The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I thought that today we would develop, in another direction, things that were mentioned yesterday. Perhaps this will help to give the questions you have put, and of which Dr. Wegman has told me, a right form.

Through your general destiny as human beings you are finding your way into the medical profession, into the vocation of healing. In this sphere you find a certain current to which, with full justification, you feel a kind of inner opposition. There are often objective reasons for this and you will understand what they are when you realize more and more that modern medicine is really like a foreign body in much of what constitutes European, Western civilization. We see for the first time how things really are when we realize that the reason why our natural science—and also a great deal else in modern spiritual life—has assumed its present form, is that people of importance in medicine and science within our culture were reincarnations of individualities from the Arabian-Mohammedan culture. These matters have recently been much spoken of at the Goetheanum. They are, indeed, connected with what is now happening in the Anthroposophical movement, but for the physicians, too, they are very important. I have said on various occasions that we must turn our attention to that center of spiritual culture which was at its prime when, in Europe, a kind of primitive spiritual life was prevailing under Charlemagne. Over in Asia there was flourishing the spiritual culture centers around Harun al Raschid (766–809). Many of the wise men of those days—including many physicians—were at his court. It was a time, as you will notice, when Christianity had already been working for some centuries.

Christianity itself appears in the world as something that can only be understood slowly and by degrees and, for an external, though not for an inner point of view, it is very strange that the deeper sides of Christianity have, in reality, not been fathomed at all by human beings. Christianity came into the world as an objective fact and the receptive faculties of men were not strong enough to develop the real essence of it in all directions. The objective consequences, therefore, are that Christianity is everywhere living in the sub-consciousness but that for three or four centuries it has been completely ruined by man. Human beings ruined Christianity through their intellect. As well as this there are the terribly dilettante institutions that have been set up in recent times at universities. Originally there were four traditional faculties, namely: philosophy, theology, jurisprudence, and medicine. The rest that have been added have been based on utter unenlightenment and misunderstanding. Faculties for such subjects as political science, national economy and the like, originated from thoughts which no longer knew anything at all of the essentials.

What has not been understood at all is that, to begin with, four men were sent out by Christ to proclaim Christianity: Matthew, the theologian; Mark, the jurist; Luke, the physician; and John, the philosopher. This fact, which has very deep roots in the spiritual life (things at present are only in germ and have yet to blossom and bear fruit), is also connected with the realization that the texts of the four Gospels cannot completely tally because the one is written from the standpoint of the theologian, the other from the standpoint of the philosopher, a third from the standpoint of the jurist, and a fourth from the standpoint of the physician. This must be thoroughly understood. And because it has not been understood, because the Luke Gospel has not yet been accepted as a guide for the inner will-to-healing, there is no truly Christian will-to-healing in modern thought. There is, instead, the attitude that has crept into spiritual culture through Arabism which has gripped Christianity like a pair of forceps. It is very interesting that Christianity, which originated in Asia, came across to Europe and spread abroad in Europe.

But now just think of the Court of Harun al Raschid, where ancient medicine flourished. The Old Mystery Wisdom, still preserved in tradition, was living in the existing knowledge concerning the being of man. There were two men at that court: Harun al Raschid himself, the organizer of the great academy of spiritual life which grew and developed under his influence; and another, who in earlier times had been an initiate. In the days of Harun al Raschid the initiation did not come to the surface. Harun al Raschid

reincarnated as Lord Bacon of Verulam (1561–1626) and with his kind of thinking which was thoroughly steeped in Arabism, he renewed the natural-scientific thinking, from the West. Such was the path he took in his life between death and rebirth. If you would study Lord Bacon you would find how greatly medicine was influenced thereby. Indeed you would be amazed. The other man, the initiate, was reborn in the soul of Amos Comenius (1592–1670). Comenius' life was one of aspiration towards the spirit, but he turned everything into intellectual conceptions.

Again, another personality in Arabism—he did not live at exactly the same time as Harun al Raschid, but he played a part in the battle of Zeres de la Frontera—was reborn as Charles Darwin (1809–1882). And so the influences that are working in natural science and especially in medicine, are re-embodiments of ancient conceptions from which Christianity was excluded. Such conceptions did not constitute an evolution of Christianity, but Christianity was excluded as Arabism embraced Europe in its fold. Medicine itself was most of all affected in this sense. The impulse which the Luke Gospel can give to medicine has still to be absorbed. To this end you must take with the very greatest earnestness what I said yesterday about understanding the being of man from out of the cosmos and then you will find your true bearings in the tasks which your karma sets you today.

Let us try to picture medicine as it was at the Court of Harun al Raschid. On the one side it contained the heritage of the Hippocratic mode of thinking. Those who have read the first course of lectures to physicians given by me here will perhaps remember that I referred to Hippocrates as being the last man who healed on the basis of the medical wisdom of the Ancient Mysteries. Over in Asia, during the transition to Hippocratic medicine, there came, from northeastern Asia, a strong influence from Mongolian methods of healing. Very much was introduced against which not only European thought but the inner nature of the human being himself could not help rebelling. The inner nature of man was not in harmony with the Mongolian-Tartar influence which thus entered into medical thinking. The reason can be found if we can understand the human being from a fundamental, cosmic point of view.

In the book Occult Science, evolution is described through the Saturn, Sun, Moon phases, followed by the phase of Earth evolution proper. The human being has passed through all these stages of evolution and from what has been said in these lectures you will have learned that there is, firstly, the stream of heredity which works in the model, and secondly, the stream of the individuality which comes from earlier earthly lives. What works in heredity leads back to earlier times but is an Ahrimanic remnant, has dried up. This is what is contained in heredity and it is really with this factor alone that modern orthodox medicine is working. No heed is paid to the other stream that is elaborated in the second period of human life between the change of teeth and puberty—the period which even statistics show to be the most healthy because during it the human being is least prone to fall ill. Modern medicine does not really desire to be connected with health; it prefers to burrow about in disease. This expresses the condition of things very radically but so it is, in reality. To have a real connection with health this understanding of the whole cosmos in man must be brought to the point where the cosmos is actually perceived in the human being. For this we need a knowledge of the data which can enable us to have a picture of the cosmic evolution of man. The Old Saturn evolution, Old Sun evolution, Old Moon evolution—all are contained within the human being. And not until these three stages which lead up to the stage of Earth evolution are grasped is it possible to understand what we really have before us in the earthly human being. There are so many sciences today—but there is no real science concerning Saturn, Sun, Moon, because in our general experience of nature we can no longer remember what was contained in the instinctive, primal wisdom. We cannot even approach the wisdom that was still so alive in Hippocrates, because it has become mere phraseology. It must again be filled with life.

Significant words sound over to us from ancient times, but, generally speaking, no heed is paid to them, least of all is any heed paid to the wonderful indications they contain for medicine. There is a sentence in the Bible to the effect that the divine powers of the world regulated life on the basis of measure, number, and weight. But is there anyone today who regards such words as being anything more than a phrase suggesting the existence of an ancient, divine architect who worked according to the principles of measure, number and weight? A physician, however, has to find measure, number, and weight actually within the human being.

If we consider Saturn—and the Saturn evolution is contained in the human being—we naturally do not find this Saturn evolution as such in the human being as he actually is today, because all the evolutionary stages are synthetically united in him; they are present, but in such a way that the single stages by themselves disappear in the union, in the harmony. Illness, however, calls forth the one or the other phenomenon in its own particular form. And now, what I have described in Occult Science must really be grasped, not with the intellect alone, but in the way that makes us feel how during the Saturn evolution a cosmic warmth was all-pervading. Whenever we study the Saturn evolution we are led back to the element of warmth. Saturn is working in the human being and all that is described about the Saturn evolution—it is all working in the human being, but it does not come to light in earthly man when these evolutionary stages are intermingled within his being. It does, however, work when a human being is ill. A separation then takes place of what is otherwise united into a harmony. The Saturn element works on its own—in fever. We shall have a science of fever for the first time when we make this science of fever cosmic, when we can understand how Old Saturn is working in the human being; we must understand how, in the phenomenon of fever, the cosmos is working in by way of the Saturn forces which, spiritually speaking, have been sucked in by the earth. Realizing that the Saturn forces are distributed over the earth's surface, and appear in their strongest form in the lead forces, we shall get an inner understanding of fever. The divine world order regulates the world according to measure, and in the measure of the fever there is an expression of the measure prevailing in the world order. We must see the principle of measure in the phenomena of fever. Therefore, we must let these words work strongly in us:

Feel in the fever's measure
The Spirit-Gift of Saturn.

Fühle in des Fiebers Maß
Des Saturns Geistesgabe.

It is in very truth the spirit of the human being that makes its appearance in the fever which, in other circumstances, is submerged in the other elements. In fever, the spirit of man asserts itself, but here it is isolated. The most ancient constituent part of the being of man appears, in fever, at the surface of existence.

After the Saturn evolution came the Sun evolution, during which the element of warmth condensed to air on the one side, but, on the other, was rarefied to light. Light and air intermingle, they belong together. When we breathe we take in the rhythm of the air. We also take in the light, and light, in the occult sense, is not merely that which works in the eye. Light is a general expression for what works through the sun. The eye is merely the most characteristic representative of what works through the sun. In the Middle Ages, what works in the light was known as spiritual tincture. The Sun evolution is also within the human being of today and we feel it at once, not as something that is now working on the earth but as the after-working of the Old Sun, when with true feeling we lay our fingers on the pulse of a human being. The number of the pulse beats is an expression of the Old Sun evolution within us. Therefore as the second couplet, we have:

Feel in the pulse's number
The Soul-power of Sun.

Fühle in des Pulses Zahl
Der Sonne Seelenkraft.

Whether we act or do not act like this, my dear friends, is by no means a matter of indifference. Such a thing can be taken seriously, or not seriously. It makes a tremendous difference if you are really mindful of this when you proceed to read the temperature on the thermometer, if, having acquired the faculty by inner practice you think of the picture presented by evolution in the Saturn period. There, because everything lives in the flow of warmth, the whole world appears to you like a spirit gift in which, by way of warmth, love streams into every single thing; and if in this mood of devotion you realize that streaming love exists in the world through Saturn's warmth, if in this mood of reverent gratitude to the love and warmth-bestowing world creative power you recognize what is happening as you test the temperature, then you will have an intuition about what you ought to do.

Similarly we ought not to feel the pulse in the slipshod, mechanical way in which this is often done, but we should actually be able to steep ourselves in the cosmic rhythm that goes out from the sun. In feeling the pulse we should be able also to feel how the human being lives within all that spreads out light, air, and brightness, irradiating the world. Then again our whole being is poured into the will-to-heal. The will-to-heal cannot be acquired by inner commandment but only when the soul's attitude to the world is one of true devotion.

Then you can pass on to examine the other symptoms. You try to discover how far the substances that are working in the human being are not taking on the human form but are adhering to their own form. To what, for example, is diabetes due? In the healthy human being, the sugar is humanized; it does not work through its own force as sugar. The diabetic condition is due to the fact that in his very atoms the human being is too weak to permeate the sugar through and through. In his ego organization he is following the sugar forces—forces which belong to the world outside man. Think of all the forces that express themselves in diabetes, in the residues of the urine, which deposit themselves in the body in migraine and other conditions. Think of all the substances that appear in the body, following their own laws and not the laws of man's nature, and two questions will occur to you.

First of all, how is it possible that there can arise in man a tendency to let substance unfold its own forces within his organism? If this tendency had never been present, the Moon evolution would never have been able to intervene. The moon forces intervene when the substances within the human organism want to go their own way. When this happens the moon forces seize hold of the forces of the substances and, as moon forces, produce the form of man. The human form is permeated with the moon forces. Saturn is the giver of warmth, sun of rhythm, moon of form.

Thus it is, in the whole human being. Think of something which I always emphasize. The brain in us has not really its own weight. If we remove the brain we find that its weight is about 1,500 grams, but when it is in the body it weighs only approximately twenty grams, because, according to the principle of Archimedes, every body in water loses as much of its weight as the weight of the volume of water displaced. The brain in the cerebral fluid, displaces some of this fluid, acquires buoyancy, and presses down on its base with a weight of only approximately twenty grams. So it is with everything else. The point is that there must be, in the cosmos, forces which up to the necessary degree take away from the human being some of the weight of the substances within him. The weight must be regulated and the third couplet has to do with the weight of substance and its regulation by the cosmos. If you are investigating the workings of metabolism, you are, in reality, investigating whether some substance is manifesting under the influence of its own weight or whether the weight is regulated by the cosmos. This is the regulation by the divine spiritual world according to weight. And the third couplet is:

Feel in the weight of substance
The forming powers of Moon.

Fühle in des Stoffs Gewicht
Des Mondes Formenmacht.

Again with this attitude we should be able to feel, when we are speaking about rheumatism, gout, constipation, diabetes, migraine, about all conditions that are somehow connected with deposits which express the inherent weight of the substances, we should feel that something is entering into our experience that can be expressed in the words: Earthly gravity has laid hold of the human being. Much is contained in such words. You should permeate your investigations with such feelings.

