The Rudolf Steiner Archive

On this occasion I should like to be allowed to include certain personal references among matters of objective history, because what must be added to the subject dealt with in the lecture yesterday is necessary for our study today and after careful consideration I believe it is right to include more details.

I want, first of all, to speak of a particular experience connected with our Movement. You know that outwardly we began by linking ourselves—but outwardly only—with the Theosophical Society and that we founded the so-called German Section of that Society in the autumn of 1902, in Berlin. In the course of the year 1904 we were visited in various towns of Germany by prominent members of the Theosophical Society, and the episode from which I want to start occurred during one of these visits. The first edition of my book Theosophy had just been published—in the spring of 1904—and the periodical Lucifer-Gnosis was appearing. In that periodical I had published articles dealing with the problem of Atlantis and the character of the Atlantean epoch. These articles were afterwards published as a separate volume entitled Unsere atlantischen Vorfahren (Our Atlantean Forefathers).¹ The articles contained a number of communications about the Atlantean world and the earlier, so-called Lemurian epoch. Several articles of this kind had therefore already appeared, and just at the time when the members of the Theosophical Society were visiting us a number of the periodical containing important communications was ready, and had been sent to subscribers. A member highly respected in the Theosophical Society had read these articles dealing with Atlantis, and asked me a question. And it is this question which I want to mention as a noteworthy experience in connection with what was said in the lecture yesterday.

This member of the Theosophical Society, who at the time of its founding by Blavatsky had taken part in most vital proceedings, a member, therefore, who had shared to the full in the activities of the Society, put the question: “By what means was this information about the world of Atlantis obtained?”—The question was very significant because until then this member was acquainted only with the methods by which such information was obtained in the Theosophical Society, namely, by means of a certain kind of mediumistic investigation. Information already published in the Theosophical Society at that time was based upon investigations connected in a certain respect with mediumship. That is to say, someone was put into a kind of mediumistic state—it could not be called a trance but was a mediumistic state—and conditions were established which made it possible for the person, although not in the state of ordinary consciousness, to communicate certain information; about matters beyond the reach of ordinary consciousness. That is how the communications had been made at that time and the member of the Theosophical Society in question who thought that information about prehistoric events could be gained only in this way, enquired what personality we had among us whom we could use as a medium for such investigations.

As I had naturally refused to adopt this method of research and had insisted from the outset upon strictly individual investigation, and as what I had discovered at that time was the result entirely of my own, personal research, the questioner did not understand me at all, did not understand that it was quite a different matter from anything that had been done hitherto in the Theosophical Society. The path I had appointed for myself, however, was this: To reject all earlier ways of investigation and—admittedly by means of super-sensible perception—to investigate by making use only of what can be revealed to the one who is himself the investigator.

In accordance with the position I have to take in the spiritual Movement, no other course is possible for me than to carry into strict effect those methods of investigation which are suitable for the modern world and for modern humanity. There is a very significant difference, you see, between the methods of investigation practised in Spiritual Science and those that were practised in the Theosophical Society. All communications received by that Society from the spiritual world—including for example, those given in Scott-Elliot's book on Atlantis—came entirely in the way described, because that alone was considered authoritative and objective. In this connection, the introduction of our spiritual-scientific direction of work was, from the very beginning something entirely new in the Theosophical Society. It took thorough account of modern scientific methods which needed to be elaborated and developed to make ascent to the spiritual realms possible.

This discussion was significant. It took place in the year 1904, and showed how great the difference was between what is pursued in Spiritual Science and what was being pursued by the rest of the Theosophical Society; it showed that what we have in Spiritual Science was unknown in the Theosophical Society at that time and that the Theosophical Society was continuing the methods which had been adopted as a compromise between the exotericists and the esotericists. Such was the inevitable result of the developments I described in the lecture yesterday. I said that seership gradually died away and that there remained only a few isolated seers in whom mediumistic states could be induced and from whom some information might be obtained. In this way, “Occult Orders”, as they were called, came into being, Orders in which there were, it is true, many who had been initiated, but no seers. Among the prevailing materialism these Orders were faced with the necessity of having to cultivate and elaborate methods which had long been in vogue, and instruments for research had to be sought among persons in whom mediumistic faculties—that is to say, atavistic clairvoyance—could still be developed and produce some result. In these circles there were far-reaching teachings and, in addition, symbols. Those, however, who wished to engage in actual research were obliged to rely on the help of persons possessed of atavistic clairvoyance. These methods were then continued in a certain way in the Theosophical Society, and the compromise of which I spoke yesterday really amounted to nothing else than that in the Lodges and Orders experiments were made whereby spiritual influences might be projected into the world. The desire was to demonstrate that influences from the spiritual world are exercised upon man.

Procedures adopted in esoteric schools had therefore been brought into action. This attempt was a fiasco, for whereas it had been expected that through the mediums genuine spiritual laws prevailing in the surrounding world would be brought to light, the only result was that nearly all the mediums fell into the error of supposing that everything emanated from the dead, and they embellished it into communications alleged to have been made to them by the dead. This led to a very definite consequence.—If the older members among you will think back to the earliest period of the Theosophical Society and study the literature produced under its aegis, you will find that the astral world—that is to say, the life immediately after death—was described in books by Mrs. Besant which merely reproduced what is contained in Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine or was to be read in books by Leadbeater. This was also the origin of everything that was given out concerning man's life between death and a new birth.

If you compare what is said in my book Theosophy about the Soul-world and the Spirit-world—to begin with, people were always trying to refute it but I think that today a sufficient number are able to think objectively on the subject—you will find very considerable differences, precisely because in regard to these domains too the methods of investigation were different. For all the methods of research employed in the Theosophical Society, even including those used for investigating the life of the dead, originated from the procedures of which I have spoken.

So you see, what the Theosophical Society had to offer the world to begin with was in a certain respect a continuation of the attempt made by the occultists previously. In what other respect this was not the case we shall hear in a moment. Taken as a whole, however, it was a continuation of the attempt which, since the middle of the nineteenth century, had been the outcome of the compromise made between the exotericists and the esotericists, except that later on things were made rather more esoteric by the Theosophical Society. Whereas the previous attempt had been to present the mediums to the world, the members of the Theosophical Society preferred to work in their inner circle only and to give out merely the results. That was an important difference, for there people were going back to a method of investigation established as a universal custom by the various Orders before the middle of the nineteenth century. I bring this forward because I must sharply emphasise the fact that with the advent of our Spiritual Science an entirely new method, one which takes full account of the work and attitude of modern science, was introduced into the occult Movement.

Now as I told you, the compromise reached between the exotericists and the esotericists to convince the materialistic world through mediums of all types that a spiritual world exists, had been a fiasco, a fiasco inasmuch as the mediums always spoke of a world which under the existing conditions simply could not be accessible to them, namely, the world of the dead. The mediums spoke of inspirations alleged to have been received from a world in which the dead are living. The situation was that the attempt made by the exotericists and the esotericists had not achieved the result they had really desired.

How had such a state of affairs come about? What was the outcome of the remarkable attempt that had been made as a result of the compromise? The outcome was that initiates of a certain kind had wrested the power from the hands of those who had made the compromise. The initiates of the extreme left-wing had taken possession of the proceedings which had been countenanced in the way described. They acquired great influence, because what was obtained through the mediums did not spring from the realm of the dead at all, but from the realm of the living—from initiates who had put themselves either in distant or close rapport with the mediums. Because everything was brought about through these initiates and through the mediums, it was coloured by the theories of those who wished to get the mediums under their control. The desire of those among the exotericists and esotericists who had made the compromise was to bring home to men that there is indeed a spiritual world. That is what they wanted to impress. But when those who thought themselves capable of holding the guiding reins let them slip, the occultists of the extreme left-wing took possession of them and endeavoured by means of the mediums—if I may use this tautology—to communicate their theories and their views to the world.

For those who had made the compromise for the good of humanity, the position was disastrous, because they felt more and more strongly that false teachings about the super-sensible were being brought into the world.—Such was the position in the development of occultism in the forties, fifties and even in the sixties of the nineteenth century.

As long as deliberation still continued in the circles of honest occultists, the situation was sinister. For the further the occultists inclined to the left, the less were they concerned to promote that which alone is justifiable, namely, the universal-human. In occultism a man belongs to the “left” when he tries to achieve some ultimate goal with the help of what he knows in the way of occult teaching. A man belongs to the “right” in occultism when he desires that goal purely for its own sake. The middle party were in favour of making exoteric the esoteric knowledge needed in our time to promote the interests of humanity universal. But those who belong to the extreme “left” are those who combine special aims of their own with what they promulgate as occult teaching. A man is on the “left” to the extent to which he pursues special aims, leads people to the spiritual world, gives them all kinds of demonstrations of it, and instils into them in an illicit way, promptings that simply help to bring these special aims to fulfilment. The leading circle of modern initiates was faced with this situation. It was realised that the control had fallen into the hands of people who were pursuing their own special aims.—Such was the state of affairs confronting the esotericists and the exotericists who had made the compromise referred to.

Then it was “heard”—the expression may not be quite exact but absolutely exact words cannot be found because one is dependent on external language and intercourse among occultists is different from anything that external language is capable of describing—it was “heard” that an event of importance for the further continuation of spiritual development on the Earth must be at hand. I can describe this event only in the following way.—In the research carried on by the individual Orders, they had preferred for a long time to make less use of female mediums. In the strict Orders, where it was desired to take the right standpoint, no female mediums were ever used for obtaining revelations from the spiritual worlds.

Now the female organism is adapted by nature to preserve atavistic clairvoyance longer than the male organism. Whereas male mediums were becoming almost unknown, female mediums were still to be found and a great number were used while the compromise still held. But now there came into the occultists' field of observation a personality who possessed mediumistic faculties in the very highest degree. This was Madame H. P. Blavatsky, a personality very specially adapted through certain subconscious parts of her organism to draw a great deal, a very great deal, from the spiritual world. And now think of what possibilities this opened up for the world! At one of the most crucial points in the development of occultism, a personality appeared who through the peculiar nature of her organism was able to draw many, many things from the spiritual world by means of her subconscious faculties.

An occultist who at that time was alert to the signs of the times could not but say to himself: Now, at the right moment, a personality has appeared who through her peculiar organic constitution can produce the very strongest evidence of ancient, traditional teaching existing among us in the form of symbols only. It was emphatically the case that here was a personality who simply because of her organic make-up afforded the possibility of again demonstrating many things which for a long time had been known only through tradition. This was the fact confronting the occultists just after the fiasco which had led to a veritable impasse. Let us be quite clear on the point: Blavatsky was regarded as a personality from whom, as out of an electrically-charged Leyden jar, the electric sparks—occult truths—could be produced.

It would lead too far if I were to tell you of all the intermediate links, but certain matters of importance must be mentioned. A really crucial moment had arrived which I can indicate in the following way; although expressed somewhat symbolically, it is in strict accordance with the facts.—The occultists of the right-wing, who in conjunction with the middle party had agreed to the compromise, could say to themselves: It may well be that something very significant can be forthcoming from this personality. But those belonging to the left-wing could also say with assurance: It is possible to achieve something extremely effective in the world with the help of this personality!—And now a veritable battle was waged around her, on the one side with the honest purpose of having much of what the initiates knew, substantiated; on the other side, for the sake of far-reaching, special aims.

I have often referred to the early periods in the life of H. P. Blavatsky, and have shown that, to begin with, attempts were made to get a great deal of knowledge from her. But in a comparatively short time the situation rapidly changed, owing to the fact that she soon came into the sphere of those who belonged, as it were, to the left. And although H. P. Blavatsky was very well aware of what she herself was able to see—for she was especially significant in that she was not simply a passive medium, but had a colossal memory for everything that revealed itself to her from the higher worlds—nevertheless she was inevitably under the influence of certain personalities when she wanted to evoke manifestations from the spiritual world. And so she always made reference to what ought really to have been left aside—she always referred to the “Mahatmas”. They may be there in the background but this is not a factor when it is a question of furthering the interests of humanity.

And so it was not long before H. P. Blavatsky was having to face a decision. A hint came to her from a quarter belonging to the side of the left that she was a personality of key importance. She knew very well what it was that she saw, but she was not aware of how significant she was as a personality. This was first disclosed to her by the left-wing. But she was fundamentally honest by nature and after this hint had been given her from a quarter of which, at the beginning, she could hardly have approved, because of her fundamental honesty, she tried on her side to reach a kind of compromise with an occult Brotherhood in Europe. Something very fine might have resulted from this, because through her great gift of mediumship she would have been able to furnish confirmations of really phenomenal importance in connection with what was known to the initiates from theories and symbolism. But she was not only thoroughly honest, she was also what is called in German a “Frechdachs”—a “cheeky creature”. And that she certainly was! She had in her nature a certain trait that is particularly common in those inclined to mediumship, namely, a lack of consistency in external behaviour. Thus there were moments when she could be very audacious and in one of these fits of audacity she imposed on the occult Brotherhood which had decided to make the experiment with her, terms which could not be fulfilled. But as she knew that a great deal could be achieved through her instrumentality, she decided to take up the matter with other Brotherhoods. And so she approached an American Brotherhood. This American Brotherhood was one where the majority had always wavered between the right and the left, but at all events had the prospect of discovering things of tremendous significance concerning the spiritual worlds.

Now this was the period when intense interest was being taken in H. P. Blavatsky by other Brothers of the left. Already at that time these left-wing Brothers had their own special interests. At the moment I do not propose to speak about these interests. If it were necessary, I could do so at some future time. For the present it is enough to say that they were Brothers who had their special interests, above all, interests of a strongly political character; they envisaged the possibility of achieving something of a political nature in America by means of persons who had first been put through an occult preparation. The consequence was that at a moment when H. P. Blavatsky had already acquired an untold amount of occult knowledge through having worked with the American Lodge, she had to be expelled from it, because it was discovered that there was something political in the background. So things couldn't continue.

The situation was now extremely difficult, tremendously difficult. For what had been undertaken in order to call the world's attention to the existence of a spiritual world, had in a certain respect to be withdrawn by the serious occultists because it had been a fiasco. It was necessary to show that no reliance could be placed on what was being presented by Spiritualism, in spite of the fact that it had many adherents. It was only materialistic, it was sheer dilettantism. The only scholarly persons who concerned themselves with it were those who wanted to get information in an external, materialistic way about a spiritual world. In addition, H. P. Blavatsky had made it clear to the American Lodge on her departure that she had no intention whatever of withholding from the world what she knew. And she knew a great deal, for she was able to remember afterwards what had been conveyed through her. She had any amount of audacity!

Good advice is costly, as the saying goes. What was to be done? And now something happened to which I have referred on various occasions, for parts of what I am saying today in this connection I have said in other places. Something that is called in occultism “Occult imprisonment” was brought about.² H. P. Blavatsky was put into occult imprisonment. Through acts of a kind that can be performed only by certain Brothers—and are performed, moreover, only by Brotherhoods who allow themselves to engage in illicit arts—through certain acts and machinations they succeeded in compelling H. P. Blavatsky to live for a time in a world in which all her occult knowledge was driven inwards. Think of it in this way.—The occult knowledge was in her aura; as the result of certain processes that were set in operation, it came about that for a long time everything in this aura was thrown back into her soul. That is to say, all the occult knowledge she possessed was to be imprisoned; she was to be isolated as far as the outer world and her occultism were concerned.

This happened at the time when H. P. Blavatsky might have become really dangerous through the spreading of teachings which are among the most interesting of all within the horizon of the Occult Movement. Certain Indian occultists now came to know of the affair, occultists who on their part tended strongly towards the left, and whose prime interest it was to turn the occultism which could be given to the world through H. P. Blavatsky in a direction where it could influence the world in line with their special aims. Through the efforts of these Indian occultists who were versed in the appropriate practices, she was released from this imprisonment within her aura; she was free once again and could now use her spiritual faculties in the right way.

From this you can get an idea of what had taken place in this soul, and of what combination of factors all that came into the world through H. P. Blavatsky, was composed. But because certain Indian occultists had gained the merit of freeing her from her imprisonment, they had her in their power in a certain respect. And there was simply no possibility of preventing them from using her to send out into the world that part of occultism which suited their purposes. And so something very remarkable was “arranged”—if I may use a clumsy word. What was arranged can be expressed approximately as follows.—The Indian occultists wanted to assert their own special aims in opposition to those of the others, and for this purpose they made use of H. P. Blavatsky. She was given instructions to place herself under a certain influence, for in her case the mediumistic state had always to be induced from outside—and this also made it possible to bring all kinds of things into the world through her.

About this time she came to be associated with a person who from the beginning had really no directly theosophical interests but a splendid talent for organisation, namely, Colonel Olcott. I cannot say for certain, but I surmise that there had already been some kind of association at the time when Blavatsky belonged to the American Lodge. Then, under the mask, as it were, of an earlier individuality, there appeared in the field of Blavatsky's spiritual vision a personality who was essentially the vehicle of what it was desired from India to launch into the world. Some of you may know that in his book People from the Other World, Colonel Olcott has written a great deal about this individuality who now appeared in H. P. B.'s field of vision under the mask of an earlier individuality designated as Mahatma Kut-Humi. You know, perhaps, that Colonel Olcott has written a very great deal about this Mahatma Kut-Humi, among other things that in the year 1874 this Mahatma Kut-Humi had declared what individuality was living in him. He had indicated that this individuality was John King by name, a powerful sea-pirate of the seventeenth century. This is to be read in Olcott's book People from the Other World.

In the Mahatma Kut-Humi, therefore, we have to do with the spirit of a bold sea-pirate of the seventeenth century who then, in the nineteenth century, was involved in significant manifestations made with the help of H. P. Blavatsky and others too. He brought tea-cups from some distance away, he let all kinds of records be produced from the coffin of H. P. B.'s father,³ and so forth. From Colonel Olcott's account, therefore, it must be assumed that these were deeds of the bold pirate of the seventeenth century.

Now Colonel Olcott speaks in a remarkable way about this John King. He says that perhaps here one had to do, not with the spirit of this pirate but possibly with the creation of an Order which, while depending for its results upon unseen agents, has its existence among physical men. According to this account, Kut-Humi might have been a member of an Order which engaged in practices such as I have described and the results of which were to be communicated to the world through H. P. Blavatsky but bound up with all kinds of special interests. These were that a specifically Indian teaching should be spread in the world.

This was approximately the situation in the seventies of the nineteenth century. We therefore have evidence of very significant happenings which must be seen in a single framework when we are considering the whole course of events in the Occult Movement. It was this same John King who, by means of “precipitation”, produced Sinnett's books, the first one, Letters about the Occult World and, especially, Esoteric Buddhism.

This book Esoteric Buddhism came into my hands very shortly after publication—a few weeks in fact—and I could see from it that efforts were being made, especially from a certain quarter, to give an entirely materialistic form to the spiritual teachings. If you were to study Esoteric Buddhism with the insight you have acquired in the course of time, you would be astonished at the materialistic forms in which facts are there presented. It is materialism in its very worst forms. The spiritual world is presented in an entirely materialistic way. No one who gets hold of this book can shake himself free from materialism. The subject-matter is very subtle but in Sinnett's book one cannot get away from materialism, however lofty the heights to which it purports to carry one. And so those who were now H. P. B.'s spiritual “bread-givers”—forgive the materialistic analogy—not only had special aims connected with Indian interests, but they also made trenchant concessions to the materialistic spirit of the age. And the influence which Sinnett's book had upon very large numbers of people shows how correctly they had speculated.⁴ I have met scientists who were delighted with this book because everything fitted in with their stock-intrade and yet they were able to conceive of the existence of a spiritual world. The book satisfied all the demands of materialism and yet made it possible to meet the need for a spiritual world and to acknowledge its existence.

Now you know that in the further development of these happenings, H. P. Blavatsky wrote The Secret Doctrine in the eighties of the nineteenth century, and in 1891 she died. The Secret Doctrine is written in the same style as Esoteric Buddhism, except that it puts right certain gross errors which any occultist could at once have corrected. I have often spoken about the peculiar features of Blavatsky's book and need not go into the matter again now. Then, on the basis of what had come about in this way, the Theosophical Society was founded and, fundamentally speaking, retained its Indian trend. Although no longer with the intensity that had prevailed under the influence of John King, the Indian trend persisted. What I have now described to you was, as it were, a new path which made great concessions to the materialism of the age, but was nevertheless intended to show humanity that a spiritual world as well as the outer, material world must be taken into account.

Many details would have to be added to what I have now said, but time is too short. I will go on at once to show you how our spiritual-scientific Movement took its place in the Movement which was already in existence.

You know that we founded the German Section of the Theosophical Society in October, 1902. In the winters of both 1900 and 1901 I had already given lectures in Berlin which may be called “theosophical” lectures, for they were held in the circle and at the invitation of the Berlin Theosophists. The first lectures were those which ultimately became the book entitled, Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens (translated into English with the title, Mysticism and Modern Thought). These lectures were given to a circle of Members of the Theosophical Society, of which I myself was not then a member. It must be borne in mind at the outset that one had to do with teaching that was already widespread and had led numbers of people to turn their minds to the spiritual world. Thus all over the world there were people who to a certain extent were prepared and who wanted to know something about the spiritual world. Of the things I have told you today they knew nothing, had not the slightest inkling of them. But they had a genuine longing for the spiritual world, and for that reason had attached themselves to the Movement in which this longing could be satisfied. And so in this Movement there were to be found persons whose hearts were longing for knowledge of the spiritual world.

You know that in a grotesque and ludicrous way I was taxed with having made a sudden turn-about from an entirely different world-view which had been presented in my book Welt- and Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert.⁵ The first part had appeared in February 1900, and the second part in the following October. I was taxed with having suddenly changed sides and having gone over to Theosophy. Now I have often told you that not only had Sinnett's book, for example, come into my hands immediately after its publication, but that I had also had close associations with the young Theosophical Society in Vienna. It is right that you should understand what the circumstances were at the time, and I want also to give you a very brief; objective view of the antecedents of the German Section. There were people in the Theosophical Society who longed to know of the spiritual world, and I had given lectures in their circle. These were the lectures on Mysticism and the Mystics which I gave in a small room in the house of Count Brockdorff. At that time I was not myself a member. The preface to the printed volume containing these lectures is dated September 1901. In the summer of 1901 I had collected the lectures given the previous winter, into the book published in September 1901 under the title Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichin Geistlebens.⁶

I will read the first lines of the preface to this book:

“What is stated in this work formed the content of lectures given by me last winter in the Theosophical Library in Berlin. I was invited by Count and Countess Brockdorff to speak on mysticism to an audience seriously interested in the subject. Ten years earlier I should not have ventured to comply with such a request. Not that the world of ideas which I am now bringing to expression was not already within me. This world of ideas is presented in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, published by Emil Felber, Berlin, 1894.—But to express this world of ideas as I am doing today and so to make it the basis of study as in this present book, requires something quite different from a mere firm conviction of its intellectual truth. It requires intimate communion with this world of ideas such as can be achieved only after many years. Only now, after this intimate communion has been vouchsafed to me, do I venture to speak in the way that will be apparent in this book.”

Now you can conceive why I had allowed the contents of lectures given in very different circles to find a place in an occult movement. In the first edition of the book Welt-and Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, the following is contained in the chapter about Schelling I quote from the first edition, which was dedicated to Ernst Haeckel and was published in February, 1900. I will read a few passages from the book of which people have said that it sprang from a world-view quite different from that presented in the book on Mysticism.—

“Now there are two possible ways of describing a being which is at the same time Spirit and Nature. The one is: I exhibit the laws of nature which are active in Reality. Or, I show how the spirit acts in order to come to these natural laws. One and the same thing guides me in both cases. The one shows me conformity to law as it is active in nature; the other shows me what the spirit does in order to represent to itself this same conformity to law. In the one case I pursue natural science, in the other spiritual science. How these two are connected, Schelling describes in an interesting way. He says: ‘The necessary tendency of all natural science is to ascend from nature to intelligence. This and nothing else underlies the endeavour to bring theory into natural phenomena. The highest perfection of natural science would be the complete spiritualisation of all natural laws into laws of observation and thought. Phenomena (the material) must completely vanish, and laws alone (the formal )remain. Hence it happens that the more conformity to law is brought into nature herself the more the veils vanish, phenomena themselves become more spiritual and finally disappear altogether. Optical phenomena are nothing more than a geometry whose lines are drawn by light, and the light itself is already an ambiguous materiality. In the phenomena of magnetism all traces of matter are lost, and in those of gravity, which even the natural scientist is only able to accept as a direct spiritual operation—an effect at a distance—nothing remains but its laws, whose transactions are in the vastness of the mechanism of the celestial movements. The perfect theory of nature would be that by virtue of which nature as a whole is resolved into an intelligence. The lifeless and unconscious products of nature are only nature's abortive attempts to reflect herself; so-called lifeless nature is, however, an unripe intelligence, hence in its phenomena the intelligent character still peeps through, but without consciousness. Nature only reaches her highest aim—to become herself wholly object—in her highest and final reflection, which is none other than Man, or more generally, what we call Reason, through which nature first completely returns into herself, and by which it becomes manifest that she, nature, is originally identical with what is known in us as intelligence and consciousness.’ ”

And referring further to Schelling, I say a little later:

“To Schelling, with his progressive thought, the study of the world was the study of God, or Theosophy. He already stood completely on this ground when, in 1809, he brought out his Philosophic Enquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom and allied Matters. All questions concerning conceptions of the world now come to him in a new light. If all things are divine, how comes it that there is evil in the world, since God can only be perfect Goodness? If the soul of man is in God, how comes it that she follows her own self-seeking interests? And if it is God who acts in me, how can I, who therefore in no wise act as an independent being, yet be called free?”

