoulder blades. Why can the bird fly? Gentlemen, the bird has something peculiar that enables it to fly; it has hollow bones. Air is inside them and the air that the bird absorbs through its organ of smell comes into contact with the air that it has in its bones. Indeed, the bird is primarily a being of air. Its most important aspect consists of air; the rest is merely grown on to it. The many feathers a bird may have are actually all dried up. The most significant thing, even in the ostrich, is that a bit of air is still contained in each downy feather and all this air is connected with the air outside. The ostrich walks because it is too heavy to fly but, of course, the other birds do.

We human beings have only our shoulder blades attached to our back, which are clumsy and solidly shaped. Although we would constantly like to fly with them, we cannot. Instead, we push the whole spinal marrow into the brain and begin to think. Birds do not think. We have only to observe them properly to realize that everything goes into their flight. It looks clever, but it is really the result of what is in the air. Birds do not think, but we do because we cannot fly. Our thoughts are actually the transformed forces of flying. It is interesting that in human beings the sense of taste changes into forces of feeling. When I say, “I feel well,” I would really like to swim. Since I cannot, this impulse changes into an inner feeling of well-being. When I say, “The odour of the manure repulses me,” I would really like to fly away. But I cannot, and so I have the thought, “This is disgusting; this odour is repulsive!” All our thoughts are transformed smells. Man is such an accomplished thinker because he experiences in the brain, with that part I described earlier, everything that the dog experiences in the nose.

As human beings, we owe a lot to our nose. You see, people who have no sense of smell, whose mucous membrane is stunted, also lack a certain sense of creativity. They can think only through what they have inherited from their parents. It is always good that we inherit at least something; otherwise, if all our senses were not rudimentarily developed, we could not live at all. A person born blind also has inherited the interior of what the eye possesses. He has this primarily because he is not only a compact man but also a man of fluid and air.

We have now seen how strange all this is. We perceive solid substances with our sense of touch through the nerve bulbs that penetrate the skin everywhere; we become aware of watery substances with our sense of taste; what is of air, the vaporous, is recognized by us through the nerve bulbs that penetrate into the mucous membrane of the nose. We also sense something else around us, though in a more general way; that is, heat and cold. So, as human beings we are partly solid, water, air, and warmth, since we are usually warmer than the surrounding world.

You see, science does not really know that the aspect of tasting concerns the man of water and that the element of smell pertains to the man of air. Because the nerves of taste come into the taste buds, it is the scientific opinion that these nerves actually taste. But this is nonsense. In the mouth, it is the fluid of the watery organization of man that tastes, and in the nose, it is the element of air that smells. Furthermore, the part of us that is warmth perceives heat and cold. The internal warmth in us directly perceives the external warmth, and this is the difference between the sense of warmth and all the other senses. Warmth is produced by all the organs, and as human beings we harbour a world of warmth within us. This element of warmth perceives the other world of warmth around us. When we touch something that is hot or cold, we naturally perceive it just on the spot where we have touched it. But when it is cold in winter or hot in summer, we perceive this coldness or heat in our surroundings; we become a complete sense organ.

We can see how science errs in this regard. According to scientific books, the human being is some kind of compactly shaped form. All the bones are drawn on the paper; the muscles and nerves are all there. But this is utter nonsense because it represents no more than one tenth of the human being. The rest is up to ninety percent water, and then we must account for the air and the warmth within. In fact, three more persons—of water, air and warmth—should be sketched into the figures drawn up by materialistic science. Man cannot be comprehended in any other way. Only because we are warmer than our surroundings and are also a portion of a world of warmth do we experience ourselves as being independent in the world. If we were as cold as a fish or a turtle, we would have no ego; we could not speak of ourselves as “I.” We could never think if we had not transformed the sense of smell within us, or, in other words, if we had no astral body. Likewise, we would have no ego if we did not possess a portion of warmth within us.

Now, someone might say that the higher animals have their own body temperature, too. Yes, gentlemen, but they are burdened by their warmth. The higher animals would like to become an “I” but cannot. Just as we cannot swim or fly, the higher animals would like to become an “I” but cannot do it. You can discern that in their forms; they would really like to become an “I,” and because they cannot they assume their various shapes.

So, as human beings we have four parts in us: the solid man, which is the physical, material part; the fluid man, which carries the more delicate body—the life body or etheric body—within itself; the air being, the man of air who constantly dies and is renewed in the physical realm but who contains the astral body, which remains throughout life; the portion of warmth, the ego man.

The sense of warmth is distributed delicately over the whole human being. Here science does something peculiar.

When we examine the human being from a purely materialistic standpoint, we discover these nerve bulbs that I have described to you. Now, people say to themselves, “If I touch this box, I feel it and its solidness because of the nerve bulbs. If the box were cold, I would also feel the cold through such a nerve bulb.” They constantly look for these nerve bulbs of warmth and these nerve bulbs of feeling, but they never find them. Someone will examine a piece of skin, and because some of these nerve bulbs for feeling look a little different he thinks that they belong to something else. But it is all nonsense. There are no nerve bulbs sensitive to warmth because the whole human being is perceptive to warmth. These nerve bulbs are used only for sensing solid, water and vaporous substances. Where the sense of warmth begins, we become extremely “light-sensed” beings, that is, no more than a bit of warmth that perceives exterior heat. When we are surrounded by an amount of heat that enables us properly to say “I” to ourselves, we feel well, but when we are surrounded by freezing cold that takes away from us the amount of warmth that we are, we are in danger of losing our ego. The fear in our ego makes the cold outside perceptible to us. When somebody is freezing he is actually always afraid for his ego, and with good reason, because he pushes the ego out of himself faster than he actually should.

These are the aspects that will gradually lead us from the observation of the physical to the observation of the nonphysical, the non-material. Only in this way can we begin to comprehend man. Having mentioned all this, we shall be able to continue with quite interesting observations next time.

Gentlemen, I said last time that we have several matters still to discuss. I would like to consider them today. Maybe during the Christmas holidays you could confer among yourselves and decide what should be brought up during the next lecture hour.

The human being has his senses for perceiving the world. We have examined the eye and the ear, considered the sense of touch, which is spread out over the whole organism, and have discussed the senses of taste and smell. All these senses are significant only for man's becoming acquainted with his surroundings and, as I have already explained, for enabling him to shape his body. But man does not live by virtue of the senses; he lives through the process of breathing. If you ask why he is an erect being, why his nose is in the middle of his face, for example, you have to answer that it is because of his senses. But if you look for the reason why he is alive, you have to consider his breathing, because the breath is related to all aspects of life. In one respect, human beings breathe just as the higher animals do, although many animals do breathe differently. A fish, for instance, breathes while swimming and living under water.

If we now look at human breathing we have first to consider the process of inhalation. The breathing process is initially one of inhalation. From the air around us we inhale the oxygen that is required for our existence. This then permeates our whole body, in which carbon in minute particles is deposited; or rather, in which it swims or floats. The carbon that we contain in our bodies is also found elsewhere in nature. As a matter of fact, carbon exists in a great many forms. For instance, carbon is found in coal and in every plant, which consists of carbon, mixed with water and so on, but carbon is the main component of the plant. The graphite in a pencil contains carbon, and the diamond, which is a valuable gem, is also carbon. The diamond is transparent carbon; hard coal is opaque carbon. It is rather interesting that something like coal exists in nature. It is certainly not elegant or attractive, yet is of the same substance as a valuable gem, which, depending on its size, for example, is fit for a crown. Coal and diamonds have the same substance in different forms. We, too, have in ourselves carbon of various forms.

When we breathe in oxygen it spreads out everywhere in our body and combines with the carbon. When oxygen combines with solid coal, a new gas, carbon dioxide, arises. This is a combination of oxygen and carbon, and it is this gas that we then exhale. Our life involves incorporating our body into the rest of the world by inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide.

If we inhaled only pure oxygen, however, we would have to contain an immense amount of carbon, and the carbon dioxide would have to remain in us. Yes, we would be forever expanding, finally becoming gigantic, as big as the earth itself. Then we could always be inhaling. But we do not possess that much carbon; it must be constantly renewed. We could not survive if we only inhaled. We have to exhale to acquire carbon anew, and the carbon dioxide we produce is lethal. Indeed, if oxygen is life for us, carbon dioxide is death. If this room were now filled with carbon dioxide, we would all perish. Our life alternates between the life-giving air of inhalation and the deadly air of exhalation. Life and death are constantly within us, and it is interesting to see how they initially enter into the human being.

To comprehend this you must realize that bacteria and bacilli—microscopically small living beings—exist everywhere in nature. Whenever we move, multitudes of these little bacteria fly about us in the air. Countless tiny living beings exist within the muscles of animals. As I have already mentioned, they can rapidly increase in numbers. No sooner does one appear—particularly one of the smallest kind—then the next moment there are millions. The infectious diseases are based on their capacity for tremendous multiplication. These minute beings do not actually cause the illness, but a feeling of well-being is engendered in them when something is ailing in us. Like the plant in manure, these little beings feel well in the stricken organs of our body and like to remain there. Anyone who claims that they themselves cause disease is just as clever as one who states that rain comes from croaking frogs. Frogs croak when a rain shower comes because they feel it and stay in water that is stimulated by what is active in the rain, but they certainly do not cause the rain. Likewise, bacilli do not bring about a disease like the flu; they only appear whenever the flu appears, just as frogs mysteriously emerge whenever it rains.

One must not say, however, that research with bacilli has no use. It is useful to know that man is exposed to a certain illness, just as one knows that frogs croak when it rains. One cannot pour the baby out with the bathwater and say that it is unnecessary to examine the bacilli, yet one must realize that they do not cause the illness. One never gives a proper explanation by merely stating that for cholera there are these bacilli, for flu there exist these other bacilli, and so on. That is only a lazy way out for people who do not want to examine the actual causes of illnesses.

Now, if you take these infinitesimally small living creatures away from their habitat, they cannot continue to live. For example, cholera bacilli taken out of the human intestines die. This bacillus can survive only in the intestines of men or of animals like rats. All these microscopic creatures can live only in specific environments. Why? That these tiny beings need a specific environment is an important factor. You see, if you consider the cholera bacillus at the moment when it is within the human intestines, the force of gravity does not have as strong an effect on it as when it is outside. The force of gravity immediately ruins it when it is out of its element. Man, too, was initially a tiny living being just like these countless little creatures. As an egg, an ovum, the human being also was such a microscopic living being, such a miniature living creature. With this, gentlemen, we come to an important chapter.

Compare a cholera bacillus, which can exist only in the human intestines, with the human being. All these bacilli need to live in a place where they are protected from the earth. What does this imply? It means that an effect other than that of the earth influences them. The moonlight that shines sometimes in one way, sometimes in another has its effects on the earth, and it is indeed so that the moon influences all these living creatures. It can be seen that these creatures must be protected from the earth so that they can surrender themselves to the cosmos, especially to the influence of the moon. Now, in its earliest stage the human egg also surrenders to the moon's influence. It gives itself up to the moon just before fertilization. Just as the cholera bacillus exists in the intestines, so this tiny human egg exists in the female and is initially protected there. The female organism is so constituted, however, that the human egg is protected only in the beginning. The moment it passes too far out of the body it becomes vulnerable; then the earth begins to affect it.

Women discharge such human eggs every four weeks. At first they are given up to the moon's influence for a short time and are protected. But when the female organism dispatches the human egg during the course of the monthly period, it comes under the influence of the earth and is destroyed.

The human organization is so marvellously arranged that it represents an opposite to the bacilli. Cholera bacilli, for example, remain in the intestines and are careful not to venture too far out. Left to their own devices, they remain where they can be protected from the earth's influence. The human egg also is initially protected from the earth's influence in the mother's body, but then it moves outward because of the blood circulation of the mother, and comes under the influence of the earth's gravity. With the occurrence of the monthly period, which is connected with the moon's course and influence, an ovum is destroyed; the human ovum is really destroyed. It is not an actual human egg yet, however, for it has not been protected from destruction through fertilization.

What really happens through fertilization? If left only to the earth's influence, this human egg would perish. Through fertilization it is enfolded in a delicate, etheric substance and is protected from the earth. It is thus able to mature in the mother's body. Fertilization signifies the protection of the human egg from destruction by the earth's forces. What is destroyed in the infertile egg passes over into the environment; it does not just disappear. It dissolves in the totality of the earth's environment. Eggs that cannot be utilized for the earth disseminate in its atmosphere. This is a continual process.

We can now look at something that people rarely consider. Let us draw our attention to the herrings in the ocean. They lay millions upon millions of eggs, but only a few are ever fertilized. Those that are fertilized become protected from the influence of the earth. It is a little different in man's case, because he isn't a herring—at least not always [Play on words. In German, “Hering” is a very skinny person.]—but all these herring eggs that are not fertilized and are cast off in the ocean extricate themselves from the earth's influence by evaporation. If you consider the herrings and all the other fishes, all the other animals and also human beings, you can say to yourselves, “My attention is directed to something that continually arises from the earth into cosmic space.” Gentlemen, not only does water evaporate, but also such infertile eggs are always volatilized upward from the earth. Much more happens in cosmic space than materialistic science assumes.

If someone were sitting up there on Venus, for example, the vapours that arise and condense again as rain would hold little interest for him, but what I have just described to you, rising constantly into cosmic space, would be perceived up there as a greenish-yellow light. From this we may conclude that light emerges from the life of any given cosmic body. We will also be led to the realization that the sun, too, is not the physical body materialistic science pictures it to be but is rather the bearer of even greater, mightier life. It is as I have explained earlier; something that radiates light must be fertilized, just as the sun must be fertilized in order to radiate light through life. So then we have this difference: When a human egg is not fertilized it goes out, it evaporates into cosmic space; when it is fertilized it remains for awhile on the earth.

What happens is like inhalation and exhalation. If I only exhaled, I would give my being up to cosmic space as does the infertile human egg. Consider how interesting it is that you exhale, and the air that you have exhaled contains your own carbon. It is a delicate process. Just imagine that today you have a tiny bit of carbon in your big toe. You inhale, and oxygen spreads out. The small amount of carbon that today is in your big toe combines with the oxygen, and tomorrow this little particle of carbon is somewhere out there in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. That is really what happens. During his lifetime man constantly has in himself the same substance that the human egg contains when it is fertilized. If we only exhaled and never inhaled we would always be dying; we would continually be dissolving into the atmosphere. By inhaling we guard ourselves against death. Every time we inhale we protect ourselves from death.

The child that is still maturing in the mother's womb has come into being from the fertilized human egg and is protected from disintegration. The child takes its first breath only at the moment of birth when it comes into the world. Before that it must be supplied with oxygen from the mother's body. But now with birth something quite significant happens. At birth man for the first time receives from the outer world the capability to live. After all, man cannot live without oxygen. Although in the mother's womb he exists without oxygen from the outer air, he does get it from the body of the mother.

Thus, one can say that when man emerges from his mother's body and comes into the world, he actually changes his whole life process. Something radically different happens to it. He now receives oxygen from outside, whereas before he was able to assimilate it in the body of his mother. Just ask yourselves if there is a machine anywhere in the world that can supply itself with heat first in one way and then in another? For nine or ten months man lives in the body of his mother before he appears in the external world. In the womb he is supplied with what life gives him in a completely different manner from the way he does after he has taken his first breath.

Let us examine something else connected with this. Imagine that your sleep has been somewhat disturbed. You are awakened from a fitful sleep by a quite frightening dream in which you perhaps experience that you came home to a locked house and cannot get in. Someone in the house is expecting you so you struggle to unlock the door. You may have experienced something like this. In dreams we do indeed experience such conditions of anxiety.

Now, if you examine what actually happens when the human being has such nightmares, you always discover that something is amiss with the breathing. You can even experimentally produce such nightmares. If you take a handkerchief and plug up your mouth or cover your nose, you will dream the nicest nightmares as nightmares go because you cannot inhale properly.

It is rather strange that our having such conditions of anxiety depends simply on inhalation and exhalation, in other words, on oxygen and carbon. We can deduce from this that we live in the air with our soul element. We do not live in our muscles or in our bones with our soul element but rather in the air. It is really the case that our soul moves along with the air during inhalation and exhalation. Thus, we can say that the soul element seeks out the air in which it floats after the child has taken its first breath. Earlier, it had absorbed oxygen in a completely different way.

Where does the human being get oxygen prior to birth? In the prenatal state an actual breathing process does not yet exist. There is no breathing while the human being is in the mother's womb; everything takes place through the circulation. Various vessels that are torn away at birth pass into the embryo from the mother's body, and with the blood and fluids oxygen also passes into the embryo. With birth man carries his basic life principle out of the watery element into the air. When he is born he transposes the life principle from the fluid element in which it existed before birth out into the air.

From this you can conclude that before conception the human being is first an entity that, like the bacilli, is not fit for the earth at all. Initially he is a being alien to the earth. Later on, he is shielded from the earth's forces and can develop in the mother's body, but when he is actually born and emerges from the surroundings of the maternal womb, he is exposed to the forces of the earth. Then he becomes capable of life only by becoming accustomed to an activity that enables him to live in the air. Throughout his earthly life man protects himself against the forces of the earth by living not with the earth at all but by living with the air.

Just imagine how hard it would be if you had to live with the earth! A man who steps on a scale finds that he weighs a certain amount—a thin one less, a fat one more. Now imagine that you had to grab yourself by the hair and carry your whole body all the time, constantly carry your own weight. Wouldn't that be an exhausting chore! Yet, although you do indeed carry it around with you, you do not feel this weight at all, nor are you aware of it. Why? Your breathing protects you from the heaviness of the earth. In fact, with your soul you do not live in the body at all but rather in the breathing process.

You can now easily comprehend why materialistic science does not find the soul. Materialistic science looks for the soul in the body, which is heavy. In its research it dissects a dead body that no longer breathes. Well, science cannot discover the soul there, because the soul is not to be found in such a body. Materialistic science could find the soul only if our constitution were such that in walking around everywhere we would have to carry our own bodies, sweating profusely

from the effort. Then it would make sense to seek for the soul with materialistic means. But the way things really stand, it makes no sense at all. We sweat for other reasons. When we emerge from the maternal womb, we do not live within our solid substances. As it is, we are only ten percent solid substance. Nor do we live in our fluid element, to which we bestow life. With our soul we actually live in our breathing.

Gentlemen, please follow me now in a train of thought that belongs to the most significant matters of the present time. Let us picture to ourselves a human fetus. Through birth it emerges into the outside world and becomes a full-fledged human being who now inhales air with his lungs and exhales again through his nose. It should be quite self-evident to you that when a person is born, he actually lives with his soul in the breathing process. As long as he exists in the mother's womb, he lives in a watery element. In a sense, he emerges from the water into the air when he is born. As earthly man you can live only in the air, not in water. But before birth you lived in water, and up until the third week you were even shaped like a little fish to enable you to live there. You lived in water up to the time of birth, but the earth does not allow you to live in that element. What does it signify that before birth you lived in water? It means that your life cannot derive from the earth at all, that it must originate from beyond the earth because the earth does not permit you to live. We must lift ourselves up from the earth into the air to live.

Because we have lived in water up to the moment of birth, we may conclude that our life is not bestowed by the earth. Our life of soul is not given us by the earth. It is impossible for the earth to bestow this life of the soul on you. Hence we may understand that it comes from beyond the earth. When we comprehend how life is actually contained in the breathing process, and how life already exists in the embryo but in a fluid element, we immediately realize that this life has descended from a spiritual world into the mother's ovum.

People will frequently call such statements unscientific. Nevertheless, we can study a lot of science and reach the conclusion that what the illustrious scientists do in their science is much less logical than what I have just told you. What I have now told you is absolutely logical. Unfortunately, things are such in our age that children are already drilled in school to turn a deaf ear to something like this; or if they happen to hear it, they will say at most, “He's crazy. We've learned that everything grows out of the human egg.” Well, it is just as ridiculous as learning that the human head grows from a head of cabbage. A human head can grow from a cabbage no more than the human element, the whole human activity during life, can be derived from the human egg. But children are already taught these completely nonsensical things in school.

I have already given you an example of this. Even the smallest children are told that once the earth, along with the whole planetary system, was one huge primeval nebula. Of course, the nebula does nothing when it is still, and so it is made to rotate. It starts to revolve quickly, and as it turns it becomes thinner and thinner. Eventually individual bodies split off, and a round one remains in the middle. The children are shown with a demonstration how this can be imitated. The teacher takes a piece of cardboard, sticks a needle through it, and puts a small drop of oil into a glass of water. He now turns the piece of cardboard and the oil drop, which floats on top of the water, begins to move. It starts to rotate, and tiny oil drops split off. A large drop of oil remains in the middle. This is a little planetary system with its sun. You see, children—so he says—we can do it on a small scale. So it is quite plausible that there once existed a nebula that revolved, and from this nebula celestial bodies gradually split off, leaving the large star remaining the middle.

But now, gentlemen, what is the most important factor in this experiment? Why does the drop of oil rotate in the glass of water? Because the teacher turns the piece of cardboard. Likewise, a great cosmic teacher had to sit somewhere out there in the universe to turn things around, spinning off celestial bodies! Gentlemen, when from the beginning someone teaches children such things, they become “clever” as adults. When someone wants to be logical and expresses doubt, they call him a dreamer because they know how the world began!