Just think how abstractly, how brutally, how heedlessly investigations are made into these things today and you will realize what is really lacking and has been killed, in spite of the fact that Arabism did conserve much of the wisdom, conscientiousness and skill of ancient times. It has been killed because Moon, Sun and Saturn—this Trinity which was then disguised as Father, Son and Spirit—disappeared and was repudiated by Arabian thought in Mohammedanism with the words: “Away with this Trinity. Mohammed proclaims only one God!” (Mohammed himself did not say this, but the Angel who inspired him, did. He was not one of the best Angels although he was a very wise one.) And so we see that all differentiations in the world are allowed to disappear; things which ought to be known are darkened and our medicine has become an Arabian-Mohammedan medicine. European humanity was incapable of discovering the truth. Today these things must be known or mankind will go to pieces.

Feel in the fever's measure
The Spirit-gift of Saturn.
Feel in the pulse's number
The Soul-powers of Sun;
Feel in the weight of substance
The forming power of Moon;
Then wilt thou see in thy healing will
Earthly man's healing need.

Fühle in des Fiebers Maß
Des Saturns Geistesgabe.
Fühl in des Pulses Zahl
Der Sonne Seelenkraft.
Fühle in des Stoffs Gewicht
Des Mondes Formenmacht.
Dann schaust du in deinem Heilerwillen
Auch des Erdenmenschen Heilbedarf

If these things are grasped with real feeling, we shall realize how in the course of life on earth the individuality who comes from previous earthly lives takes hold of the model which proceeds from the stream of heredity. I have already told you of the struggle that takes place between what is shaped according to the model as the second human body in contrast to the first body that is really a model. If we know that we have in front of us a being who is really working himself to the surface, we also realize that what comes from earlier incarnations is working at this being. Those who permeate these things with their forces of heart and soul have the best possible opportunity to perceive or at least to get an inkling of what is coming over from earlier incarnations.

What is the cause of the condition that appears as illness? The healthy human being has his head organization, whose structure, even externally, is separated from the rest of the organization. The head is a bony structure in which the brain is enclosed. A continuation of the head is also contained in the bones. The head is self-contained and the rest of the human being is joined to it. But in the finer organization of man there is something that demarcates these two parts of his being. It is not so very easy to prove this fact by external anatomy and physiology, but there is a tremendous amount to be learned by studying the transformation of the foodstuffs, for instance, the fact that these foodstuffs do not, in their own form, pass over into the head organization, nor even into the nerves. There is a sharp boundary line which must not be crossed. What is it that must not cross this boundary?

Now from the beginning of earthly life there is working, most strongly of all in the head organization, the forces from earlier earthly lives which have been preserved through the period between birth and death. The forces of the child's individuality proceed from the head. But they must not pass down unsifted into the rest of the organism. A sieve must be there, an intermediate stratum. It is not externally visible but it exists in the organization. Nothing passes downwards unsifted. The lung as an organ or the liver as an organ must not be seized hold of directly by the forces that come from earlier incarnations. They cannot bear this. The human being is in a terrible condition when one is obliged to realize that the forces from earlier incarnations are getting to his liver without having passed through this sieve. In the period between death and a new birth the human individuality transforms into the new head organization the forces that were contained in lung and liver, in the metabolic-limb system, and in part, also, in the rhythmic system. The organization of limbs and metabolism is added for the first time, from outside. The human individuality (who is eternal) may only enter in this when the gate of death has been passed and when the physical, material part of it has fallen away. It is only the forces of the lung and the liver and other organs that pass through the gate of death. Thus, during earthly life, harm arises when the individuality enters into certain organs into which it ought not to enter. Therefore when we are faced with certain conditions of illness we have only to say to ourselves: Here the individuality from the previous earthly life is working on the organ which now ought only to be influenced by the present earthly life. The proper separation is not there. In the sick human being we see the individuality working over from previous earthly lives. This individuality which ought only to live itself out in the realm of the moral, in the realm of destiny, which ought to remain in what the human being does and experiences and ought not to touch the organization in the most earthly part of the human being—this individuality is working partly in the metabolic-limb system, partly in the rhythmic system, partly in the nerve and sense system because the boundary line has become faulty.

Our attitude to the human being is influenced by the fact that we know: In the diseased lung the individuality of the human being is working. When one looks at someone suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis one feels a deep and true sympathy, realizing that the materialism of our time is diverting him into the outer world and that his karma, which ought to live itself out in the moral sphere, in destiny, is, on account of our present spiritual life, thrusting him back into his own bodily nature. The individuality, instead of passing over into the realm of the moral, retreats suddenly, becomes organic, seizes hold of the lungs. The lungs are that part of the metabolic-limb system which is turned inwards, whereas the general direction of this system is outwards. Thus, the individuality, working over from earlier incarnations, takes hold directly of the corporeality.

These things are not so important as theories, but they lead one into the whole mood and attitude which generates the will-to-healing and then finds a real connection with man's need for healing. In our modern materialistic culture there is a sharp division between the one who heals and the one who needs healing. They do not get near to each other. There must arise a feeling for the eternal in the human being and out of this feeling there will develop the right relationship between the healer and the one who is to be healed. We realize then that we must always individualize in our treatment, for every human being has his own karma. In all healing measures we must individualize.

These things must work upon our hearts. They become esoteric when we allow them to work upon us. A document like the Luke Gospel contains the whole mood that we need in order to develop this feeling. Originally there actually were four faculties, a “Luke faculty” among them, but no trace of it exists today because our medicine is so strongly imbued with Arabism. Medicine will be Christianized when once again we reach the cosmic truths. The physician, too, must be conscious of his position in connection with these cosmic truths.

All this will indicate to you how strongly the forces of the moon influence the human form. When the moon forces in the human form work too irregularly we must realize that we heal by getting rid of this irregularity in the form and this can be done if we treat the patient in such a way that cosmic consciousness can find its place. But then, you see, the other side has to be understood. You have to look at something from outside. You cannot look at the eye from outside. The forces which enable us to look at things from outside give us our clear concepts, seeing to it that these clear concepts do not at once become abstraction but that our heart thinks with them. Our concepts must not be confused, but the heart must not be excluded from our abstract thinking. We must function as the whole human being; the heart must always think as well. We must not merely think abstractly about the world but realize that when we send out our thoughts the heart must be there as well. We must understand these forces of the heart which entwine themselves around the thoughts; we must understand once again how to use the staff of Mercury. And this is only possible if we pass over from the moon to Mercury. In connection with the general cultural life, that is what I meant in the lectures dealing with Raphael, for Raphael is the Christian Mercury. If you permeate yourselves with this kind of consciousness you will get the right feeling for your tasks when, as young people today, you enter into medicine.

Everywhere in the world there is cropping up the opposite of what ought to happen. It has appeared in a dreadful form recently in the domain of medicine. Forgive me for referring here to an everyday matter, but it is an example of how this opposite tendency is working. I refer to the principle of health insurance. It is the factor of the physician who is excluded here. In Germany there is art expression which conveys the exclusion of the human element in the physician. In truth, it is the physician who heals—not the products of medical science. But this expression suggests that medical science is something that floats around without the human being. The human being does not come into the picture. A rebuff is thereby given to karma. For karma does not work in such a way that it brings two human beings together blindly. Something of karma comes to light in the free choice of one's physician. But in the purely Ahrimanic character of health insurance arrangements, karma is put completely on one side and the human being is exposed to the Ahrimanic powers who fight against karma. When we come together again I will tell you how the Ahrimanic powers are setting out to nullify the karma of man so that they may attain their goal. This element is playing a direct part in such institutions as that of health insurance where individuals cannot always choose their own physician. I believe the expression ‘healing trade’ actually occurs in the law about health insurance. This shows the whole attitude that exists about health insurance and the conception of medicine as a trade. An illness of civilization is emerging symptomatically in our times—an illness that is making its appearance in many other domains, too, showing how urgently the physician's help is needed for its curing. But just where the physician himself is most acutely exposed to this illness of civilization, his real work is completely paralyzed. There is a terrible factor in such things as health insurance. Of course, it has its good side just as other things which crop up in the world to tempt and mislead. They seem plausible and are not displeasing. When the devil appears he always assumes the form of an angel. Anyone who sees the devil as such, in a vision, may be sure that it is not really the devil, for he always appears in angelic form. If the physician himself is exposed to an illness of civilization in its sharpest form, our culture cannot help becoming diseased. Therefore you must watch where your karma places you so that you do not work merely in the sphere of medicine regarded as a trade but in the sphere that is concerned with illness of the social organism.

In this direction, please formulate your questions. We will then meet once more tomorrow. I have heard you also have a certain need to hear how you can integrate yourselves into the general Youth Movement. We will still be able to supplement what I have said today but what I did bring today I wanted to bring because I thought that it could be necessary for you to know it and work with it.

After the fourth lecture of the Easter Course for physicians and
medical students, Dornach, April 21–25, 1924.

(Rudolf Steiner said the following in response to a question about
the grasping of the fluid man by imaginative perception.)

Now, of course, you will only be able to manage here if you proceed from a comprehensive view, and not from details. One would have to investigate such questions by proceeding from more comprehensive things and especially by meditating on some of the things which I already said. If we take the connections in nature in a comprehensive way—I will only speak of things which will gradually lead to imaginative thinking—we have the drop form. One generally thinks that a drop is held together from within, but it is also possible to think that it is formed from outside or from all sides. Then one has the circumference of the universe in the surface of a drop.

Of course, in these things one should realize that the imaginative idea must be true, and that the present-day ideas which one brings with one from one's general education diverge as far as is possible from the truth.

People have this idea today that there is an infinite space which has stars scattered in it. Now, to proceed from such an idea means that one is imagining things and is brutally ignoring everything but what one has made up in thought. Just take a report which was in the paper a little while ago, and which should be taken more seriously than one thinks; they were trying to show that the cosmos is not empty after a certain distance from the earth, but that it is solid and filled with crystallized nitrogen. Things are so confused today that such a view is possible. Of course, it is untrue, but in any case, these things show one how superficial the assumptions which have been derived from observation till now are. For today someone can just decide to imagine that we live here in an empty space with a slightly condensed earth at the center with solidified nitrogen all around, and that this simulates the starry heavens for us. Of course it is nonsense but it is true that if one reads the literature today one can pick up all kinds of ideas about the way the cosmos is constituted. This report on crystallized nitrogen might just as well have been an April fool's joke, and yet many people probably believe it. One is hardly anymore foolish if one believes this report than if one believes what is generally assumed today. The thinking which is accepted today is brutally materialistic for in reality the universe acts like a hollow sphere and as if forces from the periphery were going into it everywhere. One is really dealing with formations which can only be modified and differentiated in accordance with the stars, so that it is true that we have a copy of the configuration of the stars which we see outside in us. Thus we arrive at an imagination through the idea which our head shows us.

Speaking about heads, take a look at the way a bird is constructed. One is looking at a bird's structure or skeleton in the wrong way if one simply compares it with a whole mammal or human being. You can really only compare a bird's structure with a human head, and one has to imagine that one has a modified bird formation in the human head, and that the bird has the rest of its body attached in various ways as short appendages. Birds' legs are always stunted.

Now imagine that our drop is drawn out into a cylinder. If you expand the drop into a cylinder and you imagine that the part of the head which is differentiated by the cosmos remains, except that it becomes modified in many ways, because you draw the drop out into a cylinder, you then get the human torso. In order to imagine man's torso, one has to think that the skullcap is rudimentary. The third stage is to indent the cylinder here, and then you get the limb man. What I drew here is what you would initially get at the arms. You have to imagine that you expand this to get the arms, and that the second expansion is made through the creation of a second copy from within which comes from the moon. But let us omit the arms to make it easier. So you pass over from a sphere to an expansion and then to indentations. If you get used to making images through expansion and indentations in this way you are beginning to get what you need in order to really accustom your soul to work in the imaginative sphere. For basically all organized life consists of expansion and infolding and just think how wonderful that really is.

So let us say that I imagine a sphere, and then an elongated sphere; this is an expansion in an upwards direction which is brought about by the periphery. If you think that the earth and its forces here are a counterimage of the periphery then you have the earth under the human being as that which indents him. The cosmos expands up above and the earth indents down below. Thus an image is brought from the cosmos and man is indented by the earth. You can now ask what would happen if the earth were not beneath you and the starry heavens weren't over you, and you can answer this in an imaginative way And so if you want to form imaginations you should get used to looking at the universe as a whole when you pass over from solids to fluids, and you should not just try to sort of re-educate yourselves. You should gradually think: solid, sharp contours, whereas the fluidic element is always battling solids and is trying to insert them into the flow and the stream of the entire universe. And you will then get to the point of seeing this expansion and indentation everywhere, and you will thereupon look for counterimages.

Embryologists proceed in such a way that one never really knows why things develop the way that they do. One proceeds from an egg cell and passes over into a clump of cells, and one sees how the thing suddenly folds in and becomes a gastrula. One should realize that what is really happening here is that the cosmos has the possibility of working upon the surface and that the earth can work upon the infolding process.