This view of the world is not put aside.—And I say further:

“With such views, Schelling proved himself to be the boldest, most courageous of those philosophers who allowed themselves to be stimulated by Kant into adopting an idealistic view of the world. Under the influence of this stimulus, man has relinquished philosophising about things lying beyond what the human senses alone and the thought concerning such observations, utter. Men try to rest content with what lies within the field of observation and thought. But whereas Kant drew from this the inevitable conclusion that man can know nothing of things ‘beyond’, his successors declared: As observation and thought indicate nothing divine in that ‘beyond’, they are themselves the divine. Among those who declared this, Schelling was the most forceful. Fichte gathered everything into selfhood; Schelling extended selfhood over everything. He did not, like Fichte, wish to show that selfhood is everything, but, on the contrary, that everything is selfhood. And Schelling had the courage to declare not only the ego's content of ideas to be divine, but the whole human spirit-personality. He not only made the human Reason divine, but the content of human life a divine, personal entity. One calls an explanation of the world Anthropomorphism which, starting from man, imagines that underlying the whole course of the world there is a being who guides that course as man guides his own actions. Those, too, who postulate a general cosmic Intelligence as the basis of events, they too explain the world in the anthropomorphic sense. For this cosmic Intelligence is none other than the human Reason which has been made general and universal. When Goethe says: ‘Man never realises how anthropomorphic he is’, his mind is engrossed with the thought that concealed anthropomorphisms are contained in the simplest utterances we make about nature. When we say, ‘a body rolls further because another has struck it’, we form such an idea from out of our ego. We strike a body and it rolls on. If we see that a ball moves towards another and this other rolls on further, we think of the striking of the second by the first as analogous to the striking effect which we ourselves exercise. Ernst Haeckel spoke the anthropomorphic dogma: ‘divine world-creation and divine world-government resemble the mechanical productions of an ingenious technician or engineer and the State-administration of a wise ruler. The Lord God as Creator, Sustainer and Ruler of the Cosmos is here conceived as thoroughly human in his thinking and acting.’ Schelling had the courage to lead anthropomorphism to its ultimate consequences. He declared man and his whole life-content to be divine; and as not only the rational belongs to this life-content, but also the irrational, he was able also to explain the existence of irrationality in the world. To this end he had to extend the rational views of the reasoning mind by adding another, whose origin does not lie in thinking. This—in his opinion—higher view, he calls ‘Positive Philosophy’. ‘This’, he says, ‘is the really free philosophy; anyone who does not desire it may leave it alone; I leave everyone free; I say only that if anyone desires, for instance, to ascertain the actual course of things, to have a free world-creation and so forth, he can succeed only along the path of a philosophy such as this. If rationalistic philosophy satisfies him and he desires nothing further, let him content himself with that, but he must give up trying to find in rationalistic philosophy what unfortunately it cannot have within it, namely, the real God and the reality underlying the course of things, and a free relationship of God to the world.’ Negative philosophy will ‘remain pre-eminently the philosophy for the schools, Positive philosophy, the philosophy for life. Only through both together will there come the consecration that man may expect from philosophy. It is well known that the Eleusinian Initiates distinguished the Lesser and the Greater Mysteries; the Lesser were a preparation for the Greater. ... Positive philosophy is the necessary consequence of Negative philosophy when this is rightly understood. It may therefore be said: In Negative philosophy the Lesser Mysteries are celebrated, in Positive philosophy the Greater.’

This chapter of my book closed with the passage:

“If the inner life is declared to be divine, it seems inconsistent to confine ourselves to one part of it. Schelling did not fall into this inconsistency. When he said that to explain nature is to create nature, he indicated the direction of his own view of life. If the reflective study of nature is a repetition of her creation, the basic character of his creation must correspond to that of human action; it must be an act of free spiritual activity, not one like a geometrical necessity. But we cannot recognise a free creation through laws of Reason; it must reveal itself through different means.”

I was writing a history of world-views held in the nineteenth century. I could not go any further than this, for what prevailed at the time in advancing evolution were purely dilettante attempts which had no influence upon the progress of philosophical research. Such matters could not form part of this book. But Theosophy, in so far as it is carried into earnest thinking—that you find in the chapter on Schelling.

The second part of the book, which deals, firstly, with Hegel, is dated October, two. It was then that I had just begun to give the lectures referred to, and in September, 1901, the book on Mysticism had already been published. Truly it is not for the sake of emphasising personal matters but in order to help you to make an unprejudiced judgment that I should like to refer you to a criticism of the book Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert which appeared on 15th December, 1901 in the journal of the German Freethinkers' Alliance, The Free-Thinker. Here, after an introduction and a remark to the effect that there had been no readable presentation of the development of thought in the nineteenth century, it continues:

“Especially in the domain of philosophy in which disputes can be carried on in appropriate words, many sins are committed in popular writings. The ‘Watchers of Zion’ and organisations of every kind, with their learned cliques to which unfortunately so many university tutors belong, are much to blame.”

Quotation of the folllowing extract is made only in order to point out the good-will with which the book was received at the time:

“So much the more must we welcome the fact that Dr. Rudolf Steiner, an author well known as a modern thinker and protagonist, has undertaken the task of giving the German public an objective presentation of the spiritual conflicts waged in Germany in the nineteenth century concerning views and conceptions of the world.”

Then, after an extract from the book, a remarkable statement follows and I must read it to you in full. The writer of this review regrets the absence of something in the book, and expresses this in the following words:

“Although the spiritualism of Du Prel and the anchoretic original Christianity of Tolstoi are useless for cultural activity based on the thought of evolution, yet symptomatically they have a value not to be overlooked. The same may be said of Neo-Buddhism (Theosophy), which has developed a terminology of its own, a sort of mystic jargon. A psychology of the modern belief in spirits by a man of the mental calibre of Steiner would be decidedly welcome. The language of his book is easy to comprehend. None of the yard-long passages of the academic philosopher disturbs the enjoyment of the reader.”

This was written in November 1901, shortly after I had begun to give the theosophical lectures in Berlin. It can truly be said that there was then a demand, a public demand, that I should speak about the aim and purpose of Theosophy. It was not a matter of arbitrary choice but, as the saying goes, a clear call of karma.

In the winter of 1900-1901, I gave the lectures on Mysticism, and in that of 1901-1902 those dealing with the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries in rather greater detail. These lectures were subsequently printed in the book Christianity as Mystical Fact⁷ (published in the summer of 1902).

The greater part of Mysticism and Modern Thought was at once translated into English, still before I was a member of the Theosophical Society. I could tell you a great deal of importance, but time does not permit of it now; it may be told another time. One thing, however, I must add.

You see clearly that nowhere in the course of things was there any kind of sudden jump; one thing led to the other quite naturally. At the beginning of the course of lectures on the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries—again held in Count Brockdorff's library—and indeed also at the time of the second series I had some opportunity of hearing about matters which were not so very serious at that time, but which eventually led to things which have been spoken of here as “mystical eccentricities”.

So in the year 1901-1902, I spoke on the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries and these lectures were attended by the present Frau Dr. Steiner. She had also heard the lecture I had given in the Theosophical Society during the winter of 1900 on Gustav Theodor Fechner. It was a special lecture, not forming part of the other series. Frau Dr. Steiner had therefore already been present at some of the lectures I gave during that time. It would be interesting to relate a few details here—but these may be omitted; they merely add a little colour to the incident. If necessary, they can be told on another occasion.

After having been away for a time, Frau Dr. Steiner returned to Berlin from Russia in the autumn, and with an acquaintance of Countess Brockdorff was present at the second course of lectures given in the winter of 1901–1902. After one of the lectures on the Greek Mysteries, this acquaintance came to me and said—well, something of the kind just alluded to! This lady subsequently became a more and more fanatical adherent of the Theosophical Society and was later given a high position in the Order founded to wait for the Second Coming of Christ. At the time of which I am speaking, she came to me after the lecture on the Greek Mysteries and, adopting the air of a really profound initiate of the Theosophical Society about to give evidence of her initiation, said: “You have spoken of Mysteries; but they are still in existence. There are still secret societies. Are you aware of that?”

After a subsequent lecture on the same subject, she came to me again and said: “One sees that you still remember quite well what you were taught when you were in the Greek Mysteries!” That is something which, carried a little farther, borders on the chapter deserving the title of “mystical eccentricities”.

In the autumn of 1901, this lady organised a tea-party. Frau Dr. Steiner always speaks of it as the “chrysanthemum tea” because there were so many of these flowers in the room. The invitation came from this acquaintance of Countess Brockdorff and I often thought that she wanted—well, I don't quite know what it was! The day chosen for the founding of the Theosophical Society was one of special importance for this lady. She may have wanted to enlist me as a co-worker on her own lines, for she put out feelers and was often very persistent—but nothing of any account came of it. I should like, however, just to relate a conversation that took place in the autumn of 1901 between the present Frau Dr. Steiner and myself on the occasion of that “chrysanthemum tea”, when she asked whether it was not urgently necessary to call to life a spiritual-scientific Movement in Europe. In the course of the conversation I said in unambiguous terms: “Certainly it is necessary to call such a Movement to life. But I will ally myself only with a Movement that is connected exclusively with Western occultism and cultivates its development.” And I also said that such a Movement must link on to Plato, to Goethe, and so forth. I indicated the whole programme which was then actually carried out.

In this programme there was no place for unhealthy activities, but naturally a few people with such tendencies came; they were people who were influenced by the Movement of which I have spoken. But from the conversation quoted at the beginning of this lecture, which I had with a member of the English Theosophical Society, you will see that a complete rejection of everything in the nature of mediumship and atavism was implicit in this programme.

The path we have been following for long years was adopted with full consciousness. Although elements of mediumistic and atavistic clairvoyance have not been absent, there has been no deviation from this path, and it has led to our present position.

I had, of course, to rely on finding within the Theosophical Movement people who desired and were able to recognise thoroughly healthy methods of work. The invariable procedure of those who did not desire a Movement in which a healthy and strict sense of scientific responsibility prevails, has been to misrepresent the aim we have been pursuing, in order to suit their own ends. The very history of our Movement affords abundant evidence that there has been no drawing back from penetrating into the highest spiritual worlds, to the extent to which they can now, by grace, be revealed to mankind; but that on the other hand, whatever cannot be attained along a healthy path, through the right methods for entering the spiritual worlds, has been strictly rejected. Those who recognise this and who follow the history of the Movement do not need to take it as a mere assurance, for it is evident from the whole nature of the work that has been going on for years. We have been able to go very, very much further in genuine investigation of the spiritual world than has ever been possible to the Theosophical Society. But we take the sure, not the unsure, paths. This may be said candidly and freely.

I have always refused to have anything to do with forms of antiquated occultism, with any Brotherhoods or Communities of that kind in the domain of esotericism. And it was only under the guarantee of complete independence that I worked for a time in a certain connection with the Theosophical Society and its esoteric procedures, but never in the direction towards which it was heading. Already by the year 1907 everything really esoteric had completely vanished from the Theosophical Society, and later happenings are sufficiently well known to you. It has also happened that Occult Brotherhoods made proposals to me of one kind or another. A certain highly-respected Occult Brotherhood suggested to me that I should participate in the spreading of a kind of occultism calling itself ‘Rosicrucian’, but I left the proposal unanswered, although it came from a much-respected Occult Movement. I say this in order to show that we ourselves are following an independent path, suited to the needs of the present age, and that unhealthy elements are inevitably regarded by us as being undesirable in the extreme.

• 1. Dr. Steiner's articles in Lucifer-Gnosis are collected in the book entitled Aus der Akasha-Kronik. The book was published in English translation by Rudolf Steiner Publications Inc., New York, 1959, with the title Cosmic Memory.
• 2. See inter alia: Man in the Light of Occultism, Theosophy and Philosophy, lecture 7 and lecture 10; Earthly and Cosmic Man, lecture 1; Earthly and Cosmic Man, lecture 1; The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, lecture 4; Things of the present and past in the Spirit of Man, lecture 5. (The last two lecture-courses are not yet printed but are available in translation as typescripts.) See also Notes at end of Lecture Five.
• 3. Note by translator. Presumably by means of the process known in spiritualism as “precipitation”.
• 4. See notes at the end of Lecture Five.
• 5. The content of this book is included in Die Rätsel der Philosophie.
• 6. Translated with the title, Mysticism and Modern Thought. (Anthroposophical Publishing Co., London and Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1925.)
• 7. Second English edition (revised) 1972. (Rudolf Steiner Press, London)

Today I would have liked to be able to lecture on a theme going beyond the events of the moment, and I hope that will be fully the case with tomorrow's lecture, which will begin at seven o'clock. For today, however, I still feel the need to say a few things that relate not only to the letter I had to read yesterday, but also to the very gracious letter from the members that Mr. Bauer has just delivered to me and to still another letter I have received. This is especially necessary now that the things discussed in these letters have come to pass. What I have to say will relate to the matter at hand only to the extent that this particular case can show us all kinds of things we need to know about the relationship of the details of what is going on among and around us to our spiritual movement with its teachings, for in discussing specific occurrences, it is often possible to discover something of universal importance.

I will start from the fact—speaking more or less aphoristically—that I read you a letter yesterday that was signed by two members of the Society and mentioned a third member of long standing.

I believe I will not be committing an indiscretion in telling you about a letter that Mr. Bauer showed me just fifteen minutes ago, a letter written by a Society member who is a physician.¹ The writer is quite rightly of the opinion, as I myself was yesterday, not only after but during the reading of Mr. Goesch's letter, that we are not dealing with anything logical but with something that has to be considered from the point of view of pathology.

Obviously, this is one of the many assumptions we can make in this instance, but in my opinion—and this is simply my personal opinion and should not be considered binding on anyone else—this assumption would be incomplete if we do not also ask whether we are allowed to tolerate the fact that our Society and our entire movement are constantly being endangered by all kinds of pathological cases. Are we to tolerate psychopaths who are destroying our spiritual-scientific activity? Yes, to the extent that we can have compassion for them. However, if we tolerate them without fully taking their pathological nature into account, we allow them to constantly endanger everything that is most precious and most important to us. Of course, we need to be clear that we are dealing with psychopaths, but we must also be clear about what we have to do so that our cause is not jeopardized. Even things we recognize as being caused by illness have to be dealt with appropriately in real life. Of course, how this applies to the personalities in question is a totally separate issue.

As you have seen from many things we have had to discuss over the course of time, there is a certain recurrent experience that is unavoidable in a spiritual movement such as ours: Personal interests and personal vanity inevitably get mixed up with our purely objective aspirations. This need not even be taken as a reproach, strictly speaking; after all, we are all human. But it does need to be mentioned, and I am simply stating my personal opinion on the subject; of course, you are not bound by my opinion. When people are willing to admit that they are subject to vanity in certain areas and that for the time being (perhaps for reasons having to do with their upbringing and so on) they have no particular interest in getting rid of that vanity, that is a much lesser evil than wanting to be absolutely perfect at any given moment. The greatest evil, so it seems, is when people want to believe in their own perfection in every instance, when they want to believe that they are doing whatever they are doing for totally selfless reasons, and so forth.

The greatest temptation faced by any spiritual movement such as ours is the very pronounced vanity that comes into play simply because such movements must necessarily have great and noble aims that can be realized only gradually, and not all of us can immediately broaden our interests to include the objective requirements of our cause. It is understandable enough that when some people first hear about reincarnation, they take an immediate personal interest in finding out about their own previous incarnations for reasons of personal vanity. Looking into history for this reason is the worst possible way to investigate previous incarnations, but that is what most people do out of personal vanity. Thus, instead of being an inner path of meditation, historical events or the Old and New Testaments become a treasure trove for the gratification of personal vanity. Simply put, it is nothing more than that. And it is good to be aware that looking for one's own incarnations in history or in the Bible is basically nothing more than personal vanity.

It is understandable that this kind of vanity should come into play. The trouble starts, however, when vanity is not recognized as such, and when instead of examining their deep-seated ambitious motives calmly, people shroud them in a mantle of occultism or let them merge into some nebulous mysticism.

Concerning certain things that prevail with some justification outside the confines of a spiritual movement, the movement must make a point of approaching them from the perspective of a much more elevated morality than is the norm. However, we must never disregard the possibility that a lot of what we consider higher morality may be nothing of the sort, but simply an outlet for our own drives and instincts. From the kinds of discussions we have been through before, you can see how people can have perfectly legitimate human instincts and drives, but let them get mixed up with all sorts of occult embellishments. They may even console themselves for the existence of these drives and instincts with all sorts of deceptively rational explanations. It would be much better if they would simply admit these drives exist and apply their esoteric schooling to understanding them.

I read Mr. Goesch's letter to you; you all heard it and followed what was going on. What I am going to say about it today is simply my personal, non-binding opinion. Among other things, it was stated in this letter: "I am now coming to the end of what I want to say at present. I have not been able to clothe these insights—which I achieved under the guidance of the Keeper of the Seal of the Society for Theosophical Art and Style… in the ideal form I had envisioned.”

We all know that Miss Sprengel is the keeper of the seal and that Mr. Goesch is the one who wrote the letter. I think if any French-speaking people were to read this letter and apply the old French proverb “cherchez la femme,” they would be quite right, in spite of the fact that “keeper of the seal” is a masculine noun in German. In fact, if you apply the principle of “cherchez la femme,” much of what is talked about in this letter becomes more understandable.

I still need to express my own personal opinion about some of the details in this letter. For instance, in this letter it is suggested that it is impossible to imagine that so-called lessons of the esoteric school could be held within our Society after all that has happened. I read that passage yesterday. It suggests that because of all the “crimes” the letter describes, lessons of the esoteric school could no longer be held.

We must look at these things, too, in the right light and not hesitate to look at them closely. As you know, we temporarily discontinued these esoteric lessons when the war broke out, and anyone who bothers to look at these things carefully will realize that this is due to nothing other than the present circumstances of the war.² These lessons are not being given anymore so as not to do our Society a disservice.

There are only two possibilities these days. One is to act in the best interests of the Society, which means that regardless of whether we live in a nation at war or a neutral country, we must refrain from holding meetings that are not open to the public. Just imagine what could happen, and what a windfall it would be for people who go around making insinuations, if we were to hold secret meetings behind locked doors. Obviously, we must not do that, and Society members will have to resign themselves to doing without these lessons. It is as clear as day that we cannot have meetings between members from different countries going on behind locked doors, which is not to say that anything unacceptable would be happening there. As far as we are concerned, such meetings could happen on a daily basis as a matter of course. But you know how strong the opposition to our movement is. This must also be taken into account, and we must not endanger the whole movement by doing anything stupid or foolish. That's why we must give up holding closed meetings—they would simply open the door to that modern illness known as “spy-itis.”

The other possibility, which is totally out of the question, would be to separate the members according to nationality in order to speak to them. That is obviously not in line with the purpose of our Society.

I hope you have realized by now that this measure was taken because the war made it necessary; it will be rescinded as soon as the war is over, as you could all have worked out for yourselves.
I must still mention a few more thoughts in connection with this measure. We cannot simply assume that all the people out there are so decent and respectable that they will assume that we, too, are only capable of decent and respectable actions. We cannot expect them to be concerned about us and about finding out what we are doing. They have no way of knowing whether or not we are doing something they would consider unacceptable. That is what stands behind taking measures like this. It is impossible to count on the outside world making positive assumptions about us, but we really ought to be able to count on this within the Society itself.

In recent months, not only in this letter but in all the events leading up to it, we have repeatedly heard the opinion—coming from people whose aspirations are expressed in this letter—that the lessons of the esoteric school have been stopped not because of the war but because the Society has assumed a form that makes it necessary for such lessons to stop altogether. After all, given the “crimes” that have been committed, it can no longer be assumed that people will have the requisite trust in such lessons. This means nothing less than that we have to expect that certain measures we take within the Society will be judged in a way that can no longer be considered a decent or respectable interpretation. This interpretation is absolutely inadmissible; it is real slander and cannot be excused as a simple mistake.

Legally speaking, it is no different from libel, and it is even more worrisome when the rumors being spread are veiled in all kinds of mystical disguises. The way such things are passed around is often much more disastrous than people imagine, although I wouldn't go so far as to endorse the point of view of this letter-writer and claim that rumors whispered from one person to another must necessarily make use of black magic. That is not what I mean. Spreading rumors can be accomplished by quite natural means and does not necessarily imply any talent for black magic.

Let me emphasize once again before I continue that what I am saying is my own opinion, not to be taken as binding on anyone else.

In the letter in question, there was much talk of how people are supposed to have been unduly influenced through me. I will not comment on the contradiction inherent in this—on the one hand, my friendly conversations and handshakes are interpreted as techniques of black magic, and on the other hand I am blamed for not seeking closer relationships with members. On the one hand it is stated that I cut myself off from the members and don't do enough for them, but on the other hand I am supposed to have used each and every conversation and handshake to influence people against their will.

We need to understand how such a contradiction can come about. For instance, someone may desire something—let's take the case of a person who wants to have been the Virgin Mary in a previous incarnation. This is a real example, not a made-up one. Suppose the person in question comes and makes me aware of this. If I were to say, “Yes, yes, my occult research confirms that,” then that person would most likely not take this remark as an instance of undue influence. If what people are told corresponds to their desires, they are extremely unlikely to interpret it as an attempt to influence them unjustifiably. Now, self-deception and vanity are not usually taken to such an extreme that people imagine themselves having gone through this particular previous incarnation—they are more likely to choose something else, but the principle involved is what we need to consider at this point.

At this stage of human evolution, the autonomy of individual souls must be respected in the most painstaking way. Basically, people who think like the person who composed this letter do not have a viable idea of this painstaking kind of respect. After all, the writer of this letter would have found it pleasant to have been influenced in line with his own desires, and he wished for much more personal discussion. Suppose he and I had actually discussed all kinds of stuff, and also exchanged handshakes. On the one hand, that would have been exactly what he wanted, and on the other hand, the terrible crime he mentions would have been committed against him. As I said, most people have no idea of the painstaking regard for individual freedom that has to be the rule in a movement like ours. We must make an intense effort to preserve the autonomy of individual souls.

Let's imagine people coming to us with relatively mild cases of incarnational vanity. If we agreed with them, they would surely not go on complaining about being unduly influenced. But suppose we said to them, “Don't be silly; never in all your previous lives were you any such person!” If we are being very precise about it, that would have to be considered an unjustified intervention in these people's inner being, although perhaps not a very serious one.

Let's look at this instance with all possible clarity. If people come to us and tell us who they think they were in an earlier incarnation, regardless of whether they have come to this conclusion out of vanity or out of something else, they have arrived at it themselves, out of their own individual souls. This is where their own soul's paths have led them. And it belongs to the fundamental nature of our movement to lead people further, if possible, starting from whatever point they have arrived at inwardly when they come to us, but not to break their heart and will at some particular moment. If in such a moment we simply make an end of the matter by saying, “Don't be ridiculous; that's nonsense,” that is not an appropriate response. It actually would be an unjustified intervention if we permitted ourselves to speak like this, and these people would have no option but to extend us their confidence in a very personal way not appropriate to the situation, which, as we shall soon see, requires a totally different kind of confidence.

Instead, we should really say something along the lines of, “Well, as things stand now, this thought is something you have arrived at in your own soul. Try to make this thought carry over into real life; try to live as if it were true. See if you can actually do what you would be able to do, and if what happens is what would have to happen if it were true.” An answer like this helps them arrive quite logically at how things really are. It truly preserves their personal freedom without cutting anything off short, no matter how erroneous a path they may have been on until now. It is important to realize that refraining from influencing other souls is actually a very deep issue.

If they stick to the facts, people who share the opinions expressed in this letter will also not be able to maintain that any individuals in this Society have been particularly spoiled by me when it comes to having their previous incarnations made known. Please take what I have just said extremely seriously: It is not adequate to have some clumsy idea of what it means to influence or not influence others; in this day and age, if we always try to respect the freedom and dignity of others, the standards we must apply will be extremely difficult to live up to.

I have always consciously cultivated this sort of respect for the souls of others within our Society, to the extent that, in my attempt to preserve individual freedom, I have made a habit of speaking much less affirmatively or negatively than most people probably would. I have always tried to say only what would enable the person in question to come to independent conclusions on the matter, without acting on my authority. I have tried to eliminate personal authority as a factor by simply advising people to take certain things into account. This is something I have always made a conscious effort to foster.

I hope you will also realize that the misconceptions set down in this letter are not even among the strangest ones that can come about. It has happened more than once that people showed up at a lecture cycle somewhere or other, saying that it was Dr. Steiner's expressed wish that they attend. That has happened many times. If you look into it a bit, you will find that the people in question had told me of their plans to attend the series and, since I am always heartily pleased to meet members again in different places, I had told them I was very glad. In many cases, however, what I said was so changed in the minds of the people in question that by the next day they were saying that it was my particular wish that they attend this course. This is another instance of these strange misconceptions.

Many of our friends want nothing more than to be told what to do, but I have always tried to conduct myself so the members would notice that it would not occur to me to want to give people personal advice about how to manage their everyday life. I am far from wanting to influence them in things like whether or not they should attend a certain lecture cycle. From my perspective, the thing people most often want me to do and that I have to resist most strongly is to influence them personally in details like this. I never want to do that and always have to refuse. Within a society such as ours should be, it is necessary to refrain from that kind of thing.

All of this relates to something else that needs to be stated once just as a matter of principle. Anyone who observes how I try to work will realize that I always attempt to let the matter at hand speak for itself. And that brings me to the issue of confidence, as I would like to call it. I would really like to ask you members to duly consider whether I have ever done anything with regard to either an individual or the Society as a whole to encourage confidence of a personal nature in myself. Try to think about this and come to a conclusion on the basis of how I hold my lectures.

Let us consider an obvious case. You were all so kind as to show up for the lecture I held two days ago on various mathematical and geometrical ideas.³ In the course of this lecture, I told you that from a certain spiritual scientific perspective, matter is nothing; matter as we know it is a hole in space. There is nothing there where matter is. However, I do not want you to simply take this statement on faith; I am far from wanting anyone to take these teachings on faith simply because they come from me. Instead, I try to show how modern science, including its most advanced and respected representatives, can arrive at the same insight as spiritual science. I tried to demonstrate an objective basis in fact, a basis that is also revealed by the results of scientific research, regardless of my own personal way of arriving at this discovery and quite apart from the fact that I am the one telling you about it.

I make a point of doing this so you will not need personal faith in me, but will be able to do without it and see how I try to let the subject, no matter how difficult, speak for itself.

I am sorry to have to present the issue of confidence to you like this; I would have preferred for you to see for yourself that all my efforts are directed toward making confidence in a particular personality unnecessary. The only kind of confidence that comes into question here at all would be the kind enabling you to say, “He is really making an effort to not simply lecture us on some kind of inspired insights; he is really trying to get everything together in one place so that things can be assessed on their own merit, independent of his personality.” Of course, this is not to say that I always succeed in “getting everything together in one place”—first of all, there isn't enough time for that, and secondly it is the nature of things to remain incomplete. My method, however, does tend in the direction of eliminating rather than encouraging faith in me personally. That is how we have to look at this issue of confidence in a spiritual movement. That is what is important to me, but in this, too, I am only expressing my personal opinion.

