The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will capital ownership be abolished in the threefold social organism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear attendees! Those who do not sleep through the present conditions of life, in which they are enmeshed, but who live through them with an awakened consciousness, will be able to feel that what has been looming in the life development of modern man for decades has only now, in the present, basically achieved its true historical form and its elementary historical power. That is what is making itself so powerfully felt in our lives today: the social question. In particular, one should feel how something that may have been taking place for decades, perhaps more below the surface of life in its actual form, has now come to the surface with ever greater and more far-reaching significance. The starting point of the last few years, the war catastrophe that engulfed the world, showed how the social impulses of modern humanity played a role in general life. Many a personality who shares the responsibility for the disaster that has entered our lives in this way would have behaved differently if they had not been under the influence, whether of fear or something similar, of the so-called social movement for a long time and out of a certain fear or anxiety or other mental states, behaved in a completely different way than she would have behaved if she had been able to gain clear insight into what was in the air in the ill-fated year 1914 in complete composure.

And again, during this terrible catastrophe, how did people on the one hand nurture hopes that the destroyed harmonies could somehow be reconciled from the social movement of humanity? On the other hand, how did those personalities who were somehow in a leading position during this time of horror stand under the influence of the social demands of humanity, so that they were essentially influenced by this side in their actions? Many things would have taken a different course if that had not been the case.

And now, esteemed attendees, now that the catastrophe has entered into a crisis, we can see that all the more what can be called a social movement is entering into the life of present humanity in a decisive way, so that the attitude of most people can be seen to be permeated with something of deep tragedy. Can we not say that the fact in which our lives are embedded, over a large part of the civilized world – and this will spread further and further, as anyone with insight can see – can we not say that the fact in which our life is geared to, to the judgment of people, to the judgment of people that is supposed to prove itself in the right way through action, through intervention in life, that this fact shows in the face of this judgment how little the judgment of most people can actually cope with these facts.

Yes, esteemed attendees, it is really as if certain currents, certain forces in the life of newer humanity wanted to show themselves in their impossibility, in their absurdity through this catastrophe, and as if that which which has been played out in an absurd way, to the detriment of humanity, has left something behind that undermines many of the things that we might have believed could not fail before this catastrophe occurred.

On the one hand, we see the drastic facts that are unfolding in such a way that they must deeply affect every individual life. We see how, from the innermost impulses of humanity, a re-shaping of life is demanded. We see the old party ideas and party programs asserting themselves within what is emerging, asserting themselves in such a way that they want to take hold of what is there. But how do these party ideas, these party programs, this thinking, which is also sometimes formed in a scholastic way in social events, appear to us today? One would like to say: like mummies of judgment that suddenly want to come to life, but which only walk around as mummies in the face of living events.

The way people think today about what is happening is like something dead in the face of the living demands of existence. The seriousness of the situation, which is characterized by this, makes it clear to every thinking person that it is necessary to form an opinion about the current situation, to the extent that their actions allow.

The lectures I intend to give here will proceed from this point of view, dear attendees. Today I would like to show more what the true form of the so-called social demand actually is, how this true form has arisen from the life of newer humanity, and tomorrow I would like to go into the important matter of possible attempts at solutions that do not arise from this or that fantastic fantasy, this or that one-sided impulse of the will, this or that party coloring, but which arise when one takes into account the true reality of life, the true reality in all its depth and in all its breadth.

It is not only in the life of the individual human being, but also in the social and state coexistence of people, that many things are at work that do not play out in consciousness, but rather, so to speak, prevail in the unconscious; indeed, it can be said that even in the social, state and societal life of the human being, many more unconscious factors play a role than in the life of the individual human being. And anyone who has no idea about these unconscious factors, or who has no sense of how to engage with them, will hardly be able to get behind the true nature of what is asserting itself today as a social movement.

One can certainly look with a certain respect at everything that has been thought, written and spoken for decades, and also done within certain limits, to deal with the so-called social questions and the social movement. However, as much respect as the effort and thought that has gone into it reveals, one will only be able to truly understand the social question, which is so essential for everyone today, if one looks at this question not from the perspective of how it has been shaped by the consciousness of people, but if one looks at it from the perspective of full life, including from those depths of life where the unknown factors play a role.

And if I may begin, dear attendees, with a personal remark, let it be this: I came into close contact with the social movement early on, but particularly in its full vibrancy when I was a teacher at a workers' education school for years, from where I gave lectures and had to organize discussions in trade unions and cooperatives. It was precisely through these life circumstances that I was able to experience what was going on in the minds of the proletarians and to see from direct experience what impulses are actually at play in the modern proletarian movement. I would like to say that anyone who is inclined to look at the modern proletarian movement with such a realistic view of life is, above all, confronted with what could be called a contradiction in the feelings, the will, and the thinking of the modern proletarian , but one that is as full of contradictions as all life that does not unfold in logical sequences but rather proceeds from one contradiction to the next.

And so, when we look at the modern proletarian movement in particular, we see that, on the one hand, it is not at all inclined to attach great value to human thinking and feeling, to social coexistence , for the social impulses, that it is actually inclined to consider everything that man thinks and feels more as an emanation of what goes on in economic life and in pure material, economic life. We will come back to this.

I would like to say that the sustainability, the impulsiveness of thought itself, is denied to a certain extent in the mental life of the modern proletarian. And yet – that is the strange thing – never before, one might say, was a world-historical movement built to such a high degree on thought, indeed on the scientific pursuit of knowledge, as this modern proletarian movement. Anyone who has ever really seen – which, unfortunately, the bourgeois circles have neglected to do for decades due to certain circumstances – anyone who has seen how certain difficult-to-grasp ideas, let us say ideas that arise from scientific Marxism, live themselves into, fully into the modern proletarian soul, only he gets an idea of what lives unconsciously in millions and millions of people today. For, as we shall recognize from these lectures, the fact that a deep gulf has opened up between classes of people, on the one hand the previously leading circles with their ideas, with their habits of thinking, as it has become fashionable today, with their sentimentality; on the other hand the proletariat with its habits of thinking, with its particular way of feeling - there is little possibility of mutual understanding! This is something that has a profound impact on all of modern life. Because, when you get right down to it, how superficial it seems that much of what the leading circles have done to gain understanding with regard to the social life of broad sections of humanity! They went to the theater and watched Hauptmann's “Weavers” in order to gain some insight into the lives of a large part of modern humanity. In this behavior lies – as you will recognize more and more, dear ladies and gentlemen – a profound misunderstanding.

If one tries to penetrate into the depths from what is happening on the surface of life, then one will want to pay less attention to everything that so-called intellectualist leading circles think about the social movement today. One might even want to show less consideration for what the modern proletarian himself thinks about what he wants and what he strives for; but one will feel all the more compelled to bring one's own living understanding more precisely into line: not so much the objective course of events of the social movement as the modern proletarian himself, the inner life of this modern proletarian.

I believe that countless observations of an intensive kind, intensive experiences of the life of the proletariat, have opened up the right thing to me in a certain sense, in that I thought I noticed that an essential thing in this social question is what is hidden in the word that one can hear again and again within the modern proletariat: the modern proletarian feels class-conscious. He has awakened from what used to be an instinctively dull life to class consciousness, to an awareness of his situation within his human class.

But just when one considers this as a characteristic of the modern proletarian soul, then one comes to realize that this feeling of being imbued with class consciousness points to something much, much deeper, to something that only opens up the way to the actual, true form of the social question of the present.

What can be recognized as the true form of the social question of the present has been tried to be recognized by many, by repeatedly pointing out how the modern proletariat was actually created under the influence of modern technology, which is revolutionizing people's living conditions, and the related capitalism in the economic order, to what took place in these matters in world history.

Now, esteemed attendees, I do not need to point this out in particular, it has been presented over and over again. It has been shown how the old crafts, how the old economic conditions have been absorbed by everything that depends on technology and capitalism, how the proletarian class within the newer life of humanity has actually only been created as a result. But to the student of human evolution something quite different is revealed in addition to these things. And here I come to the point where it might be apparent to the man of today that it is precisely in regard to the incisive social questions that the spiritual-scientific method can truly penetrate to reality.

The modern technology and capitalism looming before us are, after all, only a later manifestation of something quite different. In lectures that I have been privileged to give here in Basel over the years, I have already hinted at what is at issue here. The life of humanity as a whole, although fundamentally different in many respects, is similar to the life of the individual cell in one respect. Anyone who properly considers the individual life of a human being will be repeatedly forced to combat the preconceived notion that nature never makes leaps. In fact, in crucial points, all natural development makes leaps. In the individual life of man, dear honored attendees, we find that development does not proceed in a straight line, so that we can always link the effect directly to the cause. For example, we face a decisive crisis in the life of an individual human being around the seventh year when the teeth change. We find another decisive crisis when sexual maturity sets in. We find such crises even later on, when we observe life more closely. However, the later ones elude superficial external knowledge.

What takes place in the life of the individual human being does not follow on directly from a previous cause in a linear way, but it is as if forces with elemental power came up from the depths of the organism.

The life of the individual human being is no different in this respect than historical life as a whole. Within this historical life, not everything simply progresses in a successive manner. Rather, the historical development of humanity also includes critical upheavals in which elemental forces work their way from the depths to the surface. Such a crisis occurred for modern humanity at the turn of the fifteenth to the sixteenth century.

Only by treating the historical life of humanity in a scholastic way today, by looking at it rather superficially, do most people fail to see the fundamental difference in the spiritual life - and in everything connected with it - of man after the turning point in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and what took place in man in the Middle Ages or in even older times.

Once a true historical perspective replaces what, especially with regard to this point, is often convention in today's world, it will be recognized how radically life has changed at this turning point. And if one is to describe what has emerged from the depths of the subconscious, one can say: things that previously worked like instinctive impulses in the social coexistence of people, unconscious impulses, are coming to the surface more and more, so that people want to understand them consciously.

And this self-confrontation of the human personality through a deepening and illumination of consciousness coincides with what otherwise takes place superficially in modern technical life and modern capitalist economic life. And the essential thing is that, as a result of living conditions that used to be different, man is placed at the machine, to which he can only have an impersonal relationship, that man is woven into the fabric of capitalist economic life, within which he can also only have an impersonal relationship.

Look at how the old craftsman in the thirteenth century still stood by what he had produced, how he loved it, how it gave him joy, how his honor was involved in the context of his profession. Consider all the personal connections of the human being with what he has made in the economic life in earlier times before this turn of an era, see how this changes in modern life, how the human being can no longer develop a personal relationship, neither to the machine at which he works, nor to the economic conditions of circulation in which he lives. And he is called upon to submit to these impersonal conditions – at least a large proportion of people are called upon to do so – at a time when personal consciousness is awakening in particular, when the human personality is being confronted with itself.

That is the significant thing. While economic conditions arise that drive people into the impersonal, on the other hand, historical events push them to face the pinnacle of their own personality. Outwardly, they are made impersonal, but inwardly, all the more personal. Outwardly, he cannot develop any interest in what he is dealing with. This forces up the innermost strength of his soul. He comes to self-reflection. He comes to the question: What am I actually as a human being? What do I mean as a human being in the world?

Simply and fundamentally put, one could say: the one who was led as a laborer to the machine, since the machine could not interest him, truly had the opportunity and time and reason to reflect on what he actually is in the context of the world as a human being.

And so we are confronted with something peculiar. The modern proletarian calls it class consciousness. But behind this class consciousness stands the emerging consciousness of human dignity in general, the question: What am I as a human being in the context of the whole of humanity?

Not the machine, not capitalism has brought this about; they were only the cause of this most modern impulse of human life coming to light precisely in those who have been driven by the necessities of life into modern technology and modern materialistic economic life.

We must not overlook the fact that the class-conscious proletariat is actually the truly human-conscious part of the modern world. Something peculiar is taking place there, which can be easily recognized. Perhaps it can be understood by comparing it to another historical fact.

Let us consider: at a certain time, in a province of the Roman Empire that was of little consequence at the time, the impulse of Christianity arose. That impulse, which was then to take hold of the world in such an intense way. The Christian impulse spreads. But how strangely it spreads within the Greek and Roman worlds. It comes, as it were, despite the fact that in the Greek and Roman worlds there is a mature education, a culmination of ancient education. It comes only into its own when the barbarians, as they were called, came from the north and adopted Christianity. Christianity was only able to develop its true strength in the simple, elementary minds, not in the mature education of the Greek and Roman world.

You can only recognize such things if you know how, on the one hand, the mature or overripe education of some part of humanity stands in relation to the unspent, virgin powers of another part of humanity. The very personalities who count themselves among the leading circles of humanity have a very warped judgment on this point. Oh, this or that, what is emerging, it is too high for the people, they say. These judgments have been heard ad nauseam in a decadent time at the end of the nineteenth century. What had been imagined, how something should be, childishly, simply, so that the people would understand it, because the people's intelligence was not very high. Usually, such judgments prove little more than that it was uncomfortable for the person making the judgment to accept such a thing for himself.

Those who truly know life know that what the bourgeois intellectual sometimes finds extremely difficult to grasp is actually easy for the fresh intellect and the unspent power of the soul of the so-called subordinate part of the population.

And so the ancient Greeks and Romans could have said: That which did not want to enter him properly, Christianity, precisely because it penetrated the unspent soul power of the barbarian tribes coming down from the north. And that was new, original, elementary soul power. It understood much more than the highly educated Greeks and Romans in terms of what the time demanded.

We see something very similar today, only most people have not yet recognized it. Fresh intellectual and spiritual power is rising up from the depths of humanity and taking with it what can be offered from the entire historical power of modern human life.

In a sense, we are living in a new migration of peoples. Only this migration of peoples does not take place in such a way that masses of people move from some region of the world, but instead of the horizontal direction, this migration of peoples takes on a vertical direction: something rises from the depths of the people, with tremendous power of understanding, with tremendous power of longing, to receive something of the goods, of the best soul goods of people as well.