Take an epidermis cell near the surface. They exist everywhere. Such a cell is here near the surface. The terrestrial principle which brings about the infolding continues to work in the human being. And so these terrestrial principles continue to work everywhere. Thereby there is always a tendency to direct fluidic things in people, so that things always move along in this way and so that an indentation is pushed along; indentation—push from behind, indentation—push from behind, this goes in various directions. Now imagine that this occurs as if some kind of fluid would move forward and become rigid. Look at an organ from this point of view. You can see rigidified, solidified and infolded things everywhere in it, and on the other hand, you can see its outward bulges. Thereby you arrive at the organ's form and at a view of how forces work from various sides, and you see that all these organs are part of a unity. However, you should realize that you must proceed from a quite particular point, namely, from the plastic element. Now, you have already pointed out that one should grasp forms through modeling. But actually try to get a feeling for what happens by taking some soft, plastic material or clay with one hand and pushing it forward with the other hand. Try to observe what is happening at the same time. You get the feeling that the idea of empty space is pure nonsense. Space has different kinds of forces in it everywhere and in this way you gradually learn to understand plastic things.

Now, of course, if you want to understand man in a plastic way you must be able to go to extremes. Thus I can think of a sphere here. I imagine that the sphere becomes expanded on one side and infolded on the other. But now imagine that you go further and that you push it in so far here that you go beyond the expansion; then you get two formations. But now imagine that the formations do not just become acted upon from one side. Imagine that you make an expansion, infolding, expansion, infolding, and then another infolding from below and an expansion on the top, and if you do this three times you get a model of the forms of the two lungs. Thus you can gradually see how the whole human being is connected with such forces within, and then you can go on to the following.

This is a very important idea, and its pathological, therapeutic significance will become completely clear when the book which Dr. Wegman and I are publishing appears (Fundamentals of Therapy). There one will be able to see the connection which exists between a fully developed organ and its function. Let us take the organ's function. This is something which is kept in connection with fluids and which is fluctuating continuously—the same thing which closed the organ off produces the activity. So that you can ask: What is the movement of juices in the stomach? It is something fluid which is basically the same thing as the stomach which has become solid. If you imagine that the movement of juices has become rigidified, you have the stomach. If this were not the case, no organ could be healed. You can only work upon a fluctuating organ and not upon a solid organ.

Silica acts in the same way that the human kidney does. If I give the silica which is in equisetum to a patient I build up the phantom of a kidney in his renal region. The phantom then replaces the astral activity at this place. This presses out old kidney substances and permits some new kidney substances to form from what is in flux, just as it forms there in any case after seven to eight years. However, one accelerates the process by producing this phantom. One should realize that an organ and the activity which forms it are always present together, and that this activity always rigidifies into the organ. This is where you encounter the fluidic human being.

But then you run into something else. You have to be able to press on to the idea that if I look at the solid human being I arrive at the pictures which one sees in anatomical books. But what we see there is only ten percent of the human being. As long as I look at these firm contours in the solid man a liver is a liver, a lung is a lung and a stomach is a stomach. But if I pass over to the fluidic man I will find that this stream of juices is particularly concentrated in the liver, let us say, and that it is constructing a liver out of fluids. However, every organ always wants to become the whole human being. This tendency is present in every organ in the fluid man. So that one should realize that if one cuts a liver out it remains a liver. But if I would take out the fluids with which the liver is created they would have the tendency to become a whole human being. You have to put this into an imagination: on the one side the tendency to take on contours, and on the other side the tendency to permeate everything.

If one is serious about these things they are really as follows. The meditation formulas are the beginning, and through them you will eventually be able to tell yourselves what I am telling you here. The beginning lies everywhere in the formulas, and they are the way to get into imagination oneself. Anyone who begins to meditate has an enormous inner desire in the beginning, but after a certain point when things begin to get serious something in him revolts, because the thing gets enormously complicated.

If one does not approach meditation in an extraordinarily serious way what happens to one is like what happens to someone who looks for Lucifer but sees a picture of Ahriman instead. Then the meditation works in such a way that one gets the opposite of what one is striving for. Or someone looks for Ahriman and sees a picture of Lucifer. That is the trouble. One usually becomes impatient and doesn't stick with it. It is not a question of time but of an intense application of patience, and then five minutes on a meditation can sometimes be a very long time. But it doesn't make any difference whether one loses one's patience in five months or in five minutes. You must have patience and then you will see that you can begin to understand things, and that you can pass over from the solid man to the fluid man.

If you then go on to the aeriform man you will need a musical principle. Here you have to understand the breathing process, and if you really meditate you will become attentive to your breath. The astral, aeriform man appears. You will begin to realize that most people go through life without any real self-knowledge. One learns to feel with one's breath. One of the things which happens first if one is in the habit of thinking in a mathematical or qualitative way is that one may suddenly ask oneself: Are you three halves? One feels as if one were three halves. Why is that? It is because one's breathing is beginning to make one feel that one has a threefold lung on one side and a twofold lung on the other. In this way one can ascend to the astral, aeriform element, by experiencing the proportions of one's inner structures through air.

A way to study the ego organization is to listen exactly to one's own speech. You can also get at the ego organization in a meditative way which ascends to a real understanding, if you take the skeleton of a dog or other mammal and concentrate very hard on its rear and front parts. One part is a modification of the other part. Then you have to pass over to cosmic aspects and think that the rear form was created by moon forces and the front one by sun forces and you should imagine how the sun looks at the moon, and then you have the animal's hindquarters on the moon side and its forequarters on the sun side. Then imagine that a modification of the sun and moon occurs so that man can stand upright and you will get a transformation. Thereby, the whole thing gets shifted up one level, and you can begin to grasp the ego organization. But you have to proceed in the following way: the spatial element must disappear into the plastic element, the plastic element into the musical element and the musical element into what has meaning.

If you proceed in this way, you are moving towards comprehensive things, and this is really the healthier way, because you can get completely confused the other way. You really have to start with these principles and not with the details.

I should still like to add something to what we have been studying, and afterwards to consider the more general theme to which certain of your questions relate.

I want to speak now of something that it is well to consider only after we have listened to what has been given here in the last few days. It is not well to give the general truths first but only to pass on to them when certain things have already been learned. Only so can general truths receive their proper coloring.

We will now picture to ourselves that each of the four members of man's being—physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego has its own special structure. The structure of physical body and etheric body is one of space and time. The structure of astral body and ego is purely spiritual. A purely spiritual structure is not governed by space and time. It is possible, nonetheless, to make a picture of the spiritual structure so that we can have a conception of it. This can be done in imaginative consciousness. Hold it firmly in your minds, my dear friends, that on the one side we have to do with a physical etheric structure which in the sleeping human being is separated from the structure of spirit and soul, and, on the other side, with the structure of spirit and soul.

In the sleeping human being we have a physical etheric structure which has sent out the ego and astral body, and again we have the structure of spirit and soul that is separated from physical body and etheric body. These two structures are very different from each other. The physical-etheric structure is differentiated into the single organs, as an organism that has, so to speak, driven out the single organs from the center of life. The astral body and ego structure have, however, been driven inwards from outside—it is as though space and time had been left free by this process. The essential thing is that the physical-etheric structure and the structure of spirit and soul are fundamentally different from one another. In the human being as he stands in the physical world in waking consciousness, the spirit and soul (astral body and ego) are inserted into the physical-etheric organization—to use a form of expression that is not absolutely accurate but enables us to visualize the state of things. To a certain degree they permeate each other. So that every physical organ that is warmed through and irradiated by the etheric body is also filled with life, inasmuch as the cosmos works through the etheric body, and in every physical organ ego organization and astral organization are working, when the human being is in waking consciousness.

And now think of the following: Suppose that astral organization and ego organization impress their own structure upon some organ or system of organs. In other words, something that ought to maintain its physical and etheric structure receives a spiritual structure, becomes an image of the astral and ego organization. This, speaking quite generally, is the cause of physical illnesses. Speaking generally, the cause of physical illnesses is that the body of the human being is becoming too spiritual, in some parts or as a whole. Hence, as was well-known in olden times, real and devoted study of the sick human being throws tremendous light upon knowledge of man as a being of spirit.

In ancient times quite a different idea prevailed of man's nature. Therefore I do not say the following in any sense for the purpose of suggesting that this conception should be re-adopted or made the basis for modern methods. In olden times, when conceptions of the human being were more robust, a man who held heretical views was burned, if such a fate was deemed necessary for the salvation of his soul. These heretics were burned for the salvation of their souls—so at least it was alleged. They were burned in order that they might be freed from what, after their death, would cause them the most terrible sufferings. This procedure was, in earlier times, the outcome of a form of vision; later on, of course, it assumed a really brutal form. Views about the human being were more robust and so it might happen that a certain preparation of melissa (balm mint) would be given to someone who might be regarded as healthy. When he took melissa that had been prepared in a certain way, his consciousness would become slightly dreamy. He became more dreamy than he was before taking the melissa preparation. In this condition, faint imaginations entered into his consciousness. If, for instance, a man was treated in a certain way with henbane (Hyoscyamus niger) he became very susceptible to inspirations. Such investigations revealed that if the solar plexus was stimulated by means of henbane, it was permeated with spirit; in such a case, astral body and ego organization take firm hold of the solar plexus. Or it was noticed that the whole blood supply of the cerebrum became stronger—to a slight extent, but the effect was very significant—by the administration of melissa juice, because the ego organization takes a firm hold by way of the cerebrum. And so the whole human being was tested for the purpose of finding out how he could become spiritual and of perceiving how the single organs could become more spiritual.

It is a preconceived notion to imagine that we think with the head. This is simply not true. We think with legs and with arms and the head beholds what is going on in the arms and legs and receives it into the pictures of thought. I said at Christmas that man would never have learned the law of angles if he had never walked. He would never have learned the mechanical laws of equilibrium if he had had no experience of them through his own center of gravity which lies in his subconsciousness. When we come to the astral body which unfolds these things in the subconsciousness, the human being appears to us to be extraordinarily wise, even if he is often a fool in the physical world, because the geometry that comes to expression in walking, for instance, is all known—if I may put it so—in the subconsciousness, and then perceived by the brain.

Now when the organization of spirit and soul takes too strong a hold of the physical-etheric organization, physical illness ensues. In former times, therefore, the spirit in the physical organs was investigated because everything that can be spoken of as a gift from above is spiritual, of the nature of spirit and soul. But a distinction has to be made here. What the human being received, in a purely spiritual way, as a gift from above, was called a gift and retained this name. But now take a substance like belladonna for example.

Whereas in ordinary plants the physical and etheric principles are at work, there are others where the cosmic astrality works very strongly from outside, where the spiritual element—either the astral or what corresponds in the cosmos to the ego organization—works upon plants or animals. Poisons are then produced instead of the gifts bestowed by the spirit. But the poisons are a true correlate of the spiritual because, in plants and animals, they are the element of cosmic astrality which transcends the plant nature proper. By administering henbane we lead over the astral contained in the warmth mantle of the earth (which marks the boundary of the atmosphere) into the solar plexus and thereby into the diaphragm of the human being. Melissa, which is not a poison in the real sense, produces a gentle working of the spiritual which shows itself only in a form of slight stupor. In melissa, the poisoning process is in statu nascendi. This leads to the principle: physical illness arises when the physical organism or its parts are becoming too strongly spiritual.

But a different condition may set in. It may happen that when a human being is in waking consciousness, the soul-spiritual structure of his astral body or ego organization is transferred with too much strength into some physical organ. But instead of impressing itself upon the physical organism the physical organism forces physical structure upon the structure of spirit and soul, so that when he is asleep the human being becomes, in his astral body and ego, an image of his physical and etheric body. He takes the physical structure into his astral body and ego.

Here we have the difference in the two forms of irregularities which may appear. Even to observation they differ quite essentially. When a human being is ill, the sick organ is, strange to say, spiritualized. It becomes clearer. As though from outside, from its surface inwards, it is laid hold of by spirituality. Long before any definite traces are noticeable in the color of the skin and the like, a sick man appears transparent—shall I say—to occult sight and the spirit and soul is pressing into the transparency.

We notice the opposite condition, where the organization of spirit and soul is taking on the structure of the physical and etheric, when a man in his life of soul and spirit is really asleep. Then he becomes a ghost, a fleeting, wavering ghost of his physical body. He remains like his physical body. He truly becomes a specter of his physical body, and all the crude experiments that are made by spiritualists in connection with manifestations, as they are called, are due to the fact that the spirit and soul in the medium is weakened. That is indeed obvious. In some hidden way, this is what happens. In a dark room the weakened astral body and ego can take on the forms of the organs to the point of visibility. The manifestations are real, but illicit.

Now all so-called mental diseases are due to the spirit and soul—astral body and ego organization—assuming the physical and etheric structure. All so-called mental illnesses are due to this. We may therefore say: Physical illnesses are due to the physical organism or its parts becoming spiritual. Mental illnesses are due to the astral body or ego organization, or one of their parts, taking form in the physical or etheric sense. This universal truth is a very good guiding principle.