Admittedly, we must also recognize a certain perspective that tends to make everything relative, since in general it is true that everything should be subject to legitimate criticism. And it is certainly true that everyone should have the right to criticize where criticism is justified. On the other hand, this business of criticizing must also be taken relatively. Just think, the amount of work we can do is limited by time and cannot be extended in just any direction according to the whims of others. In view of that, you will realize that some of Mr. Goesch's ideas have not been thought through in terms of real life.

As I have often pointed out and can state quite openly, I would not venture to speak about certain things if I had not lived and worked with them for decades and become familiar with them over the course of a long life. For example, I would never have spoken about Faust if I had not lived my way into it over decades of intense involvement with the subject.⁴ Having done so, however, it is a real waste of time for me, as you can imagine, if someone who has not put anywhere near that kind of effort into it comes and wants to argue certain points with me. You really cannot ask that of me or of anyone else. Someone once wrote a letter to the poet Hamerling on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, addressing him as “Dear old man”; Hamerling was somewhat taken aback, needless to say.⁵ Now, I am over fifty already, but I think you will admit that my task demands a certain amount of time and will understand that I do not need to spend time debating with people about things I was already concerned with when those people were still in diapers. In the abstract, getting involved in such discussions may be the right thing to do, but it is not usually very fruitful, especially when it has to do with things like the contents of this letter. I really have to say that. It is quite a different thing when someone speaks out of age and experience than when some young upstart talks about it. That is simply a fact of life.

And then, just think about the blatant contradictions in this letter. You don't have to think as I do, but I do want to tell you what I think about it. One sentence reads: “Alongside the work dedicated to the good within your activity in our spiritual movement, I have noticed certain behaviors…,” and so on. In conjunction with this sentence, the writer lists a large number of undertakings that I would not presume to mention myself if they weren't listed here, since I would have to admit that everything on this list has been done imperfectly at best. I have always emphasized, for instance, that the Johannesbau represents only the beginning of what ought to be done. Even so, people do not seem to be able to understand that I might have to limit what I take on, that I cannot, in addition to all these activities, take the time to cultivate all the relationships dreamed up by the writer of this letter. It is really taking things too lightly to imagine that I can possibly do both.

I am reluctant to put it like this, and I ask you to recognize my reluctance, but in order to do all that I would really have to ask the person who composed this letter to make each year twice as long. Barring that, I have to be permitted to organize my own activity as I see fit, which, however, in no way limits what other people want and can do. That, in fact, has been the goal of all my efforts—that each person should do what he or she wants without anyone asking them to do anything other than what they want to do. In that case, however, I must also be granted the right to limit what I recognize as my own task. In most cases, it is just those people who do not want to get involved in any concrete tasks and do not want to develop their will to serve concrete purposes who are most involved in criticizing what has already been accomplished.⁶

However, this is not a constructive attitude in real life. People who are not in agreement with an association as it already exists are welcome to stay out of it, and to do whatever they are in agreement with. It is much easier, though, to become part of some society and criticize it from within than to do something on your own initiative. Finding fault is easy, but it in no way determines or restricts what you yourself can accomplish. Knowing what ought to happen and that someone else is doing something badly is never the crucial factor, but what is crucial is the effort someone makes to actually carry out what one talks about and is able to do. It is also not crucial that other people carry out what I want to have happen—they can take it up or leave it; their freedom is limited, not by me, but only by what they believe themselves able to accomplish. They must simply develop the will to carry out what lies within their own capabilities.

When this Society of ours was in the beginning stages, I believed it could be a prime example of this last-stated principle. It is the greatest failing of this day and age that people always want a tremendous amount but do not actually manage to do anything. Well, that is understandable enough. You see, anyone who has acquired knowledge and capability in any particular field and works with what has been learned knows that what one can actually accomplish is really terribly little. People who have had to develop their abilities are the most aware of how little can actually be done, while those who can do very little or have not yet tested their abilities think they can accomplish the most. That is why programs are more visible nowadays than accomplished facts; programs are floating around all over the place. It is extremely easy to set down in abstract terms what we hope to achieve through socialism, theosophy, the women's movement, community with others, and so on. It's easy to develop ingenious and appropriate programs. But people who have done something positive, even within extremely limited circles, have actually accomplished much more than the ones who put out the greatest programs for all the world to see. My friends, we must realize that what counts is what actually gets done. It would be best if we would more or less keep our programs locked up in a secret chamber in our hearts and only use them as guidelines for our individual lives.

Of course, it is very easy to misunderstand a movement like ours. Yesterday, I pointed out that we have to accept misunderstanding as a matter of course and spoke about how we should relate to misunderstanding on the part of people outside the movement who are not only unsparing in their criticism—their criticism would actually be a good thing—but unsparing with slander and false accusations as well. A significant amount has been accomplished in this regard over the course of the years. Especially in the area of slander and disparagement much has been achieved; yet the steps necessary to fend them off have not been taken. It is really necessary that the most intimate attributes of a spiritual movement like ours spread within our Society.

Something I always advocate and repeatedly mention because it is obviously part of my task is the fact that what I can mean to another person must be determined only by the spiritual aspect of our movement. And it is crucial that this spiritual factor, this purely spiritual factor uniting us, not be misinterpreted. I really cannot discuss the issue of the case at hand without touching upon these things. I am very sorry about all this because I always try to protect people as long as possible. However, our cause has to be more important than individuals. There is no other way.

Anyone who can judge these things objectively will be readily able to see the connection between what I said earlier about respecting the freedom of each independent soul and how I relate to individual members. I am constantly trying to make a reality out of something that is a natural consequence of our spiritual movement and that seems necessary to me in order to handle all personal relationships in such a way that they are appropriately integrated into our spiritual movement. This means I must leave each and every member of our Society free to act in ways that may differ completely from mine.

Some of you may share Mr. Goesch's opinion, and welcome any efforts to cultivate our social and personal interaction and cohesiveness. I myself think it would be a good thing if someone would make this effort, so that our Society would be a society in more than name only. However, my own role in this Society is necessarily limited. Nevertheless, I realize that I am still the one who knows by far the greatest number of members personally. Many people here know fewer than I do. I am certainly not opposed to people doing a lot to cultivate the personal aspects that play such a great role in this letter, but as I said, I must limit what I myself take on for reasons I have already presented adequately.

In view of that, it seems a very strange misunderstanding of what is actually going on when we hear opinions like those expressed again in this letter, claiming that the best of what I have to offer is becoming a mere shadowy image because of all this. According to this point of view, it seems that this Society built on the basis of spiritual science, this Society as I have to understand it, is seen as something that is too abstract and ought to assume a much more personal character. I am putting it like this—“ought to assume a much more personal character”—in order to avoid using a different expression. I have often explained that this personal character is not possible; it simply cannot be. I have even said so to some members individually. I would prefer to see this personal element rooted out to such an extent that I could, for instance, lecture from behind a screen so as to avoid mixing up personal connections to members with the main point, which is to disseminate anthroposophical teachings and make them effective in actual practice. I am sorry to have to say things like this, but how are we supposed to understand each other if these things are not said?

I would like to relate a particular incident and then comment on it. There is a certain person to whom I have always related as I described above, trying to practice what is right in relation to our spiritual movement, fulfilling my obligations with regard to this movement and disregarding any personal factors.⁷ Some time ago, this person found it necessary to write me a letter that begins as follows. I will not read the whole letter, but only the part of it that seems to be at the root of this whole incident. This letter arrived on December 25, 1914—Christmas Day of last year. I will now read this very characteristic passage, which begins with a quotation from one of the mystery dramas: “ ’Seven years now have passed,’ Dr. Steiner, since you appeared to my inner vision and said to me, ‘I am the one you have spent your life waiting for; I am the one for whom the powers of destiny intended you.’ ” Further on in the letter, we read, “Neither the teaching nor the teacher was enough to revive my soul; that could only be done by a human being capable of greater love than any other and thus capable of compensating for a greater lack of love.”

This is asking for something that cannot and must not be given in a personal sense. The teacher and the teachings are of lesser importance; what is wanted is the human being, the person. We should not play hide-and-seek in cases like this. At the conclusion of Mr. Goesch's letter, he says that he arrived at his insights under the guidance of the keeper of the seal of the Society for Theosophical Art and Style. Now, this keeper of the seal is the same person who wrote the sentence I just read, a sentence that shows that the things she is writing about have been slowly coming to a head for a long time. I will refrain from using any adjectives to describe the particularly pronounced insinuations in the letter Mrs. Steiner received from her yesterday. (See p. 115.) Such insinuations should not be repeated because of course people should be protected as long as they actually allow themselves to be protected. However, I really must point out that it is possible for things like this to happen in our Society.

Please do not imagine that I have been blind to this development, which has split into two parts, so to speak. I will speak first about the part that has to do with our Society as it is seen from outside, since it may be best to talk about that aspect first. Among the many things, some of them highly slanderous, that have been written in defamatory articles about our movement in general and myself in particular, there have been ever-recurring insinuations about the number of man-chasing hysterical women in our Society. I am not saying that this is true, but simply that it is mentioned in the many diatribes that have appeared, slandering us and myself in particular.

The current case is not an isolated incident, and things that appear in this form should not be interpreted personally but taken as symptomatic. Still, I must say that someone trying to get close to our movement should not try to do so by writing “Seven years now have passed, Dr. Steiner…” and so on. I do not want to go into these things at great length, but you will understand what was meant. These things cannot be judged on the basis of a single case, however. Instead, each individual case has to be interpreted as a sign that the teachings have not been received as impersonally as they should have been, and as an indication that there were some among us ready to set less store by the teachings and the teacher than by the human personality.

This was one of the secondary reasons why I and my loyal colleague, who had stood by me for so many years, were married last Christmas. I admit that we were not at all inclined to conceal the matter behind any occult cloak. First of all, as far as we were concerned, these personal things were nobody else's business. Secondly, with regard to the relationship between us, it had become necessary not to let misunderstandings arise because of things being taken on a more personal human level than they were intended.⁸ An expression used frequently between the two of us in those days was that by marrying me, Mrs. Steiner had become the “cleaning lady” with regard to things that had been accumulating in some people's heads. I think you understand what I mean. Our intent was to have things taken less personally than they had been until then.

I hope you will not misunderstand me when I say that in general in a society such as this one, liberating ourselves as much as possible from the customs of the rest of the world is not the point. Instead, we should be helping the world progress with regard to customs and ways of looking at things. It can only be of help to us to arrange such matters so they are quite clear in the eyes of the outer world and so no one can get mistaken ideas about them.

This also led Mrs. Steiner, in responding to a letter from the person who actually instigated this whole business, to write that a civil wedding ceremony was actually not such a terribly important event, considering our years of working together on things that were of utmost importance to our lives. The response to that was, “However, your civil marriage unleashed a disaster for me, one that I had feared and seen coming for years—not in what actually happened, you understand, but in its nature and severity.” It should suffice for me to point out that a certain relationship exists between what we are experiencing now and the appointment of the “cleaning lady.” As far as I am concerned, no further proof of the need for the cleaning lady is needed!

There is no harm in taking things at face value and not reading more into them than is actually there, my friends, but it is always harmful to link a particular occult mission with some petty detail, or even something of major importance, from one's personal life. That's why we prefer the image of the “cleaning lady,” which corresponds to the facts much better than any pompous pronouncements we might have come up with, although we never imagined we would have to talk about it.

It is my personal opinion that if someone in our spiritual movement looks for something so personal in things that are perfectly self-explanatory, it is a disturbing reminder of the prevalence of certain instincts in our Society. The only acceptable way to deal with these instincts is to admit that they exist and face up to them truthfully without any occult disguises. That is also the best way to move beyond them. It only works if you confront them for what they really are. In our circles, however, an incredible amount has been done to surround these things with an occult aura.

Why should we let the purely objective interest we actually ought to have in our spiritual movement be clouded by dragging personal vanity into everything? Why should we let that happen? People who spend a lot of time thinking about their incarnations down through history are not really interested in this cause; they lack the particular kind of interest they ought to have. The only difference between them and ordinary egotists is that ordinary egotists are not so presumptuous as to identify themselves with all kinds of historical incarnations, but satisfy their personal vanity with other things.

It is really true that it is much better for people to flaunt their clothes or their money than their incarnations—that is much the lesser of the two evils. These are things we have to take seriously and inscribe into the depths of our soul. They have done too much harm over the years and are so intimately bound up with what I am forced to call “personal vanity,” to use a general term.

When personal vanity plays a large part, the most unbelievable misunderstandings can arise. As she recounts in her letter, this “keeper of the seal” once came to me and stated that she was obliged to apply standards already long since present within her to whatever came toward her from the outer world. My response was, “Why should that mean you can't be part of our spiritual movement? Of course you can apply your own standards,” by which I only meant that our teachings have nothing to fear from anyone's personal standards. That is what people are supposed to apply. In my opinion, there was nothing wrong with her wanting to apply her own standards. But the way she interpreted this showed that what she actually meant was that she was already in possession of everything spiritual that could be given her; she had already seen it in visions and thus was already in possession of it.

Then this woman went on to ask whether in that case she could or should become a student of mine. I do not know why she asked that; the question is a contradiction in itself. Well, all I can say is that it was an undeniable fact that she wanted to join us in spite of everything, and there was no way to prevent her from doing it. However, her claiming to be already in possession of it all and condescending to work with this movement while insisting on applying her own standards reveal a kind of vanity that is looking for something other than our teachings. After all, she did not need the teachings if she had them already. People are so unbelievably unaware of this kind of vanity, and it plays such a very great role in a movement like ours.

This person assumed that what was being taught actually stemmed from her, no less. That is somewhat difficult to understand. She must have found some reason to believe that in something in Mrs. Steiner's letter of response to her,9 something that led her to point more specifically to this mysterious source of our esoteric movement. That is how this strange state of affairs came about. My friends, it is no longer possible to play hide-and-seek for the sake of protecting individuals; it is time for us to go into these things. In the seal-keeper's answer to Mrs. Steiner, she says, "Three years ago, like a sick person seeking out a physician, I asked Dr. Steiner for a consultation. There was something very sad that I had to say during that interview, and I have had to say it frequently since then: Although I could follow his teachings, I could not understand anything of what affected me directly or of what happened to me. I must omit what brought me to the point of saying this, since I do not know how much you know about my background and biography." She says this because I once had to hear a conversation in which this was discussed. “I was not able to express my need, and Dr. Steiner made it clear that he did not want to hear about it.” It's true that I did not want to hear about it, but I did respond. You cannot just avoid things like that by indicating that you do not want to hear about them. “The following summer, however, we were graced with the opportunity to perform The Guardian of the Threshold; in it a conversation takes place between Strader and Theodora, a conversation that reflected in the most delicate way the very thing that was oppressing me. Perhaps Dr. Steiner did not ‘intend’ anything of the sort”—intend is in quotation marks—“nevertheless, it is a fact. Perhaps it was meant as an attempt at healing.” In the passage in question from the mystery drama, Strader says he owes everything to Theodora.

When people write things like this, especially in an attempt at a formal style, though its grandiloquence contributes nothing to its clarity, we really cannot assume that it deserves to be treated as a personal communication. There is a lot that could be seen as personal, and I have mentioned none of that; everything I have mentioned is intimately related to the whole character and nature of our movement. If people don't want these things to be mentioned in public, they should not write them down. When the kind of attitude expressed in this letter becomes predominant, it undermines everything I am trying to accomplish with every word I speak and with everything I have been doing for many years.

If we are to go on working together, you must not remain ignorant of what I think my position among you should be. If in fact we are to go on working together, it will have to be on the same basis as before. We must find a way to create a form for our spiritual movement that will be appropriate to the stage of evolution of people in our day and age. That cannot happen, however, if all kinds of personal things take the place of what should be achieved and understood on a spiritual level. It astounds me that in these difficult times, when our interest should be focused on the development of a major portion of humanity, someone should have so little interest in the events of the day as to drag such highly personal interests into our Society. A person who thinks it permissible to live in the illusion that something did not happen the way she dreamed it would, and has nothing better to do than cause a crisis on that account, is really cut off from the most profound aspect of our times.

This is how these highly personal matters start creeping into our Society. However, personal matters cannot be allowed to enter our movement, not in this form and not in any other. People whose chief interest is in their own person will only find a place in our Society to a very limited extent. Generally, people who wrap themselves in a mystical cloud also attempt to do the same to those around them. It would be inconsistent to imagine that you yourself are everything under the sun and not have the people around you be something special too, so the tendency is to broaden the circle. But when, as so frequently happens, this purely personal interest and personal feeling of vanity take the place of objective observation of and efforts toward what our spiritual movement is meant to be, they inflict the worst possible damage on our Society.

One might have thought that the Johannesbau going up here would have presented enough problems to keep our members busy and distract them from the vainer and more foolish things in life. One really might have believed that this building would turn their thoughts to better things. But as you see, that has not come about as we might have hoped, and yet we have to go on working. I thank you all for the expressions of confidence contained in the letter our friend Mr. Bauer brought to me, as well as those expressed by other members, and I hope ways and means can be found to deal with these obstacles to our movement's true progress and to give a little thought to what it will take to keep our movement from being too seriously constrained by outer hindrances in the future.

Criticism, my friends, cannot harm us. People can criticize us objectively as much as they like, and it will do no damage. First of all, it will always be possible to counter the criticism with whatever needs to be said, and secondly, time is on our side. Today, people may well still think we're fools because of our boiler house or the Johannesbau itself, or whatever, but they'll come around, and we can wait until they do. That's the way it is with anything new.

It is something totally different when slanderous and untrue statements are made. In that case, we are obliged to set these claims straight again and again if we don't choose to simply ignore them, and of course the slanderers can always answer back. It can even reach the point of taking legal action. Yet, we do need to defend ourselves against such statements, even if it feels like washing our hands in black and filthy water.

If we could really foster an active attitude and strengthen our forces on these two fronts, we would be able to do a lot that has been left undone so far.

Of course, this is not meant as a personal reproach to anyone in particular; some of what I said applies to some people, other things to others. It is intended quite generally. However, what I have pointed out has a solid basis in fact, and in order for you to see it, I have had to present something of the situation to show how things that were only intended to be taken spiritually have been taken very personally.

Please don't take it amiss if I say that if someone comes with complaints, even if she says she already knew everything she has gained or can still gain through the movement, the only thing to do is treat that person like a child and offer fatherly admonition or friendly consolation. I was naive enough to believe that it had helped, and then had to watch these delusions of grandeur appear afterward, so it… [gap in stenographic record] great damage within this Society of ours.

Considering the claims of the keeper of the seal, there was never any point in doing anything other than smilingly forgiving her for this rubbish, the way you excuse a child. Please don't hold it against me that I said what simply had to be said. But for the sake of our movement's dignity, we cannot permit pathological elements to destroy it. That is why we cannot always take the stand that we should simply accept these pathological elements for what they are. When this pathological element takes on all the appearances of delusions of grandeur, we have to call it by name; we have no other choice. This is by no means directed against the personality in question, but only against what is deserving of criticism in that person. After all, we must face the facts and not hide the issue behind the cloak of the occult. It requires a particular effort at self-education to do that, but if we succeed, we will see things as they truly are instead of through a glass darkly.

Perhaps you will say that I myself am speaking out of vanity at this point. That will make no difference to me, since I have already been condemned to call a spade a spade in this instance. I have known many students who thought they were smarter than their teachers and proceeded to tell them off, claiming that the latter had made all kinds of promises without keeping them. That this should also happen within our Society comes as no great surprise.

Now I have given you my own humble opinion, which you are not to take as binding. I am simply asking that you take it in the same way I want you to take everything I say, that is, I would like you to try to see if we are better able to get on with life in our movement once a common resolve is there to call the big things big and the little things little instead of drawing a mystical halo around any old arbitrary personal vanity.

If we are not aware of the full seriousness of our movement, the temptation is very great to fake it by decking out all sorts of life's little vanities in this same serious garb. That cannot be, and this simple statement means more than it seems to. This is what I had to say, although I did not want to. I cannot read these letters in their entirety in front of the whole movement, but it would not occur to anyone who could read them that I have overstepped my authority by quoting passages from private correspondence. In this case, it had to happen because these things are related to the very foundations of what we are doing together.

• 1. It has not been possible to ascertain which physician and which letter are referred to here.
• 2. See the volume Zur Geschichte und aus den Inhalten der ersten Abteilung der Esoterischen Schule 1904 bis 1919, note 5 to section II above.
• 3. See II, note 1 above.
• 4. See the two volumes Geisteswissenschaftliche Erlauterungen zu Goethes “Faust” (“Spiritual Scientific Commentaries on Goethe's Faust”), GA 272 and 273, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1981). [These volumes have not been published in English—Translator.]
• 5. Robert Hamerling, 1830–1889, Austrian poet.
• 6. This seems to be a reference to Heinrich Goesch, who was not involved in any kind of practical activity. It was reported by some members that he had refused to help with the construction of the first Goetheanum.
• 7. The person referred to is Alice Sprengel. See Part Two, p. 109ff in this volume and also note 1 under I above.
• 8. The second half of this sentence is somewhat unclear in the stenographic record and may have not have been taken down exactly or completely.

Perhaps deepening some of the questions of yesterday can be our starting point today. Dr Rittelmeyer has already called our attention to some difficulties which exist in understanding the relationship of this Christian-religious Movement to Anthroposophy. These difficulties are such that you actually can't just through, one could call it a definition, try and deal with it, but that it should actually be dealt with through practical application, and then also through a certain study of soul relationships in present-day humanity. The soul relationships in present-day humanity have only really just emerged in the course of the last three to four centuries and far too little consideration has been given to exploring just how difficult these soul relationships really are. Thus you must already be clear about how, out of all the energy and best of will impulses a religious movement can be formed, which can also work powerfully and nonetheless in opposition to other movements of our time where the hearts of people have gradually become lost, if at the same time the needs of humanity were not satisfied by the older, or relatively not so very old, religious streams having become unavailable.

We may not give in to the illusion that in reality it would be possible to lead a religious movement separated from the rest of cultural life, namely to be apart from what is called scientific culture. You must be aware that an atheistic science armed with the highest authority exists today. Now you would probably say, sure, this atheistic science exists as a science, but alongside that some or other contemporary science and those involved there insist they are filled not with a contemporary but an inner piousness; so that there are possibly people who can live quite within this present day atheistic scientific community who say: ‘This is another field but when I'm not active in this field then I find myself in a religious life.’

You see, this separation between the scientific and the religious elements which has been going on for centuries, this inner separation can still not cope with such a strong and pure Movement as yours—because a religious movement must, just like a scientific movement, above all support the truth. It can now seem even trivial when, after having spoken so much about the content of a religious movement, we again return to the elementary idea: the Movement must be truthful. We may not undervalue how strong the present day untruthfulness, the inner unconscious falsehood of civilisation has become. What the first initiators of this Religious Movement felt at the time, when they made the suggestion for founding this Movement, was in reality precisely towards dealing with that inner, unconscious untruthfulness of our present day.

You see, out of the cultural historical discomfort the view has gradually been developed that one must leave science to science; the theologians need not bother with it. The theologians had to create their own principles of truth from which they developed ethical and religious content separated from anything scientific and gradually introduced eternity and religiosity while not bothering with what drove science. It is exactly this detachment of the religious life placing itself opposite cultural life which resulted in deep inner untruth. Those who practice science as it is carried out today can only be atheists if he or she is honest because the manner and way thoughts regarding the world, as it is carried out in physics and chemistry, give no possibility to rise up to any kind of ethic ideal. There exists only one truth for the science of today, namely: “The totality of the world is determined by causes. The world of causality is however neutral towards ethic and religious ideals, completely neutral. Right here we must search for the truth and conclude there is no other way than to remain with the verdict of astronomers: I have searched through the entire universe and haven't found God anywhere, I therefore don't need this hypothesis.” Something else is not possible for science, if one is really honest.

On the basis of such a scientific viewpoint depends how a question such as: “Should we abandon everything moral and ethical?” is answered in the following way: “If we do this then humanity will fall into chaos and therefore it is necessary to tame humanity from the outside with state laws or equivalents.” We then have tamed people where the principle of being tamed becomes nothing other than a higher form of submission just like one applies to animals. Religion, for people who thought like this, only had one entitlement and that was to use it as a means to activate people into mutual opposition. Religion was just a means to an end; only this was allowed by those with a scientific way of thinking regarding the present. A large part of those who undermined humanity like this is as a result of not having an honest disgust for a way of thinking which only takes the half, that is, the scientific method of thought and incidentally invents the theory of how humanity was tamed. When one speaks about religious and ethical impulses with only this attitude then one must be completely clear that all one can speak about are the taming rules. One always steers towards deeper untruthfulness if one doesn't confess these things. On the other hand, atheistic science can't be stopped. Just think how forcefully today intentions arise to establish human institutions solely and extensively based on mere materialistically thought-out inherited principles, for example laws set up for marriage where nothing about inner heartfelt relationships are the decisive factor, but rather, for example, that a doctor decides. These things are argued away but in reality these things do not have an end. For those who want to work from the basis of religious renewal it is necessary to be clear to unite the focus of knowledge simultaneously with the spirit into nature's wisdom, making the spirit prevalent within the wisdom of nature so that right into physics spirituality is alive. This need really be striven for by the fact that the religious movement is based on Anthroposophy. Still, this basis of Anthroposophy needs to be a totally inward, truthful aspect. For this reason it is necessary that the relationship between the Religious Renewal and Anthroposophy is also represented in the correct way.

Isn't it true that Anthroposophy wants and can't be anything other than a quest for knowledge? You must, also as far as your relationship involves its followers, be fully aware that you are working with a path of knowledge. The religious renewal is even a religious movement with a corresponding religious ritual. When both movements work out of their own impulses then only mutual fructification can result. Basically this can never cause trouble. One must, when one is clear about it, know that on the whole, trouble can't appear when the conditions of the time are considered. The Anthroposophical Movement can be seen to have a difficult position because many people thirst for a spiritualised world view and spiritualised knowledge but want to come to their knowledge with more comfort and ease than what Anthroposophy offers. People don't want such intensive inner work which is necessary in Anthroposophy and as a result really absurd points of view and thoughts pop up. It is like this—you only need to remind yourselves about yesterday's lecture—for those who really want to be involved with Anthroposophy, a basic rethink is necessary which creates a radical difference between Antroposophists and those who have no inkling of the existence of such rethinking and transformative sensitivity.