In view of this, it is very natural to raise the question: What did the leading circles do for this modern proletariat, which represents this mass migration, since the indicated turning point in history? What did the leading part of humanity bring to the proletariat in modern times in the way of human goods, what was it called by this leading part of humanity, what was it woven into the capitalist economic order? This proletariat, which was pointed to by life at the machine, was pointed to its own personality, was pointed to the longing to enrich the soul, this modern, emerging proletariat longed for something that could meet it halfway. But what came to meet it?

What met them was historically unlike Christianity, which met the northern barbarian voices on the soil of Roman-Greek culture. And here something very peculiar presents itself. The soul and spiritual life of humanity had taken on a special form of development towards the fifteenth or sixteenth century, and in general towards the modern times, in which the old driving force of the human spirit no longer lay. Whoever takes a deeper look at the historical life of humanity, oh, he finds, however he may feel about the content of this or that older religious or other spiritual impulse, that these impulses can strike deep, deep into human hearts and souls, that they can sustain human life from this side, that they have a certain momentum to lead man to happiness, to a certain appreciation of his life on earth. For the spiritual impulses open up for him the prospect of a connection between what he experiences here on earth and the supersensible, which shows his human dignity in a higher light than everyday life can.

In more recent times, since the turning point described, what is modern science has taken the place of the earlier spiritual impulses. This modern science has bound its ever-increasing, its immense significance for the whole development of humanity to the names Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Kepler. But one thing is curiously missing in this newer development of humanity: the older spiritual impulses cannot extend beyond what is emerging. And so we experience that a science, a knowledge takes hold of people in which nothing is alive that tells people what they are and how they are placed in the world.

And so the modern proletariat craves more and more for enlightenment through science. But it does not get, at the same time, an impulse that tells it what it is in the overall context of humanity, what constitutes its human dignity, while it seeks a task.

This is a point where, to a certain extent, modern life becomes tragic. We see how religions, at the turn of this period, have arrived at a point where they reject what is emerging as science, reject what is emerging as human knowledge, declare it heretical, prove themselves incapable of sending their impulses into what is emerging as something new.

And so we must regard the following as one of the most essential factors in the development of the life of the modern proletariat: for the reason given, this modern proletariat craves knowledge, craves insight, wants to experience through insight what is worthy of man, what a human existence is.

In this sense, only that which is imbued with the momentum that simultaneously makes knowledge and insight a powerful life content can live as insight, in addition to what bourgeois circles or the other estates bring him.

And so we see something emerging in the newer development of humanity that reveals to us the true form of the modern social question in one point, in one area. We see the proletariat's yearning for an understanding of its own nature, the search for this own nature through modern science. But we also see the impossibility of receiving an actual spiritual impulse in this modern science. And so what this modern proletariat seeks as its knowledge, as its spiritual life, becomes what is now called in the leading circles of this modern proletariat: ideology.

And in this view that the spiritual life is an ideology, we have the true formulation of the social question in one area. Much else is only a consequence of this. Even what often appears in the purely economic sphere (we shall see this in the course of these lectures) is only a consequence of the fact that in the decisive period, when the proletariat longed to receive a spiritual life, the other classes gave it something in which there was no spirituality left. The modern spiritual life had become ideology, ideology. The religious momentum, the religious impact, the spiritual impact in general had disappeared from this intellectual life. This is how the modern proletarian received this intellectual life. He, who was placed at the machine, he, who was ensnared in the capitalist economic order, asked: What is a dignified human existence? How can I learn something about a dignified human existence from science?

The intellectual life alone had become mere thoughts, mere concepts, mere laws of nature. He saw as reality that which his hand had to grasp. The proletarian saw that which entered into modern economic life as an impersonal element. Nowhere did he see anything but its reality; and that which the leading bourgeois circles told him about the spiritual was reduced to mere thoughts, to mere ideas, it was not permeated by living spiritual power.

And so the opinion emerged in the minds of the proletarians that the only real thing is the external economic life, that from this economic life in its circulation, in the external scientific existence of man, arises like a smoke, like a social superstructure, only that which takes place as spiritual life - takes place in science, takes place in art - that this spiritual life is only ideology.

It would not be true if this spiritual life were something that was imbued with the spirit itself, something that, through its own content, would lead people to tie their existence to a higher world, not just a mirror of external material reality, for the proletarians of the external economic reality, the spiritual life was so. But to see the spiritual life in this way means that the soul becomes desolate, that the souls remain empty with regard to their innermost impulses, that the soul asks, asks into the empty space, receives no answer, stands before the riddle of existence emotionally, intuitively, receives no answer!

This is the state of mind of the modern proletariat more and more become: that it had to take over as an inheritance from the other classes not a living spiritual life, but an ideology, that was its fate.

What was caused by this in the souls of the modern proletarians has ultimately led to everything that is emerging today as a social movement. This is how we must understand the true nature of the social question in the one area. It is the actual intellectual area. The modern proletarian was condemned to lead a spiritual life that had to become a mere ideology for him.

The second area, dear attendees, comes to the fore when one actually considers the legal and the political. Political and legal social coexistence was presented to the older estates with their traditions by the fact that their interests, their entire happiness in life, was connected with what emerged as the state, as external political life, as external legal life. What the individual had, what the individual did in the so-called ruling classes, that had its basis in the structure that was the state, that was the political structure.

Of the life of the proletarian, which was emerging, only one thing flowed into this structure, into this political, into this legal structure: that which is closely connected with his existence, and in relation to which he could not come into a similar relationship with the state and politics as the leading circles: it flowed into the social structure of the proletarian as labor power.

And by considering this, we come to a true picture of the modern social demand in a second area. If the worker, who has nothing but his physical strength, gives it to the machine or to something else, he is part of the social organism quite differently than someone who is interested in political or state life through property or other legal relationships. Now, however, the proletarian became more and more aware that he was part of modern technical, modern capitalist life, that his labor had taken on a very specific character through modern conditions and that this character had pushed itself into human consciousness in a particularly clear form. The modern proletarian became aware of the fact that his labor power had taken on the character of a commodity, because in modern times that which was previously instinctive has pushed its way into human consciousness.

Otherwise, economic life is characterized by what may be called the circulation of commodities, which consists of the production of commodities, the circulation of commodities in the narrower sense, and the consumption of commodities. All other classes, so to speak, brought their wares to market, bought and sold. The proletarian had nothing to sell but his own labor power. And life turned out so that this labor power of the modern proletarian more and more took on the same form as the commodity has on the economic market. Just as one buys goods according to the principle of supply and demand, so the modern proletarian has to bring his labor power to market, which the owner of the means of production buys from him – buys at the cheapest possible price, if no legal countermeasures prevent him from doing so.

This is the second area where we encounter the true forms of modern social demands. This is, so to speak, one of the fundamental points of the modern proletarian movement. One must only know, one must only understand, what impression - even if it is outdated today in certain circles, even among workers - it has made on the modern proletarian soul over decades, that Karl Marx - as I said, even if Marxism is often outdated - that Karl Marx showed in a penetrating way, as scientifically as can be justified, how modern economic development has brought it to the point where the modern proletarian has to take his labor to the economic market, just as the other takes his goods, that the proletarian must, so to speak, trade in something that is as intimately connected with his humanity as his labor, that was the inspiring thing, that was what dug itself deep, deep into the soul. That is what they carried within them, instinctively, the people, the proletarians, what they could hear in scientific form from those who wanted to lead the modern proletariat scientifically.

This is the point that must be placed in the right perspective in the historical development of humanity in order to recognize its full significance. This is not something that has only come into humanity through modern technology. This is something that the modern proletarian experiences, albeit not in full consciousness, but sometimes, in that it remains in the subconscious, in such a way that he knows, knows in a certain way: once upon a time there were slaves, the whole person was sold on the labor market, on the goods market. The whole person was a commodity. Serfdom was the next step; the human being was already less of a commodity. Now, in more recent times, labor has taken its place: with it, a part of the human being is still brought to the slave market. Such is the feeling of the modern proletarian.

And just as humanity once overcame slavery – as it was done relatively recently – and serfdom, so must the modern life overcome the fact that labor power is treated as a commodity in modern economic life.

This is what the proletarian has increasingly come to feel is in his interest in relation to the political and legal state. This is one of the fundamental issues of the modern proletarian movement: to wrest human labor from the market, to strip this labor of the character of a commodity.

Of course, dear attendees, there are still many people today who cannot see how one should separate from the goods, from the product into which this labor flows, this labor itself. One need only consider the following. We will overcome this prejudice. The great Greek sages Plato and Aristotle considered slavery to be a necessary institution; nevertheless, it has been overcome in the course of human events. Today there are many people who still cannot imagine that what has just been mentioned in relation to human labor must also be overcome in the same way.

And so, in this second area, attention must be paid to the true nature of the social demands, which consists in giving human labor a position in the social organism such that people no longer have to sell this labor like a commodity, and that only objective material goods remain as commodities in economic life, no longer human activity.

This is something that seems to many to be an almost insoluble problem. We will see tomorrow where we want to proceed to attempts at a solution that it is precisely in the attempt to solve this question that something tremendously far-reaching for the whole of contemporary social life lies. The modern proletariat craves a political and legal organization in the modern state, through which its labor power loses its commodity character, and this labor power - institution in the social organism changes accordingly in relation to the commodity.

And a third area comes to us. This is the area that represents economic life in the narrower sense, the purely economic life, which proceeds in the production, circulation, and consumption of commodities. That which is thus integrated into the human social organism has certainly taken on a very special form after the aforementioned point in time in the fifteenth or sixteenth century and during the emergence of modern technology and modern capitalism. This economic life gradually emerged, one might say, flooding out everything else with its complexity, in that the economy expanded in modern times to encompass the whole world, extending to the circumstances of the whole world; whereas in the past the economic spheres were relatively were relatively narrow; but also because economic life itself became impersonal, separated from human honor, from human joy, from human devotion, and thus this economic life became the one that presented a particular, forced difficulty in the overall life of man.

And so it came about that, as a result of the former connection between man and what he worked, what he produced, developed into the incalculable relationship to the technical, to the capitalist world, that, I would say, economic life was pushed away from man. But precisely because it was pushed away from people, because they were no longer personally connected to it and their gaze was hypnotically absorbed by this economic life, it gained more and more power over people themselves.

And so it turned out that in the materialism of modern times, people's attention, their view, their living conditions were increasingly directed towards this economic situation.

This resulted in a very special imbalance for the proletarian, compared to those who live in the other areas of the social organism. He received the spiritual life as an ideology through the course of history. He could not affirm the legal life because, through this legal life, which gave property and rights to others, his labor power was basically stamped as a commodity. Thus, the spiritual life was, in a sense, a vain ideology; something with which his interests and human dignity could not be connected: political and state life. Thus the modern proletarian was completely pushed into economic life, and so it came about that he expected everything from this economic life, until the spiritual life was paralyzed into a shadowy existence, increasingly flooded on the other side by its crude reality, overwhelming all thought, feeling and will.

And so the belief arose that in the modern proletariat there is now a third area in which a true social demand is emerging: the belief that the rest is worthless to me; that I can rely only on what takes place in economic life itself. What redeems me, what gives me human dignity, must arise from economic life and its own laws. And a strange faith, one might say, a strange economic religion, has emerged. No religious impulses could come from the spiritual life that has become ideology. No religious impulse that could somehow fill man with his own dignity could come to the proletarian from state or political life. He hoped for it from the one to whom he remained connected, to whom he became more and more connected through technology and capitalism. He hoped for it with religious confidence from economic life.

From this feeling it is understandable that, in turn, the Marxist doctrine, or what later developed from it in one form or another, entered with such power into the modern proletarian soul that economic life, that the struggle of the individual economic classes, is the only real, the only thing of real importance; and that everything else, the spiritual, the political, everything that has to do with morals and customs, even art and religion, is a kind of superstructure, an ideological superstructure of the only true thing, economic life. But the economic process is an objective process. The economic process is one that takes place outside of the human personality.

And so one could say: From these foundations, the modern proletarian soul lost all trust in the personal powers of man, retaining only trust in that which, without man, one might say, with natural historical necessity, permeates the world: economic life.

They tried to recognize the course of this economic life, how it developed from earlier economic forms into modern capitalism, how this modern capitalism culminated, culminating in capital multiplying itself through itself, so to speak. They observed all this. They observed the accumulation of capital in a few hands. This finally became particularly transparent to the modern proletarian's eye, which had become clairvoyant in this purely material, economic field: the economic process, which takes place without people, has brought about modern misery, it has brought about what the modern proletarian perceives as his life situation. It must continue. But Karl Marx tried to show how it must continue by turning into its opposite, by what the newer economic order of capitalism has taken from the proletariat must be taken back from capitalism by turning into its opposite through the proletariat.

From this reversal within the economic process, that is, from a purely economic process of development, the modern proletarian expected what was to become of him. Just as he has debased intellectual life to ideology and fails to recognize it through the inheritance he has received from the other classes, so on the other hand he fails to recognize economic life, which can certainly never develop anything spiritual out of itself, but in which he believes that it must develop something spiritual, in which he alone has confidence. Underestimation of the spiritual, debasement of the spiritual to the point of ideology; lack of faith in the legal power of the political state that has taken away the dignity of its humanity by turning its labor power into a commodity; overestimation of the viability of economic life by believing that everything a person experiences can only economic life, and giving the development of economic life a quasi-religious consecration. These three things in three different areas, in the spiritual, in the state-legal, and in the economic, are the threefold true formulation of the social question, and are what lives in the modern proletarian. If we recognize this, then we know how the modern proletarian movement came into being. But then we also know what power it has. And we see that it has emerged with a certain inevitability in the development of the present and that it must continue to exist in the development of the future. That is why all modern life springs from two roots, and that there is so little possibility of mutual understanding between the classes.

On the other hand, the formerly leading classes have brought up intellectual, state, and economic life. They have toned it down to what was then passed on to the proletariat as inheritance.

The proletariat, driven by the impulses of modern humanity, craved intellectual life. It was given ideology. It craved a dignified existence. This dignified existence was extinguished by the imposition of the commodity character of its labor power. Economic life had finally emerged as the all-encompassing factor for the other classes as well. But these other classes brought into the modern organization of economic life what they had in their traditions. The modern proletarian was placed alone in this economic life. Therefore he expected everything from the development of this economic life.

