The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The lecture yesterday will have shown you that if we are to acquire insight into the nature and evolution of man, we must be constantly mindful of the power and influence of Lucifer, of Christ, and of Ahriman.

These influences were, of course, already at work in earlier stages of cosmic evolution, but in spheres where it was unnecessary for man to have clear consciousness of their effects. On the other hand, the very purpose of our Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch is that man should become increasingly conscious of what takes effect through him in earthly existence. The unveiling of many more of the secrets of human life would be desirable at the present time if only there were greater willingness to face things frankly and objectively. For without the knowledge of certain facts of the kind indicated yesterday, it will not be possible for humanity to make progress either in the inner life or in the sphere of social life. Think only of something that is connected with the social problems we have recently been studying. It has been our aim to demonstrate the necessity for separating the spiritual life, and also the political life or life of rights, from the economic life. Our greatest concern is to create conditions throughout the world, or at least—for we cannot do more at present—to convince men of the necessity for conditions which would provide the foundation for a free spiritual life no longer dependent upon the other spheres of social life or as deeply entangled as it is to-day in the economic life on the one side and in the political life of the State on the other. Civilised mankind must either establish the independence of the spiritual life or face collapse—with the inevitable result of an Asiatic influence taking effect in the future.

Those who still do not recognise the gravity of the present situation in the world are also, in a certain respect, helping to prepare for Ahriman's incarnation. Many things in external life to-day bear witness to this. The Ahrimanic incarnation will be greatly furthered if men fail to establish a free and independent spiritual life and allow it to remain entangled in the economic or political life. For the Ahrimanic power has everything to gain by the spiritual life being even more closely intermingled with these other spheres. To the Ahrimanic power a free spiritual life would denote a kind of darkness, and men's interest in it, a burning, raging fire. The establishment of this free spiritual life is essential in order that the right attitude, the right relationship, may be adopted to Ahriman's incarnation in the future.

But there is still a strong tendency to-day to conceal the facts of which we spoke yesterday. The vast majority of people cast a veil over these things; they refuse to see them as they really are and allow themselves to be deceived by words which have no connection with reality. And very often, endeavours to shirk reality are described as “honest” and “well-meaning”.

Take, for example, the recently published letter of Romain Rolland, in which he says that men should not allow themselves to be deluded by erstwhile proclamations of the victorious powers concerning justice and the upholding of political rights. The treatment which Russia is receiving from the Entente has led him to speak in these terms. He says: No matter whether it be on the part of monarchies or republics—what has been said about rights and justice is so much phrase-mongering; the issue at bottom is one of power, and of power alone.

Now even this apparent approach to reality still betrays willingness to be deluded, for Romain Rolland is just as deluded as ever; the delusion is not one whit less. It could only be so if such men were to discard phrases and recognise that all these things for which they aspire are meaningless as long as they fail to realise that if the old unified State as such—whether a democracy, a republic or a monarchy—does not become threefold, this is simply a way of helping Ahriman's incarnation. Hence all these things, including this recent letter addressed to the world by Romain Rolland, amount to nothing more than rhetorical harangues. People do not grasp the reality, for reality can be grasped only when the necessity for spiritual knowledge and deep penetration into the nature of things is thoroughly understood.

You are all familiar with the much quoted verse: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a God.” Do men really take these lines in earnest? They utter them, but so often as mere phrases! No particular emphasis is laid on the tense: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a God.” “ Word” here must obviously have the meaning it bore in ancient Greece. It is not “word” as understood to-day—word as mere sound—but it is the inner, spiritual reality. In either case, however, it is the imperfect tense that is employed. The implication therefore is: “In the beginning the Word was; but it is no longer.” Otherwise the sentence would run: “Now is the Word; and the Word is not with God; it was with God, and a God was the Word but is so no longer.” This, moreover, is what stands in the Gospel of St. John; otherwise what would be the meaning of the words immediately following: “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” This indicates a further evolution of the Word. “Word” also means anything that man can acquire in the way of intellectual wisdom through his efforts and through his intelligence. But it must be quite clear to us that what “word” denotes here is not really the goal for which man must strive at the present time or in the immediate future. To express what is now the goal, we should have to say: “Let man seek for the Spirit that reveals itself in the Word; for the Spirit is with God, and the Spirit is a God.” Mankind must press on from the word to the spirit, to perception and knowledge of the spirit.

When I remind you of these first verses of the Gospel of St. John, you will realise what little inclination there is to-day to take such things in earnest and to surmount the arbitrary interpretations so often accepted in matters of the greatest moment. Human intelligence itself must be quickened and illumined by what is revealed in spiritual vision.—Not that actual seership is essential; what matters is that the fruits of spiritual vision shall be understood. I have repeatedly emphasised that to-day it is not the seer alone who can apprehend the truth of clairvoyant experience; this apprehension is within the power of everyone at the present time, because the spiritual capacities of men are sufficiently mature if they will but resolve to exercise them and are not too indolent to do so. But if the level befitting humanity is to be achieved, such things as were mentioned in the lecture yesterday must be taken in deep earnestness ! I used a trivial example to show you how easy it is to be deluded by figures and numbers. Is there not a great deal of superstition where numbers are concerned? What can in some way be counted is accepted in science. Natural science loves to weigh, to compute, and social science loves statistics—again a matter of computation and reckoning. It will be difficult indeed for men to bring themselves to admit that all knowledge of the external world acquired through measure and number is so much delusion.

To measure—what does it mean, in reality? It means to compare something with a given dimension, be it length or volume. I can measure a line if I compare it with a line twice, three times, four times, etc. smaller:

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In such measurements, no matter whether of lengths or surfaces or weights, the qualitative element is entirely lacking. The number 3 always remains the same, whether one is counting sheep, human beings or politicians ! It is not a matter of the qualitative, but only of the quantum, the quantitative. The essential principle of volume and number is that the qualitative is left out of account. But for that very reason, all knowledge derived from the principles of volume and measure is illusion; and the fact which must be taken in all seriousness is that the moment we enter the world that can be weighed and measured, the world of space and time, we enter a world of illusion, a world that is nothing but a Fata Morgana as long as we take it to be reality. It is the ideal of present-day thinking to experience in connection with all the things of the external world of space and time, their spatial and temporal significance; whereas, in truth, what things signify in space and time is their external aspect only, and we must transcend space and time, penetrating to much deeper levels, if we are to reach the innermost truth, the innermost being of things. And so a future must come when men will be able to say: “Yes, with my intelligence I can apprehend the external world in the way that is the ideal of natural science. But the vista thus presented to me is wholly Ahrimanic.”—This does not mean that natural science is to be ignored or put aside; it is a matter of realising that this natural science leads only to the Ahrimanic illusion. Why, then, must man have natural science, in spite of the fact that it leads only to illusion? It is because in his earth-existence he is already on the descending curve of evolution. Of the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, the Greco-Latin epoch, it may be said that in respect of knowledge, man was relatively speaking at the zenith. But now, in the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, he is on the path of decline, he is a being growing physically weaker, and to perceive the world in the way the Greek perceived it would be too much for his strength.

That is something we are not told in history! Just imagine what modern historians would have to say about it—those worthy historians who describe Greece as if they were describing some region of their own time because they do not know that the Greeks looked out into nature with different eyes, listened with different ears from those of modern men. These historians do not tell us that modern human beings would suffer from constant headache or migraine if they were to see and hear in the outer world all that the Greeks saw and heard. The Greeks lived with infinitely greater intensity in the world of the senses. Our own apprehension of this world has already weakened. To be able to bear it, a Fata Morgana has to be and is presented to us. And not only what we perceive with the senses but on account of our scientific conceptions we “dream” about the external world—that, most emphatically of all, is a Fata Morgana. The greatest dreamers where the external world is concerned are precisely those who pride themselves on being realistic in their thinking. Darwin and John Stuart Mill are fundamentally dreamers. The dreamers are the very men who claim to be thorough-going realists.

But neither must we give ourselves up entirely to our own inner life and impulses. From the way things have developed in the movement represented by the “Theosophical Society”, many of you will have realised that cultivation of the inner life alone, as attempted by numbers of people to-day, does not lead to the goal befitting man in the present age. For the all too prevalent tendency is to make no free resolve of his own to transcend ordinary life and attain higher vision but rather to bring into prominence that in him which is not free. All kinds of hallucinatory tendencies, all kinds of faculties fraught with illusion come into play.

It should be realised that just as external science becomes Ahrimanic, the higher development of a man's inner nature becomes Luciferic if he gives himself up to mystical experiences. The Luciferic tendency wakens and becomes especially powerful in everyone who, without the self-training described in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, sets about any mystical deepening of the impulses already inherent in his nature. The Luciferic tendency shows itself in everyone who begins to brood over experiences of his inner life, and it is extremely powerful in present-day humanity. It takes effect in egoism of which most people are entirely unaware. One comes across so many to-day who are quite satisfied when they can say of something they have done, that they have no cause for self-reproach, that they did it to the best of their knowledge and according to their conscience. That is an entirely Luciferic attitude. For in what we do in life the point is not whether or not we have cause to reproach ourselves; what really matters is that we shall take things objectively, with complete detachment, and in accordance with the course of objective facts. And the majority of people to-day make no effort to achieve this objective understanding or to acquire knowledge of what is necessary for world-evolution.

Therefore spiritual science must emphasise the following:—That Ahriman is actually preparing for his incarnation; where we can recognise how he is preparing for it; and with what attitude it must be confronted.—In such questions the point is not to say: We do this or that in order that we may have no cause for self-reproach—but to learn to recognise the objective facts. We must come to know what is at work in the world, and act accordingly—for the world's sake.

It all amounts to this, that modern man only speaks truly of himself when he says that he hovers perpetually between two extremes: between the Ahrimanic on the one side, where he is presented with an outer delusion, a Fata Morgana, and, on the other, the Luciferic element within him which induces the tendency to illusions, hallucinations and the like. The Ahrimanic tendencies in man to-day live themselves out in science, the Luciferic tendencies, in religion, while in art he swings between the one extreme and the other. In recent times the tendencies of some artists have been more Luciferic—they are the expressionists; the tendencies of the others have been more Ahrimanic—they are the impressionists. And then, vacillating between all this, there are the people who want to be neither the one nor the other, who do not rightly assess either the Luciferic or the Ahrimanic but want to avoid both.—“Ahriman—no!—that I must not, will not do, for it would take me into the realm of the Ahrimanic; that I must not, will not do, for it would take me into the realm of the Luciferic!” They want to be virtuous, avoiding both the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic.

But the truth of the matter is that Lucifer and Ahriman must be regarded as two scales of a balance and it is we who must hold the beam in equipoise.

And how can we train ourselves to do this?—By permeating what takes Ahrimanic form within us with a strongly Luciferic element. What is it that arises in modern man in an Ahrimanic form? It is his knowledge of the outer world. There is nothing more Ahrimanic than this knowledge of the material world, for it is sheer illusion. Nevertheless if the Fata Morgana that arises out of chemistry, out of physics, out of astronomy and the like can fill us with fiery enthusiasm and interest, then through our interest—which is itself Luciferic—we can wrest from Ahriman what is his own.

That, however, is just what human beings have no desire to do; they find it irksome. And many people who flee from external, materialistic knowledge are misconceiving their task and preparing the best possible incarnation for Ahriman in earth-existence. Again, what wells up in man's inmost being to-day is very strongly Luciferic. How can we train ourselves rightly in this direction?—By diving into it with our Ahrimanic nature, that is to say, by trying to avoid all illusions about our own inner life and impulses and observing ourselves just as we observe the outer world. Modern man must realise how urgent it is to educate himself in this way. Anyone who has an observant eye in these matters will often come across circumstances of which the following is an example.

A man tells him how indignant he is with countless human beings. He describes minutely how this or that in a, in b, in c, and so on, angers him. He has not an inkling that he is simply talking about his own characteristics. This peculiarity in human beings was never so widespread as it is to-day. And those who believe they are free of it, are the greatest culprits. The essential is that man should approach his own inner nature with Ahrimanic cold-bloodedness and dispassion. His inner nature is still fiery enough even when cooled down in this way! There is no need to fear that it will be over-cooled.

If the right stand is to be taken to Ahriman's future incarnation, men must become more objective where their own impulses are concerned, and far, far more subjective where the external world is concerned—not by introducing pictures of phantasy but by bringing interest, alert attention and devotion to the things of immediate life.

When men find one thing or another in outer life tedious, possibly because of the education they have received or because of other circumstances, the path which Ahriman wants to take for the benefit of his incarnation is greatly smoothed. Tedium is so widespread nowadays! I have known numbers of people who find it irksome to acquaint themselves for example with banking procedure, or the Stock Exchange, or single or double entry in book-keeping. But that is never the right attitude. It simply means that the point has not been discovered where a thing burns with interest. Once this point is reached, even a dry cash-book can become just as interesting as Schiller's Maid of Orleans, or Shakespeare's Hamlet, or anything else—even Raphael's Sistine Madonna. It is only a question of finding the point at which every single thing in life becomes interesting.

What I have just said may make you think that all these matters are very paradoxical. But in reality they are not. It is man who is paradoxical in his relationship to truth. What he must realise—and this is a dire necessity to-day—is that he, not the world, is at fault. Nothing does more to prepare the path for Ahriman's incarnation than to find this or that tedious, to consider oneself superior to one thing or another and refuse to enter into it. Again it is the same question of finding the point where everything is of interest. It is never a matter of a subjective rejection or acceptance of things, but of an objective recognition of the extent to which things are either Luciferic or Ahrimanic, with the result that the scales are over-weighted on the one side or the other.

To be interested in something does not mean that one considers it justifiable. It means simply that one develops an inner energy to get to grips with it and steer it into the right channel.

As some of you may know—it is a long time ago now—a number of friends bought themselves books on mathematics. A kind of “sporting spirit” had crept into them! They bought the works of Lübsen¹ but it was not long before most of the volumes found their way to library shelves and the mathematical knowledge was not much in evidence! This, of course, is not meant as a hint to tackle the matter again—I am making no such suggestion. But to come to grips with something in which, to begin with, one is not interested at all, in order that a new understanding of world-existence may arise—that is of untold significance. For such things as I want to bring home to you in these lectures—how Lucifer and Ahriman intervene in the evolution of mankind side by side with the Christ Impulse—these things must be taken in all earnestness and their consequences rightly assessed.

Had there been no Luciferic wisdom, no understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha could have been acquired through the Gnosis in the early centuries of Christendom. Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha diminished with the fading of the Luciferic wisdom. And where is there any evidence to-day of such understanding ? The fact that understanding cannot be found through external, Ahrimanic science is perceived by those who to some extent recognise its characteristics. Take, for example, a man like Cardinal Newman—a very significant figure in the sphere of religion during the second half of the nineteenth century. At his investiture as Cardinal in Rome, he declared that he could see no salvation for the religious development of mankind other than a new revelation!² But there it remained. He himself showed no special inclination to receive anything of the new spiritual life that can now stream into humanity out of the spiritual worlds. What he said remained in the sphere of abstraction.

In very truth humanity needs a new revelation. Of this there is evidence on all sides. There have been discussions recently about the deterioration in morals and in the general attitude to morality during the last four or five years. The conclusion reached is that denominational religious instruction must be introduced more intensively into the schools. But it cannot be emphasised often enough that this instruction was already being given and the times are supposed to have come under its influence. If the old denominational instruction is again to be introduced we shall simply be beginning the whole process over again. In a short time we shall be back where we were in 1914. It is in the highest degree important to realise that in the subconsciousness of human beings there are longings quite different in character from what comes to expression on the surface.

When we founded the Waldorf School in Stuttgart earlier this year, we were obliged to arrange for the religious instruction to be divided among the various clergy. A particular hour is devoted to religious instruction, which is given by a Catholic priest for the Catholic children and by an Evangelical pastor for the Evangelicals. I shall not speak of the difficulties that came from the side of the priests—that is a chapter by itself. What I do want to say, however, is that an immediate desire was expressed for religious teaching apart from any denomination. At first I thought that the attendance would be insignificant in comparison with the numbers attending the denominational instruction. But in spite of the fact that soon there will not be a single pulpit in Stuttgart from which invectives are not poured on Anthroposophy, a large number of children—five times as many as we expected—have asked for a kind of anthroposophical instruction in religion, and the class has had to be divided into two. Subjectively this may not be altogether welcome, for it may prove to be a rod for our own backs. But of that I do not want to speak. I want only to show that there is a longing for progress in human beings but that they are asleep and do not perceive that forces are keeping these longings in subjection. And moreover the courage to bring these longings to the surface is very largely lacking.

Just think what the effect could be of knowledge such as that of the future incarnation of Ahriman, who is preparing for it by means I have been describing both yesterday and to-day. It is essential to inform ourselves objectively about these things in order that we may take the right stand towards what is going on around us in the way of preparation for the Ahriman-incarnation. Only if you apply deep and mature reflection to what has been said in these lectures about the Ahrimanic currents, will you be able to apprehend the gravity of the present situation.

• 1. Heinrich Borchert Lübsen (1801–64).
• 2. See his speech in Rome, May 12th, 1879, when he had been raised to the rank of Cardinal. “... Hitherto the civil power has been Christian. Even in countries separated from the Church, as in my own, the dictum was in force, when I was young, that ‘Christianity was the law of the land’. Now, everywhere that goodly framework of society, which is the creation of Christianity, is throwing off Christianity. The dictum to which I have referred, with a hundred others which followed upon it, is gone, or is going everywhere; and by the end of the century, unless the Almighty interferes, it will be forgotten.” (The Life of John Henry Newman, by Wilfrid Ward. Vol. 2, p. 460.)

I want to speak to-day of something that will help to deepen our understanding of truths that must now be given to mankind by Anthroposophy. We have often spoken of the two poles of forces in man: the pole of will and the pole of intelligence. To understand the nature of man we must be constantly mindful of these two poles.

Man is a being of will and a being of intelligence. Between them—at any rate from birth until death—lies the element of feeling, constituting the bridge between the intelligence and the will. You know that these forces separate from each other in a certain sense when man reaches what is called the Threshold of the Spiritual World.

Our study to-day will be concerned more particularly with the relationship in which man stands to the surrounding world, on the one side as a being of intelligence and on the other as a being of will. We shall deal with the latter first.

In his life between birth and death, man unfolds the force of will as the impulse of his actions and activity. As it comes to expression through the human organism, this force of will is a very intricate, complicated matter. Nevertheless in one aspect, everything of the nature of will in man bears a great likeness, amounting almost to identity, with certain forces of nature. It is therefore quite correct to speak of an inner relation between the forces of will in the human being and the forces of nature.

You know from earlier studies that even while man is awake, he is in a condition resembling sleep wherever his will is involved. True, he has in his consciousness the ideas lying behind what he wills, but how a particular idea takes effect in the form of will—of that he knows nothing. He does not know how the idea, “I move my arm”, is connected with the process leading to the actual movement of the arm. This process lies entirely in the subconsciousness and it may truly be said that man is no more conscious of the real process of will than he is of what takes place during sleep. But when the question arises as to the connection of man's will with the surrounding world, we come to something that will strike the kind of consciousness that has developed in the course of the last three to five centuries as highly paradoxical. It is generally thought that the evolution of the earth would be the same even if human beings had no part in it at all. A typical natural scientist describes the evolution of the earth as a series, let us say, of geological, purely physical processes. And even if he does not expressly say so, he has in mind that from the earth's beginning until its hypothetical end, everything would go on just the same even if it were uninhabited by human beings. Why is this view held by natural science to-day? The reason is that when anything takes place, for example in the mineral kingdom, or the plant kingdom, let us say on November 9th, 1919, people believe that its cause lies in what has happened in the mineral kingdom prior to this particular point of time. Men think: the mineral kingdom takes its course and what happens at any point is the effect of what went before; the mineral effect is due to a mineral cause.

This is the way men think and you will find evidence of it in any text-book of geology. Conditions obtaining at the present time are said to be the effects of the Ice Age, or of some preceding epoch—but the causes are attributed entirely to what once took place in the mineral kingdom as such; the fact that man inhabits the earth is ignored. The belief is that even were man not present, everything would run a similar course, that the external reality would be the same—although, in fact, man has always been part of this external reality. The truth is that the earth is one whole, man himself being one of the active factors in the earth's evolution.—I will give you an example.

You know that our present epoch—thinking of it for the moment in the wider sense, as comprising the period since the great Atlantean catastrophe—was preceded by the Atlantean epoch itself, when the continents of Europe, Africa and America in their present form were not in existence. At that time there was one main continent on the earth—Atlantis as it is called—extending over the area that is now the Atlantic Ocean. You know too that at a certain period in this Atlantean evolution, immorality of a particular kind was rampant throughout the then civilised world. Human beings had far greater power over the forces of nature than they later possessed and employed these forces for evil purposes. Thus we can look back to an age of widespread immorality. And then came the great Atlantean catastrophe. The orthodox geologist will naturally trace this catastrophe to processes in the mineral kingdom; indeed it is a fact that one part of the earth subsided and another arose. But it will not occur to those who base their thinking on the principles of modern natural science to say to themselves that the deeds and activities of men were among the contributory causes.—Yet so it is.—In very truth the Atlantean catastrophe was the outcome of the deeds of men on the earth.

Outer, mineral causes are not alone responsible for these great catastrophic events that break in upon earth-existence. We must look for causes lying within the sphere of human actions and impulses. Man himself belongs to the chain of causative forces in earth-existence. Nor does this apply only to events of such magnitude but to what is happening all the time. Only the connection between what goes on within man and cosmic happenings which take effect in tellurian events, remains hidden, to begin with. In this respect the whole of our natural science amounts to a great, all-embracing illusion. For if you want to get at the real causes you will not discover them by studying the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms alone.

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Let me give you the following illustration of what comes into consideration here. We will approach it, so to speak, from the opposite side.—Here (X) is the centre of the earth.—When something takes place in the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom or the animal kingdom, it is a matter of seeking the causes. The causes lie at certain points which are to be found everywhere. You can picture what I mean by thinking of the following.—In the region around Naples in Italy, you will find that the earth over a wide area will emit vapour if you take a piece of paper and set it alight. Vapours begin to rise from the ground beneath you. You will say: the force which drives up the vapours lies in the physical process generated by the lighting of the paper. In this case, the physical process is that by lighting the paper you rarify the air and because of the rarification of the air the vapours inside the earth press upwards. They are kept down by the normal air-pressure and this is diminished by setting light to the paper. If I merely want to give an example of effects of a purely mineral nature—such as these vapours arising out of the earth—I could say for the sake of illustration that here, and here (points in the diagram), a piece of paper is set alight. This shows you that the causes of the rising of the vapour do not lie below the soil, but above it. Now these points in the diagram—a, b, c, d, e, f do not represent pieces of paper that have been set alight; in this instance they represent something different. Imagine, to begin with, that each point on its own has no significance but that the significance lies in the system of points as a whole.—Do not think now of the pieces of lighted paper, but of something else which at the moment I will not specify. Something else is there as an active cause, above the surface of the earth; and these different causes do not work singly, but together. And now imagine that there are not six points only, but, let us say 1,500 million points [Note 1] all working together, producing a combined effect. These 1,500 million points are actually there. Each of you has within you what may be called the centre of gravity of your own physical structure. When man is awake, this centre of gravity lies just below the diaphragm; when he is asleep it lies a little lower. There are therefore some 1,500 million of these centres of gravity spread over the earth, producing a combined effect. And what issues from this combined effect is the actual cause of a great deal of what takes place in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms on the earth. It is a scientific fallacy to trace back to mineral causes the forces manifesting in air and water and in the mineral realm; in reality the causes are to be found within man.

This is a truth of which there is scarcely an inkling to-day. It is known to very, very few that the causes of processes active in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms lie within the organism of man. (This does not apply to all the forces working in these kingdoms of nature, but to a large proportion of them.) Within mankind lie the causes for what happens on earth. Therefore mineralogy, botany, zoology, cannot be cultivated truly without anthropology—without the study of man. Science tells us of physical, chemical and mechanical forces. These forces are intimately connected with the human will, with the force of human will that is concentrated in man's centre of gravity. If we speak of the earth with an eye to the truth of these matters, we must not follow the geologists in speaking of an earth in the abstract, but humanity must be accounted an integral part of the earth. These are the truths that reveal themselves on yonder side of the Threshold. Everything that can be known on this side of the Threshold belongs to the realm of the illusions of knowledge, not to the realm of truth.

At this point the question arises: What relation is there between the forces of will that are concentrated in man's centre of gravity, and the external, physical and chemical forces?—We are speaking, remember, of present-day humanity.—In normal life, this relation takes effect in the metabolic processes. When man takes into himself the substances of the outer world, it is his will that actually digests and works upon these substances. And if nothing else were in operation, then what is taken into the organism from outside would simply be destroyed. The human will has the power to dissolve and destroy all extraneous substances and forces; and the relation between man and the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms of nature to-day is such that his will is connected with the forces of dissolution and destruction inherent in our planet.

We could not live were this destruction not to take place—but for all that it is destruction. This must never be forgotten. And what are often described as unlawful magical practices are based essentially on the fact that certain human beings learn to employ their will wrongfully, in such a way that they do not confine the destructive forces to their normal operations within the organism but extend them over other human beings, deliberately and consciously applying the forces of destruction that are anchored in their will. That, quite obviously, is a practice that is never, under any circumstances, permissible.

Through our will we are connected with the earth's forces of decline. And if as human beings had only our forces of will, the earth would be condemned through us, through mankind, to sheer destruction. The prospect of the future would then be far from inspiring; it would be a vista of the gradual dissolution of the earth and its ultimate dispersal in cosmic space.—So much for the one pole in man's constitution.

But man is a twofold being. One pole is, as we have seen, connected with the destructive forces of our planet; the other pole—that of intelligence—is connected with the will by the bridge of feeling. But in his waking life, man's intelligence is of little account as far as the planet earth is concerned. During waking life we cannot really establish a true relationship to earth-existence through our intelligence. What I have told you in regard to the will happens while man is awake, although he is not conscious of it. If you see a rock crumbling away and ask where the actual causes of the crumbling lie, then you must look into the inner, organic nature of man himself. Strange as this will seem to the modern mind, it is indeed so. But as I said, the earth would face a sorry future if the other pole of man's nature were not there—the pole of the upbuilding forces. Just as the causes of all destruction lie in the will that is concentrated in man's centre of gravity, so the upbuilding forces lie in the sphere into which men pass during their sleep. From the time of falling asleep until that of waking, man is in a condition figuratively described by saying that with his “I” and astral body he is outside the physical body. But then he is entirely a being of soul-and-spirit, unfolding the forces that are in operation between falling asleep and waking. During this time he is connected, through these forces, with everything that builds up the earth-planet, everything that adds to the forces of destruction the constructive, upbuilding forces. If you did not go about the earth, the destructive forces actually proceeding from your will would not be working in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. If you never went to sleep, the forces whereby the earth is continually upbuilt would not stream out of your intelligence. The constructive, upbuilding forces of the planet earth also lie in humanity itself: I do not say: in the individual human being—for I have expressly said that all these single causes form a collective whole. The upbuilding forces lie in mankind as a whole, actually in the pole of intelligence in man's being but not in his waking intelligence. Waking intelligence is really like a lifeless entity thrusting itself into earth-evolution. The intelligence that works, unconsciously to man, during his sleep—that is what builds up the earth-planet. By this I am only trying to explain that it is a fallacy to look outside the human being for the destructive and the constructive forces of our earth; you must look for them within the human being. Once you grasp this, what I am now going to say will not be unintelligible.