These things have a bearing, too, upon questions put by individuals about the connection between medicine and pedagogy, for in the child's organism we have before us every grade between these two extremes. The astral and ego organization in one child will tend to make the physical and etheric body spiritual. In another child the tendency of the astral and ego organization will be to allow the physical and etheric to give them form. Between these two extremes there are all kinds of intermediate stages. This fundamental principle also comes to expression in the temperament. When the astral body and ego organization have a vehement tendency (not as in insanity but of a kind that is controllable) to assume forms belonging to the physical and etheric body, we have the melancholic temperament. When the astral body and ego organization have the tendency to impress their structure on the physical and etheric body, we have to do with the choleric temperament. The phlegmatic and sanguine temperaments lie in between. In the phlegmatic temperament the astral body and ego organization have a tendency, but only in a certain sense, to assume the structure of the physical and especially of the etheric body In the sanguine temperament, the vital principle in the etheric body is strongly influenced by the astral body. So this principle also comes to expression in the temperaments.

What, in radical cases, is the guiding principle for the physician, namely, knowledge of how the spirit and soul and physical-etheric are interlinked in the waking consciousness of a human being, is also a guiding principle for educators, although they have to deal with latent conditions. Pedagogy and medicine are mutual continuations, the one of the other.

Now what you have to do, my dear friends, is to strive with might and main to attain imagination in your conception of man's being. I should therefore like, in this connection, to give you a few fundamental indications.

The form of the human being in the embryonic state is familiar to you as a picture—or at any rate can become so. We know today what the embryo looks like in its earliest stages and the form it takes later on, and from this you can make a connected picture of the human being in the embryonic state. You can also form a connected picture of the human being during childhood. You must try to make both the first and second pictures as intense as possible, as though your thinking were actually touching them, so that it seems as if the embryo were tangible to your thinking and you were inwardly following its forms. Then, in your thoughts, expand the embryo to the size of the child in an equally intense mental picture which you can look at and observe. Then, inwardly metamorphosing the mental picture of the embryo, let it pass into the picture of the child. If you really carry this out, you will be aware of certain difficulties. You will feel: If I enlarge the head of the embryo to the size of a child's head, it becomes very big. I must compress it. I must also inwardly crystallize, as it were, all that in the embryo is still watery and fluid, being part of the fluid man so that it becomes the embryonic brain. Then you will have to stretch and give shape to the limbs in the embryonic state. Inwardly you will have to carry out an act of plastic activity by letting the unplastic limbs of the embryo pass over to become the limbs of the child. It is an extraordinarily interesting inner occupation to let the embryo pass over into childhood in inner contemplation.

Then, going further, you can make the same experiment with the child and the grown-up person. Here there will be greater difficulty. The differences between embryo and child are very considerable and you will have to be extremely active inwardly if you are to succeed. But when you compare childhood with the prime of life, the differences will not be so great. The difficulty will be to fit the one into the other. But if you succeed in this, the imagination of the human etheric body will actually come to birth within you, and comparatively soon.

Shove man's earliest time
[- the embryonic life -]
On into childhood,
And carry childhood on
Into the days of youth.
There will appear to you, condensed, Human ether being
Behind the body's structure.
[- physical body in its structure -]

Schiebe die Frühzeit
[ - Embryonalzeit -]
In des Kindes Alter,
Und des Kindes Alter In die Jugend Zeit.
Dir erscheint verdichtet Menschenäthersein
Hinter Körperwesen.
[ -physischer Leib in seiner Struktur-]

Here you have a guiding principle which you can use just as well as the others I have given during these lectures. But you must fully realize that the acquisition of imaginative consciousness demands effort. It is not to be attained by mere beckoning but only by strenuous work.

Now you can go still further. You can try to picture an old, sclerotic man—old men are, to a certain extent, sclerotic—feeling that you are touching him and in this act of spiritual touching you get the impression that he is really hollow. The impression you get when you touch an old, sclerotic man spiritually is not as if he were more solid, harder, but, on the contrary, as if he were sucking at you. In this spiritual touching the feeling is as if, in the physical world, you were to run a moistened finger along the foam of a breaking wave or along the surface of clay. This, as you know, gives the impression of suction. So it is, spiritually, with a sclerotic old man. You must develop this experience of touch in your visual picture of the old man. This applies not only to the visual act but to any one of the twelve senses, also to the sense of life (Lebenssinn). So you have a picture of age, with its density, which seems to exercise suction. And now just as in the first instance you let the picture of the embryonic period pass on into the picture of childhood and then into that of the prime of life, maturity—now let the picture of old age pass backwards. Picture the mature human being and let your touch experience of the aged man pass back into the picture of man in the prime of life, who does not seem to suck but stands in the world full of vigor. When you let the picture of the embryonic structure pass over into the structure of childhood, you carried out a spatial metamorphosis—what happens now is that with old age you have the impression of a being who has been hollowed out, who sucks all the time, and this hollow being seems to be filled with force and energy when you let the picture pass back into the age of maturity. Whereas the first picture of abounding strength is connected with an experience of being very slightly paralyzed, when the picture of the old man is let pass backwards, vigor seems again to come into his bones and into the whole structure of his solid organism. More care must be taken when this inner process is being carried out. And then the picture of the prime of life must be carried back to that of youth. This is an easier thing to do. We picture a man who already has one or two wrinkles and then let him be merged into the picture of a young, chubby-faced person. When we succeed in doing this, we get the impression of the etheric body being animated, beginning to ring and sound. This gives us an impression of the astral nature of the human being. And so you have a guiding principle for the ascent to inspiration.

Shove old age's density
Back into the prime of life,
And the prime of life
Back into the life of youth.
There will ring forth in cosmic tones The working of man's soul
[—astral body—]
Out of the Ether life.

Schiebe die Altersdichte In die Menschenreifezeit,
Und das reife Alter
In das Jugendleben.
Dir ertönt in Weltenklängen Menschenseelenwirken
[ - der Astralleib also -]
Aus dem Ätherleben.

You will realize from what I have told you that guiding lines for meditation are not given out as a commandment but are based upon things that can be understood. When a human being is guided to meditation in the proper way, conditions are not as they once were in the ancient East, when both the upbringing of children and the development of old age rested upon quite different foundations. When somebody is given meditations today, they are of such a form that he realizes and understands what he is doing with himself. In the East the child was under the guidance of his Dada. This meant that the child was taught and brought up according to the Dada's mode of life. The child learned no more than he was able to learn by watching the Dada. When a grown-up man wished to make progress, he had his Guru. And the Guru taught in no other way than: thus it is and thus it shall be done. The difference in our Western civilization is that an appeal is always made to the free spiritual activity of the human being, so that he is fully aware of what he is doing. He also has insight into how inspiration arises.

If with the powers of healthy human intelligence we have grasped how physical illness and spiritual illness work—and the things I have told you today can be understood by healthy human intelligence—if we go on to realize what we should achieve in meditation, we have reached, with the powers of healthy human intelligence, the boundary of what can be attained. Healthy human intelligence can acquire everything that proceeds from Anthroposophy. When things begin that are not to be understood by healthy human intelligence, then it is right for this intelligence to work only so far as that boundary, and no farther. It is like standing by an lake—a boundary is there, too. We look towards it from the shore. Truly, the healthy human intelligence leads right up to this boundary. No criticism ought to be leveled at you for spreading an obscure, mystical view of the world, for it should be one that is attainable by all healthy human intelligence. When I once said the same thing in Berlin, an article that was written about the lecture, said: Healthy human intelligence can comprehend nothing whatever about the spiritual world and a form of intelligence which does grasp something about the spiritual world is ill; it is not healthy. This was what was held up against me.

I want still to say something else. Your medical studies oblige you to look very intimately into the whole nature and being of man and as young men and women you are in a special position. In all seriousness we must take the fact that the Kali Yuga has passed, that we have entered a new Age of Light although for the reason that the old continues through inertia, humanity is still living in the darkness. From the spiritual universe, light is shining in; as human beings, we are entering an Age of Light; only we must make ourselves fit to realize the intentions of this Age of Light. Young people are especially predestined for this and if with the necessary earnestness they unfold a definite consciousness of why they have been born precisely at the beginning of the Age of Light, it will be possible for them to adjust themselves to what is really demanded in the sense of the true evolution of humanity. And what is demanded now is that we shall look into the human being if we want to explain the world, just as formerly men looked at nature in order to see how the human being is built up out of the forces and processes of nature. Man and his being will have to be understood and the single nature processes as specializations, one-sided processes of what is going on within the human being. When this point is reached a certain inward quality in all the activities of human feeling and the human mind will arise—a quality that has been sought for, although in a rather tumultuous fashion.

Think only of how youth began to deify nature when the Youth Movement of the Age of Light began. It was all abstract, however vitally the impulse may have been felt. The true path of spiritual development for the young man or woman today must lead to the unfolding of intimate feelings for his connection, as a human being, with the world—there must be intimate, tender feelings and what the young absorb spiritually must no longer be a science for the intellect. In that he remains cold—it has always been so. Science must take a form in which every stage that is reached means that one becomes a different human being in feeling and in mind, and acquainted with something that has been forgotten. We also learned to know nature before we came down into the physical world. But then, nature had a different appearance. When a young human being today is led to a coarse, robust, external way of looking at things, the deathblow is struck at what he experienced in pre-earthly existence. If we could succeed in feeling that an old acquaintance of pre-earthly life had entered into our external, material way of looking at things, then feeling would flow into knowledge and understanding. And like a bloodstream, a spiritual bloodstream, this must go through the whole of scientific life, above all through the whole education and teaching of the human being. It is this intimacy with reality that must be acquired in science. Truly the modern age was lacking in understanding in this respect.

Comparatively early in my life I tried to show how the human being, when he confronts the outer world of sense, really has only the half reality, and how he only reaches the whole reality when he unites what arises within him with the outer, material reality. And to begin with, because the times were quite different then—things have always to be prepared—I had to present it in terms of a theory of knowledge. When you read my little book Truth and Science (Mercury Press, 1993), try to let the spiritual rise up into the mind and heart, the spiritual that wells forth from within. Thereby the first step is taken towards this “making inward” of science, especially towards a heart-filled receptivity to world reality. The physician has particular opportunities for this intimate experiencing of reality and therefore the physician, just because he is a physician, can be the person who can make the abstractness prevalent in the other Youth Movement composed of those who are not destined to be physicians, more concrete, more full of heart. A young person today who has some real knowledge of medicine has the advantage when he comes together with someone else who knows nothing but jurisprudence and is, consequently, to be pitied. Medicine can be deepened as we are deepening it here, but with law this is quite impossible. Even up to the beginning of the eighteenth century, something of the spirit still remained in medicine; in jurisprudence spirituality ceased far away in the Middle Ages, when men no longer even dreamed of the spirit and had nothing but recorded statutes. The physician who from the very beginning comes to grips with the most concrete facts of life can have an extraordinarily good effect upon the rest of the youth.

It would be good if you, as physicians, would interest yourselves, too, when opportunity arises, in the educational work that is being done in the Anthroposophical movement. There would be nothing to prevent this if you are in real earnest. The information contained in the Waldorf School Seminary courses cannot be given to everyone, but when somebody shows genuine interest there is nothing against your getting these courses if you really study them from the medical point of view, remembering the close relationship that existed in ancient times between healing and education.

In these days we have quite got away from the conception of man as a being who comes into earthly life burdened with sin, because the modern mind simply does not know what sin really is. What is it that took form as the notion of sin? It is what I have spoken of here as the law of heredity—this is the inherited sin. Individual sin, too, is something that the human being has to overcome in the second half of his life. He has to overcome the sinful model, which comes from heredity. We can also say the sick model, according to ancient conceptions. If the human being were to retain, as his body, what works in his model up to the change of teeth, he would carry it within him his whole life long and at nine years of age he would be a man—how shall I put it?—the whole of his skin would be covered with a kind of moist eczema and if the condition continued he would get little cavities all over his body, would look like a leper, and if he lived on at all the flesh would fall away from his bones. Man is born as a sick being into the world and to educate him, that is to say, to understand and guide what is working according to the model, is the same thing as a mild healing process. Within the Youth Movement and when speaking of education, you should consider yourselves as healers. You can indicate the remedies—which in the first place, of course, remain a spiritual matter—but can certainly be applied physically when a child's condition becomes pathological. In pedagogy, too, there is an art of healing, only it is on another level, another plane. On the other hand, when a patient gives no help at all by working with any guiding principle we may give him for his own subjective consciousness, for the understanding of his illness, for pessimism or optimism in his conception of life—when we simply cannot work educationally—it is exceedingly difficult to help him medically. If the patient—I do not say that he must have blind faith in the remedy for that would be an exaggeration—but if the patient, simply through the individuality of the physician, is brought to a point where he feels the physician's will-to-heal, the reflex action in him is that he will be filled with the will to become healthy. This interplay of the will-to-heal and the will to be healthy plays a tremendous part in the therapeutic process. We can therefore say that there is a reflection of education in healing, and in education a reflection of healing.

Very much depends today upon human beings in the world coming together in the right consciousness. If, therefore, medical youth comes together with the other youth in the right consciousness, the result will certainly be that the medical youth can work very fruitfully on the others. But what is so necessary is to sharpen the consciousness in both directions.