The reasons for the attempts to solve the social problem in the present must also be sought here; how this social problem, whether it be temporary or whether it be solved in some definitive way, can be solved, can only be fathomed if one first attempts to fully recognize how the true form of the proletarian social movement has emerged in these three different areas: the spiritual, the state, and the economic.

We must seek the threefold solution of this modern proletarian movement in what can arise as such attempts at solutions precisely from the three currents that have led to the modern proletarian current. From this basis, we will now try to approach tomorrow, esteemed attendees, that which is so urgent and necessary for humanity today: to form an opinion on certain attempts at solutions, realistic attempts at solutions to the modern social question.

Dear attendees! Yesterday I tried to present the real nature of the social question as it arises from the consideration of what has gradually developed over the last few centuries, especially in the last century, in the minds of people, especially in the souls of the proletariat.

Today I would like to attempt to speak of possible solutions to this social question, of such possible solutions, dear attendees, that do not arise from some program, from some party demand, from human emotions; rather, I would like to speak of such possible solutions that arise from the developmental conditions and developmental forces of contemporary humanity.

However, if one wants to speak from such a point of view, then completely different things come into consideration than are considered by those who today are often preparing to comment on what has emerged as a proletarian social movement in the life of humanity.

If one has an eye for the developmental forces of humanity in the present, just as the natural scientist is supposed to have an eye for the developmental forces that a single person has at a certain age, say at the age of sexual maturity, then one must finally, I believe, come to realize that much of what that is currently emerging in an understandable way, in a completely understandable way, here or there, as a theoretical or practical or somehow-conceived attempt to solve social issues, that we are dealing with the revival of what is rightly regarded by many in another field as medieval superstition. It is as if certain superstitious ideas have already been exhausted in the more rapidly developing field of natural science, and as if, unnoticed by human thought because they only masquerade there, because they have taken on a different disguised form, they have been preserved to this day in the field of social life and its problems and its riddles.

To make it easier to understand what I actually mean, I recall the passage in the second part of Goethe's “Faust” where Wagner creates the homunculus, an artificial human being, in a retort. Goethe points to the medieval superstitious alchemy, which believed that a human being could be created in a chemical laboratory by artificially processing certain substances and forces in a thinking way, as an indication of what he wants to represent at this point in his “Faust”. The broadest circles consider such alchemical endeavors to artificially create an organism, a human body, to be a superstition based on the principles of current scientific thought. In the field of social thinking, as I said, this alchemical superstition continues to prevail to this day, without people noticing it because the matter is veiled. For much of what is thought and done to bring about the social structure, the social organization of human society today, resembles the efforts of that Goethean Wagner who wants to artificially create the homunculus in the laboratory. Today, people think they can concoct the social organism from some social materials and forces in an artificial way.

And if we examine more closely, esteemed attendees, what is emerging here and there as a so-called solution to the social question, we find that no attention is paid to the conditions for the solution of the social organism. Even in the experiments that are already being carried out on a large scale, no attention is paid to this. Instead, it is assumed that something artificial can be created in some way.

The spiritual scientific thinking, from which this consideration started and which also takes the method for the social question, this spiritual scientific thinking is based on reality and must therefore proceed in a completely different way than many socialist experiments of today. The question for the method represented here is not: How do you shape the social organism? but rather, how can we create the conditions of life through which the social organism can shape itself as a living being, through which it can come into existence? Just as in nature one does not artificially create an organism by some kind of thinking, but one has to create the conditions under which the natural organism has to form itself, and through which it can then develop out of its own life impulse, so it must also be done for a realistic view of life with regard to the social organism.

However, this, esteemed attendees, requires a radical change in the way many people think today, and that is a very uncomfortable thing for the widest circles today. People may still be willing to accept a change in some institutions, a change in some circumstances, if they are not too sleepy. But people are less willing to accept a different way of thinking, a transformation of their whole view of reality. However, such a reorientation, such a change of thinking, is necessary for the deep social problem that not only cuts into individual areas of life, but into the whole of contemporary life. What is at stake here is that one must, as it were, change one's path from social superstitious alchemy to real social insight, to real insight into the social organism.

Just as one can study and get to know the individual human natural organism by applying the scientific method impartially enough, so too can one, with vigorous thinking and research, see through the social organism in its living conditions. That is what it is about.

I have already taken the liberty of speaking about the individual human organism, the natural organism, here in Basel in previous lectures. Today I would just like to point out that it seems to me that no one will be able to understand the natural organism of the human being, the natural life body of the human being, despite all the progress in physiology and biology in the present day, without studying the three interacting but relatively independent parts of this organism. When I spoke from the same place here in Basel about these three links of the natural human organism, I took the liberty of pointing out that I was giving something - I have outlined it in my book 'Von Soul Mysteries», - something on which I have actually been working for thirty years, trying to justify what has emerged from spiritual scientific documents by all the means that modern natural science can provide in this regard today. So that I can say: anyone who wants to, anyone who does not want to dabble but will approach the subject scientifically, need not shy away from what I will only briefly mention here and what may still surprise some people who believe they have a deep insight into scientific matters.

This single human organism is not centralized in a simple way, but is actually decentralized into three relatively independent parts: one can say, into the nervous sensory system, which is centralized towards the head; one could also say, the head system. Then into the rhythmic system, which encompasses the lungs and the heart life, which has a certain inner independence from the head life. And then again the system of metabolism.

However strange it may seem, these three systems comprise everything that takes place in the human organism. But this is not a centralized administration, so to speak, that takes place in the human body, but rather there are three independent members, each with its own center, so to speak. They work independently. And precisely because they work independently alongside each other, they build on the overall process in this individual natural human organism. Each of these links, these three links of the natural human organism, in turn relates to the outside world: the head system through the senses, the heart-lung system through the lungs, through the respiratory organs, and the metabolic system through the digestive organs, which open to the outside.

And it is precisely on this independence that the harmonious interaction, the possible and purposeful interaction of the individual human organism is based. Anyone who thinks that they can present the human organism as a sum of processes regulated from a single center completely misunderstands the essence of the human organism. The essence of the individual human organism lies in this interaction, not in subordination.

What now comes to light in a healthy observation of this human life body must be transferred to the observation, indeed not just to the observation, but to the living in it, in relation to the social organism, the social life body. And there the matter becomes far more serious.

What is a mere theoretical, scientific matter of knowledge in relation to the human organism becomes a practical matter in relation to the social organism. In relation to the social organism, it becomes a practical matter that concerns every single person. This is not a matter of scientific knowledge, but of certain intuitions, a certain feeling for how to place oneself in human life in this threefold social organism. Just as one learns the multiplication table from childhood on, how to add, subtract and so on, in order to be able to calculate, so one will have to acquire from childhood on a feeling for being part of a human , which, if it is to be healthy, if it is not to resemble a homunculus, an artificially created human being, but rather a homo, a real human being who shapes himself out of his life impulses.

But lest I be misunderstood – nowadays one is almost always misunderstood when one expresses things that are, after all, quite obvious – lest I be misunderstood, I want to point out right away that what I am expounding here has nothing, not the slightest, with any kind of, as one can call it, playing with similes or analogies, which aims to study the human organism and then transfers what it believes it has found in the human organism to the social organism, to the social life body. Such things, as the economist happened to try in his social organism, the economist Schäffle, or as [Meray] has now tried in the so-called, in the so-titled “Weltmutation”, these things are mere playing around before a serious conception of reality. The point is not to carry on such gimmicks, to somehow transfer something from one to the other, but rather that just as healthy as the consideration of which I have spoken here must be for the natural human organism, just as healthy must be - and now not a scientific consideration, but a social feeling, a social understanding of all people for the three-part social organism. If one were to play a mere game of analogy, one might do the following: One would say: Well, the human being has a head; that is the organ for his spiritual. In the outer social organism, there is also something like a spiritual culture. So one compares the opposites that relate to the organ of the part, to the head, with what is found in the social organism as spiritual culture. Because political life, law, and public life have a regulating effect on human activities, one might compare the regulating pulmonary respiratory system with the police system, the political system, and the state system. And because, as people have always imagined, the metabolic system is the coarsest, the most material, it is compared to the materialistic culture of man, to the external economic life.

This would be obvious if one wanted to play a mere game of analogy. If one goes into reality, then one is dealing with the opposite. An analogy places the social organism alongside the individual natural human organism in such a way that both are standing on their own two feet. As paradoxical as it may sound, reality presents itself to us in such a way that, in relation to the individual natural human organism, the social organism is indeed standing on its head, according to human prejudice.

For the lawfulness that must be sought precisely for the so-called noblest system of the human natural organism, for the head system, this lawfulness corresponds to economic life in the social organism. This is found in economic life. The lung-respiratory system as a regulating system is found, however, as we shall see shortly, in the legal sphere, in the political state in the narrower sense. But what spiritual culture is in the social organism is subject, strangely enough, to the same laws or to laws that can only be compared to the laws of human metabolism in the natural organism. So, as you can see, dear attendees, a realistic observation turns everything upside down. This is to be understood in the following way.

In fact, for anyone who wants to examine the living conditions under which the social life body can develop, the healthy social life body is actually divided into three parts, and without life trying to work out these three parts in relative independence, so that they do not live centralized in some centralized state or the like, but each lives independently for itself, so that they have precisely this harmonizing effect on the whole, just as the three members of the human organism, as I have described, without this a healthy solution to the social problem, to the social puzzle, will never be found.

A structure must be created, and not by some abstract theory, even if this abstract theory were a party program, but by life itself, by the real factors of life in the social organism, the social body, in three independent structures: the economic structure, which has its own laws and can only live truly healthy through its own laws alone; a second structure, alongside this, or but developing in relative independence, a link that could be described as the actual political state link, as everything that a system of rights, a system of connections between human and human, has to establish; and a third relatively independent link, which needs its independence, its being based on its very own laws, that is everything that belongs to spiritual life.

Let us consider the economic sphere as the first limb of the healthy social organism. I said that if one wants to compare – but such a comparison must serve the purpose of understanding, not be some kind of arbitrary analogy – if one wants to compare, one can say that in economic life there is something for every limited social organism that develops in any territory, in any country, in any geographic area, there is something for such a social organism that could be compared to the original gifts, talents of the individual human organism.

Just as education – which is not life through mere learning, through mere imparting or any other artificial method – must neither ignore what is inherent in the nervous-sensory organism as an original gift, nor can it, so the economic life, which is the basis of the healthy social organism, is based on everything that constitutes the natural conditions of this economic life: the fertility of the soil, the raw materials available, everything that has to do with how these things can be processed, everything that connects man with the source from which he produces everything that is produced in trade and industry. This is the basis of economic life as a limited area, just as the gifts and talents of the individual human life are the basis of the talents of the social organism.

And indeed, this is where the great differentiations occur. This is where the social organism, as it were, receives something as a dowry. Just as a person receives his or her individual talents as a dowry, let us say a few examples, which I would say have a somewhat radical effect, to show what is actually meant.

Yesterday I spoke of the integration of human labor into the social organism. We will come back to this shortly. It is essential for the social problem of the present that human labor be stripped of the character of a commodity. But just as the rhythms of breathing and blood circulation are stripped bare of the mere metabolic life, so everything that relates to human labor power must be stripped bare in a healthy social organism, of all that springs from the laws that are peculiar to economic life.

But nevertheless, the life of breathing and the life of the heart are related to the life of metabolism. Human labor power is related to economic life in such a way that one can say: Depending on the preconditions of this economic life, human labor power is utilized in very different ways by it. Let us now look at the matter radically; but if it is not too strongly differentiated, the things are there after all; they are then only there to a lesser extent, but they still have an effect in the economic process. But let us look at something radical in order to visualize it. Let us say, for example, that we want to point to a country in which bananas could be a staple food, and want to compare such a territory of the earth, in which people can mainly feed themselves with bananas, with a country in which wheat yields an average harvest, such as in Germany. One can calculate the ratio of human labor required in one territory to that required in the other. The banana is so easy to transport from its point of origin to the point of consumption, and so easy to convert into what is then consumed. So little labor is required to make the banana into a consumer product in the economic process, compared to the labor required to make wheat into a consumer product in a country with an average wheat yield that the labor required for banana cultivation is 1:100 of the labor required for wheat cultivation, that is, one hundred times more human labor is required to make wheat consumable as a raw product for humans than for bananas.

But that also varies from territory to territory within the same article. If we look at the matter from a global perspective, there are major differences. But even on a more limited territory, such differences then arise. In Germany, if you look at the matter with a healthy average yield, wheat yields seven to eight times the yield compared to sowing, in Chile twelve times, in northern Mexico seventeen times, in Peru twenty times. There are regions where it yields twenty-five to thirty-five times as much. This requires a great difference in the human labor expended to bring a product, such as the conditions of the gifts and talents of human beings, that is given to the economic process to the point where it can be consumed, compared to the point of origin for such a product. Production of goods, circulation of goods, consumption of goods: these are the things that live in economic life, but which only economic life can embrace. Man has the need, precisely for such reasons – many similar ones could be added, such as the necessity in the multitude of human labor – man has the need to be connected, to be united with that which concerns the natural foundation, which concerns the other starting points of economic life.

This interconnectedness of human beings in the social organism with the economic conditions is what gives rise to the shaping of the laws that are peculiar to economic life. This economic life can only be based on the interpretation of those laws that arise from what has just been said. What is the basic aim of this economic life? Well, it can be said, esteemed attendees: that which must be active, must absolutely be active in this economic life, without which economic life cannot flourish, that is the human need, that is the need in general. There are also intermediate needs of these human needs: that is what can be called human interest. And certain thinkers in the field of social organization have rightly pointed out that only in the free activity of human interest, of direct human desire and of the interplay of desires and satisfactions in economic life, can the proper development of that economic life lie.