You see, such thoughts contain absolutely no reality. This rotating, primeval nebula thought up by Kant and Laplace has no reality at all; it is really quite foolish. To postulate such rotating nebulas is really rather stupid. The only grounds for it are the supposedly spiral nebulas observed through telescopes. Out in the wide cosmic spaces there are indeed such spiral nebulas; that is correct. But if by looking out there with a telescope and seeing these spiral nebula, a man should say, “Well, yes, our whole solar system was once such a nebula too,” then he is about as clever as one who takes a swarm of insects in the distance for a dust cloud. This can happen, but the swarm of gnats is alive while the dust cloud is lifeless. The spiral nebula out in space is alive; it has life within it. Likewise, the whole solar system had its own life and spirituality in earlier times, and this spirituality continues to work today.

When the human egg is shielded in the body of the mother by fertilization, it can unite with the human spirit. When we gradually grow old, the heaviness slowly makes itself felt by the fact that our substances are seized by the earth's gravity. Suppose a person's digestion is amiss and, as a result, the life forces do not properly pass through it. Then all kinds of tiny solid particles form in the muscles. They become filled up with these small solid bodies, which are minute uric acid stones, and then we have gout. We begin to be conscious of heaviness, of gravity.

When we are healthy and oxygen invigorates us through our breathing, such uric acid deposits are not formed, and we do not become afflicted with gout. Gout occurs only if oxygen does not pass through our body in a truly invigorating manner and does not assimilate carbon correctly. If oxygen does not pass through our organism in the right way, carbon will cause all kinds of problems; then there will be present everywhere such minute particles in our blood vessels. We feel that as an effect of the earth in moving around. In fact, we have to be shielded from the earth. We remain alive only because we are constantly protected from the earth and its influences by the breathing process. The earth is not damaging for us only because we are constantly being shielded from it. We would always be sick if we were always exposed to the earth.

You see, in the middle of the nineteenth century, when natural science had its greatest materialistic successes, people were completely stunned by its accomplishments and scientists wanted to explain everything by way of what happens on the earth. These scientists were extremely clever, and they liberated man from much that had encumbered him. Nothing is to be said against them; they can even be praised but they were utterly stupefied by scientific progress and tried to explain the whole human being in such a way as if only the earth had an influence on him. They did not realize that when the earth's influences begin to take effect on man, he first becomes nervous and then becomes ill in some way. He is well only by virtue of being constantly shielded from earthly influences.

Eventually, however, man is overcome by these earthly influences. How do they make themselves felt? The earthly influences assert themselves because man gradually loses the art of breathing. When he cannot breathe properly anymore, he returns to his condition before conception. He dissolves into the cosmic ether and returns to the world from which he came. With his last breath, man sinks back into the world from which he emerged. When we correctly understand breathing, we also comprehend birth and death. But nowhere in modern science do we find the right understanding of breathing.

In sum, man first learns to live with the world through the female ovum, then learns to exist independently on the earth for a certain length of time by virtue of the male fertilization, and finally returns to the condition where he again can live on his own outside the earth. Gradually one learns to comprehend birth and death, and only then can one begin to have the right concept of what man is regarding his soul, of what is not born and does not die but comes from without, unites itself with the ovum in the mother, and eventually returns to the spiritual world.

The situation today is such that we must comprehend the immortal soul element, which is not subject to birth and death. This applies especially to those who are active in science. This, indeed, is necessary for mankind today. For hundreds and thousands of years, men have had a faith in immortality that they cannot possibly retain today because they are told all kinds of things that actually are nothing and fall apart in the face of science. Everything that a man is asked to believe today must also be a matter of knowledge. We must learn to comprehend the spiritual out of science itself, the way we have done here in these lectures. That is the task of the Goetheanum and of anthroposophy in general: to correctly understand the spiritual out of natural science.

You see, it is difficult to get people somehow to comprehend something new. It is Christmastime now, and people could say to themselves, “Well, we must find a new way to understand how the spirit lives in the human race.” If people would stop to think how the spirit lives in mankind, and if they would try to arrive at this understanding through real knowledge, we would find everything renewed. We could even celebrate Christmas anew, because we would observe this holiday in a manner appropriate for the modern age. Instead, on one hand, people continue to observe only what is dead in science and, on the other, they perpetuate the old traditions to which they can no longer attach any meaning. I would like to know what meaning those people who exchange gifts can still see in Christmas. None at all! They do it merely from an old custom. Side by side with this, a science is taught that is everywhere filled with contradictions. Nowhere does anyone wish to consider the fact that science presents something that can lead to the realization of the spiritual.

Today, one can say that if Christianity is to have any meaning at all, one must once again embark on attaining a real knowledge of the spirit. This is the only thing possible; it is not enough just to perpetuate the old. For what does it imply to read the Bible to people on festive occasions, or even to children in school, if along with this one tells the child that there was once a primeval nebula that rotated? The head and the heart come completely to oppose one another. Then man forgets how to be a human being on the earth because he no longer even knows himself.

Anyone is a fool who thinks that as human beings on the earth we consist only of what is heavy, of the body that is put on the scale and weighed. This part we do not need at all. It is nonsense to think that we consist of these material substances that can be weighed. In reality, we do not become aware of the body at all, because we shield ourselves from it in order to stay well. The curing of illness consists in expelling the earthly influences that are affecting the sick person. All healing is actually based on removing the human being from the earth's influence. If we cannot remove man from the earth and its influences, we cannot cure him. He then lies down in bed, allows himself to be supported by the bed and gives himself up to weight. When one lies down one does not carry one's own self.

So we have the old customs on one hand and, on the other, a science that does not enlighten man as to what he really is as a human being. Nothing positive can come from all this. It is true that the World War, with all the consequences that still afflict us today, would not have occurred if human beings had known something of the inhumanity beforehand. Even now, they do not want to know. Even now, they still want to get together at congresses without any new thoughts and just repeat the same old things. Nowhere are they able to conceive new thoughts. What at first existed in mankind as confused ideas became a habit and then became our social order today. We are not going to get anywhere in the world again until from within we really feel what in fact the human being is.

This is really what those who understand the aims of anthroposophy conceive of as Christmas. Christmas should remind us that once again a science of the spirit must be born. Anthroposophy is the best spiritual being that can be born. Mankind is much in need of a Christmas festival. Otherwise, it does away with the living Christ and retains only the cross of Christ. Ordinary science is only the cross, but once again we must arrive at what is living. We must strive for that.

Well, gentlemen, that is what I wanted to mention on this particular day in addition to the other things. With this, I wish you all pleasant holidays!

Question: For many years I have suffered from hayfever. Now I have heard that it must be treated early in the year. If injections are administered as early as January or February before a person begins to suffer, they are supposed to be more effective. Should I go along with this remedy?

Dr. Steiner: What you have said is correct, but there is one small catch. You see, the remedy that is in use here is meant to be applied prophylactically; that is, it is meant to work ahead of time. In fact, it should be used weeks before the symptoms of hayfever arise. The problem, however, is that patients come in only when they are already afflicted with the malady. Just today we received an interesting letter about another hayfever remedy. The inventor of this other remedy writes that his medication brings only a little relief to individual hayfever attacks. He believes that our remedy can permanently cure hayfever, especially if it is taken twice at wide intervals. Naturally, we would much prefer patients to be treated in January or February rather than in May or June. Understandably, however, people generally see a doctor only after an illness has been contracted.

Yet, our hayfever remedy works in such a way that if given to the patient even during the external appearance of the illness, which is only the final result of an inner affliction, it protects him from a renewed attack. It is particularly effective if applied again a year later. After that, the application need not always be repeated. Even though the illness affects only one organ, this remedy treats its basis in the whole bodily organization. To explain this, I would like to go into more detail concerning the causes of internal illnesses and how they arise in the first place.

Of course, it is quite simple to comprehend why one becomes indisposed if one breaks a leg or sustains a concussion due to a fall. In these cases the injury is external and the cause easily understood; the cause is externally visible. In the case of internal illnesses, however, one usually does not really consider where they come from and how they suddenly assert themselves. This pertains to another question raised earlier of why one may become infected when in contact with certain people. An external cause also seems to be present here.

Ordinary science offers a simple explanation for this. Bacilli are transmitted from an ill person who has influenza, for example, and then these are inhaled and bring about the disease in another. It is like someone injuring a man by hitting him with a mattock. In this case the injury is caused by a patient bombarding another person with a multitude of bacilli. Matters are not at all that simple, however; they are much more complicated. You will understand this when you realize that in everyday life a man constantly becomes a bit indisposed and then must cure himself. The point is that all of us are really a bit sick when thirsty or hungry, and we cure ourselves by drinking and eating. Hunger is the beginning of an illness, and if it is allowed to continue we can die from it. After all, we can die of starvation and even sooner of thirst. So you see that even in our everyday lives we bear something like the beginning of a disease. Every act of drinking or eating is in truth an act of healing.

We must make clear to ourselves now what in fact happens when we become hungry or thirsty. You see, our body is inwardly always active. Through the intake of food, the body receives nutrients. External substances are absorbed through the mouth and the intestinal passages into some part of the body. Now, you must understand that the human organization immediately rebels against these nutritional substances; it does not tolerate them in their original forms and destroys them. Food substances must actually be disintegrated. In fact, they are annihilated, and this begins in the mouth. The reason for this is that there is continuous, never-ceasing activity in our body. This activity must be observed in the same way as fingers or hands are. Ordinary science simply records how a piece of bread is eaten, dissolved in the mouth, and then distributed in the body, but we must also take into consideration that the human body is continually active. Even if nothing is put into it, if nothing goes into the body for five hours, say, still its activity does not cease. You may even be like an empty sack, but things have not quieted within. You remain in constant inward activity, and things are still bustling around. Only when this internal activity can become occupied with something is it content. That is especially the case after a meal when it can dissolve and disintegrate the food substances; then it is content.

This internal activity that we possess is quite different from man in general, for the human being can become lazy. The internal activity is never lazy, it never ceases. If I don't eat anything, it is as if I had an empty flour sack in which there is activity even if I avoid all tangible substance. This activity—for reasons that I shall tell you later on—is identified in spiritual science as the astral body. It is never lazy, and if it can stay active destroying and dissolving the food substances, it is filled with inward comfort; it then has a feeling of inner well-being. But if I take in no food substances, then the astral body is not satisfied, and this dissatisfaction is expressed as hunger. Hunger is not something at rest within us; it is an activity, a soul-spiritual activity that cannot be stilled. We can truly say that this inner activity is in love with the food substances, and if it does not receive them it is just as dissatisfied as any jilted lover. This dissatisfaction is the hunger, and it is by all means something spiritual.

So the activity that is executed internally consists of disintegrating food substances. What is useful is transmitted into the blood vessels, and the rest is eliminated through urine or feces. This is the healthy, normal and regular activity of the human being in which the astral body works properly to dissolve the food substances. It absorbs into the body what is useful and discharges what is not.

We must assume, gentlemen, that this activity of man is no ordinary activity; rather, it contains something immensely wise. Now, dissolved and transformed food substances are constantly being transmitted through blood vessels to the inner organs, and the nourishment that goes into the lungs is completely different from what goes to the spleen. The astral body is much smarter than the human being. Man can only stuff the provisions into his mouth, but the astral body can distinguish them. It is like sorting two substances, throwing one in one direction to be used there and the other in another direction. This is what the astral body accomplishes. It selects certain substances to dispatch to the lungs, spleen, larynx and other organs. A wise distribution is at work within. The astral body is immensely wise, much wiser than we. The most educated person today would not know how to send the proper substances into the lungs, larynx or spleen; he would not even know what to say about it. But internally man can do this through his astral body.

The astral body, however, can become stupid—not as stupid as the human being can become, but stupid in comparison to its own cleverness. Let us assume that it thus becomes stupid. Man is born with a certain predisposition and is inwardly endowed with certain forces. The activity that the astral body develops for food substances occurs even if somebody sits down all day, immobile like an Oriental idol. His astral body still remains active, but that is not enough. We must also do something externally, and if we have no work to do we must go for a stroll; the astral body demands that we at least walk around. This differs with each individual. One person needs more physical activity, another less.

Let us suppose now that someone has certain predispositions from birth that make him into a sedentary person. It pleases his stupid head—or we could say his stupid ego—to sit around a lot. Now, if he is predisposed to sit around, but the astral body is predisposed to walk about, then his astral body will become stupid. This will also happen if somebody overexerts himself walking. In both cases the astral body will become stupid and will no longer accomplish things correctly. It will no longer properly sort out the food substances and transmit them to the appropriate organs; it will do all this clumsily instead. The astral body becomes too disorganized to send the right substances to the heart or larynx. Substances improperly transmitted to the heart, for example, will remain somewhere else in the body. They are not put in the organ where they belong but, since they are basically useful, neither are they eliminated with the feces. Instead, they are deposited somewhere else in the body. But a man cannot tolerate having something deposited in his body that is not part of its proper activity; he cannot stand that.

So what happens with these improper deposits due to the malfunctioning astral body? What happens to us on account of that? Well, suppose we have in our body certain deposits that should have been directed to the larynx. Because someone's astral body does not function properly, “larynx refuse” is secreted everywhere in his body. The first thing that happens is that his larynx becomes weak. The organ does not receive sufficient sustenance, and thus the person suffers from a weakened larynx. But apart from that, his body contains larynx refuse, which is dispersed everywhere. As I have already told you, the human body is ninety percent water, and the refuse dissolves in this whole fluid organization. The pure, animated fluid that a man requires within him is now polluted. This is what happens so often within ourselves. Deposits meant for certain parts of the body dissolve in our fluid organization, contaminating it.

Say that the refuse of the larynx is dissolved in us and comes into contact with the stomach. It cannot cause damage there, because the stomach has what it needs and was not deprived of anything. But the bodily fluids flow everywhere in the human organism and penetrate into the area of the larynx, which is already weakened. It receives this polluted fluid, this water in which the larynx refuse is dissolved, and specifically from this the organ becomes diseased. The larynx refuse does not affect the other organs, but it does cause the larynx to become afflicted.

Let us now consider a simple phenomenon. A sensitive person finds it pleasant to listen to another person speak beautifully. But if someone crows like a rooster or grunts like a pig, he will not find this so pleasant to hear, even if he understands what is being said. It is not at all pleasant to listen to a person crowing or grunting. Listening to someone who is hoarse is a particularly uncomfortable and constricting experience. Why do we experience such sensations while listening to another? It is based on the fact that in reality we always inaudibly repeat whatever the other is saying. Listening consists not only in hearing but also in speaking faintly. We not only hear what another says but also imitate it with our speech organs. We always imitate everything that someone else does.

Now imagine that you are near a person who is sick with flu, and though you may not be listening to him and inwardly imitating his speech, you feel sorry for him. This makes you quite susceptible and sensitive to him. The flu patient's fluid organization contains many dissolved substances, which contaminate the pure, living fluid I told you about and make it instead unhealthy for him. I even describe the nature of such a contaminated fluid organization.

Imagine that you have a piece of ground where you plant various things. Not everything thrives in every kind of earth, but suppose you want to plant onions and garlic in this particular spot. Should the earth be unsuitable, the onions would be small and the garlic buds still smaller, so you should also add to this soil something that contains sulphur and phosphorus. Then you would have the healthiest onions and garlic buds, and they would smell strong, too!

Now, when a man has influenza refuse within his body, the same substances are dissolved in his fluid organization that had to be added to the ground in order to produce the finest onion and garlic plants, and before long, the sick person begins to smell like these plants. Now, I associate with this, though I may not even be aware that I am sitting in this odour of onion or garlic, because it need not be strong. The odour exuded by a person who is sick with the flu causes the patient's head to feel dull, because a certain organ in the head, the “sensorium,” is not properly supplied with the substance it needs. As a result of having flu refuse within us, an organ in the mid-section of the head is not properly supplied. This odour is always like that of onions or garlic and can be detected by one with a sensitive nose. Just as we tune in on and imitate a shrill and rasping voice, so do we join in with what an ill person evaporates. As a consequence, our own astral body, our own activity, becomes disorganized. This disorder causes a chemical basis that in turn makes us contract the flu. It is like making soil suitable for onions and garlic. At first, then, the illness has nothing to do with bacteria but simply with the relation of one person to another.

If you want to plant predominantly onions and garlic in a garden, and you add to the earth substances containing phosphorus and sulphur, you can now wait and say, “Well, I've done my duty. I want to harvest onions and garlic, and so with some kind of organic fertilizer I have added sulphur and phosphorus to the garden.” But it would be foolish to think that this is all it would take to grow the onions. You would first have to plant the bulbs! Likewise, it would be foolish to maintain that in man's interior, bacteria are already growing in the environment that is being prepared.

They first have to be introduced into it. Just as the onion bulb thrives in soil rich in phosphorus and sulphur, so do the bacilli thrive within a sulphuric environment in the body. Bacilli are not even necessary for one person to catch the flu from another. Instead, by imitating with my fluid organization what is happening in the patient's fluid organism, I myself produce a favourable environment for the bacilli; I myself acquire them. The sick person need not bombard me with them at all.

When we look at the whole matter, we must reply in quite a specific way to the question, “What is it that causes us to be stricken with a certain disease?” We become sick when something injures us, and even in the case of internal illnesses something is actually injuring us. The impure fluid, in which substances are dissolved that should have been digested, injures us; it injures us internally.

Now we can turn our attention to illnesses like hayfever. The incidence of hayfever depends much more on the time of year than on the pollen in the air. More than anything else, what makes a man susceptible to catching hayfever is the fact that his astral body is not properly excreting; it is not properly executing its activity that is directed more to the external surface. As a result, when spring approaches and everything begins to thrive in water, a person makes his whole fluid organization more sensitive and thus susceptible to this illness by dissolving certain substances in it. By dissolving various substances in this fluid organization, the fluids in a man's body always become a little diluted. The fluid organization in a man who has a tendency toward hayfever is always somewhat too large. The fluids are being pushed aside in all directions by what is dissolved in them. That is how a person becomes sensitive to everything that makes its appearance in spring, especially to pollen, those particles from plants that are now particularly irritating.

If the nose were not enclosed, hayfever could be induced by many other irritants. Pollen does enter the nose, however, and it cannot be well tolerated if one already has hayfever. Pollen does not cause hayfever but it aggravates it.

Our hayfever remedy is based on drawing the extended fluid organization in the body together again so that it becomes a bit cloudy and once again secretes what it had initially dissolved. It is really quite simple and based on nothing more than contracting the fluid organism to its normal size. It first becomes a little cloudy, and you have to watch that what is secreted from the fluidity is not later retained in the body. That is why it is beneficial for a person to perspire somewhat after having been inoculated with the remedy; it is good if he can move about and do something that induces perspiration right after the inoculation. The inoculation is always somewhat problematic when given to a person who is suffering from constipation, and the patient should first be asked if he is constipated. Otherwise, if the fluid organization is contracted, things accumulate too much and are not eliminated right away. This, of course, is not good. A person who is constipated should be given a laxative along with the inoculation.

Healing entails not only applying a medication but also adjusting life accordingly, so that the human body reacts in an appropriate manner to what has been given it. This naturally is of tremendous significance; otherwise, the person can be made even sicker. If you inoculate somebody with a remedy that is quite effective, even exceptionally good, but you do not see to it that the patient's digestion functions properly and that everything the remedy brings about is eliminated, you naturally drive him further into the illness.

With truly effective remedies it is important that the doctor know not only what medicine cures what disease but also what questions to ask the patient. The greatest medical art lies in asking the right questions and in being familiar with the patient. This is extremely important. Yet it is strange, for example, that we meet doctors who frequently have not even asked the patient his age, though this is significant. While he may use the same remedies, a doctor can treat a fifty-year old in a manner completely different from the way he treats one who is forty, for example. They should not be so schematic as to say, “This medication is right for this illness.” For instance, it makes a great difference if you want to cure someone who is constantly afflicted with diarrhoea or someone who has chronic constipation. Such remedies could be tested, and here experiments with animals would be much less objectionable than they are in other areas. Regarding constipation or diarrhoea, you can easily learn how some remedy reacts in the general physical organism that men have in common with the animals by giving the same medicine to both a dog and a cat. The dog regularly suffers from constipation, and the cat from diarrhoea. You can acquire a wonderful knowledge by observing the degree of difference in the medication's effect in the dog or the cat. Scientific knowledge really is not attained by university training in how to do this or that with certain instruments. True science results, rather, when common sense is aroused a little; then people know how they must conduct their experiments.

In sum, it is of prime importance to realize that an illness has its basis in the whole human organization. The individual organ becomes afflicted because the activity of the astral body directs substances to it that have been precipitated from within. The development of certain inner diseases like influenza, hayfever and even typhoid fever becomes comprehensible when we understand how substances improperly deposited in our bodies are dispersed in our fluid organism.

We are not only a “material man” but also a “water man,” and, as I have already explained to you, we are also an “air man,” whose form changes every moment. One moment the air is outside, and the next it is within.

Just as the solid substances that we contain within our bodies as refuse dissolve in the water, so does that water itself constantly evaporate within us. Within the muscles of your little finger, for example, are minute evaporations of water. Water constantly evaporates throughout your whole body. Furthermore, what is evaporating in the fluid organism penetrates into what you inhale as oxygen, which is also a vapor or gas. When water on the ground evaporates, it rises up into the atmosphere, and when water constantly evaporates in delicate processes within the fluid man, it penetrates into the air that we inhale. We cannot tolerate solid substances being dispersed in the fluids, and neither can we tolerate fluids evaporating into the air organism.