These are the things that I would fain have laid into your souls and hearts, now that you have come here again. I hope they have helped to strengthen still more the bonds between your souls and the Goetheanum and that even in such a concrete domain as that of medicine, the Goetheanum will find human beings who carry out into the world those things that can be found here. You will think rightly about this if you will also feel yourselves as part of the Goetheanum and will often turn your thoughts to what the Goetheanum desires for the world and the growth of civilization. And so the ties of heart that you can form with the Goetheanum may be a very great help to you in the tasks before you. This is what I have had in mind in giving these more intimate addresses and I believe that we shall be able to achieve much if, after what must be the last lecture now, you will carry this feeling out into the world. Thereby we shall also remain together and the Goetheanum will feel itself a center with a definite task. Then the Goetheanum will be a real Goetheanum and you, true Goetheanists. And at the same time, out yonder in the world you will be the supporting pillars which the Goetheanum needs. If things go on in this way, everything will be well.

The first specialized course for medical practitioners given by Rudolf Steiner took place at Easter, 1920. Several medical students also participated: Helene von Grunelius (1897–1936), Manfred von Kries (1899–1984), Henk and Madeleine [‘Maddy’] van Deventer (1888–1983). At an advanced age, Madeleine van Deventer wrote an article in which she recorded her memories: Die anthroposophisch-medizinische Bewegung in den verschiedenen Etappen ihrer Entwicklung [The Anthroposophical Medical Movement in its Various Stages of Development] (Arlesheim, 1982). The following material was taken from her article and also from Wer war Ita Wegman [Who was Ita Wegman] Volume I, by J. E. Zeylmans van Emmichoven, 1990.[1]

From the beginning, a number of medical students took part in the medical courses. [...] During the third course which took place in the autumn of 1922 in Stuttgart, there were about fifteen students. We often gathered in the cafés of Stuttgart. Intense conversations took place there. It had been clear to us for quite some time already, that although Rudolf Steiner's medical lectures satisfied our need for knowledge, they did not meet our humanity. We had repeatedly asked the physicians of the Stuttgart Clinic to request of Rudolf Steiner that he give other lectures to deal with the more human-moral aspect. The answer was: “We can't do that because we haven't yet fully understood the value of what he has already given us.” Where-upon we answered: “We can't wait for that. Who knows how long Rudolf Steiner will still be among us.” We knew, with that assurance which youth may have, that his time was measured, and that it would be unpardonable if he did not hear the questions which would enable him to deal with the more intimate aspect of medical work. When we realized that the path via the ‘older physicians’ led nowhere, we decided to appeal to Rudolf Steiner directly. So after discussing it amongst ourselves we decided to submit the following question at the end of the Stuttgart Course, during the time set aside for questions: “Is it not possible to show us students a way of becoming anthroposophical physicians even while we are still students?” The paper with the question on it was ignored by the discussion leader. It floated down under the table. Rudolf Steiner asked, “What is that note?” He was told, “It is a question from some students.” The only thing left to us was to turn to Rudolf Steiner directly. After the discussion we asked for a meeting with him and were asked to come the next day. Of the fifteen students, only four of us were present the next day (October 29, 1922) in front of Rudolf Steiner's apartment [...]

We brought forth our concern as well as we could. We said quite openly that we weren't able to do much with the lectures in this cycle; they seemed to us to be directed entirely toward the older physicians. We hoped to be able to understand more later, but for now we were unable to find our way there. We were searching more for what was human and moral. One of us mentioned medical school experiences. To get anything positive out of the negative aspects of university teaching, a high level of spiritual knowledge was already necessary. Another voiced the hope that there might be lectures concerning what was generally human with the subtheme of ‘Medicine’, just as there had recently been the Pedagogical Youth Course [The Younger Generation, GA 217] which had dealt with the generally human from the perspective of world history.

Rudolf Steiner listened intensely and then said: “If you want to form a humanitarian group of people, effective in the culture as the pedagogues want to be, that is a contradiction in terms. You see, for the pedagogues, the pedagogy itself could be completely absorbed in what is generally human. That is not possible in your case. You can gather either as a humanitarian group with general cultural tasks, or as medical practitioners and physicians. Both together cannot exist in this form. You may not forget the purely medical within the purely human. Also, the pedagogues are in quite a different situation: through their profession they have maintained a much stronger connection to the living human being, the child. Through their work they really cannot lose touch with the human being. But the academic medicine of today is entirely dead, has no connection at all to the human being and has no idea what happens when it concerns itself with a sick person.

In your case it is actually an entirely different matter. You feel in yourselves a vast abyss across which you have to find a bridge. You must find the bridge from the medical-scientific to that which is moral, loving. You see, if, for example, I speak of that which I call the warmth organization of the human being, then for the moment that is an abstraction for you. But you must find the bridge, so that you experience this warmth organization in such a way that out of the experience of this warmth differentiation in the individual organs, you find your way to what is morally-warm. We will have to arrive at the point where that which we call a ‘warm heart’ can be felt into the physical realm itself. You must find the way out of the scientific-physiological into the spiritual-moral and out of the spiritual-moral to the anatomical-physiological. Such a group of people, that have a ‘warm heart’ and who know right into the physical sphere how the ego in themselves works on the warmth organization, such a group will then be able to affect its surroundings out of much deeper warmth forces; it will be able, through these forces of love, which work into the physical realm, to affect the culture. On the other hand, if such people sink down, in spite of all, to the level of philistines, of narrow-mindedness, then it will become clear that sclerotic and other forces will become effective in a most radically destructive manner, much more destructive than for others!

Gather up fifty, sixty, seventy medical students who share your attitude, and bring them to me and I shall talk to you more of this. Naturally, they will have to be younger medical people, for you see, to the older ones, I really cannot speak of these things. But gather up fifty, sixty, seventy young medical students for me, they must be medical people, and young, of course not schematically according to age; for, indeed, there are old people, too, who are still young. Well, you understand what I mean, bring them to me and I will give a course for you to which one might give the theme: ‘The Humanizing of Medicine.’ ” (The quotations are unfortunately not exact. They were recorded later from memory.)

With that we were dismissed and the search for the young medical people began. [...] All inquiries flowed to Helene von Grunelius who carefully filtered and appraised them.

1923 saw several additional conversations with Rudolf Steiner in connection to our goals. I remember a meeting in the carpentry shop with Rudolf Steiner, Ita Wegman and the assistant physicians from the Clinic. Besides myself and my brother there must have been one or two other students there. The theme was Rudolf Steiner's indication that we ought to take a notebook and on the left hand side write what the professor says, or a good case history, while on the right hand side we were to transpose the medical symptoms into the language of the human sheaths. As an example, Rudolf Steiner gave the following: ‘The patient has edema of the lower half of the body’, would be transposed into: ‘Weak etheric in the lower half of the body’. It was advice which we did not follow enough, for we lacked confidence. [...]

Helene von Grunelius was, as van Deventer put it, ‘the soul’ of this group. That this was so can also be surmised from her invitation for medical students to the planned course which was to take place in Dornach in January, 1924:

Arlesheim, August, 1923

In the meantime you will have heard more about the incredibly significant lecture cycle held by Dr. Steiner from June 10 to 17, 1923, in Dornach [The Anthroposophical Movement, GA 258]. Through these lectures we anthroposophists should be moved to self-awareness. Why did we become members of the Anthroposophical Society, and are we conscious of the responsibility we have thereby taken on in relation to the spiritual world? If a society like the Anthroposophical Society is to be truly vital and capable of fulfilling its task in the world, then it must always follow a straight path toward its goals. That means that everything that is wanted and worked for in such a society must arise from the heart, the very center of Anthroposophy itself. Dr. Steiner emphasized this most particularly when he came to speak of the scientific tendencies which have sprung up within the anthroposophical movement in the last years. This is where our self-awareness must begin.

For a long time now, we younger physicians have felt that our medical movement is proceeding along a strongly intellectual track. We became particularly conscious of this during the medical course held in Stuttgart in October, 1922 [in Fundamentals of Anthroposophical Medicine, GA 314, Mercury Press]. With the exception of Dr. Steiner's lectures, these lectures, as regards the direction of their thoughts, might just as well have been given at any university. Inwardly, we rebelled against them because we perceived that the human being was not considered in his totality; warmth of heart and the pure will forces were ignored. We, however, really wanted to be able to stand within medicine as anthroposophists, meaning, as complete human beings. We perceived that all our medical work would get the proper impetus only if it arose directly out of the basic impulses of the anthroposophical movement.

We will find our way to true healing in the present time only if we really recall the core of what is anthroposophical. First of all, we must become conscious of our true humanity, and as physicians, especially of our will to heal. It is just Anthroposophy that gives us the possibility of acquiring those capacities which reveal the relation of every single thing in the outer world to the human being, so that we are then able to direct the forces of the outer world to the sick human being, so that they support his own forces of healing.

Another, no less important, task of the physician will be to accompany the human being as steady advisor, showing him how he can overcome the tendencies toward illness slumbering in him because of his onesided soul development, only by unfolding his entire human nature. For ruling the individual human being as well as all of contemporary culture are the destructive forces of the brain and of the intellect, striving toward decline. But if we want to be effective in the ascent of development we must develop in ourselves forces of the future, forces which will make us capable of true healing. We can only acquire perceptions of the human being which are necessary for such working by deepening our studies of the physical and chemical processes on the one hand, and on the other hand, by attempting to grasp, in a living way, the soul-spiritual in the other human being. Only then will we gain a real view of how these realms relate to each other in the human being. Then we will be able to see and to show how the soul-spiritual works into the physical structuring and differentiating, and how this physical in the human being can and must, in turn, be transformed into the soul-spiritual through the efficacy of moral impulses in the warm force of heart.

The task which we physicians must carry within the anthroposophical movement is so great, that only if we unite all our forces can we even attempt it. With the rebuilding of the Goetheanum, a new medical science must also be rebuilt, a humanizing of medicine.

If you would like to work with us in this way, please inform us in detail soon, so that we may begin our work together as soon as possible and meet during the fall or the Christmas holidays.[...]

On November 1, 1923, Helene von Grunelius wrote to her friend Madeleine van Deventer in Utrecht:

[...II was in Arlesheim from Friday evening until today (Thursday). I went there to inquire about the course, since we are now up to thirty-five people. After talking it over with Dr. Wegman, Dr. Steiner committed himself for eight days immediately after the Delegates Conference at Christmas (it will last from December 24 to January 1) in other words from January 2 to 9. I think this will be an opportune time for everyone. I gave him the list. He had no comment (about the names). Dr. Wegman thought he would consider it more closely in a few days, and comment on the individuals and ask questions. So he might cross people off the list if he has the impression that their attitude is not active enough and they're not really ready to follow through courageously on all he intends to bring (at least that's my impression). He expects total work from us. He said: initiative is necessary. There probably are individuals who have it, but it ought to come about that an entire group develops initiative. And that ought to be possible with a group of young people. Then he said how much the continuation and success of our work depends on its being spread in the outer world. We are now at a stage in the medical movement when it is mostly enthusiasm that can be effective, for we haven't much to show yet by way of success in healing.

[...] We can't say anything to the people yet about the course, because we have to wait to see whether Dr. Steiner will have anything to say about the list in the next few days. In any case, only people who have been invited by us or Dr. Steiner can take part in the course (we've already invited Steffen and Wachsmuth). If others ask us, we will say that we are not dealing with a 'medical course' but a particular study amongst a small group with Dr. Steiner. I gave my point of view about the Stuttgart physicians first and also mentioned how the medical conference in September had affected us, whereupon Dr. Steiner said: yes, they would actually be disturbing, if they were present. This judgment was very clear, as was the whole opinion he had of them, which wasn't exactly lofty. We agreed that we would not say anything about this statement, and if the Stuttgart physicians are insulted or complain, we, ourselves, will take the responsibility. I will try to prepare them as carefully as I can for the fact that we will not invite them to the course. [...]

Grunelius' unadorned language reflects the mood clearly. How things stood with those taking initiative for the first ‘Young Doctors' Course’ is evident. Their resistance to the older physicians was no doubt intensified by Dr. Steiner's remarks. On December 5, she wrote another letter to van Deventer with quotations from a letter of Ita Wegman's which show her attitude toward these students.

Dear Maddy, [...] Enclosed is the final (meaning, from our point of view, just about final) list. [...] Names underlined in red are those who have definitely committed themselves to the course. People responded very quickly and enthusiastically. [...] In the meantime, I did hear from Dr. Wegman. She says that, as regards the list, it is very difficult for her and also for Dr. Steiner, since both of them don't know all the people, to say whom they want and whom they don't want. Actually the organizers, meaning you and Maddy van Deventer, should choose the people, invite them and take responsibility for making sure that the people you have invited really understand what it's all about. [...] “What I gather from Dr. Steiner is that the emphasis of the course will be on the morally-human and the anthroposophical in medicine, in other words, mainly for those still studying, and for the young physicians, who, during their studies and the beginning of their practice did not find what they sought as satisfaction in their profession and their studies. So the main focus will be on this not-being-satisfied. Therefore, you must choose people who are really asking and seeking in this way. From what I can tell, not much by way of therapy will be given in this course.” [...]

By the way, we did not send a form letter, instead I wrote personally to everyone. In this case it surely was better and more effective. [...]