What is the aim of everything that now takes place in the interplay between need and the satisfaction of need in the production, circulation and consumption of goods? It is necessarily all aimed at the purpose of the commodity, at the consumption of the commodity, one could also say, at the most appropriate consumption of the commodity. Look around you wherever you want – if time allowed, I would expand on the concept of the commodity, but everyone feels that – if you want to look around you wherever you can in economic life, you will see that ultimately what matters in economic life is to consume what is produced in the most expedient way – in the most expedient way, I say, to consume.

What does that mean for the human labor force, esteemed attendees? If it has become clear in modern human life, precisely because of the flooding of this modern life with economic life in technology and capitalism, if it has become clear that the proletarian without property, whose own labor is brought to the labor market and is treated, precisely because it is on the labor market, as if it were a commodity, in terms of supply and demand, this is contrary to human dignity. For, in contrast to anything that may be a commodity, a person does not bring their own essence to market. But in the case of his labor power, he markets himself.

It is the abolition of this that the modern proletariat, out of a sense of human dignity, absolutely seeks. Perhaps here and there one will be found who, in full consciousness, can give the correct reasons for this demand; but in the subconscious, in the depths of human souls, in the depths of the proletarian souls, there lives what it is about. There lives a feeling in it: everything that comes onto the market of commodities is ultimately consumed in the most expedient way. But man must resist, absolutely resist, the mere consumption of his labor-power in the most expedient way in the labor-market of commodities. He feels that he has a value in himself, that he has something to preserve in himself, that he carries something in himself, which also lies in his labor-power, which must not be brought to the market of commodities, which must not be treated in the social organism as a commodity. Because in the tripartite social organism everything ultimately boils down to being consumed in the most expedient way, the modern proletariat cries out to the world: I do not want my labor power to become mere consumption for others.

This unconsciously underlies what I tried to work out yesterday as the one main aspect of the social question. And if you look at how it actually came about that, in the course of the development of modern technology and modern capitalism, labor was driven into the economic process, then, to understand this, you have to ask yourself: How did the economic conditions, the satisfaction of economic interests, the whirling up of the economy for the previously leading circles, for the previously leading classes, develop?

This is an essential and important question. They have not developed out of economic life, but precisely because in modern times there has been a fusion of state life with economic life that is no longer appropriate for these modern times; what has developed alongside the economy of humanity as the modern constitutional state, as the modern authoritarian state, is not what the proletariat was initially interested in, but what the so-called leading circles and leading classes were interested in. Within the development of modern technology and modern capitalism, these had an interest in regulating the economic underpinnings from the rights, as they were conceived, within the state adapted to the bourgeois and other ruling classes.

The oppressive aspect of economic life, the aspect that has created an unbearable situation for the proletariat in economic life, my dear attendees, does not come from economic life itself. It is a complete fallacy to believe that. And just as no defect in the metabolism or in the lungs can arise directly from a self-regulating metabolism, but only indirectly, so whatever in economic life has become oppressive for the proletarian world comes from – one need only study history, and one sees this if one is not blinded by prejudice, it stems from the history of conquests, from the history of the power relations and the legal relations that establish the power relations and the laws that oppress the proletariat. As I already mentioned yesterday, property relations are also based on laws. The oppressive nature of the proletariat's situation and the real pulse of the proletarian movement arise from such legal relationships.

Just as legal issues of the old state have worked their way down into economic life, the proletarian labor force, which has been pushed down into economic life by modern technical and capitalist development, must be taken up into legal life, which must now develop as an independent member in the healthy social organism alongside the economic member.

In this context, it really does not matter what they are called. If people prefer, they can call the economic organism the state and the other thing something else – the names are not important; what is important is that these two systems, these two links in the social organism, do not have a single centralization, but that each is centralized within itself, so that they can work side by side and harmonize precisely through their coexistence. That is what matters!

What can be state in the narrower sense can only encompass the regulatory system, that which takes place in the relationship between people. Just as the economic organism has interest in consumption, need and the satisfaction of needs, so the legal organism, the actual state organism, which must not be an economist, which must not engage in any economic activity at all, has the will to right at its core, in the healthy human [social] organism, which has the will to right at its core.

Rights can only exist in a state context. Economic interests can only exist in the economic body. And they must go side by side and together independently. That is it, if you look more closely, however little most people still believe it today, that is it, which has brought about such misfortune in modern life, which encompasses a representative body, an administration, economic life, and the state-regulating legal life. An independent system of representation is necessary for the purely political state. For the legal life, an independent representation, independent administration, for example in the Reichstag or in any ministry, is necessary. An independent administration, an independent ministry, but, to put it bluntly, for economic life, which is inherent in itself in terms of its administration and its perpetual further development, this will arise by itself. While the legal life of the state is concerned with the relationship between people, in that we must all be equal before the law, and while the legal life, if it is properly understood, can only result in a complete democracy, the economic life must be based on independent associations, on such associations that arise from the way people grow together, like the natural conditions previously characterized, in their economic life. Entire systems of associations will develop that, in a corresponding way, interpret the economic organism from the self-regulation of forces in such a way that it must and can be viable for everyone. These things are basically beginnings, yes; but beginnings in which many misunderstandings prevail. We have cooperatives – fine; we have trade unions, we have various other associations; certainly, such things have arisen out of the urge to serve the developmental forces of modern times. But partly from the form that such things have taken, partly from the fact that it is thought that economic life can be handed over to the state, to the community – in all these things it can be seen that in these new structures one does not want to include only what arises from the laws proper to economic life, but what must develop alongside economic life as an independent link in the social organism, namely, the political and legal life of the state, as described in the narrower sense. In contrast to all the concepts of labor and the position of labor in the social organism, as they haunt today, there will be, when these two elements of the healthy organism are juxtaposed, there will be, above all, as there is ownership in the old social organism, such a very different labor law in the new, healthy social organism, which will correspond to the present and the future.

As a result, dear attendees, one thing will happen: the fact that natural conditions are decisive to a certain extent for the formation of economic value in the circulation of goods is already ensured by these natural conditions themselves. But something else must become equally decisive. When what I have described occurs, when the relative independence of the legal sphere occurs, which in itself will comprehend the law of labor, then the value of the goods circulating in the economy will be limited in the same way as the natural conditions. Likewise, this value will be limited and determined by the labor that can be contributed to the economic process according to general human values and humane labor law. No true labor law can ever arise from the mere economic process itself, but only from the separate, relatively independent legal link of the healthy social organism.

This has been abandoned even in the heyday of capitalism, when the state, which is supposed to be merely a constitutional state, stretched its claws over the larger transport companies, especially railways and so on. And while what emerged as a social disease from the delusion of nationalization should be cured, a certain form of modern socialism seeks to continue the disease. That is what matters. For people do not see the following. They do not see what results in this area from a real understanding of the social organism.

Among the various schools that have emerged in modern times, one was already in the eighteenth century for economics. It is called the physiocratic school. This physiocratic school had, but in a terribly one-sided way, we would say today, according to the bourgeois method - it had the principle of the free circulation of economic forces and economic essence. The followers of this physiocratic system, who did not want the constitutional state to interfere in economic life, said the following. They said: Either the constitutional state issues laws that coincide with the laws that economic life already has of its own accord, in which case these laws are superfluous, or it issues laws that contradict the inherent laws of economic life – in which case these laws destroy the rightful existence of economic life; in that case they certainly should not be issued. – So said the physiocrats.

This seems extremely plausible – for what seems more plausible to the superficial person than such an either-or! But when it comes to the reality of life, such an either-or is nonsense, a folly. How so? In the following way: Economic life also develops when man does not want it to, when he interferes with it through all kinds of state laws; it develops independently through its own power, and it always has a certain tendency, always a certain directional force. After all, it tends to bring human coexistence into such a balance that it in turn has to be straightened out.

That is the great error of a certain radical socialism, that one believes that economic life could make people contented and happy if it followed its own laws. No, if it follows its own laws, then it will always end up in crisis-like conditions, which must be helped, and another system must intervene, just as the respiratory-pulmonary system must always intervene in the metabolic or head system to regulate it. Therefore, it is necessary to face reality: the laws of the constitutional state cannot run in the direction of economic laws. But because economic life requires constant correction, because otherwise it would consume people, it is precisely necessary that the laws of the constitutional state constantly limit, regulate, and correct mere economic life, just as metabolism is corrected by breathing. That is what matters.

Today, when we believe we are so practical, we have more and more abstract theories in our heads, not reality. We believe that something makes itself, and laws are there when we just think about what makes itself. Laws, institutions, and forces must often be applied in precisely the opposite sense of what is given from one side, so that a prosperous, healthy development can take place. That is what matters.

Therefore, the healthy spiritual-scientific method, which is based on reality, must not establish any abstract principles - and these are also party programs today - but must point to life. It must point out not how to think up that the labor power of the commodity character is stripped, but it must show what is to be created so that in the emerging social organism human labor power is really perpetually withdrawn from the commodity character. That is what is at stake here: the living shaping of reality. This is what is striven for by the much-maligned spiritual science, and what is most important in the present, what is truly urgently needed in the present: what is important is the living interaction. One cannot push the life of the social organism either economically or in mere rigid conservative legal codes.

Gladstone, one of the most superstitious bourgeois of modern liberalism, once said: “The Americans have such a perfect constitution that it could hardly be more perfect, that it has truly proven itself in all the individual circumstances of the American people.

Another Englishman, who, it seems to me, was cleverer, if perhaps not as great a statesman as Gladstone, said: it is no proof at all that the American administration is a perfect one, that it proves itself, Because if it were less than perfect, it would also prove itself, because the Americans are still such a healthy people – in the opinion of the person concerned – that they would do all this even with a less healthy constitution. And the latter is certainly more right than what Gladstone said, because it points to the living reality, because it really does not matter which laws prevail in a living context, but that people work together in such a way that the necessary damage that arises on one side is constantly corrected by the living forces on the other.

Imagine a homunculus in which the waste products of digestion are not produced inside, which in turn have to be removed by other forces – then you have thought up something that has no breath of life. Spintize, and even if it is in the sense of the most radical people of modern times, about a social organism that does not cause harm to people, that does not consume people, that does not need to have another link of the social organism besides itself other than the constitutional state, as the actual state, then you have thought up an unhealthy social organism. That is it, that one is always pushed again, by the practically minded, but in the most eminent sense impractical way of thinking of modern times, that one again penetrates to a conception of reality, to such thoughts that can submerge into true reality, that can speak of what conditions itself, not what wants to have conditionality out of human prejudices.

And as a third link, alongside the two links that I have mentioned – alongside the economic link and the strictly political or legal link – there must be development of that which encompasses spiritual life in the broadest sense, the spiritual life that exists in education, in all schooling, from the most elementary school up to the university; that which exists in the artistic life, and finally in the religious life, which must also include - this will again seem paradoxical to some today, although it arises from real factual considerations - that must also include [not] public law, the law that is conditioned by the relationship between human beings; it belongs to the second link.

But this third part must include everything that aims at private law and criminal law. There the individual human being is confronted with the individual human being in such an abnormal relationship that the public life of the constitutional state, although it is up to the one who - if I may express myself trivially - has to carry something out; but to pass judgment is the responsibility of a relationship between individual human beings. The execution of the judgment may in turn belong to the constitutional state.

Everything, dear attendees, belongs in this area, in this spiritual area, everything that must be based on the ground of the individual human soul and body, which can only arise from the individual, from the freedom of the human being, how it must be placed on the economic interest of the economic body, the independent one, and how it must be placed on the legal life of the political body, so must it be placed on freedom the body that encompasses the actual spiritual life. Modern social democracy has included a single area in an impulse that goes in the direction described here, but not out of an appreciation of this area, but precisely out of an underestimation of it: religion should be a private matter.

Of course it should be. And anyone who does not underestimate religion, but understands its full value, will demand this all the more! But in the face of the legal and economic state, all of intellectual life must be a private matter. And now that the social question of the present day is coming to a conclusion – for that is what it consists of, the merging of economic life with legal life, of the state with the economic organism – it is precisely through the emergence of the capitalist and technical world order in modern times that the merging has also occurred, which was not there at all before the point in time marked yesterday, before the fifteenth century. The amalgamation of intellectual life with state life. The interests of the emerging bourgeoisie, which were connected with the development of the modern state, also tended to have intellectual life absorbed into the organism of the state. Judges were needed, doctors were needed, theologians were also needed, teachers were needed, and so on and so forth. The state extended its omnipotence over the spiritual life as a result of this impulse.

This spiritual life must be redeemed again, and placed on its own ground, on the free individuality of the human being. Then, and only then, will it develop in a healthy relationship to the other two limbs of the social organism.

Sometimes things are very hidden and masked there. Perhaps only someone who, like the one speaking to you, has spent his whole life has avoided in any way bringing what he has striven for spiritually into any relationship with any state; who can therefore know how this spiritual life must develop when it is freely left to its own devices. And it must be left to its own devices if it is to develop.

The dependence of the spiritual life on the life of the state has not contributed in the slightest to the weakening of the impact of the spiritual life to the point of the dead ideology that the modern social question creates. For it is not only that the personalities who drive intellectual life come to depend on state life and have to serve the institutions of state life. Anyone who can look at these things in depth knows something else entirely: , he knows that the inner form, the content of spiritual life itself becomes dependent on its relationship to the other organisms, which can only be a healthy one if the spiritual life develops in complete independence. Otherwise, dependencies also conceal and mask themselves. If it occurs independently, if it occurs in complete freedom, if it is completely left to its own devices, then a healthy relationship with the legal and economic body will arise naturally in life. How we adjust our own impulses; otherwise, due to certain prejudices, we do not notice things. Let us take a case that could seem radical, but which is quite characteristic. Let us assume that some young student wants to take his doctorate in the field of philology. He is advised to write, say, about feeling words in some old Roman writer or about the [parenthesis] in Homer. Such a task even had to be done by a young friend of mine. For such a work, a young person needs a year of extensive work.

Those who are so asleep in today's scientific life will say: Well, scientific interests. Science demands such an investigation into the feeling words of an ancient Roman writer, or into the [parenthesis] in Homer. In this way, science is served. But there is something else to consider. The healthy relationship of such a work to the whole of human life must be considered. This must become transparent in the entire human [social] organism. The student who works for a year to determine the hidden [parenthesis] in Homer eats, drinks and dresses for a year. That is to say, a number of people have to work for this work, to work for a year to feed him, to clothe him, so that he can do in time that which certainly does not fit into the healthy human [social] organism in a proper interest! Because a spiritual achievement only fits into the healthy human organism with a proper interest if it is desired, if there is a need for it. That is what matters.