Take the case of a person whose lungs have become afflicted because something has occurred like the process that I have just described. This person can become afflicted with a lung disease, which can be cured if it arose from the wrong substances being deposited in the water man. But let us assume that the lung's affliction is not pronounced enough to become apparent. After all, the human organs are sensitive. The condition does not reach the point where the lungs become so strongly afflicted that they are inflamed, but they do become a little indisposed. The person can tolerate this slight indisposition, but substances now enter into his fluid organism that really should penetrate the lungs. In this case, the fluids within the lungs have the wrong kinds of substances dissolved in them; and these substances evaporate, especially if the lungs are not completely well.

Thus, in the case of the quite obvious internal diseases, the water man receives something inappropriate from the solid substances, and in this case something inappropriate reaches the point of evaporation and mingles with the oxygen that is inhaled. The fact that water evaporates inappropriately and unites with oxygen damages the nervous system in particular, because the nerves require healthy oxygen, not oxygen that has evaporations in it from the contaminated fluid of the water man. Contaminated fluid evaporates into the lungs, and this fluid may be responsible for their slight indisposition. Something that should not evaporate does, and this is damaging to the nervous system. The person does not become radically ill, but he does become insane.

It can be said that internal physical illnesses are based on something in man that causes improper substances to be dispersed in his fluid organism. But so-called mental illnesses are in reality not mental at all, because the mind or spirit does not become ill. Mental illnesses are based on body fluids evaporating improperly into oxygen and thereby disturbing the nervous system. This can happen when some organ is so slightly impaired or indisposed that it cannot be detected externally. You see, then, that man must continually process substances correctly so that nothing inappropriate disperses in his fluids and that his fluids in turn do not improperly evaporate. But even in everyday life there is a process that causes improper evaporation of water, and this becomes noticeable when we are thirsty. We cure the thirst by drinking; we free our water, so to speak, from what is inappropriately evaporating within it and wash away what is incorrect.

So we can say that in hunger there is actually the tendency to physical illness, and in thirst there is the predisposition to mental illness. If a man does not properly nourish himself, he forms the basis for organic diseases, and if he does not quench his thirst rightly, he may bring about some form of mental illness. In some circumstances, the improper quenching of thirst is difficult to detect, especially if it occurs in infancy. At this stage one cannot clearly distinguish between assuaging thirst and hunger since both are satisfied by milk. Therefore, if through the mother's milk or that of a wet nurse something harmful comes into the organism, this can much later cause the fluid organism to evaporate incorrectly and thus lead to some mental disorder. Or let us say a person is wrongly inoculated. An ill-chosen inoculation with one or another cow lymph or diseased human lymph can afflict the organs that work upon the water, even though the water itself does not become directly diseased. As a result of an inappropriate inoculation, a person's evaporation processes may not function correctly, and later he may be disposed to some kind of mental illness.

You will have noticed, gentlemen, that nowadays a great many people become afflicted with dementia praecox, so-called “youthful insanity,” which extends, however, quite far beyond the years of youth. This illness, in which people begin mentally to deteriorate in their youth, originates in great part from the wrong kind of feeding during the earliest years of childhood. It is not enough merely to examine chemically the baby's milk; one must look into completely different aspects. Because people have ceased to pay attention to feeding in our age, this illness arises with such vehemence.

You will have realized from all this that it does not suffice simply to train doctors to know that a certain remedy is good for a certain illness. One must rather seek to make the totality of life healthier, and for that one must first discover all that is related to a healthy life. Anthroposophy can provide this understanding. It aims at being effective in the field of hygiene and seeks to comprehend correctly questions of health.

Dear attendees,

In my lecture the day before yesterday, I tried to show the path into the supersensible world that can be taken by modern humanity and which, from our present-day consciousness and stage of human development, we ourselves demand as a requirement, even if we have so far only sensed this inner soul fact rather than consciously followed it. A challenge to go into the supersensible world by other paths than those we have been accustomed to understand until now.

Not so much because I believe that the direct experience of the content, especially in the form of the supersensible world view that I spoke of the day before yesterday, must also underlie the thoughts and impulses of the reorganization of our external public, namely social life, but because I am convinced that in order to penetrate the supersensible from the point of view of today's man, such a transformation of the entire soul life is necessary, as it must take place, in order to solve the great problems, [in order] to solve the social problems of the present, because, simply, as I believe, thinking, feeling must be trained in such thoughts and ideas about the supersensible, as they have been mentioned, I preceded the lecture here last Saturday with today's lecture. Because, my dear attendees, I do believe that a way out of the confusion and chaos of the present social structure is only possible if we look with full awareness and without fear at the radical transformation that we are currently undergoing with regard to our public life. I do not believe that anyone who sees the World War catastrophe as a mere event that interrupts the course of human development, so to speak, and that can subsequently continue in the same way, I do not believe that anyone who views this war catastrophe in this way is inclined to muster the thoughts and feelings that are necessary today for someone who wants to participate in what is necessary to build. It seems to me that only those who, in this world-catastrophe, can truly recognize the collapse of an old spiritual and world view, and who at the same time can recognize the new demands that have not yet taken on a definite form from which one can expect the necessary for the future, but which already announce at least parts of what we have to strive for. But those who are still steeped in the old way of thinking, who have become accustomed to the old social spirit in their thoughts, who are rooted in the old institutions with their habits of life, still cannot bring themselves to really accept that a fundamental transformation is necessary. And still those who come forward with their new demands, honestly and sincerely, cannot bring themselves to look at the reality of life as thoroughly as is necessary to strip these demands of the character of the factions, of the character of abstract programs, and to think them out, to feel them out of the immediate reality of life. Only when humanity has come to see the terrible abyss that has opened up between two sections of the population today will it be on a par with intellectual life and its demands. In fact, we are living in such a transitional period today that we must bring all the details, all the individual characteristics of a downfall before our soul; that on the other hand we must carefully examine everything that asserts itself in a more or less vague way as new demands.

And so, my dear audience, our gaze is not initially turned to what I spoke about last Saturday when we look at the phenomena of the time. Rather, our gaze is directed to that link in life that is, so to speak, opposed to the actual spiritual current of humanity, but from which all the new demands of the present time arise, and where the collapse of all habits of thought and life becomes apparent; our gaze is turned, if we want to understand the actual character of the time, to economic life. And within this economic life, I think it is quite clear that two views of humanity, two ways of feeling humanity, are asserting themselves, between which there is an abyss, and which today can understand each other less than such currents of humanity have ever understood each other within the development of humanity. There is no inclination to look everywhere for what is really characteristic. Above all, there is no inclination to look at the economic life of the present in such a way as to recognize in it forces other than the purely economic ones, which assert themselves both in the collapse and in the new ascent that is to be hoped for. But a comprehensive view must not shy away from drawing attention to these other forces. Therefore, today I will need to speak not only about economic life, but also about everything else that is part of economic life and which must undergo the same renewal and transformation as economic life itself. I will therefore have to speak to you today about the fundamental challenge of our time as a threefold one. I will have to speak of the social question as a spiritual or cultural question, I will have to speak of the social question as a legal or state question; I will have to speak of the social question as an economic question.

But has not this economic life developed in recent times in such a way that we can say: it basically floods everything, and we have become completely dependent with regard to external public life, also with regard to intellectual life and with regard to legal life, completely dependent on the shaping of our economic life.

Let us first look at what we can call the spiritual culture of the present day. This spiritual culture of the present day has received much praise. Time and again, and rightly so from a certain point of view, it has been emphasized how far humanity has come in terms of the development of spiritual life and spiritual culture. Again and again, people have pointed out how magical our intellectual culture must appear to someone who lived a millennium ago and surveys the human intellectual life of that time. Again and again, people have emphasized how, with the help of human resources, thought can now travel at lightning speed across the whole earth. And again and again, the way in which the boundaries that used to be drawn between the individual cultural areas have been overcome in modern times has been emphasized – and much more of the same.

But little consideration has been given to something that is connected, intimately connected, with the basic character of our newer intellectual life. It is connected with this fundamental character of our newer spiritual life that only a small minority of people can participate in this actual spiritual culture. This spiritual culture is such that only this small minority can find their way into what emerges in the most diverse fields of newer spiritual life when it is about the actual spiritual development of this culture, through their thinking habits and their entire way of feeling. We have a rich literary life, a rich artistic life. We have the most diverse world views. We have a developed ethic and so on, and so on. But all this encompasses human impulses, human ideas, human feelings that arise from the particular soul-orientation of a few. And these few must conquer this spiritual life in that the great mass of people simply cannot participate in it. Anyone who takes a broad view of what is actually happening in our culture today knows full well that, on many sides, there is a good will to use all kinds of folk art events, adult education centers and the like to communicate to the great majority what is spiritually conquered by a minority. However good the intentions in this area may be, they do not lead to the goal that they should actually achieve; basically, they only lead to a cultural lie. For, ladies and gentlemen, the nature of intellectual life is such that one can only participate in any form of it if this intellectual life flows from the most original human perceptions and experiences of life. But now our humanity is divided into a small minority, whose habits of life give rise to today's intellectual life, and the great mass, which is devoted only to manual labor, to the external economic life, and within this external economic life develops habits of life, the inner soul condition, and can find no real inner access to what the soul of a minority calls its spiritual life. Today, however much goodwill we may have, we communicate what we produce in the way of science and art through popular events for the masses. We are under a great illusion if we believe that this mass of people can truly absorb into their souls that which a minority is able to regard as its spiritual property. My dear audience, one must actually speak from life experience about this. And so, with reference to what I have just mentioned, please allow me to make a seemingly personal remark, but one that is meant to be symptomatic of what I am discussing here. For many years I was a teacher at a workers' education school. My students were all members of the proletariat. During that time, I tried to present within this workers' educational school what I could directly present from person to person, what I could express in the fields of history and natural science, so that what I expressed was always different from what was presented only last Saturday here in other fields as generally human. And I was actually always well understood, in that I reshaped history in a general human sense, in that I reshaped knowledge of nature in a general human sense. But, as a result of a certain contemporary fashion among the students and the school management, there was also a need for me to lead the students through galleries and the like, for example. And there it turned out that I actually felt like someone who was speaking to people about something, as if I were a complete stranger to them. If I expressed what I took directly from the soul of the people in the school lesson, we understood each other. If I spoke to the people about what the minority had produced as their culture, as their intellectual life, then the message was actually a lie, because people did not find access to what came from completely different psychological backgrounds through their habits of thought, through their feelings. In the ruling circles, people's thoughts were not directed towards such facts and phenomena. Hence the gulf, the abyss between the spiritual culture of the minority and the soul life, the life of the proletarian, who was completely caught up in the economic cycle. What did those who belonged to the minority know, basically, in the last three to four centuries, but especially in the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century, of what was going on in the souls of the broad masses of the proletariat? He directed these broad masses to work, to work that was created entirely in the direction of the minority culture. But he did not seek access to people, he did not seek access to hearts and souls. This was especially noticeable when he was sought, as happened in the case cited by me.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is approximately what can be said from the spiritual side with regard to the characteristics of one stage of human development. And if you then take a closer look at this spiritual life, this cultural life of the minority, then you have to say that this cultural life, because it is the life of a minority, is alien to the whole of contemporary human life. Despite all our arrogance, we live in an abstract culture; a culture that does not penetrate into the reality of human life. Therefore, it is not surprising that this culture produces a thought life that is actually unrealistic. A thought life that is out of touch with the whole person has the peculiarity that it can also submerge into reality. And if you will allow me to make another personal comment, again only meant as a symptom, it is the following:

In January 1914, I was obliged to summarize, deliberately at the time in Vienna before a small gathering, because a larger one would probably have laughed at me at the time, I was obliged to summarize what had formed in me as an idea, which I was telling, about the whole [course] of this modern cultural life and its way of thinking, what I had to form as an idea about the direction in which this cultural life is heading. And I had to summarize these insights, I believe I may call them that, at that time – that is, in the early spring of 1914 – about what is brought into the world of men through the contradictions in this intellectual life. I had to summarize it by saying: Our social conditions, right up to the highest levels, give the impression of a social disease, a social cancer, to anyone who observes them impartially, and this must express itself in a terrible way throughout the civilized world in the near future.

That was the opinion of an “impractical idealist” back then, as they say today; the opinion of someone who wants to decide something about reality from their own point of view. Today, we can be reminded of such a view of reality when we consider how, on the other hand, those who had emerged from the intellectual culture of the minority with its unrealistic sense of reality thought at the time about what was to come. Let us recall that in January 1914, a directing statesman summarized his views, despite the responsibility that weighed on him, in the words he said at the time to a parliamentary body: “We live in a general relaxation of political conditions,” he said, “which gives us hope of maintaining peace in Europe in the near future.” And he added: We are on the most friendly terms with the Russian government, which, thanks to the efforts of the cabinets, is not getting involved in the lies of the press pack. And we certainly think – the statesman in question spoke as a statesman of Central Europe – we certainly think to continue our friendly relations with Poland. And he adds, so at that time: negotiations are in progress with England that promise the very best for European peace. They have not yet been concluded, but they will bring about desirable conditions.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the train of thought of a person who is well-informed about the present and who lived at the time of the terrible world catastrophe that followed, which killed thousands and thousands of people in Europe and left three times as many maimed. The lesson to be learned from this global catastrophe is that, to the very depths of the soul, the culture of the minority has lost its sense of, its instinct for realities. These things are to be taken more seriously than ever. And they will only be taken seriously if we do not want to ignore the fact that the ideas that emerged from this unrealistic basis were simply not suited to bringing fruitful ideas into our economic life. People still do not want to admit this today. But this is the most important fact of economic life in modern times: the ruling circles have lost the comprehensive ideas of this economic life, and therefore, for a long period of time, this economic life has run its course throughout the entire civilized world as if it were running mechanically by itself. And the catastrophe of the world wars is nothing more than the result of allowing the economy to be driven into its own contradictions and destruction. This was due to the fact that within modern spiritual culture these thoughts were not taken from reality and therefore could not master and control this reality. Thus the leading and ruling circles pursued an economic policy which, by maintaining old institutions, actually destroyed life. But they never took the trouble to organize this economic life on a human basis. But within this economic life there arose something from the hearts and souls of those who, through their work, were merely harnessed to this economic life. And by looking at this, we come to the other side of the abyss; to the side where those stand who could not participate in the indicated way in the spiritual culture of the minority, who, since the advent of modern technology and modern capitalism, have been completely harnessed with all their humanity to this technology, to this capitalism that is emptying of meaning.

Now I would like to say: everything that I have characterized as a minority spiritual culture, as a certain attitude towards the broad masses of working proletarians, and as an attitude towards the mechanical course of economic life, which is noticeable on the one hand, has found its echo on the other. And this echo develops slowly, little by little. Only then will one do justice to the present time if one sees in this world catastrophe the leading of the spiritual and economic life ad absurdum, which I have just described. But now, from the other side, for more than half a century, there has been the sound of what once ended in the words, the world-shattering words: “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” And the catastrophe of the world wars has brought about the era in which everything that has since taken hold in the hearts and souls of the broadest circles of the proletariat under the influence of that from which that call arose has been realized. It has brought all this about and summarized it in a new way.

Therefore, the present is even more permeated with the necessity of pointing out with understanding what stands like an echo on the other side of the abyss. There we see that the proletarian masses look at the intellectual culture of the minority, which was to be given to them through all kinds of popular events and everything that is connected with the minority's intellectual life and habits, and there we see that the proletarian masses look at all this because they could not participate in it; and they found it understandable when their ingenious leader, who is just as great in his truths as he is great in his fallacies, when Karl Marx gave them the word, which characterized their relationship to the life of the minority in a way that could be misunderstood, generally misunderstood, but all the more understandable to the hearts of the masses, in the words “surplus value” and “labor performance”. And more or less clearly, large masses of proletarians were seized by the awareness, one might say, not to understand everywhere, but to feel: What we have as a relationship between what elevates religiously, what satisfies artistically, what warms as a worldview for the minorities, that is, we create the basis for this intellectual culture of the minorities by generating the capital base through the added value, through what is taken from what we have produced, from the proceeds of our products, beyond what is only compensation for our labor. And we must not judge the present time merely from the external standpoint of political economy; we shall not do justice to it; we must also judge it from the standpoint of the mass psychology of humanity. Here it is not a matter of whether one can discuss a word like surplus value more or less accurately, but rather how such a word works in the masses; how it arouses feelings, what hopes it inspires. These hopes are entirely in line with what I have just characterized. And more and more closely and more and more accurately did these proletarian masses see what their share is in that which lives as a spiritual culture, and what as a spiritual culture also guides legal and economic life. And that is why they also understood a second word, which was coined for them from the same source; they understood the word about the labor power of man, which can be bought as a commodity on the labor market, just as other commodities can be bought and sold. It may be that intellectually they did not grasp what was meant by this, but they felt it. By being made aware of this word, and hearing it from sources that were more or less clear or obscure, they sensed their way back to ancient times, when slavery still prevailed and when the whole human being could be bought and sold on the labor market like a thing or an animal. And they looked to the somewhat later period of serfdom, when fewer, but still enough human strength and labor were harnessed in bondage. And they sensed something of that personality consciousness that has gripped the hearts and souls in the development of humanity, as I explained the day before yesterday, since the middle of the fifteenth century. And they sensed: The time is past when something like a commodity, like a thing, can be sold by man. And they felt: the leading, guiding circles have failed to see the moment when the labor force must be stripped of the character of the commodity. And in one way or another, more or less clear or unclear, this demand “stripping the labor force of the character of the commodity” arises. Such was the answer to the lack of understanding shown by the leading, leading circles for the great masses of the proletariat.

And another point was also made, which must be taken into account if, in as naive a way as Woodrow Wilson does, one treats the social question of the present day only as a production question. It is certainly a production question, but the fact that it has only become a production question is precisely the fault and the neglect of the leading and guiding circles. What has developed in humanity over the last three to four centuries, ladies and gentlemen, is not only the newer economic life with its expanded technology and its capitalism. It is also a very specific direction of intellectual life. This spiritual life is not only the spiritual life of the minority, as I have characterized it, but a very specific direction of the spiritual life has moved into humanity.

When we look back to earlier times, there was also a religious, artistic spiritual life; a spiritual life that is now more or less regarded as a fantasy life. We do not want to talk about that now. But it was a spiritual life that provided people with a living world view, with an inner momentum; it placed people in the development of humanity and in the social order in such a way that each person could, in some way, find the answer from this spiritual life, how they are connected as spirit, as soul, with the spirit, with the soul of the world. He received the answer to the question: Do I have a dignified existence in the whole world? This possibility ceased under the influence of what came from modern science to meet man. This newer scientific attitude and orientation has ultimately lost all connection with the foundations of existence; it is directed only at the exterior of existence. In the end, one no longer had the feeling: a super-sensible element shines into your thoughts, into your ideas – but one had the feeling: the thoughts, the ideas are only thoughts, only ideas. One did not admit this to oneself; one retained the gesture of the old religious, the old artistic and other world-view feeling; but what one shaped anew was formed in such a way that it could not fulfill man as a whole. The proletarian, who had been snatched from the social situation in which he had formerly lived, to the machine, into soul-destroying capitalism, the proletarian, he truly could not believe in what had been revealed to the leading, guiding circles as the content of this spiritual life. They still spoke in the old formulas, which speak of a divine world order, a moral world order, expressing itself in the historical becoming of humanity. The proletarian was trapped in the mere economic order, in capitalism, which orients and guides this mere economic order. He felt nothing but: what is developing in the newer intellectual life is mere phrase, mere ideology; only the economic life has truth; only the economic order has truth! And so the view resounded again and again, especially in the leading thinking people of the proletariat: everything spiritual, everything artistic, everything religious, everything scientific, everything legal, everything moral is something that rises like a smoke from the only real, from the economic basis of existence, which is the only reality.

Yes, with such a view it is possible to think, it is possible to know – what is usually called knowing – but it is not possible to live with such a view, because the soul becomes desolate with it, because the soul is finally withdrawn from everything that can answer the question: Do I live a dignified human existence? The soul is driven to a mere brutal belief in the external product and its effectiveness. This ideology, it did not educate the proletariat! This disbelief in the spirit, the proletariat did not educate it. All this is the last legacy that the proletariat has inherited from the leading, guiding circles. It has inherited it in good faith, believing that it must be the newer worldview. And everything that has become soul-destroying in the hearts and minds of the proletarians comes from this side. And so we see what it looks like on the other side of the abyss. And we become aware that the proletariat, when it looks at the intellectual life that the modern age has brought forth, has finally said: In the end, it is only the smoke and sound of what is rising from the economic life, the actual basis of human life, the life of the leading, guiding circles. We want nothing to do with that!

And the other consciousness arose in the proletarian: these leading, guiding circles have separated themselves from us by taking possession of the old structure of economic life and shaping the life of the minority from it. But they have left us to be a second-class class, and our relationship to them is not that of man to man; our relationship to them is actually that of a disadvantaged class to a privileged class. And it is a cliché when they speak of the divine, the moral world order, of the ideas that live in history, of the spiritual powers, because all this comes from the economic order. And from a different economic order must come that which satisfies us as they are satisfied by their spiritual and other culture, their culture of life in the minority! What is called “historical materialism” arose out of these feelings.