What actually makes a community? A communal thinking and feeling! One can hardly imagine that people who truthfully work with the Anthroposophical impulse would not get such a feeling of community, as it had never before been in the world. Such a fundamental change in thinking has never existed before, even in the Mysteries: then everything was quite similar to popular thought. There is a strong bond where everyone calls and shouts for community which often becomes evident among the youth, surfacing basically as an absurd tendency. However, don't forget we are not in a studio where we can make people out of plasticine, but that people exist out there in all their absurdities, which one need to refer back to, from which there is no escape if one wants to do real work. It comes down to taking these things profoundly and in all seriousness. One tends not to think about all the various fields. Perhaps you will understand me better if I give you a popular example.

In the Waldorf School we now have 12 Classes and students of up to the age of 18 or 19. They all want to be teachers. Now, the first and foremost requirement in teaching and education lies in the non-discussion of the teaching methods to the child, boy or girl; these methods need to remain a mystery. The way things are accomplished these days centre around the child in the Waldorf School; revealing the pedagogical foundation and so on to them as they are growing up until they sometimes know what Waldorf pedagogy is better than the teacher. Yes, when things are like this there can be no progress.

On the other hand it is not acceptable today to dissect things in an outer manner. Recently in a delegation meeting we spoke about the method of how money could be acquired for the reconstruction (of the Goetheanum). A hateful article appeared as a result in a Geneva newspaper in a wild attack, how the poor Swiss people were having a million Franks pulled out of their pockets. Open secrets also don't work. It must come down to the ability to inwardly depend on people, so that when basic rules of secrecy are not given, that a form of tact develops among the authoritative personalities, speaking about something in a specific way and not, for instance, reveal the ground rules of Waldorf pedagogy to a fifteen year old as one would to a thirty year old person. This must gradually come out of it. In fact all kinds of absurd added impulses come to the fore, when things are not considered in depth or with enough strength.

This is how the impulse for community building appears in the Anthroposophical Movement. The Anthroposophical Movement is a movement for knowledge. It is founded on the communality of will, feeling and thought. Thus one can actually consider that the Religious Movement would simply rise out of the foundation of the Anthroposophical Movement, taken up in the way which was once given to religious movements which had come out of archetypal impulses and then developed further.

Before any religious movement existed among the Anthroposophists, a substitute was looked for in all kinds of esoteric circles which were however based solely on knowledge and the aspect considered as ritualistic also was just there to serve knowledge. As a result nothing from these circles could be brought across into a movement for the renewal of religion.

Had things going on at that time, considered then as ritualistic, had these things not been permeated with the pulse of knowledge, they would have been conceived outwardly which is not where they had their origin.

In contrast it is namely so in religious movements, that the ritual itself contains immediate content in each act of worship so that those who for instance refuse to strive for knowledge within the ritual, still through their participation in the ritual shares in the ritual's life, because the ritual, in the way it should work in this Religious Movement, is the speech of the spiritual world, brought down into earthly form, making participation in the ritual something quite positive.

Let us contemplate the central focus of the ritual from this viewpoint. When we look at the Act of Consecration we notice the preparatory part being the Gospel reading. Now here is another difficulty because it is really necessary to get a better understanding of the Gospels than what currently exists. It is really a matter of understanding that the Words of the Gospels are to be taken up quite differently to any other words, which have flowed from civilisation's development through humanity. The Word of the Gospel, when it is taken as the truth, contains within itself something which can be described when one says: The person who reads the Words of the Gospel out loud, speaks as the conduit for something which comes down from the spiritual into the physical world in order for the prepared part of the Gospel text to somehow enable the entire congregation to establish a link to the spiritual world.

Following this, the actual offering takes place, in three parts: Revelation, Transubstantiation and Communion. A real conception of this trinity is not possible if one is not clear about the very moment when transubstantiation is fulfilled, even for those who actually take part, when natural law and ethical law flow together as one, so that quite a different world order is opened up every time for the congregation, each moment when a person is lifted up to the divine, and the spiritual sinks down into the congregation. When one takes this as reality then one must say, something is happening which is completely independent to what one can recognise as happening in it. Mere feeling is sufficient for what precedes it. For knowledge, mere feeling is insufficient. For the preparatory steps to transformation, it suffices to have feeling, therefore actually it is a task, an activity involving the congregation, when the priest celebrates the Act of Consecration for the congregation. This is something which must definitely be accepted and as a result you should never disturb this harmony by asking the question: ‘Could any ritual which is received today out of the spiritual world’—and all our rituals are received from the spiritual world are to some extent ordained by God—‘can it be changed or stopped?’—You see, by somehow evaluating these rituals and come to saying: ‘Yes, it should develop into another state where people can have an invisible ritual’—these questions are unreasonable.

The relationship must be thought of in this way: people are always going to look for a ceremony followed by a sermon; in the sermon the only enrichment flowing into it can come from Anthroposophy, out of spiritual science. It will happen in future that those who are knowledgeable in the topmost degree in spiritual matters, will never reject keeping community with those who attend the ritual. He or she has also no other way of relating to the ritual than, I could call it, a naive person. Therefore the question can't possibly be raised: ‘Do we carry the ritual for the present time and in future substitute it by another?’—Through our founding of the ritual it is established and will continue; it is subject to other rules than those that human beings validate when it is asked: ‘Will there one day be an invisible ritual?’ The Ritual is subjected to the immense cosmic world impulses which include everything in its evolution which comes about in the world. However, the changes of the future will be quite different to changes that have happened in the past.

Take the Mass of the today's Roman Catholic Church. What is present there is the synthetic confluence of all the corresponding rituals of ancient times, deepened in a Christian sense. This is the wonderful element within the Catholic Church which has flowed together out of all the ancient mysteries. However, at specific times in the development of Christianity there came about—these times actually already began in the third and fourth century—times during which there was no understanding any more for what was woven into the sacrifice of the Mass and so it became an empty formula, propagating itself through tradition, one could say, out of respect. Then, seemingly soon, people came with the courage of non-understanding and started to improve all kinds of things. Today, as a result, we have in the Catholic Mass sacrifice, something which gradually, simply through the dying out of language, has become fundamentally incomprehensible. It is celebrated in the old language, without it possibly bringing about understanding. One can regard this sacrifice of the Catholic Mass as a corpse, which is something unthinkably huge and powerful, yet still as a corpse possessing unbelievable power. In totality the peculiar aspect of the Catholic Church is how the priesthood is exceptionally educated philosophically but theologically extraordinarily uneducated. The Catholic theology has no liveliness, so that actually right up to the greatest climaxes Catholic theology is something extraordinarily uneducated. Since the Middle Ages it hasn't undergone any further development. On the grounds of religious needs of humanity, the teaching or sermon all fail to be satisfying, yet by contrast this is not the case with the cult because the cult has an extraordinary power of building the community. This is what is given in which you can engender a feeling of eternity through this new ritual, so that no disharmony need to bear down on your souls. Some Anthroposophists claim that parts of the prescribed ritual can be left out. This question would actually not come about if one has the right attitude. I really don't know out of what grounds these ideas could have come. Because, take the case of the funeral today; surely a religious community will ask for a ritual? So you are called to the Consecration of Man for the whole of humanity and not only with the attitude that it is something temporary, it will be replaced by something else. This is something eternal as far as something can be called eternal on earth. This conflict which appears to be developing among many of you, that Anthroposophy sees the ritual to some extent as something less meaningful or that something else in the future must represent the present Movement, this conflict can only be based on a feeling of a misunderstanding. As soon as you are clear that naturally Anthroposophy lies more on the side of knowledge and that it must give itself over to that, as far as the ritual is considered, then on the other side, people who attend the ritual and also seek the knowledge aspect, because of the strength of the intellect, and approach the ritual from the basis of Anthroposophy—as soon as you are clear about this then you can say to yourself in some way this is only a kind of division of labour. If taken from this basis, conflict should not arise at all.

Now I would like to ask you, following on from these comments, to express whatever you want because I know that much still lies in the depths of your souls.

A question is posed (which is not written down by the stenographer) regarding the lecture given on the 31^st December 1922 in Dornach.

A Saying:

The world's working approaches
As a material reflection to me
In the Heavenly Beings of the stars
I see, through Willing, their loving motion.
Penetrating me with life's water
Forming me through matter's power
The heavenly deeds of the stars
Within feeling I see their wise revolving.

Es nahet mir im Erdenwirken
In Stoffes Abbild mir gegeben
Der Sterne Himmelswesen
Ich seh' im Wollen sie sich liebend wandeln.
Es dringen in mich im Wasserleben
In Stoffes Kraftgewalt mich bildend
Der Sterne Himmelstaten
Ich seh' im Fühlen sie sich weise wandeln.

Rudolf Steiner: What I spoke about then is a kind of cosmic communion. When this is performed meditatively, then under the circumstances as things are today, they could offer people a certain satisfaction. In this way a kind of communion can be received. However that doesn't exclude those who receive communion through their knowledge in this way, when they in their entire soul constitution strive for it today, to also receive communion in another way. The differences should not be stressed because the two things are not contradictory. Do you experience a stronger contradiction here than what you have against the old, still truly understood, Catholic Church? There they have the priest communion and naturally also the lay communion—I don't want to say that all Anthroposophists should be priests. You have those who can give and receive communion and you have those who can receive communion but not give it. When you grasp the difference you have to say to yourself: ‘Those who give communion can't possibly, without it adding some inner experience, take the communion anyhow like the layman. He must experience something more in it.’ Therefore the priest, when working with the communion, must also experience something more, an inner communion, and this he does have. Now, it comes down to strictly adhering to the difference between the priesthood and the laity. Only these two classes exist. Today one walks away from the developments in these olden times, this past time is no longer here.

Today much which was only available to the Priests in olden times is now to some extent also made available to the laity. Our entire modern theology, all its literature is now available. The same can be said to be valid in our case. You can study theology as a layman. If you choose a way of knowledge like Anthroposophy it is self-evident that the thoughts of participants become familiar with such things as would first and foremost been available for the celebrating Priests in past times. Today it is different. We can't put up boundaries. If we would have clung to old principles it would be as if a religious movement existed and within that movement would have been the priesthood who then would have Anthroposophy to themselves, who would have to do everything on the level of profane technicality, as demanded by the times ... (gap in stenographer's notes). If you take that into account you will understand that this communion which the priest celebrates has developed from something which belongs to the Anthroposophical Movement. However, there is no ground for saying: ‘On the one hand we have the priestly, on the other we have cosmic communion.’ Both come from the same foundation, only differentiating in form. They can both stand independently beside one another. So when you enter with profound feeling into these things you will have no difficulties.

A Participant: In the report about the meeting of delegates in February 1923 it is said that the ritualistic element is something which comes from prenatal life. In the course which we attended in Dornach, it is illustrated how our ritual raises up the dead in their life after death.

Rudolf Steiner: This is something which is applicable to all things created out of the spiritual world; the concepts need to be grasped very precisely. To grasp concepts scholarly dialectic needs to be entered into. However we haven't come that far yet, neither in the area of Anthroposophy, nor in the Religious Movement. You see, the way people work in the ritual, to really engage, so that the human soul is involved, is in order for this to lead to the Portal of Death and encounter Christ—this is the one side of the cult. The other side through which that takes place for the human being is like a cosmic memory of what had been experienced prenatally. Let's take an example in ordinary life to make this clear. What meeting makes a great impression on a person today? To have had an encounter, already during his youth, with a venerated person. Now something else is added to this. It is something different, when I depict it, which germinates in the mood of soul towards the future; as a result of this he might approach relationships in life in quite a different manner to the kind of person he had been in his youth. When one partakes in the ritual, one's next, future life is touched. This happens because its origin lies in prenatal life. This works very strongly on the human being.

A Participant: Does one accomplish more by meditating on the Mass or when one celebrates the Mass? One can then come as far as saying we don't need to read the Mass any more.

Rudolf Steiner: Logically that is not quite untrue, but in fact it is not so. When the Mass is read and is then experienced meditatively and thus has an effect on you, then this effect, while depending on a more intense inner activity, actually becomes stronger. However you are not always able to call upon this inner activity. When you haven't read the Mass for some days then its power becomes paralysed. It is true, if one can, then it is good, but when it has had no preparatory stages then these forces are paralysed. It is not true that the inner meditated Mass is as strong as the read Mass, and it must not somehow become an ideal for the Priest, to not read the Mass. Then he could well say: ‘I refrain from working with my congregants, I, alone, want to make progress.’ It is possible to imagine this ideal (not reading the Mass but meditating) but the power which the priest will need, when he wants to read the Mass, this he must not allow to weaken as a result, by him wanting to present such an ideal.

A participant: How does one bring people to the Consecration of Man? Are we to only take people who emotionally come from underdeveloped religious sentiments, to whom the way of knowledge is closed? How should we approach participants if we don't follow the route of thinking?

Rudolf Steiner: You don't just have the ritual, but also in the broadest sense the sermon, lectures, or preaching in the terminological sense. Nothing can be seen as a problem. Today's younger intellectuals who work out of nothing don't want an isolated intellectual aspect, but strive strongly towards ritual.

What can enter here, which must from external sources form a synthesis between the Religious Movement and Anthroposophy, I now want to characterise. On the one hand today's intellect is not enlivened without the ritual. The ritual firstly calls upon the intellect. Today people stop believing they can think if they don't have the ritual. Stopping thinking is a danger of the time. On the other hand I don't see where the limitation must lie when presenting a sermon and ritual. A limitation can only exist where you create it artificially. They don't want to learn about Anthroposophy, they say. That they can't handle because they must! Of course one should not throw Anthroposophy at them because then the problem arises with them saying: ‘We don't want to learn about Anthroposophy.’

A participant: So I won't talk about the ether body, for example?

Rudolf Steiner: That depends on the knowledge of the congregation. I can easily imagine a congregation who relate honestly to the ritual and still can have a need for knowledge. I don't see why you shouldn't speak about the ether body.

A participant: There are actually people with a desire for knowledge and who find their way to Anthroposophy through the ritual. Can we find a possibility to satisfy people who don't want Anthroposophy?

Rudolf Steiner: The question is actually: how will you characterise someone who should be led by you, who will actually be led by you in order for that person to be seen quite separated from Anthroposophy? How must that person be? It is like this: When one really grasps what a person is about, when one really enters into true humanity, then people want Anthroposophy, just as at all times the underlying soul is being sought for. To not want Anthroposophy is only the case with inhibited people. For forty years you could still find elementally healthy people in the countryside, they uttered the highest wisdom. (The following sentence was only partially captured.) Under their pillows they use to hide something—take Jacob Böhme for instance—this is no longer found today. People who have become inhibited in large cities don't come anywhere near such things. As a result I can imagine that another way can be used, other than anthroposophic. Your approach need not be from what is printed in books but what you have experienced through books. For example the concept of the etheric body is easy to bring across to naive individuals. In some regions people called the little substance left in the eyes upon waking, “night's sleep”; the etheric is in there because it comes from the etheric body's activity. Starting points are everywhere. You satisfy people more when you become free of words and come from experience itself.

A participant: Is it possible to find the difference between cosmic communion and the ritual in order to formulate it as sacramental?

Rudolf Steiner: That is something which is difficult to say, because experience of real cosmic communication is already sacramental. All of anthroposophic thought is something sacramental, as I have expressed it already in my Theory of Knowledge in the Goethian world view. Knowledge, when it is true knowledge, strives towards sacrament. It depends more upon us trying to bring things together than to find differences, because in reality you bring yourself together with it.

A question is posed with reference to specific words in a sentence from one of Rudolf Steiner's Dornach lectures of 1922 (indicated by a few connecting words by the stenographer).

Rudolf Steiner: ‘Anthroposophy needs no religious renewal’—so you have correctly formulated the sentence. What will it mean for Anthroposophy, whose foundation is in itself, to need religious renewal? The reverse: ‘Religious renewal needs Anthroposophy!’ What was said there in the lecture, that Anthroposophy needs ritual, was actually directed at Anthroposophists, not at the Movement for Religious Renewal. Such things need to be said because many people believe they need to orientate themselves out of principle, whether they should choose to take part in the Religious Movement. There were members of the Anthroposophic Movement who were much older than Dr Rittelmeyer; when they asked if they should take part in the ritual, one must say to them: ‘In the end you should know this yourself, you must be able to consult Dr Rittelmeyer.’—One may not say that the only way to come to anthroposophy is through the Religious Movement; that would be very wrong. My lecture at that time was directed at Anthroposophists. It is therefore self evident that the Anthroposophists, as they have become lately, could be consultants for the ritual. The opposite is deadly for Anthroposophy: when you say one couldn't come to an anthroposophic understanding (of Christ) if you do not come via the ritual. It is necessary to stress that the lecture was directed at Anthroposophists. The misunderstanding came about by both sides making mistakes of omission in their handling. There are many in the Religious Movement who doesn't know what they should be doing.

Marie Steiner: Some Anthroposophists created the saying: “Dr Steiner wants the Religious Movement to replace the Anthroposophical movement”; that was Dr Steiner's assessment. Similarly at the start of the Threefold Movement it was also suggested it should replace the Anthroposophical Movement. There have already been signs of people believing that Anthroposophy should be disassembled. Lecture cycles at the publishers were cancelled, and such like.

Rudolf Steiner: These things appear in outer practice and do not lead to inner difficulties.

A Participant pointed out that Rudolf Steiner had said during the lecture on 30 December 1922 that there were many people who are orientated towards knowledge but other people with dull religious inclination (text here only copied in key words by the stenographer).

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, that can't be denied, there are people with a thorough orientation towards knowledge and others with just a dull religious inclination. If I said that Anthroposophy can't do anything with people who have dull religious instincts, but only through something like the Religious Movement, then it is true. However it does not mean that the Religious Movement is applicable to only these kinds of people, but it means these people can't do anything with Anthroposophy. These people can only be reached through the ritual, not through Anthroposophy. People with a dull religious inclination are to be involved through the ritual and possibly will become very thoughtful people in their next lives.

A participant: People say: ‘The Anthroposophists have a university, you have a school for children.’ This is the kind of thing we have to deal with.

Rudolf Steiner: Recently I saw a big poster which came out of Austria with sheer nonsense on it, claiming how concerned individuals reach the spiritual world, but on the other side it said: ‘With my spiritual system I include all things which are only approached one-sidedly by Anthroposophy and Theosophy etc.’ With such things inner difficulties can't be judged. Such people one may not take as tragic. You can't be upset by this.

A participant: To prevent such things being proclaimed, the leader of the branch needs to take action.

Rudolf Steiner: These are outer things. The leader of branch is not involved with what members do outside the branch.

A participant: It is said directly that the two paths are contradictory. This frightens people and they stay away.

Rudolf Steiner: This is not inner difficulty, it is outer action of practical life. That these things happen cannot be stopped. One can't characterise something in a trivial way which is connected to the most serious profundity; for this is needed clear formulation, with serious words which can possibly appear as falsely expressed. What one or other branch leader has to say is quite insignificant. Otherwise we have to regard it as a task to only have branch leaders who are infallible. Your spiritual tools are there to educate people.

Emil Bock: In a certain sense there was no confusion in the beginning. We were looking for our field of work as somewhere different from the Anthroposophic field. We probably took the declarations of the opposition as our connecting point which made us too separate from the Anthroposophic work. Some of us also had no more time for it. As a result of these difficulties arising among the Anthroposophists we realised we could not speak from the side of Anthroposophists. As a result of the course of events we had separated ourselves somewhat out of the anthroposophical line. Now we ask you, please help us, to find the true way in the anthroposophic work again, because we have a strong desire not to fall away from the Anthroposophic work and see how as a result we have attracted the possibility to really contribute to the clarification of us not being seen as Anthroposophists but as standing for Religious Renewal. We do not want to be poor representatives of Anthroposophy.

Rudolf Steiner: The danger was actually there from the beginning. It all depends on the correct critical attitude being maintained. It is possible through many things that judgement is rectified. For several months already, Dr Rittelmeyer is very actively involved in the Management (Forstand) of the Anthroposophic Society. What he says is highly recommended. It is already so that the strength of each one of you becomes strongly recommended. I will never again, at an occasion where social relationships are to be healed by the ritual, participate without a representative of the Religious Movement working with me. At burials I will no longer speak alone, without a priest. The ritual needs to be celebrated by the priest. In this way correct judgement must be built up. In discussions misunderstandings arrive, but the facts speak for themselves.

It is important that the Religious Movement does not deny Anthroposophy. You are mistaken if you believe you can make progress without it. It is far better to be clear and stand firm on the foundation of Anthroposophy. Everything must be openly brought to light. You may not allow people to come to the opinion that it has nothing to do with Anthroposophy. The Waldorf School is completely related to Anthroposophy. Some lecturer has said that the Waldorf School is quite nice if only their basic views could be dropped.

It is this which I want to stress: If Anthroposophy is the foundation of the Waldorf School then we don't create an anthroposophic sect education, but by going through Anthroposophy we strive towards a general education of mankind.

We have the task not to clarify misunderstandings but simply to speak the truth.

The spiritual science of Anthroposophy aims to go beyond sensory perception, towards perception of things spiritual. It aims to progress from the intellectual approach—which we have to use in everyday life and in science as we know it—to other forms of soul activity, activities that permit insights to be gained into worlds that, while they are in evidence in the realm of the senses, nevertheless are not immediately accessible to the senses and to the intellect. Such inner soul activities are alive in what I have referred to in my written works as Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition.

When the term Imagination is used, it should not be taken to mean something vague and mysterious that is arrived at by abandoning the insights to be gained by clear, reasoned thinking and instead concentrating on something dimly stirring in the soul. On the contrary, it should be taken to mean something achieved by making full use of the insights gained with the rational mind, while also developing the mind further by activating latent soul forces. Such soul activity does not come to life within the usual intellectual concepts but initially does so in a world of images. Further development should, however, bring such images to expression in concepts that are as lucid as the insights gained by the intellect. In my books, I have described the spiritual exercises that are necessary to develop soul forces that in ordinary life and for ordinary science are hidden, in order to achieve imaginative perception.

I should like to begin today by giving you a brief picture of the imaginative perception that can be achieved by the method described in my books.

This imaginative perception is not to be found in the abstract ideas formed in our ordinary logical thinking. On the other hand, neither should it be thought that such perception is a matter of mere fancy. Let us start by looking at it in quite an everyday way. Consider the type of experience a person has when memories are recalled from the dim recesses of the mind, and also when such memories come up as though of their own accord, triggered by one thing or another. Clearly picture in your mind's eye such a recalled memory, for this will also be the way in which Imaginations are alive within the soul. They are alive with the same, and indeed often much greater, intensity.

By the way they appear, by their specific content, memories reveal the nature of an experience a person may have had years ago. Imaginations on the other hand, if they are genuine cognitive Imaginations called up in the soul, will be found not to relate primarily to personal experience. They may be exactly the same in character as memories, but they relate to a world that is not accessible to the physical senses, though nevertheless entirely objective, a world alive and active within the sense-perceptible world, but not revealing itself through the organs of sensory perception.

This is how one might characterize the more external aspect of imaginative perceptions from a positive point of view. Taking the negative approach, it is possible to say what these imaginative perceptions are not. They are not a kind of vision, or hallucinations and so on. On the contrary, they develop man's soul faculties in a direction opposite to the one the soul finds itself in when subject to visions, hallucinations and the like. Imaginative perceptions are healthy soul experiences. Visions, hallucinations etc. are unhealthy soul experiences. What are the characteristic features of visionary, hallucinatory activity, the features that matter to man? One characteristic is egoity subdued, clear awareness of Self subdued.

When we approach the world that is real to our senses with healthy commonsense and perception, we do so in what may be called a clear awareness of our own egoity. All the time we are looking at the outside world in a healthy way, having a healthy regard for our position in that outside world, we need to distinguish to some extent between our Self and the content of our Self. If we are overwhelmed by the content of consciousness, of Self, so that the necessary awareness of Self is partly paralysed, unhealthy conditions will result, including those of visionary, hallucinatory activity. Anyone able to consider these issues without prejudice will know that in the sphere of healthy sensory perception we are always to some extent aware of our own egoity, and he will know that visionary, hallucinatory activity is at a level below such healthy, normal sensory experience. He will not feel the least temptation to take such reduced levels of consciousness for revelations from a world that ranks higher than the world of the senses.

A person's attitude to these things may be taken as a criterion for their understanding, or lack of understanding, of genuine anthroposophical spiritual science. Anyone thinking he can gain more valid insights into the world by visions and hallucinations than by sensory perception really cannot be said to have a true feeling for Anthroposophy. Sensory perception brings us into relationship with the outside world. Visionary, hallucinatory activity takes this relationship down to a lower level of awareness, reducing to the level of subjectivity what in sensory perception definitely takes a purer, more objective form. The content of experience gained at this lower level has arisen in an unhealthy way out of the organism itself. It pervades our sensory perception and in case of illness drives them out altogether, replacing them with something that is pathological.

Keeping firmly in mind what I have just said, it will be essential, in all circumstances and for any form of cognitive Imagination, not to tune down the relationship we have to the objective world outside us, in the sphere of the senses, paralysing it, but to tune it up and let it receive the stimulus of active life.

It is reflection on our own Self, on the I, which raises sensory perception above the level of mere visionary, hallucinatory, dreamlike experience. Having grasped this, we can also see why the spiritual scientist insists on the necessity, if cognitive Imagination is to be achieved, of doing specific exercises. Initially these will not reduce the inner intensity of our sense of egoity, but rather increase and enhance it.

This brings me to something that is most eminently necessary for the achievement of knowledge not directly accessible to the senses, something that may present a risk—not for the organism, but primarily for the mental and specifically the moral condition of man—unless all the rules outlined in my books Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Occult Science are observed.

The sense of egoity needs to be enhanced, reflection on the Self to become more powerful. If people do not take the preventive measures I have so often described, which will enable them to tolerate such an increased sense of egoity without taking harm morally and psychologically, an element of megalomania, delusion of grandeur, is bound to arise in the soul (I am not in this case speaking of the pathological condition).

One often sees this when people are in the early stages of doing the exercises that are to help them gain knowledge of things not perceptible to the senses. They want to skip the necessary preparations, with the result that they do not gain in humility but really develop a kind of megalomania. This has to be said openly, for surely no one who has achieved genuine anthroposophical knowledge would wish to close his eyes to the fact that such megalomania is indeed often unleashed in people who have some ulterior motive or other in declaring themselves followers of Anthroposophy. When the sense of egoity is enhanced in this way, something quite specific occurs. It is this: it is possible to increase the same sense of egoity, it is possible to make the ego much more aware of its existence, to a very much higher degree than in everyday life. How does this enhancement first of all show itself?