And something else is important. It depends on the healthy development of the spiritual part of the social organism that the spiritual part of human culture also has the corresponding momentum, that it really produces what is relevant to reality. From this spiritual life, for example, technical ideas also arise, that which, as a spiritual idea, constantly intervenes in economic life in a productive and creative way. This can only be born in a healthy way in a real spiritual life, not in a spiritual life that has been deadened to the point of abstraction, which can be described by the term ideology.

The important thing is not to fight against the leaders of the modern proletariat labeling spiritual life as ideology, but to recognize that spiritual life, which has emerged from the unfortunate amalgamation of spiritual culture with the other two links of the social organism, has reduced spiritual life to ideology. It is easy to describe modern intellectual life as ideology; but a productive, self-effective intellectual life must in turn occur in a healthy social organism. This will also have a healthy effect on economic and legal life. This in turn must be relatively independent.

That this life in spiritual culture, in the third link of the healthy social organism, must be built on itself, I believe I showed as early as the beginning of the nineties of the last century in my “Philosophy of Freedom” , which, I believe, is now being republished at the right time, and which shows that real freedom can only exist and is only justified where a true spiritual life can flourish.

Now there is far too little time to elaborate here on what I would like to say about the free spiritual life. But I would at least like to hint at it. I will hint at it by saying that a healthy consideration of the threefold human organism shows that what is produced out of the spiritual sphere will then intervene healthily in the other two organisms when the spiritual life is completely self-contained. For then, he who can have a leading position in economic life according to his own conditions will not only need the proletarian who toils and labors, and who will then no longer be there as such at all, but he will need the one who, as a spiritual worker, can be the consumer. But through labor legislation, he can preserve that part of his labor power, that is, of his life force, which must not be consumed in the labor market, but must be regulated by the second link of the healthy social organism. Today, at least within the capitalist economic system, the one who is in a leading - that is, today essentially capitalist - position has only an interest in the consumption of human labor in the proletarian. The healthy three-part social organism will not only have an interest in the working laborer, but also in the resting laborer, in the laborer who can consume what will strive for consumption. This will certainly not be what the young badger will do, spending a year writing about the sensory words of some old writer and doing a doctoral thesis, but it will be what is demanded, what is needed by spiritual life. A full unison, a living unison will arise between spiritual production and general human, spiritual consumption. No one will be excluded from what the spiritual life offers. And precisely because of the interconnection of the three parts of the social organism, which should be independent, so many people are actually excluded from what other people do.

Everything that is produced as the lifeblood of society in a healthy human organism must also flow in a healthy way into the other parts of the social organism. It will not be possible to say, esteemed attendees, that in the future, for example, in a constitutional state that will have a democratically oriented representation, the individual circles will also sit, that they can also form a party, an agricultural party and so on. This will not be the case for the reason that the interests that today develop in opposite directions will then develop in the same direction. Even the antagonism between the Conservative and Liberal parties will not exist in the future if the social organism is allowed to develop healthily, because in a constitutional state, the conditions that always arise concretely will not be oriented objectively towards conservatives, liberals and so on, according to the slogan, I say slogans.

So today I could only sketch for you, dear attendees, what is at stake, in that not only a transformation of circumstances, but a transformation of the whole life for the social organism must occur.

On February 28, I will give another lecture here. There I will give individual evidence and details, and also show that for everything I have hinted at today, only a sketch could be given, that for all this there is a proving, a reasoning science. So that is to take place here in this hall on February 28.

Today, I would just like to point out that this terrible catastrophe that has befallen humanity for four and a half years, as I already mentioned yesterday, has highlighted the social question as a major question of world history, on which every person must take a practical stand based on life.

It is necessary for each individual to take a position on what has happened. One will soon be convinced how the life of each individual depends on the position he will take on the social problem, on the social riddle in the future. That is why it happened that way, because I always these things - allow me here, a personal but in reality not personal, but quite objective remark - because I did not invent these things to make something up, but because I won them from the observation of the present human that I wanted to put them into practice more and more when this terrible catastrophe of war reached a certain point, where one could see that it would develop out of the absurdity of previous forces, that it would develop into the essential social problem of humanity. During that war catastrophe, I tried, for example, to present to individuals, sensed and adapted to the circumstances, that the time demands something like the social impulse, which I have also explained here in yesterday's and today's lecture.

In a sense, I wanted to show personalities who were still active at the time, but have now been swept away, what they need if they are to contribute to changing that which proves to be diseased in the social organism. And so I had to speak to many people, to those who still mattered at the time, about what I am saying here. It is not a program that has been thought out, not something that has been thought out, but reality, in that the forces that are at work within the development of humanity will bring about what will happen in ten or twenty years over a large part of Europe. And to many I said, I believed that their hearts and souls could be stirred by it, to many I said: You now have the choice, if you still want to join in, either to follow that which will happen because it must happen, out of reason, or you wait until social cataclysms and social revolutions come.

People were drawn into what they were drawn into more quickly than could be hinted at in those days. In those days, the word “could” meant “was allowed to”. That was the way one had to speak in those days. But people did not want to listen. We have also experienced similar things in other areas! We have experienced that statesmen, leading statesmen, as late as May 1914, announced to parliaments in the most prominent positions: We are in such a European context that peace is secured for a long time. — This can be proved to them. People are that far-sighted!

However, anyone who is serious about what is really going on would have had to speak differently to people at the time. Before this military disaster, I repeatedly had to hint at what I, in turn before this military disaster, said like the others, like the statesmen: Peace is assured, we now live in one of the best of worlds. I was told in Vienna: This tendency - namely the tendency that lies in the present social life - will become ever greater and greater until it destroys itself. He who has a spiritual grasp of social life sees everywhere the terrible growth of social ulcers. That is the great cultural question that arises for him who sees through existence; that is the terrible thing that has such a depressing effect and that, even if one could suppress all enthusiasm for spiritual science, if one could suppress what would otherwise open one's mouth for spiritual science, which could then lead one to cry out to the world, as it were, for the remedy for what is already so strongly on the rise and will become stronger and stronger if the social organism continues to develop as it has done so far. This is how cultural damage occurs, which can be seen for this, for the social organism, just as cancerous growths can be seen for the natural human organism.

Faced with the social question, we are faced with the possibility that people will continue to sleep through events, that they will not listen to what must necessarily be said to the social organism, just as it can be said to the natural organism when someone has a cancerous ulcer inside.

Not only did people refuse to see the full implications of what I mean in the course of the war catastrophe so far – they took what they understood of it, usually in such a way that it can only be seen as an expression of the internal politics of this or that state. I did not then and do not now mean it only as the domestic policy of this or that state territory, but I do mean it in such a way that I find it rooted in the developmental forces towards which humanity is heading. And I mean it first and foremost as the foreign policy of the various states.

That is what I have emphasized above all: that certain states, to whom it concerns, have to hold these things up to the world as their foreign policy. If we consider that one state is not so closely connected with another as they would have been, for example, these European states in 1914, that the unnatural mixing of the political and state problem to the southeast of Austria, the Austro-Serbian problem, of ill-starred memory, - the states would not have linked their economic and political interests in such a way, the social organisms would not have linked their interests in such a way as they were linked in Europe, and therefore alliances arose that necessarily developed to such an extent after a certain point that ultimately decisions were made from the most one-sided strategic-military points of view.

Let us assume that the states are in a relationship in which the threads are drawn, the legal ones, which will essentially be the same for all states - the actual political relationships will be the same for all states, especially in the case of a healthy organism - then the economic and intellectual threads will intertwine. More and more, the one will be corrected by the other. And precisely where today, at the borders, the contradictions have arisen as a result of the interconnection of the three areas, these contradictions will be corrected when, regardless of the political relationship, the system of economic efficiency extends across the borders.

I can only hint at this here. But it should mean, it should point out, that the various territories of the world, through what is characterized here as a healthy social organism, come into such a system that, in contrast, the League of Nations, as it is conceived today, will be an abstraction, into such a system that is based on reality, so that one reality increasingly excludes the damage of the others. That is what matters today.

Now, esteemed attendees, what I have presented is perhaps more uncomfortable for many than what these same many imagine as the solution to the social question today. Because you can very easily see from what I have presented – as I said, more on February 28 – but you can already see from what I have presented today that one cannot imagine: The social question has arisen, clever people will solve it, and then socialism will be here. But it is not like that. It is contrary to all development.

Of course, the social question is here because human development has entered a new stage of existence, because new forces have emerged. But since it has been here, this social question will not disappear for all time in the future development of humanity. Economic life will continue to be more and more a social question. It will not be possible to invent a socialism that will solve the social question at a stroke. But it will be possible to create a healthy social organism in which the social question will be solved in a living context through the active engagement of people, day by day, year by year, epoch by epoch, in an ongoing process. No solution of the social question that can be thought of today must be allowed to take place. I am not pointing out institutions to you that will eliminate the social question. It is there, it is there as a life force of future humanity. The life of this future humanity will consist in the fact that this future humanity will have to create something through which the solution of the social question will be experienced perpetually. The existence of the social question, the existence of social development, will be enriched, not impoverished; a new element of life will enter into the social organism. That is what matters: the self-regulation of social life through the three relatively independent social links, that is what matters.

When I consider this, and when I consider that the general prejudice that once prevailed against spiritual science is also applied when this spiritual science speaks about the social question, on the one hand it strikes me that a very well-known gentleman had it said to him when a certain goal was explained to him, which I am practically striving for in terms of rebuilding the ailing conditions of the civilized world – in a brief appeal, the person in question was able to read, in a few sentences, what I have explained to you yesterday and today – he replied: he would have thought that I would not point to such economic things for the recovery of the current human situation, but to the spirit.

Now, dear ones, this shows how the minds, how those who have worked with us for a long time, brought about the disaster, and even today do not want to see what is important. It is not enough to just preach: spirit, spirit and spirit. It is not enough to call out to people today: but rather that we use this spirit to immerse ourselves in the actual conditions and to control the actual conditions as they must develop in accordance with reality. It depends on how the spirit is applied in life. It does not depend on repeatedly pointing out in the abstract: Spirit, spirit, spirit must be placed back into humanity, then all will be well.

That is one thing that occurs to me. The other thing that occurs to me in response to what the clever people are saying: what does the spiritual scientist want in the social question? I would like to reply: he wants to adjust human thinking and feeling and willing to true reality, just as he does in everything else. This reminds me of the poor boy who once sat as a servant at a Newcomen steam engine. He had to take out and push in the two cocks alternately, which let in the condensate on one side and the steam on the other. And then this boy noticed that the balancer was jumping up and down. It occurred to him, because he was not forming theories, but was standing at the machine itself, it occurred to him: What would happen if I took two cords, pulled one at a time, and the other at the other? And behold, the balancer went up and down, and all by itself, one tap opened at the right time and came down again, and the other from the other side. And the boy could watch! You see, someone of the ilk of those people who observe everything that is observed from reality poorly and say, “You good-for-nothing boy, what are you doing! Get rid of the cords. – World history has done it differently. World history has allowed the self-control of the steam engine, one of the most important modern inventions, one of the inventions that has most comprehensively intervened in modern technical life, to emerge from this initially poor boy who tied the cockerel to the balance arm.

Not out of immodesty, and not to characterize something for the one who is already established in the teaching represented here, but to characterize those who would like to come, to speak in relation to the social aperçu that I have presented, to speak, so to speak, from the standpoint of their cleverness, as one would have said: “Stupid boy, quickly get rid of what you are doing, what nonsense are you up to?” Leave it alone! I would only like to say to them what occurs to me with regard to the little working boy, as I have told you. For people will soon have to realize, those who cannot do it with their minds will have to realize it with their lives and with their feelings - they will have to realize that they have to approach the reality of the social question in a realistic way. It is there; it has been knocking at the door of human life for long decades and has come in through the door. It will not allow itself to be thrown out again by anyone. The desire to throw it out will be the worst policy. But it will also be bad if people do not listen at the right time to what needs to be said about the social question. Because then it could be that communication from person to person, across class lines, is no longer possible because the instincts have been unleashed too strongly. We need only look at the fire signs that are rising on the world horizon today to realize that we have to deal with the issues at hand, otherwise it could well be too late due to the unleashing of human instincts that can no longer be calmed – perhaps not for decades!

Dear attendees! The issue that is currently being called the social question has been on the horizon of modern historical development for more than half a century, and humanity has had the opportunity to reflect on what is expressed in the social demands of the movement associated with this question. During this time, people have also taken measures, small, medium and large, conceived in terms of state, through which they have tried to satisfy these demands in the way they have best understood. But now, when this social question, which in comparison to what is now, was more present in the undercurrents of human life, has emerged in a completely new form as a result of the terrible war catastrophe of recent years, and now that this question has been brought up by many quite horrifying , one cannot, if one really wants to learn from them, raise the question of why everything that people have tried to do to understand this social question is inadequate. Does it not prove that in many respects people today have not only been taken by surprise by the shape of the facts, which most of them truly did not dream would come about one day, that they did not dream that these facts would have to bring everything that can be executed in the human soul to this social question, that they have to relearn and rethink in a certain sense?

One could already see, dearest ones present, during the war catastrophe, how the suppressed forces of this movement pushed their way to the surface of life. Many a person who, through their words or advice, could have contributed to the inhibition or promotion of what was pushing towards the terrible war catastrophe of 1914, felt moved to push towards this war because they believed that a military victory would save their country from the forces against which the social movement was directed. But such personalities have had to realize over the past few years that they have made their decisions under serious illusions, because they have not been able to somehow push back the social forces moving to the surface through what they have achieved. On the contrary, they have - one can say so, the facts teach it - fuelled the fire all the more. And again, during the catastrophe of the war – the other world-shaking powers have driven humanity into chaos, into a terrible misfortune; then, during the catastrophe, hope emerged here and there in wide circles that precisely from the ranks of the international proletariat and its leaders those people will arise who will bring order back into the chaos that had emerged.