From the threefold path, the proletariat has learned how a gulf has arisen between itself and the leading, guiding circles, in the way of the spiritual life in the way I have mentioned. But then, as this intellectual life developed and the minority had to draw in the broad masses of the proletariat for its work, something else arose. What is called the newer human formation had to be more or less carried into the broad masses. What was the result of this? Yes, a special fact emerges. The fact that when one quality of the soul develops, another develops at the same time. One of these was the one that developed through the intellectuality of the proletariat, in that democratic education, education of the people, was carried into the proletariat. But as this quality developed, something else developed as a general human world consciousness. There has been much talk about this consciousness today. For those who look at the things of this world impartially, this consciousness today is an elementary emanation of the human being itself. Just as one cannot really discuss color with someone who does not have a healthy eye, one cannot discuss what is a universal human right with a human soul that has not awakened. But it was possible to discuss these universal human rights with the proletarian soul, which was increasingly awakening from patriarchal conditions. And a clear awareness arose of the right that man has by being human. From this consciousness the proletarian looked at what the ruling and leading circles had taken over from the state and made it into a living right. And he found not this human right, but the right of favored classes and the disadvantage of other classes. That was what ate deeper and deeper into the souls of the proletarians. And that was the cause of the second ordeal, the legal process, and the third was what necessarily resulted from the proletarian being completely harnessed into economic life and capitalism; that he could not, like the others, find the [leisure] and rest from work, could not find human development through education to participate in what beautifies the life of the minority. That was what he felt, while he had to say to himself: I am only harnessed into economic life; I am basically only a wheel in economic life. The whole of human life is for me a running off of this economic life. I am harnessed like a machine into this economic life.

That is the third ordeal that the proletariat went through. This threefold suffering of the proletariat, if properly followed and compared with what lives on the other side of the abyss in the way I have characterized, leads to seeking that which must first be striven for from our present-day consciousness, again in a threefold way: in the life of the spirit, in the life of right or state, and in the life of the economy. And that in relation to these three ways of life, something must be striven for from the consciousness of modern humanity, is evident in three fundamental demands of modern times, which have been clearly expressed, but which have nevertheless remained more or less generalities and have not been fully incorporated into our modern life.

Over the past few centuries, the call for liberalism has been rising more and more in human consciousness. Today a word that is no longer held in high regard. Likewise, the call for democracy is rising. And thirdly, the call for socialism is becoming ever clearer and clearer. From this or that side, one could not resist the one or other impulse expressed in these three; but one nevertheless tried to remain in the old conditions and to let what is announced in these three expressions flow into the old conditions, to press it into them. They simply took the old unified state and tried to shape it in a liberal, democratic and social way. Today we live in an age in which it must be recognized that the error lies in living under the suggestion of this unified state and believing that what is expressed in liberalism, democracy and socialism can be pressed into this unified state.

Let us take democracy, which has emerged as an impulse as the middle way in modern humanity. Does not the call for democracy express everything that I have just characterized as emerging from the human sense of right and wrong? Does not the call for democracy express the impulse for something that makes every human being equal to every other human being in the world? Is there not something in it that says that every mature human being has a say in everything that simply affects the position of the human being in the world? Once this has been thought out, the necessity for the development of a democratic state order arises. Democratic state orders are developed in which every person of legal age deals more or less directly with every other person of legal age through representation, and in which each person is to be equal to the other. In the course of modern development, it was impossible to resist what lives in humanity as such an impulse of democracy. And they tried to permeate what they took over historically as the old states with this democratic element in the modern parliaments. They did not realize that two elements of life do not fit into this democratic element, especially if it is to be understood honestly and sincerely. As true as it is that every mature human being must decide on everything in which each person is equal to the other, and as true as it is that this must be experienced and regulated from the standpoint of democratic parliamentarism , it is just as true that the moment this democratic element is allowed to decide on the one hand over economic life and on the other hand over intellectual life, it leads to impossibilities.

Let us first consider economic life. Economic life is based on the fact that the individual human being works his way into the economic knowledge of the individual profession and branch of production in the course of his life. Only someone who is not just theoretically, but through having experienced it, is inside a profession or branch of production, only such a person can decide what is necessary in that profession or branch of production. Only those who have grown together with any profession through which this or that is produced can be trusted in this economic life. In short, any branch of production in economic life, harnessed to democracy, becomes an impossibility, because then the one who does not understand it and does not understand it or who is involved in one economic sector, decides by majority, he decides over those who are involved in completely different sectors, of which he understands nothing. We have seen how terribly this lack of understanding of the relationship between democracy and economic life has manifested itself in those states that have proven to be least mature, above all, in the sub... [gap in the transcript]. But anyone who has lived there for half their life, three decades of life, and has been involved in Austrian political life, knows where the damage lies, which has ultimately led to the fact that such terrible horrors have befallen Austria, that Austria has collapsed so terribly in this world war catastrophe. Because, you see, when people in this patriarchal-clerical Austria in the 1860s worked to get out of the old conditions, to at least take the modern call for liberalism and democracy into account by means of a people's representation – how was this people's representation shaped? They were formed in such a way that four electoral curiae were created: large estates, cities and markets, chambers of commerce and industry, rural communities; all economic curiae. The representatives were people who had to represent the economic interests of individual groups. These people now formed the Austrian parliament. What did they actually do there? What did they strive for? Nothing other than the mere transformation of economic interests into human-legal conditions, into state conditions, into security conditions. The state's mutual human relationships should arise from what was decided in the interest of individual economic circles. It was believed that only economic interests needed to be transformed in order to create legal interests. Anyone who has been able to follow the development of Austria knows that in this construction of state life out of mere economic conditions, the damage that must necessarily lead to ruin has arisen. And as with this example, so could be substantiated by numerous examples for other states, that it is impossible to forge together that which emerged as a democratic demand in modern times with that which has been shaped in economic life.

The same question arises with regard to intellectual life and intellectual culture as a whole. It is impossible for decisions to be made on a democratic basis about what is actually at stake in intellectual culture. In the case of intellectual culture, it is essential that everything that arises, let us say, from unknown sources as human, individual abilities and talents, be developed according to purely spiritual principles; according to those principles that look impartially at what can develop spiritually and individually in the human being, right down to the physical working capacity. But in modern times, the entire care for this development of the individual human abilities has been relegated to the state. This has come about through quite understandable historical facts. In more recent times, when it became necessary to wrest the state side of the church's educational system from certain underground sources, it was justified to hand over certain branches, namely the public branches, the branches of education and instruction, to the state, to which one had to adhere, as the spiritual life. Time and again, it turned out that this spiritual life became a mere copy of the state; that ultimately, in what people produced spiritually, it was not what lives that springs from the direct nature of the human being, what the spiritual produces in the human being, but that what emerged in the spiritual life was what corresponded to the interests and needs of the state. No wonder that eventually – and the world war catastrophe showed this terribly – no wonder that this intellectual life remained free in a few individual branches, in art or the like; that the rest of the intellectual life became nothing but a copy, a reflection of the utilitarian demands and interests of modern states. And as the modern states have become more and more economic entities due to the increasing complexity of economic life, intellectual life was ultimately only an expression of economic life.

The proletariat saw what recent times have done to intellectual life. The proletariat saw this and believed that this was the absolute truth, that intellectual life always only emerges from economic life. That is the great error of the modern proletariat, to take an appearance for something absolute. That is the great error of Marxism, that it does not look at the fact that precisely through the development of the last three to four centuries, on the way I have indicated, the spiritual life has been absorbed by the state, which has increasingly become an economic body, and that we are under the effect of this fact today; but it is not right to say: Let us change the economic life, then a different intellectual life and a different legal life will come. Rather, it is necessary today to say: the spiritual life must be made free again; the spiritual life must be torn away from the state order; the spiritual life must be placed on its own ground. In the future, only that which emerges from the spiritual foundations of the human being may be expressed in the spiritual life. The spiritual life must not be a mere mirror image of the state or economic life.

On the basis of these documents, what first emerged in my appeal “To the German People and to the Cultural World” and then in my book “The Key Points of the Social Questions in the Necessities of Life in the Present and Future” has now been developed and is represented by the Federation for Social Threefolding in its various branches. What this book seeks to do is to dispel the suggestion that the social organism must be a unified state, which, on the one hand, is completely submerged by economic life and, on the other, absorbs spiritual life.

No, what is necessary for the future is to place economic life on its factual and professional basis, to lift this economic life out of the democratic parliament. Only then will it be possible to socialize this economic life when this economic life is placed on its own ground in such a way that those people who are of the same profession, of the same profession as manual laborers, as intellectual workers, join together in associations; when those people who comprise certain consumer and production circles join together in other associations. When such economic communities arise, linked together by federal foundations, then negotiations will be conducted from profession to profession, from consumerism or rather linked together with production branches to other branches. Then it will no longer be possible for a parliament based on democratic principles to decide on economic interests with a majority of people who decide only out of self-interest or ignorance. Then, from profession to profession, from branch of production to branch of production, the interests of economic life will be served by free economic behavior. Then nothing else will occur within this economic life than that which will lead to the fair regulation of the mutual prices of commodities. Then nothing else will assert itself in this economic life but the production, circulation, and consumption of commodities. Above all, everything that must be administered on a democratic basis must be eliminated, above all human labor and capital. Where does human labor lead us? Today, human labor is at the center of economic life. I have pointed out that the proletariat is aware that the wage relationship in economic life is treated like other commodities. The commodity labor power is bought through wages. Labor power must be removed from economic life in terms of its dimensions, in terms of its nature, and then only the mutual value of the commodity will be contained in the prices of the goods. Then the price of the goods will not contain what is contained in the wage situation today. Then, in the field of economic life, decisions will only be made about the price of the goods, which is separate from the human being. Then, in the field of legal or state life, political life, security life, decisions will be made about the extent, type and time of human work. The regulation of human work will be a legal relationship. The regulation of human labor will not be such that the economic coercive relationship has an influence on it. Rather, only that which is decided on the basis of democracy will have an influence on the determination of the human labor force, where every person who has come of age decides on what is due to every person who has come of age. The regulation of the human labor force belongs in the democratic legal order. If this human labor is regulated by democracy, then the worker enters the economic body as a person who freely disposes of his labor and does not conclude an employment contract, which can never contain justice, but a contract for services with those who, as spiritual leaders, are involved in this service. Then the contract is simply concluded on the basis of the earnings and the services provided. Then the regulation of labor is completely separated from economic life.

In the light of their prejudices, this seems completely incredible to people today, to the extent that even a thinker like [Rathenau] believes that such a detachment of the labor force from the economic cycle is not possible. It is possible precisely because what depends on natural conditions is not included in the economic cycle; what the soil yields and what climatic conditions determine must be accepted in economic life. What raw materials are in the soil and how they can be extracted must be accepted as given. This cannot be decided according to so-called economic cycles. In the same way, in the future, it will no longer be permissible to decide, on the basis of economic conditions, what the worker receives. This will be decided by mature people on democratic ground. With this decision, the worker will enter into the economic cycle and conclude a contract in which his labor provides a basic condition, like the natural conditions themselves. The economic process will be constrained on the one hand by natural conditions and on the other by legal conditions. This is what the broad masses of humanity unconsciously demand. One need only understand this unconscious demand; one need only raise it into consciousness and formulate it; then one will perceive with clarity what is so terribly confusing in life today, which manifests itself as social ambiguity. What this path, the threefold social order, is pointing to, is a real path to clarity about the abstract demands that are being raised today. If someone says: Abolish the wage relationship! —, then one can say that for a long time. As long as one does not show a way to overcome this wage relationship, it remains an abstract demand that only has a disturbing effect, that only arouses the elementary instincts of human nature, but that leads to nothing. The moment one realizes that, with regard to public institutions, economic life must be completely separated from legal life, that labor law, as a prerequisite for economic life, must be developed on the basis of democratic legal life, one can show an economic path that can be taken every day from any starting point. For it is impossible to follow such a path tomorrow if one only has the good will to do so. And the same applies to the capital conditions that are currently wedged into economic life.

Oh, people have actually already completely forgotten what the origin of capitalism actually is. The origin of capitalism is diverse. For example, it is based on the fact that in older times land was conquered and thus passed into private ownership, and those over whom the conquests extended came into dependency, into ownershiplessness. It is based on the fact that from what resulted from the conquests as property, the possibility was offered to bring the power conditions of modern times, the means of production, into the private, selfish possession of the individual. In view of what has just been mentioned, the proletariat in turn formulates a demand: the abolition of capital. In its naivety, it does not realize that the words “abolition of capital” actually say nothing, even if they are repeated over and over again. They express what they feel is fair, but they do not take into account that these modern conditions are such, in their economic and other configurations, that one must work with capital in modern social life. Even if you transform the whole modern state into a large cooperative, as some socialists want, nothing else but capital could work in it either, only instead of today's private owners, the [bureaucratic] official would take their place. And those who today, as proletarians, raise this demand would very soon notice how they are much worse off under these newer conditions than under the present ones. Here, by thinking out of reality, one must think quite differently about the conditions of capital. One must also be clear about the fact that it is ultimately the fundamentals of human abilities that lead the individual to have a certain superiority over others. The fact that the individual has acquired a certain superiority makes it possible to collect the means of production and the means of production that made him the leader and that enabled him to transfer to others what he achieved as the leader. Those who think this through carefully, who judge it according to reality, judge it impartially, know, my dear attendees, that all capital is based on the ability of the individual human being, and that this individual ability of the human being must not be eliminated. If you replace the individual, capable person who manages the production processes with the abstract generality, it will only lead to the dismantling or depletion of economic life, not to its reconstruction. But that does not mean that the old institutions should live on, that, as is currently happening, what is capital or the means of production should always be transferred again in the sense of the old order. Rather, it can be replaced by the old order, by which, little by little, those people come into possession of capital in the form of money capital and rent, who no longer have anything to do with production, with the application of individual abilities in the management of economic life, come into possession of capital. What must be opposed to the old economic order is directed against this. It must also be quite possible in the new economic order that capital is concentrated through the abilities of the individual human being, but that only as long as this individual human being, who has brought together these capitals, that is, means of production, remains the head, or in any case remains in a context with these means of production, as his individual abilities can be connected with it. Then, in the ways I have indicated in my book The Core of the Social Question, the capital, or the sum of the means of production, passes through legal transfer to those who in turn have the best individual abilities. This introduces what I call the circulation of capital in the social organism. This circulation of capital, or of property, has always been admitted on spiritual ground, at least in principle, to a certain extent. If today one expects of people that what they admit on spiritual ground should also occur in the field of material possessions, then they certainly make astonished faces. What I produce spiritually remains spiritually mine and the property of my heirs only for a certain time; then it passes into the public domain, in which everyone who has the individual ability to do so can administer it. Similarly, in the future, what is acquired as material property must be transferred to the person who can best manage and administer it through individual abilities. Then there will be harmony between the physically and spiritually working. Then capital, which always originates from individual abilities, will not be able to pass over to those who do not justify ownership through individual abilities. Rather, individual abilities will always remain connected with the management of the means of production. Then the person who has work to do under such management will say to himself: My work thrives best when the circulation of capital takes place in this way, that a sum of means of production always passes to the one who has the best abilities; for he manages my work best.

It is certainly not the case that the impulse for the threefold social order should be accused of false idealism. Those who say that it will take other people to carry it out do not take into account that this impulse for the threefold social order is based on the people we have at present. The manual laborer has an egoistic interest in always having the best leader at hand. But this can only be achieved if the means of production are circulated in this way. But this requires, ladies and gentlemen, that we break with the principle that the means of production are a commodity like those goods that are consumed directly by human needs. A means of production, that is, one in which capital is invested, may only be able to claim capital as long as it costs something until it is finished. The locomotive may only be considered capital until it is finished. Then it ceases to have an external commodity value. Then it only passes to the one who knows how to manage it best in the interest of the whole through transfer or through legal relationships. Land will be... [gap in transcript] from the very beginning.

Today, people still oppose such things out of prejudice, which is rooted not only in habitual ways of thinking but also in the habits of life associated with old institutions. But those who cannot bring themselves to realize that the terrible catastrophe of the world wars calls upon us to think not in terms of a small reckoning, but in terms of a great reckoning, will only contribute to further decline and to destruction, but never to escape from destruction. Thus we see that simply economic life, in which only the production, circulation and consumption of goods may occur, must be separated from the regulation of labor, from the administration of capital. And what must occur in our entire life through this detour that I have just described? That capital, that is, the means of production, must always be administered by the person who has the individual abilities to do so. What must come about is the detachment of the spiritual life from our economic and legal life. This spiritual life must be placed on its own ground. So that in the future, no longer will some experts, merely harnessed into state bureaucracy and torn out of the spiritual life, participate in the administration, but that this spiritual life will be organized from factual foundations entirely by itself, through its self-administration. In the future, the life of the social organism must be shaped in such a way that the spiritual life is administered by those who are at the same time somehow directly involved in the production of this spiritual life. If we look at this spiritual life in particular, on the basis of education and teaching, then only those people who participate in education, from the lowest elementary school teacher to the highest university teacher, must be part of the spiritual organism. In the future, anyone who teaches in any field will only have to teach so much that they still have time left over from this teaching to help administer. That is to say, the production of the spirit and the administration of spiritual life will be carried out in one combined activity. No state school system, no connection between intellectual life and economic life; completely self-contained, so that the lowest elementary school merely aims to artistically acquire knowledge of man or anthropology in the broadest sense, so that from the age of six to fourteen, the child is taught in such a way that this teaching leads solely to the development of the strengths that the child needs in life. This will automatically lead to a unified school, not one that is dictated by the state. Everything that is built up will arise from general human needs. For example, at the secondary schools, the design will be such that at certain school levels, teaching is geared to the fact that the person who has received the teaching is suitable for entering into this or that state system. The opposite must happen: that the school levels are designed according to pedagogical-didactic, spiritual principles, and people will have achieved this or that at 17, at 19 years of age, and the state will have to ask itself: how do I use people who have been educated according to spiritual principles? The state will have to adapt to the spiritual life. The universities will have to have autonomy; they will be the administrators in the highest sense of the spiritual teaching and education system itself.

I can only sketch out all this. It should only be expressed that in this field of spiritual life, a struggle of spiritual efficiency with spiritual efficiency must really take place. Furthermore, that which can be called comprehensive liberalism must be allowed to develop.

In the sphere of state life, in the sphere where decisions are made about the transfer of capital, about the administration of labor law, that which has emerged as democratic impulses will come to fruition.

In the economic sphere, what serves the circulation of goods and human abilities will give full rein to the socialization that has emerged in recent times; the individual spheres of economic life will be linked according to objective principles, where only goods and their production are administered, not people. Then it will be possible to produce in the economic life out of associations, which get to know the needs of the people in a liberal way, not through statistics or other connections, but which get to know them in a liberal way. It will be possible to produce in such a way that the abstract demands of the proletariat are transformed into more concrete demands, into a real path. The proletariat has emphasized that in the future production should not be for profit, but for consumption. But consumption is only possible if the associations of the socially organized economic cycle really create such connections between producers and consumers that production is not based on the randomness of supply and demand on markets, but on a careful, understanding, and appropriate study of needs. It will be necessary to understand and, above all, follow the laws of economics quite differently than they are followed in today's random relationship between supply and demand. We will have to know that at the moment when too many workers are employed in a branch of production, production in that branch of production is too cheap. Human labor is being wasted. Workers must be directed through negotiations and contracts to other branches of production. If too little is produced somewhere, the article will become too expensive; then other workers will have to be directed into that branch of production.

In short, in the future there must be in socialist, capitalist economic life what is now being established through the efforts of the Federation for Threefolding as the institution of the free [works councils], to which the traffic councils, the economic councils, this whole system, will later be joined. But this is not a political system, because the political must be based on democracy. This system of councils, rooted in economic life, which is only concerned with the proper administration of economic life, is the system that will emerge to the surface of modern life, not through the arbitrary demands of individuals, but through the legitimate demands of the times. The institute of the advisers will be such a body, which does not rule by bureaucratic or democratic coercive laws, but which rules by negotiations from person to person, from council to council, from economic association to economic association. If the labor force is distributed across individual branches of production in such a way that every commodity, every good that people need, is produced in such a quantity as is needed for it. Then such prices arise, then in economic life there is that which can form the basis for fair prices to prevail in economic life, whereas, since we have wages in economic life, which, as a commodity, corresponds to the labor force, you can increase wages, ... [gap in the transcript] the prices of goods also increase because no just legal relationship can be established as long as something is included in economic life that does not belong in it, namely human labor, which belongs in legal life.

Thus we see, my dear attendees, that in the future what has had such a suggestive effect on people must be structured as a unified state, in the three-part social organism, in the independent spiritual life, administered according to its own requirements; in the democratic state or political life, in which it is decided, directly and indirectly, by each mature person, what concerns him as an equal to every other person. This also includes property and working conditions. In the future, economic life, in which only appropriate administration by economic associations and bodies takes place, will be the third independent element. These three areas will get along with each other. It is well known, for example, that members of the intellectual professions have concerns and cannot live because the state does not pay them enough. It will become clear in the future that, just as the proletariat must be paid as teachers, only that the path must be different. The spiritual corporations will belong to the economic body in the same way as they belong to the economic body as consumers, and the appropriate relationship will have to be established. This regulation will only be one reason why the individual elements of legal, economic and spiritual life will come together harmoniously, precisely because each one can really work in its own field of expertise.