You look up to the stars, saying that something is streaming from them that can be perceived by man's sense-organs here on earth.—But what you behold when you gaze at the stars is not of the same nature as what you perceive on the earth in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. In reality it proceeds from beings of intelligence and will whose life is bound up with those stars. The effects appear to be physical because the stars are at a distance. They are not in reality physical at all. What you actually see are the inter activities of beings of will and intelligence in the stars. I have already spoken to you of the ingenious description of the sun given by astrophysicists. But if it were possible to journey to the sun by some means of transport invented by a Jules Verne, it would be found with amazement that nothing of what was to be expected from these physical descriptions exists. The descriptions are merely a composite picture of solar phenomena. What we see is in reality the working of will and intelligence which at a distance appears as light. If an inhabitant of the Moon—supposing in this sense there were such a being—were to look at the earth, he would not detect its grassy or mineral surfaces but—also perceiving it as a light effect or something similar—he would detect what takes place around the centres of gravity of human bodies and also the effects of the conditions in which man lives between going to sleep and waking. That is what would actually be seen from the universe. Even the most perfect instrument would not enable the chairs, for instance, on which you are now sitting, to be seen; what would be seen is all that is taking place in the region of your centres of gravity and what would happen if you were suddenly to fall asleep—it is to be hoped that this would not happen in every case! But wherever it did happen, it would be perceived out in the universe.

So that to the outer universe, what takes place through human beings is the perceptible reality—not what surrounds man in earthly existence. A very common saying is that everything perceived with the senses is maya—the great illusion—no reality but simply appearance. Such an abstraction is of little account. It has meaning only when one enters into the concrete, as we have now been doing. To say glibly that the animal, plant and mineral worlds are maya means nothing. What is of value is the realisation that what you perceive outwardly depends fundamentally upon yourselves and that—not of course at each moment but in the course of mankind's evolution—you make yourselves an integral part of the chain of causes and effects.

Even when such a shattering truth is uttered—and I think it may well be shattering—it is not always seen in the aspect where it becomes of importance in life. Such a truth assumes importance only when we perceive its consequences. We are not physical beings only; we are moral—or maybe immoral—beings in earthly existence. What we do is determined by impulses of a moral nature.

Now just think with what bitter doubt modern thought is assailed in this domain.—Natural science provides a knowledge of the earthly that is confined to the connection between purely external causes and effects; and in this cycle of natural causes and effects, physical man too is involved. So it is alleged by external, abstract science which takes account of one aspect only of earthly existence.

The fact that moral impulses also light up in man is admitted but nothing is known about the connection between these moral impulses and what comes to pass in the round of external nature. Indeed the dilemma of modern philosophy is that the philosophers hear on the one hand from the scientists that everything is involved in a chain of natural causes and effects—and on the other hand have to admit that moral impulses light up in man. That is the reason why Kant wrote two “Critiques”: the Critique of Pure Reason, concerned with the relation of man to a purely natural course of things, and the Critique of Practical Reason where he puts forward his moral postulates—which in truth—if I may speak figuratively—hover in the air, come out of the blue and have no a priori relation with natural causes.

As long as man believes that what takes place in the external manifestations of nature can be traced only to similar manifestations, as long as he clings to this illusion, the intervention of moral impulses is something that remains separate and apart from the course of nature. Nearly everything that is discussed to-day lies under the shadow of this breach. In their thinking men cannot fuse the earthly round as such with the moral life of humanity. But as soon as you grasp something of what I have tried briefly to outline, you will be able to say: Yes, as man I am a unity, and moral impulses are alive within me. They live in what I am as a physical being. But as a physical human being I am fundamentally the cause—together with all mankind—of every physical happening.—The moral conduct and achievements of human beings on the earth are the real causes of what comes to pass in the course of earth-existence.

Natural history and natural science describe the earth in the way we find in text-books of geology, botany and so forth. What is said there seems entirely satisfactory according to the premises formed through modern education. But let us suppose that an inhabitant of Mars were to come down to the earth and observe it in the light of his premises.—I am not saying that such a thing could happen but merely trying to illustrate what I mean.—Suppose a being from Mars, having wandered dumbly about the earth were then to learn some human language, read some geology and thus discover what kind of ideas prevail concerning the processes and happenings on the earth.—He would say: But that is not all. By far the most important factor is ignored. For example, I have noticed crowds of students loitering about in their beer-houses, drinking and indulging their passions. Something is happening there: the human will is working in the metabolism. These are processes of which no mention is made in your books on physics and geology; they contain no reference to the fact that the course of earth-existence is also affected by whether the students drink or do not drink.—... That is what a being not entirely immersed in earthly ideas and prejudices would find lacking in the descriptions given by man himself of happenings on earth. For a being from Mars there would be no question but that moral impulses, pervading human deeds and the whole of human life, are part and parcel of the course of nature. According to modern preconceptions there is something inexorable in the play of nature, indeed pleasantly inexorable for materialistic thinkers. They imagine that the earth's course would be exactly the same were no human beings in existence; that whether they behave decently or not makes no fundamental difference or really alters anything. But that is not the case! The all-essential causes of what happens on the earth do not lie outside man; they lie within mankind. And if earthly consciousness is to expand to cosmic consciousness, humanity must realise that the earth—not over short but over long stretches of time—is made in its own likeness, in the likeness of humanity itself. There is no better means of lulling man to sleep than to impress upon him that he has no share in the course taken by earth-existence. This narrows down human responsibility to the single individual, the single personality.

The truth is that the responsibility for the course of earth-existence through ages of cosmic time, lies with humanity. Everyone must feel himself to be a member of humanity, the earth itself being the body for that humanity.

An individual may say to himself: For ten years I have given way to my passions, indulged my fancies and have thereby ruined my body.—With equal conviction he should be able to say: If earthly humanity follows impure moral impulses, then the body of the earth will be different from what it would be were the moral impulses pure.—The day-fly, because it lives for twenty-four hours only, has a view of the world differing entirely from that of man. The range of man's vision is not wide enough to perceive that what happens externally in the course of nature is not dependent upon purely natural causes. In regard to the present configuration of Europe, it is far more important to ask what manner of life prevailed among human beings in the civilised world two thousand years ago than to investigate the external mineral and plant structure of the earth. The destiny of our physical earth-planet in another two thousand years will not depend upon the present constitution of our mineral world, but upon what we do and allow to be done. With world-consciousness, human responsibility widens into world-responsibility. With such consciousness we feel as we look up to the starry heavens that we are responsible to this cosmic expanse, permeated and pervaded as it is by spirit—that we are responsible to this world for how we conduct the earth. We grow together with the cosmos in concrete reality when behind the phenomena we seek for the truth.

I so often tell you that we must learn to perceive the concrete realities of things for the most part taught as abstractions to-day. Nothing much is accomplished by adopting oriental traditions such as: the external world of the senses is maya. We must go much deeper if we are to arrive at the truth. Such abstractions do not carry us far, because in the form in which they have been handed down they are nothing but the sediment of a primeval wisdom that did not hover in abstractions but teemed with concrete realities which must be brought to light again through spiritual intuition and research. When you read in oriental literature of maya and of truth as its antithesis,do not imagine that what you read there to-day can be really intelligible to you. It is only a much later compilation of matters that were concrete realities to the ancient wisdom. We must get back to these concrete realities. Men think to-day that they have some understanding of cosmic processes when they assert that the external world of sense is maya.—But nothing can be understood unless one presses on to the underlying realities. The moment it is realised: we have not to ask how the present mineral world has developed out of the mineral processes of another age; we have rather to ask about what has been going on in mankind—at that moment the real meaning of the saying, “the outer world is maya”, becomes clear. Then we begin to perceive in man a reality far greater than is usually perceived.—And then the feeling of responsibility for earth-existence begins.

If you will try to get to the inner core of these things—and it must be by inward contemplation, not by means of the kind of intelligence employed in natural science—you will gradually find your way to the realisation that mankind is composed of free human beings. Nature does not, in truth, counteract our freedom, for as human beings we ourselves fashion the nature immediately surrounding us. It is only in its partial manifestations that nature counteracts our freedom. Nature counteracts our freedom to an extent no greater than if—to give an example—you are stretching out your hand and someone else takes hold of it and checks the movement. You will not deny freedom of will simply because someone else checks a movement. As men of the present day we are checked in many respects because of some action of our predecessors that is only now taking effect. But at all events it was an action of men.—What men? Not anyone against whom we can turn with reproach, for we ourselves were the men who, in earlier earthly lives, brought about the conditions obtaining to-day.

We must not confine ourselves to the mere mention of repeated earthly lives but think of the connection between them in such a way that even in external nature we perceive the effects of causes we ourselves laid down in earlier lives. Naturally, in reference to the single, individual human being, we must speak of contributory causes only, for in all these things, as I have said, it is a matter of the collective interworking of men on the earth. No one should, for that reason, exclude himself as an individual, for each of us has his share in what is brought about by humanity as a whole and then comes to expression in what constitutes the body for the whole of earthly humanity in its onflowing life.

I have been endeavouring to give you an idea of how a spiritual scientist must regard the statements made in ordinary scientific text-books.—Suppose I were to draw a series of figures:

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And now suppose some creature who had never lived in the world of men were to crawl out of the earth and, having some rudiments of arithmetical knowledge were to look at the figures and say: First figure, second figure, third figure. The third is the effect of the second and the second the effect of the first. Effect of the first figure—a triangle; effect of the second—a circle.—This creature would then be combining cause and effect. But it would be a fallacy, for I have drawn each figure separately. In reality the one is independent of the other. It only appears to be dependent to this creature who associates what comes first with what follows, as if the one were the outcome of the other. This, approximately, is how the geologist describes the process of the earth: Diluvial epoch, Tertiary epoch, Quarternary epoch, and so on. But this is no more true than the statement that the circle is the outcome, the effect of the triangle, or the triangle the effect of the rectangular figure. The configurations of the earth are brought about autonomously—through the deeds of earthly humanity, including the mysterious workings of the intelligence during the periods of sleep when man is outside his physical body.

This shows you that the descriptions given by external science are very largely illusion—maya. But merely to speak about maya is of little account. To the assertion that the external world is maya we must be able to reply by stating where the actual causes lie. These causes are hidden to a great extent from man's powers of cognition. The part played by mankind in shaping earth-existence cannot be fathomed by means of external science but only by an inner science. My book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment speaks of man's inner activity between the time of going to sleep and waking. This can be revealed by knowledge that reaches down to the sphere of the will. Man knows nothing of the connection between the will and the outer world for the processes of the will are hidden and concealed. He does not know what is really going on when by lifting his hand he sets in operation a process of will; nor does he know that this process continues and has an effect in the whole course of earth-existence.

This is indicated in the scene in my Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation, where the actions of Capesius and Strader have their outcome in cosmic manifestations—in thunder and lightning. It is, of course, a pictorial representation, but the picture contains a deeper truth; it is not phantasy but actual truth. For a fairly long period in evolution, truths of this kind have been voiced only by true poets whose phantasy must always be perception of super-sensible processes.

This is very little understood by modern man who likes to relegate poetry, indeed all art, to a place separate and apart from external reality. He feels relieved not to be asked to see in poetry anything more than phantasy. True poetry, true art, is of course, no more than a reflection of super-sensible truth—but a reflection it is. Even if the poet is not himself conscious of the super-sensible happenings, if his soul is linked with the cosmos, if he has not been torn away from the cosmos by materialistic education, he gives utterances to super-sensible truths, in spite of having to express them in pictures drawn from the world of sense.

Many examples of this are contained in the second part of Goethe's Faust, where as I have shown in the case of particular passages, the imagery has a direct relation with super-sensible processes. [Note 2] The development of art in recent centuries affords evidence of what I have been saying.—Take any picture painted by no means very long ago, and you will find that as a rule, landscape is given very secondary importance. The painting of landscape has come into prominence only since the last three to five centuries. Earlier than that you will find that landscape takes second place; it is the world of man that is brought to the forefront because the consciousness still survived that in regard to objective processes of earth-existence the world of man is much more important than the landscape—which is but the effect of the world of man. In the very birth of preference for landscape there lies, in the sphere of art, the parallel phenomenon of the birth of the materialistic trend of mind—consisting in the belief that landscape and what it represents has an existence of its own, entirely apart from man. But the truth is quite the reverse. Were some inhabitant of Mars to come down to the earth he would certainly be able to see meaning in Leonardo da Vinci's “Last Supper”, but not in paintings of landscapes. He would see landscapes—including painted landscapes—and the whole configuration of the earth quite differently and with his particular organ of sense could not fathom their meaning.—Please remember that I am saying these things merely in order to illustrate hypothetically what I want to convey.

So you see, the saying: “the external world is maya” cannot be fully understood without entering into the concrete realities. But to do this we must relate ourselves intimately with earth-existence as a whole, know ourselves to be an integral part of it. And then we must grasp the thought that there can be external and apparent realities which are not the truth, not the true realities. If you have a rose in your room, it is an apparent reality only, for the rose as it is in front of you there, cannot be the reality. It can be true reality only while it is growing on the rose-tree, united with the roots which in turn are united with the earth. The earth as described by the geologists is as little a true reality as a plucked rose is a reality.

Spiritual science endeavours never to halt at the untrue reality, but always to seek what must be added, in order to have the whole, true reality. The meagre sense of reality prevailing in our present civilisation expresses itself in the very fact that every external manifestation is taken as reality. But there is reality only in what lies before one as an integrated whole. The earth by itself, without man, is no more a true reality than the rose plucked from the rose-tree.—These things must be pondered and worked upon; they must not remain theories but pass over into our feelings. We must feel ourselves members of the whole earth. It is of importance again and again to call up the thought: this finger on my hand has true reality only as long as it is part of my organism; if it is cut off it no longer has true reality.—Similarly, man has no true reality apart from the earth, nor has the earth without mankind. It is an unreal concept when the modern scientific investigator thinks, according to his premises, that earth-evolution would run the same course if humanity were not there. I recently showed you that it would not be so, by telling you that the bodies laid aside by human beings at death become a leaven in earth-evolution and that if no human bodies—either by burial or cremation—became part of the earth, the whole course of physical happenings would be other than it is in consequence of these bodies having been received into the earth.

In the lecture to-day I wanted to speak in greater detail of the connection between the two poles of will and intelligence in man and his cosmic environment.

Notes:

Note 1. Representing, approximately, the total population of the earth.

Note 2. Twenty-eight lectures given in the year 1915. Geisteswissenschaftliche Erläuterungen zu Goethe's Faust. [This is a reference to GA#'s 272 and 273: Spiritual Scientific Note on Goethe's Faust, Volumes I (15 lectures) and II (13 lectures), most of which are yet untranslated. – e.Ed.]

We have heard that the human soul was once endowed with a kind of primeval wisdom, that this wisdom gradually faded away and is now no longer accessible. Consequently in respect of their knowledge, men feel thrown back more and more upon what is presented to them by physical existence. By “knowledge” I do not only mean science in the accepted sense, but the knowledge that is consciously applied by the soul in the ordinary affairs of life.

The question will naturally arise: how did this ancient wisdom actually come into being? Here I must touch upon a new aspect of matters we have often considered from other angles.

Let us look back to the time when man began in the real sense to be a citizen of the earth, when as a being of soul-and-spirit he came down to the earth, surrounded himself with its forces and became an earthly being. If he had simply descended to the earth with the qualities inherent in his own nature, evolution would have taken quite a different course through the various epochs of culture. But having made the descent, man would have been obliged to establish relationship with the surrounding world, to acquire earthly knowledge—I will not say through clairvoyance in the proper sense—but through instincts imbued with a certain measure of clairvoyance. The acquisition of this earthly knowledge would have been a very slow and gradual process and for long ages men would have remained ineffectual, childish beings. By our own time they would, it is true, have succeeded in developing a constitution of soul and body compatible with manhood, but they would never have reached the spiritual heights they have actually attained. That they were able to achieve this evolution in a way other than by passing through all the stages of childhood, is due to the intervention in earthly evolution of the Luciferic beings. We know from recent lectures that the Lucifer-individuality himself incarnated in Asia in a certain epoch of pre-Christian times, and that the original Pagan wisdom to which many historical data bear witness, proceeded from this Being. But the Luciferic beings have from the very beginning been associated in some way with the evolution of humanity.

I beg you earnestly—although I know that such requests are of little avail—not to adopt a philistine attitude when mention is made of Luciferic beings. Even among anthroposophists there is still the tendency to say: “That is certainly Luciferic. At all costs let us avoid it, reject it!” But these things have to be considered in many different aspects and it must always be remembered that the whole of the old Pagan wisdom emanated from a Luciferic source. The subject is one that calls for deep and serious study.

The farther back we go in the evolution of humanity, the more do we find certain individuals who through the qualities attained in earlier incarnations were sufficiently mature to apprehend the treasures of wisdom possessed by the Luciferic beings Think, for example, of the seven Holy Rishis of ancient India.—When an Indian interpreted the wisdom of the Holy Rishis, he knew, if he had been initiated into these things, that the Teachers of the Rishis were Luciferic beings. For what the Luciferic beings brought with them into earth-evolution was, above all, the world of thought, of intellectualistic thought pervading culture, the world of reason in the highest sense of the word—the world of wisdom. And going back to the primeval origins of human existence, we find that the sources of Pagan wisdom always lie with Luciferic beings.

It may be asked: How is this possible? We must realise that man would have remained a child had he not received from the Mysteries the constant instruction that emanated from Luciferic beings. Those who possessed the knowledge and the inherited, primeval wisdom wherewith to foster the progress and education of mankind, were not—like a modern philistine—fearful of receiving this wisdom from Luciferic sources. They took upon themselves the obligation incumbent upon everyone to whom Luciferic beings impart knowledge from spiritual realms. The obligation—for so it may be called, although such words do not always convey the exact meaning—was to use this Luciferic, cosmic wisdom rightly, for the good of earth-evolution. The difference between the “good” wisdom and the purely Luciferic wisdom—which so far as content is concerned is exactly the same—is that the “good” wisdom is in hands other than those of the Luciferic beings. That is the essential point. It is not a question of there being one wisdom that can be neatly packed away in some chamber of the soul and make a man virtuous! The wisdom of worlds is uniform, the only difference being whether it is in the hands of wise men who use it for good, whether it is in the hands of the Angeloi or Archangeloi, or whether it is in the hands of Lucifer and his hosts. In olden times the wisdom needed for the progress of humanity could be obtained only from a Luciferic source; hence the Initiates were obliged to receive it from that source and at the same time to take upon themselves the obligation not to yield to the aspirations of the Luciferic beings.

Lucifer's intention was to convey the wisdom to men in such a way that it would induce them to abandon the path of earth-evolution and take a path leading to a super-earthly sphere, a sphere aloof from the earth. The Luciferic beings inculcated their wisdom into man but their desire was that it would make him turn away from the earth, without passing through earthly evolution. Lucifer wants to abandon the earth to its fate, to win mankind for a kingdom alien to the kingdom of Christ.

The wise men of olden time who received the primeval wisdom from the hands of Lucifer had, as I said, to pledge themselves not to yield to his wishes but to use the wisdom for the good of earth-evolution. And that, in essence, was what was accomplished through the pre-Christian Mysteries. If it be asked what it was that humanity received through these Mysteries, through the influence of the Luciferic beings who, in post-Atlantean times, still inspired certain personalities like the Rishis of India and sent their messengers to the earth—the answer is that man received the rudiments of what has developed in the course of evolution into the faculties of speech and of thinking. Speaking and thinking are, in their origins, Luciferic, but were drawn away from the grip of Lucifer by the wise men of old.—If you are really intent upon fleeing from Lucifer, then you must make up your minds to be dumb in the future, and not to think !

These things are part of the Initiation-science which must gradually come within the ken of humanity, although on account of the kind of education that has now been current for centuries in the civilised world, men shrink from such truths. The caricatured figure of Lucifer and Ahriman—the medieval devil—is constantly before their minds and they have been allowed to grow up in this philistine atmosphere for so long that even to-day they shudder at the thought of approaching treasures of wisdom that are intimately and deeply connected with evolution. It is much pleasanter to say: “If I protect myself from the devil, if I give myself to Christ with the simple-heartedness of a child, I shall be blessed, and my soul will find salvation.”—But in its deep foundations, human life is by no means such a simple matter. And it is essential for the future of human evolution that these things we are now discussing shall not be withheld from mankind. It must be known that the art of speaking and the art of thinking have become part of evolution only because they were received through the mediation of Lucifer. The Luciferic element can still be observed in thinking. Speech, which has for long ages been differentiated and adapted to earthly needs, has already been assailed by Ahriman. It is he who has brought about differentiation, who has degraded the one, cosmic speech into the different tongues on earth. Whereas the Luciferic tendency is always towards unification, the fundamental tendency of the Ahrimanic principle is differentiation.—What would thinking be if it were not Luciferic?

If thinking were not Luciferic, human beings on the earth would be like one whose thought was utterly non-Luciferic, namely Goethe. Goethe was one of those who, in a certain respect, deliberately set out to confront and defy the Luciferic powers. That, however, makes it essential to keep constant hold of the concrete, individual reality. The moment you generalise or unify—at that moment you are nearing Luciferic thinking. If you were to contemplate each human individual, each single plant, each single animal, each single stone in itself alone, having in mind the one, single object, not classifying into genera and species, not generalising in your thought—then you would be little prone to Luciferic thinking. But anyone who were to attempt such a thing, even as a child, would never get beyond the lowest class in any modern school.

The fact of the matter is that the universal thinking implicit in Pagan wisdom has gradually been exhausted. Man's constitution is such that this Luciferic principle of unification can no longer be of much real service to him on earth. This has been counteracted by the fact that the God-created nature of man has followed in the wake of earth-evolution, has become related to, allied with the earth. And because this is so, through his own inherent nature man is less allied with the Luciferic element which always tends to draw him away from the earth.

But woe betide if man were simply to draw away from the Luciferic element without putting something different in its place. That would bring nothing but evil. For then man would grow together with the earth, that is to say with the particular territory on earth where he is born; and his cultural life would become completely specialised, completely differentiated. We can already see this tendency developing. It has taken root most markedly since the beginning of the nineteenth century; but the tendency to split up into smaller and smaller groups has been all too apparent as a result of the catastrophic world war. Chauvinism is more and more gaining the upper hand until it will finally lead men to split up to such an extent that at last a group will embrace only one single human being! Things could come to the point where individual men would again split into right and left, and be at war within themselves; left would be at loggerheads with right. Such tendencies are even now evident in the evolution of mankind. To combat this, a counterweight must be created; and this counterweight can only be created if, like the old wisdom inherent in Paganism, a new wisdom, acquired by the free resolve and will of man, is infused into earthly culture. This new wisdom must again be an Initiation-wisdom.

And here we come to a chapter that must not be withheld from the knowledge of modern man. If, in the future, man were to do nothing himself towards acquiring a new wisdom, then, unconsciously to him, the whole of culture would become Ahrimanic, and it would be easy for the influences issuing from Ahriman's incarnation to permeate all civilisation on the earth. Precautions must therefore be taken in regard to the streams by which the Ahrimanic form of culture is furthered. What would be the result if men were to follow the strong inclination they have to-day to let things drift on as they are, without understanding and guiding into right channels those streams which lead to an Ahrimanic culture?—As soon as Ahriman incarnates at the destined time in the West, the whole of culture would be impregnated with his forces. What else would come in his train? Through certain stupendous arts he would bring to man all the clairvoyant knowledge which until then can be acquired only by dint of intense labour and effort. Men could live on as materialists, they could eat and drink—as much as may be left after the war!—and there would be no need, for any spiritual efforts. The Ahrimanic streams would continue their unimpeded course. When Ahriman incarnates in the West at the appointed time, he would establish a great occult school for the practice of magic arts of the greatest grandeur, and what otherwise can be acquired only by strenuous effort would be poured over mankind.

Let it never be imagined that Ahriman will appear as a kind of hoaxer, playing mischievous tricks on human beings. No, indeed ! Lovers of ease who refuse to have anything to do with spiritual science, would fall prey to his magic, for by means of these stupendous magic arts he would be able to make great numbers of human beings into seers—but in such a way that the clairvoyance of each individual would be strictly differentiated. What one person would see, a second and a third would not see. Confusion would prevail and in spite of being made receptive to clairvoyant wisdom, men would inevitably fall into strife on account of the sheer diversity of their visions. Ultimately, however, they would all be satisfied with their own particular vision, for each of them would be able to see into the spiritual world. In this way all culture on the earth would fall prey to Ahriman. Men would succumb to Ahriman simply through not having acquired by their own efforts what Ahriman is ready and able to give them. No more evil advice could be given than to say: “Stay just as you are! Ahriman will make all of you clairvoyant if you so desire. And you will desire it because Ahriman's power will be very great.”—But the result would be the establishment of Ahriman's kingdom on earth and the overthrow of everything achieved hitherto by human culture; all the disastrous tendencies unconsciously cherished by mankind to-day would take effect.

Our concern is that the wisdom of the future—a clairvoyant wisdom—shall be rescued from the clutches of Ahriman. Again let it be repeated that there is only one book of wisdom, not two kinds of wisdom. The issue is whether this wisdom is in the hands of Ahriman or of Christ. It cannot come into the hands of Christ unless men fight for it. And they can only fight for it by telling themselves that by their own efforts they must assimilate the content of spiritual science before the time of Ahriman's appearance on earth.

That, you see, is the cosmic task of spiritual science. It consists in preventing knowledge from becoming—or remaining—Ahrimanic. A good way of playing into Ahriman's hands is to exclude everything of the nature of knowledge from denominational religion and to insist that simple faith is enough. If a man clings to this simple faith, he condemns his soul to stagnation and then the wisdom that must be rescued from Ahriman cannot find entry. The point is not whether men do or do not simply receive the wisdom of the future but whether they work upon it; and those who do must take upon themselves the solemn duty of saving earthly culture for Christ, just as the ancient Rishis and Initiates pledged themselves not to yield to Lucifer's proviso that mankind be enticed away from the earth.

The root of the matter is that for the wisdom of the future too, a struggle is necessary, a struggle similar to that waged against Lucifer by the ancient Initiates through whose intermediary the faculties of speech and of thinking were transmitted to men. Just as it devolved upon the Initiates of the primeval wisdom to wrest from Lucifer that which has become human reason, human intellect, so the insight which is to develop in the future into the inner realities of things must be wrested from the Ahrimanic powers. Such are the issues—and these issues play strongly into life itself.

I recently read some notes written shortly before his death by one who was a friend of the Anthroposophical Movement. He had been wounded in the war and lay for a long time in hospital where, in the course of the operations performed on him, he had many a glimpse into the spiritual world. The last lines he wrote contain a remarkable passage, describing a vision which came to him not long before his death. In this last experience, the atmosphere around him became, as he expresses it, like dense granite, weighing upon his soul. Such an impression can be understood in the light of the knowledge that we have to battle for the wisdom of the future; for the Ahrimanic powers do not allow this wisdom to be wrested from them without a struggle. Let it not be thought that wisdom can be attained through blissful visions. Real wisdom has to be acquired “in travail and suffering”. What I have just told you about the dying man is a very good picture of such suffering, for in this struggle for the wisdom of the future, one of the most frequent experiences is that the world is pressing in upon us, as though the air had suddenly frozen into granite. It is possible to know why this is so. We have only to remember that it is the endeavour of the Ahrimanic powers to reduce the earth to a state of complete rigidification. Their victory would be won if they succeeded in bringing earth, water and air into this rigidified state. Were that to happen, the earth could not again acquire the Saturn-warmth from which it proceeded and which must be regained in the Vulcan epoch; and to prevent this is the aim of the Ahrimanic powers. A trend which has an important bearing on this is the lack of enthusiasm in human souls at the present time for the content of spiritual science. If this lack of enthusiasm were to persist, the first impulse towards the rigidification of the earth would emanate from the souls of men themselves, from their apathy, their indolence and love of ease. If you reflect that this rigidification is the aim of the Ahrimanic powers, you will not be surprised that compression, the feeling that life is becoming granite-like, is one of the experiences that must be undergone in the struggle for the wisdom of the future.