At the moment I am circulating the December, 1920 lectures [of December 17, 18 and 19 in GA 202, The Bridge between Universal Spirituality and Physical Man][2] and Hygiene [Health Care As a Social Issue, April 7, 1920 in GA 314][3] amongst the people, so that everyone will have read them by the time the course starts. [...]

Regarding The Bridge lectures [included in this volume] M. P. van Deventer has this to say:

In discussions between Helene von Grunelius and myself, we realized the significance of the lectures we had both heard in December 1920, which were later published and became known by the title The Bridge. The role of the warmth organization as mediator between soul and body appeared to us to be of fundamental significance. The Bridge lectures were available only in the Archives. However, upon being asked, Rudolf Steiner immediately gave us permission to duplicate and distribute them to all future participants for common preparation.

In late summer Rudolf Steiner asked me about the state of the preparations. In the course of the conversation he suddenly became very serious and requested that I tell him exactly what we really wanted. He demanded utter clarity of consciousness. I attempted to speak about the path which we already wanted to embark upon during our studies. I was too reticent, however, to speak about meditative practices. Afterwards I had the feeling as if I had failed an exam. I immediately wrote to Helene von Grunelius and asked her to go to Dornach as soon as possible and continue the discussion.

This continuation took place in late Fall 1923. Helene complained that it was impossible for her to follow the advice of keeping a notebook because she wouldn't know whether what she wrote on the right side was correct. Rudolf Steiner answered: “That doesn't matter. In the course of time you'll correct yourself; besides, you can send the notebooks to me. However, if you would like to gain greater certainty, I can give you a meditation.” Then he gave her the Warmth Meditation and told her that she could pass it on to all future participants. He himself would give it to Dr. Wegman. He called it a chain meditation (passed on from person to person by word of mouth), not a circle meditation. And he described it as the path of the physician towards beholding the Etheric Christ. [...]

In Dec. 1923 we could again report to Rudolf Steiner. By then we had unfortunately only found 30 participants. “Why shouldn't I speak to 30 people,” he said. As a date he gave us the week immediately following the Christmas Foundation meeting, beginning January 2. We wrote this to all participants and invited them at the same time to come already December 24 to participate in the Christmas Foundation meeting.

In this way, all were immediately united with the new stream which began with the new founding of the General Anthroposophical Society and the founding of the High School for Spiritual Science. The ‘Course for Young Doctors’ was thus the first event of the High School for Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum in Dornach.

Notes:

1. The English translation of that book, and thus much of the text in this introduction, was done by Dorit Winter and has been published in 1994 by Mercury Press.

2. These three lectures are included in this book starting on p. 221.

3. Available from Mercury Press

Flyer, February 1919

Term:

[ 1 ] 1. The essence of the socialization of the economy is that the organization of production and sales are regulated in accordance with the economic laws inherent in them, and that no "rights" or powers of authority are involved in the resulting economic organism. All "rights" are exercised by the political organism, which is equal to the economic organization and is based on the equality of all men before the law. All intellectual achievements, including technical ideas, are to be placed under the free, individual administration of a third, equal intellectual organism.

[ 2 ] 2. The representatives of the economic organism shall be the elected members of the associations established on the basis of the classification of occupations and the distribution of labor. Representatives of the political organization may be elected on the basis of universal, equal (secret) suffrage. Representatives of the spiritual organization shall be the personalities placed by circumstances at the head of the individual spiritual branches. Delegations elected from the representatives of each of the three bodies serve to connect them. (The three bodies stand side by side like three relatively independent states that organize their common affairs through envoys.)

Practical implementation:

[ 3 ] 3. The transfer of branches of the economy from the present to the future state shall be effected with due regard to the present economic condition, in such a manner that all factors (employers and employees in every form) shall participate in the fundamental (constituent) reorganization, and that the present possible economic organization shall be established on opportunistic conditions.

[ 4 ] 4. The new economic order thus sought must under no circumstances lead to an interruption of consumption by breaking off economic continuity.

[ 5 ] 5. Everything that intervenes in the economic organism as a law that is the same for all people (such as accident prevention, damage through usury and so on) is subject to the powers of the political organization. The general taxes shall be expenditure taxes (which is in no way to be confused with indirect taxes). Revenues as such do not become taxable; they become so at the moment when the public has an interest in them, i.e. when they are transferred into circulation.

Branches of the economy:

[ 6 ] The following can be considered as the most necessary economic sectors to which point 3 should be applied immediately:

1. Mining
2. Iron
3. Electricity
4. Hydropower and its land
5. Gas and water supply
6. Aeronautics
7. Trams; all types of roads
8. Canalization and canal shipping
9. Chemical industry
10. Grain growing and grain processing
11. Sugar industry, brandy and so on
12. Tobacco industry
13. Everything relating to the cultivation of land (whereas the ownership of land belongs to the political body)
14. Insurance
15. Money institutions

The peace treaty

[ 7 ] It is to be effected in such a way that representatives of the three corporations negotiate with foreign countries from the German side with independent mandates emanating entirely from their corporation. A unilateral socialization based on aspects other than those mentioned is also impracticable for Germany for reasons of foreign policy. On the other hand, a justification of foreign policy for the establishment of the three corporations is quite promising.

[ 1 ] The call for a reorganization of social coexistence and cooperation between people is going around the world. The economic, legal-political and spiritual conditions of life that prevailed at the beginning of the twentieth century led to the horror-filled world catastrophe of that time. An economic system that was unsocial, a legal-political life that was incapable of overcoming the class antagonisms perceived as unjust by the consciousness of the great majority of contemporary humanity, a spiritual culture that, despite its "progress", has proved incapable of being a leader out of an unsocial economic life and a state based on class antagonisms: they must make way for a new one.

[ 2 ] Whether one person today understands socialization to mean this, another that: all those who do not want to live through our time spiritually blind could agree that socialization must call upon all those who have hitherto seen these conditions imposed on them by the power of classes superior to them spiritually, legally or economically to shape their own social conditions. Class struggles can only disappear with the cessation of the intellectual, legal and economic class antagonisms themselves.

[ 3 ] The fact that this is the call of the times is shown by the movement of the proletariat, but also by the correctly understood development of history itself.

[ 4 ] The goal is felt.

[ 5 ] The impulse wants to show the way towards the tripartite social organism.

[ 6 ] This impulse calls for the complete independence of intellectual life, including the educational and school system. It sees the causes of the intellectual inability of our time in the absorption of intellectual culture by the state. He demands the complete self-administration of this culture from a purely objective and general human point of view. It will only be properly educated when no one has any say in the question of how to educate all people to become true people capable of living, except those who can only judge from the depths of human nature itself.

[ 7 ] This impulse demands the restriction of state life to all those living conditions for which all people are equal before one another. On this ground, in a strictly democratic way, with the transformation of the present private capitalist property and forced labor relations, above all such a general human right is to be achieved that confronts the worker as a completely free personality with the labor leader (who is only a spiritual worker).

[ 8 ] This impulse demands an economic life in which the worker confronts the labor manager in such a way that a free social relationship can be established between the two by contract, so that the wage relationship ceases completely. This requires the complete socialization of economic life. Only from the proper participation of all people in appropriate cooperatives, which arise from the professions on the one hand, and from the needs of consumers and producers on the other, can a regulation of the value of goods emerge that ensures a decent existence for all people. Such a regulation of the value of goods can only realize the principle: people must not produce in order to profit, but only in order to consume. It is only possible if, after the detachment of intellectual and state life in the economy, we are dealing with nothing other than the production, distribution and consumption of goods. Any interest in the unobjective, mere utilization of capital, any wage system based on competing economic interests and acting out of such interests, hinders a correct reciprocal pricing of goods and therefore a just distribution of goods.

[ 9 ] In all details of social life, the impulse wants to follow the tripartite social organism:

[ 10 ] 1. development of man in all his faculties through independent spiritual life;

[ 11 ] 2. the establishment of human rights through the exclusion of all non-general human interests from the legal sphere;

[ 12 ] 3. equitable distribution of goods in a correct relation of value of goods (commodities) by reorganizing the present capital and wage system;

[ 13 ] The German people can only hope to be integrated into the international world conditions if it removes the inhibitions that have arisen in its economic, legal and intellectual life as a result of their inorganic fusion in the previous state system through the organic threefolding of the social organism. In this way it can be brought about that through the free development of each of the three members and the higher unity arising from it, the highest economic productivity compatible with the healthy body and soul of man, the true satisfaction of a genuine folkish sense of justice and the all-round revelation of the forces inherent in the German spirit become possible.

[ 1 ] Professor v. Heck is of the opinion that the social conditions which I promise as the final success of my proposals would "solve the social question in a happy way", but that the implementation of my proposals would not have the hoped-for effects, indeed that this implementation, if at all possible, would "not promote but harm" the common good and especially the working class. - One can hardly pass a more devastating judgment on an endeavor that pursues such goals as mine, the threefolding of the social organism. For in comparison with these aims it is of course quite worthless to put forward the dream of a happy solution to the social question and then to make impracticable proposals for bringing about this solution. Pretty much all so-called "solutions to the social question" suffer from this flaw. The moment I was forced to admit that an assessment such as that of Prof. von Heck was right, I would easily consider my own ideas to be refuted. And I would certainly not consider it shameful to make this confession publicly. For the "social question" is, on the one hand, such a comprehensive and difficult one and, on the other, something so binding that the retraction of an unsuccessful attempt can have nothing shameful about it. Prof. von Heck can therefore believe that I can respond to his presentation quite objectively. However, he misunderstands me with regard to the point of view from which he views my endeavor. I am aware that I am not at all aiming to "solve" the social question "in a happy way". I do not believe that anyone who is familiar with the psychology of the individual and the masses can strive for such an "ultimate success". My assumptions are quite different. I believe that I recognize that humanity has currently reached a point in its historical development that demands the threefolding of the social organism out of the nature of today's human being. If this demand is met, it will be possible to master the elementary unrest that has gripped mankind. If it is not met, this unrest will lead to the self-destruction of our culture. It is not because I wish to fantasize about an ultimate goal that I speak of the threefold structure, but because I believe I recognize the causes that demand this threefold structure from the present state of humanity. That is why I have not invented "proposals" for a dreamed-up final goal; rather, for me these proposals are the result of observations that I believe I have made over decades of the social development of humanity. The way in which I have arrived at these observations is proof to me that my "proposals" have nothing utopian about them. But it also makes it understandable to me how so many people come to regard the threefold structure as unclear and impracticable. Such people think they are thinking practically. But they are entangled in theoretical assumptions that they consider to be practical. They have formed these theories according to what was considered practical for a while. If this "practical" then requires a transformation through its own development, they find the newly formed "impractical" because it contradicts their usual ideas. It is precisely among the supposed "practitioners" that one finds such theorists. It seems to me that the threefold structure of the social organism will only be judged correctly by those who not only think they know what has been practical "up to now", but who have a healthy instinct for what may prove practical in its "future" development.

[ 2 ] If Prof. von Heck already misjudges the premises of my "proposals", this misjudgement becomes more and more complete as he continues to pursue what I have presented, since he does not reproduce and oppose my views as such, but replaces them almost point by point with others and then "refutes" these others. I would like to say: he creates his own threefold structure, which has very little to do with mine. I must confess: I would fight this threefold structure no less if it confronted me than Professor von Heck fights it. In this judgment I am in complete agreement with him.

[ 3 ] But I ask: have I really given cause to understand the tripartite structure in such a way that three parliaments should replace the unified state parliament in the way Professor von Heck presents it? Have I ever said or had anything printed that is equivalent to the monster "three states on the same territory"? My idea of the threefold structure demands that the affairs of spiritual culture, on the one hand, and those of economic life, on the other, should not be organized by such a representation of the people as is equivalent to what has hitherto been regarded as a "parliament". The administration of spiritual culture should arise from the same foundations from which the life of the spirit itself unfolds. Those personalities should be in this administration who take an active part in spiritual life, who bring to bear in this administration the same impulses that are at work in spiritual production. And I believe I recognize that such an administration is only possible if the administrators do not sit within the state administration, or are appointed from the spiritual realm into the state realm; but that the spiritual life is placed on a basis independent of the "state". In the state, everything that arises through it must ultimately be the outflow of the sound judgment of every responsible person. For the state strives for democratic organization. In intellectual life, only expert judgment can decide. It seems impossible to me that with further democratization of the state this expert judgment can be found within its framework. I believe that only those who are inclined to take out of democracy what cannot thrive in it can honestly want democratization. I could imagine that a fruitful discussion could arise in this area if the question that comes into consideration were to boil down to the following: Can the administration of intellectual life (especially education) take on a form that merely corresponds to the demands of this life if the democratic state exercises rule in any aspect of this administration? My experience compels me to answer this question in the negative. I believe I know the reasons which lead to its affirmation. But they do not seem valid to me. If my opinion is justified, then the judgments that Professor von Heck puts forward from the point of view of the economic security of intellectual life and compulsory schooling would have to be placed on a completely different basis than his own. I believe I have pointed to this ground on page 88 ff. of my paper "Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage". If what I indicated there is properly put into practice, then institutions will emerge that secure the economic basis of intellectual life and also protect against the "temptation" of "not sending children to school, but using them to earn money." Despite everything that von Heck says, it seems unfathomable why, when considering these questions, it should play a role that "as a result of peace, we are approaching a time of impoverishment that no other nation has experienced". No one can doubt that this last sentence is as true as it can be. But why the school should not get what it can out of this poverty, if this is to happen in other ways than before, is surely not understandable.