From all this, it can be seen that it was precisely in the face of these war catastrophes that this social movement first took on its critical form. And now, after the catastrophe itself has entered into a crisis, what is now apparent? Dear attendees, facts do not show whether everything in the face of all this history, in the face of these facts, is gripped by a deep tragedy. People, both those who profess the modern socialist worldviews and those who oppose them, show everywhere that the thoughts they have formed, the conclusions they have reached, and the preparations they have made are nowhere equal to these facts. The facts are overwhelming people, so it can be said in view of the current world situation.

It is therefore justified to reflect on whether the ideas that have been cultivated over the course of many decades really did capture the true nature of the social question. Did they take the true character into account? Is it possible that something quite different from what was sought to be grasped in the ideas is present and at work in the depths of the soul of the proletariat? Whether perhaps in the depths of these proletarian souls there is something quite different from what the proletarian himself believes is at work and calling to him?

Now, it is precisely in the circles of today's socialist thinkers that one finds a true disdain for intellectual life. But anyone who has been able to follow the proletarian movement of the last decades with a certain insight into life must say to himself that this rejection of intellectual life, of intellectual culture, this contempt for intellectual culture on the part of the proletariat actually expresses something extraordinarily significant that points the way to at least one in the true form of the modern social movement. If one has understood in the course of the last time, not only from some theoretical or quite scholarly point of view to reflect on the proletariat, but if one has been able to live with the proletariat, then one could see that in this rejection of the intellectual life there is something much, much deeper than one usually believes. And one is pointed to what is actually contained in it when one examines a certain word, which one could hear over and over again from the mouths of proletarian people, for its true content. It is a word that stands out significantly from the modern proletarian movement: the word is class consciousness of the proletariat. The modern worker says that he has become class-conscious. And by this he means that his consciousness is no longer as it was in the old days, when, based on certain instincts, a person placed himself in a relationship of dependence on this or that other person in order to work for him, and also established his relationship with these employers more instinctively, more unconsciously. The modern worker knows himself to be class-conscious. This means that he acts in accordance with certain ideas that he has about his dignity as a human being, about his value as a human being, about his position as a human being in society. He uses these ideas to determine the relationship he wants to enter into with those from whom he takes his work. What he represents in the world, he expresses with these words “class-conscious”. And this class consciousness is then accompanied by a certain feeling, a certain sentiment. It is this that only when the worker draws the full consequences of this class consciousness, when he behaves in his social position as this class consciousness makes him behave in relation to his human duty, then he will first achieve that goal, that goal that must be in his mind in the true sense of the word: to become the person he can desire to be according to a just world order.

Now, esteemed attendees, we can examine how, in the course of more recent times, what is hidden in the words “class-conscious proletariat” has emerged. To do so, we must go further back in contemporary history. And indeed, it has often been pointed out that we must go back to a certain turning point in time to gain insight into this question. Again and again it has been emphasized that, if one wanted to reflect on the origin of the modern proletarian movement, one had to look at how modern technology has emerged on the horizon of humanity, how this modern technology has given rise to modern capitalism, and how technology and capitalism have destroyed the old crafts, how they have led the worker away from what were his own means of production to the extensive means of production of modern factories and modern technology. And from all that could be seen from the historical development, the idea was formed that modern technology and the modern capitalism associated with it actually produced the proletariat.

However, dear attendees, it is not important that one realizes: modern technology and modern capitalism have created the proletariat, so to speak; rather, what matters is what the proletarian himself has become at the machine, in technology, through his integration into the modern capitalist economic process. And when one poses a question to that effect, then something extraordinarily significant becomes apparent to those who understand the issues, to be considered in historical parallels. Then one involuntarily recalls another great movement in world history. One recalls the spread of Christianity from Asia, through Greece and Rome to the north – to that north where, at the time, while Christianity was spreading, barbarian hordes were moving against the south, with more elementary sentiments than the inhabitants of the south had. And a remarkable historical phenomenon occurred at that time: Christianity, which then proved to be a world movement, also took hold, in a certain way, among the people, among the highly educated people of Greece, among the people of the Roman Empire. The way in which it took hold in these areas of civilization at that time shows at the same time that it would not have become what it has become in world history if it had only been able to come to the Greeks and Romans. The Greeks and Romans had a highly developed intelligence, they had a highly developed wisdom; but at the same time, this intelligence, this wisdom, was, I would say, like a fruit that had overripened, in a certain process of decline. And precisely this highly developed intelligence, this highly developed spiritual life of the European south was less able to absorb the impulses of Christianity than the elementary minds of the barbarians advancing from the north; and in the unconsumed intelligence, in the unconsumed mental powers of these advancing peoples of the north, Christianity created the impulses by which it has become what its actual impact in world history shows.

At the same time, the first [history] of Christianity must be studied in the migration of peoples from north to south.

But it is also a mistake, dear attendees, to assume that the modern proletarian movement began with what it is actually still experiencing and will continue to experience for a long time. Only here we have to do with a migration of peoples that does not run in a horizontal line, so to speak, but consists of masses of people who previously merely allowed themselves to be led, striving upwards, striving towards the form of consciousness, the intelligence, the ability to make decisions that the leading classes have: one might say a migration of peoples running in a vertical line!

But this vertical migration was met with something quite different from what happened with Christianity. The highly developed Greeks and Romans could give the Christian religion that which struck home in the elemental, primitive hearts, in the northern barbarian hearts of the attacking population. And these latter needed that, longed for it in a certain respect, which the more highly developed Greeks and Romans brought them.

Christianity brought a special spiritual gift with a strong impact on the souls - that was what it brought to the primitive minds of the north. But what could the ruling classes do in the new mass migration, what could they offer the proletarian masses storming from below?

I am not saying, esteemed attendees – I ask that you take this explicitly into account – I am not saying: they could offer them modern science; but rather, I say: they could offer them the human orientation, the human way of thinking that is connected with this modern science. And the surging masses of proletarians were hungry for this mode of thinking, for this acceptance of the modern scientific way of thinking. Why were they hungry for it? They were hungry for it because they were people who had been torn out of their old life contexts.

Let us consider the crafts as they developed up to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, well into the late Middle Ages. We will see that the human being is close to what spurs him on to produce. He is close to what makes economic production possible for him. And from his occupation, not only does an external professional honor arise for him, but something arises that gives him the feeling: he is of value in human society, he stands in a certain way. Human dignity is inherent in this human society. The craft was worthy of the person who practiced it. The craft instilled something in the soul that carried that soul. Not so with those who were torn out of their life contexts and led into the desolate factory, placed at the machine and harnessed to capitalism, which is alien to the human being. These people received nothing from their surroundings. Everything flowing towards them from their work tools and their work environment was alien. What did they have to fall back on when they asked themselves: What am I as a human being in the world? What do I mean in human society? They were dependent on their inner being, on that which can arise loudly from the soul, which can say about the human being from the inner being: I mean in the world as a human being. — But it is quite natural that no answer could come from an inner intuition, from an inner enlightenment, to these people's questions about their human dignity, about their human worth. They looked around for what the ruling class could offer them. Just as the barbarian masses storming in from the north had earlier accepted Christianity, so the modern proletarian masses wanted to accept what spiritual life could be brought to them, what a certain world view could be brought to them by those leading classes who had such spiritual life, such a certain world view.

One must not mistake this, esteemed attendees. It has often been completely misunderstood that the modern working masses approached the leading classes with a certain, I would say unconscious, trust and demanded of them: Give us information from your knowledge, from the science to which you have brought it, about what man actually means in the world!

But what was this scientific way of thinking like? What was it like, this scientifically oriented way of thinking that educated the bourgeoisie at roughly the same time as modern technology and capitalism emerged? It was like this: of course everything that has happened is also, in a sense, an historical necessity. One can hypothetically say that what the bourgeoisie had to offer the proletariat in the way of intellectual life was scientifically oriented, and was precisely the achievement of the newly emerging science. But the leading classes had not understood how to incorporate into this scientific attitude the momentum of spiritual life that was inherent in the old worldviews.

One need only recall the momentum that lived in the old religious and artistic conceptions, in general worldviews. These conceptions were able to give man something that carried his soul, filled his soul completely, and was meant to show his soul how this soul was connected to a spiritual world that stood above mere nature.

The modern scientific way of thinking could not do that. That was precisely what people were — certainly it was necessary, but one can still characterize it like this: It was the case that the old worldviews, and their representatives in particular, even opposed what was being developed as a modern scientific attitude. They did not understand how to give this science something that would have been a soul-bearing element. And so this science became well suited to give man enlightenment about nature and about the way he himself stands in nature; but it was impossible for this science to tell man anything serious about the questions that arose in his deepest inner being: What am I as a human being?

So, one might say, the proletariat did indeed place its trust in the leading classes; but this trust, and this, even today, is not fully understood by the proletariat, one must say: this trust was betrayed. The proletariat believed it could find something in modern science that could become its creed, its religion, so to speak, and what did it find? There is another word that shines brightly on what lives and happens in the modern proletarian soul. There is the word that can be heard again and again in proletarian writings, in proletarian assemblies, the word that proletarian leaders always have on their tongues - there is the word “ideology”.

What does the proletariat mean when it speaks of ideology? It means that the entire intellectual life: science, art, religion, law, custom, morality, that all this is not something that contains an inner, spiritual reality above nature, but that all this is based only on ideas that are mere reflections, mere reflections of what is going on outside in material life. The intellectual life that the bourgeois class handed over to the proletariat was so paralyzed, so paralyzed that the proletarian class could only perceive it as an ideology, that it no longer sensed in it anything that bore the soul as reality, but only sensed in it only insubstantial, unreal mirror images of external material reality.

And what was this external material reality for the proletarian? Only the economic life in which he was involved, only the machine, the factory. Only this gave him the bleak capitalism in which he was socially placed. And so it showed itself that now, in this new mass migration from bottom to top, people also longed for spiritual nourishment, but that they were only offered a spiritual nourishment that gradually hollowed out their souls, that gradually made their souls desolate.

And what was the result of this? The result was that demands arose in the modern proletariat that could not be illuminated by the impulse of any spiritual life, and that had to assert themselves as mere instincts, so to speak. By perceiving the spiritual life, which it has inherited from the leading classes, as ideology, the proletariat must, on the one hand, reject this spiritual life, but on the other hand, it must also allow this spiritual life to work in such a way that it is deprived of the possibility it sought in this spiritual life of feeling through this life what it is as a human being, whereby it places itself in the whole scientific order.

With these suggestions, dear attendees, I believe I have touched on the one link in the modern proletarian, in the modern social movement. In any case, more than one would believe, this movement is a spiritual movement, but not one in which the spiritual has had a beneficial effect. The trust in the intellectual life of the leading classes has become mistrust. And in the facts, which today stand so horribly for many, one experiences the consequences of this mistrust. Yes, the way things play out on the surface, how they live out in the human imagination, that is sometimes not the essential, not the decisive thing; in this respect, man often misunderstands himself. What stirs below [in the true depths] of the soul is what matters. And however little the modern proletarian admits it, in the depths of his soul he yearns for something that can carry this soul. And if he believes he finds it in the current scientific attitude, with his ideas and his thoughts, then his unconscious feeling tells him that he must be dissatisfied with his whole situation, because this modern scientific attitude only shows him, so to speak, the vanity of man.

In this respect, there is a huge difference, an enormous difference between what still permeates the consciousness of the leading classes and what permeates the consciousness of the proletarian.

Dear attendees, you have to experience these things as they happen in the striving proletariat itself. If I may interject something personal here: I remember very clearly a scene with all its details, which I experienced in this area, among others, when I stood at the lectern at the same time as Rosa Luxemburg, who recently died so tragically. It was precisely in this scene that the deep gulf became apparent to me, which exists and must widen more and more between the leading classes and the storming proletariat. As a member of the ruling class, you could be well convinced of what modern science teaches about man, you could theoretically be a free thinker, you could even theoretically be an atheist, but in terms of what lived in the feelings, you were part of a life context and wanted to remain in it , even if one was a natural scientist like Vogt or a scientific-psychological researcher like Büchner, for example, wanted to remain in it, despite all theoretical-scientific conviction, in what was a life context that was truly not determined by modern science, but by old world view impulses. In this respect, science seemed theoretically convincing, but there was no sense of entitlement in the soul to be completely hollowed out by this science. The modern proletarian is different. I remember exactly the words that Rosa Luxemburg spoke about science and the workers at the time, how she made it clear to the workers that the newer scientific way of thinking had finally enlightened man in a true way, how man now knows that he does not have his origin close to angels or any spiritual beings, but that he has his origin in the fact that he once moved indecently while climbing trees, and other such things. “Of such origin,” she said, ”to such origin man goes back, and whoever considers this must admit to himself what an enormous prejudice there is in all the differences in rank, in all the differences in class, within human society. From such an explanation of man as man, from such a placing of man in the natural order, not in a spiritual world order, something quite different followed for the proletarian than for the member of the bourgeois class. That gave the modern proletarian his soul's imprint. That made him what he actually is.

Do not tell us, esteemed attendees, how many proletarians there are who occupy themselves with such things. How far removed from the proletarian question of bread and that of status is what touches on such questions of world view! If you say this, then you only testify to how little you know about the reality of the proletarian movement. No matter how uneducated the individual proletarian may be in the eyes of the ruling class, no matter how little he may have heard of the things I have just mentioned – within the proletarian class he is so organized that a thousand threads lead from the perhaps few people who know, a thousand threads lead from such things to him. And the most radical actions and measures that today frighten the leading circles, which come from the proletariat, are really connected with the intellectual direction and intellectual character that the proletariat has acquired.

Thus the proletarian question is, in one of its aspects, more than one might think, a spiritual question. But it is not only a spiritual question. It is, in the second place, what one might call a legal question. For something else happened at the same time that modern technology and modern capitalism were developing. There was a certain orientation of human interests towards state life.