But remember that men to-day can prepare themselves to look into the spiritual world by apprehending with their healthy human reason what spiritual science has to offer. The effort applied in study that lets itself be guided by healthy human reason can be part of the struggle which leads eventually to vision of the spiritual world. Many tendencies will have to be overcome, but for men of to-day the fundamental difficulty is that when they want to understand spiritual science they have to battle against their own granite-like skulls. If the human skull were less hard, less granite-like, spiritual science would be far more widely accepted at the present time. Infinitely more effective than any philistine avoidance of the Ahrimanic powers would be to battle against Ahriman through sincere, genuine study of the content of spiritual science. For then man would gradually come to perceive spiritually the danger that must otherwise befall the earth physically, of being rigidified into granite-like density.

And so it must be emphasised that the wisdom of the future can be attained only through privations, travail and pain; it must be attained by enduring the attendant sufferings of body and soul for the sake of the salvation of human evolution. Therefore the unwavering principle should be, never to let oneself be deterred by suffering from the pursuit of this wisdom. So far as the external life of mankind is concerned, what is needed is that in the future the danger of the frozen rigidification—which, to begin with, would manifest in the moral sphere—shall be removed from the earth. But this can happen only if men envisage spiritually, feel inwardly and counter with their will, what would otherwise become physical reality.

At bottom, it is simply due to faint-heartedness that men to-day are unwilling to approach spiritual science. They are not conscious of this, but it is so, nevertheless; they are fearful of the difficulties that will have to be encountered on every hand. When people come to spiritual science they so often speak of the need for “upliftment”. By this they usually mean a sense of comfort and inner well-being. But that cannot be offered, for it would simply lull them into stupor and draw them away from the light they need. What is essential is that from now onwards, knowledge of the driving forces of evolution must not be withheld from mankind. It must be realised that in very truth the human being is balanced as it were between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic powers, and that the Christ has become a companion of men, leading them, first, away from the battle with Lucifer, and then into the battle with Ahriman.

The evolution of humanity must be understood in the light of these facts. One who presents secrets of cosmic existence in the way that must be done in spiritual science, is often laughed to scorn, for example about the use of the principle of the number seven—as you will find in my book Theosophy. But you will notice that people do not laugh when the rainbow is described as sevenfold, or the scale—tonic, second, third and so on, up to the octave which is a repetition of the tonic. In the physical world these things are accepted, but not when it comes to the spiritual. What must be regained here is something that was implicit in the old Pagan wisdom. A last glimmer of this Pagan wisdom in regard to a matter like the principle of the number seven, is to be found in the Pythagorean School—which was actually a Mystery-school. You can read about Pythagoras to-day in any text-book; but you will never find any understanding of the reason why he based the World-Order on number. The reason was because in the ancient wisdom everything was based on number. And a last glimmer of insight into the wisdom contained in numbers still survived when Pythagoras founded his School. Other branches of the ancient wisdom survived much longer, some indeed until the sixth and seventh centuries of the Christian era. Up to that time many true things about the higher worlds are said in the sphere of what is called natural philosophy. And then, gradually, this primeval intelligence in mankind ran dry—if I may use this expression.

Let us picture some orthodox representative of modern learning sitting in a corner and saying: “What nonsense these anthroposophists talk! What do they mean by asserting that the primeval wisdom has run dry? Wonderful, epoch-making results have been achieved, above all during the last few centuries, and are still being achieved. There may have been a temporary halt in 1914, but at any rate up to then marvels were accomplished!”—But if you look candidly and without bias at what has been achieved most recently, you will arrive at the following conclusion.—Admittedly, masses of notes have been collected—masses of scientific and historical data. This kind of collecting has become the fashion. Countless experiments have been made and described. But now ask yourselves: Are there any fundamentally new ideas in all that this modern age has produced? New ideas, new conceptions were given by individual spirits like Goethe—but Goethe has not been understood. If you study recent findings of natural science or historical research, it will be clear to you that, in respect of ideas, there is nothing new. Certainly, Darwin made journeys, described many things he saw on these journeys and gathered it all into an idea. But if you grasp the idea of evolution in its details, as idea, you will find it in the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras. So too you will find the fundamental principles of modern natural science in Aristotle—that is to say in the pre-Christian era. These ideas are treasures of the primeval wisdom—springing from a Luciferic source. But the primeval wisdom has run dry, and something new in the form of insight into the spiritual world must be attained. A certain willingness on the part of man is necessary to undertake the labour entailed by really new ideas. And mankind to-day is sorely in need of new ideas, especially concerning the realm and the life of the soul. Fundamentally, all that science tells us in regard to the soul amounts to nothing more than a collection of words. What is taught in the lecture-halls about thinking, feeling and willing, is simply a matter of words thrown out spasmodically. It amounts to little more than the sounds of the words. There is hardly the beginning of an attempt to take seriously anything that is really new.

In this connection one may have curious experiences! Some time ago I was invited to speak to a “Schopenhauer Society” in Dresden. I thought to myself: Yes—a Schopenhauer Society—that must surely be something out of the ordinary! So I tried to show how the contrast between sleeping and waking, between waking up and going to sleep is to be understood in the psychological sense, how the soul is involved. I spoke of something I have recently mentioned to you, namely, that a zero-point is there at the moments of falling asleep and waking up, that sleep is not merely a cessation of the waking state, but bears the same relation to the waking state as debts bear to assets.

If you were to search through modern psychology you would not find the slightest trace of any attempt to get to the root of these far-reaching matters.—After the lecture, in a “discussion” as it was called, certain learned members of the audience got up to speak. One of these philosophers made a really splendid statement, to the following effect. He said: “What we have been hearing could not possibly be a concern of serious science. Serious science has other, very different matters with which to occupy itself. Man can know nothing of what has just been put before us so plausibly; none of it is a concern of human cognition. Moreover we have known it all for a long time.”—In other words, therefore: what we cannot know is something with which we have long been familiar!

Now contradictions do exist, but contradictions of this kind exist only in the heads of present-day scholars! If someone says that certain things cannot be known, that they are not objects of human cognition—well and good, that is his opinion. But if he says in the same breath that he has known all about them for a long time, then there is an obvious contradiction. Erudite scholars of to-day often have a habit of placing two diametrically opposite opinions side by side in this way.

This kind of thinking has a great deal to do with the present situation. An individual—thanks to the Divine Powers and also, be it remembered, to Lucifer and Ahriman—is often able to form a fairly sound judgment of these things; but when it comes to presenting them to the world—that is a different matter altogether. Many people are willing to embark upon the study of spiritual science provided they find a society of rather sectarian tendencies in which they can take refuge. But when they have to face the world and present something of which the world itself possesses evidence, everything is apt to go up in smoke and they become veritable philistines.—And then Ahriman's progress is greatly furthered.

Recently, the most diverse views, including those from various quarters here in Switzerland, have been expressed regarding the relationship between what has been cultivated for many years in our circles as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, led to the building of this structure here, the Goetheanum, and ultimately to what is to be brought into the world by us in another direction, linking up with the social movements and aspirations of the present day. The fact that we had to add this social endeavor to our anthroposophical striving has met with the most diverse assessments, both approving and disapproving. Of course, this cannot be decisive for the way we have to pursue our path; but it is necessary to draw attention to a number of facts that have come to light in this regard.

Anthroposophists often say that the anthroposophical movement should not have burdened itself with the task of realizing the threefold social organism. And some of those people who have taken an interest in the social movement that is to lead to the threefold social order find it disturbing that the idea of threefold order has taken as its starting point anthroposophical knowledge, which is often perceived as mystical, dark and unclear. Thus the threefolders are often criticized by the anthroposophists, and the anthroposophists by the threefolders. And on both sides, the community is sometimes not welcome.

As I said, this cannot deter us; but it is important to be fully aware of such a fact and to remember the inner connection that we have often had to bring before our souls in the considerations that have been practiced here.

But another thing has also come to light more and more, and this other thing is, I would like to say, something that perhaps needs to be considered more intensively for our task; because ultimately, if people with a social mindset criticize our association with anthroposophy, there is nothing we can do about it, just as there is nothing we can do about anthroposophists emphasizing that it would be better if we had not burdened ourselves with social thinking. We cannot do anything special about that either, but must continue unwaveringly on the path we have recognized as the right one. But what is perhaps more urgently to be taken into account is that more and more people are also speaking out and saying that it is necessary to create an anthroposophical foundation for the personal understanding of the idea of threefolding. The idea of threefolding would be much better understood if an anthroposophical basis were created. And, for example, especially in proletarian circles, there is more and more demand for such an anthroposophical basis. This is something that may come as a surprise to some, although basically it is not too surprising.

The way in which anthroposophical striving was often regarded in the past was already regarded by our friends — which was also due to class differences — in such a way that little anthroposophy could be brought into proletarian circles. And now it is inevitable that every person who encounters the threefold order will somehow also hear something about anthroposophy, and initially become acquainted with it in an external way. And it is very strange that a vivid need for anthroposophy arises precisely at this point.

For example, after the idea of threefolding had been cultivated for some time in Stuttgart without any anthroposophical discussion, we needed to give lecture cycles on purely anthroposophical subjects. This had become necessary for good reasons, and they will be continued.

This is a matter that should be given special consideration here, and it is this thought that I would like to present to you today. Here in Switzerland, we are in a very special position with regard to these two currents, the social current and the anthroposophical current that is connected with it, at least for us. The question of social striving born of anthroposophical thinking is indeed quite different for Central Europe than it is for Switzerland. For Central Europe, the situation is such that it is a matter of life and death, the life and death of the nation. There may be many people today who do not realize the seriousness of the situation; but it is a matter of the life and death of the nation. People think far too superficially about such things. When you say “death of the nation,” they think: you can't kill eighty million people in a short period of time, so it can't be about the death of the nation.

Anyone who thinks like that does not understand at all what is actually at stake. It is quite natural that you cannot physically kill eighty or ninety million people in a short time. But the death of a nation means something quite different. We only need to remember that when Jerusalem was destroyed, it was not a matter of the death of individual Jews living in Jerusalem at that time. Nevertheless, in a certain sense it was a matter of the death of the nation, and this death of the nation can occur in a completely different way than it occurred at that time. It is a matter of life or death! And life can truly — one could think of many other things about the threefold social order — be saved only by the inauguration of the threefold social order. In the immediate future, it is a matter of either-or: an understanding of the threefold social order or the death of the national culture. Today this may seem immodest and perhaps even foolish to people. But it is so. So that one can say: There is much reason to reach out to threefolding out of a certain compulsion. It may take longer or shorter, but there is reason for compulsion. This compulsion also exists towards the East of Europe, towards this East, indescribably crushed by its karma.

The situation here is different. Here there is — or would be — the possibility of voluntarily reaching out for something like the threefold social order; for here, as in the West, it is not a matter of life and death, but of the continuation of events in a more or less spiritual or unspiritual sense. Of course, life in Switzerland and in the West can continue in a materialistic sense for a long time without a spiritual impulse; or one can come voluntarily to see in an eminently spiritual movement, such as the threefold social order movement, that which must give a new impulse. There is no need to think that it is a matter of life or death.

But it is quite a different matter to carry out a task out of free will or under compulsion. And one could also say that for the overall development of the world, it would mean something quite different to arrive at the stream of threefolding out of free insight, especially in a place like Switzerland. Today it is extremely difficult, even for me, to formulate and express these things objectively. I believe it would be a great blessing if someone belonging to the West, or especially to a neutral country, would have the courage to express this openly; for outwardly it would mean something quite different. In particular, the following would have to be taken into account: What would come from the few countries that have remained neutral would also be of the greatest significance inwardly. If, therefore, something like the impulse of the threefold social organism could come out of a country or neutral territories in relation to the earlier warlike conditions, then something very significant would actually be done for the world-historical movement. To understand this is also an anthroposophical question. For only anthroposophy can answer the question: What does the integration of such an impulse mean in the overall development of humanity? And here it is not unimportant that this impulse should be formulated in an abstract form, but it is significant from which fact it arises: whether it arises from the fact of free knowledge or whether it arises from the fact of necessity, as it can only arise in Central Europe because nothing else can arise there now but that which arises out of the bitterest need.

So I think that here in Switzerland, in particular, we should consider what could provide enthusiasm for the idea of the threefold social organism. And the question then arises in the soul: how do you get over a certain dilemma? Among you there are many who have been participating in our anthroposophical movement for quite a long time and have been able to see for themselves how slowly or how quickly — mostly how slowly — what is meant in this anthroposophical movement penetrates people's souls. It is happening slowly. And if it were to depend on people first becoming anthroposophists in order to then be able to think socially in the right way, then it could, under certain circumstances, be much, much too late. Therefore, it had to be borne in mind that the idea of threefolding, even if it appears less strongly founded, has to be presented to the world in its own right, because it is not possible to wait until it emerges as a matter of course from anthroposophically oriented thinking. However, it will probably be necessary for this idea of threefolding to receive a certain amount of support. Since it cannot receive this support quickly enough from the real spread of anthroposophy, which is slow, it should be able to receive this support from the way the members of the anthroposophical movement act. In other words, the members of the anthroposophical movement should try to gain trust by acting socially.

In any case, this is a question that cannot be answered theoretically, but only practically, in line with life, because it is a question of appearance. We must try to represent the social aspect in such a way that people can see something inspiring in the way it is represented, even if the foundation from the anthroposophical side cannot be laid quickly enough.

Now you will ask me: Yes, how is it possible to find the right tact, so to speak, in representing the social movement? — Of course, no catechism-like instruction can be given about this either. But something can be said that, if sufficiently taken into account, will help a great deal: each and every one of us should make more and more effort to really get to know the so-called social movement in a way that is appropriate to life. When a socially oriented movement was started in our circles, it was obvious that this was not the case. Among the most well-meaning and benevolent co-workers in our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science movement, there were quite a few who had completely overlooked the fact that there was and is a modern social movement in the second half of the 19th century and into our own days. That is, I do not mean that all members did not know that there is a social movement. But it does not do anything to know that there is a social movement; nor does it do anything to follow what the newspapers report about the social movement. Rather, it is a matter of really knowing the concrete expressions and aspirations of this movement. Not so long ago I met people in our midst who did not know when threefolding began, that there are trade unions and what trade unions are. We have become too accustomed to ignoring people in life and not caring about what people actually do and do. We must learn to truly care about the souls of people, to really take an interest in the souls of people. There is a major obstacle to this, which I would like to mention without wanting to hurt anyone: “bourgeois goodwill” for the working population. This bourgeois goodwill for the working population, which often oozes with social impetus, is basically a serious obstacle to social effectiveness in the present day. We have experienced what I actually mean by this in a wide variety of areas. Just think of how we have experienced a certain getting to know the so-called 'people'. We have experienced historical novels, folk novels, folk novellas in which people who understood nothing about the people For example, Berthold Auerbach or similar authors – who understood nothing about the people – described the way the people were or are, and what came from this side was then accepted as an occupation, a cognitive occupation with the people. One even felt that it was something belonging to the social question when one saw Gerhart Hauptmann's “Weavers”. Of course, in Gerhart Hauptmann's “Weavers” one sees the misery of the proletarian masses in such a way that one is shown on stage how a poor family has to feed on a dead dog. But it is a strange conception of the understanding of social life when people sit in the stalls or in the gallery in some large city and watch how the poor family has to feed itself on a dead dog, and then go home to, say, have one of the usual soups. I do not want to say that it is perhaps possible in our time to bridge the class divide overnight. But what it comes down to is that we really have to get a sense of what is happening; that we have to stop walking past people and not knowing the contexts of their lives. What is really at issue today is whether each individual can visualize a broad context of world history, a context that only opens up when we look back to earlier times, which have left behind much that lives in our present, and when we look at new things that are emerging in this present as if from the depths of the earth to the surface of life.

One question that comes up again and again when talking about modern public life is that of organization. Our living conditions have become complicated. Work has become more and more compartmentalized. The individual is involved in a narrowly defined area of work and activity. We can only work, we can only be effective as modern people through organizations. There have always been organizations. But people do not take into account that older organizations were quite different from the organizations that have to arise today. Today we live almost exclusively in such organizations, which in part continue the old, but in part already have the new within them, and are constantly experiencing inner upheavals. However, the awareness has not penetrated that something truly radically new must emerge from the depths of human evolution.

When we inquire about older organizations, we can actually identify one thing as the impulse behind such organizations: human blood, the bond of blood. When we look at older times, we see tribes that belonged together, extended families that belonged together. What belongs together is actually organized out of human depths through blood. This means that the organizing principle is often subconscious and does not fully emerge into consciousness. People are organizing, but it does not emerge into consciousness. Higher spirits than man are involved in this organization.

Today we are faced with the necessity to do what used to happen unconsciously, that is, in many cases, to be carried out by higher spirits than man is, out of human consciousness itself. We consciously want to join together in associations, in organizations to promote social work. That which has united people out of blood is gradually losing its significance.

The observed, the recognized thing, the objective must provide the reasons for the union. Subconscious or unconscious union must give way to conscious union. We live in the midst of this interweaving of these two currents: conscious organizing and unconscious organizing, and the convulsions of the present are in many ways connected with the confluence of these two currents. Take, for example, the efforts of socialist parties of various shades that are currently in the public eye. In these socialist parties, there is a certain urge to organize consciously, even if it is still instinctive today. They want to organize. But on the other hand, they have not yet progressed to finding the object for conscious organizing.

You can, by wanting to make this clear to yourself, simply, I would like to say, look at the archetypal phenomenon of today's social striving. Suppose someone were to appear here – let us speak quite impartially – and say: Social striving should be done! – What would he mean by that? He would mean: Social striving should be done in Switzerland. If you were to expect him to think differently, he would naturally feel that this was an unreasonable demand. Or do you think that someone in France would act in this way: he would naturally think that social efforts should be made within French borders. It has also been stated in theory that socialist programs should use the old state borders as a framework for large socialist cooperatives. The state is to be transformed into a large socialist cooperative. But the state is, after all, what is left of the old, consanguineous associations, the old blood associations. So it is simply to be imposed on what comes out of the old consanguineous relationships.

We expect a great deal of people today when we expect them to think clearly about this matter. And people will not be able to think clearly about these things at all unless they become anthroposophists. As strange as it may seem, what I am saying now is true: people will not be able to think clearly about this at all. For what is the call that is going through this world? The call that is going through our world is: the liberation of peoples. That is, the old blood ties that come from the old days are to be reorganized in some way. Liberation of the peoples! As this call goes through the world, it completely ignores what organization out of consciousness should be. Things collide so violently in our present time. Therefore, only a truly anthroposophical, a general understanding of humanity will be able to lead to where we want to go.

But there are good reasons for this. For the anthroposophical understanding, namely the earlier so-called theosophical understanding, has always stopped at this question. It is true that people have said: fraternal understanding of people without distinction of race, color and so on. — But has this become real anywhere in our modern times? It has become theory, abstract theory; it has not become real in our time. And now it is least real of all.

As a result, this anthroposophical-theosophical striving has participated in the general love for the abstract, which has been spoken of so often here, that general love for the abstract that lives in the mental and emotional existences, which are separate from life. We live as modern people, as people of the present, the life that we are not allowed to live, the double life: on the one hand, life in our external work, where we have our profession, where we have many other things as well, and the life where we consider, where we feel. A life of everyday, a life of Sunday. We do not want to hear when the spirit is spoken of, something that intervenes in the life of Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday and Saturday; we want to have a life when the spirit is spoken of, a life in which we feel comfortable when it is spoken of on Sunday , morning or afternoon, from the pulpit, where we do not need to think about what will happen on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, but where we only feel a certain pleasure at the words: brotherhood, love of neighbor, and so on. This extends to the life of science. And there it shows itself in particular how it has been effected; this historical effect must be considered.

You see, our profane sciences no longer allow themselves to know anything about the spirit, and not even about the soul. It is taken for granted that the profane sciences do not allow themselves to know anything about the spirit and the soul. Scholars today proclaim that science must be free from that which is belief, and in so doing they think they are serving unprejudiced science. They think one is prejudiced if one still has something to say about the soul and the spirit in the field of science, because, so people think, only subjective faith decides about such things. But where does this actually come from? In reality it comes from the fact that the age has developed in such a way that religious creeds have monopolized the tendency towards the soul and the spiritual. The religious creeds have formed a monopoly for the soul and for the spiritual. And today it is taken for granted that when something like anthroposophy is judged from this point of view, people simply say: This must not be cultivated; science must remain free of these things, science has no say in the soul and spirit, because the relationship to the soul and spirit should be a monopoly of the denominations. That is why it is so humoristically serious – forgive me for using the expression in the face of a very serious fact, but just as there can be tragicomedy, there can also be humoristically serious, and the tragicomic is sometimes more significant for the development of the world It is humorous to hear from the lecterns today that science must be so and so objective, without getting involved in the things of the soul or the spirit, because that would break the exactness of science. It is therefore humorous to hear such things, because it comes from the fact that people who do not have to defend the faith were forbidden to speak about spirit and soul for so long. And those who believe today, as scientific scholars, that they have to keep science pure for the sake of its exactness, they really want to keep it pure because they have been forbidden by dogmatics to think about soul and spirit. It is the dregs, the residue, the residue of the old ecclesiastical prohibitions, which are proclaimed to us today as exact scientific demands from the lecterns. People simply do not know how historically what they proclaim today as a self-evident and sometimes, in their opinion, high truth has developed. And these things should not be slept through, but people should wake up to them. But without waking up to these things, we will not get anywhere. No matter how many beautiful things we pass down about the social question, we will not get anywhere if we succumb to any illusions about the greatest lie that actually exists, about the scientific lie of the present. We do not yet feel it, this scientific lie, but we must learn to feel it.

What I have just said is not meant emotionally, it is meant quite theoretically, and can only be understood correctly if it is taken up in this theoretical sense. You see, I only feel called upon to speak the word scientific lie because, just as I speak this word and unreservedly criticize present-day science from this point of view, I also defend it just as much ; for it has grown great through all that it has been able to achieve by the mere fact that for some time men have been investigating only the physical and bodily through science, without particularly turning to the soul and spirit. But this may only be regarded as a utilitarian and pedagogical principle of human development, not as something epistemological.

Thus, even today, the necessity must be recognized to permeate again the profane science with real knowledge of the soul and the spiritual. Only from this will the strength arise to tackle the social problems deeply enough. In our time, the human being is now faced with the necessity of recognizing differently than is recognized today in our schools. I would like to say that things are now coming to fruition in knowledge that did not need a long time to come to fruition. For a long time, the Copernican worldview was quite sufficient. It was useful for people to imagine it this way: here is the sun, the earth moves around in an ellipse, around the earth in turn moves the moon, between the sun and the earth Mercury and Venus, further away Mars and so on. — It was nice to present this whole picture of the movement of the planets around the sun in ellipses for humanity. This picture was enough until the present.

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But how did this picture come into being historically? I have mentioned this often enough. Historically, this picture came into being because the great Copernicus once wrote his book about the revolution of the heavenly bodies. Right at the beginning there are three sentences. If you pay attention to all three, then it is good. But they were not all three observed, only the first two. The third was ignored. If you only consider the first two Copernican sentences, then the Copernican system, continued in the Keplerian and Newtonian sense, emerges. But this system is not correct. If, according to the calculations of this system, a planet should be at a certain point and you point the telescope in that direction, it is not there! But according to this system, it should be there. Therefore, for some time now, the so-called “Bessel Reductions” have been used; the position is always corrected. Before setting up the telescope, one does not point it towards the point for which one would have to point it according to this system, but towards the point for which one would have to point it after applying the Bessel corrections. But what do these Bessel corrections actually mean? They mean that we must always apply anew what we would apply at once if we were to observe all three Copernican laws, that is, if we had not left the third out of account. But if we take this third Copernican law into account, then history is again at odds with the beautiful revolutions of the planets around the sun. Then we must think of a different world system. But people will not think of this other world system either before they are properly prepared for such a rethinking through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For how do people look at the world today? People look at it today as if they were sitting inside a train, never looking out the window and never getting off, but always sitting inside and only living with the passengers of the train. But a person could also travel through the world with a train in such a way that he travels a distance, then he leaves the train, gets off, experiences what is in a city; it may be that another train then comes along, it does not matter, in which he gets back on. He travels further, experiences something in another city. These are the stages that one experiences there. One then carries this with oneself.

Today's astronomical science experiences the Earth's journey through space as if one were sitting in a train and experiencing nothing but the experiences of one's fellow passengers, never getting off. Now you will say: How can you get off the Earth? Is it possible to get off the Earth? — You can, but it is different to get off the Earth than to get off a train. To get off a train means to walk out of the door of the carriage and then go somewhere. To get off the earth means to penetrate into the human soul. When you really penetrate into the soul, when you reach what is inside the soul, then you have gotten off the earth; then you have undergone the same procedure in relation to the earth as you do when you get off a train and get back on. But now the peculiar thing is that when you get off, that is, when you really delve inwardly, concretely delve, not through illusions, but concretely delve, then you experience something different with each getting off, really experience something different with each getting off. Reciting mysticism that delves into the human interior, that experiences God in the soul, that is just mere reciting. To really experience something inwardly, that turns out to be different in different ages, that it is always a renewed experience. If someone has really experienced something inwardly in 1870, and again inwardly in 1919, the two things are experienced differently inwardly. Why are they different? Because man experiences the universe, always at a different place.

It was through such an inner experiencing that the ancients found their system of the heavens, not through a purely outer experiencing. It was through an experiencing like that in the train that the Copernican system arose. The system of the future will again have to be experienced inwardly, in that man measures the journey through the world in inner experiences. Then something different will come out. Above all, we will learn to experience the world concretely, not in the abstract way that people love today.

Something special happened to me recently in Berlin that basically gave me great satisfaction. Some time ago, a disgraceful article was published in the German magazine “Die Hilfe” (“False Prophet” was the title of the article). Now, such articles are read, even overslept. But a few weeks ago, when I was in Berlin, an American visited me and said that he had actually come to see me because he had read the article in 'Die Hilfe' in which you railed so terribly and in such a way that one had to take an interest. I just want to say that by way of an introduction. What actually satisfied me was a question that this man asked, which was highly objective. He said that he had grasped very quickly what the threefold social order is about, but he would now like to ask: Do you think that this threefold social order is an eternal truth that, once found, creates social conditions that must now always remain, or is it a truth for a period of time that only replaces old things; is it a truth that will in turn be replaced by something else? I was positively amazed that there are still such reasonable people in the present day who do not believe in millenarianism, in the 'thousand-year Reich', where an absolute is once found and remains, only one truth over the whole earth and into all eternities. If someone today thinks in socialist terms, he thinks: tomorrow the social state must be realized; when it is there, it will never need to change.

I then formulated my answer in such a way that I said: Of course the last few centuries have striven for the unified state; now we have come so far in concrete terms that we must build it in three parts. After some time, the other, the synthesis, will come again; then the opposite will have to occur again. — You see, it is not so convenient to always have to follow the concrete circumstances, it is not as convenient as thinking up an absolute system. But today it is necessary to follow the concrete circumstances, to be aware that what we have to create, we have to create for the present world situation. But this can already be understood “astronomically” today, in that we see, firstly, that mystical experiences differ depending on whether they are gained in this decade or that decade, in this century or in that century, and that one can follow the movements of the earth itself, experience them inwardly in a mystical way. But today the “great astronomical” must be seen and felt together with the social. We must gain the possibility of advancing in such a way that we today cross a threshold that can only be compared with thresholds of earlier times, which were not only transitions but also leaps in development.

Take the ancient Greeks. They had their land area. As far as the Pillars of Hercules, the earth was still something concrete for them. Then came the indefinite, the completely indefinite. They had a land consciousness. The newer times emerged, the discovery of America, sailing to the East Indies, similar things. Earth consciousness emerged. The land consciousness of the Greeks became the earth consciousness of modern times. Just as for the Greeks, what lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules was indeterminate, so today what is outside of earth consciousness is indeterminate for man, merely mathematical fantasy, Galilean, Newtonian fantasy, and so on. This imagination must be replaced by real facts. We must transform terrestrial consciousness into cosmic consciousness, as one transformed the terrestrial consciousness of the Greeks into terrestrial consciousness. We are at this point today, and we will not make social progress if we do not find the way to develop the world consciousness of the future out of the earth consciousness of modern times, just as the land consciousness of the Greeks was transformed into the earth consciousness of modern times.