[ 4 ] Professor von Heck's argument against the separation of economic life from the state proper is no less riddled with misunderstandings. He says: "The complete separation of legal questions and economic questions, which Steiner demands, is not possible at all." What makes it clear that I am "demanding" the "complete separation" spoken of here? What I see as necessary is this: all legal matters should be organized by the democratic parliament; and the economy should be managed by associations arising from the professions, from production, transport and consumption interests. Through this organization it will come about in economic life that its cycle will be governed solely by the decisions of the individuals experienced in individual branches of the economy and by the credit which economic men enjoy through their position in a branch of the economy. The "natural laws of economic life" will force us to replace democratic electoral intentions, which could at most play a role in the transitional period, with the democratic delegation of capable people in the sense of the two conditions of a healthy economy described above. Democracy and parliamentarism will be recognized in their damaging consequences for economic life when this life is no longer veiled in its peculiarity by the state legislation spread over it, but when it is placed in its self-government on an associative basis. Professor von Heck says: "The law determines the forms of the economy and can only be ordered by a power that oversees economic life." However, this sentence is only correct as long as economic life and legal life are merged. If economic life is left to its own devices, that is, if it exhausts itself in the administration of the production, circulation and consumption of goods (with import and export), then the legal relations of the economic agents remain unorganized by this economic cycle. And these are organized on the territory of the state, outside the economic cycle. Legal relations will then not be the expression of economic forms, but on the one hand their basis in the same way that natural conditions (geographical, climatic, etc.) are the basis of the economy. - Anyone who believes in the axiom that legal forms must be the expression of economic forms must find it difficult to accept the emancipation of law from the economy. But whoever realizes that this "axiom" contradicts the present consciousness of mankind will try to overcome his belief in it. Contemporary man cannot bear to live as a subject of law under the compulsion of economic forms. To close oneself off to this fact and to pay homage to the view that "the law determines the forms of the economy" means little more than declaring the work on an important link in the social question of the present to be a chimera. But one should only do so if the separation of legal life from economic life were to be supported by more weighty reasons than those put forward by Professor von Heck.

[ 5 ] One misunderstands the structure which the social organism is to receive through the threefold structure if, as Professor von Heck does, one expresses the following objection: "Steiner, too, if one looks more closely, leaves three economically very important questions to the legal parliament. He leaves to it the questions of taxation, the creation of workers' rights and the restriction of ownership of the means of production, which should last only for life." It is not correct that in a tripartite social organism taxation should be regulated solely by law. Read about this on page 53 of my "Key Points of the Social Question": "What the political state itself demands for its maintenance will be raised by the tax law. This will develop through a harmonization of the demands of legal consciousness with those of economic life." With regard to labor law, it is possible that it will not be left to legal life as an economic matter, but that it will be removed from the economic cycle, that is, stripped of the character of an economic matter. It is also quite inaccurate what Professor von Heck states as my view on the "restriction of ownership of the means of production". What is in question is not left to the "parliament of law", but is made a matter in the ordering of which the administrations of intellectual life and legal life are involved.

[ 6 ] The requirement concerning taxation can be fulfilled in practice by the fact that formally the constitutional state as a consumer organization stands opposite the economic cycle, just as within this cycle itself a consumer association stands opposite a production cooperative, for example. The regulation of general tax requirements and the use of taxes takes place within the legal system. On the other hand, the distribution of tax claims to the individual economic areas will be the responsibility of the associations resulting from the professions and from the interaction of production and consumption. Professor von Heck says appropriately: "The most difficult task that the future threatens us with is the distribution of the enormous, unheard-of tax burden that peace will impose on us ... These taxes cannot be raised without the most serious interventions in economic life. Therefore, even if Steiner's ideas were implemented, every economic group would have to secure representation in the legal parliament in order to defend itself against overburdening." However, this "most difficult task" can only be solved by separating legal life from economic life in such a way that the solution does not contradict the legal consciousness of individual groups of people. For if the interests of an economic group are represented in a parliament based on a democratic foundation, it will always be the case that the economically more powerful group will impose measures on the less powerful group. It will be able to do so through its own power or by entering into compromises. The formation of a parliamentary majority always makes it possible to assert and suppress interests in an unobjective manner. The situation is different if the administration of economic life is organically separated from that of legal life. In this case, no decisions can be taken on the legal ground that have effects in economic life that are detrimental to any group of people. Everything that happens in economic life will be based on negotiations between the designated associations. In these negotiations, the expertise of one association can be contrasted with that of the other; and the unobjective, merely democratic parliamentarization can be dispensed with. Someone might perhaps say that what we are striving for here could also be realized if the main negotiations in the "legal parliament" were transferred to the committees and experts from the individual economic areas were added to them. It seems to me that this would only be half a measure. What limited good it could do would have to show just how the desired effect could be achieved completely only by separating the economic administration from the legal organization. Professor von Heck does not emphasize strongly enough what it means in the practice of life when the competent representatives have to negotiate from branch to branch in such a way that through them the living conditions of one branch have to promote and limit those of the other, without the influence of unobjective majority decisions. Anyone who takes into account the practical effect of such an institution will not think of saying: "How should scientists and doctors have special expertise for ecclesiastical questions, and farmers, merchants and craftsmen for large-scale industry?" This seems to be the right question, but it does not argue against a self-reliant organization of economic life, but against the representation of economic and cultural interests in a parliament in which everyone has a say in matters about which they know nothing. The negotiations between the economic organizations through their representatives do not require any expertise outside the area that someone has to represent. For the outcome of the negotiations will be determined objectively by the factual significance of one area for the other. The basis for such objectivity is created by the fact that the administrative bodies will be organized around those personalities to whom a leading office is transferred in the manner described on page 86 of the "Key Points of the Social Question". The other members of this administrative body will emerge from the needs of economic management in such a way that the usual election will be replaced by a selection of suitable personalities, since ability will be revealed in the organization of work and the conviction will be established that one's own work will prosper best if the most knowledgeable leader is appointed. The members of higher administrative bodies and a central council will emerge in a similar way from the lower ones. Thus, despite the central council, the overall administration will be built on a federal basis.

[ 7 ] Such a structure of economic administration will only be tolerable to the democratic consciousness if everything that relates to the legal relations of the persons involved in economic life is separated from it and relegated to a democratic parliament. However, these legal relationships include everything that relates to the work that people do for each other.

[ 8 ] Whoever understands my proposals for the tripartite social organism in the way described here, and not in the completely misunderstood way in which they appear in Professor von Heck's rendering, will hardly demand a refutation of the objections listed in the last columns of my critic's article. For these objections stem only from the fact that Professor von Heck does not refer to my exposition, but creates his own threefold structure and then polemicizes against it.

[ 9 ] In the essay "My impression of Dr. Steiner and his theory of threefolding" by Alfred Mantz, it is said that my explanations could only represent something that could be realized "if people were different from what they are". One can only hold this opinion as long as one has not yet sufficiently realized in what sense and with what intention one can develop ideas about the institutions of the social organism. It is true that ideal social conditions are only possible with ideally inclined and developed human beings. But anyone who rejects thoughts about the organization of the social organism because of this one-sided truth is moving in a dubious circle of ideas. He will want to wait with desirable institutions until he has the people suitable for them; during this wait, however, he will only ever have people whom he finds unsuitable. If Mr. Mantz will examine my ideas more closely, he can see that I do not require any other people for the realization of these ideas than those who are available. And I find these people as mature, or as immature in general, as he himself. But I assume, as everyone who does not want to sink into fatalism must assume, that among the people of today there are those who can convince themselves of the necessity of reorganizing our social structure. In the tripartite social organism I see - as I explained in the discussion of Professor von Heck's essay - that which fulfills the demands to which mankind is pressing at the present stage of its development. It seems to me that if those people who can convince themselves of the necessity of the threefold structure succeed in doing what is necessary for its realization, conditions will be created which will give such efforts a basis that will make people different "from what they are". The assertion that I am sketching a picture "that must look very good in a vacuum, but in reality is utopia" is truly wrong, since I am not even touching the reality in which we live, but merely replacing the structure of this reality, insofar as it stems from intentions, inclinations, habits, judgments, etc., with a different one, which should also develop from similar human impulses.

[ 10 ] How little is true of what is written in the essay "Dr. Steiner and the Proletariat" can be seen completely in my book "The Key Points of the Social Question". Anyone who wants to refute the statements in this essay must not attempt to do so by claiming that "capital will never submit to their implementation". For he would first have to prove that he has a social structure in mind for the implementation of which "capital" is not needed. But then why should it be needed precisely for the realization of mine? As Mr. Seeger then goes on to say that through the institutions which I would like to see brought about, the worker could "never get rid of the feeling of having to work only for a single entrepreneur", it must be held against this that my efforts are directed precisely towards finding conditions through which the "physically working man" is given the feeling of being a free man in his work.

[ 1 ] It is necessary to found a bank-like institution which, in its financial measures, serves economic and spiritual undertakings that are oriented both in terms of their goals and their attitude towards the anthroposophically oriented world view. It should be distinguished from ordinary banking enterprises by the fact that it serves not only the financial aspects, but also the real operations which are supported by the financial aspects. It will therefore be important above all that the loans, etc., are not obtained in the same way as in ordinary banking, but from the objective points of view which are relevant to the operation to be undertaken. The banker should therefore have less the character of a lender and more that of a businessman who is familiar with the matter, who can assess the scope of an operation to be financed with a sound mind and make the arrangements for its execution with a sense of reality.

[ 2 ] It will mainly be a question of financing such undertakings as are suitable for placing economic life on a healthy associative basis and for shaping intellectual life in such a way that legitimate talents are brought into a position through which their talents can live out in a socially fruitful way. What is particularly important, for example, is that enterprises are created that are profitable at the moment in order to support other enterprises that can only bear economic fruit in later times and above all through the spiritual seed to be poured into them now, which can only sprout after some time.

[ 3 ] It is necessary for the officials of the banking enterprise to have an insight into how the view of life given by anthroposophy can be translated into economically fruitful activity. To this end, it is necessary that a strictly associative relationship be established between the bank administrators and those who, through their idealistic effectiveness, can promote the understanding of an enterprise to be brought into being.

[ 4 ] An example: a personality has an idea that promises economic fruitfulness. The representatives of the ideals of the world view can evoke understanding for the social consequences. Their activity is financially supported by the amounts to be raised, which should also economically and technically support the realization of the idea.

[ 5 ] The focus must be on supporting the headquarters of the anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement itself. The building in Dornach, for example, cannot initially support anything; nevertheless, it will bring about a powerful economic return in later times. It must be understood that everyone can support it while respecting their financial conscience, if they only count on its material fruitfulness over a longer period of time.

[ 6 ] The enterprise must be based on the realization that technical, financial, etc., activity can develop branches that are not only financial but also material. The enterprise must rest on the realization that technical, financial, etc. activity can develop branches which, while temporarily producing favorable results for the individual entrepreneur, are destructive in the context of the social order. Many of the latest ventures were oriented in this way. They were fructified, and it was precisely through their fructification that the social order was undermined. This type of undertaking must be countered by those that stem from healthy thinking and feeling. They can fit into the social order in a truly fruitful way. But they can only be borne out of the social way of thinking stimulated by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

[ 7 ] It is true that even an enterprise such as the one characterized here can initially only overcome the socio-technical and financial crisis possibilities, and that it will be confronted with social difficulties as long as these still bear the form of the actual workers' question, which originates from the old mode of production condemned to crises. The workers involved in the new enterprises will, for example, behave in the same way with regard to wage differences as they do with regard to the old-style enterprises. But in such matters one must not underestimate how soon, if properly managed, an enterprise of the kind characterized here must also have socially favorable consequences. We will see that. And the example will be convincing. When an enterprise of this kind comes to fruition, the workers who are involved will already have their convictions in the process of bringing it back into flow. For it is only by bringing the manual laborers and the intellectual leaders of enterprises into one interest through a way of thinking that affects all classes of people that the forces of social destruction can be countered.

[ 8 ] The basic condition is that the spiritual endeavors are intimately connected with all material ones. We cannot achieve such an orientation with the forces now available in the anthroposophical movement because we have no practical enterprise in its bosom that has grown out of its own forces, apart from the Berlin anthroposophical publishing house. But this alone is not enough to have an exemplary effect. For its economic orientation is only the outward expression of the clout of spiritual science as such. Only those undertakings that do not have spiritual science as such as their content, but which have a content supported by the spiritual scientific way of thinking, can have a truly exemplary effect. A school as such can only be considered exemplary in this sense if it is financially supported by only those undertakings whose entire institution has already emerged from humanities circles. And the Dornach Building will only be able to prove its social significance when the personalities associated with it have brought such enterprises into being that are self-supporting, provide the people who maintain them with adequate sustenance and then leave enough left over to cover the deficit that is always required of an intellectual enterprise. In reality, this deficit is not a deficit at all. For it is precisely the fact that it arises that causes the fructification of material undertakings.