And there is no need to be afraid of how international relations will judge these things. What I have presented here first arose from a consideration of the international conditions that led to our terrible war catastrophe. Anyone who has studied the development of modern humanity over the decades that preceded this catastrophe knows, for example, how the Balkan issues arose from the interweaving of the three areas of intellectual or cultural life, political or legal life and economic life down there in south-eastern Europe, insofar as they affected the relationship between the Balkans and Austria; that they then led to the outbreak of the world war from this side. First of all, there was the general cultural question of the cultural and intellectual conflict between the Slavs and the Germans. To what extent there was a legal question when the old conservative Turkish element was replaced by the Young Turkish element, the Turkish-Bulgarian question, for example, the history of the Sanjak railway, if you study it, you can see that there were economic interests from Austria to the Balkans. If these circumstances could have been organized out of their own foundations, something else would have emerged than this tangle of circumstances. It was this tangle that brought about such international conflicts. You can also study the problem of the Baghdad Railway. There, too, you will see how the cultures of the nations involved are constantly intermingled with the political, legal and economic aspects. And again and again we see how the economic becomes more powerful than the cultural, and thus again and again another state is on top, for example with the problem of the Baghdad Railway, and so on. It is precisely in international relations that this interweaving of the three areas, which on the ground of each social organism must become three links, plays a terrible role. The only hope for the development of humanity in the future lies in the threefold social organism, in an independent spiritual life with its own administration, in a democratic legal life, in an independent economic life that administers itself from within through its own nature in associations and corporations, in cooperatives. And anyone who studies what is hidden in this terrible, horrific war catastrophe and in what has now emerged from it, need only look to the East and they will find that behind these conditions, which prevailed in the East and which today lead to such terrible exploitation out of misunderstood social impulses, live the great spiritual impulses of the Russian and other Eastern peoples. These spiritual impulses are smouldering beneath the surface today, and they must first work their way up again from what has been superimposed by prejudices of civilization and what lurks as a threatening social spectre from the East towards Central Europe. To prevent this from happening in Central Europe, efforts should be made to ensure that in Central Europe, what is being confused in the East is not confused, but that in Central Europe, intellectual life, state or legal life, economic life are separated.

And let us look to the West. These Western states have essentially brought it about that economic life is developed. They permeate the world economy; they expand private competition to the great imperialistic conditions. That which prevails there one-sidedly as economic life corrupts state and spiritual life. Here in Central Europe, these three areas must be separated. If we have not yet grasped this through the lessons of the terrible catastrophe of the war, we will grasp it out of the necessity into which the threefold unnatural foundations of modern development have brought us, since the time I mentioned the day before yesterday, around the middle of the fifteenth century, began. People longed for a spiritual life, but a new spiritual life did not arise. The spiritual life was not placed on the own ground of the modern spiritually producing personalities. Only the Reformation and the Renaissance, a renewal of the old, came up. Today we live in a great, important time. Today we must not be content with a renaissance of an old spiritual life; today we must appeal to a completely new spiritual life. But this cannot flourish in the shadow of economic life, in the shadow of a state order. It can only flourish if it is free to stand on its own.

Let us look to the East; there we can see how it was initially intellectual life that had an effect, with economic and legal interests only hiding behind it. At first, it was the case that the Banat peoples were to be liberated from Russia. This was based on genuine popular instincts. Confounded with this was what should not be confounded with it.

And then the French Revolution, one sees the same thing happening there. This French Revolution was a different kind of Renaissance. People thirsted for human rights. Rights only came into humanity, a renaissance of state life, to which we also devoted ourselves in Central Europe in the nineteenth century.

But a new legal life is demanded of man as such. In the sphere of the legal life, we have no need of a renaissance, of Roman or other legal conceptions. We need a thorough separation of the legal life from the intellectual and economic life, from which no relationship of power, either spiritual or physical, of one man over another, may arise. Only that which places all mature men on an equal footing may arise from the democratic state. From all this an economic life has developed, in relation to which it is believed that it is sovereign. In Eastern Europe, it is intended to regulate legal-political life and spiritual life from mere economic life. In this way it will be possible to achieve a mere administration of goods, but only such an administration of goods which, instead of founding a new human right, breaks down the old rights and cannot replace them with anything; which, instead of founding a new spiritual life, lets the old spiritual life fade away and finally seep away, and transforms everything into the mechanism of an economic life. Only when they have overcome the old order, which was rightly called the service of throne and altar, will people see whether they have achieved something better. But this service to the throne and the altar must not merely give way to service to the office and the machine in the mechanized economy; rather, the future must bring us an independent economic life in which the individual corporations and associations and cooperatives join together fraternally in genuine socialization. But this can only be built up if it is supported by a democratic state in which man finds his rights as an equal alongside other equals. And economic life, which otherwise would dry up and become rigid, can be stimulated when there is a free spiritual life constantly producing forces and sending them into life, which do not produce a reality-strange world of ideas and science, a reality-strange spiritual culture, but which produce a spiritual culture that can be applied to all areas of life. We have imitated the Renaissance in its love of all things Greek, but the Renaissance created a spiritual life for itself. We need a spiritual life that is suitable only for our present time. And, however strange it may sound, the more spiritual, the more practical this spiritual life will be; and the more we will be able to really intervene in state and economic life. Only it will be the spirit that can fertilize capital; that calls upon labor, the same service for the same service for all. Not as it is today, where production is merely for the market. Only then will we understand what it actually meant when, in the course of the nineteenth century, very clever people reflected on the great motto of the end of the eighteenth century: liberty, equality, fraternity, and said – truly not out of prejudice – that liberty must contradict equality, and that ultimately, everything that lives in liberty and equality is incompatible with fraternity. It turned out that there are contradictions between what one perceives as freedom, as equality and as fraternity, that is, between the three great, public ideals of humanity. How is it possible that three ideals can stand, as if born out of the innermost, most honest striving of the human heart and soul, and yet contradict each other? The reason for this, ladies and gentlemen, is that these three ideals have so far been established from the point of view of the unitary state. As long as we believe that these three ideals, liberty, equality, fraternity, must live in the unitary state, we will find contradictions in them. The future must understand that this unitary state must not bundle together three areas of life that must be administered from different bases. The future must understand that this unitary state, as a social organism, must be divided into three areas, and that in the future the spirit must prevail in freedom. That man must live as the owner of his human rights in democratic equality. That work for the needs of the people must be done in associations, in cooperatives, in short, through brotherhoods on a large scale, out of economic brotherhood. Only when we are no longer under the influence of the unitary state will we be able to hear the call of the future clearly enough.

If we have so far been somewhat shy in Central Europe about directing our thoughts, our feelings, our habits of life to the three spheres of life in their true form – since Versailles, since we have been living under the prospect of much adversity and misery still We will perhaps find our way back to those forces of our Central European culture from which emerged in earlier times what we call German idealism, which can also live in areas other than the artistic and intellectual fields. It is a mere prejudice to believe that practical men are those who, coming from ancient times, had too short thoughts for economic life, so that this economic life of modern times is sailing towards destruction. Those who are ridiculed today as impractical idealists will be seen in the future as true practical men. For public affairs, people will turn to those who have developed these forces, to the forces that Lessing, Goethe and Schiller have brought forth in us. But then one will work out of these healthy forces of Central Europe into the development of the future of humanity in such a way that the threefold social organism will stand on its three healthy foundations, which can be characterized by the fact that in the future the spirit must live in freedom, in free development; that everything that makes each person equal to every other person must live in democratic equality; that legal life must live in the sun of this democratic equality; that economic life, regulated associatively and managed factually in a federative way, must live under the principle of fraternity. Only then will the future of humanity flourish in Central Europe. This Central Europe should radiate something that can be a model for East and West. It should radiate from Central Europe what will benefit humanity in the future. So what should happen will have to happen from this Central Europe, and we will have to say of this event:

Freedom for the mind,

Equality for the law,

Brotherhood for economic life!

Discussion [not reported]

Closing words

Dear attendees,
I must say that I have the greatest respect for the first speaker in this discussion in terms of his very beautiful social will, but that I nevertheless – since I have something to say about what he presented today – I must find it disturbing that he, too, has brought up something that I consider a very unfortunate sign of our time. Please do not be offended, esteemed attendees, if I express this openly and honestly, even to a valued discussion partner. I had to discuss what Dr. Einstein said, let's say, in the 1880s, for example with [Adler and Pernerstorfer] or similar people. These things, which Dr. Einstein has again brought up today, are, so to speak, only the typical phrases of what has developed as a social-democratic party order for more than half a century in the civilized world, but especially in Central Europe. We know this very well. And precisely when one knows it very well, perhaps even knows it somewhat differently than Dr. Einstein, then in the present time one is faced with an enormous problem, to which I have, as best as possible in the brevity of a lecture that was already too long, pointed out something.

What is presented as a social-democratic program was suitable – I said in the lecture that when it comes to such things, which are, so to speak, great cultural-educational means, it does not matter so much whether one can discuss them, whether one can prove or disprove them, but rather how they work in terms of education. And in what was the Social Democratic program, what, in a sense, Dr. Einstein listed in his summary, that is such an educational tool. And I am familiar with all the various currents, the individual perceptions and thoughts that have found their way into the hearts and souls of the proletarians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in this way. Above all, however, we must not forget how this program has led to the establishment, within our modern economic and political life, of the notion, let us say, of the self-development of this economic and political life. It was so easily imagined: that which emerged as capitalism became private capitalism, it will concentrate more and more into large capital holdings, and then the transformation of capitalist society into a socialist one will happen by itself.

Today, we still see talk of positive impulses, of germinal thoughts leading to action, and this self-development is held up to us. It is intimately connected with what Dr. Einstein regards as the correct socialist program. But the whole situation with regard to what has just been mentioned has become somewhat different for the truly unbiased observer of current world events due to the world war catastrophe. Today we are not dealing with a self-perpetuating economic or political development; we are dealing with the fact that old cultural currents - as I expressed it in the lecture - have led themselves into self-dissolution. Today we are not dealing with some program, but with the fact that people are faced with a collapsing economic order and have to rebuild it.

Today we are faced with the proletarian human being with his subjective demands and subjective impulses. It is therefore necessary not to get stuck in general phrases, such as “socialization of the means of production”, but to show: how can we make the means of production function in a truly progressive way? And for me, the problem was to apply all these abstractions, including what Dr. Einstein said, to a concrete reality and to always ask: what can be done without dismantling, but by what is there, further develop it; not by ruining the cultural development, but by developing it in such a way that the legitimate demands, which I have also enumerated today in my lecture, can be satisfied for the broad masses. That was the task: not to stand still with the old socialist party programs, which are still floating around today like mummies of party officials, but to move forward in the spirit of the lessons that this world war catastrophe has taught us. That is what it is about, that the abstract, the non-realistic of social democracy must again be transformed into that which is conceived in terms of the three-part social organism that is being implemented today. It is a strange thing when some speaker appears who describes ideology and the fact that ideology has entered into the hearts and souls of people as desolate for the soul, when a speaker who sees in ideology a harmful legacy of the proletariat on the part of the former ruling circles, then a speaker who says: This speaker only wants a new ideology. That means falling back into old dogmatics; it means not wanting to go along with what honestly endeavors to bring the old into a truly contemporary form. That today it is being said again that the old remedy at the beginning, if not at the end, is a transfer of the means of production into the ownership of the totality, on the other hand, it must always be objected: What is this totality? I have explained to you in concrete terms how this transfer to the service of the whole comes about through the circulation of the means of production. It is an empty concept that never contains a germ of action if one only talks about transferring the means of production to the service of the whole. Because how this whole can function with the means of production is what matters. This is something that anyone who does not remain mired in the old dogmas will recognize. They will not want to impose a new ideology here; rather, they will see how an attempt is being made here to finally implement honest and well-intentioned abstractions in realistic thoughts and realistic social will.

I see in those who do not want to develop under the impression of our difficult, distressing and painful times, but who only want to remain with the old dogmas, I see in them - without wanting to offend anyone personally, least of all Dr. Einstein, of course - a terribly conservative mind. And I am glad that at least there are people today, especially in the proletariat, who go beyond these conservative leaders and demand that we look beyond the heads of the leaders for what can finally lead to the goals. If, like Du Bois-Reymond, you proclaim your 'ignorabimus' in the face of the limitations of nature, proclaiming an ignorabimus against this threefold social organism; or if you say, 'We cannot wait', then you are actually saying that you are substituting a nothing for that which, of course, cannot be exhaustively characterized in a short lecture. But today it is necessary not to get stuck in empty abstractions, not to just keep talking: because the pressure gauge is at 95, we need the revolution. But what is the revolution, after all, if we don't think about what we actually want to achieve through a revolution? If people only ever talk about conquering the machines, then the question must be asked: What do they do with these machines when they have them? That is the question. We have often had the example in the development of mankind that people who had machines did not know what to do with them. Should the demand for machines be sought from the vague abstractions, and then it be experienced that one does not know what to do with them?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I have had to explain this to you, especially in connection with a point of view that I appreciate, like that of the person who spoke about it in the usual way. I have been accustomed to this since the 1980s, and what I have learned from it for myself has been incorporated into what I advocate today as the threefold social order.

To those who have objected that we cannot wait, I would simply refer them to my book “Key Points of the Social Question”, in which I explain in detail how what I have outlined today can be put into practice. then he will no longer say that we have to wait so and so many years, but he will say: we can bring about development in such a direction, as envisaged by the threefold social order, from today to tomorrow, from every point of spiritual, economic and political life. We just have to move in that direction, and the rest will follow. But we need courage for that. It takes less courage to keep talking about how the revolution must come, that the dictatorship of the proletariat must be striven for, and so on, than to really get to work on the details. Because this courage includes overcoming old habits of thinking.

My dear audience, when you go into more detail about what the threefold social order is, you will no longer say: practical work should be done and not lectures given forever! Practical work has been indicated piece by piece in the very will of the threefold social order.

And when it is said: we need other people, yes, then one does not know what relationship exists between the social in which the human being lives and between what the human being does. You see, the other day a magazine that also calls itself a social one wrote that socialization should not be rushed because people are not yet mature today. When I hear or read something like that, I always think that those who talk like that are not mature themselves. Because if we had those people who were now fully mature in this sense, then we would no longer need socialization, then people would truly live freely and equally and fraternally. Then we would not have the whole social question. The issue at hand is something else. I would like to mention a fact that occurred in a certain area. During the so-called war economy, it was necessary to employ merchants in the bureaucracy, for example, because they were specialists. The merchants still differed considerably from the bureaucrats when they were outside. But a strange fact occurred: after a few months, these merchants were more bureaucratic than the bureaucrats. Thus the environment had rubbed off on them. This will happen if you do not give each individual link in the social organism the character I have mentioned today. Then a social minority will be created in which people who used to be quite different can develop further in the sense of human ennoblement. I would like to know how one could think of social ideals if one were always to move in the circle: We need other people to achieve other conditions. If we keep going round in circles, we will never be able to achieve other conditions. The point is to create the conditions under which people can develop ethically and spiritually! This is another feature of threefolding: it does not go round in circles but goes straight for the facts; it aims to intervene directly in reality.

If someone says that I should have said this ten to fifteen years ago, when it would have been new, then I would reply that it is no different today than it was ten years ago. But how do you know that what I am saying today, perhaps less clearly formulated, I did not say ten to fifteen years ago? I would like to tell you something about that. I have already mentioned that I was a teacher for many years at the Workers' Education School founded by Liebknecht. There I tried in particular to show people how the materialistically oriented teaching only abstracts from the historical development of the last three to four centuries. At that time – that is, at the beginning of the present century – I had a fairly large number of students. When I had few students, the party bigwigs paid little attention to what I said to the people. When the number of students grew and grew, these party bigwigs became unpleasantly aware of what was being taught in a central workers' education school. As a result, a large number of students were called together one day and some party leaders were sent to the people. I said at the time: You want to be a party of the future, you want to establish future conditions. I would now like to know where freedom of teaching is to prevail today if you always want to suppress it, if you want to teach party dogmatism here. One of these leaders stood up and said, in contradiction to his entire group of hundreds of students: We cannot tolerate freedom of teaching; we know of no freedom in this area, we only know reasonable constraint. That is the [experience] I had at the time. It showed me that one must continue to work first, but that one must wait until one can meet with understanding. That is why I must also refuse today when it is said: You don't need a new party! You certainly don't need one. I really don't know where it could be inferred from the lecture that I want a new party. I have spent my whole life studying the various social conditions in all circles and all walks of life. But I have never been involved in parties. And I am glad of that. And do you think that now, at the end of my sixth decade, I would like to put myself in the shoes of a party, after saying what the parties have actually achieved and where they have brought our political life? I appeal to the intellect and reason of each individual and not to parties; I always have to say that when I am told that what I am saying is difficult to understand. I know it is taken from reality. And that which is taken from reality requires a certain instinct for its realizability. This certain instinct for realizability cannot be absorbed from abstract party-line opinions. But we should also learn from the past. Unfortunately, we have experienced it enough in Central Europe that people have accepted what they have been ordered to accept from any side, for more than four and a half years. We have experienced it: if only from the great headquarters or from somewhere else the opinions that one truly could not understand well with one's own reason, if one could repeat them, then one saw them. You didn't ask yourself: should this be understood or not? You took orders to understand. Now it is a matter of understanding something that you are not ordered to understand, but to understand out of the freedom of the human soul. And only this appeal to the direct freedom of the human soul leads us forward. I am not thinking of a party, but I am thinking of all those people who today, out of necessity and misery, want to save themselves – a reasonable judgment of common sense: they will not flock to a party. But perhaps they will be the bearers of what we need for the future, what we must strive for if we want to emerge from confusion and chaos.

I do not want to give a program for solving the social question, but rather speak about observations of life.

It is said that never in the history of mankind have people experienced such terrible things as in this war: but then, to be consistent, one would also have to add: it takes a very special idea to find a solution to today's task. What is given, what people have to absorb, must be completely different now than it has been so far. The Communist Manifesto is not just a theoretical question, but a question of world history, one must understand that. What is called the social question lies deep, deep down in the development of humanity, only one must grasp it.

Thermometer – an indicator of the temperature of a room.

What consciously comes to the surface, the demands, are not the real thing at all. Everything that flares up in the Communist Manifesto of all countries is a historically necessary thing: “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” It is not an idea that is being appealed to, but the impulses that arise from a certain life situation, precisely because one is a proletarian, the vague demands that arise from proletarian life, something un-ideological, a force arises. The proletarians do not want ideology, they do not want any ideas. But what comes from the bourgeoisie is and will be built upon. One speaks as if the proletarian programs were something new, but that is not the case. They have been adopted from the bourgeoisie. This will only be recognized later. A gap has opened up between the leading forces and the proletariat. But this is not the case; only the class differences are there; the proletarian world has learned a great deal from the leading circles. But when it saw that their science could not bring it salvation, it lost faith in that science and in those circles. The proletariat recognized the ideology of the intellectual life.

The earlier worldview still had a very different impact; it was still connected to the spiritual world. Today's worldview has no impact; the working of spiritual power is absent. This worldview does not fill people. It is a matter of the head, while the other is a matter of the heart. This difference is expressed in the Protestant confession: understanding everything that the world around us offers with the mind; for the other, faith must suffice. In the bourgeoisie there is still a remnant of the earlier worldview, a kind of connection with the spiritual world. The proletarian is placed in the factory, at the machine. Nothing passes into him, as it did, for example, in the old crafts, when the soul spoke out of the old door handles, for example, and so on. Cut off from any connection that the old craft still had, what spoke out of things and events.

“What am I in the world?” - “I am a highly developed animal organism.” This is the proletariat's perception of what he [the proletarian] has adopted from science. You can be inspired by such ideas, but you can't live with them in the long run. The intellect is convinced that this does not come from the spiritual, but the soul revolts against it. And this is what underlies all social questions. That is the real face. It is thought that everything that lives as art, as science, as custom, law and so on, is ideology, smoke. With such a view, one can think - one cannot live with it.

It is also connected with the fact that economic life has been absorbed by the state in recent centuries.

The municipal administrations have been absorbed and united with the interests of the princes. Intellectual life flows into this state structure. It was bound to happen that the school was wrested from the church and handed over to the state. The state has absorbed the church's “trailing resentment” with regard to schools. The demand for socialism and democracy must lead to the call for the liberation of intellectual life from the state.

Should the dependence of schools and education on the state be further increased? Intellectual life is now being crushed in Russia.

Every person who has come of age should be free to decide on the organization of everything that a person who has come of age has to decide on. In the spiritual life, only those who are knowledgeable and competent in this spiritual life should have a say. Only those who are active in the spiritual life, from the lowest teacher to the highest teacher at the university, should have a say. He must have sufficient time to be able to share in the administration of this life alongside his work in education. Not as it is today, when people who are not practically involved in the profession determine what has to happen.

Then we will have true democracy in the legal life and knowledgeable, efficient leadership in spiritual life.

But the decisions that are made in economic life can only come from knowledgeable and competent and capable individuals or groups of people. It is difficult to form appropriate judgments. The current economic structure of the state is a product of historical development. That is very true. Marx's friend, Engels, explained this very well in his book.

Where expert and professional judgment is needed, the majority cannot decide. One-sided economic thinking cannot lead to a solution of the social question.

In order to properly initiate the transformation of the credit system, it is also necessary that knowledgeable and competent personalities are active. Confidence in persons or groups of persons is creditworthiness.

Not three parliaments, but only one for political life. In the intellectual and economic fields, not the majority, but knowledgeable and competent personalities who lead and guide.