If we do not educate through the teachings of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science the great astronomical world view of that which is outside as outer space, then we do not grasp the truth of outer space. But if we do not grasp the truth of outer space, we cannot become citizens of the world. But we will not become social citizens until we have become citizens of the world in our consciousness.

In the last few days I have spoken about how the human being can advance from the present earth-consciousness to a world-consciousness, just as he has advanced from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the Middle Ages and the end of the Middle Ages, by transforming his land consciousness into an earth consciousness. We do not take these things abstractly, but we try to penetrate into them in such a way that they become concrete links in our consciousness.

In connection with this idea of the expansion of consciousness, I have said that in the first three epochs of his life, man is influenced by forces that we can actually call sub-sensible forces. From birth until the age of seven, the human being is connected with the forces of the earth planet itself. The formative forces at work in the human organism are essentially those that are anchored in the earth planet itself, in the interior of this earth planet. And what then takes effect, organizing the human being, living through the human being from the seventh to the fourteenth year of life, these are the forces of the air circle, which then, namely through the detour of breathing, permeate the human being, and through which he lives through the formations and forms laid down in the first seven years of life. Then the time begins for the human being in which he is exposed, but without this penetrating into his consciousness, to the forces that work on the human being indirectly through the earth from the planetary system.

Man is therefore actually so organized that the organizing forces in him are not merely those that he carries in his body or within the limits of his body, but are forces that take their radiations from the earth planet and later from the entire planetary system. And through such considerations we must gradually come to the realization that man forms a unity with the whole earth.

In the past I have often used a comparison to characterize this awareness from a different point of view. I have said: a human finger is a human finger only as long as it is connected to the human body. The moment we cut it off, it withers away. Just as the finger is related to the body, I have often said, so man is related to the whole Earth, indeed to our entire planetary system. If you were to remove man from the Earth and from the entire planetary system, he would wither away, he would die like the finger when it is removed from the human body. The point is that in human life one gradually advances from the perception of the part to the perception of the greater whole. Man, as he can observe himself, is really a partial being, insofar as he is a physical organism and also insofar as he is an etheric body. He is only considered as an organism when he is in connection with the earth and even with the whole planetary system. But if you really absorb this in your consciousness, you know that you belong more to the world than to the mere earth, because the earth draws its forces from the universe, and while we are at first only dependent on the earth, we gradually move on to dependence on the universe.

But these things can be deepened even further. Among the stars that form planetary systems around the Earth, the most important are, as you know, the Sun and the Moon. And as we gradually grow into a state of dependency on the planetary system from the age of fourteen onwards, that is, in the third epoch of a person's life, we also become dependent on the other members of the planetary system, on Mercury, Mars and so on, but we become predominantly dependent on the sun and moon. But man's dependence on sun and moon can only be judged correctly if one knows not only from external observation what the sun and moon represent. External observation shows man the moon, full and new moon, first, last quarter as a disc, which he assumes to be dark in itself, illuminated by the sun, and therefore turns part of its being towards him in illumination. But that does not exhaust the nature of the moon. We can only really learn to recognize that which is in the universe if we always see it as a sum of forces, a connection of forces. And we must ask ourselves: what kind of forces are actually concentrated in the moon? In the moon, human forces of will are primarily concentrated, or rather, forces that are related to human forces of will, forces that are related to everything that affects people from the subsensible. So the moon radiates those forces that are related to the subsensible in the human being. The physicist tells us very nicely that the moon is a kind of slag, that the sun is something like a glowing, burning cosmic body that has a corona, that sends out radiations of its fire into the world; so that man has the rough idea that if he could wander there slowly or quickly and approach the sun, he would enter a glowing body. I have already told you several times that this is not the case; rather, the truth is that where the sun is, there is a hollow space, a nothingness, and that light radiates only from the surface of the sun. In truth, there is nothing where one suspects that there is something physical; for the nature of the sun is thoroughly supersensible, just as the nature of the moon is subsensible. The supersensible and subsensible aspects of the planetary system, as they are concentrated in the sun and moon, begin to take effect on the human organism from around the age of fourteen. They affect the human organism in the first place insofar as the lunar is more akin to the female element, to everything feminine in the world, and the solar is more akin to the male element in the world. But they also work in such a way that man has a solar element in everything he develops in terms of knowledge, in everything he develops in such a way that he thinks, and has a lunar element in everything he “does”, in all impulses of will. The sun and moon are not only out there in cosmic space; the sun and moon are within us. And in so far as we think, we are sun beings; in so far as we will, we are moon beings. Better said: in so far as we develop organs in us that are the mediators of thinking, the forces of the sun, the supersensible, work in us from the age of fourteen to develop these organs; in so far as we develop organs that mediate willing, the forces of the moon, the subsensible, work in us from the age of fourteen.

Thus, when we transform such knowledge into a living being, we can feel within us: You human being, you are such that not only what is here on earth lives in you, but what constitutes the sun and moon also lives in you. The sun and moon are in you. You are a citizen of the world. You would not be what you are as a human being if the universe did not work in you.

To know such things in the abstract has no great value; but to feel within oneself that one is such a being, in whom the sun and moon are at work, that gives inner life. To feel everything that one can think supersensibly and will subsensibly comes from the sun and moon, and makes one say to oneself: I may be walking on the earth, but with every step I take on the earth not only what springs and sprouts on earth, and what rejoices and suffers on earth, but with every step I take on earth, the sun and moon live in me. I am not just an earth citizen, I am a world citizen. When this surges and strengthens as a living life in man, then a certain power comes over his thinking, which he does not have without this consciousness. Particularly in the present time, people should learn to feel when they are walking on earth that the universe lives in them. This should become feeling, this should become perception. As it were, when man looks up at the sun, he should say to himself: I am also of your essence, O sun! —When he looks up at the moon, he should say: I am also of your essence, O moon!

When man bears this within him as a feeling, as a sentiment, only then does he become ripe for grasping social ideas. Otherwise his thinking bears a certain earthly heaviness. Of course, one can grasp certain ideas in the abstract, but one cannot inwardly animate them in the concrete. The social is something in which man is active as man. Natural science comprehends only that in which man is not present. One can never understand social forces and social activity in terms of natural science concepts. One can only understand social activity through the kind of light thinking that comes from the feeling that we have as world citizens. It is simply the case that such a world-citizen consciousness must arise from our relationship with the sun and the moon. Only when a person no longer feels that he is, as it were, dependent on the earth, only when he feels as if he is a temporary inhabitant of the earth, who brings solar and lunar forces into this earthly existence, only then does his thinking become so powerful and at the same time so light that he can truly grasp social concepts as they live in social existence. For you see, many an economic thinker thinks that he can grasp social concepts with the ordinary way of thinking that is modeled on natural science. Today you can read many concepts and interpretations in economic works about the concept of the commodity, about the concept of labor — I have already made some allusions to this — and about the concept of capital. But all these concepts are actually useless. They do not capture what is truly alive in social life. If you want to try to create a concept of what circulates in economic life as a commodity, and you create this concept in the same way that you create the concept of a crystal or a plant or an animal or even of a physical human being, then nothing comes of it. You cannot grasp the concept of the commodity according to the pattern of natural science. If you want to grasp it in living life, as it is in social life, then you basically need an imagination; because there is something about the commodity that is inseparable from the human being. Every commodity has something of the human being in it, whether the commodity consists of a sewn skirt or a painting – because in terms of political economy, a painting is also just a commodity – or whether it consists of a lesson in teaching. Even a lesson is, from a national economic point of view, only a commodity. But what constitutes the concept of a commodity is related to human performance. And it is not ordinary, fully conscious life that goes into the commodity, but rather, something of the subconscious life goes into the commodity in many ways. That is why you need imagination to grasp the concept of a commodity correctly. And you need inspiration to grasp the concept of labor, and you need intuition to grasp the concept of capital. For the concept of capital is a very spiritual concept, only a reversed spiritual concept. That is why the Bible quite correctly refers to that which is connected with capitalism as mammon, as something that has to do with the spiritual; only it is not exactly the very best spirit that has to do with it. But one penetrates into the highest regions of spiritual knowledge if one wants to grasp what capital actually does in economic life.

Here we are confronted with something quite curious, with a necessity: in order to arrive at correct economic concepts, one must have an idea of supersensible knowledge. That is why all economic concepts that are being advanced today are so amateurish, because people have no supersensible knowledge and therefore grasp these concepts wrongly.

But do not misunderstand me. If you read my “Key Points of the Social Question”, you will say: “But it is not imagination that you give when you talk about goods; it is not inspiration that you give when you talk about labor, and it is not intuition that you give when you talk about capital. Certainly not. One does not need to ascend to the higher worlds to speak of goods, labor and capital, although it is also very interesting to see the reflections of goods, labor and capital in the higher worlds. But one does not need to ascend. But one only needs to be familiar with what imagination, inspiration and intuition are in order to say the right thing about capital. That is what it is all about. Someone who is not familiar with imagination, inspiration and intuition will not say the right thing about goods, labor and capital. Thus, spiritual science and today's social science are inwardly connected, and there is no other way for today's human being than to ascend from earth consciousness to world consciousness, so that he acquires the ease and also the power of thought that enables him to grasp social life. As long as man only crawls on the earth and basically believes that he is nothing more than what he absorbs from plants, animals and minerals, which is only a little differently composed in him, man does not know himself as the right being that he is. Only then, when he says to himself: the sun and moon work in me — then man knows himself as the right being that he is. World consciousness must be attained in a spiritual way; in a spiritual way, man must recognize how he belongs to a greater part of the world than the earth.

Now it is important to really grasp how one must go beyond ordinary everyday concepts in order to arrive at the kind of thinking that is meant here. You know that there are materialistic thinkers in the world. Today the number of materialistic thinkers is very large, and you are probably all convinced in your innermost being that one should not be a materialistic thinker. At least you were convinced to a certain extent and therefore came to a more spiritual way of thinking, felt drawn to the spiritual thinking that is cultivated in this anthroposophical movement. So let us disregard ourselves here. But there are also other people who represent the spirit, and there are many such people in the world who say: Well, there are all those people walking around who think only of material processes and material beings. These materialistically thinking, materialistically feeling people are opposed by the spiritually thinking and spiritually feeling. The latter believe in the spirit and are often despised by the materialistic thinkers as fantasists. But they accept this contempt because they believe that the materialists do not realize how right they, the fantasists, are when they hold on to the spiritual. This distinction is made and observed in the world between materialistic thinking and spiritual thinking, and there is much dispute between the two camps as to which is right, the materialistic thinker or the spiritual thinker. From some of the things that have been discussed here, you should realize that basically the one who has not yet penetrated into the meaning of spiritual science is the one who argues about such things, but only the one who says, 'You are a materialist; that's fine, that's all right,' has properly penetrated into the meaning of spiritual science. You are a spiritualist, that's fine too, that's also very good. Just as you can photograph a tree from one side and photograph it from the other side: it looks different from the different sides, but it is always the same tree. If you grasp the world materially, it is only a photograph from one side. If you grasp the world spiritually, it is a photograph from a different side. Materialism looks quite different from spiritualism. But the secret is that you have neither materialism nor spiritualism in the world, but that these are actually only two photographs from different points of view. Basically, the materialist is just as right as the spiritualist and the spiritualist is just as right as the materialist. Because these concepts, spirituality and materiality, are only valid on the physical plane. As soon as one goes beyond the physical plane, these concepts are overcome. Then one no longer argues whether the world is material or spiritual, because one knows that these are two different aspects. But why does man actually argue about whether man is material or spiritual? Why does man argue about whether one has a mere bodily being or a mere spiritual being? Why do some people see only, I would say, physical corporeality in a person, while others see soul and spirit in addition to physical corporeality? Because a person is both! And the secret of life actually consists in the fact that a person is both. If you say: a thought is only a spiritual entity, it is only something spiritual, then you are right, because the thought is only something spiritual. But the thought is never in you as spiritual-soul without having a physical imprint, so that you can actually always also prove the physical imprint; it is there. So that every thought is also something material. One would like to say: The universe has impartially ensured that one can be both a spiritualist and a materialist. Because you are indeed spiritual; if you see it that way, you can be a spiritualist. But you are also a material imprint of the spiritual; if you see it that way and ignore the other, you can be a materialist, because a person is both, and because one is only an imprint of the other, because one is the same as the other. Therefore, it is really only a matter of whether man puts himself more into his physical being, then he becomes a materialist; or whether he puts himself more into his soul-spiritual being, then he becomes a spiritualist.

You can't really escape what this is about as long as you remain in the ideas of ordinary everyday life or even in the ideas of ordinary science. You can invent all kinds of theories. There is no end to the theories about the soul and body and about the interrelationship or parallelism and so on! But these are all things that have been invented, they are not rooted in reality. For people have forgotten — I have emphasized this many times before — how to think about these things correctly, because in the course of historical development they have been forbidden to do so, as I have said. In the year 869, the eighth general council was held in Constantinople, and that abolished the spirit, that established the dogma that man does not consist, as a Gnostic science had known until then, of body, soul and spirit, but the eighth Ecumenical ecumenical council decreed that man consists only of body and soul, and that the soul has some spiritual properties, hence the medieval scholastics had a terrible fear of speaking of the so-called trichotomy, of body, soul and spirit; because that was forbidden. Today's philosophy professors are not afraid, because they have overcome their fear; but they have not yet overcome the Roman commandment. They also only speak of body and soul, of a duality, and believe that they are impartially imparting unprejudiced science, while they are actually teaching Roman Catholic dogmatics from the eighth general council of Constantinople. They believe that it follows from their unprejudiced research, but they only say that because they are stuck in history.

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Today we have the task of returning to the acknowledgment of body, soul and spirit. For when we look at the outer world and our human organization, insofar as it is perceived like the outer world, we perceive a bodily aspect. If we then look into our inner being, whether we consider our thinking, our will, our feeling in an external, superficial self-knowledge, or whether we descend mystically deep, we experience a soul aspect — on the outside bodily, on the inside soul. But the connection, the interpenetration of the two, the constant interpenetration of the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily, is brought about by the third aspect. We do not even have a proper word for it; we have to take the word from one side. The spirit brings it about. So we can say: body, soul and spirit are two different aspects, but the spirit forms the connection. We must return to the healthy concept of body, soul and spirit, otherwise body and soul will always fall apart. You cannot find anything physical in the soul, or anything spiritual in the body, as long as you do not have the spirit in them, in their midst.

Many years ago, to make this clear to you, I used a comparison. Suppose there is a seal here, and engraved in the seal, let us say, so that it is a rather “rare” one, is the name Müller. And now I take sealing wax here, for example on a letter, I can press the name Müller into the sealing wax.

Now the Kantians and the physiologists might come and say: There is no relationship between the seal, which may be made of bronze, and that which is made of sealing wax. - Of course, this is all bronze, the other is all sealing wax. Never does something pass from the bronze into the sealing wax and never does something pass from the sealing wax into the bronze. The two are quite different. It is the same with body and soul. One is expressed in the other, but nothing passes from one to the other, each has its own substantiality, and nothing, absolutely nothing, passes from one to the other. And yet, when you have printed, you have “Müller” in the sealing wax and “Müller” on the seal, one and the same. But the mediation did not happen by something very fine coagulating or trickling over from the seal to the sealing wax; that did not happen. Rather, something happened that is neither sealing wax nor bronze, but is the same in both. And that this is precisely 'Müller' is truly connected neither with the bronze nor with all that is in the bronze, but is in the living. That someone has received the name Müller is connected with life; it points to the whole breadth of life. Thus we have the spiritual-soul, and we have the bodily. The spiritual-soul is reflected in the bodily. But that which is the same in both, the spirit, is a whole wide world. But we do not grasp the spirit if we only look at the soul, just as we do not get to know the miller if we only look at the seal. We also do not grasp the spirit if we only look into the material world, just as we cannot recognize the miller if we look at the sealing wax.

So it is a matter of the spirit imparting to us that which is a relationship between the soul and the body. And in our age, we live in a phase of human development in which we must properly understand precisely this fact.

If you look at the newer natural science, you will find that it imparts to you all kinds of physical, actually only physical things. If you take some of the psychological concepts that come from older times, they convey something of the soul. We can only come to terms with both if we rise to the spirit, for only by grasping our being spiritually do we become citizens of the world, in contrast to the citizens of the earth that we were until today. As you can see from this, we must not merely grasp that which is physical about a person, in the way that we can grasp the external corporeality, but we must see the person in broader relationships. I will tell you of such a case, so that this case can serve as an example.

Ordinary natural science sees the human being only until his death. Then it follows the remains, what is left here on earth, the body, how it is cremated or how it is returned to the earth, becoming dust. Now you could examine what components are in this human dust, which is left over from a human organism. Then science will say: the human substance is breaking down and returning to the earth. Yes, that is not even a quarter of the truth, not even an eighth, it is not the truth at all, if you say it out loud. For that which is given back to the earth, whether by burning or burial, had a human form, and also had a human form because, before birth or conception, a spiritual being descended from the spiritual worlds and worked in this physical body until death. Then this physical body is returned to the earth. Whatever is human form continues to work in the earth, regardless of whether it was cremated or buried. The earth continually receives what it would not have if human bodies were not given to it after death. It is good for the earth to receive human bodies after death. Otherwise the earth would only have earthly substances if human bodies were not imparted to it.

But this human body was inhabited by a spiritual being that descended from spiritual worlds before the birth or before the conception and gave the structure to this human body. This structure remains as an essential in every speck of dust, passes into the earth or into the atmosphere when burned, no matter how, and the earth receives with this human body that which has descended from the spiritual worlds. This is not without significance. This is not just an ordinary truth, but it has a very, very great significance. For our Earth is no longer evolving, and it would have been so long ago that no human being, and perhaps no animal either, could inhabit it today if it were not for the continuous supply of spiritual and soul-like refreshing forces through human bodies. The fact that the Earth is still a habitable place for people today is due to the fact that human bodies are continuously being supplied to it. These always refresh the earth's forces. Since the middle of the Atlantean period, the earth has already been withering. It no longer has the rising powers that it had in the old polar, Lemurian and so on periods. But since the middle of the Atlantean period, the earth has only withering forces of its own and is only refreshed for further existence by the fact that the formative forces of human bodies are imparted to it. These continue to work in the earth. These alone make the earth habitable for people.

From this you can see that, on the one hand, as I have told you, the human being has the inner forces of the planet at work in him, the forces of the atmosphere. But in turn, he returns spiritual-soul forces to the earth; he also supplies the earth with spiritual-soul forces. By being born, he brings spiritual-soul forces from the spiritual universe into the earth, uses them for as long as he needs them, until his death, and then hands them over to the earth in the form of forces. If asked what man means for the earth, the external scientific world view would say something like this: if man had never come into existence on earth, everything would have turned out as it is; man would just not be there. Of course, the houses would not be there either. Cities would not be there, and so on, that is, what man brings forth through his culture would not be there; but otherwise everything would be there, only man would not be there. Spiritual science teaches us that man is not merely a spectator here on earth, but that through his existence he is a co-builder, a co-shaper of the earth, and that through the body, which he hands over to the earth, he becomes a mediator for the earth between the spiritual world and this physical world of the earth.

This, too, is part of the process of gradually becoming aware that one is not merely a citizen of the earth, but a citizen of the world. The citizen of the earth is born of a mother and father, carries the characteristics of inheritance within himself, acquires some things that he leaves as an inheritance to his physical heirs, has children and so on. The person who sees himself as a citizen of the world says to himself: By entering into existence through birth, I bring something of the soul and spirit into this world. In this way I contribute to the future existence of the earth, even after I have departed from this earth through death. The human being only really becomes aware of how his existence is connected to earthly existence, how he is one being with the earth, but a being that basically gives the earth its spirituality, through being a citizen of the world.

All these concepts that one acquires from spiritual science should not be acquired like ordinary knowledge. I would like to say, although this is perhaps a little paradoxical: knowledge is not particularly valuable at all. Only what we become through knowledge is valuable. This also applies to education. The fact that we teach geography to a child has a certain external significance, but not really a significance for the soul. Outwardly, it has the significance that later, if the child wants to travel from Dornach, say, to Zurich, it will not confuse Zurich with Bern and the like. So, outwardly, there is a certain significance to learning geography. But there is an inner significance to what happens to the soul when it learns geography. One becomes oriented in the world. Certain spiritual forces are released from the depths, from the roots of the soul, and it is the release of these spiritual forces that is important.

If we take the period since the middle of the 15th century, then this is the time when people were least inclined to release spiritual-soul forces within themselves. They were more attached to the imprint, to the sealing wax. People have actually entered the material age since the middle of the 15th century. But now we are at the point in time when we have to become aware of this and when we in turn return to the spiritual and connect the spiritual with the material.

Why did all this happen? Superficial thinkers might say: Yes, the Lord God could have made it easier for himself. He could have simply given people spiritual life in the 15th century, then they would not have had to go through the whole detour of materialistic struggle. — Perhaps he could have. It is an insult to the Protestant conscience to say that he could not do it. But that is not what interests us here. He did not do it, however, but allowed people to struggle through materialism. And so they arrived at the low point of materialism in the 19th century. If they were now to struggle towards spirituality, they needed a strong inner jolt; this strong inner jolt is the redeemer of freedom, it is the redeemer for man to turn to spirituality out of himself, not through divine inculcation. If man had not been absorbed in the material, then he could not have struggled out of his own free will to the spiritual. In order to call people on earth to independence, this struggle, this struggle through the material was so strong that even the religions and theology have become material. You see, even today's theologian finds it difficult to grasp something spiritual, sometimes with the greatest difficulty, really with the greatest difficulty. Recently I had an opportunity to test it when I discussed something with a Catholic theologian. It just so happened that I had this discussion with this Catholic theologian under the well-known Raphael painting, the so-called 'Disputa'. The conversation led me to try to exemplify something from the 'Disputa'. I said: We must come back to this – all those who want to strive for the spiritual life – so that it can be understood why Raphael actually painted this 'Disputa' from his contemporary consciousness. Up there are the heavenly worlds with the Trinity, below the Sanctissimum on the altar and the church fathers and theologians. But all this is not the essential thing in the picture. The essential thing is that a theologian who was not frivolous (there were many like that even in those days), who was still serious about his theology and out of whose soul Raphael painted, had the consciousness: When the host, the Sanctissimum, is consecrated and one looks through it, then one looks at the world that Raphael painted in the upper part of the “Disputa”. — It is really the consecrated host that provides the means to see through and into the spiritual world. That is why Raphael painted the thing. I wanted to exemplify that. I wanted to say: we must find our way back to understanding such a picture, which is painted from a different consciousness, with its true content. I cannot paint for you right now the picture of the face that this theologian made when he was expected to see his Holy of Holies in such a spiritual sense. Theology, too, is thoroughly materialized, perhaps more than most. It no longer has any real spiritual basis, which is why Christology itself has become materialistic. For the fifteenth-century theologian to turn his attention to the “simple man from Nazareth” would have been inconceivable. The indwelling of Christ in Jesus of Nazareth was still alive in him. It has disappeared from consciousness. Only a person somewhat higher than Socrates and Plato or Aristotle is the simple man from Nazareth. But he is defined and seen as the simple man from Nazareth even by theologians. Theology itself has become materialized.

We need to make the leap from the innermost grasp of our humanity to the spiritual in freedom. We cannot do this by twisting spiritual phrases, by talking about the spirit; we can only do it by thinking spiritually. And it is spiritual when we say: knowledge is connected with the forces of the sun, will with the forces of the moon. When human bodies are formed here on earth through the currents of heredity, it is not something earthly that works, but something solar in the male force, something lunar in the female force. The earth is covered and permeated with solar-lunar forces, and these forces are related to the powers of knowledge and will. The spiritual permeates the physical, the physical expresses itself spiritually. Synthesis, the uniting of soul and body, is what must be sought today, must be sought unconditionally. It does not include those shadowy concepts that have been developed in recent times since the mid-15th century – they are only thoughts that have been developed in recent times since the 15th century. But a spiritual life that has been experienced is only one that can also have a practical effect at the same time. We have had a basically impractical spiritual life for long enough. As I have already said, people have talked a great deal over a long period of time about being good, being fraternal, and practicing love for one's neighbor. But these were concepts that remained in a certain sphere and had no impact on practical life. Just think: a real modern merchant, a real modern industrialist or, let us say, a civil servant – so that we have all three types – he can, and this also happens, even be a pious man. But there is a significant difference between what a merchant may experience inwardly in his soul as his religious confession and that activity of life that finds its expression in his account books! That which lives in his religious life has no power to penetrate into the account books. And the civil servant is not prepared to be a human being, but rather to be a civil servant. What he has learned as a civil servant, what does that have to do with what he may inwardly profess religiously? — Religious life is a current, so-called life practice is the second current. Because the concepts and ideas have become weak and cannot penetrate down into the practice of life, we cannot find such vivid, strong concepts that lead into social life today. For this, they need to be refreshed by spiritual science, so that the concepts become strong enough to penetrate not only as far as the concepts of a Sunday afternoon preacher, which evoke warm feelings in the heart, inward soul voluptuousness, but do not penetrate into the activity that finds expression in the account book. The concepts that are derived from the spiritual must penetrate further into practical life. Concepts are not spiritual if they do not penetrate through their inner power to the deepest essence of matter. This is precisely the spirituality of the concepts: that the concepts are strong and penetrate to the deepest essence of matter.

We need this if we are to overcome the gulf that has arisen between present-day humanity, which still has all possible inheritances from earlier times, and future humanity, which must truly carry out the synthesis, the synthesis between the material and the spiritual. It is a complete regression to earlier human ways of feeling when one is a materialist on the one hand and a spiritualist on the other. And when one can be both, so that both live in each other, then one is only up to the present demands of humanity.

We have made a number of observations that have essentially been concerned with showing how a recovery of our social and other conditions of human coexistence can only be brought about by people being seized from within by different ways of thinking from those that have, so to speak, been developed over the course of the last three to four centuries. Among the influences that have been particularly effective in bringing forth such ways of thinking that must no longer dominate people, the scientific way of thinking was also particularly influential. It is difficult to speak quite impartially about this scientific way of thinking today, because there is no doubt that great, tremendous progress has been made for humanity through this scientific way of thinking. However, we must realize that the very advances of modern times that have been made in this area are those that have diminished the actual spiritual life of man. Little by little things have turned out in such a way that those parts of human knowledge have mainly undergone progress that could be utilized in external technology. And even the rest of cultural life has been influenced by this tendency to always orient human thinking, human imagination, towards how it can be used in external technology.

It would be quite wrong to think that this statement applies only to that which is dependent on the scientific way of thinking in modern intellectual life. That is not what is meant here; rather, it is meant that the whole thinking of modern humanity, insofar as old ideas, old elements in this thinking have not been inherited, is of the same nature as it has now come to expression in the extreme in scientific thinking and is expressed. It is not only those people who are directly influenced by science who think scientifically today. It is even true to say, somewhat paradoxically, that those people who are directly influenced by science are the ones who think least in the sense meant here. It is only that which is the general way of thinking of human beings that has found expression in a particularly characteristic form in natural science, so that, to a certain extent, natural science is the best way to see how this modern humanity thinks. Thus, we have repeatedly spoken of the influences of the way of thinking that has found its particular characteristic expression in natural science.

Now I would like to point out a particular idiosyncrasy that is inherent in our thinking, in our entire conceptualization, in fact in our entire modern soul life, due to the fact that so much of natural science impulses is present in this soul life. This idiosyncrasy consists in the fact that we, as modern human beings, have, in a sense, forgotten how to observe things impartially. People believe that they observe things impartially; but they do not. Even our school education today is such that it instills in people a great many preconceived ideas, which color our pure perception of things. We do not actually have a pure perception of things at present.