What happened there is also often misunderstood today. History, as it is taught, is actually just a kind of fable convenue. People today imagine that the state was more or less as it is today throughout the whole of history. But that is not the case. What is important in state life today has actually only emerged in the last four centuries. It has emerged because the ruling class in the state was able to see something that served their interests. The state has emerged as an instrument for the ruling classes to realize what they call their rights. And the consequence of this was that the ruling, the leading classes in the state sought to realize what they called their rights. One can trace it historically, how property rights, how other rights have gradually emerged through the fact that more and more the leading classes of humanity linked their interests with state life.

But the worker was called to the machine, was put into the factory, was harnessed into soulless capitalism. For him, one right remained unrealized in the realization of rights in modern state life. And this unrealized right was one of the strongest impulses of the modern social movement. This unrealized right arose from the fact that the corresponding right did not arise because the worker was completely placed in mere economic life, in mere external economic existence, in that which only expresses itself in the production, circulation and consumption of goods. And within this economic existence, it turned out that an important factor in the production of goods, even in the modern technical sense, was human labor! What has become of this human labor? This human labor itself became a commodity. Others, who had objective commodities, offered them on the commodities market; the commodities were bought, are bought. The worker has nothing to sell but his labor. And this labor power took on the character of a commodity. Just like other commodities, it was subject to the law of supply and demand. The modern proletarian learned this, and it penetrated deep into his soul: the awareness that it is indeed degrading to know that a part of yourself is a commodity within the human social order.

What this impulse means can be understood, honored attendees, when you have seen time and again how it struck the hearts of the proletarians. For example, what flowed into their souls from Marxism and similar socialist beliefs, where it was made clear to them that their labor power had become an ordinary commodity through the modern capitalist mode of production. The proletarian understood this from his own life. But in him the social question is expressed in its true form in a second point, in a second link. Admittedly, the modern proletarian believes that it is quite understandable that modern economic life has turned his labor power into a commodity, and he even believes that the further development of this economic life will in turn take away the character of the commodity from his labor power. But this belief is vain. This belief is only on the surface of consciousness. In the depths of his soul, the proletarian feels something else. In the depths of his soul, he feels that this labor question is nothing more than a continuation of what is expressed within humanity on the way from slavery through serfdom to the modern proletariat, which has to market its labor power.

In other times, you could buy the whole person as a slave. Then the time when you could buy less of the person, but still a good deal of him within economic life, is during serfdom. In more recent times, within the capitalist economic system, you can only buy the labor force, but the whole person has to go along when you buy his labor. The whole person thereby comes into a dependency on the one who gives him the work that he perceives as degrading. And one can only show understanding for this matter if one realizes that in this question about human labor, we are now dealing with a legal issue.

I said earlier that the worker has been neglected. His labor law has not been realized in modern state life. He was thrown into economic life, and it was out of economic life that the relationship between his labor and the other factors of human society was shaped.

More and more, the urge took hold in the unconscious to break out of this economic life, to break out and carry oneself into another realm where the question of labor is not a mere economic question, where it becomes a legal question. This is actually inherent in the question of labor: the transformation of labor from an economic factor into a legal factor. This is the true form of the second classification of the social question.

The third area can be seen in its true form by looking at economic life itself. This economic life is humanly marred by the fact that not only do goods separate from people circulate in it, but also human labor power is remunerated in it like a commodity. As a result, in modern economic life there is not only objective commodity that is subject to exchange, there are people who are separated from the rest of humanity because they have to be determined in their entire will, in all their soul impulses, by this economic life. To tear it away from the human being, to place it on its foundation, to place it on the foundation on which it then has a mere commodity-circulation character: that is the third area of the social question in its true form.

And so you see that the social question actually has three core issues, and can be broken down into three parts: the first part is a spiritual question, the second part is a legal question, and the third part is an economic question. These three parts of social life, these three core issues must be taken into account if one is to gain any kind of insight into the modern social movement.

This attitude can only arise if we consider the following. Our time is already in a serious crisis of human development. And something of this crisis is evident in the following: social life - of course there was social life in the past as well. But people placed themselves in this social life in such a way that they took certain thoughts for granted, which brought them into a relationship from person to person. This is now beginning to change. It actually began to change a long time ago. The necessity arises that a feeling arises in each individual human being of how he or she stands within the entire social organism. And it will become necessary for something of this feeling to be incorporated into our education, into our school system.

People find it very difficult to adapt their way of thinking to such things. Nevertheless, people will have to learn to feel more and more drawn to these things. Today, of course, you are only considered an educated person if you know the four types of arithmetic, at least to a certain extent, and if you are not illiterate. You have to have a certain amount of education if you want to be considered a real person in the right sense; but you can be seized very little by the feeling of being inside a social organism, like a single human limb is inside a natural human organism. Feelings will have to be developed like rules, like the truths of the multiplication table, in the future human being – feelings of how the spiritual life, the legal life, and the economic life express themselves in the social organism. There is more to this than is usually thought. Therein lies the actual, purely human side of the social question.

When the social organism is discussed today, one often gets the impression that there is something like a last remnant of medieval superstition in all this talk about the social organism. This medieval superstition comes to the fore in a certain scene in the second part of Goethe's Faust, where Wagner is preparing the homunculus in the laboratory, wants to prepare the homunculus from mere abstract human ideas, from natural ingredients.

Goethe deals with medieval alchemical superstition in his own way. Of course, modern enlightened humanity does not believe in medieval alchemy; but it does not know that it has often transferred such superstition to a different area. What is being attempted today with regard to the social organism, the social being, with all kinds of socialist theories, and what is sought in what the medieval alchemist does in “Faust” by artificially to create a living being, a human being, artificially, that which is striven for as a social organism, out of all kinds of principles, out of all kinds of impulses, one would also have to say of that: it is artificially conceived. The principle of allowing something to become self-sustaining and natural, of merely giving it the opportunity to become viable, must underlie it – this feeling must become part of humanity with regard to the social organism. People must learn to recognize that one does not have to think theoretically: How should one go about creating a social order? – but that one has to promote reality, through which this social order can continuously be realized.

Those of you who are present today and who approach the study of the social organism from this point of view will find that, as a result of the developments that have taken place over the last few centuries, and particularly during the 19th century, the three limbs of this social organism, each of which requires a certain degree of independence in order to function, have been welded together, so to speak. The best way to understand this is to draw a comparison. But it should not be a scientific gimmick, just a comparison, between the social organism and the natural human organism. I pointed out the truth on which this is based in my last book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Mysteries of the Soul). Today, we have already progressed so far scientifically that what I am about to say can be fully asserted, even if the scientific scholars themselves do not yet recognize it, but they will come to recognize it. The system of the natural human organism actually consists of three parts. One of these is what we can call the nerve-sense system, which encompasses the processes that take place in the nerves and senses. The second link in the natural human organism is what I would call the rhythmic system, which encompasses the activity of the lungs and heart and everything connected with them. And the third system is the metabolic system, which is often perceived as the coarsest, most materialistic system in the human organism.

These three systems of the human organism are not fully centralized; each has a certain independence and each also stands independently in a certain relationship to the outside world. The nervous-sensory system through the senses; the rhythmic system through the respiratory organs; the metabolic system through the nutritional organs. These three organ systems open independently to the outside world.

As I said, not to play a scientific game of analogy, but only to make myself understood, I point out these three independent links of the human organism. The nervous-sensory system has a certain independence, and it is precisely because of this that it can be properly presented and supported by the respiratory and rhythmic systems, which in turn function independently and are connected to the outside world independently. If everything in the human organism were centralized in a single point, the human organism could not exist in the perfect harmony in which it exists. What nature has made of the human organism, a three-part system with three relatively independent individual areas, must become, out of the impulses of modern times, the healthy social organism. Until now it has been so instinctively. Man must work towards it consciously, and every single person must build this healthy social organism. But this requires that we recognize that the welding together of three links in the one state life must cease. And here we touch on one of those attempts at a solution that bears the sole character of a reality thinking, one of those attempts at a solution that present-day humanity in particular thinks least of all. What matters is that one can first bring about in the social organism, by making it viable – but one can only do that by letting certain things drift apart again, which have drifted together over the last four centuries as a result of historical impulses.

The situation is as follows. Initially, the leading classes, through the interests that pushed them towards the state, also drew the spiritual life into this state. The state has increasingly extended its power over the spiritual life. The social entity and many other branches of the spiritual life have been included in the sphere of the state. But anyone who is familiar with the spiritual life, esteemed attendees, its inner structure, anyone who knows what should be at work in this spiritual life if it is to sustain the soul, knows that this soul-sustaining, true reality impulse of the spiritual life must dwindle more and more as the external power of the state makes use of it. Spiritual life can only fully fulfill man if it is based on the direct individual freedom of man, on the free initiative of each individual, on the talents and abilities of each individual. One should not recoil from the thought that spiritual life must be drawn out of the sphere of the state so that it can develop through its own forces.

The modern proletariat is not aware of this – but the very longing that drove it is in fact there in the depths of its soul, in the unconscious depths of its soul: for a liberated spiritual life! Only when this spiritual life is released from the state organism, when it is left to its own devices, will it again have the power to push forward, to push forward through the free initiative of the human being, through the connection of the deepest, innermost interests with the spiritual life, which is necessary to answer the question inwardly to the human being: What do I know as a human being? A spiritual life that is detached from the external state, which in turn is intertwined with the economic and legal life, such a spiritual life will not be materialistic. The state has materialized science. The state has externalized spiritual life. An internalized spiritual life is capable of making a completely different personality out of the proletarian.

This is the first key point in the attempts to solve the social question, even if today the proletarian does not yet know it, he longs for the development that he needs and that he has not been able to receive, even though he has longed for it in this time when he was first put into the factory, in a comprehensive way.

Dear attendees, but then, when intellectual life has been removed from the actual political state, the state will be left with the actual legal life. And it will then be pushed to prove its competence, so to speak. It will then realize that it must be the stronghold of justice. Then the tendency will also arise, just as on the one hand spiritual life has been pushed out of the sphere of the state, economic life has been pushed out, which has also been pushed into the state by the ruling class, they started with the larger transport institutions: post, telegraph, railways and so on, which have become nationalized, socialized. They went further and further. And the modern proletariat wants to draw the final consequences, wants to nationalize everything, and is only imitating what it has received as an inheritance from the bourgeoisie. At the moment when, so to speak, intellectual life has been freed from the sphere of the state, the state itself will realize that it must also push economic life out of itself in the other direction. Then the State will have its own sphere and there will be three constituent parts of a healthy social organism. The first of these, considered relatively, is the life of the State, the public life of the State, and the second is the rounded-off, self-contained economic life, endowed with real substance and having its own laws, just as the life of the law and the life of the spirit have their own laws. Completely independent impulses rest in these three areas. Economic life is completely dominated by what man needs in his everyday and other higher life. Economic life must be built on the satisfaction of needs. And a peculiarity of economic life, ladies and gentlemen – it is a pity that I cannot expand on these things, but time is pressing – a special character of economic life is expressed in that what circulates in economic life must be suited to the most appropriate consumption. Everything that is produced in economic life wants to be consumed in the appropriate way. And if it is not consumed, then it has missed its goal. But if that is the case, then human labor must not be harnessed in this economic life; for it must not be completely consumed, it must be preserved for that which man wants to be as a being that enters the whole world situation in a lawful way. This human being must be able to draw something from mere economic life, must not be completely consumed in economic life. What each person must draw from this economic life is the relationship itself from person to person, and the working relationship is no different than that from person to person in the realm of the political state, which, alongside economic life, is the second link in the healthy social organism. Here it is not interest that is at work, as in economic life, but right. What makes man equal to man. The law before which all men must be equal in a certain respect is at work. But this right can only take effect on human labor power if the consequence, if the destiny of human labor is not regulated by economic processes, but when it is regulated by law; just as other rights must be the subject of the political state, which is separate from economic and intellectual life, so must labor law be decided within this separate political state, not within economic life. And so it will have to be that in a healthy organism the independent economic life will develop, a life that is built on the interests and needs of man, and that will live itself out primarily in associations that are built for the present regulation of consumption and production and other things that are present in economic life. The state, public law, which no longer wants to be an economist, will develop with real matter-of-factness in a healthy social organism. The development dreamt of by the proletariat must take precisely the opposite course and institutions; the state must be separated and excluded from economic life. The state must develop a single public law.

And the third area must be the free spiritual life, which can be built only on human freedom and human talent. Just as the state can only be built on the law, and the economy can only be built on the interest, just as no human organism can survive healthily if the head wants to take over the functions of the lung and heart system or the metabolic system, so no healthy social organism can survive in the future if these three elements are mixed up. They will only support and sustain each other in the right way if each stands independently. Therefore, a relative independence of the three characterized parts must be demanded. If I may express myself this way: the spiritual life must form its administrative body, its law-giving body, out of its own laws. In the state area of law, a democratic order will have to prevail. There the relationship between people will be regulated. But this state system must in turn have its own legislative and administrative body. And the entire social structure of this economic life will arise out of the associations of economic life.

But these three members will, so to speak, each be sovereign in their own right, just as sovereign states stand side by side and are accountable to each other, in order to enter into a relationship with each other similar to that between the three characterized member systems of the human natural organism.

Perhaps today one is somewhat astonished when looking at such a solution to the social question. But, dear ladies and gentlemen, the way of thinking that is presented here is not based on theory but on reality. It does not ask: How should we think in order to solve this or that social problem? Instead, it asks: How should human coexistence be shaped so that people can solve the social question from within, through their own feelings, thoughts and will?

No human being can solve the social question from a one-sided economic life, nor from a one-sided state life, nor from a one-sided spiritual life. Because this social question is not something that has arisen in the world today and will be solved tomorrow - the social question has come to stay. The social question has entered the life of the human soul and will now always be there. Therefore, it will have to be solved again and again. The situation will arise more and more that economic life consumes the human being, that the human being must save himself again, must make himself independent of economic life in order to restore in the state legal life that which is consumed by him in economic life. Just as something is consumed in the human nervous system, which is always restored by the lung-heart system. What is important is not to penetrate one area with the other, but to ensure that these areas stand side by side and thus have the right effect on each other. We must strive for a certain state of the social organism, through which this social organism will become viable.