In everyday life, and also in everyday science, there is something I would call ‘awareness of the moment’. We need to get a clear idea of what this awareness of the moment really means. This can be done by distinguishing the way we experience an event where we are right in the here and now, an event we perceive with our senses, grasp with our intellect, of which we form concepts here and now, and to which we may also relate at this moment due to will forces being stirred. Take a good look at your soul life when it is in the position just described, and compare it with the inner state of your soul life when it is given up to a complex of memories. Consider the nature of the soul content which memory presents in the form of images. Something we experienced, say, ten years ago, in what was then the here and now, comes to experience in the present moment, though with less intensity than something we experience right now. It comes to experience as something that is objective where our awareness of the moment is concerned. Our awareness of the moment looks back through the memory concept to something we experienced ten years ago. Compare the intensity of experience in the case of a present event with that relating to a past event. Compared to our experience of the present event, how little are we involved with our total personality in something that for the moment we are only conscious of through memory images.

This changes when a person progresses to cognitive Imagination, for now experience can be managed at will, without the person being overcome by it. What happens is that the experience of egoity gradually increases to such an extent that ego experience arises for the whole of our past life, which normally is only memory, as though we were really living in those past experiences as in something immediately present. Awareness of the moment is expanded, becoming an awareness moving with the river of time. That is the first stage in the experience of cognitive Imagination. The I, the ego, is allowed to flow out into the experiences one has had in this life, from the moment of birth. When I speak of our not being overcome by such intensified experiences, I mean that anyone who advances to such a level of perception in the right way will be in a position to have deliberate control of such outflowing of the ego into the past. He will be able to determine the beginning and end of the process, in all other respects remaining the same person he was before, reflecting at the same level of everyday consciousness. There must be nothing overwhelming, and what we achieve has to be subject to deliberate choice just as much as the capacity for another form of perception, the use of any other complex of judgements in ordinary life, is subject to the deliberate choice of the person making such judgements. Otherwise there is no sound foundation to these things. It does however mean a considerable intensification of the ego when an aspect of ourselves that normally lives only in the moment is expanding its power of experience to cover the whole of one's life.

For moments of perception when imaginative perception is to be the capacity used, one does in a sense become another person, in so far as one is now not merely living in the present with a certain sense of egoity but is living within time, having completely taken time into one's experience. In normal experience only the present moment is subjective; the rest of the course of time, including all one has experienced from birth, really is objective. It will be found that when capacities for inner perception are thus systematically developed we are in fact entering into objectivity. The first way of entering into objectivity consists in entering into the flow of time in the area I have outlined to you.

In the course of this enhancement, egoity reaches a kind of culmination. What happens is that egoity first has to become enhanced through exercise, but will then, in the process of enhancement, come to a point where laws inherent in the situation cause enhancement to cease. From a certain point onwards the ego will then of its own accord come to reduce the intensity. It is only up to a certain point that the ego is able to achieve further enhancement in developing perception with regard to its inner life. After this, it will experience a decrease in its sensing of egoity, as the curve moves downwards. What happens is that the ego abandons the experience of its own concerns—which had been the first thing to develop in experiencing the flow of time—and moves out into experience that now is no longer limited to the river of its own time and into experience of the cosmic life of the universe. This is an experience that does not, in the first place, appear in the form of abstract intellectual concepts but as something we may call Imagination, because it takes the form of images. The experience is exactly of the same kind as that described for the way one comes to understand freedom in my Philosophy of Freedom, yet the content of this experience is such that the images entering into consciousness do not present a content personal to ourselves, but a universal content, just as our sensory perceptions have universal content.

It is possible in spiritual research to describe every single step, indeed even the smallest of steps, that leads from ordinary intellectual perception to the development of imaginative perception. When this imaginative perception first occurs it is—and we certainly may call it this—an inner experience of destiny. And this brings me to a point where a distinction must be made between the process of seeking knowledge of things beyond sensory perception and that of seeking ordinary knowledge, the latter today considered the only objective knowledge. The ordinary search for knowledge will in most cases proceed without disasters and sudden reversals. What the whole person, not just the brain person, experiences in the search for ordinary knowledge is very much secondary to the actual process of perception. Yes, a scientist may experience a certain pleasure and satisfaction when making a new discovery, but the pleasure felt in what has happened, in the invention, the discovery, only bears a very distant relation to the method of discovery used. Neither have other traumatic experience and sudden reversals, things we may call the tribulations of examinations and the like, anything to do with the process of acquiring knowledge. We can have those in our normal experience of making discoveries, but they have nothing to do with the process of discovery as such. Yet, on the other hand, when we progress from ordinary intellectual perception to imaginative perception, it is the whole, the complete person who is involved in experience, representing inner destiny.

Such inner destiny is experienced particularly when at some point or other in the development of such perception it happens that, having first of all had more inward experiences, still connected with the person, these experiences shift outwards, into being able to see through the secrets of the cosmos. Let me give you an example that will at the same time also—figuratively speaking—take you a little into the laboratory of the spiritual scientist. It happened quite a long time ago now. I had been going through a process of inner deliberation and assessment that specifically concerned the question as to what is the state of soul experience of someone who is forced, due to his life impulses, to become a materialist, and what is the position of a person who feels driven by his life impulses to become an idealist or a spiritualist—‘spiritual’ here being the term used in German philosophy—or how such soul constitutions acquired in the world stand in relation to each other. I tried to put myself objectively into the inner experience that fills the idealist, the spiritualist; I tried, as it were, to slip into the state of mind that can take hold of a person in this way. For this is the only way of really coming to understand the world of the soul from the inside, by being a materialist with the materialist, of one's own free will, though only for the purpose of trying it out, and on the other hand also trying out being an idealist or spiritualist in the same way. This puts one in a new relationship to the very way in which a person logically represents, in all he is, what then becomes the content of his life philosophy.

I am of course only referring to the method here. Anyone who has in honesty, with inner integrity, gone through something of the kind I have just described, will perceive karmic elements also in these specific soul states, for you come to see, in quite a different way, how people can be compelled towards materialism or spiritualism. You will cease being sharply critical in the usual sense, judging others harshly and entirely from your own point of view, and so on. Soul experience is taken to another level, it becomes different in kind.

Having gone through this for some time, one discovers that meditations like these, that take hold of the soul life, are something of a real soul process, going straight towards the development of faculties for objective cognitive Imagination. If the soul has prepared itself in the way I have described, it will have achieved a state where suddenly there will arise before it the insight needed to experience, in perception, how the movement of the sun through the Zodiac, something normally regarded as merely a physical, mechanical process, is indeed a living, cosmic, organic process. Something previously only presenting itself as a mechanism figured in the cosmos has achieved real content as an image. I have seen something new in the cosmos. Such widening of awareness in things relating to the cosmos is karmic. It shows us what it means to have strengthened the ego by carrying out certain intellectual operations with much greater intensity, and when a certain culmination has been reached to feel this ego flow out into the world, so that we then stand right in the world with our ego. This is an experience that points to a karmic element in the process of gaining such insights, a process of cognition that does indeed involve the whole person. It is this involvement of the whole person, as distinct from the ordinary process that only involves the head aspect of man, that is the true distinguishing mark. My intention here has been to show clearly that the road to cognitive Imagination is not something I would present in some vague, mystic form but a process that can be just as accurately defined as the solution of a particular mathematical problem. The capacity for cognitive Imagination acquired by such means is there in the soul in the same way as mathematical, geometrical forms are present in the soul, in great clarity and lucidity. The soul content gained is not one we give ourselves up to in a nebulous way, as a secret inner experience. It is a soul content as lucid and as much connected with a sense of our own reality being maintained as a mathematical soul content.

This has been a somewhat superficial presentation of an imaginative life coming to reside in the soul that will then lead to insights into the world which lies beyond sensory perception, in a way to be described later. It is however important always to remember that the search for such forms of knowledge and the efforts made to achieve them do not represent something arbitrary wanting to come into the culture and civilization of man as it is developing in the present day but rather something that arises with a certain necessity, out of the very development of the present age. Today, it is necessary to work in a very conscious way to achieve the imaginative perception I have described, and this will then also be able to find expression in concepts, having taken the roundabout route via pictorial imaging. In earlier periods of man's evolution this was aimed at in a more instinctive way. The progress of human evolution has been such that earlier times did not gain insight through the logical and empirical reasoning that has come to be acknowledged as the right way for us since the middle of the 15th century. In earlier times, Imaginations were sought instinctively, in a way, and were also achieved in that fashion.

At the time when spiritual vision was of this instinctive type, it was not possible to clothe it in concepts. Today we are able to express ourselves in concepts; we are able to do so through science and because of the way we are used to dealing with the inorganic sphere by forming concepts. But that is something which has arisen only from the time of Galileo and Copernicus. Before that, people were unable to use concepts in this way. The concepts used by the Greeks were something completely different. They used pictures, pictures created with lines, or perhaps also combinations of colours. Let me mention just in passing that in earlier periods of man's evolution knowledge was not handled in the same general fashion, one might say democratic fashion, as it is handled today. Instead, those who had gained insight and knowledge formed special groups, relatively small groups that it has become the habit to call secret societies and the like. Traces of these, though always misleading traces, are still to be found in all kinds of orders and similar groups. Those gaining insight shut themselves away in small groups. They carefully prepared the people they admitted to their groups, so that they might achieve such insights as were thought to be important without danger to their moral life. And symbolic, pictorial presentations were used to teach what could be experienced in instinctive Imaginations. Such images represented the body of knowledge taught in the old schools of wisdom, just as today the body of knowledge is in books, but in those days the teaching aids were entirely in the form of pictures that had their origin in the mind of man.

Now I do not want to talk to you in rather nebulous terms. Let me therefore call to mind something quite definite—one particular symbol. One symbol coming up again and again was used to depict imaginative perception of the process of cognition in man himself. The process was not described in the way a modern expert in the theory of knowledge would do so. It was beheld in a form of instinctive clairvoyance, and they represented what they saw by drawing a picture of a serpent biting its own tail. That image showed a major characteristic of the process of attaining to knowledge. But in fact the picture I have described to you is only something that came to be used later, more or less for popular presentation. The actual symbolic images were carefully guarded secrets in the groups, guarded because there was a certain desire for power, the desire to be the ones in the know while others were not in the know. The picture shown in public, of the serpent biting its own tail, should in fact be the image of a serpent that not merely bites its own tail but swallows it, as it were. As much of the tail as enters into the mouth becomes spiritualized. And then something would show itself that would need to be painted in subtler colours—if the serpent itself had been painted in strong colours—as a kind of aura for the serpent. The result was a somewhat more complex image. If we try to express it in simple words, we need to use the expression Dr Unger was using in his lecture this morning, though he actually kept apologizing for using it. (It is indeed necessary, in a way, to apologize for many things, even if they are perfectly justifiable today, when speaking on the basis of Anthroposophy.) Dr Unger repeatedly used the term ‘invert.’ Imagine you have an elastic ball and push the upper part in, so that it becomes inverted. What has been above is below, and we have a kind of bowl or dish instead of a sphere. Now imagine the inversion continuing not just as far as the bottom of the sphere but beyond it, passing through it, as it were. The sphere through which the inverted part has passed now has a halo of light around it, and this has arisen from the inverted part. It is a figure we cannot easily make a drawing of, but it represents, in simplified form, the symbol used in those secret societies to indicate the process of attaining to knowledge, to stimulate a vision of this process in the people who were to learn from such vision.

As I have said, those figures were kept a deep secret, because of a certain feeling of power. They were obtained only by achieving inner vision of a cosmic process. There was no other way of developing a sense for the inner experience and understanding of such figures. To use an expression that perhaps is a little light-weight in relation to the process concerned, I would say: Inner spiritual contents arose to give people something for which they attempted to find symbolic expression, in something that might be understood in itself. Those were fixed instinctive Imaginations.

Then, in more recent times, discoveries were made in science that in a certain sense came to be epitomized in the work of Haeckel.¹ Haeckel had a certain way of gaining an overview of whatever he was working on, a way we may indeed call brilliant. Out of the background I was able to outline to you yesterday,² he felt the need to make drawings of what his researches into animal nature showed him, i.e. everything concerned with the physical organization of the animal. If you open Haeckel's books and look at his drawings (others have of course also made drawings, but Haeckel, I would say, made them the fundamental core of his whole thinking process) showing the early stages of embryonic development, the stages by which he hoped to show that ontogeny³ is a shortened recapitulation of phylogeny,⁴ you will find drawings that would remind anyone who knows of these things of the instinctive Imaginations recorded by the wise men of the past. Haeckel studied the initial stages of embryonic development known as gastrulation, the development of a cup-like form where the cells do indeed become arranged in a way that resembles the inversion of one half of a sphere into the other. He came to visualize a hypothetical entity, the Gastraea, that was once supposed to have had that form in the course of phylogenetic evolution, a form he felt was now being repeated at this early stage of embryonic development, the gastrula stage. In other words, what Haeckel drew was supposed to be a faithful reproduction of processes occurring in the world that is accessible to our senses, faithful though obtained only through evidence of the outer senses, and perhaps slightly coloured by his imagination and expressed as a hypothesis.

I am mentioning something to you that may be of no interest whatsoever to many people today, yet it must be regarded, by anyone following the path of knowledge with integrity, as a truly outstanding fact in cultural development. Haeckel drew the outside world and arrived at the beginnings of symbolic figures that were considered highly esoteric in an earlier age, figures still preserved here and there, though very much in secret. Within certain power-hungry organizations it is considered downright treason to speak of them. In the past, these figures had emerged from inner experience; they were records of instinctive Imaginations. This means nothing less but that science has arrived at a point—in progressing to insight into processes within the animal organism—where scientists have to draw things representing external processes in the same way as long ago people drew what emerged from an imaginative life that arose freely in the soul, achieving cosmic insight by intensification of the inner life. Inner experience was used to create symbols that completely and utterly resemble those now achieved by drawing what is seen in the outside world. More and quite different ones will be found as science progresses. This is an utterly outstanding fact in the history of cultural development.

We have now reached a point in human evolution, as far as the achievement of knowledge is concerned, where empirical, outside observation of animal life forces images upon us that formerly were found in the innermost recesses of the soul. Exoteric study today yields contents that once formed part of the most profound esoteric life. Haeckel arrived at this in a wholly naive fashion. The process is a great deal more interesting if we observe it in a mind that did not so much arrive at it in naive fashion, for example, Goethe who, as I showed you yesterday, went through the stages of his cognitive experience with some awareness. In the 1790s, Goethe drew his archetypal plant for Schiller, a symbolic plant. He sketched a few lines to show what he felt to be the plant that appears in all plant forms, in metamorphosis. Schiller said: ‘That is no empiricism, that is an idea.’ Goethe's reply was: ‘Then I see my idea with my own eyes.’ Goethe was aware that he had drawn something objective, something he had seen in the plant world. How was he able to do so? In my writings on Goethe, I have on several occasions described the inner process by which Goethe was impelled to look at plant life in such a way that he arrived at this theory of metamorphosis.

In the meantime, a younger man who at one time used to visit me a great deal, has published a dissertation in Berlin—that is a few years ago now—on Swedenborg's influence on Goethe.⁵ This dissertation is one of the most outstanding literary works in our day. Such things generally disappear from sight in the great mass of unread dissertations that are published. This dissertation on Goethe's philosophy of nature in relation to Swedenborg shows how Goethe arrived at certain conceptual categories for the very reason that as a young man he had fully entered into Swedenborg's state of mind, categories that were then more or less unconsciously to lead him to his morphological Imaginations relating to the plant world. It is most interesting to look at Goethe's relationship to Swedenborg in this respect.

Where Swedenborg is concerned, the situation is that he certainly was an eminent scientist when at his peak. Until his fortieth year, he evolved conceptual categories that enabled him to proceed in a truly scientific manner, in accordance with the state of science in his day, and a scientific association is now publishing his previously unpublished scientific work as something of the greatest value. Until he reached the age of forty, Swedenborg was one of the leading, representative scientists of his day. This was because synthesizing ideas were alive in his mind that made it possible for him to present the wider contexts of natural processes. Then he fell ill, in a way, and into his sick organism poured the conceptual categories he had previously evolved for the study of nature. Certain mystical natures are now revering something in Swedenborg that is his former scientific attitude of mind metamorphosed through disease.

A healthy spiritual vision will be unable to see the spiritual worlds the way Swedenborg did. It will see nothing of the personifications, of the pictures entirely deriving from his own constitution that only need a few changes to be completely like life on earth, providing we remove a certain weightiness from it. I will not go into details about the basis of Swedenborg's illness, but in order to avoid misunderstanding let me point out that Swedenborg's achievements as a seer can nevertheless be of tremendous interest, because something has flowed into this that came from a great, far-seeing mind capable of scientific thinking. All this conceptual synthesis, as one might call it, that emerged in Swedenborg held the most tremendous fascination for Goethe when he was a young man. and Goethe evolved in a healthy way, in his morphology, in his penetration of the plant world based on characterization and scientific study, what in Swedenborg had developed into pathological visions.

This connection between Goethe and Swedenborg is of the greatest interest, for here a road was taken in a pathological direction by one person, while another, with greatest intensity, went in a direction that was healthy. And the concepts formulated by Goethe when he came to evolve his plastic vision of the plant world are already part way towards the kind of drawings or ‘paintings’ I would say, using the term very widely, that Haeckel felt impelled to use for the organic world of the animals. But Goethe was more alert. He was so alert that he followed Swedenborgianism only in so far as it was healthy. Yet Goethe, too, inevitably came to create images of the outside world in pictures that in earlier times, when men acquired knowledge in more inward ways, arose or were brought up from within. In Goethe's day, cognitive life had already reached a point, at least for Goethe and those who understood him, where it was necessary to look in the outside world for the same picture language that had formerly been found in instinctive Imaginations.

The development of man progresses, and it would be wrong to remain based on instinctive Imaginations. Life in Imaginations now has to be worked towards in full awareness, as I have described at the beginning of today's talk. The result will be as follows. Using the rational intellect, we are able to represent the inorganic world around us in measure, weight and number, to arrive at constructive concepts of a world which has its being in measure, weight and number. Moving up into the plant world, into animal nature, such intellectual analysis is not enough, for the very reason that the scientific approach has made some progress in our age. We need another form of presentation.

In dealing with inorganic nature, man uses his rational mind and lets this inorganic nature become part of his inner life and so arrives at knowledge, at insight into this world, in terms of measure, weight and number. Yet when man tries to apply to the plant world, the animal world, the same approach he is already using in his study of the inorganic world—a way not open to earlier ages with their instinctive Imaginations—he finds he simply cannot rely on a way of comprehension with mind and soul that is based entirely on intellectual concepts. Instead, we find Goethe arriving more consciously and Haeckel quite naively and unconsciously, at a form of presentation reminiscent of earlier, instinctive Imaginations. This serves to indicate that the progress that has gradually been made in the observation of nature is the very reason why, on advancing from mineral to plant, from animal to man, and to the acquisition of knowledge about the world altogether, we have to use higher levels of cognition, have to advance from our ordinary intellectual comprehension to Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. More will be said about this in the following talks. It will then be obvious that there are still other healthy spheres, in addition to those frequently enumerated, which can be used to relate to present-day science, a science to which Haeckel brought a certain touch of his own. The relationship has to be a living one. It is necessary to consider this science in depth, in order to show how its own further development has made it necessary to enter into imaginative life in full conscious awareness. In what follows, an objective presentation of the sources of anthroposophical knowledge will show that when I came to evolve the anthroposophical view at the turn of the century it really was a matter of showing how it is necessary to progress from what Haeckel put forward—or at least hinted at, rather naively, in relation to outer nature—to a true spiritual science.

The point is that in the approach Haeckel developed to the study of nature only the pictures he drew had in fact real significance. In these pictures he developed all kinds of concepts. He took these concepts from his own period. I have often said, when lecturing on Haeckel, that we should take the first pages of his much-maligned book Die Welträtsel (The Riddles of the Universe), where the reality of animal nature is shown positively and constructively, and tear off the final pages, which are the greater part of the book, full of polemics. This would still leave us with a book of great value for anyone wanting to find the right way of entering into organic nature today. But the concepts Haeckel extracted from all that, the concepts presented in the part of the book I am saying we should tear off, these derive from the general conceptual approach of more recent origin. And these concepts have gradually become dead concepts as far as organic nature is concerned.

Haeckel was working with living views and with dead concepts. This is something I have often had to refer to in lectures on Haeckelism, and I therefore wrote my pamphlet Haeckel und seine Gegner⁶ This is based on the feeling that while Haeckel expressed his views in dead concepts that are not appropriate, his opponents used their own dead concepts in opposing his views. So even in those days the issue was the same as we have it today when spiritual science concerns itself with science: it would be wrong for spiritual science orientated in Anthroposophy to approach science with criticism, using dead concepts. Instead, it is necessary to take up the views science has achieved, the advances made in research into nature, and take them forward into living concepts. The knowledge gained in science should not be opposed in a dead spirit, but taken onwards to the living spirit.

• 1. Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, German biologist, 1834–1919. With reference to his ‘Gastraea,’ see Rudolf Steiner's comments in his Riddles of Philosophy.
• 2. Lecture given in Stuttgart on 1 September 1921. (Translator)
• 3. Ontogeny—basically the embryonic development of the individual. (Translator)
• 4. Phylogeny—an animal's pedigree in terms of evolutionary descent. (Translator)
• 5. Hans Schlieper, Emanuel Swedenborgs System der Naturphilosophie besonders in seiner Beziehung zu Goethe-Herderschen Anschauungen. Dissertation of 16 February 1901. Berlin: G. Schade, 1901.
• 6. Haeckel und seine Gegner (Haeckel and his opponents), 53 pages, Minden i.W., 1900 Reprinted in Methodische Grundlagen der Anthroposophie 1884–1901. GA 30. English Translation in: Three Essays on Haeckel and Karma. London: Theosophical Publishing Co. 1914.

I do not propose today to link up with what I was saying here last Sunday in the manner usually intended when people speak of continuing a subject. On that occasion I tried , as far as this was possible in a mere outline, to show in a general pedagogical and introductory way how we are to conceive the organisation of a life of spirit, a life instruction, independent of either the economic life of that of the State. I tried, too, to show how, once this independence is established, the various branches of instruction have to be applied in a new way, in order to give what must reveal itself to teacher and educa tor some kind of anthropological and pedagogical form or, perhaps it is better to say, a kind of anthropologically pedagogical activity. On the same occasion I remarked that one essential in the future will be the training and particularly the examining of a prospective teacher or educator to discover whether his personality is fitted for the task.

I will reserve the direct continuation of these matters for a later occasion and try to pursue my main subject in quite another way. I shall try to put before you clearly how it is necessary for me to think out of the evolutionary forces of the age—and how today we should have to speak at teachers' conferences, for example, or at somethigg of the sort, where people really desire to serve their times. At present it is a fact that, if we want to emerge from utter confusion and chaos, many things will have to be spoken of quite differently from how the present thinking habits prompt us to do.

Today even at teachers' conferences people talk—as can be proved by striking examples—on the old hackneyed lines, whereas it would be possible to introduce a really liberal education for the future, only if educators and teachers were able to rise to the level from which they could survey the very great task s at present facing us, insof ar as, out of the very nature of education and instruction, these tasks lend themselves to logical development. True, the manner in which I shall speak to you today will not be what I should like to hold up as a standard or even a pattern. But what I want to do is to indicate the angle from which we should speak to teachers so that they may themselves receive the impulse to get to work on an education having free play. It is just those who do the teaching who must rise to the level of the great and all-embracirg tasks of the age; they must be first to gain insight into the nature of the forces concealed behind present world events; they must see which forces have to be recognised as coming from the past and therefore needing to be superseded, which forces need to be specially cherished as having their roots in our present existence. These matters must be looked at today culturally and politically, in the best and most ideal sense, if we are to create a foundation for the impulses which will have to exist in those who are teachers. Above all, people must become aware that at every stage of instruction and guidance our education has suffered impoverishment and the reasons for this must be understood. The principal reason is that education has lost its direct connection with life. The educationalist today talks of many things which have to do with method, above all of the tremendous benefits that education is to derive from State control. Apparently, in his almost automatic way, he will still be speaking of these benefits when in theory he will in part have accepted the concept of the necessary threefold social organism. There has never been an age when thinking has been so automatic as it is now, and this is particularly evident where ideas on education are in question. These ideas on education have suffered under something that up to now we have been unable to escape; we must, however, escape from it. There are indeed questions today that cannot find so easy a solution as the following: Judging from past experience this or that will be possible. Then doubt will immediately take possession of the hearts and minds of men. Today there are innumerable questions which will have to be answered by: Is it not imperative that something should happen if we are to extricate ourselves from confusion and chaos? Here we have to do with questions of will, where the often apparently justified intellectual doubt regarding the validity of experience can settle nothing. For experience has value only when worked upon in a suitable way by the will. Today, though very little worked upon thus by the will, there is much in the way of experience. In the educational sphere itself a great deal is said against which, from the purely intellectual and scientific point of view, not much objection is to be made, and which from its own point of view is quite clever. But today it is important to understand the real issue—above all to understand how alien from real life our education has become.

I should here like again to refer to a personal incident. In Berlin about twenty-three years ago a society was formed concerned with college education. Its President was the astronomer Wilhelm Forster. I too belonged to this society. We had to hold a course of lectures most of which were given on the assumption that all it was necessary to know were certain stereotyped things about dealing with the various branches of science, about grouping these into faculties, and so on. I tried—though at the time I was little understood—to draw attention to the fact that a college should be a department of life in general, that whoever wants to speak about college education ought to start with the question: From the standpoint of world history, in what situations are we in life at present in all its different spheres, and what impulses have we to observe in these various spheres of life in order to let these impulsesstream into the college, thus linking it with the common life? When we work out such things, not in the abstract but concretely, countless points of view are revealed which, for example, help to reduce the time to be expended on any particular subject, and new ways of dealing with the various subjects are discovered. The moment any proposal is made for this reduction simply out of the ideas with which education works today, everything falls to the ground; the educational centres in question become mere institution s for training people who have no real connection with the world.