You can raise the question: Should not the particularly harmful aspect of this fact, that we do not have a pure view of things, be particularly evident in scientific research, in natural science? — One should believe that it is so. But if you look more closely, you notice something else. Science saves itself from the devastating and destructive nature of this inability to properly see relationships by directing more and more of its attention to the external sense world, to that which is given to the external senses. The outer senses do not conform to preconceived ideas, and so they constantly correct what comes from preconceived opinions and ideas, especially from preconceived views. In this way, observation constantly corrects what man carries within himself into his view of things. That is why we do not notice when scientific observations are made that all kinds of preconceived ideas are also brought into them. But they are still brought in. And if you then take what is produced scientifically in context, you will find that preconceived ideas are indeed brought into the entire scientific view.

But the particularly harmful aspect of this inability to see is especially evident when the present-day person is to reflect on social conditions. In this case, the facts do not at all correct the preconceived notions that people bring to these facts. And so, little by little, we have really come to the point where, with regard to the social facts of life, you can ultimately assert anything you want to assert. Today, in fact, you find all sorts of opinions represented. On the one hand, you find the opinion that true social reality consists only of economic processes, that all spiritual life is only a kind of superstructure, a kind of smoke that rises up or is erected over economic facts; that is one extreme. The other extreme is this: today, since we have no clear concept of the real spiritual powers that live in the world, we speak of the prevailing, abstract ideas, ideas of things and so on, and claim that these ideas shape – perhaps through people, but they do shape – what external economic and other facts are.

As you can see, there are two opposing opinions. Now it is a matter of proving one opinion and the other opinion. You can give quite correct arguments, incontestable arguments today for both the one and the other opinion, arguments that are equally good for the one and for the other opinion. If someone comes forward today and claims that all events are actually controlled by the spirit, by ideas, he can prove it. And someone else can come forward and say: What you are proving is pure fantasy; in reality, all ideas are only the mirror images, only the superstructure of what are economic facts. He can refute what the other says in the most beautiful way; he can prove his case and the other's. The arguments are in both cases equally good.

This is a phenomenon that is actually far too little appreciated in the intellectual life of our time. People today separate themselves into parties or groups and advocate some maxim or other, some program. They are convinced of this maxim, they are convinced of this program and can prove it. The others represent a completely different maxim, a completely different program; they can also prove it, and it cannot be said that one has worse or the other better reasons for his conviction. This is a phenomenon of public life that should really be noticed, because it is the most characteristic phenomenon of our time. This phenomenon ultimately leads to the most anti-social facts and attitudes. For if one is convinced of some maxim and one knows the good reasons for this maxim, then one considers the person who has a different conviction to be a fool or a scoundrel or some kind of dishonest person. And the other person, who may have the same good reasons, in turn considers the first person to be a fool or a scoundrel or a dishonest person. That this fact is not recognized as such is, in a sense, the tragedy of the present time. It is just that people today are so attuned that they believe that what is true for the human soul today has always been true. And as soon as anyone's attention is drawn to this phenomenon today, one can almost certainly expect that he will come and say: Yes, what you are explaining, that all opinions prove themselves side by side, that has always been the case in the development of mankind. If people would only take the slightest interest in educating themselves about the real development of humanity, they would not make such an assertion; for it was not always so in reality; the well-proven opinions and maxims and programs were not as openly juxtaposed as they are today. For today one can prove very well. Today, if one is as clever as certain socialists on the Left, one can prove Marxism quite clearly, and one can prove quite clearly, if one is willing to take just one other point of view, that Marxism is complete nonsense. Today one can prove very, very well; one should be quite clear about that.

This training, this ability to prove, is instilled in children today. But therein lies something extraordinarily sad for our present time, that one can prove everything so clearly and so strictly, and therefore can be so easily convinced of a thing. Because of all the ways of being convinced of a thing, the easiest, in today's sense, is to prove this thing. There is no easier way to acquire a conviction today than to prove it. It is precisely because of this ability to prove that people have completely lost a feeling, a real feeling, that convictions in life must be fought for and acquired, that overcoming is necessary if conviction is to take root in the soul.

Where does this fact come from, this fact that is so deeply ingrained in our entire lives, that we can prove so very easily? It comes from the fact that we are accustomed to thinking so superficially with our thoughts. People today think superficially about things, without making any effort to penetrate very deeply into them. And the more superficial one's thinking, the better one can prove. It is extremely important to realize this. The thinner the concepts are – and on the surface of things all concepts become thin and abstract – the better these concepts seem to provide evidence for what one wants to believe and accept from completely different sources, from very unconscious sources, from feelings, from directions of will and the like. Our entire party life should one day be studied and described from the point of view that has just been developed before you here.

What can be achieved least of all under the influence of this superficial approach is a real knowledge of the human being. That is why so many people today demand that we should at last deepen our conception in this respect, that man should penetrate to something of self-knowledge, that is, to knowledge of his essential nature. How many writings and lectures and instructions and political speeches there are today that already speak of this necessary knowledge of the human being! But first of all, the basis for such a possible knowledge of man must be established! It cannot be gained from any starting point. And what is necessary in order to get beyond the misery of proof is to learn to see impartially, to see things really simply as they are in the outer life. For a healthy perception and for a healthy view, it is especially necessary that we learn to see things as they are; for that is what we have most unlearned. We prove how things should be; but we do not look at them in reality, as they are, because looking is indeed more inconvenient than proving that things are so or so. One can only arrive at certain assertions, for example in the social sphere today, if one proves. But if one secures an unbiased view of reality, one cannot arrive at such assertions. So what matters most is a real looking at, a real seeing of things as they are.

If you read Goethe's scientific writings, as well as his writings on art, you will see how he tried to point out with all his might how to see with an unbiased eye even in his time. He saw how all the sciences work from concepts that have to be proven. He found this to be something that must be overcome above all else, and he wanted, above all, to achieve that people really get to know the phenomena, the appearances, the facts in their original meaning, to get to know them as they are. It has been of so little use that the ground on which Goethe particularly tried to let the facts speak, the ground of the theory of colors, is still today a ground on which Goethe's right to speak about the matter is completely disputed. But in particular, it is necessary for the knowledge of the human being to come to a real seeing of the facts of life, of subjective life. For example, people today talk a lot about what is external to the human being and what is internal. I believe that if you ask many people today: You see a red color, you hear a certain sound, you perceive this or that in the outside world - is that inside or outside? - that the person in question will tell you: What the senses perceive is the external! - Then he points to his inner being: that is in contrast to the external. Now ask the person if he is clear about what kind of contrast there is between the external and the internal. He will tell you with a fair degree of certainty: Yes, I am quite clear about that; I know exactly: what the senses perceive is the outside, and what is inside, what belongs to the person himself, that is the inside. But if you go further in your questioning and say to him: Look, you say about the outside: the grass is green, the sky is blue, the sun rises, and so on, you say what you observe and list it in detail, fine. But also describe to me in just as much detail what you have inside, what you call your inside! — Try to get any clear answer at all from most people today, an answer in which you are dealing with concrete facts by which a person describes his inner being to you. He is under the illusion that he knows this inner being quite well in contrast to the outer being; but if you penetrate a little into him and say: Describe your inner being to me as you describe your outer being! you will see that this knowledge of the inner self is not very profound. And when a person does manage to describe this inner self, it turns out to be nothing more than a reflection of the outer self, what has developed from the outer self, stored in the memory, at best, faded in the mind's eye. But what a person describes is not much different from the outer self. As a rule, he cannot tell you anything more about his inner life than that the grass is green and the sky is blue; at most he will tell you that he feels this way when he sees the blue sky, that he feels that way when he sees the green grass, and so on. But a real contrast and a relationship between the external and the internal will not be easily described to you by a modern person.

But this has a great consequence. The consequence is that people today do not even come to grasp the contrast between the external and the internal in relation to the human being in any correct way. For you see, natural science, from its present point of view, endeavors to examine the organs that are supposed to be the carriers of the inner processes. And if one regards from the present point of view what is proved there, but is by no means really seen, one will say: Well, the table is outside, inside is the soul life. And here one points to one's own inner life and thinks, for example in natural science, that the inside of the skull is the inside of the human being. One transfers the unclear images gained by seeing to the human body and says: “In there, somewhere behind the eye, is the inside.” If perhaps some people, when they want to grasp more precise concepts, begin to question the things that are given to them as concepts, unconsciously man still thinks: there, at the tip of my finger, that is outside, and in there, behind the eye, that is inside. But the fact that we say this, and in particular that we draw this conclusion for the bodily organs, arises only from an inaccurate seeing. Because in fact, everything that you are entitled to call your inner self is what you experience in the outside world, in the so-called outside world. You are constantly together with the outside world, and what you seemingly experience inwardly, you experience with the whole wide outside world.

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In one of the 'Eight Meditations' — you can read about it there — I pointed out how, by observing the outside world, a person actually grows together with this outside world, and that it is quite unjustified to distinguish between the external and the internal with regard to what we experience in the outside world. That which is in our surroundings for our consciousness, we could only describe as our inner being if we really expressed what we see. But that is precisely our inner being. This is, however, an unpleasant thing for some mystics, because they attach great importance to deepening inwardly. But this inward deepening is usually nothing more than calling certain physical ideas of the outer world inward and even renaming them as divine inward and the like. These are favorite ideas that one borrows from the outer world. That which one can see without prejudice and which one usually describes as the exterior, that is what one should actually call the interior. In a sense, a person is inside his own face in his inner being. After all, we are really much more at home, let's say, in the moment when you are all sitting here in this hall than in your so-called inner being, especially if you call what is inside the skull behind the eye this inner being. Because however you may think about this inner life, except for the few concepts that you have absorbed from anatomy or physiology, which are really quite scanty, you know terribly little about what is behind your eye or your brain skull. And if you ask yourself: What is more inward to me, what is around me in this hall or what is behind my brain skull? you will say to yourself: What is in this hall around me is undoubtedly more inward to me than what is behind my brain skull. — In any case, at this moment your inner life is much more affected by what appears to be the outside world in this hall than by what is going on inside your brain skull. What goes on in your brain is very external to you, it is something that is not really within you at all. And if you describe objectively what you see, you must say: the external is actually the internal, and the internal is very much an external for the human consciousness.

Now you may say: these are concepts spun out of a spider's web. — First of all, it is not the case that they are concepts spun out of a spider's web, but rather they are concepts that stem from the observation of what is really perceived in contrast to what is theoretically proven, proved. It is what is really perceived, really seen. It is what is immediately present in consciousness and what one would regard as correct if one were to observe only what is really present in consciousness and if one did not construct the matter through preconceived notions. That is what needs to be said for the time being. But there is an important consequence to this. As long as you entertain the belief that what is out there is an external thing and what is in there is an internal thing, you cannot come to what I always call: understanding spiritual-scientific facts through common sense; because spiritual-scientific facts can only be understood if you take an unbiased look at them. But then one can see them, can see them long before one ascends in any way to clairvoyant views. But with the complicated concepts of today's everyday life, it is of course very difficult to see what the truth is.

The fact that we see the outside world - what we usually call the outside world - as we see it, and that it also contains our correctly seen and defined inside, comes from our senses and has to do with the way our senses are arranged. Through the senses we live in the immediate present. And we experience through our senses what is happening around us in the present. Our senses essentially make us co-experiencers of the present. But while we are absorbed in the outside world, our perceptions give rise to our ideas, which we then carry forward in our memory. We remember afterwards what we have experienced as co-experiencers of the present. We carry that with us. And these are essentially our concepts. People's concepts are mostly recollections of what they have taken from the so-called external world. But these ideas, these concepts and ideas are mediated, not created, but mediated, by what is otherwise called the inner self, what we have now got to know as the outer self. Through that – what you actually don't know – what lies behind your eye, through that, ideas and concepts are mediated. That is certainly the case. These ideas and concepts are conveyed through it. But what actually goes on in this human head?

If you observe what is actually going on in this human head, then you cannot say: insofar as man thinks, insofar as man imagines, he is just as much a witness to the events of the present as he is when he perceives with his senses. — That is not the case as a thinker, but rather, in our head, through our thinking, there is an effect of what we did as an activity before birth or before conception. That is to say, what goes on in there (see drawing), by imagining, is not an activity that you engage in by being a present human being, but you engage in this activity by the activity that you carried out in the supersensible world between death and new birth or conception continuing to resonate.

You are only a present-day human being because you perceive through your senses; by opening your senses to the external world, you perceive the present and live as a present-day human being with the external present. But the moment you begin to think, what plays into your brain is not what you are presently as a human being, but the echo of what you were in the spiritual world, in the supersensible world before birth or before conception. If you want to visualize it pictorially, you can imagine it quite well by thinking: I strike a note; this note continues to sound even after I have long since stopped striking it. Now imagine that you have some kind of activity in the spiritual world all the time between your last death and this birth, which I am describing schematically (see drawing, red). This activity has an after-effect; and this after-effect is the activity you perform when you think as a present human being. You are not performing an activity of the present human being by thinking now, but the activity that you performed in the supersensible world between your last death and your present birth still resonates.

You are only a present-day human being as a sensual human being. As a thinking human being, you carry out an activity that is the reverberation of what you did before your birth in the supersensible world. It is simply not true that, by thinking, we are “engaged in an activity that originates in the present.” If you examine the present scientifically, what is inside your brain, you will of course only find material things, because what works inside your brain outside of the material is something that came into being before birth and only resonates. The living proof for those who can see correctly is the fact that man not only comes out of the supersensible world, but that what he has practiced in the supersensible world still lives on in him while he lives here.

If you imagine that you have experienced a strong pain here in this physical world, which lingers in you, that is the echo of the pain that no longer causes itself in facts. So in the present your thinking is the echo, the reverberation of what you experienced in a much more intense way before you were conceived here for the sensual world.

Thus, only by perceiving with the senses are we men of the present. If we were only people of the present, we would never think, because we are not granted thinking by being born here into the physical world, but we are granted thinking by being able to resonate the activity that we exercised in the spiritual world before birth or conception, and by applying this activity to what is spreading around us sensually here.

One will never understand this fact if one starts from the ordinary concepts of 'exterior' and 'interior', and one will least of all understand the true facts, which express themselves in the human being, if one starts from that stupid mysticism that dominates so many minds today and that speaks: 'There is something to be sought within, something human and supersensible'. What should be sought is the prenatal: you should not point to your inner self by pointing beyond the outer sensory world, you should point to the time you lived through before your conception and before your birth; you should go out of this present human being into the pre-present human being, then you will enter into the real supersensible. That is what it is all about. Because one does not want to work one's way to this sound concept, one speaks in words that actually have no content, of all kinds of divine inner things or the like. The inner being that one seeks in the present human being should be sought in what was there before we were conceived for this life.

And if we act, when the will enters into our actions? Let us take the simplest action: we walk around the room; that is an action, isn't it? First we see ourselves walking around. There is no consciousness in man of how volition is connected with our walking, just as there is no consciousness in man in ordinary life of what he experiences in sleep. The human being does experience himself asleep. Outwardly, he sees as he sees the color blue or a tree or the stars, and also that which this individual of the flesh does, as he walks around. He observes himself. How he wills, he knows nothing about. He only knows that there goes one who is himself. And because he is compelled to think himself in the one who goes about, he says, “I go about.” But how this wanting hangs together with this going about – there can be no question of man's knowing anything about it in ordinary consciousness.

Now, this is again very closely related to what is usually called the “outward” and what is actually an “inner” process. When you walk around, i.e. move your legs, you see how you move your legs (see drawing on page 158). You see the guy walking around and you can see what he wants. You see this external process. But here you can actually see much more that it is actually a human inner process, because you put your will into this walking around, even if you cannot see how it is connected. This walking around is actually a part of him. You can see this more easily here than with the sense world, so that you can more easily call what is there an inner being than with the content of the sense world. With what goes from wanting to acting, you can more easily see that it is an inner being.

Of course, this does not suit the present-day mystics either, who explain external action as an external thing and say that one must penetrate to the divine human being within, who is the truly true human being and so on. But just as we have an inner side in sensory perception and an outer side in the so-called interior of the human head (see drawing above), so we have, in relation to this interior (drawing below), what the human being with limbs is.

And now we come to this strange idea, which of course does not agree with what can be proven today, but which, strangely enough, is correct if you look at it impartially. I do believe, however, that the present mood of human souls is such – excuse me, I must also mention these things – that many of the present philistine natures, and there are quite a few of them, believe that that region of the cosmos that spreads out below their diaphragm has a great deal to do with their inner selves. That is what people call something that has something to do with their inner selves. Now, in truth, this is the outermost part of the human being for human consciousness. We can say that if we call this (drawing above) an exterior, we can call that which lies below the diaphragm the outermost part of the human being (drawing below). What lies below the diaphragm, what is the human abdomen, is the very, very outermost part of the human being. Every tree, every stone that we see with our eyes is closer to us inwardly than what our abdomen is. That is the very outermost. Our true inner being is the sense perceptions, that which we perceive as our actions. The contents of the head are already external, and what lies below the human chest is the very outermost. That is the real observation of what can be seen. And it can be seen.

You see, that has a very specific meaning. Just think, since we have been practicing anthroposophy, we have always said: When a person is awake, his I and his astral body are in the physical and etheric bodies. That is correct. But when a person is asleep, from the moment he falls asleep until he wakes up, his I and his astral body are outside the physical and etheric bodies. But I have often pointed out what this exteriority mainly consists of. This exteriority consists in that what is otherwise of the I and of the astral body in the head, submerges into what is below the diaphragm. You can even, I might say, have empirical proof of this: You dream of the most beautiful snakes because you have just woken up from your stay in your own abdomen, where you perceived the intestines. You dream this memory of perceiving the intestines as the most beautiful snake dream. — So, when we speak of human conditions, the exterior and interior only really make sense when we know what is really exterior and interior in man.

But only if one can acquire such seen ideas, not those that can be “proven”, but such seen ideas, then one again gets the possibility to understand the spiritual-scientific achievements through common sense. Because what we want arises in a certain way from the most external.

Now think about what healthy ideas have to take the place of quite unhealthy ones. Man believes that when he wills something, it arises from his inner being. It arises from his very outermost part, it arises from that in which he is already completely out of touch during the day, and in which he is at most in touch with when he is asleep. When we want something, we are not at all within ourselves. We are in the cosmos. We are performing something that is a cosmic event, that is not at all merely our subjective event.

I have endeavored, I would say, throughout my entire literary life, to teach the present such concepts that are healthy concepts from this point of view. You can start with my “Introductions to Goethe's Scientific Writings,” in which I tried to replace the unhealthy concepts of the present with healthy ones from Goethe's worldview. In these writings, I have pointed out that one can only properly observe certain things that take place within a person if one does not say: That is going on in there, and the person does it - but if one regards this so-called human interior as the arena for human actions that are carried out in this arena from the cosmos, if one regards the so-called human interior as the arena for the cosmic. My entire development of epistemological concepts in my booklet “Truth and Science” ultimately fades away, on the last and penultimate page, into this: that man is a theater for what the cosmos actually does in him, and that he does it in connection with the cosmos, from the outside in, not from the inside out. The last two pages of my booklet 'Truth and Science' are the most important part. And because these two pages are the most important and significant, because they most intensively address what needs to change in the way we present the present, I was only able to design this booklet, which was also my doctoral dissertation at the time, after the doctoral dissertation was over. In the form in which it was submitted as a dissertation, these last two pages were missing; because one could not expect science to draw the conclusions from these things, which have a certain significance for the transformation of the entire world view. What was prepared epistemologically was relatively harmless in the dissertation; because that is an objective philosophical development. But what it amounted to could only be added in the later print. Only then, when one looks at things in such a way that one really practices this precise seeing, that one no longer succumbs to the illusions caused by preconceived notions, only then is one in a healthy way able to gain corresponding insights through the will. For what we see outside when the “guy” or the “gal” walks around, when we observe ourselves doing the simplest of actions, when we move our legs forward, that is only the inner side of our will. The outermost side, the one that has a meaning for the cosmos, is apparently hidden within us. But hidden in our outermost being is a spiritual element that underlies the inner being, which is not readily accessible to people. And what happens in there, the spiritual - of course not what happens physically, but what goes parallel to this physical as a spiritual - that is not a present moment. What is present is what you observe externally in the guy or gal. What is going on internally is something different, something that is only just beginning to happen in the germ, in the embryo. While you are walking around or performing some other action with your limbs, something is happening in your external being that only takes on real significance after your death. This is just as much a foreshadowing of the processes from death to the next birth as what is in your thinking is an echo of what you were in the spiritual world from your last death to this birth or conception. That which resonates in your outermost being, what people call your innermost being, is the embryo of the processes you will engage in between your next death and your next birth. Only he sees the human will that now, in turn, does not look at the present human being, but sees in what lives in the human being, seemingly in the human being, but in the uttermost part of the human being, the correlate, the belonging, to the action, and in the action sees the what emerges through the gate of death, becomes activity between death and a new birth and is formed in such a way that it can come in again and now continues to vibrate here in the external.

When one examines human volition and wants to seek mystically deep in the present human being the source of this volition, the divine source of this volition, then usually the word mystics find that they should not do that in the gut, because that is not noble enough for the word mystics; for them it is not about truth, but about special, unctuous phrases. But if one goes to the truth, then it is a matter of the fact that, with regard to the sensual-physical fact, now, let us say, the most unsavory thing is a correlate that goes through the gate of death into the later world; there we must seek the future man. And so we obtain the evidence from the thinking of prenatal man and from the volition of the man after death, as I have often stated here and as I have even mentioned in public lectures here and there. But these are truths that must be brought to our consciousness without fail today. It is imperative that we realize today that human thinking is something that cannot be produced at all by the human being who lives in the present with his flesh and blood and bones and nerves, but that it from prenatal life, and that the will is not something that can be brought forth by the present human being in his totality, but that the will has a side that remains beyond death. If we really get to know that which in the present human being cannot be brought forth by the bodily-carnal human being, then the eternal human being is present in the human being who stands before us. But these truths are not attained by speculating about the eternal, but by really being able to enter positively into what thinking on the one hand and willing on the other hand is. In this way one attains such knowledge.

It is really necessary: if one wants to pursue higher knowledge in the sense of today's spiritual science, then one must, above all, consider the word mysticism, which is practiced in many ways today, to be the most harmful.

That is why certain things that have to be written down today from the point of view of an honest spiritual science should be accepted. And they are indeed widely accepted. But when it comes to what it is actually about, to the intervention of the concrete facts of human life, then people no longer go along with it, because then they prefer to listen to the chatter of mystifying people who want to conjure up an inner world out of words. But the present is too serious in their lives to be able to indulge in such a pleasure. For most people, mysticism today is just a pleasure. What is to be done today is something that shapes the soul of the human being in such a way that he can really only grasp what lives in social life with these appropriated concepts. Is a person to arrive at social concepts if he cannot see, if he learns from the scientific way of thinking, to approach reality with nothing but prejudices and preconceptions? The pure observation of reality, as we need it today, can only be gained by freeing ourselves from the thicket of ideas to which we have surrendered through spiritual-scientific ideas, and which finds its ultimate, extreme consequence in some mystical aberrations of our time. The mystic aberrations of our time are not the sign of an initial improvement for the better; often they are the last sign of decline, the very utmost of mere empty words instead of real insights.

Real insights provide something like: Thinking is an echo of prenatal life; volition is a prelude to post-mortal life. These are concrete insights. When we speak of such concrete things, we speak quite differently from those who say: the eternal lives in the temporal man, the divine I lives there; when one experiences oneself in that, one has grasped the divine, that is the true I; the other is the untrue I, and so on. You can waste the whole day with playful terms. It can create a great sense of well-being internally, but you won't get any real insights with it.

In these reflections, I have spoken to you from a variety of perspectives about the fact that there is a connection between the assimilation of spiritual-scientific knowledge and social understanding, which should spread more and more among humanity. You have probably felt the need to raise the question more thoroughly: What is the inner relationship between the relationships between people, which we call social, and what can develop as feeling in us as we gradually become familiar with spiritual scientific ideas? The spiritual-scientific concepts show us, first of all, a certain inner soul mood by making us understand that which one experiences in ordinary life but must actually feel as the most incomprehensible: human destiny. This human destiny becomes understandable from a certain point of view by getting to know the law of repeated earthly lives and their interrelations, the law of karma. We learn how an earthly life that we enter and complete is dependent on our previous earthly lives. We have already spoken of the forces that play over from one earthly life into another, and from this we have seen how, so to speak, the cosmic technique of shaping fate is.

Now everyone feels that today, unless he attains higher knowledge, man can only dimly sense how his fate is shaped by the laws of successive earthly lives. What we call karma is something that, in theory, can be relatively easily understood today. You can see this from the last edition of my Theosophy, in which the chapter on karma has been reworked. But the real vision of life that I spoke of yesterday, that simple vision of life, unclouded by prejudice and preconception, which would immediately reveal the law of fate, is still possessed by very few people today. If people would really see what is going on in life as I spoke of yesterday, in terms of simple, unprejudiced seeing, then common sense would speak of the law of destiny in the sense of spiritual science. But that is not yet the case for most people today. Above all, because of their lack of simple seeing, most people do not see clearly how the consciousness of the I lives in the soul. Even today there are philosophers who speak of the sense of self as if this sense of self were the most certain, the most real. This can be said to be just as true on the one hand as it is one-sided, even almost incorrect, on the other. For how do we actually perceive our human self?

Yesterday, you learned with regard to our inner life how our mental life is actually only a reflection of our prenatal life, how our life of will is the embryonic, germinal aspect of our post-mortem life, and how, therefore, what takes place in our soul plays out is fundamentally not at all attached to what envelops us as a body from birth to death, and how our being, which is outside of the body and even outside of time, plays into our thinking on the one hand and into our will on the other. But they also know how we look back on our lives and have the feeling that we have the completed course of life behind us as memory. As human beings, it is very easy for us to imagine that we have consciously traversed our life and stored it in our memory from the point in time to which we can remember going back. It seems to a person that if the moment of the present is here (see drawing), he remembers back to the moment in childhood to which he can remember. You can easily see that this is a huge mistake. If you retrace your life back to the moment you remember in your childhood, and view this as a closed current, then of course it is totally wrong, because in reality, when you look back in this way, you first perceive only the 'events of the last day on which you look back; then there is the night in between, then the previous day, then the night in which you perceive nothing, then the day before that and so on.

So it is a tremendous illusion if you simply overlook the fact that this recall, this conscious recall, does not give you a closed flow, but in reality gives you a continuously interrupted flow, in that all the times you were asleep are left out of this recall. So you don't have a continuous line of recall, but a discontinuous line of recall, a continuously interrupted line of recall.

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Now, in order to make the meaning of what I am actually trying to say here clear to you, I would like to convey an image to you. Imagine you have the following image: a white disc and a dark spot within this disc. You can now ask: What am I perceiving here? – The white disc. Where there is no white, you see the black spot. I don't want to discuss whether the black spot is real or just the absence of white. But you see this black spot. You see that this black spot is where there is no white, inside the white disc. Take this image and apply it to the way you actually perceive your self in ordinary life. Just as you do not perceive anything here (in the middle) where the black spot is, so you do not really perceive your ego. You do not perceive your ego at all, but you do perceive your experiences that you have gone through during your various day-wakings. And you do not perceive your ego at all; only by the fact that somewhere, when you survey your experiences, your experiences are not there, just as there is no white here in the black spot, you perceive your ego. When you look back over your life, you perceive the experiences, and you do not perceive these interruptions. Instead, you perceive your ego. It is the absence of the experiences of the day that gives you the real perception of your ego, that is, when you say “I,” you perceive the time in your life that you have slept through.

In fact, the blank space in your life when you look back is what gives rise to your sense of self. Suppose you didn't sleep at all, you would always be awake, then you would have no sense of self when you look back. You would feel like a being that floats, without a sense of self, in the events of the world's existence.