[ 9 ] You just have to take things really practically. This is not done by those who ask: so how should one make a financial or economic enterprise in the sense of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science? That is simply nonsense. What is important is that the powers organized in the anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement itself undertake the enterprises, that is, that bankers, manufacturers, etc. join forces with this movement, so that the Dornach building becomes the real center of a new spirit of enterprise. That is why it is not "social", "technical" etc. "programs" that are to be set up in Dornach, but the building is to be the center of a working method that is to become the working method of the future.

[ 10 ] Whoever decides to provide financial support for the Dornach undertakings will have to understand that we have already reached the point where supporting undertakings in the old sense means putting one's money into unfruitful things, and that caring for one's money today means supporting promising undertakings that alone are capable of withstanding the devastating forces. Short-sighted people who still believe today that such things have never borne financial fruit will certainly not join the Dornach endeavors. Those who join must be far-sighted, financially and economically sound people who realize that continuing to muddle along in the old ways means digging themselves a safe grave. It will be these people alone who will not follow the destructive existences of the last four to five years. Continuing to work in the same way as before means nothing more than using up financial and economic reserves. Because the reserves of raw material and agricultural production, which last the longest, will also be used up. Their financial and economic fructification does not lie in the fact that they are there, but in the fact that the labor by which they are supplied to the social organism is possible. This work, however, definitely belongs to the reserves. Everything for the future depends on a new spirit taking the lead in individual enterprise as well.

[ 1 ] The Goetheanum in Dornach near Basel, Switzerland, is intended to be a school of spiritual science and a place for cultivating an artistic life in the spirit of this science. Its construction began in the spring of 1914. Work on it continued during the war. The enclosing walls with the double dome have been completed. Its architectural and sculptural forms, the paintings of the interior, the stained glass windows produced using new methods already show the visitor what kind of envelope is intended for the scientific and artistic work that is to be carried out in this place.

[ 2 ] Not a building in a historically traditional art form has been erected in Dornach; what can already be seen today shows that a new style and form of artistic realization is being attempted. The whole of the building and every detail have flowed from the same spirit that wishes to create a center of its activity in this place.

[ 3 ] And this spirit wants to serve the rebuilding of scientific, spiritual and social life. It has grown out of the conviction that the human constitution of the soul, which reached its peak at the beginning of the twentieth century, is internally interwoven with the destructive forces that have revealed their true form in the world catastrophe.

[ 4 ] Just as the building in its design aims to represent a unity with everything that is to be accomplished within it, so it is hoped that the spiritual work emanating from Dornach will develop the spiritual impetus that can be formative for a true moral, social and technical practice of life.

[ 5 ] For modern man there was an abyss between his spiritual experience and the practice of life. Through illusions he deceived himself about this abyss. He believed that he could draw science and art from the reality of life and permeate this reality with his spirit. These illusions are the true causes of the devastating world catastrophe and the social hardships of the present. Modern man did not find the spirit in science and art; therefore his life practice became a spiritless routine.

[ 6 ] The social practice of life, the mechanically oriented technology, the externalized legal life lack the impulses that can only arise when the souls within people experience the spirit.

[ 7 ] The spiritual science to be cultivated at the Goetheanum in Dornach has driven out of itself a social view of life, the impulse of the threefold organization of the social organism, which wants to gain genuine life practice from real spiritual knowledge. Who wants to avoid everything utopian by creating out of the reality of the spirit.

[ 8 ] What souls need in order to experience their full humanity is to be cultivated in Dornach just as much as the technical aspects of outer life. The school of thought that wants to form its center here wants to create a workshop for life-enhancing technology, for the social shaping of human work as well as for the development of the life of the soul. It needs the cooperation of all those who are impartial enough to see that modern life lacks what it wants to create.

[ 9 ] In order to complete the Dornach building, almost as much sacrifice is still necessary on the part of such unbiased people as has already been revealed in the possibility of bringing it to its present state. But even with the completion of this building, nothing has yet been achieved for the goals that are to be served with it. Parallel to this completion must go practical institutions of life that are designed in the direction of the spiritual work it represents. Very practical institutions of life, such as technical and social undertakings, must prove the life-promoting nature of its powers. It must come to the point where it no longer seems ridiculous when the spirit that wants to create a world view is also active in the founding of technical enterprises, financial institutes and scientific research institutes.

[ 10 ] The spiritual direction meant here is already at work in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. Even people who still tolerate it there, because it is active in the "spiritual" field, will still demand today that it "keep its hands off" institutions about which only the "practitioner" should be able to judge.

[ 11 ] In this area, one of the most powerful prejudices must be overcome. The personalities who have already been found today to contribute to this overcoming through practical work expose themselves to the accusation of unrealistic enthusiasm. They believe they know that humanity will only get out of some of its troubles when the enthusiasm of those who falsely accuse them of enthusiasm today has been seen through. But the number of such personalities who, despite such accusations, are currently putting their energies at the service of genuine life practice is still small. Institutions are in the making that want to lay the foundations for this practice of life. Whether it can succeed will depend on whether as many people as possible can be found who want to join forces with the few.

[ 12 ] Only on an international basis can something favorable be achieved in this direction. For the spirit meant here is, by its very nature, far removed from the narrow-minded erection of barriers to humanity. What is necessary for it, however, is the unified embracing of spiritual and practical-material life. It is on this basis that he would like to carry out his work on overcoming the "social question". He believes he can say in all modesty that he was already working in close circles on this basis before his opponent showed his true face in the outbreak of the world catastrophe. He understands that before this loudly speaking fact he could only be heard by a few. He believes that now, out of the needs of the times, he should be met with understanding. The growth of the new life will not be promoted by alliances of nations based on the old spirit; the League of Nations will grow out of the new spirit as something self-evident. The old constitutions of the soul will not support a new social life; from the renewal of the life of the soul the social structure will arise with inner necessity.

[ 13 ] Some people are already saying today: A revival of dead or dampened human forces from the spirit is necessary. But if we take a closer look, the question remains unanswered: What is the content of the new spirit? At the Goetheanum in Dornach, however, one would like to speak of this content, one would like to work for this content. For it is not the mere appeal to the spirit that can help at this time, but only the spirit that is recognized and incorporated into the work of life. But this spirit wants to be worked for itself. It wants to permeate all scientific research; it does not merely want to be tolerated as a side effect of a science that keeps its distance from itself. It does not want to be there so that those working in the factory can find it when they leave the factory; it wants to live in the work of the factory itself, in its economic and technical orientation. He does not want a practice of life that also "leaves time for spiritual interests"; he does not want to leave time in which he does not work. He does not want an art that embellishes "sober" life; he is aware that real life is naturally artistic.

[ 14 ] This is how Dornach and everything connected with it is conceived; it can become a full reality when it is recognized how this "thought" wants to work out of the roots of real life.

[ 1 ] Noteworthy is a confession that the socialist theorist Karl Kautsky feels compelled to make in his recently published book "How the World War Came About". Kautsky talks about the question of guilt. Of course, he cannot help but point to individuals and institutions as the causes of the terrible world catastrophe. He feels that he is violating a tenet of a socialist theory that he has defended for decades. He says: "Marx taught that the course of history is not determined by individual persons and institutions, but ultimately by economic conditions. Capitalism in its highest form, that of finance capital, produces imperialism everywhere, the striving for the violent expansion of state territory... It is not individual persons and institutions that are guilty, but capitalism as a whole; this must be fought."

[ 2 ] Anyone familiar with the development of the Marxist tinged socialist party current knows how the doctrine crystallized in the above sentences has been hammered into the heads of the broad masses of the proletariat. One can agitate excellently with such a doctrine. It can be used to forge party programs. Kautsky's attitude to the reality of life becomes apparent at the moment when he is not supposed to work with the doctrine on the construction of the social organism, but when he only wants to gain an objective judgment of the destructive powers of this organism. He finds himself compelled to say about the judgment that capitalism is the culprit of the world war: "This sounds very radical and yet it has a very conservative effect wherever it dominates practical work. For capitalism is nothing but an abstraction derived from the observation of numerous individual phenomena... One cannot fight an abstraction except theoretically; but not practically." And then he admits that in the practice of life, one is forced to direct one's attention "against certain institutions and persons as bearers of certain social functions".

[ 3 ] It is not worth pointing out such confessions when they occur among dozen-agitators. But Kautsky is no dozen-dollar agitator. He is a conscientious, scientifically-minded socialist. He is one of the very best among his peers.

[ 4 ] He feels compelled to take the step from a party dogmatism that is hostile to life to the reality of life, because he wants to find out "how the world war came about". All the popular party abstractions must fall apart. The actual proof is provided that one can justify parties with such abstractions, but that they are completely alien to the practice of life. Should such a fact not shed a bright light on the destructive effect that parties must have that want to model life according to their abstractions?

[ 5 ] The drives towards the threefolding of the social organism find their main opposition in party dogmatisms that are rooted in abstractions. For these drives are based on the insight into the unfruitfulness of such abstractions. They approach social questions from the point of view of the broadest possible observation of life. Of course, one cannot claim that abstractions are not necessary when observing and shaping life. But it depends on the spirit in which one abstracts. When abstracting, one should never lose sight of "certain institutions and persons as bearers of certain social functions". Abstracting can be an instrument for approaching life; but for those who view it in this way, it will never become an obstacle to working within the real practice of life.

[ 6 ] It does not refute what has been said here when Kautsky then continues (see page 14 of his book): "It is ... It is by no means Marxism to divert attention from the search for guilty persons by referring to the impersonal guilt of capitalism." For this sentence is nothing more than an outgrowth of party dogmatism that is alien to life. In one particular case, Kautsky feels compelled to reinterpret this dogma, because without it he could not have written his book. But if it were a question of such a party man passing judgment on the idea of the threefold organization of the social organism, then the "abstractions" of the kind of "capitalism" would immediately march up again as if by military command and "divert" the gaze from work in keeping with life. Whether one can theoretically claim that something is "Marxism" or not is irrelevant for real life; what is relevant is the spirit that Marxism pours into its bearers.

[ 7 ] Marxism can only be an example of what is meant here. For other party doctrines have an equally unrealistic character. The damage to our social life is based on the pathological phenomenon of the times that is being pointed to here. - One can now imagine how someone who is under the influence of this contemporary disease will easily come up with objections to what has been said. He may say: Yes, of course Kautsky cannot denounce abstract capitalism; but how can one point to specific individuals if one wants to work out a general social view of life? Of course one cannot. What one can do, however, is to build such an outlook on the knowledge of reality in such a way that, as a result, institutions arise in which people can live. And if one builds up such an outlook, then it will be applicable to conditions of reality without artificial reinterpretation in the sense of Kautsky's confession. The abstractions with which such an outlook must also work will not even make it necessary to emphasize that one cannot practically fight against them; for by their very nature they will everywhere point to the real that one has to fight against.

[ 8 ] Almost everything that rejects the idea of the tripartite organization of the social organism is under the influence of ideas that are alien to reality, which at present often consider themselves to be the only practical ones. Those who stand on the ground of real observation of life could be discussed with them. For it goes without saying that no one who professes the idea of the threefold structure should claim that all the proposals for this or that put forward by the supporters of this idea are incontestable. What must be asserted, however, is that these proponents stand on the ground of a view of life against which all those have sinned who have been shown by the painful events of recent years that their ideas are alien to life.

[ 9 ] It is a long way from the perniciousness that clings to the currents of the times of the kind described to that which in the present time is producing its perverse blossoms by saying things in public life that have no connection with reality. And yet, a generation which, as long as it can, educates itself in abstractions devoid of essence, gradually loses its sense of responsibility for the connection between what it believes it can say and what really is. This becomes very clear to those who are affected by it themselves. - These days, a number of German newspapers have carried a note: "The theosophist Steiner as a henchman of the Entente." Everything in this article is a slanderous untruth from beginning to end. The slander even goes so far as to speak of passages in letters that are intended to elicit information intended to serve the Entente. All this is nothing but the most nonsensical untruth.

[ 10 ] I am the object of much hostility. I've kept quiet about almost everything so far. I consider it fruitless to argue with personalities who consider it compatible with their sense of responsibility to write the nonsense: "About Steiner ... people around him have recently complained that he is becoming sterile, that he no longer has any new insights and always presents the same thing; he will probably soon throw himself into something new." What is the value of dealing with someone whose state of mind allows him to seek a path to the truth on such grounds! It was even claimed that I was once a Catholic priest, and then this untrue assertion was retracted by the same party that spread it, with the words: this can probably no longer be maintained. I don't like to polemicize against people who don't check whether something is true before they claim it.

[ 11 ] However, even learned people today are known to repeat assertions without checking them and say: The matter has not been refuted.

[ 12 ] For this time I would just like to say the following in response to the slanderous falsehood identified above: We know the murky sources from which such things originate. We also know the soil on which the intentions that speak from them grow. But we also know that proving that such things are objectively untrue is of no avail against these intentions. One would only wish that as many people as possible would shed the naivety that prevents them from seeing through such things. For only in this way could many things become better that are in great need of improvement in our time. I don't need to say that, despite this debate, I don't lump the misguided abstract thinkers together with those I last characterized here.