Now what are the intrinsic reasons, the deep lying reasons, for all this? Whereas in recent times thinking on the lines of natural science has made such wonderful progress, this fine method of thinking, which on the one hand has come to look upon man as purely a being of nature, has—to speak truly—cut off all knowledge of the real man. We have spoken quite recently of the tremendous importance of this knowledge of man's being for the right kind of teacher—the knowledge that recognises the real nature of the living human being, not in the formal way in which he is so often represented today, but in accordance with his inner being, particularly in accordance with the evolution of that being. There is a symptom, to which I have often referred here, showing how dreadfully foreign man's real being is to the modern educational movement. When a thing of this kind is said it may perhaps be considered paradoxical; it must be said today, however, for it is of the utmost importance. The loss of any real knowledge of man has produced that dreary, barren effort that is a branch of what is called experimental psychology against which, as such, I have no complaint. The so-called intelligence tests are a horrible travesty of what is really beneficial in the sphere of education. I have perhaps often described how, by certain physical contrivances, experiments are made with the avowed object of testing the memory, the understanding, of a human being, in order to register whether the particular person's memory and understanding are good or bad. In a purely mechanical manner, by giving part of a sentence and demanding its completion, or by some other device, it is sought to form an idea of the abilities of a growing human being. This is a symptom of how the direct relation between people—which alone is profitable—is a forgotten factor in our culture. It is a symptom of something cheerless which has been allowed to develop; but today it is admired as being remarkable progress—this testing of intelligence, this offspring of what are called in modern universities psychological laboratories. Until people see how necessary it is to return to a direct intuitive knowledge of man by studying the human being himself, particularly the growing human being, until we get rid of the unhappy gulf in this sphere between man and man, we shall never be able to understand how to lay the foundations for an education that is really alive and for a life of the spirit that is free. We shall have to purge all our educational establishments of this desire to experiment on the human being in order to satisfy the pedagogues. As groundwork for a reasonable psychology, I consider experimental psychology of value; in the form in which it has crept into education and even into the courts, however, it is a pervesion of the sound development of the evolving human being, between whom and his equally evolving fellow there is no yawning chasm. We have brought matters to such a pa ss that from what we strive after culturally we have excluded everything human; we must retrace our steps and once again unfold what belongs to man. We have also to find the courage to make an energetic stand against much of what in recent times has aroused growing admiration as a great achievement; otherwise we shall never make any advance. This explains how those today, who leave college with the intention of teaching, and proceed to educate human beings, have the most misguided conceptions about the real nature of man, and do not acquire the true conceptions because, in place of them, the kind of superficiality has arisen which we see in these intelligence tests. This will have to be recognised as a symptom of decline. We must seek within ourselves the capacity for judging the abilities of a human being, since he is a man and we ourselves are men. It must be understood that, because of this, every other method is unsound, for it destroys the fulness of what is immediately and vitally human—so necessary a factor in beneficial progress.

Now today these things are not seen at all. It is of primary importance that they should be seen if we are to progress. How often these things have been spoken of here; sometimes they have provoked a smile. But people have no notion that the reason for speaking of these things so frequently today is that they are an essential part of our life of spirit. There is nothing to be gained today by listening to what is said here as if it were a novelette; the important thing is to learn to distinguish between what is merely perceived, observed, and what may contain within it the seed to action. The culminating point of all the anthroposophical endeavors here is the building up of the idea of man, the passing on of the knowledge of man. It is this that we need. We need it because, from the very nature of the times, we have to overcome three forms of compulsion, the survivals of earlier days. First, the most ancient compulsion which masquerades today in various forms—the compulsion of the priesthood. We should make more progress in our study of the present situation were we today to recognise these disguises of certain obsolete facts and of the ideas and impulses unfortunately still living on in the thinking of the peoples of Europe, America and even in Asia—the modern disguises of the old priestly compulsion.

As our second compulsion we have something that develops later in man's historical evolution, also disguised in various ways today—the political compulsion.

And thirdly, coming comparatively late, there is the economic compulsion.

Out of these three compelling impulses men have to work their way; this is their task for the immediate present. They can get free today only if, to begin with, they clearly perceive the masks which in various ways disguise what is living in our midst, the masks which conceal the three compelling impulses among us.

Above all today the teacher must look to the level on which these things can be discussed, where, by means of the light gained from these things, we can illuminate contemporary evolution and thus become aware how one or other of these compulsions is lurking in some contemporary fact. Only when we find the courage to say: It is because teachers have isolated themselves, withdrawn into their schools, that such ill-judged ideas have been thought out as this testing of human efficiency by experiment—which is merely a symptom of much else... But everywhere today, where either general or special educational methods are spoken of, we see the result of this withdrawal behind the school walls where teachers have been banished by the State; we see this remoteness from real life. None of the principal branches of life, namely, the spiritual, the rights or political, and the economic, can develop fully at the present time—I say expressly at the present time, and particularly in this part of Europe—if these three branches do not stand each on its own ground. For the extreme west, America, and for the extreme east, it is rather different but, just because this is so, we ourselves must be aware of this. We shall have to think ultimately in concrete terms and not in abstract ones; otherwise, where space is concerned, we shall arrive at some theoretical Utopia for mankind throughout the entire earth, which is nonsense, or a kind of millennium in historical evolution—also nonsense. Thinking concretely in this sphere means thinking for a definite place and a definite time. We shall have something more to say about this today.

The attention of the teacher must be directed towards the great world phenomena; he must be able to survey what is there in our present spiritual life, and what changes have to be made in this present life by bringing out of the growing human being something different from what has been cultivated in him of late years. What has been cultivated of late years has, among those in educational circles who should have been active as teachers, led to terrible specialisation. On occasions such as speech-days, gatherings of scientists and other meetings of experts, we have often heard the praises of this specialisation vociferously sung. Naturally it would be foolish on my part were I unable to see the necessity for this specialisation in scientific spheres; but it needs to be balanced or we just create a gulf between man and man, no longer meeting our fellow men with understanding, but as a specialist confronting him helplessly as another kind of specialist. This gives us nothing on which to bare our belief in a specialist but the fact that he bears the stamp of some existing body of knowledge. We have been very near bringing this specialisation from the school into life. Whether the present vicissitudes will preserve us from the unhappy fate of having psychologists brought into the courts in addition to all the other experts, as many people wish, so that experiments can be made on criminals in the same way as they are made on our young people—this remains to be seen. I have less to say against the matter itself than against the way in which up to now it has been dealt with.

This is how things are under State control in the sphere of education, of school instruction.

Now after the short time in which people were talking of the inherent rights of manor, as they were then called, natural rights—no matter whether these were contestable or not—after this comparatively short time, came the age when people began to be shy of discussing these natural rights. It was taken for granted that whoever did so was a dilettante; in other words anyone was a dilettante who assumed the existence of something that established rights for man as an individual human being; the only professional way was to speak of historical rights, that is, of those rights which had developed in the course of history. People had not the courage to go into the question of the actual rights and on that account confined themselves to a study of the so-called historical ones. This especially is something that a teacher must know. Teachers must have their attention drawn, particularly during their conferences, to how in the course of the nineteenth century the concept of natural rights has been lost, or lives on in rights today in disguise, and how a certain wavering, a certain inner doubt, has persisted in face of what is merely historical. Whoever is acquainted with the conditions knows that the principal impulse today goes in the direction of historical rights, that people are at pains—to use Goethe's words—not to speak of inherent rights. In my lectures here I have frequently focus sed attention on how we must openly and honestly come to a final settlement in this matter. Hence we should not shrink from giving a true account of what has to be abolished, for nothing new can ever be set up unless there is a clear concept of what has impaired man's habits of thinking and perceiving.

It may well be said that our mid-European culture is a particularly forcible example of how a really positive idea of the State has broken down. There was an attempt to build it up again in the nineteenth century. It foundered, under the influence of the idea of purely historical rights, which made their impulses felt without this being noticed by those concerned. Whereas these people believed they were pursuing science in a way that was free from all prejudice, it really amounted to their pursuing it in the interest of the State or for some economic purpose. Not only into the carrying on of science but also into its content, and especially into all that has became practical science, there has flowed what has come from the influence of the State. Hence today we have practically no national economy because a free thinking, established on its own basis, has been unable to develop. Hence, too just where the most important laws of the economic life are concerned, there is today an utter lack of understanding given laws relating to genuine political economy are mentioned. We can see especially clearly into what confusion education has been thrown—education on a grand scale—for it has no connection with life, it has withdrawn from life into the schoolroom. A really living study of anything can never arise if we show merely what is to be experienced outwardly, without showing the way in which it should be experienced. The one thing cultivated today, namely, the worship of merely outward experience, leads simply to confusion, especially when it is a conscientious worship. We need the capacity to cultivate the inner impulses which lead us to the right experiences.

You will remember that last Friday I called your attention, in the necessarily brief way for lectures such as these, to how, by studying the conditions of European economy at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century, we were able to gain a clear idea of the forming of associations in future from impulses arising out of production and consumption. But to this point of observation, which underlies the whole of European life and proceeds from what is so clearly to be learnt in the general change-over to our modern age at the end of the fourteenth century, we come with the right point of view only by studying anthroposophy in its deepest aspects. The essential facts are not falsified by this, but we are directed to that point in evolution where is revealed in clear symptoms what lies rather beneath the superficial stream of evolution, and what is to be looked upon as the actual driving element. For this reason, what is inherent in the scientific method has been hidden from modern pedagogy and scientific didactics; pedagogy and didactics were thrown back upon chance and chance dictated in what sphere they were to be found. What we need is inner guiding lines to direct us to important truths; the directing lines which can be found by studying Goethe's world conception, through which such an infinite amount may be learnt. This is not just to be built up nor looked for intellectually, it must be sought in an inter-weaving of man with the world. This is something lost to us, as may indeed be seen in our present wish to fathom the individual being of man in the superficial way this is done in the educational side-line we call experimental psychology.

What is pre-eminently necessary today is for a light to be kindled in those who are responsible for the education of children concerning the very root of our modern development. If we now stand at a point where the main direction of life has to be changed, it is absolutely necessary to see into what has happened in the course of evolution up to now. The first thing to go under was the elementary impulse towards a free economic life of the state; then in the last third of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth,—particularly in Central Europe, we trampled on our life of spirit, made it into something of secondary importance. How much, for instance, of the great impulse of Goetheanism has flowed into the kind of life of spirit we want today? Nothing, or practically nothing! People talk in a superficial way of Goethe; of the immensities concealed in the very way Goethe perceived the world, nothing has sunk into the general consciousness. As I have frequently told you the Goethe Society at Weimar showed themselves lacking in all sense of responsibility by placing at their head not a man who had understanding of Goethe, but a superannuated Prussian Minister of Finance!

Thus have we let ourselves sink into utter forgetfulness of our spiritual past. Nowhere in present day consciousness do we find what, through Goethe, gave the German life of spirit its characteristic stamp. It is all effaced, reduced to the level of a parasite. Editions of Goethe have followed one upon another, but nowhere do we meet with Goethe's spirit. Whoever sees through all this must say: In the realm of economy this is bad, in that of politics it is bad, but it is worst of all in the spiritual realm. In this way we have begun by ruining our political consciousness; after that we have ruined all connection with our own life of spirit. I do not say this from pessimism, I say it because, out of insight into what has happened in the past, there must arise what is to happen in the future.

Then—well, then came what is called the world war. After the collapse of the political life, which in its collapsed condition was nevertheless kept going, after the collapse of the life of spirit comes the economic collapse, the magnitude and intensity of which is even today not realised, because it is believed that we are at the end or at any rate in the middle of it, whereas we are merely at the beginning. This economic collapse—it can be studied in everything that played a part in producing the world catastrophe. If we would go into the pertinent details of the question of the Baghdad railway before the world war, for example, you would see there the most unhappy consequences of linking the political with the economic life. If you follow the single stages of the Baghdad transactions, with which the unfortunate Helfferich is specially connected, you see economic capitalism on the one hand forming combination on combination, on the other hand the interference of the national-political machinations of chauvinists, machinations which differ according to whether they work in from the east or from the west. In Germany, my dear friends, we observe the loss of all sense of action as the lifo of the spirit has been lost; the sense of action has disappeared with the real life of the State, and what remains is merely the economic life. Everywhere from the West we see economical-political aspirations playing in, wearing the mask of chauvinism or nationalism, the mask of the economical-political; whereas from the East we have the spiritual-political masquerading in various forms. All this is united in a confusion of threads which then lose themselves in the absurdity, in the impossible situation, of the Baghdad question. This question of the Baghdad railway, this whole procedure shows clearly the impossibility of any further development of the old imperialism, of any further development of the old political system.

Now what in the will to build this railway we see here as a great political problem of world importance, is seen again in incidents during the war. Things, however, have never been observed so that, guided on the right lines, people have come to the point where outer events can betray their inner connections. So Kapp squealed, Bethmann Hollweg raised an outcry while there was silence on the part of the spiritual leaders of Germany. That was indeed the situation. Kapp who represented agriculture squealed, not knowing which way to turn between war economy and the problems of the land. Bethmann Hollweg, who had no head for politics, raised an outcry, no longer having anything reasonable to say on the matter; and those Germans who were at the head of the spiritual life were silent because they had withdrawn into the schoolrooms of Germany and were no longer in touch with real life, having no notion of how in real life things should be managed.

I don't know how many of you remember all this. What I am giving you is no highly painted version but the situation in its actual colors. Kapp did squeal, Bethmann Hollweg really raised an outcry against the terrible way in which he, poor man, was attacked in the Reichstag; and those who were supposed to know something of the matter in question said either nothing or what, because it had no connection with life, amounted to nothing. The lines on which economy was developing could be shown up in all their absurdity only by a great, conspicuous world affair. Indeed, many people have never noticed the pass to which we have come also in what concerns the State. They had their Hohenzollerns, their Hahsburgs, their Romanoff Czars. That because of their impracticability, already in a most decided form the elements of disintegration were present within the empires of Hohenzollems, Habsburgs and Romanoffs, could be ignored, for it was possible for these empires to be held together in an umatural frame, already in process of disintegration because, within the State, there was no longer any real impulse.—On the part of the socialists today we frequently hear it emphasised that the State must cease. No one has done more to prevent a judicious administration of the State than those who represented the European dynasties in the nineteenth century. By deluding ourselves, and refusing to be conscious in various ways, it is possible to ignore the fact that we have trodden the life of spirit underfoot, as far as its achievements in the nineteenth century are concerned. This cannot be done to the economic life. When the State is starved people are offered the consolation of public holiday and royalty is feted with paper flowers. For example, it is no fabrication but an ascertainable fact that on the Hamburg bridges well-dressed women, souvenir mad, violently precipitated themselves on the cigarette ends William II had thrown away. Neither is it an idle tale that this same William II was not averse to such flattery but that it tickled his vanity; he delighted in such displays.

Thus, in the sphere of the economic life we have ultimately experienced the remarkable phenomenon which can be characterised only by saying that agriculture squealed, that there was an outcry on the part of the political life, and industry preened itself with satisfaction, workers included—to the extent to which they formed part of industry—until they arrived at the front, where they learned another tune and spread abroad other views on returning to their homes. It is obviously untrue when today it is said that collapse started in the home. Collapse started at the front because the men there could no longer endure the conditions. Such things must be known, especially by those who want to educate others. Henceforward they dare not sit in a comer without any understanding of life; they have to know what must happen. Far more important than keeping to any school time-table today would it be for the instructors of youth to hear discussions about this cultural and historical phenomenon, and to have revealed to them what shows itself so clearly in the sphere of the economic life under capitalism.

You know the saying ascribed to a certain society—a saying approved on one side, disputed on the other—“The end justifies the means.” In the economic life under capitalism another impulse has shown itself during the world catastrophe, and that is: The end has desecrated the means. For everywhere among the declared ends and aims—this is revealed also in that very question of the Baghdad railway—the means were desecrated, or, again the means desecrated the ends.

These matters must be known today and must be studied unreservedly. My present observations have an educational purpose insofar as I believe that from the aspect from which I am speaking today—not perhaps in accordance with the way in which I speak—teachers must, above all, have each stage elucidated. We have to outgrow what previously has prevented teachers hearing of these great world events. Because of this we are experiencing today the comfortless fact of how entirely ignorant a great part of the population were politically. Today we meet people—in this instance I cannot politely say “present company excepted”, at least not in all cases—who do not know what has been going on for decades in the most external affairs, for instance in the workers' movement; these people have no notion what form the struggles of the proletariat have taken during these decades. Now an educational system that turns out into the world men who pass one another by, and know nothing of each other, must surely be a factor leading to collapse. Are there not in the middle class today those who scarcely know more about the workers than the fact that they wear different clothes, and details of that description; who know nothing of the struggles going on in trades unions, in associations, in political parties, and have never taken the trouble to look into what is taking place all around them? Now why is this? It is because people have never learnt to take lessons from life, because they always learn some particular thing. They think: Ah, I know that, I am a specialist in that sphere; you know something else and are a specialist in some other sphere.—People have become accustomed to this without ever getting beyond what they have absorbed as knowledge at school, considering this as an end in itself, whereas the important thing is learning to learn,—Learning to learn, so that, however old one is, one can remain, up to the very year of one's death, a student of life. Today even when people have taken their degree, as a rule they have exhausted their powers of learning by the time they are out of their twenties. They are unable to learn anything more from life; parrot­wise they reel off what they have absorbed up to then. At most they have, now and again, an inkling of what is going on. Those who are different are exceptional. It is important that we should discover an educational method where people learn to learn, and go on learning from life their whole life long. There is nothing in life from which we cannot learn. We should have different ground beneath our feet today if people had learnt how to learn. Why nowadays are we socially so helpless? It is because facts are confronting us on a level to which men have not grown. They are unable to learn from these facts because they have always to confine themselves to externals. In future there will be no education that bears fruit if people will not trouble to rise to the great points of view in human culture.

Now whoever views the world today out of a certain anthroposophical back ground frequently discussed here, knows how to think concretely about all that is in it. He looks to the West, he looks to the East, and out of this concrete observation he can set himself problems. He looks towards the West into the Anglo-American world in which for many decades, perhaps even longer, there have played the great political impulses so damaging at present to central Europeans. Nevertheless these impulses are on a grand scale; and all the great impulses in the political life of the present time have originated from the Anglo-American peoples, for they have always known how to reckon with the historical forces. When during the war I tried to bring this to the notice of certain people sayinq: The forces coming from there can be withstood only by forces arising in the same way from historical impulses,—I was ridiculed because there is no belief, among us here, in great historical impulses. Whoever knows how to study the West rightly, insofar as it is Anglo-American, finds there a number of human instincts and impulses coming from the historical life. All these are of a political-economic nature. There are important impulses in an elementary form within Anglo-Americanism, which all have a political economic coloring; ever one there thinks so politically that this political thinking is extended into economics. But in all this there is one peculiar feature. You know that when we talk of economy we are demanding that, in the economy of the future, fraternity should hold sway; it was driven out of the imperialist-political economic strivings of the West. Fraternity was left out, eliminated; hence what lived there assumed its strongly capitalist trend.

Fraternity was developed in the East. Whoever studies the East in accordance with its nature, so entirely of soul and spirit, knows that out of the people there really springs a sense of brotherliness. Whereas what was characteristic of the West was a boom of the economic life destitute of brotherliness and tending therefore to capitalism, in the East there was brotherliness without economy, these two being held apart by us in Central Europe. We have the task—a thing the teacher must know—the task of synthesising the brotherliness of the East with the non-brotherly but economic way of thinking belonging to the West. We shall be socialists in a world-embracing sense if we bring this about. Let us now bring the East into a right line of vision. You find there, from very ancient times, a highly spiritual life. That it should have died out can be maintained only by those who have no understanding for Rabindranath Tagore. Men there, in the East, live a spiritual political life; and what of the opposite pole? It is to be found in the West. For this spiritual-political life of the East lacks something—it lacks freedom. It is a subjection that leads to the renunciation of the human self in Brahma or Nirvana. It is the reverse of all freedom. On the other hand, the West has made a conquest of freedom. Standing between East and West it is we who have to unite these in a synthesis, which is possible only by keeping freedom and fraternity quite distinct in life, but at the same time preserving balance between them. We must not understand our task, however, in such a way that what is suitable for one is suitable for everyone; for abstract thinking of that kind is the ruin of all striving after reality. All thinking in accordance with reality comes to grief when people believe that one kind of abstract ideal can be set up over the whole earth, or that an ordering of society holding good today will do so to all eternity. This is not only nonsense, it is a sin against reality, for each part of space, each section of time, has its own task, and this must be realised. But then we must not refuse through laziness to gain knowledge of the true, concrete human relations; and we must recognise our task by learning to study facts in accordance with their meaning. The primary and secondary education of recent days has led us very far from this kind of study; it has no wish to know anything of this concrete approach to phenomena, for at this point the region begins where men today feel uncertain of themselves. Instead of describing they would rather define. They would like today to take up images of the facts instead of accepting images of the facts as mere symptoms of what is expressed in the deeper lying impulses.

I am speaking today in such a way that the content of all I say is meant to be drawn from the region out of which anything about education must issue. Those who can best enter into what is said from this region make the best educators and teachers; not those who are asked what they know of any particular subject—knowledge of that kind can be found in a textbook and read up before a lesson. The important thing in future examinations must be to discover what those who aspire to be teachers are as men. A life of spirit of this kind applied to education, out of its very nature, creates the necessity of not being trained for cultural life one-sidedly but as spiritual workers standing fully within the three branches of the nature of man. I am not saying that anyone who has never worked with his hands is unable to see the truth rightly and never ta ke s a right stand in the life of the spirit. The following should be the aim—for man to go in and out of the three spheres of the threefold social organism, that he should form real relations with all three, that he should work, actually work, in all three. We need have no fear that the possibilities for this will remain hidden. A feeling for this, however, must arise particularly in the heads of those who in future will be teachers of the young. Then another feeling will come to life, a tendency to go beyond specialisation to what we try here to bring about through anthroposophy. We must come to the point of never breaking the thread of our study of the universally human, of our insight into what man actually is; we must never be submerged in specialisation in spite of having our specialists. This, it is true, demands a much more active life than most people today find pleasant.

I have often experienced an extraordinarily discordant note at conferences of specialists or technical conferences. People foregather there with the express purpose of furthering their special subject. Now this frequently is done for hours, with great diligence and keenness. But I have repeatedly heard a very strange expression—the expression "talking shop". Time is requested when shop is no longer to be talked, when no one is to speak any longer on his special subject. Then, for the most part, the silliest rubbish is talked, the most boring rubbish, but no shop. There is a certain amount of malicious gossip; many subjects are discussed, sometimes very interesting subjects—though that is looked at askance—in short, everyone is relieved when the talking of shop is over. Doesn't it show how little connection people really have with what they actually do, and what they are supposed to do, for mankind, if they are so pleased to get away from it? Now, I ask you: Will leaders of men who want to esca pe their particular profession as soon as possible ever be able to face up to a population of manual workers who enjoy their work? When today in their complacent way, they talk about the wrongs existing among the manual workers, you must not question the manual workers, you must question the bourgeoisie who have created the wrongs—these are the real sinners. Those who as manual workers are tied to the desolation of capitalism cannot attain joy in their work, when above them stands a class who perpetually have the wish to escape from what should make for their happiness. These are the ethical by-products of recent educational methods. It is something which must above all be realised and above all undergo change. There is much here that will have to become different in the customary thinking of those who teach.

What am I wanting to tell you in these remarks? I want to make clear to you how thorough-going today we have to be in our indications of what is to come about; how thoroughly necessary it is to leave the realm of the trivial, the terribly trivial content to which we have confined our thinking, and not only our thinking but also our life of feeling and will. How should the will prosper—and we need our will for the future—if it has to remain in the light of this petty habit of thinking, this petty quality of our ordinary thinking and feeling?

How much is entirely lacking that we must have for the future? For one thing we must have a real people's psychology. We must know what there is in the growing human being. We have blotted out this knowledge and in its stead have acquired tests that experiment with human beings because of the inability to apprehend their characteristics intuitively. All kinds of apparatus are supposed to reveal what the human being has in the way of abilities. We do not trust in ourselves to discover these things. And why? Because we do not approach them with interest; because we go through the world with our soul asleep. Our soul must wake up and we must look into these things. Then we shall see that much of what today is looked upon as great progress is really absurd. This poor pedagogue of the primary and secondary school is sent out like a human tame rabbit unable to see what is really going on in the world. The rabbit then proceeds to educate human beings, who because of this very education pass by their fellow men without any feeling for what lives in their souls. Thus, it is today, irrespective of the fact that among many of the middle class there is obviously no will to enter into the great contemporary questions and impulses, and that those today who have any will are not of much use because they know absolutely nothing about what is necessary, having slept through the time during which the proletariat day by day, for decades, have been schooling themselves politically. It is indeed very seldom that, when it is a matter of discussing the great questions of the day, we find proletarians making the excuse of not being able to afford the time to look into them; they make the time. But if you inquire of any bourgeois group, they have so much to do that they cannot afford the time to study contemporary matters—they all have far too much to do. That, however, is not the real reason; as a matter of fact they have no notion at all what it is they are supposed to study. They do not know how to go to work beca use this was never included in their education.

Now these are not just so many pessimistic remarks, nor are they intended as a sermon; they are a pure statement of fact. What is more, we have experienced that, when men have been forced to it by life, they have educated themselves in this matter. In cases where people should have been able to educate themselves out of their own impulse, it has all come to nothing, nothing at all has happened. It is on this account that we find ourselves in our present wretched condition, on this account that we hear about anything tried-out today not only expressions of ill-will, which are frequent enough, but all the unintelligent nonsense arising from ignorance of life, because no school has ever thought of teaching its pupils how to learn. Knowledge in individual cases always trickles to people through the protecting walls of comfort, but this does not have the same result as when the human being has free access to the phenomena of life with unimpeded senses.

The sad events of the present time might show us an infinite amount in that very sphere where people go on talking in the old way, and where it appears as if the clockwork of the brain had been wound up and was obliged to go on ticking. Conferences on external matters proceed today still in the same way as they proceeded before the war catastrophe. A great proportion of the people have learnt practically nothing from these terrible events, because they have never learnt how to learn. Now they will have to learn from dire necessity what fear has not taught them. In the past I have referred here to an utterance, quoted in what I wrote on the social question, of a most unassuming but cultured observer of life, Herman Grimm. “In the nineties of last century this man said: When we contemplate the life around us today and consider whither it is heading, whither it is rushing headlong, particularly in these ceaseless preparations for war, it is as if the chief desire was to fix the day for general suicide—so utterly hopeless does this life appear.” People are wanting, rather, to live in dreams, in illusion, those above all who think themselves practical. But today necessity is calling us to wake up; and those who do not wake will not be able to take part in what is essential, essential for every single man. Many do not even know how to put their hand to the plough in this matter.