It is extremely important to simply see these things. Because every person believes that the perception of the self is an experience. No, the perception of the self is the respective hole in the experiences. I ask you to hold on to that for the time being.

And now I ask you to remember how I told you over and over again that a person not only sleeps when he sleeps, but that a person also sleeps when he is awake. A person is actually only awake with regard to his world of sense and imagination. A person is only really awake in his sense perceptions and in his imagination. In relation to his volition, he sleeps. Just as little as man looks into what he accomplishes from falling asleep to waking up, he looks into the inner impulses of his volition. Yesterday I spoke about how the “guy” or the “gal” look at each other in their actions, but do not see the volition. With regard to the will, man sleeps. He also sleeps during the day by being a willing person. He only wakes up by being a sensually perceiving and intellectually conceptualizing person. He is only half awake; for the other, for the willing part of his being, man also sleeps while watching.

And now you will understand how it actually is with the I. It does not enter at all as a real being into your sensory perceptions and into your ideas, but remains down in the will and continues to sleep there even from waking to falling asleep. Therefore, you can never see it as a real being, but only as the hollow circle in the middle. You can have the dark feeling that you have an ego in that something of what you have like a hole in your soul experiences sounds out of your will. But the perception of the ego is a thoroughly negative one. It is extremely important to realize this. It is necessary that the superficial idea of the ego, which also appears in many philosophies of modern times, be recognized in its vanity. For only when one has seen through all the facts that I have set out here, will one understand, inwardly understand, the relationship between people in life.

I have described this relationship between people in life in the new edition of my “Philosophy of Freedom” in one of the extensions that I have added to the book in the new edition. We not only perceive our own ego, as I have just discussed, albeit negatively, but we also perceive the ego of the other person. We could not perceive it if the ego were in our own consciousness. If the ego were in our own consciousness, then the relationship between people would be quite fatal; then we would go through the world and only have I, I, I in our consciousness within our world of sense and imagination. We would pass by other people and perceive them only as shadows, and we would be surprised when we reach out our hand that these shadows stop our hand. We would not be able to explain to ourselves where this comes from, that we cannot reach through a person. All this would lead to the fact that we would have the ego substantially, not merely as the idea of a negative in our ideas and in our sense life. We do not have it in our thinking and sense life. There the I is actually in it, but not in the thinking and not in the sense life directly.

When we perceive another person, we actually perceive them through our will. It is not uncommon today, among people who think of themselves as philosophers, to hear the following crazy notion: when we stand in front of a person, we find a form: there is hair on top, then a forehead, then a nose, a mouth, and so on. We have often seen ourselves in the mirror; we look just like the person standing in front of us. And since we have an ego, we conclude by analogy that the other person also has an ego. – This is a crazy idea, a real, proper nonsense! For we actually perceive the other person's ego just as we perceive our own, albeit as a negative. And precisely because our ego is not in our consciousness, but outside of our consciousness, like the will, that is why we can put ourselves in the other person's shoes. If the ego were in our consciousness, we would not be able to put ourselves in the other person's shoes and would only perceive them as if in a shadowy existence. And how does this perception of the other person take place? Something like a very complicated process takes place when we perceive the other person. We are facing him: he, so to speak, takes up our attention and puts us to sleep for a very brief moment. He hypnotizes us, he puts us to sleep for a moment. Our sense of humanity is actually put to sleep for a very brief moment. We resist this and assert our personality. This is now like the pendulum swing: sleeping in the other, waking up in ourselves, and again sleeping in the other, waking up in ourselves. And this complicated process of swinging back and forth between falling asleep in the other and waking up in ourselves takes place in us when we face the other. It is a process in our will. We just do not perceive it because we do not perceive our will at all. But this continuous oscillation back and forth takes place as described in my “Philosophy of Freedom”.

You see, in this vibration between falling asleep in the other and waking up in ourselves, you have the primal element, so to speak, the atom of human beings living together socially. This is the original element of what social life is from person to person. This original element and with it all the complicated structures of social life actually rest in that part of our being that sleeps, even when we are awake. Social life is essentially at most a dreaming being of the waking person; it is not a fully awake life that the person lives in social life. This is why the social element is so difficult to grasp in our ordinary lives, because it is not really a fully waking life at all, because it is a dreamy life, and because we actually always have to defend ourselves against the social feeling, against the feeling in the other, in order to maintain ourselves in ourselves.

Now think about how complicated it makes our lives that we enter into such relationships with different people, relationships that consist of a constant falling asleep and waking up. One person is like that, the other person is like that. We fall asleep into them. This falling asleep is how the other person is. We merge with them as we fall asleep. Just remember the following: Imagine that you have now spoken to so and so many people, for my sake, during the interval or somehow else in the hall. You have fallen asleep in all of them, and that is always there in you after you wake up from them. In this way you take something of the essence of these people across with you. All this vibrates from person to person, this waves from person to person. Basically, it is a dim, dark element that prevails in this social coexistence of human beings. And the present consciousness of the human being does not have much of this social feeling, which waves and weaves from person to person in a dark, dim way.

In our time, it is now our task as people of the present – as you can see from the various reflections we have made – to gradually rise from the old blood relationships to an understanding of what is so dimly and darkly weaving and undulating among us socially. One of the most important tasks of the present time is to acquire an understanding of this weaving and rippling. What I call the “threefold social organism” is basically just a structure of human coexistence that allows people, little by little, after a number of generations, to really absorb this weaving and essence from person to person, which can be described as the social element. This understanding can only come about through the independent coexistence of economic life, legal life and spiritual life, and in particular through the spiritual life being completely free from the other two areas of life.

It is the most important public task of present and future humanity to carry out this threefold order so that humanity can continue to exist at all and so that it can come to a truly social inner understanding of human life. In modern times, since the middle of the 15th century, humanity has begun the process of developing this understanding. It is difficult at present only for the reason that for the first time in the whole evolution of humanity on earth, the divine spiritual powers of the world are appealing to the consciousness of human beings. All progress achieved so far has been brought about more or less unconsciously. The first thing to be done is to consciously strive for a social structure. Old social structures have emerged from blood ties, from the small and large family, from the clan, the classes and so on. They have then expanded into folk connections. Today, humanity is floundering in the belief that it can adhere to such connections in a dishonest way, in the context of nations, while basically it has long since overcome what national connections are, and the need has long since arisen to arrive at social connections other than those represented by the blood relationship between nations.

I have told you that, to a certain extent, the first step on this path to an understanding of the kind that is necessary for the present and the near future was the development, with the Reformation, of the dominance of the economic man. I have pointed out to you how in ancient times the initiate, the initiate, ruled, how then the priest ruled, and how then since the middle of the 15th century the economic man has become the ruler. Since the Reformation, those who otherwise wore purple robes and presented themselves as rulers had to become the puppets of the economic people if they wanted to rule. In truth, more and more economic people have ruled since the middle of the 15th century, those people who took care of the economy of the various territories of the earth. If in name others ruled, it was only in name, and the governments were basically permeated by economic principles. Of course, no one likes to admit that everything that has been done since the Reformation has been done from an economic point of view. People talk about ideals and so on. But for the representative of real history, these are only masks. In order not to lift the veil too much, since the Reformation there have also been ministers of education, justice, and so on. But all of them were actually only somewhat less nuanced economic ministers. Those who look at the realities can see that at most they transferred old traditions, but essentially they did so under economic considerations.

In this respect, the Catholic Church actually understood how to be quite contemporary, especially in the age of the Reformation. In the onset of the Reformation era, the Catholic Church basically understood best how to make progress in line with the newer economic principle. One only needs to pick out one “fact from the other facts. Up to that time the church had managed to draw close together the highest spiritual matters and the most trivial worldly matters. In the old days, sins could be atoned for by all manner of deeds. Gradually it came about that sins could be atoned for by paying. And the Pope, faster than the other worldly powers, understood very well how to take advantage of the progress of the modern age. He anticipated his income from the atoning of sins in later times. When one has the power to be paid for forgiving the sins committed by people, it means a very substantial future income. And when this is as secure as it can be through the faith of men, then it means a very secure income. The largest bank in Siena therefore considered it a safe business to buy so and so much of the future atonement of humanity from the Pope. The Pope received huge sums of money from a Siena bank, while he was already using these funds well. And the banking house sent Tetzel to collect these sums. He then traveled around the countries of Central Europe and collected the sums again for the Sienese banking house.

You see, the church was extraordinarily good at dealing with the circumstances of modern times. That is also history! This history must certainly be considered.

The economic man came up. The church was there. But after all, the administration of spiritual affairs with the help of the Siena banking house and its collector, its agent, is only a mask for the actual spiritual. And if you study modern history, you will find that there is a deep meaning when it is said that the economic man became the dominant one. The Pope has remained such a strong ruler only because he understood at the right moment to become an economic person as well, to adapt to the economic type.

Yes, the economic type has prevailed since the Reformation. It replaced the old priestly type. In the 19th century, humanity in general was only as far advanced as the church, which understood progress much better, had already been at the time of the Reformation. But the economic type of person only prevailed until the 19th century. In the 19th century, another type became dominant. When we say that this type became dominant, it means that the decisive influences in the social structure depend on this type. In the 19th century, in the first and second decades of the 19th century, the usurer, that is to say the banker, then became decisive. If you were to look for an appropriate definition of the banker, then history becomes extremely precarious. If you set up a definition of the banker, the big and the small, from a truly social-economic basis - one avoids that very gladly - then you should not at the same time look for a definition of the usurer. For these two definitions will resemble each other; they can only resemble each other. But this is something that modern humanity has guarded just as carefully as certain secret societies have guarded their “signs” and “words”. It has not been spread among humanity at large. It has remained a secret in social life.

The banker became the ruler. And if you examine how the social structure developed during the 19th century, you find that by the first or second decade of the 19th century, the banker, this particular economic type who only economizes with money, is the man who, just as the economic man did in the past, now exercises his decisive influence on a large scale over everything that turns out to be a social structure, over all the laws of the countries, and so on. It is very important to understand these conditions, it is very important to understand that the economic type of person has been becoming dominant since the Reformation, that the banker has been becoming dominant since the beginning of the 19th century. And one cannot understand the public affairs of the civilized world in the most recent times if one does not see in them a history of the domination of the banking system. Towards the end of the 19th century, what I had already mentioned in 1908 in my Nuremberg lecture cycle then occurred: In the first half of the 19th century and still somewhat into the second half, the individual bearer of the money was the ruler; but then this principle of rule was transformed in such a way that the money itself became the ruler. In the first half of the 19th century, however, the individual human being as a banker was still the ruler. I illustrated this with an example, if you remember. I told you how the Parisian Rothschild was once supposed to be “pumped” by the King of France. If the Parisian Rothschild was supposed to be pumped by the King of France, that already reveals a bit who is actually the ruler. Well, kings don't pump directly, do they. While the king sent his minister – they call this kind of economics minister “minister of finance” – Rothschild happened to be dealing with a leather merchant. The servant told the minister sent by the King of France to wait in the anteroom. Of course, this seemed highly unusual to the minister of the King of France, that he should wait while Rothschild was dealing with a leather merchant. “He shall wait?” He does not wait, but throws open the door: ‘I come to you on behalf of the King of France.’ ‘Please, take a chair,’ said Rothschild. This was, of course, completely incomprehensible to the minister. ‘Yes, but I am the emissary of the King of France!’ ‘Take two chairs and sit down!’

You see, the individual banker was no longer the ruling force. This gradually changed into the rule of shares, of banknotes as such. And we have gradually sailed into the time when the individual money owner is no longer the essential thing, but the abstract, accumulated capital. A person can be rich today and poor tomorrow. The human being himself rolls up and rolls down. The joint-stock company, the abstract one - I explained this in Nuremberg in 1908 - is what has become dominant.

But this means that human development has reached an extreme, an extreme. For as soon as money reigns as such, as soon as money is the actual driving force, the time has come when it must be replaced, I might say, by mere cash figures in money through realities. Now money is the most spiritual part of the economy. It is that part of the economy that can only be grasped spiritually. It has only a spiritual value, money, only a value in human recognition. You can eat bread and meat, but you cannot eat money. You can really acquire something useful for people with money, if the money is recognized. It has only a soul, a spiritual value, a conceptual value, a value of imagination. The time has come when the development of the purely economic spirituality of money must change into something that is truly grasped in the spirit. And what is to be demanded through the threefold order as social understanding is that which must follow directly on from the domination of the most abstract economic factor, namely money. For as dark and dim as social understanding, as I have described it, lives among people, so must it actually become. For just imagine that (see drawing) would be a human life in the present from birth to death. This life would be lived in such a way that the human being acquires social understanding within himself, that the social life, the social structure, would not be built on the monetary value that he has, but on social understanding. Then the human being would go through the gate of death, live through the time until the next birth and then again live through his life from birth to death. What a person acquires here between birth and death in the way of social understanding also lies within him. Above all, it goes into the sleeping will, of which I spoke yesterday; this is carried through the gate of death. So that the person carries his social understanding through the gate of death until world midnight and then carries it again through birth into the next life on earth.

What then becomes of this understanding, acquired through social understanding, in the next life on earth? That is the big question that must be raised today. It becomes understanding of karma. This means that we have now reached the epoch in the world-historical process of human development in which humanity must acquire social understanding; for this social understanding provides an understanding of karma for the next incarnation. But no human being can acquire social understanding other than by acquiring understanding for the spiritual.

You see how things are connected. You see how social understanding depends on spiritual understanding, on a spiritual view of the world and a spiritual philosophy of life. And you see how this in turn determines what, as a conscious recognizing their destiny in the course of human evolution, for those who then, with social understanding, will pass through the gate of death, be reborn and after rebirth understand their destiny.

What is important is to realize how things are connected in the development of humanity on earth. We live in the epoch of the necessity for social understanding. We will be reborn in the epoch of understanding the destiny of the individual human being. It is truly not out of a mere abstract impulse that we speak today of the necessity of social understanding, but it is connected with the innermost developmental impulses of humanity on earth in general.

This is what I wanted to suggest to you today, my dear friends. We will talk about these things further next time.

The lectures in Zurich – you know that tomorrow is the public lecture in Basel – have to be postponed by two days because a hall other than the one initially considered had to be chosen, so that the first lecture will take place on October 24, then there will be lectures on October 25, 26, 28, 29, and 30, and on October 31 there will be a eurythmy performance in Zurich. This means that it is of course not possible for me to give a lecture here next Saturday and Sunday, and I will therefore continue on Thursday for those friends who are willing and able to come here at half past seven next Thursday.

We have spoken at length about the relationship between a humanistic worldview and a social approach to life. We are discussing these matters because it is necessary today, from various points of view, to recognize how a thorough recovery of our lives and a truly fruitful development towards the future are only possible if spiritual-scientific views and ideas enter into the way people think and imagine.

Besides what I said recently about looking back on life, there is something else that applies to this life review. I have drawn your attention to the fact that when a person looks back on his life, he should actually be aware that he is only aware of discontinuous elements of his life with his ordinary consciousness, and that between these discontinuous links, which man looks back on, are the states of sleep, which actually fall away, with regard to which man, in terms of his retrospective view, even indulges in a certain delusion. He assumes that life is continuous; but it is not continuous. This life is such that it only shows us fragmented episodes. But from the spiritual-scientific background one should be clear about the fact that what is not perceived from the review of life is nevertheless an experience, just as much an experience as that which is incorporated into ordinary consciousness.

Now, the experiences that the human soul always undergoes between falling asleep and waking up are not easy to describe, because the person has to free themselves from a number of things that are part of their usual perception of consciousness if they are to have any idea at all of the experiences that take place between falling asleep and waking up.

We live for ordinary life in space and time. When we are completely asleep – from the point of view of ordinary consciousness, speaking now – then it is the case that we live neither in ordinary time nor in ordinary space. When we recall what happens to us in the time between falling asleep and waking up, the memory itself is a kind of shadow image or, as they say, a projection of the experience during sleep into the space and time of waking day life.

But if you want to take a closer look at these conditions, then you must also bear in mind that the state of sleep is not merely rest in relation to the waking state. It is precisely in this respect that one of the cases arises in which people judge more out of preconceived ideas than out of real observation. One might ask, if one calls the ordinary waking life the normal state of man: When does rest occur? Rest actually only exists in two points, at the moment of falling asleep and at the moment of waking up. In a sense, falling asleep and waking up are zero compared to the waking state during the day. But the state of sleep is not zero; the state of sleep is the opposite. We must here resort to the favorite comparison from arithmetic. You may, for instance, have some property, say fifty francs; then you have something. When have you nothing? Well, just when you have nothing. But if you owe fifty francs, then you have less than nothing, then you have the negative. Thus, in relation to waking, nothingness is falling asleep and waking up; in relation to the ordinary waking state, the state of sleep itself is the negative. For while we sleep, processes opposite to those of waking occur, processes of a completely different kind, processes that, above all, in their reality, are not subject to the laws of space and time like the processes of waking daytime life.

But, as you may have already suspected from my previous lecture, it is actually only in this state of sleep that our real self is truly in its element. The self certainly lives in our will, but even there it sleeps, as we know. The real self does not enter into our ordinary thought life. We would not even be aware of the real self if we did not perceive it as a kind of negative. And when we look back on our experiences, we do not say to ourselves: We have experienced days and nights – but we only look back on the days. And instead of saying: We look back on the nights – we say: “I” – we feel, we perceive ourselves as I.

People must gradually come to understand such truths, otherwise they will be crushed by the purely scientific world view, which has indeed taken hold of all other life, of all other views of life, in the majority of modern people. We will only be able to know ourselves completely as human beings if we say to ourselves at every moment of our lives: You are not only a human being in flesh and blood who has a consciousness, as is familiar to most people now living, but you are a human being who has only slipped out of his body from the moment he falls asleep until he wakes up. But then you live under completely different circumstances than in ordinary waking life, and only then, between falling asleep and waking up, is your ego in its actual element; there it can unfold, there it is what it can lay claim to: to be substantial. During daytime wakefulness, our ego is present only in our volition. In thinking, in imagining and even in a large part of feeling, of sensing, only images of the ego are present.

Therefore, it is a great mistake when some philosophers claim that there is a reality in what a person addresses as his or her self. Only when a person awakens in sleep in higher consciousness would he become aware of his real self. Or if he were to see through what the process of the will is, then he would experience his real self in willing.

But these things must actually pass over into the human being's intuitive perception, into his feeling, if they are to play the right role in life. Man must, so to speak, be able to say to himself: You are a being who, with his ordinary conception of the world, actually perceives only one half of it; you are embedded with the other half of this being, continually in supersensible experiences, which you cannot perceive with your ordinary consciousness alone. A certain reverence for the creative principles behind man can only be attained by man in the right way, when he can connect with the supersensible in this way. Therefore, in a materialistic age like ours, not only will the view of the supersensible fade away, but in such an age reverence for the creative principles of the world will also fade away. Respect will have vanished altogether from human hearts. There is little respect and few feelings in the present time that can truly uplift the soul to the supersensible! And much of the sentiment that people try to preserve is nothing more than a certain sentimentality, and sentimentality is at the same time also untrue, sentimentality is never completely true.

When one – and I must mention this again on this occasion – takes such things into one's consciousness, intellectually and emotionally, then the fact that human and world life has something of the character of a great mystery comes before one's soul's eye. And without this view, that life and the order of the world are a mystery, real progress in the development of humanity cannot really be imagined. Epochs such as our own, in which no one really wants to believe that life contains secrets, can basically only be episodes. They can serve to cut people off from their own origins for a while, and then, precisely through the reaction against this cutting off, they can penetrate all the more to a real feeling for the mystery of life. But this mystery of life can reveal itself to man neither out of sentimentality nor out of abstraction. It can only reveal itself when man is inclined to enter concretely into the facts of the supersensible world. And it will be something of a beginning of such an engagement with supersensible facts if one can really develop a kind of sacred feeling when entering into the state of sleep and can develop a sacred feeling with regard to looking back into this state of sleep, in which one, one may, without actually speaking figuratively, characterize it in this way: was in the dwellings of the gods.

Ultimately, we must realize how far removed our present-day view of life is from this idea, how thoughtlessly the present human race sees this other side of life. But how can we see through what lies beyond birth and death if we cannot see through what lies beyond falling asleep and waking up? For that which lies in man beyond birth and death is also there between birth and death; only between birth and death it is hidden behind the physical shell. But if there were less egotistical religiosity and more altruistic religiosity - I have already spoken of this - then in what man lives through from birth on, the continuation of prenatal life or life before conception would be seen in the spiritual world. But then the phenomena in human life would appear to us as miracles, and we would constantly have the need to unravel them. We would have the longing to see the revelation of that which is formed, embodied from supersensible worlds into the sensible world, through human evolution. And basically, it is already the case today that we can only understand the after-death life in the right way if we look at the prenatal life.

You see, there are secrets of life. A number of secrets of life must be revealed in our time because of the developmental demands of humanity. A human being cannot become aware of their full humanity if they do not broaden their view of themselves to include prenatal and post-mortem life. For we only know part of our being if we do not allow the prenatal and post-mortem to reveal themselves to us in this physical existence. Even today it is still extraordinarily difficult to speak of these things to people who have not been introduced to them through anthroposophy, because either there is the utmost interest in these things, in which case the truth is not allowed to come among people, or there is a lack of proper understanding. You only need to look around in life, then you will find that the usual world views today pay very, very little attention to prenatal life. They care about the afterlife out of selfishness, because they demand not to perish with their physical body. And the religious denominations count on this selfishness by basically only speaking of the afterlife, not of the prenatal life.

But the matter is not just that, but it is still difficult today to talk about these things because it is a dogma of the Catholic Church not to believe in prenatal life, a dogma that other Christian denominations have also adopted. So that pretty much most Christian denominations today consider it heresy to speak of prenatal life. But it is something that reaches extraordinarily deep into the spiritual development of humanity when one dogmatically forbids looking at prenatal life. It is indeed difficult to imagine — and here I am not speaking of conscious things, but rather of unconscious ones in the development of humanity — that anything could succeed more in lulling man into illusions about his actual being than withholding from him views about prenatal life. For the whole view of man is falsified by the fact that people are deceived into believing that the mere fact of being born of father and mother is the only reason man is placed on earth at all. By withholding man's insight into prenatal life, the church has created an enormous means of exerting power. Therefore the church as such will fight in the most terrible way against all those teachings that dwell on prenatal life. The church will not tolerate that. There should be no illusions about that; but nor should there be any illusion that life simply cannot be understood if no consideration is given to prenatal life.

But something will follow from this that you should really take into account deeply and thoroughly. Consider this: it was in the interest of the church creeds to withhold important information about themselves from people. The church creeds have made it their mission to withhold the most important truths about themselves from people. These church creeds have thus found their means to envelop people in dullness, in illusion. And today it is necessary not to succumb to any illusions on this point, not to compromise out of any kind of indulgence with all kinds of church dogmas. There is no compromising on this. And it should be noted that it is of no avail to assert somewhere: Anthroposophy is concerned with the Christ, it is not atheistic, it is not pantheistic either, and so on. This will never help you, for the church creeds will not be annoyed that you do not concern yourself with the Christ; they do not care much about that, but they will be annoyed precisely because you do concern yourself with the Christ. For it matters to them that they have the monopoly on saying anything about Christ. In these matters one must not practice inner indulgence, otherwise one will always be tempted to shroud the most important things in life in twilight and fog and illusion. Humanity today has a need to approach spiritual knowledge. But dogmatic church creeds are the ones that are most opposed to spiritual knowledge, especially those dogmatic church creeds that have gradually developed in the West. The Church as such cannot actually be hostile to spiritual knowledge; that is quite impossible, because the Church as such should actually only be concerned with the feelings of man, with ceremonies, with worship, but not with the life of thought. The educated Oriental does not understand the Western church creeds at all, because the educated Oriental knows exactly: he is bound to the external cult; it is his duty to devote himself to the ceremonies to which he devotes himself in his confession. He can think whatever he wants. In the Oriental confession one still knows something of freedom of thought. This freedom of thought has been completely lost to Europeans. They have been educated in the bondage of thought, especially since the 8th or 9th century AD. That is why it is so difficult for people of Western culture to understand the things I mentioned the other day: that it is easy to prove any opinion. You can prove one opinion and you can prove its opposite. Because the fact that something can be proved is no proof of the truth of what is asserted. To arrive at the truth, one must go into much deeper layers of experience than those in which our usual proofs lie. But certain church creeds have not wanted to bring experience to the surface; therefore they have separated people from such truths as these: There you stand, O human being! As your organism develops from infancy, what you have lived through in prenatal life gradually develops within you.

And what, in particular, develops mainly from prenatal life in the individual human life between birth and death?

Now, we distinguish between an individual life and a social life in a human being. If you do not keep these two poles of human experience separate, you cannot arrive at any concept of the human being at all: individual life – that which we have, so to speak, as our most personal sense of ownership every day, in every hour; social life – that which we could not have if we did not constantly exchange ideas and engage in other interactions with other people. The individual and the social play into human life. Everything that is individual in us is basically the after-effect of prenatal life. Everything we develop in our social life is the germ of our after-death life. We have even seen recently that it is the germ of karma. So we can say: there is the individual and the social in man. The individual is the after-effect of the prenatal life. The social is the germ of the after-death life.

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The first part of this truth, that the individual is, so to speak, the after-effect of prenatal life, can be seen particularly clearly by studying people with special talents. Let us say, because it is good to look at the root of the matter in such cases, that we study human genius. Where does the power of genius come from? Man brings the genius into this life through his birth. It is always the result of pre-birth life. And since, understandably, pre-birth life is particularly evident in childhood — later, a person adapts to life between birth and death, but in childhood everything that a person experienced before birth comes out — that is why, in the case of genius, the childlike manifests itself throughout life. It is virtually the characteristic of genius to retain the childlike throughout life. And it is even part of genius to retain youthfulness and childlikeness until the very last days, because all genius is connected with prenatal life. But not only genius, all talents, everything that makes a person an individuality is connected with prenatal life. Therefore, if you give people the dogma that there is no prenatal life, that there is no preexistence, what are you implicitly doing with it? You are spreading the doctrine that there is no reason for special individual talents. — You know that the actual church creeds, when they are completely sincere and honest, profess that there are no reasons for personal talents. It is not right to deny personal talents themselves; but if you deny their reasons, then you can consider personal talents to be quite meaningless.

This is connected with the fact that an education of European humanity has emerged from the church confessions, as they have prevailed for centuries, which has ultimately led to the modern levelling of people. What are people's individual talents today? And what would individual talents be if the usual socialist doctrine were implemented? In these matters, it is less important to look at the outward name of a thing than at the inner connections. A person who is a Catholic believer in dogma on the one hand and a hater of social-democratic teachings on the other is subject to a very strange inconsistency. He is as inconsistent as someone who says: I met a little boy in 1875, I was very fond of him then, and I am still very fond of him today. But now someone says to him: But look, the little boy of 1875 has become the guy who is now standing in front of you as a Social Democrat. Yes, so the answer goes, I still like the little boy of 1875 in his life back then, but I don't like, I hate, the man he has become. But social democracy grew out of Catholicism! Catholicism is just the little boy who has grown into social democracy. The latter does not want to admit it, nor does the former want to admit it, but only because people do not want to see any liveliness in the external social sphere, but only want to see something made of papier-mâché. When you make something out of papier-mâché, it remains stiff and keeps its form as long as it lasts; but that which is in the social life grows and lives and can also be preserved. But here one must distinguish between 'deception and reality. You see, you distinguish between deception and reality when you, for example, come up with the following idea. 8th century: Catholicism; 20th century: From the real Catholicism of the 8th century, social democracy has emerged! And what is present as Catholicism alongside it is not the real Catholicism of the 8th century, but its imitation, counterfeit Catholicism; for real Catholicism has since grown into social democracy.