Centralized administration is nothing but the product of politically mature thinking. Economic life will not be depoliticized if it is merely separated from the political parliament and centrally administered alongside it with politically mature thinking. Rather, this administration must be carried out quite differently, as envisaged in the threefold order.

Production should not be for profit, but rather for consumption. The motive for production should not be the entrepreneur's profit, but rather what the people need.

Is there anything underlying this essentially correct demand that can lead us to a proper solution of the social question?

The abolition of the prevailing wage system and the right to vote for all those with equal rights – these are in fact demands that had been raised up to the Eisenach Program. Then came the Erfurt Program: nothing more of these two demands, but something quite different: the abolition of all private property and the transfer of all property, of all means of production, into state administration. The old social order had its good support in throne and altar. But now it no longer has that. Instead, it has the office and the factory, and we no longer have that “good support” from them. Overall accounting instead of church administration, nationalization and so on. This is already being done in the East, and what is being done and what is going on there is terrible. This is the grave of the entire modern civilization. One does not notice this immediately, because there are still spiritual and political forces from the past in the circumstances.

Hypnosis of the spirited Lenin.

Spiritualism of [blank in transcript] Trotsky.

Capital: sum of the means of production and land.

The developmental leap of all humanity in the fifteenth century, as in the individual human life in the sixth [to] seventh and thirteenth [to] fourteenth years. And this developmental leap boils down to the fact that man wants to be seen as a personality - each individual.

And this now leaps out in the social question. In the past, the patriarchal relationship, now industry. What about the means of production now? In the past, land was in the hands of a few people, and others worked on this land, which created a special relationship. Today, the means of production have to be procured with large sums of money and are managed by these owners. But these managers have failed to change the relationship with the workers. If there is damage somewhere, statistics are kept. But ideas for change are not found. People were without ideas. The time must come when ideas may again guide the facts. Today, people who have such ideas are branded as utopians, idealists, impractical people.

Talking about abolishing private property is nothing more than childish. Individual initiative is not anti-social, but social. Capital should be centralized by those who have the ability to do so in the right way through their own initiative. In the intellectual field, ownership passes to those who can best manage it for the general public thirty years after the owner's death. People still look perplexed today when this principle is applied to the economy.

In the Platonic teaching, defense and nurturing classes, we have the exact opposite of what must now be striven for with the threefold social order. A wall is erected in that order, between the classes. In the threefold order, it is precisely the class distinction that will be overcome. That which is outside of the human being is threefolded, while everyone can belong to any of these three realms. Do not approach humanity with abstract programs - works councils and so on - but let knowledgeable people speak from reality. That is the essential thing.

If you were to bring together about 800 such works councils, there would only be 25 to 30 who would really achieve something and have something good to show for it. It will be a great piece of work to achieve something out of today's chaos. But if there is not only debate and parliamentarization, but real work, then what these 25 to 30 can say will be understood by the other 700 to 800. The understanding is already there in the masses.

An economic community must have a very specific size. If it is too large, it becomes too inefficient; if it is too small, it cannot achieve the right level of success. The right size is somewhere in between. This must first be understood and recognized. Rathenau, on the one hand, was highly ingenious, but on the other hand, he was bound by the old, outdated ideas and concepts that must first be overcome today.

The economy does not need laws, but contracts. As soon as a product becomes too expensive, too few people work on it – if it becomes too cheap, too many work on it. If an article becomes too expensive, it shows that the particular article is not produced enough; so it must be contractually ensured that more people turn to this article. If an article becomes too cheap, too much of it is produced, then a factory may have to be closed down. Difficult! It is certainly difficult. If someone just wants to say that it is difficult and not intervene, then they do not want to ensure right relationships. Economic life should be regulated through associations, not through the chance of the market. A federal structure, not a centralized administration, must ensure proper production and circulation.

The impulse for threefolding does not claim to be wiser than other ideas, but it does assume that the wise will be called upon. That is what matters. The language of facts must be spoken. Only very deaf ears have been cultivated against the language of facts. Economic life must be fed from the spiritual life. Only from a self-governing spiritual life can the right things flow into life in all areas. A freely administered spiritual life never releases dreamers; you can never be a real philosopher if you can't chop wood when the time comes, that is, be a whole man.

Merging of blood heritage... [gap in transcript] and educational results,... [gap in transcript] and yet spiritual unity. This is how it is in a threefold state. The spiritual permeates all life, does not remain outside. It cannot be socialized in the sense of a [planned economy] or the like, but conditions can be created in which people can work socially. That is what matters. People must have the opportunity to be social, education must be such that they become social. Realistic ideas must have taken root in a sufficient number of souls.

That is the “how” of this impulse for the threefold social organism.

Roman Boos: Before Dr. Steiner's lecture on the problems of threefolding, I would just like to make the announcement that there will be an opportunity to ask questions after the lecture. I would kindly ask you to make use of this opportunity and ask any questions that arise in relation to these problems of threefolding.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! It is not out of any personal or social arbitrariness that from this Goetheanum, or rather from the spiritual movement, of which this Goetheanum is to be the representative, a stimulus is also going out in the newer time with regard to the social question of the present and the near future. It is an inner necessity that, out of the seriousness with which the spiritual affairs of humanity are to be treated here, suggestions must also flow about the most important, that is, the social problems of the present and the immediate future of humanity.

Now, the suggestions that come from here have often been misunderstood in the strangest way. And by pointing out some of the principles of the social question that arise from here, I would like to take this opportunity to clear up misunderstandings either immediately in the discussions or afterwards, by linking them to questions.

When we look at the social question today, it is basically a misunderstanding that is actually quite old. The fact is that this social question was not seen in its true form during the period when it first began to arise most vehemently and when it developed most intensively. It only really emerged in its true form after the terrible war catastrophe of recent years, or perhaps during it. Before that, people had basically come to terms with it, talking about the social question from a wide range of party standpoints, or from one or other understanding – but mostly very limited understandings – that had been developed for this question, trying out this or that means of providing information, this or that institution, which were supposed to provide a remedy for one or other of the ills that arose in the course of the social movement. But a real, in-depth understanding of what is actually at stake in what we call the social question has not emerged in recent decades; it has not emerged since the middle of the nineteenth century, when it should have emerged. Today it turns out that this social question cannot be tackled without considering it as a human question, as a question of the life of our entire social existence within European and American civilization. And as long as we do not find a way to understand this [social] question as a human question, we will not arrive at views or institutions that can be of any significant help in finding a solution to this question that is as humane as possible.

There has been a lot of talk about the social question for a long time, and it must be said that at present people do not really have any idea of how this question has been in people's minds in the last decades of the nineteenth century, or how it has affected people's lives. It is the case that today people think relatively briefly, that they only see what is immediately in front of them, and that they are not given the opportunity to see larger connections. One does not, my dear audience, come to an understanding of this social question without seeing the larger context.

Now, the deficiency that is being pointed out here is actually present in all our current education. It is also present in the way in which our current education has taken hold of people from the most diverse social classes through the particular development of the civilized world in the second half of the nineteenth century. Spiritual science, as it is to proceed from this building here in Dornach, is not meant to be merely an uplifting of the human soul to spiritual worlds, nor is it meant to be merely the bringing of knowledge related to the spiritual world. Rather, it is meant to permeate all human activity with the fruits that can be obtained from this spiritual science. And now, in public lectures, I have emphasized for two decades that the most important thing in this spiritual science is not what one absorbs in terms of content – it is important, but it is not the most important thing, it is, so to speak, the precondition, but it is not the thing to stop at. It is not the most important thing to absorb the knowledge that the human being consists of these and those physical and spiritual elements, and that, from a spiritual point of view, human life proceeds in such and such a way. Rather, the most important thing is to progress from this spiritual-scientific foundation of human knowledge to something very much alive. That is how one must think of this progress. If one hears about the insights of spiritual science, if one reads about it – one can already read a lot about this spiritual science in numerous works of an authoritative literature – if one reads and hears about what it presents, one is forced to think quite differently from what one has been accustomed to thinking in the last three to four centuries. Everyone must feel that: If you want to understand what is offered here as spiritual science, you have to acquire different ideas, different concepts, from those that have been common today and for some time. But by acquiring these other thoughts, these other concepts, our thinking first becomes much more agile. Because the immobility of thinking is a hallmark of newer education. Thinking becomes much more agile. In order to even begin to grasp the larger contexts presented by anthroposophy, one must absorb more comprehensive concepts and, above all, concepts that do not get stuck in the details. So, to a certain extent, one first trains one's thinking to take in larger life scales. One also makes one's thinking more agile.

That this is so is actually corroborated by an external circumstance, ladies and gentlemen. You can hear time and again, when public anthroposophical lectures are given and the illustrious gentlemen of journalism deign to write something about them, you can always hear again: “In the hall there was mainly a female audience” — whereby the esteemed ladies present are not always paid compliments with regard to their spiritual and other constitutions. But in a sense it is not always untrue that the audience at such lectures is mainly an “audience of women”. But perhaps there is another side to this than is usually meant when this is raised as an accusation against the spiritual science movement; perhaps one could also say what I have often said in response to this statement, which is meant as an accusation: Yes, why are the men not there? They could come just as easily as the ladies, and perhaps it is not exactly because of the humanities that these men are not there, because after all - as you will admit, you usually cannot talk to those who are not there!

Now there is also an inner reason for this, and here I must ask you to really take what I have to say sine ira and without emotion. I am never pleased that – forgive me – the majority of the audience usually consists of ladies. I would very much like it – the ladies may not see this as any kind of allusion to anything – I would very much like it if, so to speak, every lady could have her gentleman at the lecture. But that is not the case, and it is not just an external reason, but there are deeper reasons.

You see, our entire modern education is basically a male education. How long has it been since women were able to participate in a certain way in what the educational means of modern times have to offer? Our entire civilization is more or less a male civilization. This was something I was confronted with very strongly in all the discussions in which I, for example, had to confront people like Gabriele Reuter with the fact that, yes, the women's movement can basically only have any significant impact on the entire social life of modern times if women do not simply enter into what is, after all, only a male education in our time. What would ultimately be the result if women all put on tails, trousers and top hats? They would just be going along with the men's tastelessness. But basically the same thing has happened in the intellectual sphere! Women have not brought what was in them into modern life, but have conformed, they have donned the intellectual trousers, that is, they have become the same kind of doctors as men have become , they have become lawyers or philologists just as men have become lawyers or philologists, and they are now even striving to become theologians just as men have become theologians – they have simply put on the intellectual trousers. It is the case that one must say: the women's movement will only become something when women contribute their special element – I do not mean the feminine at all now, but the special element – to our intellectual civilization, which comes from the fact that – well, I will express myself drastically, although it not always meant to be so drastic — that their brains are not constricted in Spanish boots, which come from the various faculties of the present day as well; for men's brains have been trained in these Spanish boots for centuries. They have become those thoughts that cannot overlook any great connections, that are above all immobile, rigid, and that can only view something like spiritual science, because it demands longer thoughts, as something fantastic. Thus women, protected by their naivety, come to the anthroposophical lectures through the fact that the false boot element of male education has not yet entered their brains. They come because, if I may express myself figuratively, their brains have remained even softer. It can still absorb more than the male brain. This is also a deeper reason. So I do not want to compliment the ladies that they have the better brain; they just have the one that is less deformed. I do not want to pay the ladies a compliment either, that they understand anthroposophy better because they are ladies, but only that they understand it better because they judge from the heart and have learned less of what one has been accustomed to learning in the last four centuries.

Spiritual science consciously opposes the education of the last four centuries and simply demands more comprehensive thoughts, which initially also make the imagination more agile, but from the imagination they make the whole person more agile. So it can be said that someone who has undergone training in spiritual science will more easily see through a reality, including its economic context, than someone who has only emerged from the education of the last few centuries.

I have already pointed out how little this education of the last few centuries was suited to looking at the essentials of the matter. I have pointed out how, in a certain period of the nineteenth century, the gold standard was introduced in place of the previous bimetallism. Those who advocated the gold standard claimed everywhere – you can read about it in the most diverse parliamentary reports – that free trade would be established through the gold standard. The customs barriers of the various countries would fall. Well, there is no doubt that if these tariff barriers had fallen, we would be in a different position today. But not only have the tariff barriers not fallen, anyone crossing borders today knows that many other barriers have been erected. None of the predictions of learned economists and practitioners of life have come true as a result of the gold standard, of monometallism. None of it has materialized; everywhere the opposite has happened: customs barriers have been erected. That means that the esteemed practitioners in all areas of life have been thoroughly mistaken; they have not foreseen anything of how reality works. What has come to light on a large scale – in business life – has come to light on a small scale everywhere and is still coming to light everywhere. What is meant by an overview of circumstances has not been taught to people. What could be learned in the highest schools did not result in an education of the human soul for an overview of the larger contexts of practical life.

But please do not think that I consider all the practitioners or the learned economists who have stated what I have just indicated to be fools. On the contrary, I find that the people who spoke in the European parliaments and wrote in the European newspapers, especially in the 1960s and 1950s, were very clever people. Very clever people predicted the wrong things, because you couldn't predict anything right under the circumstances that existed. Because, my dear attendees, cleverness doesn't help you if you can't gain life experience through that cleverness. And the conditions as they were in industrialism, in commercialism, they just offered only the possibility to see the next; they did not offer the possibility to also tie the most clever thoughts to that which lives in reality. One had become accustomed to seeing through the microscope in science, to magnifying the smallest, so that one would not have to judge something larger. This has trained people to see the smallest relationships. This is only a comparison, an analogy, but the analogy is valid.

Spiritual science, therefore, does not want to consider as important that which can be learned as content, but it wants to consider as most important the education that a person acquires through the thoughts that he must make if he wants to understand spiritual science. And that is why there is an inner necessity for this spiritual science to be applied today in the practical areas of life, because it aims to develop the kind of education that enables people to look clearly and without illusion at the practical areas of life.

And so we can say: because people were not able to look at the social question from such a broader perspective, they have not really seen it for what it is. Today, after the catastrophe of the war, we can actually see: all the discussions that have been held, all the fine theories that have been put forward, they are actually for nothing, they basically lead nowhere; because it is not at all about the wickedness of institutions; it is not at all about that, not in the big picture, of course it is in the details, but not to the extent that the illusionary theories of socialists and anti-socialists would have us believe. We are not dealing with something remotely similar to the antagonism between capital and labor – on which entire broad theories are built. No, we are dealing with something completely different. We are dealing with the fact that feelings and urges have grown in broad masses of the population of civilized humanity that have been ignored for decades and that should be understood. One should humanly understand what is surging up. One should ask oneself: What are the natures of the people who today demand revolution or something else, who today aspire to political power or the like? How did this come about in these human souls? One should look at what is a social question as a human question, then one could gain ideas about how to deal with what is before us. Again and again, the question was not: What are the souls of the broad masses of the proletariat made of? Rather, the question was: What are the living conditions of the broad masses of the proletariat, since the proletarians themselves, under the influence of bourgeois education, formed only concepts that had actually been trained in the economic science of the bourgeoisie. We do not have anything at all in today's general world education that realistically captures the social situation.

It can be said, ladies and gentlemen: The thing that weighs most heavily on the heart of anyone who is truly concerned about the social question today is that so few want to see clearly and distinctly the guilt that the leading circles have incurred in modern times, a real guilt, truly not so much in the sphere of external economic life as in the sphere of educational life, in the sphere of intellectual life. We have seen a whole new class emerge in the last few centuries. We have had this new class alongside us; we have seen how this new class has a completely new language for soul development that we have not looked at. We have continued to speak the old language of tradition in the educational life of the leading circles. No effort was made to bridge the gap between the leading classes and the classes that emerged in the proletariat. No real interest was paid to what was emerging in humanity as a human question. At most, institutions and facilities were set up to provide for the broad masses in the sense of the old-oriented charity, to provide for stomachs, clothing and housing, and so on. But no thought was given to the fact that it had become necessary to achieve a world view in which all people of the modern age could come together in understanding. Today we have the fruits. You read today in the newspapers of the proletariat, full of omissions about everything that has come from the leading, from the formerly leading classes. They read that actually all the thinking about capitalism in earlier times, you read that all that is useless, that a completely different spirit must come, the spirit of the great masses, the spirit that rises out of the great masses like smoke out of a chimney. The most abominable abstraction has become the idol of the broad masses of the proletariat; an indefinite spirit that is supposed to arise from the totality.

Two questions can be asked; one that must be answered from a deeper understanding of history, which says again and again that the spirit, if it is to work in life, must go through personalities, that a spirit never flies around without working through personalities. But the other question - it can be asked very specifically today. First, a practical realization of what can be meant in social terms has gone out from Dornach and from our friends in Stuttgart.

You know that our friends Molt, Unger, Kühn, Leinhas and others have joined forces in Stuttgart to translate into practical life what can come from Dornach in social terms. We then – I will of course omit the details – we then began to work in about April 1919. Of course, such work – where one is not dealing with wax figures but with the living humanity of the present – can only be done step by step, with exact consideration of the real conditions. And it may be said that, in particular, in the first 14 days of our work at that time, everything actually went quite well. To a certain extent, what had to be achieved was achieved: winning broader sections of the proletariat over to reasonable social ideas. If something else had been achieved at the time, namely to win broader circles of the bourgeoisie, the leading class, for these ideas, namely to win over those who were then leading, then something that could have been fruitful would certainly have happened. But the broader circles of the bourgeoisie basically failed at first because they did not know that they were dealing with a human issue. At the time, I said to many people in Stuttgart who could have been in a position to understand such things: Yes, you see, the fact that you and I are talking about social theories can certainly have a good theoretical and later also a practical value, but that is not what matters now. What matters is that we can do something, that we can bring together people who can really do something together. To do that, it is necessary, for example, to speak to the workers in a way that they can understand, so that you first have the workers. I even said: if you don't like some of the things that have to be said in the language of the proletariat to the proletariat, it doesn't matter at first, but what matters is that you bring people together. Just have the patience to bring people together.

There was really very little understanding of the fact that the modern social question is a human question. And so it could happen that one day the so-called leaders of the proletariat noticed – it is always the worst when the leaders of any party or class or religious community notice that followers are being acquired among their flock; that is always the most dangerous thing, actually. They are not very interested in things if you talk cabbage and don't win any followers. But when people realized: Yes, something is happening here, they appeared on the scene, and it soon became clear that through all the foolish warming up of old socialist theories and Marxism that could be done, it was done, people were persuaded that one did not mean well by them, but that one was also something of a disguised capitalist or at least a capitalist servant. In short, a few leading personalities appeared on the scene, and the masses quickly evaporated. This is something that teaches in a very concrete sense that the spirit is not something that comes out of the masses and flies around, but by showing us that the Stuttgart workers are more Catholic in their method of obeying than have ever been Roman Catholics, one could see that all this is a fuss, a phrase about the “spirit” that comes “from the masses,” that even today the masses, as they have always done, follow a few bellwethers. Not only does history teach this, but experience also teaches it. Because it would have been [therefore] a matter of undermining the ground - I say it quite sincerely - undermining the ground of the leaders. Until one admits to oneself that nothing can get better if the leaders do not get away from this leadership of the broad masses, who have emerged from the circumstances of the last decades, things will not get better. That is the crux of the matter. Therefore, one had to – and in this respect we too have made mistakes – one had to approach the masses directly, leaving out everything that the leaders did. It is a question of humanity, and it has basically arisen as a question of humanity, and it has been noticed here and there: it is not a matter of achieving individual institutions, but of achieving a world view and conception of life through which a bridge can be created between the people who emerged as the leading class from the old world order and those who are digging so wildly in the proletariat. But that is the strangest thing: those people who have seen something have always been like preachers in the wilderness. One can indeed make the strangest experiences through appropriate retrospectives.

When I wrote my first appeal, which was then published as an appendix to my “Key Points of the Social Question” and which so many people signed, some people were furious about it because I pointed out how the last decades, especially in Germany, were not at all suitable for setting and solving realistic tasks; and even today I still receive angry letters from “well-meaning” people about this first appeal. And yet, these people are all unaware of the facts. Facts are only reflected in something like the following.

V[iktor] Alim&] Huber wrote the following in a magazine in 1869 – I ask you to take note of the year, I choose this year and this quote quite deliberately because what was written here predates the reestablishment of the German Reich – Huber wrote the following in a magazine published in Stuttgart in 1869, for example, by first pointing out how the labor question arose , how the social question shines in through the windows; after he has explained how one should try, as he calls it, to create some alleviation of the contradictions that are bound to arise through the “corporation route”, through the route of appropriate union; after he – in 1869, my esteemed audience – after he has said: If the spirit that has been developed so far in view of the social question is further developed, the time will come when the military state will reveal this question in a terrible way as “to be or not to be”. These words appeared in a Stuttgart newspaper in 1869! I would like to know how many people have thought about this, now or after the so-called German revolution, where the words “to be or not to be” were used again and again, how many people have considered that a somewhat more clairvoyant person had already written this in 1869, at a time when people were confronted with completely different facts than they are today. The man wrote, after he had dealt with such things:

Here, too, we are ultimately referred to a reform, strengthening and multiplication of all institutions and means of social education of the people at all, but here in particular at the higher levels, as an indispensable condition of social reforms.

The man realized that it is a matter of spreading a particular intellectual life, which, however, did not yet exist at the time. But an understanding of intellectual life could have grown out of such foundations if people had listened to such people at all in the frenzy of the following decades. And this man spoke even more precisely in 1869:

It goes without saying that this cannot be the case without a fundamental change in the spirit of our universities, and all the more so the less one

— namely at the universities —

have any inkling or even understanding of this need and this profession.