This is what I wanted to say as a kind of exposition of what should be discussed today at teachers' meetings. It is what should be developed particularly by those who have the task of educating youth, those who should be looking towards what the future is to bring. When we continue these studies we shall go more into the details of education, details of primary and secondary education.

Thoughtful statesmen and observers of world-politics know full well that the greatest and most real problems of the present, and of the immediate future, concern the relationship of the East and West. They are problems of life and death, in the material as well as in the spiritual sense.

Our Western scientific civilisation, with its commerce and industrialism, must expand. Its inner impulse is to expand over the earth; moreover, it has apparently the outward power so to do. But the East is not meeting this expansion passively. On the contrary, there is every sign that the East is awakening to take a very active part in determining the forms and conditions under which this expansion shall take place. Here arises a question fraught with the gravest possibilities for good or evil. Will the Western and Eastern civilisations, deeply different as they are, blend and harmonise? Will a fuller humanity arise and develop in this process? Or will they clash in spiritual conflict, and at last in external warfare?

A spiritual humanity movement in our time—and such is the movement which has arisen out of Anthroposophy—must meet this question in full consciousness. For it is, ultimately, a spiritual question. It can never be answered in the sense of progress, unless and until something of a spiritual knowledge of humanity filters down into our public life. ‘The public affairs of today,’ says Rudolf Steiner, writing on the eve of the Conference at Washington, ‘comprising as they do the life of the whole world, ought not to be conducted without the infusion of spiritual impulses.’¹

We, in the West, are carrying our industrial civilisation farther and farther, more and more intensely, to the East. We are accustoming the Eastern peoples to deal with us in the forms in which we are familiar both as regards political and economic intercourse. These outward forms of our civilisation, from railways and banks to Parliaments and Conferences, the Eastern peoples may or may not be ready to accept. Whether they harmonise with us in inner impulse, or whether the very contact with these external Western features rouses in them a deep and fiery resistance, is a very different question. Here, again, it is well for us to hear the warning and the hopeful summons conveyed in the words of Rudolf Steiner. To quote again from the above-mentioned article:—‘Asia possesses the heritage of an ancient spiritual life, which for her is above all else. This spiritual life will burst into mighty flame if, from the West, conditions are created such as cannot satisfy it ...’

The Asiatic peoples will meet the West with understanding if the West can offer them thoughts of an universal humanity thoughts that indicate what Man is in the whole universal order and how a social life may be achieved in conformity with what Man is. When the peoples in the East hear that the West has fresh knowledge on those very, subjects of which their ancient traditions tell, and for the renewal of which they themselves are darkly striving, then will the way be open for mutual understanding and co-operation. If, however, we persist in regarding the infusion of such knowledge into pubic activity as a fantastic dream of the unpractical, then in the end the East will wage war upon the West, however much they may converse about the beauties of disarmament.

The West wishes for peace and quiet to achieve her economic ends and these the East will never understand unless the West has something Spiritual to impart.

In the West there is the potentiality of a living, spiritual development. From the treasures she has collected by her natural-scientific and technical mode of thought, the West has power to draw forth a spiritual conception of the world, though what she has drawn forth in the past has led her only to a mechanistic and materialistic conception.

‘On the redemption of spiritual values in the West it will depend, whether mankind will overcome the chaos of today or wander in it helplessly.’

These are inspiring words; we feel that they give expression to world impulses, world dangers, and world destinies. They are an adequate indication of the task that an anthroposophical movement must set out to perform, or, at any rate, to place before the men and women of today. It is the potentiality of a living, spiritual development, the treasure that lies hidden beneath the cold exterior of Western scientific intellectuality—it is this that Anthroposophy seeks to reveal: it is this to which it would awaken the consciousness and conscience of the world. As a result of the methods of development that have so often been described in these pages, Anthroposophy arrives at a transformation of Western science into a ‘higher science’: one that is not merely ‘scientific’ and ‘technical’ (able to grasp the dead and inorganic world of our immediate environment), but cosmic and all-human. Thoughts of a universal humanity, thoughts indicating what Man is in the whole universal order—these are the fruits of Anthroposophy. And it is from such thoughts alone that an all-human society—a thing absolutely that necessary in our age for the survival of civilised mankind—can receive life and form and impulse.

Our age has a fundamental striving towards internationalism. Internationalism, as men like Wells have pointed out, is, if nothing else, a necessity imposed on us by our economic development; though, indeed, our need and striving for it are far more deeply rooted. But the international ideal has so far only been expressed in abstract forms. Wilsonian idealism and Marxian idealism alike are born of an intellectual and abstract consciousness. The good intention is there, but the means for its fulfillment are lacking.

For the forces that make for harmony between men and nations live deeper than the intellectual mind. They are far more deeply situated in the souls of men. I may be intellectually convinced that ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ is the most excellent of moral precepts; I may have the sincerest ethical intention to live according to it; and yet, if I do not understand my neighbour, I may find myself unable to suffer him, or to restrain my aggravation with him. Once, however, I understand him—not an abstract, but a concrete and individual understanding—I have planted in my soul a force that is deep enough to dispel aggravation, and make for harmony and love.

An individual and concrete understanding of the nations is what we need an understanding that is intimate and sympathetic, like the understanding of an individual man. Nothing short of a spiritual science can provide us with such an understanding. For a nation is not manifested as a physical entity; it lives in what is spiritual. We may know it to be real by its effects, but we can never grasp it, define it, and see it, in the physical. The artist alone, short of the spiritual scientist, will come near to understanding it, for he is gifted to perceive, in the physiognomy of things, the signature of the spiritual being that lies beneath them. Hence, even in our time, the works of great artists—Dostoievsky, for instance—are the most valued means we have of fostering a true and real internationalism. But the artist's instinct and expression are not enough for us; we need a definite knowledge and enlightenment—one that contains the artistic, perceptive, imaginative quality, it is true, but a conscious knowledge, firmer than instinct, more universal than isolated genius.

Mention has often been made in these pages of the threefold constitution of the human being. It has been indicated how the human, physical organism shows this threefold nature in the system of nerves and senses, the rhythmic system, and the assimilative system. These three systems, with their characteristic processes, are the physical counterparts of the three main activities or functions of the soul: thinking (conception, ideation, including sense perception), feeling, and willing respectively. Anthroposophical science shows how the different human races and peoples are by no means identical with respect to their development of the three systems in the human organism. Without going into the more intimate differentiations, which exist, three main types may be distinguished. These are first, the Eastern, or Oriental; secondly, the Middle European and thirdly, the Western, or Occidental (West European and American).

The Eastern peoples, especially those of Southern Asia, live essentially in connection with the inner forces of the earth. The forces which seethe and surge beneath the surface of the earth, and in the roots and fruits of plants and trees; the thriving, living forces of the earth: these have, as it were, their continuation in the assimilative, digestive system of the human being, and are connected with the surging and flowing of the human will. The Oriental is especially related to the assimilative system. He lives naturally and instinctively in the will process, that is related to the surging inner forces of the earth. His peculiar spirituality is like an expression of the earth itself. And when he forms a conscious ideal of higher striving and development, it is in connection with the next ‘higher’ system of the human being: the rhythmic Organisation. For man, when he seeks a conscious ideal of development, reaches out to what lies just beyond his natural instinctive gifts. The Eastern man, who lives naturally in the assimilatory-digestive system, seeks an ideal in the development of the rhythmic life. The paths of Yoga, all the characteristically Eastern paths of higher training, seek a spiritual development through the rhythmic man, through the special regulation of the breath, the circulation of the blood.

Now, if we consider the Mid-European, we find that he lives instinctively and naturally in that very element which the Oriental seeks to cultivate when forming a conscious ideal of higher development. The Mid-European is essentially the rhythmic man; his natural element is a certain inner harmony and rhythmic wholeness. The ancient Grecian civilisation essentially belongs to the Mid-European element in this respect. The balance and control, the aesthetic harmony of the spiritual and material that is evident in Grecian art (by contrast with the more uncontrolled imaginativeness of Oriental art), already indicates this great Mid-European impulse. In Goethe, the representative man of Middle Europe, we find it developed to the highest degree This natural development of the rhythmic, or middle, man tends to make the Mid-European (like the great German idealists of a hundred years ago, and unlike the external Germany of recent times), if he remains true to himself, the mouthpiece of a certain all-humanity; just as the Eastern man, in his great spiritual productions, is the mouthpiece of the Earth. The tendency to understand and to express man as man, this is characteristic and natural for the Mid-European element. The Mid-European has a feeling for the human relationship of ‘I’ and ‘You,’ the rhythmic interplay between men.

As the Eastern man, who lives naturally in the life of the assimilatory system, idealises the rhythmic element in his conscious striving for higher development, so does the Mid-European strive upwards, from the rhythmic organisation which he has by nature, to the conscious development of the life of thought connected with the Head system, the system of nerves and senses. The Mid-European idealises the life of thought. Dialectic, logic, scientific education, the development of pure thought and philosophy—through these, the Mid-European seeks consciously for a higher spiritual development. He works from the rhythmic system, in which he lives, into the life of thought: like the Eastern man, who works from the assimilatory system in which he lives into the rhythmic life. And as the Eastern man, as a result of his spiritual striving, comes to express the Earth forces with which his connection is so intimate, so as to be, as it were, the Earth's interpreter to humanity, in like manner the Mid-European, as a result of his development, comes to be the interpreter to mankind of Man as such.

The Western man, the man of Western Europe and America, has by nature what the Mid European seeks consciously. He lives in the system of nerves and senses: in the thought process, in intellectuality. He is essentially the Head-man. He tends instinctively into the region of abstraction. Thus it is that Rabindranath Tagore, speaking as a thoughtful Eastern observer, though not with any antipathy, compares him to a ‘spiritual giraffe.’

For the Western man, when he seeks a conscious ideal, the danger lies near at hand to leave the human sphere altogether, to lose himself in abstractions. There is in effect only one possibility for the fruitful development of our Western humanity; it is, to find the connection with the spiritual cosmos. What lives in man's thought life is cosmic in its origin. Starting from the thought-life, the nerves and senses organisation in which he naturally lives, the Western man must find a conscious relation to the spiritual universe. The Western man can be, as it were, the interpreter of the Universe, as the Mid-European is the interpreter of Man and the Easterner of the Earth.

We should find all this confirmed if we compared, for example—not pedantically, but with a certain artistic perception—the quality and colouring of Western and Mid-European science. What lives in the great scientists of Western Europe is a certain cosmic feeling; their whole manner of expression shows that the revelation of cosmic facts is to them a cherished element. With the great Mid-European scientists, on the other hand, though they be dealing with, or even discovering, facts of the same cosmic order, we feel that they live more in the formalistic element of thought; it is this that they chiefly feel and value,

The Natural Science of our times, however, has no means to penetrate and interpret the cosmos save by a few mathematical formulae and mechanistic abstractions. Hence the Western man finds himself starved by the materialistic and intellectualistic age. The result is that he is driven to seek refuge in experiments, speculations, and extremes of every kind. He tends to become sectarian, and to devote himself to ‘crank pursuits’; he seeks through a materialistic ‘spiritualism’ the spiritual life that he needs, but has not the means to reach. It is only the Spiritual Science cultivated by Anthroposophy that reveals and provides what he requires. Hence the immense significance of this Spiritual Science for Western peoples.

On the other hand, the Western man, living instinctively and naturally in the thought process with its cosmic origin, turns and finds an outlet in economic and industrial life. And with his economic greatness he expands his sphere of influence over the whole earth. By virtue of the cosmic quality, which is his, he becomes the ‘man of the world’ par excellence. He comes in touch with all the different peoples, and inspires a certain respect and confidence wherever he goes. From his contact with the Eastern peoples, there is kindled in him a great longing for what he lacks—the ever-present sense of the spiritual and the divine in things. He brings back Oriental cults and teachings, and begins to idealise various kinds of Eastern mysticism, by very reaction from his own matter-of-factness and intellectuality.

It is here that the necessary union of all three sections of mankind must set in, essentially a spiritual union, not founded, like racial kinship, on ties of blood, but founded on a common spiritual understanding. The individual man—be he a member of East, Middle, or West—who has, through Spiritual Science, begun to learn and to understand the nations, has an impulse of love and harmony implanted in him—an impulse far more powerful, more lasting, and effective than was ever possible by the mere recognition of an abstract ideal of internationalism. A nation to him is no longer a mere name or collective term, associated, perhaps, with strong sympathies or antipathies. It means a reality, which he knows, and of whose being he is convinced.

He stands in awe—as, learning Spiritual Science, one cannot but stand in awe—before the wisdom that is poured out into the World, manifesting as it manifests in the diversity of plants in outer Nature—in the diversity of human races and peoples of the earth, with their gifts and possibilities and missions. He has the foundation of knowledge for intelligent co-operation with other nations. From the thankfulness and reverence inspired by the contemplation of this wisdom, the seed of spiritual Love is born in his feeling. This is the ‘Holy Spirit of Truth,’ the real liberator of man.

• 1. See Dr. Steiner's articles in the Goetheanum weekly, and translation of an article published in The Threefold Commonwealth journal, Vol. II, No. I. This article also appeared in The New Age

Translated by Peter Stebbing

What is called the social question asserts itself in the most decisive manner in our time, as a historic challenge. However, at the same time, it has to be said: Our present age is little prepared to approach the social question in its true form with active comprehension. On this point one has only to avoid yielding to illusions. We have often had to indicate the profound chasm existing in our time between the leading classes and social ranks and the proletarian masses. In the course of recent historical developments, the leading classes and social ranks have allied themselves with certain interest groups and have neglected to cultivate a generally human understanding. The proletarian masses have increasingly had to regard themselves as excluded by virtue of their entire life situation from what the leading classes have essentially concocted for themselves. As regards the division into classes, the situation in ancient Greece, for example, could be said to have been still more unfavorable. At that time there was the large number of slaves who not only partially, with regard to their capacity for work, but with respect to their entire humanity, were viewed as a commodity to be bought and sold on the open market. Yet it would be wrong even so to see it as a matter of looking at this alone. Well into modern times a sharp class distinction and class division has certainly persisted, though it has existed more in terms of the external aspects of life, as expressed in one's social status.

More recently—and precisely this is of significance—a kind of cultural commonality closely connected to the egoistic interests of these leading classes has spread far and wide—in which the great proletarian masses are unable to participate. One need really only consider how little the cultural life of earlier ages assumed this direction. In ancient times there were single individuals to be sure, Mystery leaders, students of the Mysteries imbued with the higher elements of spiritual life, but this spiritual life did not take the form it does today—such that the human being undergoes a bourgeois education, donning superior civic garb as compared to the worker's overalls, while relegating the worker to only a proletarian education. One need but think of how Christianity endeavored for centuries to imbue humanity with a common spiritual life, aiming to represent all human beings as equal before God. In the same way, if you look back for that matter to the cultural life of the ancient Hebrews, there were of course the scribes and Pharisees, single communities that stood out, that were in possession of a certain spiritual life, but what they gave out of this spiritual life, they gave in the same way to all classes of people. Class division concerned other matters than cultural life itself. And it should not be forgotten that throughout the Middle Ages the content of spiritual life lay in something quite different than it does today. The content of spiritual life in the Middle Ages resided in the images to be found in the church, where everyone could see them, where the highest nobility could see them, where the last of the poor could see them. Spiritual life united people from above and below.

Then came more recent times that essentially replaced the old pictorial element with what is literary. Ever less understanding showed itself for the pictorial, for what is of an imaginative nature. More and more, people sought educational development by means of literature, by means of the written and printed word. And this written and printed word increasingly took on the form that made it possible to a certain extent that, alongside the proletarian, universally-human feeling, an upper stratum emerged in education. This soul-duality in social life has manifested itself ever more in recent times and has laid the basis, more than anything else, for the profound social chasm that now has such frightful consequences.

In addition, it transpired that in this fifth post-Atlantean time-period involving the development of the consciousness soul, human beings became more and more egoistic. In a sense, a pinnacle had to be attained in evolving the human personality. By virtue of this development of the human personality, human beings became less and less capable of understanding each other in reality, of entering into each other. We have finally arrived in this present age at the point where it has become almost impossible for one person to be convinced of another. On that account, spreading ideas is so easily sought on the path of violence. How often have I not emphasized here and elsewhere in our Society, that nowadays, on the basis of no prerequisites of any kind, everyone actually has his standpoint. Today someone can be a presumptuous young whippersnapper and still have his standpoint with regard to even the most mature way of thinking. The feeling that a point of view for judging life is to be won by way of maturation, by way of extended experience, this sense has reached the point of disappearing altogether. Entering into the other person, becoming convinced of what lives in the soul of the other person—this has retreated more and more. Hence people understand each other so little—indeed to an ever-diminishing extent.

Further, in the course of the last centuries human beings have turned away more and more from spirituality. I recently emphasized here once again that one should not deceive oneself in that people still go to church, maintaining they have religion. This “religion” signifies extraordinarily little as compared with the connection the human being needs and ought to seek, between the sense world in which he lives between birth and death, and the supersensible world. The greater part of what people claim for themselves today as religious content is after all nothing more than a living in words, a living in language. And having stressed yesterday and the day-before-yesterday, how abstract this life in language has become, it need not surprise us that religious life, expressing itself for the most part for people in language, has become abstract and hence materialistic. For, everything abstract leads human beings continuously to what is materialistic. And the question that should in fact imbue us inwardly and resonate throughout our entire life: “What is the human being in reality?” is one that points to something barely approached by the average person today. I ask you to consider, after all, that in order to answer the question, “What is the human being?” one needs, in a devoted manner, to enter into the whole world; for the human being is a microcosm, a little world, and only becomes comprehensible if conceived of as born out of the entire world. Understanding the human being presupposes understanding the world. Yet, how little is a real understanding of the world actually sought (and hence a real understanding of the human being) in a natural scientific age that enters purely into what is external. If nowadays such considerations are deemed to have nothing to do with understanding the social question, it nonetheless remains true that everything I have set forth here is intimately connected with understanding the social question. This will only gradually be acknowledged once again in reaching the point of wanting to enter lovingly into what is spiritual. Today, the intention is solely to solve the social question on the basis of externalities. It will only really be solved, however, in seeing spiritual experience as the basis of all human striving, feeling and willing—in being able to pose the question once again: How can a true relationship be established between the world in which the human being lives between birth and death, and the world in which he lives between death and a new birth?

You will already be more or less familiar with the “Group Statue” which is to depict the trinity for the worldview of the future: “The Representative of Humanity between Lucifer and Ahriman.” You may have become aware that the attempt is to depict this Representative of Humanity in a way that otherwise corresponds only to the human countenance with its features. The human countenance with its features is an expression of the soul-life. With respect to the human being, we speak of physiognomy, of certain external gestures, and we recognize this mobility expressing itself in physiognomy and gesture as being connected to the soul life. In the Representative of Humanity of our group statue the aim was not only to portray the countenance in so far as it assumes a physiognomic expression in the human being between birth and death. The further attempt was, as it were, to portray the human being as a whole according to the principle by which nature builds up the human countenance—making every formation, every limb, so to speak, an extension of the countenance. Why something like this? Because in our time the endeavor has to take hold once more of calling forth a common understanding between beings that live only as soul-spiritual beings, and beings that live here on the earth in human physical bodies. Let us remind ourselves as before, of what the dead learn of our language—what they perceive, in so far as they perceive anything of our earth.

On the earth we first of all have the mineral kingdom. We have this mineral kingdom to a certain extent in the form of crystals, and we have broken-up, amorphous minerals as they are called. Basically, of the earth element the dead see only crystal forms and those of the earth's formations that result in regular figures, seeing them as empty voids. You can read about these things in my Theosophy. Of the plants the dead do not see in the first place the forms we see with our eyes. It is actually rather difficult to point to what the dead see of the plant world. For them, the whole of the earth's plant world is like a vast body, but they do not see the green plant forms that we see, only a certain movement, the growth process of the plants. They see precisely what escapes the human being. They see the earth as a great unified organism and the “hair” so to speak, growing spiritually out of the earth—for the plants are spiritualized. Again, of the animal world—I am referring to the outer sensible forms—the dead see only the running of the animals over the earth, not the individual forms of the animals, but their spatial alteration.

And, in as much as they can be accounted physical forms, what do the dead see of human beings? Well, the dead see nothing at all of human beings, with the exception of just a few parts. They perceive the soul, the spiritual, but the outer form not at all. Thus if we were to form the Representative of Humanity as a human figure appears on the earth, this figure would be quite imperceptible for the dead, as also for the Angeloi and Archangeloi. For all beings no longer possessing a body in which there are physical eyes, the human figure, portrayed purely according to its physical form is something invisible, something imperceptible. And only if you begin to express the soul element in the form, so that the external form does not correspond to the human form naturalistically in the here and now, only then do the dead begin to see the form. If you look at a normal, symmetrical face—as faces generally are not, but how people see them—of such a so-called work of art the dead see nothing at all. Our sculptural figure could only be made visible also for supersensible beings in being asymmetrical, in especially emphasizing asymmetry, that is, in containing something of a soul nature that otherwise does not come to expression naturalistically in the external form.

But call to mind how art has become increasingly naturalistic in recent times. Perhaps I already related that I once knew a young person, a sculptor, who had even acquired a name for himself in his native country, who said—we were talking about artistic monuments—to my horror: “Well, the finest rendering of a human being would result from copying every detail of the person precisely, in stone or in bronze, or in some other material.” I replied, “That would be as far removed as it possibly could be from a work of art!” For in reality, a work of art should have nothing in common with such a mere reproduction. It should be anything but like the original. He could not understand that. A “casting” actually counted for him as the most perfect work of sculpture. But it could be said, much of recent art is formed on the basis of this way of thinking, as well as prevailing opinions on art. Whence, ultimately, is any other opinion on art to be derived? After all, on seeing a statue in marble or bronze or in another material, people have to experience something or other! And if they have no relation at all to a spiritual world, they can hardly come to any other judgment than in asking themselves, “Is that in accordance with nature, is there something like that in nature?” And if someone finds that nothing of the sort exists in nature, he then considers what art portrays as having no justification.

But, my dear friends, let us remind ourselves again and again, that it is actually quite absurd to replicate life naturalistically! To write dramas in the manner of Gerhart Hauptmann (1862-1946) is ridiculous, since that can self-evidently, be done better in real life. In this respect, we cannot keep up with nature, after all. Whatever is gained from the spiritual world, on the other hand, is a valuable addition to nature. It represents something new placed into this world. But recent times have turned ever more to naturalism, amounting to materialism on a historical level.¹

All this stems from human beings turning away from spiritual life. A sound return to spiritual life is only possible in conceiving the relation of the sensible to the supersensible in concrete terms, such as we have now attempted to do in various fields, making clear to ourselves what the dead hears of speech and sees in the way of forms that exist for the earthly human being. If we make concretely clear to ourselves, in detail, what the relationships are for the sensible and supersensible, in the same way we do for something on the physical plane, then only do we gain a real idea of the connection between the sensible and supersensible! The emerging materialistic naturalism of recent times that has taken hold of people ever more forcefully since the 15th 16th century has killed the sense for this connection of the sensible and supersensible. Finally, natural science lets nothing count as valid other than sensible reality. In this manner, human beings have torn themselves away from a true, living, feeling-connection with the spiritual world.

In separate branches of civilization in the 18th century this took yet another turn. Within French culture, among the Encyclopedists (1751-80),² materialism yielded its ingenious results. This spread far and wide. And finally there came what leads most of all away from the spiritual world: the life in theosophical abstractions! This life in theosophical abstractions limits itself to saying, the human being consists of physical body, ether body, astral body and so on; the human being has a karma, the human being lives in repeated earth lives. It wants to teach these abstractions as something grandiose, while remaining stuck in words, leading in the end to the extreme arrogance prevalent in many theosophical societies. There one remains completely in words, in externalities. Only in passing over to questions such as, “What do the dead hear of what we say? What do the dead see of what we have here in our surroundings?”, only in proceeding to such concrete ideas do real thoughts reveal themselves concerning the spiritual world. The utmost extremes border on each other: empty words and blather such as “astral body”, ”ether body” and so on, behind which there is often nothing at all but words and pure naturalistic materialism.

It is absolutely necessary to acquire a feeling for these things, a feeling such that one demands to hear in concrete terms about the relationship of the physical and supra-physical world. And only in permeating ourselves with such definite ideas of the connection between the physical and the supra-physical world can we return once again to what in a different manner human beings of older epochs possessed—return, that is, to more wide-ranging world-interests. We can ask, why has so much misfortune broken out over the world? Well, the ultimate reason is that people's interests have become so narrow as to barely transcend the most everyday matters. Naturally, if the human being ceases to interest himself in the stars, he then begins to interest himself in kaffeeklatsch. If the human being ceases to survey the relation of the higher hierarchies in his own thoughts, the inclination arises in him to waste time in ordinary dilly-dallying. It is only necessary to look at what interests have occupied the leading circles of humanity over the last centuries. One need only take account of what these people do from morning to evening! And if one does so with comprehension, one will not be surprised that such a debacle has befallen humanity. Nowadays people are glad if they can gain a rough idea of something in just a few words! They are pleased if they can encompass this or that without any effort.

The historical development of humanity speaks in clear terms of the various possibilities for viewing things. There are countless examples in this respect. In recent years, for instance, German culture has frequently been reproached for having a Hegel³ with his theory of the state, i.e., for Hegel having said, the state in the end is something like a kind of god on earth. But it should be remembered that German culture had not only Hegel, but Stirner,⁴ not separated by many years at all from Hegel. While for Hegel the state was something like an ever-changing earth-god, for Stirner the state was worthless trash, something to be negated. The two lived in close proximity to each other. One can hardly imagine two greater extremes arising from the same cultural life. If one then wants to portray such a cultural life, then one has to do so as I did in my Riddles of Philosophy, for example, where the one thinker is accorded the same weight as the other. On first reading about Hegel, you might be led to believe I adhered to Hegel's viewpoint. Then, in reading about Stirner, you might assume I adhered to Stirner's viewpoint. With that, nothing else is implied than that we should train ourselves to acquire understanding for the many-sidedness of human beings, and gain inner tolerance. It should interest us, what is conceived by another soul quite differently than what we ourselves have thought. For we should have the feeling, this other thought complements our own.