This is not generally recognized, not because people are unwilling to face reality, but because they create illusions and deceptions to shield themselves from reality. And it is easy for them to do so. For one simply gives the same name to what has long since ceased to be itself. But if today what is represented in Europe from Rome - I have to describe it - is given the name Catholicism in the same sense as what was represented in the 8th century from Rome, it is just the same as if I were to say of a sixty-year-old man: “He's just the eight-year-old lad!” Once upon a time he was an eight-year-old lad, but today he is no longer an eight-year-old lad.

I am drawing your attention here to something that needs to be considered because social life, too, may be seen as something alive and not as something inanimate and dead. And until such things are seen through, present-day humanity will not rise to an understanding of real social life. The social life has its roots in spheres that we today no longer grasp with our externalized names in any language, at best in the oriental languages, a little in the European languages, least of all in English or American, which is of course very far removed from reality. So our languages are obstacles to understanding the social. Therefore, humanity will only advance in its understanding of the social if it emancipates itself from mere linguistic understanding. But today, anything that goes beyond mere linguistic understanding is very much condemned. And what is most often found today is that when something is to be explained, some kind of word explanation is presented first. But it does not matter what you call a thing, what word you use for it; the important thing is to lead people to the thing and not to the word. So, above all, we must overcome the bondage of languages if we want to advance to social understanding. But the bondage of languages will only be overcome if the greatest prejudices of our time are overcome. During the years of terror that we have gone through, the cry rang out throughout the world: Freedom to the individual nations! — and the smallest nations today want to create their own social structures. A passion, a paroxysm of nationalism has come over humanity, and this is just as damaging to the social life of the earth as materialism is to the life of thought. And just as man must work his way out of materialism to freedom and spirituality, so must humanity work its way out of all nationalism, in whatever form it may appear, to universal humanity. Without this, no progress can be made.

However, we will not find the possibility in languages of completely getting out of nationalism if these languages do not draw on deeper forms of expression for the spiritual. You see, I would like to conclude these reflections more or less with an image. If you reflect on this image, which I will use, you will be able to come up with many things that may be important for your understanding of the present time. Look at any piece of writing today. These little devils standing on the white paper are called letters, which you put next to each other. They have grotesque forms and in their juxtaposition they then signify the sounds of our languages. This goes back to other more expressive forms of writing. And if we trace this back very far, we come to the forms of writing, let us say, as the Egyptians had them, or what the original Sanskrit was like, which more or less developed entirely from the snake character in its forms. The Sanskrit signs are transformed snake forms with all kinds of things attached to them. The Egyptian forms of writing were still painted, drawn forms of writing, were still pictures, and in their oldest times were even the imagination of that which was depicted. The writing was directly out of the spiritual. Then writing became more and more abstract until it became what was more or less bad enough: our ordinary writing, which is only connected to what it represents by learning its forms.

Then came something even more terrible, shorthand, which is now the deathblow to the whole system that developed out of ancient pictographic writing. This downward development must give way to an upward one; we must return to a development that leads us out of all that we have been driven into, especially with writing. And with that an attempt was made to make a beginning. Here on this hill at Dornach it stands. However much is lacking in the Dornach building, however much is imperfect, it is something in its forms that expresses in a contemporary way the supersensible essence to which the human being is meant to aspire today. I would like to say that it is also meant as a world hieroglyph. If you really study its individual forms, you will be able to read much more in them than you can absorb from descriptions of the spiritual. This is at least the intention. The intention is to realize a world scripture in it. Writing emerged from art, and writing must return to art. It must go beyond symbolism, allow the spiritual within itself to live directly, by becoming a hieroglyph again in a new way.

What is written here on this hill will only be properly understood if one says to oneself: There are many demands of humanity in the present time that should have an answer. Basically, the language of today is not sufficient to provide an answer. Such an answer is attempted with the forms of this building. Much in it is imperfect; but the attempt at such an answer has been made through this building. And if one looks at it from this point of view, then one will look at it in the right way.

This is what I wanted to add to the previous reflections.

To-day I wish to speak to you of some fundamental pieces of knowledge of the science of initiation, which will then supply to us a kind of foundation for that which we shall consider tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. To-day we shall first speak of something which lies in the consciousness of every human being, but is not grasped clearly enough in the ordinary course of life. When we speak of such things, we always speak of them from the standpoint of our present time, in the sense and meaning which I have often explained to you: namely, that knowledge is not in any way valid for all time and for every place, but that it is only valid for a certain definite time, indeed, only for a definite region of the earth. Thus, certain standpoints of knowledge would be valid, for instance, for the European civilisation, and other standpoints would be valid—let us say—for the knowledge of the East.

Everybody knows that we live, as it were, between two poles of our knowledge. Everyone feels that, on the one hand, we have the knowledge gained through our senses. A plain, unprejudiced person learns to know the world through his senses, and is even able to sum up what he sees and hears, and, in general, what he perceives through his senses. After all, that which science supplies to us, in the form in which science now exists in the Occident, is merely a summary of that which the senses convey to us.

But everyone can feel that there is also another kind of knowledge, and that it is not possible to be in the full sense of the word a real human being living in the ordinary world, unless another kind of knowledge is added to the one which has just been characterized. And this kind of knowledge is connected with our moral life. We do not only speak of ideas pertaining to the knowledge of Nature, and explaining this or that thing in Nature, we also speak of ethical ideas, ethical ideals. We feel that they are the motives of our actions, and that we allow them to guide us when we ourselves wish to be active in the ordinary world. And every man will undoubtedly feel that this knowledge of the senses, with the resulting intellectual knowledge (for, the intellectual knowledge is merely a result, an appendix of the knowledge transmitted by the senses) is a pole of our cognitive life which cannot reach as far as the ethical ideas. The ethical ideas are there, but when we pursue, for instance, natural science, we cannot find these ethical ideas by contemplating the plant-world, the mineral world, or by following any other branch of modern natural sciences. The tragic element of our time consists, for instance, in trying to discover, upon a natural-scientific basis, ideas which are to be applied to the social sphere. If sound common sense were adopted, this would never be possible. The ethical ideas exist as if on another side of life. And our life is indeed under the influence of these two streams: on the one hand, the knowledge of Nature, and on the other hand, the ethical knowledge.

From my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity you will know that the highest ethical ideas required by us as human beings are given to us when we grasp moral intuitions, and that when we begin to gain possession of these ethical ideas, they are the foundation of our human freedom. On the other hand, you may perhaps also know that for certain thinkers there has always been a kind of abyss between that which is given, on the one hand, by the knowledge of Nature, and on the other hand, by ethical knowledge. The philosophy of Kant is based upon this abyss, which he is unable to bridge completely. For this reason, Kant has written a Critique of Theoretical Reason, of Pure Reason, as he calls it, where he grapples with natural science, and where he says all that he has to say about natural science, or the knowledge of Nature. On the other hand, he has also written a Critique of Practical Reason, where he speaks of ethical ideas. We might say: The whole human life is born for him out of two roots which are completely severed from one another, which he describes in his two chief critical studies.

Of course, it would be unfortunate for the human being if there were no connecting bridge between these two poles of our soul-life. Those who earnestly pursue, on the one hand, spiritual science, and on the other hand, earnestly consider the tasks of our present time, must eagerly ask themselves: Where is the bridge connecting ethical ideas and the ideas of Nature?

To-day we shall adopt the standpoint which I would like to characterize as a historical standpoint, in order to come to a knowledge of this bridge. You already know from the explanations which have recently been given here, that in past times man's soul-constitution was essentially different from that of a later time. The origin of Christianity really forms a deep incision in the whole evolution of humanity. And only if we understand what has really arisen in the evolution of humanity through the birth of Christianity we shall understand human reason.

That which lies behind the rise of Christianity—not to mention Jewish history—is the whole extent of pagan culture. Jewish culture was, after all, a preparation for Christianity. This whole extent of pagan culture is essentially different from our modern Christian culture. The more we go back into time, the more we shall find that this pagan culture had a uniform character. It was principally based upon human wisdom. I know that it is almost offending for a modern man to hear that, as far as wisdom is concerned, the ancients were far more advanced than modern man; nevertheless it was so. In ancient pagan times a wisdom extended over the earth, which was far nearer to the origin of things than our modern knowledge, particularly our modern natural sciences. This ancient, this primeval knowledge, was very concrete, it was a knowledge intensively connected with the spiritual reality of things. Something entered the human soul through man's knowledge of the reality of things. But the special characteristic of this ancient pagan wisdom was the fact that the human beings obtained it in such a way (you know that they obtained it from the Mysteries of the Initiates) that this wisdom contained both a knowledge of Nature, and an ethical knowledge. This extraordinarily significant truth in the history of human evolution, this truth which I have just explained to you, is ignored to-day only because people cannot go back to the truly characteristic times of the ancient pagan wisdom. A historical knowledge does not reach back so far as to enable us to grasp the times when the human beings who looked up to the stars really received from the stars, on the one hand, a wisdom explaining to them in their own way the course of the stars, but on the other hand, it also told them how they were to behave and act here upon the earth. Metaphorically speaking, (yet it is not entirely metaphorical, but quite objective up to a certain degree), we might say, that the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Chaldean civilisations were, for instance, of such a kind that men could read the laws of Nature in the course of the stars, but in the star's course they could also read the rules governing that which they were to do upon the earth.

The codices of the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs contain, for instance, rules concerning that which was to become law. It was so that for centuries ahead that which would later on become law was foretold prophetically. Everything contained in these codices was read from the course of the stars. In those ancient times there was no astronomy such as we have it now, merely containing mathematical laws of the movements of the stars or of the earth, but there was a knowledge of the cosmos which was at the same time moral knowledge, ethics.

The doubtful element of modern astrology, which does not go beyond the stage of dilettantism, is that people no longer feel that its contents can only be a complete whole if the laws discovered in it are at the same time moral laws for the human beings. This is something extraordinarily significant.

In the course of human evolution, the essence of that primeval science was lost. This lies at the foundation of the fact that certain Secret Schools—but the schools of an earnest character have really ceased to exist at the end of the 18th century—and even certain Secret Schools of the Occident, have again and again pointed back to this lost science, to the lost Word. As a rule, those who came later no longer knew what was meant by the expression “Word”. Nevertheless, this conceals a certain fact. In Saint-Martin's books we may still find an echo showing that up to the end of the 18th century it was very clearly felt that in ancient times men possessed a spiritual wisdom which they obtained simultaneously with their knowledge of Nature. Their spiritual wisdom also contained their moral and ethical wisdom; this had already disappeared in the eight centuries preceding the rise of Christianity. We may even say: Ancient Greek history is, essentially, the gradual loss of primeval wisdom.

If we study the philosophers before Socrates, namely Heraclitus, Thales, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, the philosophers of the tragic epoch, as Nietzsche called them—I have dealt with them in my book Riddles of Philosophy, and have tried to give as good as possible a picture, from an external standpoint—if we study these philosophers (but the external writings tell us very little about them), we shall find again and again that the passages which have remained like oases in a desert, re-echo a great, encompassing wisdom and knowledge which existed in the remote past of human evolution. The words of Heraclitus, of Thales, Anaxagoras and Anaximenes, appear to us as if humanity had, as it were, forgotten its primeval wisdom and only remembered occasionally some fragmentary passages. The few passages of Thales, Anaxagoras, of the seven Greek sages, etc., which have been handed down to us traditionally, appear to us like fragmentary recollections.

In Plato we still encounter a kind of clear consciousness of this primeval wisdom; in Aristotle everything has been transformed into human wisdom.

And among the Stoics and Epicureans this gradually disappears. The ancient primeval knowledge only remains like an old legend. This is how matters stood with the Greeks.

The Romans—and they were by Nature a prosaic, matter-of-fact nation—even denied that this primeval knowledge had any meaning at all, and they transformed everything into abstractions. The course which I have just described to you in regard to the primeval knowledge, was necessary for the evolution of humanity. Man would never have reached freedom in the course of his development, had the primeval wisdom, which came to him indirectly through atavistic clairvoyance, remained in its original intensity and significance. Nevertheless, this primeval knowledge was connected with everything which could reach man from divine heights in the form, I might say, of moral impulses. This had to be rescued. The moral impulse had to be rescued for man.

Among the many things which we have already explained in regard to the Mystery of Golgotha we have also explained that the divine principle which descended to the earth trough the man, Jesus of Nazareth, contained the moral power which was little by little dispersed and cleft through the waning and gradual dying out of the ancient primeval wisdom. It is indeed so—although this may seem paradoxical to a modern man—that we can say: Once upon a time there was an old primeval wisdom. Man's moral power and moral wisdom were connected with primeval knowledge; this was contained in it as an integrant. The ancient primeval wisdom then lost its power, it could no longer be the bearer of a moral impulse

This moral impulse had, as it were, to be taken under the wing of the Mystery of Golgotha. And for the civilisation of the Occident, the further continuation was the Christ Impulse which has arisen from the Mystery of Golgotha containing that which had remained as a kind of moral extract from the ancient primeval wisdom.

It is very strange to follow, for instance, that which Occidental civilisation contains in the form of true science, true wisdom, up to the 8th or 9th century after Christ. Try to read the description of Occidental wisdom up to the 8th and 9th century, as contained in my book, Riddles of Philosophy, and you will see that, after all, this course of development contains nothing of what may be designated as knowledge, in our modern meaning. For this arises towards the middle of the 15th century, at the time of Galilei. Until that time, knowledge has really been handed down traditionally from the primeval wisdom of the past. It is no longer a wisdom gained through inner intuition, no longer a primeval wisdom experienced inwardly, but an external wisdom handed down traditionally. I have often told you the story of Galilei, the story which is not an anecdote, namely, how Galilei had to make a great effort in order to convince a friend of the truth of his statements. Like all the other people of the Middle Ages who pursued wisdom, this friend was accustomed to accept what was contained in the books of Aristotle, or in the other traditional works. Everything which was taught at that time was traditional. That which was contained in the books of Aristotle was handed down traditionally. And the learned friend of Galilei agreed with Aristotle that the nerves go out from the heart. Galilei endeavoured to explain to him that according to the knowledge he had gained by studying a corpse, he was obliged to say something else: namely, that in the human being the nerves go out from the head, or the brain. This Aristotelian thinker could not believe it. Galilei then led him to the corpse, showed him that the nerves in fact go out from the brain and not from the heart, and felt sure that his friend would now have to believe what he saw with his own eyes. But his friend said: “Indeed, this appears to be true; I can see with my own eyes that the nerves proceed from the brain. But Aristotle says the opposite, namely that the nerves proceed from the heart. If I have to choose between the evidence of the senses in Nature and Aristotle's statements, I prefer to believe in Aristotle, and not in Nature!” This is not an anecdote, but a true occurrence. After all, in our time we simply experience the same thing, only the other way round.

You see, at that time all knowledge was traditional. A new knowledge only began with the time of Galilei, Copernicus, and so forth. But throughout these centuries the moral impulse was borne by the Christian impulse. It was essentially connected with the religious element. This was not the case in pagan times. The pagans realised that when they obtained cosmic wisdom, they obtained at the same time a moral impulse.

A new impulse arose towards the middle of the 15th century, an impulse which completely severed the connection with everything that existed in the form of ancient wisdom, even though this merely existed traditionally. It is very interesting to see the passion with which those who brought to the surface this new science—for instance, Giordano Bruno—abuse everything which existed in the form of old traditional wisdom. Bruno almost begins to rave when he rails against the recollections of ancient wisdom. Something entirely new arises. In fact, we shall be far from understanding human evolution if we are unable to look upon this new element which thus arises, as a beginning.

We may say (a drawing is made on the blackboard): If we indicate, here, the Mystery of Golgotha ... the moral impulse will continue from there, but what was that which the Mystery of Golgotha carried from an older into a more recent time? What was it, in reality, while it was being borne in that direction? It was an end. The more we progress, the more the ancient wisdom disappears, even in its traditional form. We may say that it continues to drip like water, in the form of traditional knowledge; but a new element, a beginning, arises with the 15th century.

Indeed, we have not advanced very far in this new direction. The few centuries which have elapsed since the middle of the 15th century have brought us some natural science, but we have not progressed far since that beginning.

What is this new wisdom? You see, it is a wisdom which, to begin with, in the form in which it has appeared, has this peculiarity: Contrary to the ancient pagan wisdom, it does not contain a moral impulse. You may study as much as possible of this new wisdom, of this Galilei wisdom—mineralogy, geology, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. etc.,—but you will never be able to draw a moral impulse out of this knowledge of Nature.

If modern people think that they can establish sociology upon the foundation of natural sciences, this is a tremendous illusion. For it is impossible to squeeze out of natural science, such as it exists to-day, that kind of knowledge which can be an ideal for human actions. For natural science is altogether in an elementary stage, and we can only hope that by developing more and more, it will again come to the point of containing, as natural science, moral impulses.

If the knowledge of Nature were to continue only in accordance with its own form, it would not be able to produce moral impulses out of its own nature. A new super-sensible knowledge will have to develop by the side of this knowledge of Nature. This super-sensible knowledge will then contain once more the rays of a moral will. And when the beginning which was made towards the middle of the 15th century will have reached its end at the conclusion of the evolution of the earth, then super-sensible knowledge will flow together with the knowledge of the senses, and a unity will arise out of this.

When the old pagan sage, or the follower of pagan wisdom received pagan wisdom from his initiate in the Mysteries, he received at one and the same time a knowledge of Nature, a cosmic knowledge, an anthropogenesis and a moral science, and this was simultaneously a moral impulse. All this was one.

To-day it is necessary to admit that we obtain on the one hand, a knowledge of Nature, and on the other hand, super-sensible knowledge. This knowledge of Nature is, as such, devoid of moral impulses. Moral impulses must be gained through a super-sensible knowledge. Since the social impulses must, after all, be moral impulses, no true social knowledge, and not even a sum of social impulses can be imagined, unless man rises to super-sensible knowledge.

It is important that modern man should realise that he must strike out a new course in regard to social science; he must tread a different path than that of natural science. But I am at the same time obliged to draw your attention to a strange paradox:—I have often explained to you here that the deepest truths of the science of initiation appear strange to the ordinary every-day consciousness, may even appear crazy to an extreme materialist, but in our time it is necessary to grow acquainted with this wisdom which appears so paradoxical to-day. For in our time many things which appear foolish to men are wisdom before God. It would be a good thing if this bible passage were to be considered a little by those who brush aside Anthroposophy with a supercilious smile, or who criticize it in a vile way. They should consider that what they look upon as foolishness may be “wisdom before the Gods”. It would be a very good thing if several people—and by “several” I mean many—particularly those who go to church with their prayer book and revile Anthroposophy, were to insist less upon their proud faith and look more closely into that which is really contained in the Christian faith. In our time it is necessary to become acquainted with several things which appear paradoxical. You see, two things are possible to-day. Someone may become acquainted with the natural science of to-day (I shall now characterize these two things rather sharply), he may, for instance, take up the facts supplied by the science of chemistry, physics, biology, etc. He may study diligently and eagerly the Theory of Evolution which has arisen from the so-called Darwinism. If he studies all this he may become a materialist, as far as his world conception based on knowledge is concerned. Indeed, he will become a materialist; this cannot be denied. Since men, as it were, so quickly arrive at an opinion, they become materialists if they give themselves up wholly to the external knowledge of Nature, according to the intentions of some of their contemporaries. But it is also possible to do something else. In addition to that which physics, chemistry, mineralogy, botany, geology, biology, offer, in addition to that which these sciences teach, we may also direct our attention to what we do in the physical laboratory, to our behaviour during an experiment; we may watch carefully how we behave in the chemical laboratory and what we do there; we may watch the way in which we investigate plants, animals, and their evolution.

Goethe's knowledge of Nature is chiefly based upon the fact that he has deeply studied the way in which others have come to their knowledge. The greatness of Goethe depends upon this very fact, namely, that he has deeply occupied himself with the way in which others have attained to their knowledge. And it is very, very significant to penetrate really into the essence and spirit of an essay by Goethe, such as “The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject”. Here we may see how Goethe carefully follows the way in which phenomena of Nature are handled. What we may call the method of investigation, this is something which he has studied with the greatest attention. If you read my Introduction to Goethe's Natural-Scientific Writings you will find what great results Goethe has reached by thus pursuing the natural-scientific method.

In a certain way, that which Goethe has done can be developed further for the achievements of the 19th century and up to the 20th century ... but Goethe was no longer able to do this.

I therefore state: Two things are possible. Let us keep to this, to begin with. We remain by the results which natural science supplies, or else we investigate the attitude needed in order to arrive at these natural scientific results. Let us keep to what we have said in regard to the knowledge of Nature; let us now observe the human striving after knowledge from another standpoint.

You know that beside natural science there is also a spiritual knowledge; in the form of Anthroposophy, the knowledge of man, we may pursue cosmology, anthropology, etc., in such a way that they lead to the kind of results described, for instance, in my Occult Science. There, we may find positive knowledge pointing to the spiritual world. Just as we obtain positive knowledge in natural science, in mineralogy, geology, etc., so we have, here, a positive knowledge referring to the spiritual world. In our anthroposophical movement it was particularly important for me to spread also this kind of positive knowledge concerning the spiritual world in the various books which I have written. Now we may also tackle things in such a way that we observe chiefly the way in which these things are done, and do not merely aim at obtaining knowledge. We observe how a person describes something, how he rises from external observation to inner observation; how he arrives to a higher spiritual conception, not through scientific investigations in the laboratory, in the clinic, in the astronomical observatory, but through his inner soul-development, along a mystical path. This would be parallel to the observation of the natural-scientific method, of the handling, of the way in which things are done. Also here we have this twofold element: to watch the results, and to watch the way in which our soul comes to these results.

Let us take hypothetically something which may seem rather paradoxical. Let us suppose that someone were to pursue the natural-scientific methods, like Goethe: he will certainly not become a materialist, but will undoubtedly accept a spiritual world-conception. An infallible way of overcoming materialism in our modern time is to have in insight into the natural-scientific methods of investigation. In the natural-scientific sphere, men become materialists only because they do not observe, because they insufficiently observe the way in which they carry on their investigations. They are satisfied with results, with what the clinic, the laboratory, the observatory supply. They do not progress as far as Goetheanism, i.e. the observation of their manner of research; for those who allow themselves to be influenced by the natural-scientific manner of contemplating the world and of handling things in order to reach knowledge, will at least become idealists, and probably spiritualists, if they only proceed far enough.

If we now try to avoid reaching the positive results of spiritual science, if we find it boring to enter into the details of spiritual science, and only like to hear again and again how man's soul becomes mystical, if we concentrate our chief attention upon the methods leading to the spiritual sphere, this will be the greatest temptation for really becoming materialists. The greatest temptation for becoming materialists is to ignore the concrete results of spiritual science and to emphasize continually the importance of mystical research, mystical soul-concentration, and the methods of entering the spiritual world.

You see this is a paradox. Those who observe natural science, natural research, become spiritualists; those who disdain to reach a real spiritual knowledge and who always speak of mysticism and of how spiritual knowledge is gained, are exposed to the great temptation of becoming more than ever materialistic. This should be known to-day. We cannot do without the knowledge of such things.

To-day we have monistic societies. Those who give themselves the air of leaders in these monistic societies spread a very superficial world-conception. They condense the external materialistic results of natural science to a superficial world-conception. This is so easy for modern men who do not wish to make a great effort, who prefer to go to the “movies” rather than to other places, and consequently prefer to accept a kind of cinema-science—for materialism is nothing else—they prefer this to something which must be worked out inwardly. These leaders of monistic societies therefore supply a superficial materialism. Undoubtedly they are, at least for a time, temporarily noxious creatures, for they spread errors. It is not good if they flourish, for of course they turn the heads of people in a materialistic way. Nevertheless they are the less dangerous elements, for to begin with they are generally honest people, but this honesty does not protect them against this spreading of errors; however, they are for the most part frankly honest and their errors will be overcome. They will only have a temporary significance.

But there are other people who systematically, knowingly, refuse to lead man towards the concrete positive results of spiritual-science. Indeed, they nourish the aversion which exists to-day through a certain love of ease, the aversion of penetrating into the positive concrete results of spiritual science. You know that the things described in my Occult Science must be studied several years if we wish to understand them, they are not comfortable for a modern man, who may indeed send his son to the university, if he is to become a chemical scientist; nevertheless, if he is to recognize and grasp heaven and earth in a spiritual way, he expects him to do this in a twinkle, at least in one evening, and from every lecture on the super-sensible worlds he expects to have the whole sum of cosmic wisdom. Concrete results of a positive spiritual research are uncomfortable for most men, and this aversion is made use of by certain personalities of the present time who persuade men that they do not need these things, that it is not necessary to pursue the positive concrete details of spiritual facts. “What is this talk of the higher hierarchies which must first be known? What is this talk of Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan etc.? All this is unnecessary.” They will tell you: “If you concentrate deeply, if your soul becomes quite mystical, you shall reach the God within you”. They will tell you these things, give general indications on the connection of the material and the super-sensible world. They nourish man's aversion to penetrate into the concrete spiritual world. Why do they do this? Because apparently, apparently they wish to spread a spiritual mentality, but in reality they aim at something else: Along this path, more than ever, they seek to produce materialism. For this reason the leaders of the monistic societies are less harmful. But the others who so often spread mysticism to-day, and who always speak of all kinds of mystical things, they are those who truly foster materialism, who foster it in a most refined way. They put into the heads of men that one or the other way leads into the spiritual world, and they avoid speaking about it concretely. They chiefly speak in general phrases and if they remain victorious they will undoubtedly succeed in making the third generation entirely materialistic. To-day, the more certain and also more refined way leading into materialism is to transmit mysticism traditionally, a mysticism which despises to penetrate into positive spiritual-scientific results. Many things which appear to form part of the spiritual literature of to-day foster materialism far more strongly than, for instance, the books of Ernst Häckel.

You see, these things are uncomfortable to hear, because in setting them before men we strongly appeal to their power of discernment, but men do not wish to listen to this appeal to their power of discernment. They are much more satisfied if every kind of mystical nonsense stimulates an inner lust of the soul. This is why there are so many opponents, particularly of those efforts which to-day honestly pursue spiritual life by disdaining to approach men with a shallow mysticism of a general nature. True spiritual science arouses opposition. In the present time there are numerous people and communities who do not in any way wish that a true spiritual regeneration and elevation should take hold of humanity, and who make use of the fact that materialism is undoubtedly festered if they speak to men of mysticism in general terms. They make use of this fact. For this reason they wage war to the knife where they encounter honest paths which are meant to lead into spiritual science.

I have thus characterized an extensive literature which exists to-day. In reality everyone who takes up a mystical book, no matter of what kind, should appeal strongly to his own judgment. This is strictly necessary. For this reason we should not be led astray by the fact that the many pseudo-mystical scribbles of our present time seem to be so easily accessible. Of course, people will easily understand us if we tell them, for instance: “You only need to penetrate deeply into your inner being and God will be within you; your God whom you only find by treading your own path; no one can show you this path because every other man speaks of another God”, or similar stuff. To-day you will find this in many books, and it is described in a most tempting and misleading manner.

I would like you to take to heart these things very deeply. For that which is to be reached through our anthroposophical movement can only be reached through the fact that you are at least a small number of people who strive to cultivate the characterized power of discernment; it would be fatal for humanity if no effort were made to develop this power of discernment. To-day we must try to stand firmly on our feet, if we do not wish to lose our foothold in the midst of the confusion and chaos of the present. We may often ask to-day after the cause of so much confusion in humanity. But we can almost touch these causes. We may find them in insignificant facts, but we must be able to judge these little facts on the right way.

It is uncomfortable to see this immediately, in the many forms in which it exists on all sides. Many grotesque paradoxes can be found not only in rather loathsome places, but also in the modern life of humanity. They undoubtedly exist also in the modern life of humanity. And it is necessary to-day to strive to obtain a clear understanding, an understanding as sharp as a blade, if we wish to gain a firm foothold. This is the essential thing.