Now, my dear attendees, while the man said in 1869: It must begin at the universities, something else must be introduced into the lecture halls, because it is far removed from the spirit must take hold in humanity if improvement is to occur –; while the man said this in 1869, today the people who “mean well” come and say: So we are founding adult education centers! That is to say, we take what has been concocted at the universities, cook it in somewhat more favorable preparations that it may benefit the masses, and administer the same stuff in smaller doses. What does that really mean? What it really means is that what was no good when the leading classes did it, now carried into the broad masses, should be good. The issue is not that we carry what has been taught further into the broad masses, but that we replace what has been taught and has brought us into the catastrophe with what is emphasized here, what is taken as a starting point here: we must first find the kind of spiritual culture that leads to the adult education center. We will not find this if we do not make an effort to find our way out of materialistic science and into spiritual science. What comes from the old science is what the leaders of the proletarians have learned, what the Trotskys, Lenins and so on have learned. This has led to what these people preach to the proletarians, what they set up. That, that is sufficiently widespread. That is the kind of thing you can't do anything with. What we need is what comes from spiritual science. It is not something that tells people, for example in the social sphere: let us set it up like this and like that, militarize work, and then a paradise will arise on earth! You will not find such a sentence in the 'Key Points of the Social Question'. In the 'Key Points of the Social Question' you will find this as a starting point: We want to have a possible social and viable social organism, that is, we do not want an earthly paradise, such a thing is perhaps quite impossible. It is not at all a question of whether one should strive for this or that, because of course people strive for something higher when they are offered something; because what one has once striven for as the highest is immediately the lowest in the next moment. What is important is not to promise people heaven on earth, but to study how the social organism becomes viable, how it can best be brought to life. Then it may turn out that not all of people's wishes can be fulfilled, but an especially ingenious person might say – I have known such people, I have met many a freeloader in my long life – it might occur to people, for example, could occur to people to say: It is a highly inappropriate arrangement that beings move on two legs, it could all be arranged differently; this physical human organism, there is so much that is inappropriate, and so on, and so on. There could well be specially designed heads that could imagine the human organism very differently from how it is. Of course, the imagination would not be a realistic one. But there are people like that, I have met them. Of course, there are also people who promise others paradise on earth. But that is no proof that it is possible to realize what people promise and in which they find understanding, because, of course, you only have to promise people what they want and desire, then you will find understanding in broad circles more easily than if you only talk about what is possible, if you only talk about what the social question can really achieve. That is what the “key issues of the social question” are all about.

That is why, because only this can be spoken of, we have arrived at the threefold social organism, which seems utopian only to those who look at it superficially, because wherever you look at life, if you are not blinded by preconceived theories, you will see that the main structure of our present-day intellectual life, so-called intellectual life, has been built up and promoted by the fact that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state, certainly under the compulsion of confessional necessities – at the time when it happened – has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has has been promoted by the fact that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state, certainly under the compulsion of confessional necessities – at the time when it happened, it was a necessity, today we can go beyond it – that the unified state has shaped this intellectual life by taking over the schools. It educates its people as it needs them. It educates theologians as it needs them, it educates lawyers, doctors, as it needs them. Switzerland, for example, needs doctors who have only been educated in Switzerland, at Swiss faculties, because a doctor educated a few hours away cannot practice medicine in Switzerland; and it is the same with philologists, it is the same with everyone. The state, when it has control of education, must of course impose its point of view.

Now imagine, instead of such a state education, an education system that is completely self-governing, an education system that, from the lowest to the highest schools, has as administrators those who are actively involved in this spiritual — the teacher teaching only enough to have free some hours in which he can devote himself to the administration of the educational system; no one else is involved in this administration of the educational system except those who are actively involved. No corporate body has a say in it, no parliament; for what is to be said regarding the training for intellectual life requires specialized training and expertise, requires certain abilities and could only be trained if intellectual life stands on its own ground. As soon as something that arises from majority opinion or from the average view is decreed as law and then passes over into the administrative sphere, the sphere of spiritual education must wither away. And there is an inner connection between the materialistic type of our modern spiritual life and the nationalization of that spiritual life.

You see, you can experience special things there. People cannot always see immediately if they are not familiar with spiritual science, which shows itself through itself, through its entire being: what must be striven for through it can only be striven for in free spiritual life ; it can only be striven for if it comes solely from the personalities, if it is only as good and as bad as the personalities of an age can make it, if one does not succumb to the illusion that There are laws that prescribe how teaching should be done. What use are laws! It depends on the teachers, on the real, concrete teaching personalities; it depends on the people who are involved in teaching, in the spiritual realm, that they also manage this at the same time. If we were to hypothetically assume the sad case that in an age, in a generation, there were only stupid teachers, then this generation would have to be educated in a stupid way. That would still be better than having good laws for the teaching system, and these good laws being treated even worse than when stupidity springs from within the human being. In the spiritual sphere it is necessary that what happens should come out of the abilities of the human being, for in this way it will always be the best conceivable for a given age. That is what matters. That is why it is not immediately apparent that this freedom, this emancipation of spiritual life as one of the links in the social organism, is a necessity. It may happen that very well-meaning, very clever people raise the objection – it comes up again and again – let us say, for example, it is someone, I will say now, in State X – so as not to offend anyone – it is someone in State X, and they are told that it is necessary, the threefold social order, the freedom of spiritual life. He will perhaps say the following: Yes, in the other state Y, Z and so on, it is already as you say, but with us in X, there, there we notice nothing of the dependence of teaching on the government, on the state powers; with us, the education system is not disturbed by the state powers.

Yes, my dear attendees, I would like to say: That is precisely the problem, that people say so, because by saying so, they no longer realize how dependent they are. They are so dependent that their dependence appears to them as freedom. Only dependence goes through their heads. They approve of everything that is put into their heads, and because they obediently follow the state's orders as a matter of course, they do not feel in the least confused by them. They do not even realize what the matter is. That is perhaps the very worst of all, that especially in the intellectual field, but especially in the educational field, it has already come to such a pass that people no longer feel at all how they are dependent, that they glorify this dependence as freedom. Of course, if someone thinks like the pastor who had just preached a sermon and in which he explained that, according to the wisdom of the world, man is best built, a hunchback was waiting for him at the church exit and asked the pastor: “Yes, Reverend, can you tell me that I am also best built?” He replied: “For a hunchback, you are built very well indeed.” Yes, you see, when we speak of freedom of thought to people who perceive dependency as freedom, they tell us: “Yes, we have complete freedom!” That is the one link in the threefold social organism, the free spiritual life.

Just as little as spiritual life can tolerate the schematic classification of the democratic state, in the least because democracy can only lead to the manifestation of average opinions, and average opinions are most intolerable in the free development of intellectual life, just as little as intellectual life tolerates the schematic principle of the state, just as little does economic life. Economic life can only be based on real conditions, just as intellectual life can only be based on human abilities. Spiritual life must work in the way that is possible from the talents of the people of an age; economic life must work in such a way that it can develop fully in this economic life, with expertise, professional competence and involvement in a branch of economic life, so that others who have to do with this branch of the economy can have confidence in those who are involved in it. This means that economic life is only possible if it is built on associative lines, if it is built in such a way that what belongs together in economic life joins together, that economic circles - be they professional circles or circles that face each other, such as production circles, consumption circles, and so on - join together in such a way that they are associated.

Of course, not every circle can be associated in every circle; but it is possible for the whole economic life to be associated in an indirect way. But because the individual economic circles are associated with each other in this way [see blackboard drawing, p. 596], the person who is in any association stands [opposite another] and can gain from the circumstances he faces, through contracts or similar, what is necessary to have the basis for a proper economy. You can never organize economic life, but only associate it. You cannot organize how the individual professions should work and so on from a central location, as Lenin and Trotsky wanted to do, but you can only, by having the professional associations, try to bring them into such economic associations that one supports the other, that one gains trust for one's work from what one learns from the other.

To look at the circumstances realistically is so terribly far from the people of the present. Oh, what irony of facts we are experiencing in our time! We have seen, my dear ladies and gentlemen, that in certain states the blessing of militarism has been pronounced by parliaments, that no one but at most smaller parties has raised objections. It is decades behind us. We have seen, especially during this war, that those who have the least understanding of the situation have once again let loose their decrees out of anti-militarism!

It does not matter at all whether one was right or not, but rather that one knows why one can be right, that one knows the circumstances. And we have seen that today in socialist Germany, for example, a thunderstorm is brewing over militarism, and we see a man who now, in a legislative assembly, says, “Militarism has not only had dark sides, but militarism has brought great benefits to humanity. We have seen how those who went to war learned how to organize; and when they came back, we found that the people who had gone through the school of this war were the best people to organize work in the factories in a military sense. We have experienced that we have obtained a correct hierarchy of people through the training of this war, in that the people of this war have learned to work systematically and to subordinate themselves. We have come to understand the victory of the military order for social life.” – And just a few weeks ago, this man continued in this vein! Who was it? Trotsky in Moscow, justifying the militarization of Russian labor!

Yes, one would like to ask in the face of such things: Is there really no spark of alertness left in humanity today, when it does not look at this stark contradiction of life? Should life go on when these stark contradictions are part of this life? The point is really that, for example, in these 'key points of the social question', nothing else is striven for than that which can arise – it is clearly emphasized at one point in detail – which can arise precisely out of the present institutions. If the people who are involved in these current institutions only begin to set themselves the goal of what the meaning of threefolding is, then one can work in the spirit of threefolding everywhere, if one sets oneself the goal of threefolding, if you know that it can only be a matter of achieving, on the one hand, a free spiritual life, as I have characterized it, and, on the other hand, an economic life that works only out of economic necessities.

You see, it has even become possible to have people together in Stuttgart for a few weeks with whom one could talk about the next requirements of a non-state, free economic life. Not just once, but many times, I said to the people there: Those who will now be called upon to work on this free organization of economic life will soon, when the going gets tough, see that they cannot stop at socialist phrases, at Marxism and so on, but that they will have to work from the specific demands of economic life, and each in his own place; the plant manager, the labor manager, as well as the proletarian, they will have to work, each from his own place, from the point of view of economic life itself. This will bring to light completely different questions than those that are usually raised today, and especially those raised by practice. Just now, people were beginning to realize that, among many other things, it is necessary, for example, to figure out how a certain article in a certain economic area must have a very specific price, a very specific price range, and that the institutions must be set up in such a way that a certain price range is available. I showed people how to achieve these price ranges through arrangements, not through things like, for example, the monetary theorists with their statistics, with their state office, which is all utopian, but how to achieve it through the actual social structure, through what arises from the interaction of the associations. What is the practice today? Today it is practice that something becomes more expensive due to certain circumstances. More pay is demanded, or there is a strike. Because more pay is demanded, other things become more expensive, of course, and then more pay is demanded again. And so what is most important must be taken into account: a certain price level, that which is considered the most trivial by our social circumstances. Today, most people view any price increase with indifference, even if it is ruinous for our lives as human beings.

We were just about to enter into the practicalities, and we cannot make any further progress, ladies and gentlemen, unless as many people as possible develop an understanding of the specific issues. What do you expect to achieve with people who understand nothing of what needs to be done, who only understand what their agitators tell them? Do you think you can bring about a new economic order with them? You can only bring about a new economic order with those who have first gained an understanding of the demands of life itself. Everything else that the “key points of the social question” for a free economic life demand is already contained in this. For what individuals have spoken of, where it has been recognized – and after all, it must be said: the idea of threefolding, a part of it, is recognized – that is even made into an objection by theorists; people always come to me and say: Yes, what you are saying is already wanted here and there! I can only say to people: I would love it most of all if everything I say were already wanted. I am not at all striving to say something new, but rather what follows reasonably from the circumstances!

But that is the essential thing, that the details are demanded here or there, but that it is a matter of summarizing these very details. It is the big picture that is at stake. That is why spiritual science must intervene, because it educates in the big lines. It is right that here and there understanding arises for this or that, but then one must have the opportunity to bring it to bear. And so it also becomes clear to individuals how nonsensical it is when, for example, a judgment is to be made about an issue that should interest industry. Now, in the branches that have been nationalized, judgments are made by the state central representation or the like. That is, a majority of people make judgments that can, under certain circumstances, overrule that small minority who actually understand something about the matter; apart from everything else that is being developed in terms of reciprocity and so on, about which individual, namely western states, provide wonderful opportunities for study, as do southern states. Therefore, some have suggested: Well, we must have parliament, we must have the unified state; so at least for economic life we need industrial committees, professional representations in parliament. Yes, but what matters is that these professional representatives in parliament can first of all really assert for themselves what can then be decided from professional association to professional association, what is necessary; not that everything is mixed up again in one parliament, so that perhaps what is to be decided for this group is decided by the others, who have no say in it. Sometimes one has experienced very strange things in relation to majorities, for example in Austria, which is of course the “model state” for the downfall of the state. Because this Austrian state, one has seen it perish – I lived there for three decades – one has seen it perish if one has seen with open eyes what was actually going on there. In this Austrian state, there was a time when they wanted to revise the existing school law. They wanted to replace the existing school law with a reactionary one. This school law would have been rejected by a minority if conditions had been normal. The only way to achieve a majority was to get the Poles to vote with the other people in favor of this reactionary school law. The Poles had to form a majority with the other reactionaries. The Poles said at the time: “All right, we'll form a majority with you, we'll make the bad school law with you, but our Galicia must be exempted from this bad school law!” So the people came together in the common parliament. There was one community, the Polish delegation, that worked with the others to give the countries of the others, those who did not want it, a school law from which they exempted their own country. Krass stood out in particular at the time. But how could this not be the case in many other areas in a parliament like the Austrian one, which actually only had economic representatives? Because, you see, when a minister in Austria, Giskra, said at about the same time as Huber [in Stuttgart] set out his views: “There are no social issues, they stop at Bodenbach” – this has been discussed several times – people in this country were dreaming of a new era. Dreams came that a new era was needed and that a parliament had to be set up. So they set up the parliament based on four curiae: the curia of the large landowners, the curia of the cities, markets and industrial centers, the curia of the rural communities and the curia of the chambers of commerce – which, due to their special nature, were all economic cooperatives, all economic communities. They then formed the parliament, which made Austrian laws, fabricated rights. It is quite natural that a majority could not be formed by the representatives of the chambers of commerce and the large landowners, and that they made laws that were in their interests, not laws that would have emerged from what has been dawning more and more in humanity in modern times from the feeling of democracy. It is precisely those who take democracy seriously who must separate economic life and intellectual life, which cannot be based on democracy at all, but which arise from factual and specialized knowledge. They must separate economic life and intellectual life must separate economic life and intellectual life from what is legal life in the broadest sense, which can only develop when the mature human being opposes the other mature human being as an equal in parliament. But then only that which concerns every mature human being in relation to every other mature human being as an equal may be decided in this parliament. And the question must always be: it cannot be a matter of professional committees being formed in a democratic parliament and then the decisions being brought about by majority vote, but rather that what is the future action in economic life should emerge from negotiations, from the direct negotiations of economic associations, that which develops out of the essence of economic life itself.

What appears as the threefold social order is not a theory at all, it is not a program at all. I have experienced enough programs. In the 1880s, I used to drink my black coffee after dinner at the Viennese writers' café, the so-called Café Griensteidl. In addition to writers and authors of all sizes, poets, painters and sculptors – each was a great talent, which everyone else denied – social reformers and Marxists also met there. Viktor Adler was always there too. There you could experience the programs at noon and in the evening and at midnight in the most diverse forms. Everyone always knew what was best, and everyone thought the world would become a paradise when their social program was implemented. The opposite of all this program-making is what is striven for by the threefold social organism. Put in a simple formula — what does it actually mean? It means that there are three distinct and separate spheres of interest in the social life of humanity. One of these is the spiritual life. No one has the right to claim that they know how this spiritual life can best be administered; no one has the right to say: I prescribe a program for this spiritual life. If you are grounded in reality, as you are in spiritual science, you will not say this. But one does say: Let this spiritual life be administered by the people who are called to do so, who are actively involved in it, then you can spare yourself your program; then the right thing will come about through what life brings forth. The point is not to set out programs for the threefold social order, but to point out how people must find themselves in life so that from week to week, from year to year, the best arises in life itself. And in the same way, it is a matter of giving economic life a form such that, through economic activity, that which must arise again and again arises. For you see, the most absurd thing of all is to draw up social programs that are supposed to apply forever. Because the social question arises once and for all, but it cannot be solved overnight. The social question is a certain kind of living condition, it is a human question, and the only way to solve it is to organize life in such a way that it is continuously resolved, so that from week to week, from year to year, from decade to decade, there are always people who can bring about what can solve the social questions. The social question cannot be solved all at once, but must be solved continually throughout life. But for this it is necessary that this life should be such that the people who are called to solve it develop out of this life.

Apart from economic and spiritual questions, there are still those that simply arise between people who have come of age. These are decided democratically. They are the legal questions in the broadest sense. That is what life itself demands: that is, we must not formulate a program or develop a theory, but we must reflect on how people should live together so that life can be shaped. Today we cannot discuss whether it is already too late for European civilization, or whether there is still time for people to come together in this way. But we should keep saying to ourselves: the social question has not been grasped in its true form because the essential thing has never been expressed at all, because it was always believed that programs had to be found or institutions had to be devised, whereas it would have been necessary to communicate in such a way that humanity would have formed common interests where life demands common interests. If economic life is, of course, to stand on its own feet today – we cannot demand that tomorrow the people who are inside, who are now full of liberal, socialist or conservative ideas, should judge from the point of view of economic requirements. In the 1950s and 1960s, this would have been possible to a high degree. Today, far too much confused stuff has entered people's heads. But that is not for us to decide; instead, we muster the will to ensure that the right thing happens even today. But we should keep an eye on how, by diverting attention to completely different areas instead of coming together in the face of aligned interests, we have to divert things to completely different areas. Let us assume, hypothetically at first – which, of course, is a hypothesis today – that people, regardless of whether they are supervisors or employees, are fully involved in economic life and have been accustomed to deciding economic issues based on economic facts for some time. Then, even if it took a generation, a commonality of interests would have formed, which must exist, for example, when those who are producers have to work together. The worker and the foreman both have the same interest, if only the same interests are cultivated. The worker and the foreman do not have different interests with regard to, for example, remuneration; they have the same interests. But in order for their feelings to be fulfilled by these same interests, they have to oversee economic life. You can only oversee it if you can learn about one association by having something to do with the next association, which in turn has something to do with the next one [and so on], so that a network of relationships of trust is formed. You can only learn what the true interest is in this way. Instead, true interests are carried out of all this. The people who are work managers stand there [in the blackboard drawing: filled circles ), the employees stand there [in the blackboard drawing: open circles ). The foremen will stand there, the employees will stand there, and so on, and so on. And just as the party forms itself in parliament – what is together here in real work stands together, separated by party lines, fighting each other – an unnatural relationship, a nonsensical relationship when considered in terms of life! Why? Because economic life is not separate, does not live in its independence, but those who work in it organize themselves into parties according to completely different aspects, into parliamentary parties. If life here has nothing to do with anything other than what concerns all people of legal age as equals, which has nothing to do with what arises within economic life itself, then it is impossible for that which wants to develop into our time.

These things are found difficult to understand. Those who find them difficult to understand say: Yes, it is not clear. Yes, my dear audience, this is just life, and what is from life requires that those who want to understand it look at life. But today people no longer look at life, today they look at their prejudices. One person has acquired his prejudices from Marx, another from the liberal or social-democratic leaders, a third from the pastor, and so on and so forth. Today they only look at what is theory, what they only call practice. And so today one senses something of what individual people have actually felt for a long time.

You see, something strange happened to me. I gave a lecture in Stuttgart and also here in various places in Switzerland, in which I said, based on the matter: Today, instead of an original spiritual life, we have a phrase that is very close to the lie; instead of a real legal life, we have only convention. Something similar could perhaps still happen in relation to these things. But now I have spoken about the third area, about the economic, and I have said: in the economic sphere we do not have a real practice of life, not that which grows out of economic conditions, but mere routine. Now you think that is what I said, and today I read – namely, only today I read this Huber, really, I am not trying to pin something on you that is not true, I really read him today – and there I read in this Huber – he has invented certain corporate interests, I read in this Huber: “But where in our empire?” — says the 1869 in Stuttgart —, “where are the men who can make these arrangements?” And then he continues and says: “Least of all do we find them among practitioners, among those who call themselves practitioners, because today nothing but routine prevails there.” And – he says – we would need at least ten [men]. “But when I look around,” he says, “I want to exempt his majesty right away (he is, as people were then, loyal, a very loyal gentleman), but since he is out of the question anyway, not only are there not ten, but around the steps of the throne and everywhere outside there is not even one.”

I don't know, I couldn't quickly examine the extent to which the man was right for the year [18]69; but in our present circumstances, one has every reason to seek out those who at least have a heart and mind for studying and responding to the real circumstances. That is what is at stake today. We need people who recognize that a renewal of intellectual life and a reorganization of economic life on its own foundations are absolutely necessary. We need this because we have to relieve the state, which then forms the third link of the threefold social organism with its legal and related relationships. Everything in more detail can be found in my book “The Key Points of the Social Question”. We need this third link, which throws the others to the left and right; in short, we need the structure of the social organism from which a structure of the human being can emerge that is suited to the difficult, extraordinarily complicated and difficult conditions of the present, which will become even more complicated and difficult in the near future.