I have only been able to sketch out what actually follows from the world view represented here; but everything I have said can be scientifically substantiated in full detail today, and it is to be carried out in all its details for the entire life of the social organism. It must be clearly understood that the questions to be considered are not to be solved by one or other side gaining a view on this or that from its deliberations, but that the questions are to be solved by the fact that, on the one hand, economic life is there and produces something that, on the other hand, needs a counteraction through spiritual and legal channels. This does not offer a way out of the social confusions of the present that can bring a solution tomorrow; but it does offer a way out that can make the social organism viable in the future.

One would like to say: what has been discussed here was already instinctive in the souls of modern people when, in the eighteenth, at the end of the eighteenth century, the great, powerful impulses of the French Revolution were heard, clothed in the words: liberty, equality, fraternity. On the one hand, there was already an awareness of what needed to be done to heal the social organism; on the other hand, there was still confusion and the chaotic idea of realizing all of this in a centralized state. Then, clever people of the nineteenth century often wondered how these three impulses, which expressed themselves as freedom, equality and fraternity, could be reconciled with each other in real life. And some extraordinarily astute ideas emerged in the course of the nineteenth century with regard to this. For example, people of great acumen have said: freedom entails that man creates out of his individuality, out of his personality, letting everything that is peculiar to him come to light; he cannot be completely equal to another. Equality contradicts freedom. And on the other hand, fraternity cannot easily be reconciled with mere equality, and so on.

What is the basis for this? The basis is that the true meaning of these three impulses of freedom, equality and fraternity can only come to light not in a one-sided centralized social organism, but only in a healthy threefold social organism. This healthy threefold social organism will have its three relatively independent limbs. That which lives itself out in the realm of spiritual life will be built on freedom, on the individual freedom initiative of human talent and ability. There freedom will be able to be realized, as in the natural organism, in the head, thus in the nervous-sense system, one thing is realized, in another system another. In the actual political state member of the healthy social organism, the equality of all people as human beings will be realized. And in the third link, in the economic link of the healthy social organism, fraternity will be realized. Even if this social organism is constantly being recreated from day to day as a threefold entity, it will be able to live because this threefoldness will then live as a further unity in freedom, equality and fraternity.

All that I have said shows perhaps one thing, dear attendees; it shows that many people today have ideas about the social problem that differ greatly from a real understanding of the social problem through the modern necessity of life. I believe there is still little understanding of this social question, as I have characterized it to you today, which is taken from life itself. For this requires not only that one admits that this or that aspect of the situation must be changed, but that many things in human thinking itself must be changed. If the social movement is to be healthy, one must be willing not only to change things, but also to rethink and relearn. And the facts of the present speak loudly, and for some people they are so shocking that one must indeed relearn. How could we not have to relearn, after it has been shown that what we thought we had learned over decades, over more than half a century, proves to be so unfruitful when we consider history with regard to the social movement, when we consider the facts themselves! Do not the facts show that they demand something completely different from what we have prepared for? Do not these facts demand that we change?

Now, dear ones, anyone who points to this fact will say that it would be necessary for the gap that has opened up between the classes, and about which there is hardly any understanding today, to close; but one thing is necessary: that souls open up, that hearts open and seek such understanding.

But this understanding must go so far as to want to penetrate into the essence of a healthy social organism, to want to penetrate into the essence of such a feeling that tells the human being: I do not place myself worthily in the social organism if I do not empathize with what happens in the threefold social organism.

If we then look at how very different what arises from the observation of real life as an attempt to solve the social question is from what many people imagine such attempts to be, if we look at this correctly, we will, when we realize on the other hand what the loud-speaking facts are like, that is, if he turns his attention to the loud-speaking facts, he will say to himself: Indeed, effort is necessary today, indeed, overcoming the mental discomfort of some feelings and inability to will is necessary today if one wants to gain a position corresponding to a fact in the social life of this present. But perhaps such a person will also be able to think something else: the solution, the real solution to the social question, cannot be found by excluding the human spirit, by excluding the human soul. It must be found not only in the economic life that takes place from person to person, but also in the harmony of souls. If it is not understood in time that such harmony of souls, such socialization of souls, must be striven for through a greater deepening than that sought so far, then it could be, dearest present, that through the misjudgment of the most important facts, it will happen that not social understanding, not social feeling, but the wildest instincts of humanity will assert themselves. And we see a current of development in the present already on this path. This current of development could stand admonishingly before man in spirit and say to him: Today, everyone is basically obliged to take a look at the key points of the social question, because it depends on each individual whether the social organism will become viable as soon as possible or not. And in this field one can only do right if one loses no time in seeking understanding of that which alone can bring healing, that alone can bring a way out of and into chaos. One must feel this: Today, in relation to the social question, different things are necessary for each individual than humanity imagined was necessary just a short time ago. From this insight into the necessity that exists, may everyone sufficiently deepen their thinking and feeling with regard to social life, otherwise wild instincts could take the place of possibilities for understanding, and then, dear attendees, it would be too late.

During the course of this evening's discussion, questions were asked and various concerns were raised, for example:

Elisabeth Vreede reads out a postcard from Holland calling for the immediate introduction of a council system.

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to say something in connection with what has just been said. I will start from a book by Professor Varga about the proletarian movement in Hungary. Professor Varga was People's Commissar for Economic Affairs during the Hungarian Council Republic. He was one of the leaders of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, along with a few other people, who fled and are now interned at Karlstein. He has now written an extremely interesting book, 'The Economic Problems of the Proletarian Dictatorship', in which he explains how he and his colleagues intended to implement this Soviet Republic in Hungary. In between, he intersperses remarks about the experiences gained during the short period of the existence of the soviet republic in Hungary. Now this whole treatise is very interesting because the Hungarian soviet republic was, so to speak, a significant experiment that was so instructive because the consequences can be better surveyed in the relatively small territory of Hungary than in the vast territory of Russia.

The first thing that is remarkable about this book is that it is an eminently professorial work, something quite alien to real life. One gets the distinct feeling that here is someone who has revolutionized an entire country but who has never looked into the real forces of the national economy. Professor Varga stands squarely on the ground of Lenin and Trotsky; only Varga and his colleagues in Hungary had to deal with a smaller area than Lenin and Trotsky in Russia. And that is why many things came to light in Hungary that will only come to light in Russia at a later time. Naturally, Professor Varga does not attribute the failure of the Hungarian experiment to the inherent impossibility of this entire abstract striving and working, but claims that the cause of the failure was that it could not be carried through to the end because the Romanian military power attacked from the flank.

Take one of the main points that we are confronted with. This example is particularly valuable because we are not dealing here with just any Marxist theorist, but with a man who has organized an entire country according to his abstractions, who could do whatever he wanted. He wanted to be a practitioner, and one must ask: could he be one? Professor Varga was indeed obliged to make arrangements that would now bring the Hungarian economy to its feet in a social-democratic sense. He had to emphasize that the real standard-bearers of his reforms are the urban industrial workers, who naturally have the improvement of their living conditions as their driving motive. But now he shows that initially nothing else can come of it than that these actual standard-bearers must experience a significant deterioration in their living conditions during the initial period in which the council republic is introduced; the only ones who gain are the farmers in the countryside. So what does Professor Varga conclude from this? He concludes that the industrial proletariat, those who actually had the only interest in such a revolution, will not achieve what they want to achieve in the near future, but that it is the rural peasants who will achieve it. But he thinks that these conditions will improve for the urban industrial proletariat later on – namely, indirectly through the countryside. All that was needed was to educate the urban industrial proletariat to the point where it would realize that it would have to go hungry and live in rags for a while before things got better.

This is a capital mistake, which is the most absolute consequence of current abstract thinking on social issues. The result would not have been that things would have improved through the detour via the countryside, but that the entire industry would have gradually been wiped out. The cities would have gradually been abandoned and everyone would have moved to the countryside; production would eventually have been limited to the mere exploitation of land and soil. All other forms of life would have gradually disappeared, meaning that we would have reverted to certain primitive human conditions. If you think about it, that must be the conclusion from Professor Varga's remarks.

The second interesting thing is what we find in his social structure. Varga is a Leninist, a Trotskyist, a Marxist, so he sees not people, but only categories, in everything that is active in the social organism. He does not see personalities of flesh and blood, but categories. In the existing social organization, he sees the military, the lawyers, the civil servants, and even the proletarians as categories of people. His limitation consists in his wanting to transform the entire existing state into a huge economic cooperative. It is very interesting to see how he deals with the three links of the social organism. He begins by dealing with the second link, the political state. He peels this second link very finely. He lists the individual categories nicely: lawyers, officials, and so on, and declares: all of them will be abolished. - So actually the whole political state will be abolished. And the spiritual life? Professor Varga actually only knows economic life. He says: the intellectual life consists of teachers. He takes comfort from the fact that they generally fall into line, and that for economic reasons, while the first category, the category of lawyers and civil servants, does not fall into line with the new regime and must therefore do proletarian work. Now, in the threefolding movement, we have also found that teachers always ask: Yes, but who pays us? Varga finds that most of them submit and merge with economic life. The others are sent away. So it is not about the intellectual life at all, but about the economic life of the teachers; only the economic life remains.

It is interesting to see how the establishment of the council republic was taken in hand with a certain iron energy. The companies were simply expropriated; however, some consideration was given to foreign countries. That is, the companies were taken over with all their assets and liabilities, and this made it possible to treat the foreign owners of companies differently from the domestic ones. The aim was to municipalize certain companies and to nationalize others. And now something interesting happens. The election of works councils was decreed. As a rule, it was decreed that a works council should be elected from the proletarian workforce. These works councils were such that they did not understand anything. And then Professor Varga says: The “success” was that the people who had advanced from manual labor to become works council members just sat around all day doing nothing, and the actual misery remained. He thinks that things have gradually improved. He does not accept that the misery has grown ever greater and greater; nor does it follow from his experiences that it has diminished. So now the works councils were at the head of the companies, and even in the beginning there was a great deal of corruption among them. Now he says: corruption was also present earlier – it was the same with the bourgeoisie – only now there are more people who can steal, and that is why the figures have naturally increased. According to Professor Varga, however, it would have improved later if there had been more agitation. He also says: in order to manage the centralized economic life, there had to be production commissioners. So they first elected works councils from within the factories – not the kind we wanted in Stuttgart and Württemberg, who should have worked hard to familiarize themselves with economic life and then had to form a works council. But that did not suit people like Varga. They simply voted – what else could they do if they wanted to regulate things from a utopia? The production commissioners were pulled out of the works councils. They were involved in general orders, in the shutdown of factories, in the concentration of branches of industry, and so on, but also in the discipline of the workers. These production commissioners were the actual central officials in economic life.

Now, it is interesting: Professor Varga's entire book is a Marxist thicket of the most abstract kind from beginning to end. He describes the reforms that are to become reality with such matter-of-factness that it makes the same impression as if, for example, a person like Lenin were describing them. And Varga knows how to explain these principles in a way that is plausible for most minds today. Anyone who is familiar with these things knows that the most terrible utopian spirit reigns precisely where people want to put things into practice today. You can't think of anything more utopian than what was supposed to be done in Hungary. Wherever Varga talks about his experiences, he talks about something bad and evil. In council-ruled Hungary, corruption, worker revolts, and so on went hand in hand with such confusion that people said it was good for the people that the Romanians came, because otherwise they would have made fools of themselves even more miserably. It would have been a terrible destruction from within.

The entire 140-page book is a Marxist thicket that should have been practical. With such a thicket, they wanted to set up an entire country as an economic cooperative. But in the middle of a few pages, you suddenly find a sentence that completely falls out of the rest of the narrative and that makes you feel like it's not the same Varga at all, but something foreign. For example, he talks about the great usefulness of the production commissioners and remarks in a parenthesis: ... if the right personalities are in their place. — It is the same with the parenthesis that it is not possible at all to get along with these institutions until “the greedy, selfish ideology of these people” has changed. The Marxists always claim that ideology arises from the economic relations of production. So, if Varga had any kind of healthy, consistent thinking, he would have to say to himself: We Marxists have been claiming for more than seventy years that ideology must arise out of the relations of production, that ideology must arise as a superstructure like smoke that develops out of it. So when we set up our big economic house in Hungary, then the ideology must arise from it, which, after all, has no other meaning than to rise like smoke from economic life. — But Varga does not say that; rather, everywhere he talks about the basis of his institutions, it comes to light — even if only in subordinate clauses: it will only get better when people's greedy ideology has changed. That is, he waits for the time when people will have a way of thinking that is not geared towards the greedy and the selfish; he waits for the transformation of the greedy ideology into a selfless one. Now, that cannot follow directly from the economic mode of production, because he admits that it leads everywhere to the opposite. So he simply waits for this transformation to come of its own accord. One sees: Where it was essential to base the new structure on a change of direction in spirit, where it was essential to come across the concrete spiritual, Varga has nothing but a small subordinate clause, which, however, was meaningless for the whole development in Hungary. That is precisely the sad thing.

Today, in the broadest sense, we are faced with the opinion that one comes from the abstract to the concrete. This emerges from the appeal that Miss Vreede just read, which probably comes from the Netherlands. It proposes some sort of council, but it does not contain the necessary subordinate clause that something will only come of it if the appropriate personalities are in the appropriate places as councils. That is what matters: that you approach the matter from the concrete end. You can talk as much as you like, but none of it will help; the only thing that helps is to bring spirit and soul into the personalities. We have been completely squeezed out, no longer have any idea that it is important to bring strength, spirit and soul into the personalities. That is what the threefold social order is striving for.

I have related this about the man in Hungary so that you can see the spirit in which the things that are created today arise and the reasons why they must break down. Everything that appears like this book and then has to make such a strange confession shows us that it cannot be done with the old spirit. This is what can be seen everywhere today: You can claim anything in theory, but when someone like Professor Varga, who was able to set up something new, sets up something according to his ideas – then you can see how it works.

I say this so that you can see how nonsensical such demands are, like the ones on this correspondence card that Miss Vreede just read.