From our last lectures you will have seen how man comes to a kind of illusory idea of the outer world; but as a matter of fact, what are usually understood as the connections of nature are inwardly dependent on humanity itself; and we can only gain a true view of the world when we consider the earth and indeed the universe, in its entirety—which means when we regard man as being part of the world—and visualise the interchange, the inter-relation between man and the world. Otherwise we always come to an unreal, a mere abstract grasp of the mineral kingdom; at most understanding something of the plant and animal worlds, which no longer play any strong part in the present concept of nature.

When one speaks of the connections of nature, it is, as a rule, merely the mineral connections in nature to which one refers. To these, if one so desires, that short episode which one calls History, is added; but as a truth of quite a different nature.

From this view, which does not extend to man in his real being, humanity in our present age has to come right away. From diverse points of view we have brought forward the reason why humanity must abandon this view of things, a view which, as you know, has in a sense been necessarily developed in the last three or four centuries.

To-day I will only mention that human beings, with reference to their external knowledge, their external cognition, will become more and more dependent on the physical body with its necessities, unless they can rise in their own evolution to the production of a higher knowledge, through the very effort of their own Will. And in the future it is a question of this:- either humanity will simply succumb to a view of the world gained by remaining just as one was at birth, acquiring no other concepts than those one has already through being placed on the earth through birth, and by means of the ordinary education customary to-day.

That is the one possibility. The other is this: That humanity will cease to believe that, simply from being Born as human beings on earth, they can judge of everything real; and they will then be able to build up a real evolution of man, such as is indicated by Spiritual Science. That is the other path; humanity will have to traverse this latter path, otherwise the earth simply faces its downfall.

What I have just said, can also be observed geographically, when it acquires a quite special significance for the present.

If we only go far enough back in the evolution of the earth, we find man is not rooted in earthly existence itself; for before the evolution of the earth, he had already undergone a long previous development. You find this evolution described In my Outline of Occult Science. You know that man was, in a sense taken back again into a pure Spiritual existence, and from this pure Spiritual existence, he has descended to earthly existence. Now it is a fact that, because of this descent of man into earthly existence, there has been taken away from humanity, a comprehensive, one might call it—an inherited Wisdom—a primeval Wisdom, which was of such a nature that it was one and the same, uniform, for the whole of humanity. You will find such things described in more detail in those lectures which I have called The Folk-Souls, a course given in Christiania. So this inherited Wisdom was a uniform thing. When I naw speak of knowledge, I mean not merely that which is usually called knowledge in Science to-day, but everything which man can absorb in his soul life as a view of his cosmic environment and of his own life.

Now this primeval knowledge specialised itself in such a way that it became different according to the different territories of the earth. You will see this better if you go into those chapters in Occult Science dealing with this matter. But even externally, if you just look at what we call the civilisation of the different earthly races, you may say: That what the human beings of the different races upon earth have known, differed from the beginning. One can distinguish an Indian civilisation, a Chinese civilisation, a Japanese civilisation, a European civilisation. And again, in this European civilisation there is a special culture of its own for each of the various European territories. Then we have an American civilisation and so on. But if we ask: How it it that this primeval or inherited wisdom became specialised, how did it become ever more and more differentiated? We must answer: The inner relationships, the inner dispositions of these races were to blame for this. Indeed we find that there is always an adaptation of the inner relationship of the different races to the external conditions of the earth. We can to some extent get an idea of this differentiation if we try to find out the connection between, let us say, what forms the Indian civilisation and the climatic geographical conditions of the land of India. In the same way we can get an idea of the special nature of the Russian culture, if we consider the relationship between the Russian and his earth. Now we must say, in reference to these relationships, that humanity to-day—as indeed in many other connections—has arrived at a kind of crisis. This dependence of man on his territory gradually, in the course of the 19th century, increased to the utmost conceivable extent. Of course, it is true that human beings have emancipated themselves from their territories. That is true. they consciously have emancipated themselves from their territories; but they are nevertheless dependent in a certain way upon these territories. Te can see that if we compare, let us say, the attitude of a Greek to ancient Greece, and say that of a modern Englishman or German to their countries. The Greeks still had much of the ancient wisdom in their civilisation and education, they were perhaps more physically dependent upon their land of Greece than the modern human being on his country. But this stronger dependence was modified, because the Greeks were inwardly filled with this ancient wisdom. This wisdom has however gradually faded away from humanity, and we can point almost exactly to the time in the middle of the 15th century when the direct understanding for certain treasures of wisdom ceases, and how even the traditions of such treasures gradually faded away in the 19th century. Artificially, as I might say, like plants in a forcing house, certain of these treasures were still preserved in all sorts of secret societies, which sometimes pursued very evil practices with them. But such societies still preserved a primeval wisdom even in the 19th century. (In the 19th century it was somewhat different), but in the 19th century they still preserved some things of which one can say: They are like plants in a forcing house. What have the symbols of the Freemasons to do with the ancient wisdom from which they originated? They are like plants raised in the forcing house, compared with plants growing freely in nature. Not even so much likeness still remains between the masonic symbols and that ancient wisdom!

Just because humanity is losing that inner permeation with this old wisdom, men are really becoming all the more dependent upon their territories and unless they can again acquire a treasure of Spiritual Science which can develop freely, they will be differentiated all over the earth according to their territories.

As a matter of fact, we can distinguish three types which we have studied already from other points of view. To-day we can say that unless the impulses of Spiritual Science are spread abroad in the world, from the West there will come none but economic truths, which can indeed produce many other things out of their bosom; none but economic thought and ideas would prevail in the West. From the East there would come over what once were essentially Spiritual truths; Asia,, even if in very decadent ways, would confine itself more and more to Spiritual truths.

Central Europe would cultivate the more intellectual sphere; and this would make itself specially felt in the uniting of something of the traditions of ancient times with what streams over from the West as economic truths, and with what streams over from the East as Spiritual truths. Human beings living in these three main types of earthly division, would specialise more and more in this direction.

The tendency of our present age tends absolutely towards making this specialisation of humanity a really dominant principle. We can say, my dear friends—and I beg you to take this very seriously, that unless a Spiritual Scientific impulse permeates the world, the East will gradually become absolutely incapable of managing its own Economic Life, of developing its own economic thinking. The East would come into a position of being able to produce only; that means, of actually cultivating the soil, of working upon the immediate products of nature with the instruments transmitted from the West. But all that has to be administered by human reason, would develop in the West.

From this point of view the catastrophe of the World War which has just run its course, is nothing but the beginning of the tendency: (I will express it in popular phraseology)—to permeate the East by the West in an economic way. That means making the East a sphere in which people work, and the West a sphere in which economic use is made of what is derived from nature in the East. The boundary between the East and the West need not be a fixed one; it is moveable.

If this tendency which is dominant to-day, goes further, if it is not permeated Spiritually, then without any doubt at all the following would have to arise. One need simply utter it hypothetically. The entire East would economically be an object of booty for the West; and man would regard this course of development as the proper course laid down for earthly humanity. It would be regarded as quite justifiable and obvious. There exists no other means of introducing into this tendency that which does not make half of humanity slaves and the other half employers of these slaves, than by permeating the earth with a common Spirituality which man must acquire once more.

If one utters these things to-day most people prefer to reject them. The man of to-day is only too inclined to wave these things aside with a movement of his hand, for the simple reason that it is externally uncomfortable for him to face the true reality. He says to himself: “Well, even if this economic permeation of the East does come about, it will not take place yet awhile, not in my lifetime.” Certainly those who have children, do think a little more earnestly, because of their children; but then they like to fog themselves a little in the hope that better times may come, and so forth.

But to realise in their inner being that there exists no other means of fashioning the future of humanity into a form worthy of human beings, than by not permeating merely the earth economically, but also Spiritually is a thought very few people pursue for themselves to-day, because of a certain love of ease.

We may say that humanity has received the present configuration of its life of civilisation from three sides, and it is extremely interesting to fix one's mind on these three sides of this earthly life of civilisation, especially for the task we have set ourselves in these lectures.

If one surveys the whole earth-sphere from East to West, one must say: “Everything which man possesses in the way of ethical truths, of moral truths, has come from the East”. One can say that the form in which the East, with its general view of the Cosmos, has developed its ethical truths, the form of its general cosmology, and so on, has now been lost; but certain Ethics have remained over as relics of oriental thought and feeling.

It is infinitely interesting from this point of view to read the speeches which Rabindranath Tagore held, which are collected under the title of Nationalism. You will see if you read these speeches that there is hardly anything now to be found in them of that great Cosmic Wisdom teaching, which at one time, lived in the feelings of men in the East. But one who can read with understanding these speeches of Tagore collected under the title Nationalism will say: the moral pathos which lives in them and which indeed is the chief essence of these speeches, the ethical will which lives in them, that bitter moral criticism which exercised against the individual mechanism of the West, and against all the still more evil political mechanism of the West, lives as Ethos in these speeches of Tagore, could not have been uttered unless there stood behind them the ancient primeval wisdom of Asia; even though it no longer lives externally in men's consciousness. With that wisdom, created out of the stars, the moral truths were permeated which resound from out of the East, and this comes to us when such people as Rabindranath Tagore speak.

If, without prejudice, one investigates everything which has developed in this way of culture in the West, in Central Europe, one must say: What lives there, whether it be in philosophers or non-philosophers, in the simple or most educated—that which ethically and morally permeates the humanity of the West has all trickled over from the East, from Asia. The East is the real home of Ethos, of ethics.

If we now Look towards the West, the civilisation of which has transpired before the eye of history, we see how muck enters into the consideration of the reasoning, intellectual working-man, of world phenomena. There what rests an the principle of utility comes into consideration.

There is a great contrast, of which humanity should become aware, between what lives as pathos in the speeches of Tagore, and everything which develops in the West as the stand-point of utility.

To speak radically, one might say, that the sort of thing we meet with in philosophers such as John Stuart Mill, or in national economists such as Adam Smith or intellectual philosophers such as Bergson, anything of this nature remains for the Asiatic, even if he tries to understand it, something which lies completely outside his being. He can grasp as an interesting fact that such things are said by human beings, but he will never be tempted to produce things which relate simply to external human utility, from out of his own nature.

The Asiatic thoroughly despises the European and American nature, because it always refers him to the standpoint of utility, which can only be dominated with the intellect, with the understanding. So it has come about that this way of thinking, which is connected with the idea of utility, is above all the product of the West.

As I have previously drawn your attention to the fact that over the earth the ancient wisdom, has specialised itself according to Races, so we can now distinguish these great types. The ethical type in the Orient, in the East; the intellectual utilitarian type in the West, the Occident, while in between there is, always trying to press forward, what I want to call the third type, the Aesthetic, which is just as much characteristic of Central Europe, as the ethical type is of the East and the utilitarian type of the West.

We need merely remind ourselves of a certain phenomenon, in order to be able to bring forward a proof drawn from external facts: how it is that just in Central Europe this Aesthetic type seeks to make itself felt. While in the West the French Revolution partially raged and partially bore its consequences, and the East was still immersed in Spiritual dreams, we see e.g. Schiller writing his letters concerning the aesthetic education of man. These are directly concerned with the French Revolution, but they seek to solve the problem thrown up politically by the French Revolution, they seek to solve it humanistically, in a purely human way. They seek to make man inwardly a free human being. It is interesting to note that the whole method of observation of Schiller in those Aesthetic letters rests an this: that on the one side he rejects the pure utilitarian intellectual standpoint, and an the other he rejects the merely ethical standpoint. You see, this ethical standpoint had once already been rationalised, intellectualised. Everything in the world goes through different metamorphosis and then reappears in another form. And so although this ethical standpoint of the East is certainly not intellectual, yet one can grasp it with one's intellect, one can intellectualise it, one can (Königsbergerise) it, and it then becomes Kantian. That happened; and from Kant there comes this beautiful saying: “Duty, thou mighty, exalted name, thou hast nothing within thee of an attractive or insinuating nature, but requirest solely and simply the subjection of man to morality”.

Schiller an the other hand, said, “I gladly serve my friends, yet unfortunately I do so with inclination. Therefore I reproach myself that I am not virtuous”. Schiller as a real Central-European man, could not take into himself this Kantian, this Königsbergian intellectualising of ethics. For him no man was a complete human being who had first to subject himself to duty in order to fulfil his duty. For Schiller a man was only a complete human being who felt in himself the desire to do what was of moral value. Therefore Schiller rejected the ethical rigourism of a Kant. But he also rejected the purely intellectual principle of authority, and he saw in the production and enjoyment of Beauty, (thus in the Aesthetic behavior of man), the highest, free expression of human nature. He wrote his Aesthetic letters, one might say, as a personal description of Goethe. Schiller had only with difficulty struggled to acquire an appreciation of Goethe. He had started with jealousy, with inner antipathy to Goethe; and one may say that there was a time in Schiller's youth when any talk of Goethe left a bitter taste in his mouth. Then they became acquainted; and they learnt not only to honour each other, but to understand each other. Then Schiller wrote one might say as a kind of Spiritual biography, a Spiritual description of Goethe, his letters upon the Aesthetic education of man. Nothing which stands in these Aesthetic letters could have been written unless Goethe had previously lived a life which was to Schiller an example of what stands in them. Schiller wrote a letter to Goethe at the beginning of their friendship which I have often quoted: “For a long time I have followed the path of your life, although from a far distance.” And now he described Goethe, according to his spirit, which was really that of a reincarnated Greek; and we see how the first dawn of the Aesthetic spirit of Central Europe is united with Greece.

And now as regards Goethe, we see how he works his way up from an intellectual element, to a recognition of truth, which can be just as well understood through art as through science. If you follow how Goethe with Herder studied the Ethics of Spinoza, how Goethe then went to Italy and wrote home that, in the works of art which he sees proceeding out of the Greek spirit, he sees Necessity, he sees God.—then one must say, the intellectualism of Spinoza becomes Aesthetic in Goethe, on his Italian journey, in the contemplation of those works of art. Goethe bears testimony that the Greeks created their works of art according to the same laws which nature herself follows, laws which Goethe believed he was now on the track of. That means, Goethe is not of the opinion that when a man creates a work of art he is merely creating a thing of phantasy. Science is strictly true. No, Goethe was of the opinion that what lies in a true work of art absolutely gives the deeper, true, content of the life of Nature. Now that is an Aesthetic view of the world, and so we must say: Occident, West—intellectualistic utilitarian; Central earth-regions—Aesthetic; the East—ethical, moral. It is absolutely true, my dear friends, that wherever it be, whether in the past or in the Centre or in the lest, wherever ethical truths have appeared—they have originally sprung up from the East. It is no matter whether utilitarian truths spring up in the Centre, or in the East they all originally spring from the West. Beauty arises from the Central region.

One can follow everywhere the path of these three elements in the life of man in this way, down to the very details.

You see, my dear friends, when through one's karma one is destined to found Anthroposophy in Central Europe, then in this Anthroposophy something must live of that Goethe-faith, which is after all, the same element that lives in art; that is, the element of truth. That same element which is expressed in painting, in sculpture, and even in architecture must live also in the thought structure of truth. One must come to say, what I attempted to say in the first chapter of my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity—that the philosopher, the man who founds a World-conception, must be an artist in ideas. One usually rejects the concepts of an artist of ideas. In that book I had to accept it; it all sprang from one and the same spirit.

When one produces something of this kind, all the ideas one expresses have a definite character, which bear the colourings of what I have just described. Books are written, form instance, much as that bit Aime Blech, which recently appeared as a Pamphlet, containing all kinds of evil, consciously evil calumnies. Books are written in which, for instance, it is stated that in what is brought forward from this side as Anthroposophy, there are, of course many beautiful things, but they are opposed to the clarity of the French mind!

Certainly Anthroposophy contradicts intellectuality, the barren, rhetorical grasp of ideas; such minds would much prefer the coarse, material ideas which can be grasped in sharp outlines, so as one can follow these things down to the minutest details. I could bring forward many an example, entering into details which would make clear what I have shown you in general outline; but I will rest content with the example I have already given you, which is a very interesting one.

Now the point in question is that we should clearly realise that e.g. in the West morality, art and intellectualism are simply not being produced. No! Art, is taken over from the Central regions, and Ethics, from the East; and they are then inserted into the intellectual-utility-element, just as in the Centre a kind of ethical element is cultivated, and everything which has been taken up, especially in the 19th century into the Aesthetic element has come over from the West. It would be interesting to follow for once the path of biology from this point of view. If you read Goethe's Theory of Metamorphosis to-day, you can find in that a grand theory of evolution, but the West would always consider that theory spoilt by its Aestheticism. In the 19th century, over the entire earth which is dependent an the West, the Darwinistic element penetrated into the theory of evolution, and brought in the Utilitarian-standpoint, the doctrine of purpose, of aim. You find that doctrine of “purpose” entirely excluded in Goethe, because he is everywhere permeated by Aestheticism.

It must not be the case in the future, that men are thus economically differentiated, as it were, to such an extreme degree that they will not learn from each other. Because that would mean that there would gradually spread over Asia a certain Ethos, such as one finds advocated in the fire-sounding words of Rabindranath Tagore. In Central Europe there would sp read in another form—that which certain Nietzsche-fops have already advocated—a certain “Beyond-ness” of good and evil, a certain Aestheticism, even in moral ideas. We see here the triumphant march of this Aestheticising making itself felt, especially towards the end of the 19th century. And then the merely utilitarian standpoint would pour out over the West, cleverness in the utilitarian standpoint, a caricature of the Spiritual element from the utilitarian standpoint, etc., etc.

The permeation of humanity by a real Spiritual element can alone help mankind. We assume, of course, that this Spiritual element shall be taken in full earnestness—that men shall develop the will to regard things as they present themselves to-day to one who is really prepared to be unprejudiced. This War-Catastrophe has brought many extraordinary things to the surface, amongst which are phenomena, which are in part uncomfortable to the highest degree, but which can teach us much, I will mention one such phenomenon.

In the German literature of the day there appear—one simply cannot keep pace with what comes out in this way—but almost every week there appear slimy excretions, as I must call them—the explanations of different men concerning their share in the course of the War and of political events—and we can read what such heads—I say expressly such heads—as Iagow Bethmann (Michaelis has, I think, still spared us), Tirpitz, Ludendorf, and a whole row of others which one can name. It is unpleasant, in one way,to read this stuff, but from another point of view, it is interesting to the highest degree.

You see, one can read such books as those written by Bethmann or Tirpitz, from quite opposite points of view. But their points of view depend very often an whether the author has been treated with the toe or the heel of the boot for a certain time. Bethmann was favoured for a time by the “All Highest”, whereas Tirpitz was treated with the heel of the boot. Hence their different points of view!

And so we will enter further into the view-point; it is not so much a question of that, but of seeing what spirit lives in the writings.

Now one can experience the following: I once made the following experiment. After allowing myself to be saturated with the dreamy writings of Bethmann and Tirpitz, I turned back to certain utterances (very dear to me;, of Herman Grimm, which indeed have been found chauvinistic by non-Germans. But again that is just a point of view. It is simply a question with me of the spirit which lives in them.

At the first view one can put this question: How does the spirit, the way of thinking, the inner soul-constitution of the Bethmann and Tirpitz writings compare with what lives in Herman Grimm's political observations? Here we must say: Herman Grimm felt that Goethe had lived and had not lived in vain; to him he was a living presence. To, Bethmann and Tirpitz Goethe was not there. I will not say they had not read him, it might have been better if they had left him unread; but as far as they were concerned he was not there. And at first I had to say to myself; what stands in these books sounds as if it were written by a medieval serf—with the logic of a medieval Serf.

Especially interesting, for instance, is the logic of Ludendorf. He is the one who was so greatly praised for the idea of having Lenin transported in a sealed wagon, through Germany to Russia! Ludendorf is the real importer of Bolehevism into Russia! Now he simply had not the cheek to deny that in his book, although he had cheek enough for many things. So he says, that to send Lenin to Russia was a military necessity, and that the political government should have avoided the evil consequences, but did not do so. Such is the logic of these gentlemen. But I do not wish to assert that Clemenceau has better logic; and I beg you not to think that I take sides with any Party. Neither Lloyd George nor Wilson have any better logic. This, however, is not so easy to substantiate.

One may say that at first sight, but the matter goes further. One finds on comparing things that one must go further back still. An extraordinary similarity exists between the Tirpitz and Ludendorf way of thinking, and those human beings who guided the so-called civilisation of Rome in the 1st and 2nd pre-Christian centuries. And if we wish to establish an intimate community of soul between these, we may say that it is as if the old method of thought of the ancient pre-Christian Rome again appeared, and as if everything which has happened since then, including Christianity itself, (even if these gentlemen externally speak of Christ, and so on), had never taken place.

You see, it is often supposed, when one says of the Luciferic that it remained behind in humanity—that one means something only external to the world. But this principle of remaining behind, expresses itself quite strongly within the world. One can say the pre-Caesar greatness of old Rome has re-arisen in such people, and everything which has happened in Europe since that time is really non-existent for them.

My dear friends, this phenomenon must be observed in an unprejudiced way to-day. It must be kept in mind; because only by so doing can one win a strong standpoint for judging the present. This present age makes great demands on man's capacity for judgment. All this must be said, if one speaks of how necessary it is that the present age should be permeated by Spiritual impulses. Superficially considered it is easy to say the present age must be permeated Spiritually; but, my dear friends, the matter is not quite so simple as this. You need only investigate where Spiritual Impulses found their way to some extent into humanity to see whether they have always borne the right fruit. One must in conclusion also say the following. Let us consider certain brochures, certain pamphlets which have been written, some written indeed by members of long standing. There are such written, wherein what figures here as Spiritual Science, is really placed before the world, but inverted, turned upside down, as it were. These are plants which have grown on the soil on which we attempt to give Spiritual treasure to humanity to-day. And anyone who thinks that this process, has run its course—of our so-called followers into its opposite what is transmitted as Spiritual Science to-day, must be a simpleton. For it most certainly is not yet finished. It is by no means so easy to reckon with this fact, that Spiritual truths must be brought to humanity, because as humanity is to-day it tends above all to differentiate into the three types which I have characterised: the Ethical, the Aesthetic, the intellectual; and further differentiations again within these.

Now Spiritual truths are not adapted to be taken up in their purity by human beings who approach them with such differentiations. Just think how on all sides to-day human beings tend to shut themselves off in their national chauvinism, and if you try to take up generally human and spiritual truths with national chauvinism, you transform them thereby into the opposite. It is impossible simply to impart what is now desirable from a certain point of view, for human beings tend to such differentiations as I have described. Therefore it is necessary above all that the interest of man should be awakened from the side which already exists. It is necessary that, in a certain sense, one should link on to what is already there, continually bearing in mind the tendency men have to turn away from that ancient treasure of wisdom and put nothing else in its place except the territorial differentiation on this earth. It does not do to spread Spiritual truths among humanity, without also spreading a certain Ethos.

Many people have read How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. These books have been read considerably for some time. They have objected that the first counsels given there are ethical, and that they must be in ethical agreement with them. They are right. right The first counsels given must be ethical and form an extract of the best Ethos of earthly civilisation. But, on the other hand, it is also necessary to cultivate a certain artistic element, and that has made quite special difficulties in the Anthroposophical Movement; for without the Anthroposophical Movement there existed a certain disinclination at first towards artistic things. An abstract, Aesthetically indifferent, symbolism was striven for. There still exists to-day, movements which call themselves Theosophical which rejects everything artistic. Therefore it was a good fate, a good Karma, of our Movement that we were able to make artistic experiments here in Dornach, and that we could work them out away from the abstract symbolic element. Perhaps if things had gone according to the desires of many, we should see many a black cross with red roses or something like roses, as the deep symbol of our building. We have of course, to beware of this symbolism, and strive to create from out of the artistic element. That had to be linked an to the best traditions, of human civilisation—if I may call impulses traditions. Above all one thing must be considered, that these are deep and earnest truths, and they must run somewhat as follows: whoever wishes to attain true knowledge must cultivate in himself a sense for truth! When one speaks radically about this question, my dear friends, one comes in touch with something which sounds repellent to many to-day, because this rigorous striving everywhere for the truth is something which is extraordinarily unpleasant to many people to-day, truth being something which they want at least to touch-up in life. But untruth, even if untrue from sentimentality, does not go with that strong sense for truth, demanded e.g. by a real devotion to these truths which Anthroposophy wishes
to place in the world.

My dear friends, in this connection the religious confessions have sinned especially, because they have inserted something which can no longer be united with a pure sense for truth. Certain kinds of piety are carried out into the world which satisfy human egoism far more than human feeling for truth. Therefore it is quite specially necessary that real attention should be paid to the cultivation of inner truthfulness, as is so often pointed out in our Anthroposophical writings. As you know, life itself demands from human beings to-day many untrue things, and we may say there exists to-day two distinct tendencies, which evoke in man a certain disinclination to look at facts in their true light. To-day the tendency exists to characterise things from personal preference and not according to the facts. To-day a man is called practical who is in a certain sense a man of routine; one who with a certain brute force works within his own sphere regardless of any consideration, and puts aside everything which does not serve to promote his own particular objects. From this standpoint one distinguishes “practical” men and “visionaries”; and with a certain world-historic untruth, the consequences of these things have shown themselves in a terrible way, in the course of the 19th century, and up to our own day. Indeed it was difficult before this great testing came over humanity through the catastrophe of the World War, to say something of what ruthlessly characterises these things. I am shortly publishing a collection of a few of my more important early writings—articles written in the eighties and nineties, in order to show how, as it were through small slits, I even then attempted to utter many truths. Among these articles there is one on Bismarck, the Man of Political Successes, in which I attempted to show that the success of this personality depended upon the fact that he could never see much further than his nose! But, as you know, it is no use to cast these things in the face of the world if no one is there who can take them up. Now, however, we must start from this basis, that the World-War Catastrophe can teach us many things. Of course, for most men, nothing is to be learnt from these facts. They have a certain fund of opinions, and do not alter them. They are not able to understand what underlies the statement that we must learn from the facts.

I always tell each person whom I conduct round the Goetheanum, that if I had to design such a building a second time, I would do so quite differently. I would certainly never make it in the same way again. There is nothing, of course, against the present building, but I myself would not make it in the same way again, because obviously, one has learnt something from what one has made, and which stands there as an accomplished fact.

To-day I read with astonishment that Field-Marshal Hindenburg said, if he had to conduct the World-War over again he would do it in exactly the same way.

Indeed these things are read, but they are read carelessly; and people do not notice that one must gain an understanding of the age from the teachings which are given in such a bitter way through this world catastrophe. Whatever one reads and what constantly resounds in one's ears from the world to-day, should be taken with the corresponding background, and one should always be able to say: In important things a revision of judgment is essentially and constantly necessary. It was right as far as could be seen externally, to call Bismarck a practical man, until the World-Catastrophe came. Hermann Grimm regarded Bismarck as a tower of practical excellence. But the World War catastrophe has taught us that Bismarck was a visionary, and the opinions of his judgment have had to be altered; for his idea of the creation of an Empire was naturally only a phantasy.

You see, I just want to make you see clearly that it is life itself, and must be life, which teaches us to discover illusions, even in the sphere of moral history. I have shown you how one must substantiate these illusions in the sphere of natural connections, noting how in nature things stand side by side, and that is how natural investigators describe them. Thus we must say that humanity shares in the occurrences of nature, and that what natural science says about this is simply a web of illusions.

To-day I wanted to make comprehensible to you how we must learn the very facts of history and of life to correct things; because, often for long periods, they only show themselves outwardly as illusion. Men who were naturally regarded by many as practical, must now of necessity be regarded as visionaries. One must accustom oneself to-day to revise one's judgment in this manner. At each step in life, there is not only opportunity enough but also a necessity for revising one's judgment. And one is only in the right mood, the mood the Anthroposophical Movement seeks to acquire, when one says to oneself: “I must revise my opinions, perhaps even about the most important things in life.” Opinions about natural connections, can as a rule, be revised through the study of Spiritual Science. Judgments about life one can only revise when one really develops in oneself the mood necessary for the Anthroposophical Movement.