That is why I wanted to draw attention to this again today: that an impulse in the social sphere does not come from Dornach here with a spiritual-scientific movement through an arbitrary act, not through the arbitrariness of an individual [person] and not through the arbitrariness of the Anthroposophical Society, because it is actually true what individual people have repeatedly and repeatedly come to realize in recent decades: Things can only improve if we undertake a fundamental transformation of our entire spiritual life. But this transformation must not remain a mere theoretical demand, it must not be expressed only in idealistic terms, it must not shrink back from really presenting to the world a spirit such as has not been known before. Many people today can talk about the spirit. But it is not a matter of talking about the spirit, but of giving positive, concrete spirit. Positive, concrete spirit must be creative, creatively also in economic life. The time must be considered over when people said: Economic life is external, the spiritual world is not involved in it, it is found precisely when one departs from economic life, when one leaves the coarse material, when one ascends to the spiritual in higher regions. The time when people spoke in this way, that is the time that brought about rivers of blood in Europe. And the people who still speak from their pulpits today: 'Return to the old Christianity!' — to them we must say again and again: If we return to you, we can indeed start again — with the things that finally led us to 1914. It is a matter of having the courage to really present the new spirit to people. But then we must also be serious about it. Today, people approach us and say, 'So, what is being done in Dornach in the economic sphere?' Let us say, for example, that someone who is involved in economic life in America says, 'It's all very well to be working on the economy in Dornach; if they know how to do it, they should tell us.' This would imply that we are demanding a program. But here we are not working with programs, with things that are alien to life, but here we are seeking to create life. Therefore, no one can demand of us that we find a program to be implemented by this or that American bank, but here it is a matter of creating a center of life that is a real, living center around which people must organize themselves. Therefore, the American bankers must be told: It does not depend on you working out your program through your bank, which is given to you from here; but it depends on you centering what you do around Dornach, that you seek union with Dornach. Because it is not about issuing lifeless programs, but about creating a real center that must create as such. Here one cannot merely study; from here one should work.

The essential thing is that everything that comes from here is seen as life, not as theory, not as thought, not as idea. Therefore, those who go to Dornach or to the Waldorf School to see how things are done, how they themselves can do it, will not get it right. Rather, those who understand: Here a beginning has been made, here a start has been made. One must work together with that with which the start has been made, not with a theory but with life. In working together, ladies and gentlemen, we can find ourselves with all the people of the civilized world today - but in living together.

We must once and for all make it clear that the spirit does not live in empty thoughts, not in abstractions. And because we want to assert here that the spirit does not live in abstractions, that the spirit is a living thing, we cannot satisfy the person who only wanted to seek out what abstract thoughts are, which could now be realized in any way , but we can only satisfy those who understand that we must work together in the sense in which it is characterized, as it is suggested - but not programmatized - in the “Key Points of the Social Question” and the next issue of “The Future”. Not just lecturing from here that the mind is a living thing, but the living mind should be sought. We will see whether there is enough understanding in the world for the fact that the living spirit, not the abstract spirit, must be sought, that we must seek for an improvement of the future, for a true construction not just any abstract idea, but [that we must seek] the living spirit. (Lively applause.)

Discussion

Rudolf Steiner: Ladies and Gentlemen, is there perhaps someone here who has a question to ask orally or something to say? Two questions have been submitted in writing (about the “threefold state”; question of whether a school association should have a say in the free spiritual life of the “threefold state”).

Now, esteemed attendees, sometimes it is necessary for me to become a terrible pedant, which I otherwise abhor, for the sake of the matter! The state is conceived of as one of the three limbs of the threefold social organism, and it is actually impossible to say: the threefold state. It can be tolerated for the sake of expediency, but attention must also be drawn to such things from time to time. I am saying this because the question here explicitly mentions “the threefold state”.

Now, questions are understandably asked from the present consciousness, and that is ultimately quite right. But if you want to look at life, you have to realize that life is a process of becoming, and that some things that are desirable may only happen after a long time, but that, if the courage is there, they may also happen relatively quickly. And so one must also consider the questions a little, must consider that questions are asked from the circumstances of the present, perhaps even from the very close circumstances of the future, but in a form that can no longer be asked. Not this question, in particular. Because, believe me, it will be a matter of the spiritual life being administered by those who are alive in it. Those who are truly alive in it will naturally have to ensure that all that can in any way be favorable to their decisions is fully incorporated into them. Now imagine that I am a primary school teacher and a child enters the first class at the Waldorf School. It would be perfectly natural for the school to proceed in the same way as a sensible doctor would, who, when a case of illness arises, does not make a snap judgment but familiarizes himself with the biography of the patient. You have to get to know and read the biography when you get a schoolchild in order to know what the child has been through so far. The best way to get to know the child is, of course, to talk to the mother, although the father should not be left out completely. But here only the mothers are asked. Take just one small point from what I said today about the free spiritual life. Take seriously the fact that this free spiritual life will bring to fruition all those factors that make this free spiritual life possible. What follows from this? It follows inevitably that mothers will be drawn into it. This is self-evident! But we should not want to transfer to the free spiritual life what has so terribly emerged bit by bit in the old spiritual life. When something occurred somewhere, no matter how trivial, you could hear everywhere: Yes, a law should be made. People had nothing else on their minds but: a law should be made. A law should be made for everything! So I took the liberty of saying in a lecture in Nuremberg: What is the ideal of the modern person? And I characterized this there in such a way that I said: Man actually only wishes nowadays that he is always accompanied in his life by a policeman on his left and a doctor on his right; so that he has the doctor for the time of illness, and the policeman or another faculty takes care of the other half of life. That is precisely what we want to achieve with such a social organism: to enable people to take care of themselves, to produce, as a matter of course, what is needed for the laws that the philistines want everywhere. I know that today people usually say in such a case: Yes, but people are not yet mature enough for that. For me, this and many other things are precisely the reason why, when someone tells me: People are not yet mature enough for that, I answer that two things result from this; firstly, that he considers himself mature, and secondly, that he is certainly not mature when he thinks that he understands this, but that the others are not yet mature for it, that he is therefore judging from a subconscious self-knowledge that is not alive in his consciousness. It is not a matter of waiting for people to mature, because we can wait until the end of the days on earth, but rather of seizing the moment and then waiting to see what happens under the circumstances. When people mature, some questions simply resolve themselves out of the circumstances.

The other question that has been asked here is: “Can any of the forms of association that are common today, a labor cooperative or an individual company, be considered particularly suitable as a starting point for the associative form?”

Now, my dear attendees, consider life in its becoming again. Consider it in such a way that it is constantly transforming itself, just like the organism itself, until a certain degree of stationarity is initially achieved in one area or another, then remains for a period of time, and then dies off. You will find it already hinted at in the 'Key Points of the Social Question'. What we have today should initially be the starting point. It cannot be any different. Today we have joint-stock companies; indeed, we even set them up. We have set one up in Stuttgart. So we set them up ourselves, are in the process of setting one up here, as humanities scholars. We are building everywhere on what already exists. We are not talking about some utopian fantasy, but want to build on what already exists. Then we might have all sorts of associations emerging from what already exists: cooperatives, joint-stock companies, I don't know what all, and we are only looking for the associations. [See blackboard drawing, p. 597]

But the fact that these associations enter associative life means that they change again, and that the joint-stock companies will take on a different form when associative life awakens. The cooperatives will also take on a different form. It does not matter - suppose there were a corporation here that was abominable, it would also associate. By itself it is abominable; but by being placed in the network of association, it is constantly influenced, gradually carried along by what arises from associating, and in time becomes something quite different, or perishes. For us, it is not a matter of abolishing something, but of accepting things as they are. And if something is bad, then it naturally perishes. But to abolish something through laws can never be the issue.

That is what weighs most today, that healthy thoughts must first enter human souls! You see, I would like to say this, although it was already hinted at in the lecture: the fact is that what hurts most today is that for a long time no effort has been made to build the bridge across the gulf between the classes. What concern did they have for the fate of the proletariat during the long decades of the second half of the nineteenth century? Basically, they watched what was happening; they didn't care much about it, except that they sometimes heard in larger cities that people said: There's a house again where they're having thicker shutters made because they're afraid something will break out soon! – At most, people were concerned about such things in this way. But no one sought to create a vibrant life that would have been the basis for understanding.

In my “Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life in the Present and Future,” you will find an indication of how the worker in each factory should actually be led through the entire process of production, introduced to the knowledge of the raw products, and made familiar with the path the product takes, so that he has a common interest with the plant manager and takes an interest in it. Today, of course, this is still very difficult, and even if it is aspired to, it cannot be achieved overnight! It is still very difficult today for the very reason that you can experience being in a company and getting along very well with one or two workers; you get along very well with them. But when it comes to making a decision, they say to you: Yes, but I can't have the same opinion, I have to have the opinion that my union dictates to me. That's just how people are today. But why have they become like that? They have become like that because in the leading circles, where leadership should have remained, there was no desire to get to know the world. Yes, they said they wanted to get to know it, they gradually did something out of their ideas. But the one who has gotten to know it knows even more about the things.

From the years when I was a teacher at the Workers' Education School, which was basically a Social Democratic institution, I could see how the plant managers knew absolutely nothing about what was going on among the workers, and I could see how they were not interested in it either. What I am saying now may be seen as an exaggeration, because one is in the same case as the one who says that laws should... [illegible in shorthand] and so on, and so on. The states may want to stifle intellectual life, but here in X we feel no such oppression. Just as they closed their eyes there, closed for decades to what was actually coming! At most, they locked people up. But what matters is that a person really gets to know life. And that is still missing today to the utmost degree. That is one thing I would like to say in response to such questions.

From what is said, one can tell everywhere that people only know a small circle. That will change. Just consider what I said in response to...; the people were not stupid at all: here he comes and asks, and the arguments that were put forward were very clever; but they could not know anything about what is explained when one is inside a factory. Through the associations that arise more and more, where one is in a lively exchange, where one does not have to check first, but where one knows how far trust can be placed in things, one's own experience teaches what can be learned. That is what you need for your judgment. Until now, you could only judge according to prejudices and therefore judged by the by. And economic experience is given by those principles of association that I spoke of in my “key points”. That is what matters.

Does anyone still have a question?

Emil Molt, Stuttgart: I don't know whether it is allowed, whether there is still time to ask a few questions, because I don't know whether here in Dornach there is a rule that when social questions are discussed there is neither time nor clocks; but for us in Stuttgart it is the case that we can really talk without time. I would now like to tie in with what has just been said.

Especially if you are a working person involved in the threefold order, then it weighs heavily on your soul, especially in recent times, that you have had so few points of attack to implement the threefold order in reality. Last year, as has also been mentioned this evening, we tried to to put the threefolding into practice through the proletariat, and in doing so, we did not, however, disregard the fact that bourgeois circles, above all among these circles, should also become acquainted with the matter. The success has been described this evening. The parties have withdrawn their sheep, and the employers have rejected us from the start. Our work continued. Something left over from working with the proletariat is always like this: the proletarian side in particular is still showing us the judgments that, for example, all the meetings that have now been held by associations, parties and so on are so terribly boring and full of empty phrases. We are told this by the proletariat in particular, that it was a different time, when Dr. Steiner in Stuttgart still had something to tell us about the issues, about the social issues.

But we do find that the proletariat in general is not sufficiently mature to fully grasp the core issues. And we find, on the other hand, that the business community simply makes it impossible by dismissing anyone who works intensively in this direction as a Spartacist or Bolshevik.

We always ask ourselves: What can be done, especially now, not only to get the threefold order into people's heads, but above all to introduce it into practice? And here I would like to, because the question is actually always coming up again and again, especially now that in Germany [...] is such a way that employers would rather cling to big capitalism than to implement social progress, and on the other hand, the trend is so strongly to the right that we have to take that into account. They have a completely different view of things. In these times, people who dedicate their entire being to the threefold order are repeatedly shaken by the question: What has to happen to implement the threefold order of the social organism before it is too late, before it is impossible, before civil wars and economic chaos occur? In this regard, the one who is asking the question feels a particularly heavy burden on his soul from posing this question, and he would be grateful for an answer.

Rudolf Steiner: If I have understood the question correctly, it is this: How is it possible today to introduce anything practical at all into the world in the field of threefolding, given the resistance that is ultimately brought from all sides to the threefolding of the social organism?

This question is, of course, the one that weighs on one. But on the other hand, this question is based on a completely different one that must not be ignored. That is precisely the question: how do you approach something in a truly living way? And I have basically already hinted at something in answer to this question very quietly between the lines in the lecture, by saying: Of course we have also made mistakes. And that is true. We have not yet grown out of the child's shoes in the practice of the threefold social organism. For example, I want to draw attention to the following.

If you want to have a living effect, if you want to promote something in life, then it is important to really work out of life and try to understand life. Now, the situation today is that when one speaks before a proletarian assembly, one has the choice of either speaking in the language of the proletarians about what is ultimately for the good of the proletarians, developing it out of the ideas that the proletarians have. And I have always tried to do that. Or you can do the other: you talk from a general theory, you say this and that must happen – then you are thrown out the door! Because the proletariat today is very quick to make its decision.

Now, that actually never happened in Stuttgart, that we were thrown out the door; but something else happened. You see, I naturally spoke in such a way everywhere that I was not thrown out the door, because I would not have considered it very beneficial – I don't just mean because of the small abrasions that can happen, but because then you can't achieve anything, right, you can't achieve anything from outside the door! I didn't speak in such a way that you were thrown out the door. But then it is known that I said this or that in this or that meeting. Then I spoke to someone who was even a minister, and to him I said in all my innocence: Just wait and see what comes of it. It's not about throwing things in people's faces that make them angry, but about getting people to work with you.

So we wait until we are ready to work together. Then what must be the arithmetic mean of one opinion and the other, will perhaps emerge, or the others will be converted to your opinion, and so on. But we have to work from life.

And I was inclined to do that too! So you just face things like that. You get angry when you hear that something has been said somewhere that only differs in form from what you are used to hearing; and in this regard, you see, we really have made mistakes. For example, I gave a lecture to the workers at the Daimler factory that could only have had a favorable effect if it had been understood in this way – it was spoken for the workers at the Daimler factory, it was spoken in their language.

Well, unfortunately it is the custom in our circles that it is always demanded, and it cannot be resisted, that everything that is spoken in front of any audience should now be printed with skin and hair and should also be readable for everyone else out of context.

Yes, my dear attendees, that is simply not on! And you should realize that it is not on. It is not possible for something like that to happen. We should refrain from broadcasting what I say to a particular audience to the whole world lock, stock and barrel, because it can only be understood in context. Therefore, I understand very well that I received a letter from Nuremberg from a bourgeois pastor who, of course, could not think the way a worker at the Daimler factory can think now, for example. It may happen that people come together when they really work. But it is quite natural that he was angry about the lecture at the Daimler factory, that it is so and must be so! But it is really not about me giving a lecture to excite the delight of a Nuremberg bourgeois pastor, but about working in a lively way, about bringing the proletariat to where it should be for its own good, in cooperation with the other circles, someday.

That is what we want to put into practice. It must be clearly understood that we are not speaking theoretically here, but as life demands, never taking anything for granted that misses the truth, but saying what life demands.

But now, I would say, everything of this kind must not be schematized. It would also be wrong to schematize it. Suppose I were to give a lecture here on Thomism, on Thomas Aquinas, and a socialist were to come who had never heard of the context. Well, he would naturally be furious about it. There is no way to prevent him from becoming angry at the public lecture. But the practical work must nevertheless be done differently than we have done it so far. One has to understand that there is differentiation in life. And so it is important that we first really agree on this preliminary question: How do we get together a number, a sufficiently large number of people – we don't have that yet – who really show that things have now reached the point where it can be seen that people no longer even speak a language that can be understood by each other, and that one must rise above what is spoken on the one side and on the other side on the party sides. Above all, we must work to spread our views, and only when we have a sufficiently large number of people will we be in a position to introduce our views further into contemporary universal life.

It is the same with all things that depend on willpower. You can see that life can only give you opportunities to become pessimistic from day to day. But one must will optimistically; one must will in such a way that what one sets out to do will happen. After all, free human will does not consist of always saying, “This cannot happen and that cannot happen”; rather, it is a matter of knowing what one wills and working in the direction of that will. And that is the only thing we can really do in the first instance, each in our own place. Then an extraordinary amount will happen; there is an objective difficulty in putting the threefold order into practice as a whole.

You see, my “Key Points of the Social Question” have grown out of decades of observation of European life in all its aspects. They have grown entirely out of practical life. And I am convinced that if the practitioners were to take them up, it would be best to reach an understanding. The reason why no agreement can be reached is not that the practitioners have not got into the habit of checking what is said on the basis of practice, but because they say: reform ideas in a book! Books contain theories, so it is a theory. People do not read the book. If they read and study it, they would see that it is different from other books. So this objective difficulty is a factor. Unlike all other similar books, this book, 'The Core of the Social Question', is a book of life. It is the product of decades of observation; there is nothing invented in it. Therefore, it does not come across in such a way that one could say it is easy to understand, like a newspaper article. But I would never want to admit that this book, for example, cannot be made understandable to everyone in serious work. I think it is also the case with this book that I found that theater directors always said: Yes, we won't get an audience with this play, we have to give other plays - which they imagined should get an audience. I have had the most extraordinary experiences there. For example, I met a theater director who was talked into a play; he gave it a try, and he was completely convinced, he only did it out of complaisance. And one evening he did it – and it was a failure. He bet his wife, who had a different opinion, he bet her the entire royalties that were coming to him. The wife bet him that if the play went well, she would get the royalties. Well, the man lost his bet, the play became one of the best-visited plays. So he said in his theater language: At the theater, you can fake everything, you can fake criticism, you can fake approval, you can fake everything, just not the box office. You can't fake the box office. At least it doesn't help if you fake the box office.

This is basically how it is when you say that something cannot be made understandable. It can be made understandable if you just find the right way of doing it. And I can't really go into the question of why it was said in Stuttgart that the evenings were interesting back then when I was there and then they became boring; but I would like to bring this matter into what I would call a direction of will. It is really not a matter of brooding over why things are the way they are, but of trying to find ways and means to make things understandable, to make things popular, and above all, not to harbor illusions. It is no different than that we first need a sufficiently large number of people who understand our ideas; then it will work. But we must never sit back and do nothing; we just have to work. And I believe we will find understanding if we do not shut the door on ourselves too easily by acting not out of life but out of our prejudices. We must not throw every theory in everyone's face, but we must speak to everyone in their language; not because we think they are more stupid than we are, but because it is sometimes difficult for us to speak in their language when they are cleverer than we are; but even then we should try to speak in their language, even if they are much cleverer than we are in their field.

Perhaps it is necessary for us to develop and maintain a real life practice for the promotion of the threefold social organism.

Emil Molt: Perhaps I can correct something about the boring evenings that were party meetings. The proletarians have learned to see that party meetings in particular are full of the most outrageous nonsense, and that it was different in the old days at the trade union building than it is now, when we still organized lectures for the public.

Rudolf Steiner: I just wanted to say that I understood that the evenings back then were interesting and that afterwards the party line was followed, of course not by our people. That's not what I meant, but what I meant was that it doesn't help us if people realize that they have got to know something better. It does speak well for the people when they realize this, but it does not help us if they do not follow us. We only have an influence on them if they put into practice what they have decided. Don't you agree, you see, with us the meetings were interesting. But they don't go to us, but to the others. This just goes to show that, above all, it must be considered how people are like a flock of sheep, how they simply follow their leaders, no matter whether they talk boring stuff or not. They also vote for their leaders when it comes to something, and they follow the training. And we have no illusions about this. It is no use just holding interesting meetings for the people; it only helps if we manage to throw out the leaders and lead the people. That is the experience. Of course, it takes time, and many other things are needed; but here too we have made mistakes, we have negotiated too much with the leaders. We should not have done that. Because we should have been clear about it from the very beginning: the people do not want to understand us and cannot understand us. And so it is in many different ways that we should and want to first acquire the full practice of life.

So I beg you not to think that I meant that our meetings have become boring; rather, I meant that this judgment is of no help to us. What good does it do to enter into a discussion about a judgment that is unfruitful in people? It doesn't help at all.

You see, I knew a Catholic priest very well. He often walked with me – I was still at school – for almost an hour, the way I had to make from school to home. In that place, there were often Jesuit sermons. And the pastor talked with me, even though I was still quite young, actually quite sincerely. I said to him at the time, out of all naivety: Yes, Reverend, how is it that you don't preach the sermons yourself? You only need to do that for the same community every Sunday. Why do you bring the Jesuits over for that? That's not necessary. - He replied: That's right, but it is necessary to talk the cabbage into people; only in this way are they good. And I won't talk it into them myself, they can't ask me to!

So what use is it for a person to understand something if they act differently because of the social structure in which they live! That is precisely what we have to come to, to understand life without illusion, completely soberly, even though we aspire to the highest heights of spiritual life. - I don't know if I have answered the question exhaustively.

Emil Molt: Certainly, Doctor.

Rudolf Steiner: Is there anything else that needs to be asked? Emil Molt: I have already pointed out that in Stuttgart it was not the custom to go home so soon after meeting someone.

Rudolf Steiner: Well, here there seems to be a tendency to

go home and go to bed. So I bid you all good night.