Let us say there are a number of people, ten individuals (a sketch was made), I am one of them, the other nine are there. I now say to myself, I think about certain matters in one way, the second person in another way, the third again differently, and so on, all varying in some degree. All are right, none are right. If we sense the approximate arithmetical middle of all this, if in this context we feel able to take up everything with the same love, irrespective of whether we say it, or others say it, learning to feel ourselves within the totality, then we join in hastening toward the purpose that exists for the human beings of the future. We must strive for this “hastening.” We must strive for it simply in order to gain a feeling for true social life. We must learn to feel ourselves standing within what is comprised by the genius of language, by what is comprised by the life of rights, by the rights-genius. We must learn to stand within what is encompassed by the mutually shared economic genius. Only this living feeling of being within a totality that has to be consciously acquired in the age of the consciousness-soul—only this propels the human being toward humanity's future destination. However, we cannot attain this approach to the human being's future destination in any other way than by extending our interests ever further, in other words, in learning to overcome ourselves more and more. Yes, my dear friends, in taking counsel with oneself quite honestly, one will after all find in the end, that actually what is of least interest in the whole world is what one is able to think and feel about oneself within the narrow confines of the “I.” Indeed, in our age many people occupy their thoughts and feelings to a great extent within the most immediate boundaries of their “I.” Hence their life is so boring and hence they are so dissatisfied with life. We never become interesting in always only circling around this midpoint. In contrast to this, if we look out, always focusing on how the external world shines toward us, if we expand our interests ever farther, then our “I” becomes interesting by virtue of giving us a standpoint for observing the world. Then our “I” becomes significant through the fact that, just from this point of the “I,” only we are capable of seeing the world, as no other person can. Another person sees it from a different standpoint.

However, if we remain within ourselves, circling continuously around our own self, we contemplate in fact only what we have in common with all other people. And then, in the end every other person loses interest for us—and ultimately the whole world actually loses interest for us. A widening of interest is above all what is striven for by means of spiritual science. However, in order to experience this widening of interest it is necessary for us to educate ourselves to become receptive for what approaches us from outside, so that we really can take up something new. People do not reject spiritual science because it is difficult—it is not actually difficult—they repudiate it for the reason that it does not roll on in the well-worn trains of thought they are used to, since it requires them to engage in new trains of thought. People reject everything that calls for new trains of thought. One can encounter quite peculiar things in this respect. The content of the Aufruf⁵ which will be known to you, as also various things on the social question contained in the paper that is to appear in a few days' time, I communicated to certain personalities during the last horrifying years. It would really have been a question of these people learning from bitter experience to act of themselves as necessity demanded. In speaking to one or another individual of the need for cultural life to be placed on an independent footing, and not continue to be combined with the state and economic spheres, people listened. On many such occasions, it initially appeared as though they exerted themselves to arrive at a thought in this connection. In one's presence, while speaking, people are polite and do not conduct themselves as when they are only supposed to read something. Having thus given the matter a thought, the gesture of politeness (which has no truth to it) is over—and then the “thought machine” shuts off again, and one heard the same thing every time, “Oh yes, the separation of church and school is comprehensible!” That was the only thing they had actually heard, the one thing that has been said over and over again in one way or another for generations—well-worn trains of thought. The rest dissolves like sound and smoke.

Here we touch on things that need to change in our time. We should cultivate the devoted attitude that leads to receptivity for revelations that, as I mentioned here a while ago, would reveal themselves in our time to human beings from the spiritual world. How often, of late, one heard the words, “Simple, everything has to be simple!” The most sensible, the brightest people could be heard quoting Goethe, saying for instance, “The all-comprehending One, does He not comprehend you, me, Himself?” “A name is sound and smoke, feeling is everything”—and so on. It was all supposed to be very profound. But Goethe wrote this as Faust's instruction to a sixteen-year-old girl. That was forgotten! What was well suited to the heartstrings of the naive Gretchen became profound philosophical wisdom! People do not notice such things. But it is easier, self-evidently, to understand what is appropriate for the sixteen-year-old Gretchen, than what is not appropriate for a sixteen-year-old Gretchen, but for mature human beings. In our time, people should take account of such aberrations and break with all too many inherited notions. Reverberating through modern culture there has also been what contains seeds for the future. A while ago I quoted here a saying ofFichte, “The human being can accomplish what he should accomplish; and if he says, he cannot, he does not want to.” This is a most important saying, one the modern human being needs above all as a guideline. This is because the modern human being is not permitted to be a layabout, saying in regard to certain things, “I can't do that.” It lies in the nature of the modern human being that he can do far more than he often supposes, and that “genius” has to be for him more and more a result of diligence. However, one has to be capable of gaining belief in this diligence for oneself. As far as possible one has to rid oneself of every thought that one would be unable to do whatever it is one ought to do. It should constantly be kept in mind just how easy it is to claim that one would be incapable of doing something, merely because making the attempt would be uncongenial. And the more the modern human being makes this an everyday rule, the more will he attain the mood of the soul-spiritual. In more people than you might think, this mood will call forth the inner experience of what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to say. What anthroposophical spiritual science wants to say is available, my dear friends, at least in regard to certain elementary matters. It is available for the human soul. One need only summon the courage to have it. In developing the corresponding mood, the social understanding and the social interest will develop. For when do we have no social understanding? We have no social understanding only when we have no interests that transcend our immediate concerns. Social understanding awakens at once when we take an interest in what lies beyond our immediate circle; albeit really and truly! Taking these things into consideration is quite especially necessary in the age of the evolving consciousness soul. It is necessary for the reason that in the age of the consciousness soul the cosmic powers point the human being to the “I”. Hence, the human being has to be all the more vigilant in transcending the “I”! Since so many antisocial forces rise up from the depths of the human soul today, the social element has to be consciously cultivated that we send down once again into subconscious depths. Most people today do not really know what to do with themselves. But that comes from only wanting to occupy oneself with one's one concerns. The moment we do not merely occupy ourselves with personal matters, but enter into a feeling relation to the whole world, then we begin to do what is right for ourselves.

These things are closely allied to understanding the social question. In many respects the social question is a soul question. But only someone standing within anthroposophical spiritual science will know to sense it rightly as a soul question. That is what I wanted to say to you today.

• 1. It should perhaps be noted that, in her recollections, Margarita Woloschin reports, “Once, after visiting an exhibition of modern art, Dr. Steiner said, ‘Non-representational painting is a protest against naturalism, but strictly speaking it is absurd.’—Trans.
• 2. identified with the rationalism of the Enlightenment
• 3. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770-1831
• 4. Max Stirner, 1806-56
• 5. The March 1919 “Appeal to the German People and the Cultural World” contained in GA 23 and GA 189

There is much still to be said about the various manifestations of karma; but as this is our last lecture, and time is necessarily short for so wide a subject, you easily understand that much that could be said, perhaps much of that which is in your minds in the way questions, cannot be dealt with this time. But our anthroposophical movement will continue, and that which in one course of lectures must necessarily remain unanswered, can on another occasion be carried on and explained further.

It will repeatedly have come before your minds that in the law of karma, man experiences something which is so organised that at every moment of our life we can look upon what we have gone through, upon what we have done, thought and felt in the incarnations preceding our own, and we shall always find that our momentary human inner and outer fate may be understood in the light of a ‘Life-account,’ in which on the side we set down all the clever, reasonable and wise experiences, and on the other all that is unreasonable, wicked or ugly. On one side or the other there will be an excess which signifies at any moment of life the destiny of that moment.

Now various questions may arise in this connection, and the first one would be: How is that which human beings do as a society connected with what we call ‘Individual karma?’ We have already touched upon these questions from other aspects. If we look back at any event in history, back, for instance, to the Persian wars, it will be impossible for us to believe that these events—looked at in the first place from the Greek point of view—represent something only to be written in the book of fate of individual men, who upon the physical plane may appear to be the persons most directly interested. Think of all the leaders in the Persian wars, of all the men who sacrificed themselves at that time, of all that was done by individuals—from the leaders down to the separate individuals—in the Greek legions at that time. If we really consider such an event in a reasonable light, could we possibly ascribe what each separate person did at that time solely to the karmic account of that individual? We should find it impossible so to do. For could we imagine that in the events which happen to a whole nation or to a great part of civilised humanity, nothing further occurs than that each separate human individual simply lives out his own karma? This is not possible. We must in the course of historical evolution always proceed from one event to the next, and we shall see that in the evolution of mankind itself both meaning and significance are to be found, but that such events cannot be identical with the particular karma of separate individuals.

We may reflect on an occurrence such as that of the Persian wars, and ask what significance they had in the course of human evolution. In the East a certain brilliant civilisation had developed. But as every light has its shadow, so must we clearly see that this Eastern civilisation was only to be attained by humanity at the cost of certain darker shadowy elements which should have had no place in human evolution. This civilisation had one pronounced shadow-side—the impulse to extend its frontiers by means of physical force. If this desire for aggrandisement had not been there, it is evident that the whole of that Eastern civilisation would not have come into being. The one cannot be thought of without the other. In order that man might evolve further, the Greek civilisation, for instance, had to develop from quite different principles. But the Greek civilisation could not of itself make a direct beginning. It had to obtain certain elements from outside and it borrowed these from the Eastern civilisation. Various legends about heroes who from Greece passed over to the East, do in fact represent how the pupils of certain Greek schools went over to the East and brought back to the Greeks those treasures of Eastern culture which could then be transformed by means of the national Greek talent. But for this it was necessary to eradicate the shadow-side of this culture—the impulse to press forward to the West by means of purely external force. The Roman civilisation which succeeded the Greek, and all that contributed to the evolution of European mankind would not have been possible if the Greeks had not prepared the ground by a further development of the Eastern civilisation—if they had not beaten back the Persians and what pertained to them. Thus that which had been created in Asia was purified by the driving back of the Asiatics.

Many events in the evolution of the world can be considered in this way, and one then obtains a striking picture. If we gave a course of lectures extending over three or four years and during that time gave our thought only to the traditional, historical documents of humanity, we should then see the unfolding of something which we might really call a plan in the evolution of mankind. We could then survey such a plan and say to ourselves, ‘this had to be attained; it had this shadow-side which later had to be cast off; the treasures which had been acquired had to pass over to another, and there be perfected further.’

After the Greeks had carried on the acquired treasures for some little while, the downfall of Greece occurred, and Rome took her place. In this way we should arrive at a plan of human evolution, so that when speaking of this plan we could never fall into the error of saying: ‘How did it come about, for instance, that just Xerxes or Miltiades or Leonidas had this or that individual karma?’ We must consider this individual karma as something which must be determined by and interwoven with the plan of the evolution of mankind. This cannot be understood in any other way; and this, too, is the view of Spiritual Science. But if this is the case, we must say: In this well-planned advance of human evolution we must see something which is a thing by itself, which is continuous in itself, in a similar way to that in which karmic events in individual human lives are connected with each other, and we must further enquire: ‘What relation does such a plan of the whole evolution of mankind bear to the individual karma of man?’ Let us first of all consider what one might call the ‘destiny’ of human evolution itself.

When we look back we see how one civilisation after another arises, and how the evolution of one people follows upon that of another. We see further how one nation after another acquires this or that which is new, how something remains out of the separate national civilisations which is permanent but how just on that account the nations must die out, so that the treasures each separate nation has acquired may be saved for the corresponding later epochs of human evolution. We must, therefore, find quite comprehensible what Spiritual Science has to say, that in the continuous advance of human evolution one can in the first place clearly distinguish two currents. Consider how in the whole course of the evolution of mankind there is what we may look upon as a ‘continuous current,’ within which wave after wave develops, and that which the foregoing wave has acquired is carried over into the next. We can get an idea of this if we look back to the first civilisation of the Post-Atlantean age, and observe the great achievements of ancient India. But if we compare that with the feeble echo of it which is contained in the old Vedas, which are, to be sure, wonderful enough, but which are but a faint reflection of that to which the Rishis attained and of what Spiritual Science relates to us of the great culture of the Indians, we then are compelled to admit that the original greatness of what this people accomplished for mankind had already faded when a beginning was made to preserve this treasure of human culture in those beautiful poetical productions. But that which the Indian culture first gained flowed over into the general course of human evolution and this alone made it possible for that to develop later which again was required by a young people, not by a people already grown old. The Indians had first to be driven back to the southern Peninsula, and then the Zarathustran view of the world evolved in Persia. How sublime was this view of the world when it arose, and how low had it fallen in a comparatively short time in the people who had received it! In Egypt and Chaldea we see the same thing happen. Then we see the passing over of the Eastern wisdom into Greece, and we see the Greeks beat back that which is Eastern on the external physical plane. We then see all that the whole East had acquired taken up into the lap of Greece and interwoven with much that had been acquired in various domains of Europe. Out of this there was created a new culture, which then in various indirect ways became capable of receiving the Christ Impulse and of transplanting it into the West.

We find this continuous stream of civilisation in which we see wave after wave, and each successive wave is both a continuation of the preceding and a new contribution to mankind. But what was the origin of all this? Remember all that each nation experiences in its own culture. Think of the accumulation of emotion and perceptions in countless individuals, of wishes and enthusiasms fostering the impulse of this culture. Think how the individuals were united in the one cultural impulse, so that through countless centuries of human development, one nation after another, developing the successive cultural impulses, each one lived its enthusiasms; but lived too in a sort of illusion. Every one of them believed the particular achievement of that culture to be not transitory but eternal. For that reason only was the devoted work of the separate peoples made possible, because the illusion always survived. Even today the illusion exists; although we are not so absolutely bound by it and do not speak of our culture as necessarily everlasting.

There you have two things necessary to national civilisations, and which are only beginning to change in our own day. For the first domain of human spiritual life in which such illusions cannot persist, is that of Anthroposophy. It would be a grave error for an Anthroposophist to believe that the forms in which our knowledge is now clothed and the train of thought which we are able to give out today from our Anthroposophical thought, feeling and will, are eternal. It would be very short-sighted to suppose that in three thousand years there would still be persons who would speak of the Anthroposophical truths just as we ourselves do today. We know that we are compelled on account of the conditions of our time to impress something of the continuous stream of evolution into present forms of thought and that our successors will express their experiences of these things in completely different forms. Why is this so? Throughout many centuries and many thousands of years of human culture, civilisation imposed on single individuals experiences through which a contribution was made to the collective evolution of the nations. Think of the numberless experiences which were gone through in ancient Greece, and think of what issued from that later as an extract for the whole of humanity! You will then say: There is more in this than merely the individual currents. Many things occur for the sake of this primary current.

So we must observe two things: first, something which must spring up and die away, in order that from its entirety a second thing, which reckoned by quantity is the smallest part, may survive as something lasting. When we realise that in the evolution of mankind since there has been human individual karma, two powers or beings are at work whom we have always found to be active—Lucifer and Ahriman—then only shall we understand the progress of human evolution. For the aim of this evolution is that finally, when the earth shall have attained its goal, those experiences which were gradually embodied in the whole human evolution out of the different civilisations, will bear fruit for every separate individual, quite regardless of what particular destiny he may have had. But we can see this goal only if we look at the evolution of the world in the light of Anthroposophy. For let no man deceive himself. To think of such a goal in the right way, with the full strength of the human individuality, without the merging of the individuality into some nebulous pantheistic unity, but in such a way that the individuality is completely maintained, so that into it flows that which mankind has as a whole acquired—this goal can only be clearly and definitely seen when the soul develops by means of Anthroposophy.

If we glance back at the earlier civilisations, we see that ever since human individualities have incarnated, Lucifer and Ahriman have had a share in the evolution of humanity. Lucifer on his side always seeks to take part in the progressive stream of civilisation by settling down into the human astral bodies, and impregnating them with the Lucifer impulse. Lucifer carries on his existence during the course of the evolution of mankind by working in upon the human astral bodies. Man could never acquire what Lucifer gives him, solely from those powers which bring about the continuous stream of civilisation just described. If you separate this stream of civilisation from the whole progressive course of mankind, then you have as ever increasing wealth that which the normally progressing Spiritual Beings of the Hierarchies cause to be poured down into humanity. We must look up to the Hierarchies and say: Those who go through their normal evolution furnish the earth-civilisation with that which is the lasting possession of humanity, which was, it is true, transformed later, but has nevertheless become a lasting possession. It is just like a tree and the pith within it. And so we obtain a continuous living stream in the progressing civilisations.

Through these powers who are going through a normal evolution on their own account, man would have led his Ego more and more with this progressing enrichment of human evolution. From time to time there would have flowed in that which brings man on further. Man would have filled himself more and more with the gifts of the spiritual world, and at last, when the earth had reached its goal, it stands to reason that man would have possessed within himself everything which was given from the spiritual worlds. But then one thing would not have been possible. Man would not have been able to develop the original, sacred ardour, devotion and enthusiasm arising in one age of civilisation after another. Out of the same soil from which springs every wish and every desire, springs forth also the wish for great ideals, the desire for the happiness of mankind, for the accomplishments of Art in the successive periods of human civilisation. From the same soil whence spring injurious desires leading to evil, springs forth also the striving after the highest which can be accomplished upon earth. And that which enkindles the human soul for the highest good, would not exist if, on the other hand, the same desire might not sink into wickedness and vice. The possibility of this in human evolution is the work of the luciferic spirits. We must not fail to recognise that the luciferic spirits have brought freedom to mankind at the same time as the possibility of evil—free receptivity for that which otherwise would only flow into the human soul.

But we have seen on other occasions, that everything provoked by Lucifer finds its counterpart in Ahriman. We see Lucifer and all his hosts work in that which gave to human evolution the impulse of the Greek civilisation, in the Greek heroes, in the great men and artists of Greece. He penetrates into the astral bodies and enkindles enthusiasm within them for that which they honour as the highest. So that what was to flow into evolution through Greece became at the same time an enthusiasm in the soul of the people. This is precisely Lucifer's realm, because Lucifer owes his power to the Moon-evolution and not the Earth-evolution. He is a challenge to Ahriman, and as Lucifer develops his activity from one age to another, Ahriman joins in and, bit by bit, spoils that which Lucifer has brought about on earth. The evolution of man is a continual action and reaction between Ahriman and Lucifer. If Lucifer were not in humanity, the zeal and fire for the continuous progress of human development would be lacking; if Ahriman were not there, he who in nation after nation destroys again that which comes,—not from the continuous stream, but from the luciferic impulse—then Lucifer would want to perpetuate each civilisation. Here you see Lucifer drawing down his own karma upon himself. This is a necessary consequence of his evolution on the old Moon. And the consequence now is, that he must always chain Ahriman to his heels: Ahriman is the karmic fulfilment of Lucifer.

Thus in the example of the ahrimanic and luciferic beings we get an insight into the karma of the higher beings. There also karma reigns. Karma is everywhere where there are egos. Lucifer and Ahriman naturally have egos and therefore the effects of their deeds can react upon themselves. Many of those secrets will be touched upon in the summer, in the series of lectures on ‘Secrets of the Bible Story of Creation,’ but there is just one thing to which I should now like to draw your attention, showing you the profound importance of each single word in the true occult records.

Have you never thought why it is that in the Bible History of the Creation, at the end of each day of creation comes the sentence: ‘And the Elohim saw the work, and they saw that it was very good!’ That is a significant statement. Why is it there? The sentence itself shows that it refers to a characteristic of the Elohim who evolved in a normal way on the old Moon and whose opponent is Lucifer. It is given as a sort of characteristic belonging to the Elohim that after each day of creation they saw that ‘it was very good.’ It is given for the reason that this was the degree of attainment reached by the Elohim. They could on the Moon only see their work as long as they were performing it, they could not have a subsequent consciousness of it. That they were able subsequently to look back reflectively upon their work, marks a particular stage in the consciousness of the Elohim. This only became possible upon the earth, and their inner character is shown by the fact that the element of will streams out from the being of the Elohim, so that when they saw it they saw that it was very good. Those were the Elohim who had completed their work upon the Moon and who, when they looked at it afterwards on the earth, were able to say: ‘It can remain, it is very good.’ But for that it was necessary that the Moon-evolution should be completed.

Now what of the Lucifer beings, who had not completed their Moon-development? They must also try to look back upon their work when on earth, for instance, to their share in the ardour and enthusiasm of the Greek civilisation. They will then see how, little by little, Ahriman crumbled it away; and they will have to say, because they did not complete it: ‘They saw their day's work, and behold, it was not of the best; it had to be blotted out!’

That is the great disappointment of the luciferic spirits; they are always trying to do their work over again, always trying to swing the pendulum again to the other side, and always they find their work again destroyed by Ahriman. You must think of it as an ebb and flow in the tide of human evolution, a continuous rousing of new forces by beings who are higher than we are ourselves, and the experiencing by them of continual disappointments. That comes into the experience of the luciferic spirits in the earth-evolution. Man had to take up this karma into himself, because only thus could he attain to real freedom which can develop only when man himself gives the highest purpose to his earth Ego. That Ego which man would have had, if at the end of the earth-evolution all goals were given to him, could not in a true sense be free; for from the beginning it was predestined that all the good of the earth-evolution should flow into him. Man could only become free, by adding to the Ego another Ego which is capable of error, which is always swinging backwards and forwards between good and evil, and which still is able to strive again and again after that which is the purpose of the earth-evolution. The lower Ego had to be joined to man through Lucifer, so that the upward struggle of man to the higher Ego should be his own deed. Only thus is ‘free will’ possible to mankind. Free will is something which man may acquire gradually, for he is so situated, that in his life, free will floats before him as an ideal. Does there exist a movement in human evolution when the human will is free? It is never free, because at any moment it may succumb to the luciferic and ahrimanic element; it is not free because every man, when he has passed through the gates of death, in the ascending time of purification—perhaps during several decades—has impressions which are definite and determined. It is the essential part of kamaloca that we should see to what an extent we are still imperfect by reason of our failings in the world, that we should see in detail in what way we have become imperfect. From that issues the decision to reject everything which has made us imperfect. Thus life in kamaloca adds one intention to another, and the conclusion that we make good again everything that we did and thought which lowered us. What we then feel is imprinted into our further life and we enter into existence through birth with that decision and intention thus charged with our own karma. Therefore we cannot speak of free will when we have entered into existence through birth. We can say we are approaching nearer to ‘free will,’ only when we have succeeded in mastering the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman, and we can obtain the mastery over the luciferic and ahrimanic influences, only by means of knowledge. Firstly, through self-knowledge, we make ourselves more and more capable—even in the life between birth and death—of learning to know our weaknesses in all three departments of the soul, in Thought, Feeling and Will. If we constantly strive to yield to no illusion, then that strength grows within our Ego by means of which we are able to resist the luciferic influence; for then we shall realise more and more how much those treasures of mankind are really worth. Secondly, we can obtain this mastery by means of the knowledge of the external world, which must be supplemented by self-knowledge—both must work together. We must unite self-knowledge and the knowledge of the external world with our own being and then we shall be quite clear as to how we stand regarding Lucifer.

It is characteristic of Anthroposophy that through it we are able to throw light upon these questions how far inclinations and emotions, and how far Lucifer and Ahriman play into every human action. What have we done in this course of lectures other than to explain in how many different ways the luciferic and ahrimanic forces work in our lives! In our present age, enlightenment as to the luciferic and ahrimanic forces may begin, and man must be enlightened regarding these if he really wishes to contribute something towards the attainment of the goal of earthly humanity. If you look around you, everywhere where human feeling and human thinking exist, you can see how far removed men still are from a really true enlightenment of the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman and you will find that by far the greater number of people do not wish for such enlightenment. You will see a great part of mankind succumbing to a certain religious egotism, and being overcome by the feeling that above all they should in their own souls attain the greatest degree of well-being. This egotism is such that people are not in the least conscious that the strongest passions may play a part in it. Nowhere does Lucifer play a greater part than when people, driven by their emotions and desires, strive to ascend to the Divine without having had the Divine illuminated by the light of knowledge. Do you not think that Lucifer is frequently involved where people believe they are striving for the highest? But the forms which are striven for in this way will also belong to the disenchantments of Lucifer, and those people whose erroneous desires cause them to believe that they are able to receive this or that form of spiritual culture, who preach over and over again that this Anthroposophy is so bad because it believes in something new, ought to reflect that it does not depend upon human will that Ahriman fastens himself to the heels of Lucifer. That which came about in the course of evolution in the forms of religion will, because Ahriman mingles into them, go under again through Lucifer. The continuous stream of human evolution will alone be preserved.

In a preceding evolution as we know, certain beings sacrificed themselves by retarded development. These beings live out their karma for our sake, so that we may in a normal way express what these beings can bestow on us. Indeed Jehovah originally poured into mankind by means of the Divine Breath, the capacity for absorbing the Ego. If only that Divine Breath had entered which pulsates in the human blood, without that which leads us away from it; if in fact the luciferic as well as the ahrimanic impulse were not at work, man would, it is true, have been able to attain to the actual gift of Jehovah, but he would not have perceived it with a self-conscious freedom.

Today we may indeed look back upon many disappointments of Lucifer, but we can also look forward to a future in which we may learn more and more to understand what the real current of evolution is. Anthroposophy will be the instrument for the understanding of this and will help us to be more conscious of the influences of Lucifer, more able to recognise it within ourselves, and therefore more able to make good use of it consciously; for formerly it worked but as a dim impulse. The same applies of course to ahrimanic influences.

In this regard I may perhaps call attention to the fact that an important period of human evolution is before us, an age in which soul-forces are reversed. It is an age in which certain persons—very few—will develop capacities different from those recognised to-day. For example, the etheric body of man, besides the physical body can be seen only by those who have undergone a methodical training. But even before the middle of the twentieth century there will be people possessed of a natural etheric clairvoyance, who, since mankind has reached the epoch in which this will develop as a natural gift, will perceive the etheric body as permeating the physical body and extending beyond it. Just as man, once able to see into the spiritual world, has descended to the merely physical perception and intellectual comprehension of the external world, so he begins gradually to evolve new and conscious capacities which will be added to the old ones. One of these new capacities I should like to characterise.

There will be people—at first only a few, for only in the course of the next two or three thousand years will these capacities evolve in larger numbers, and these first forerunners will be born before the end of the first half of the twentieth century—who will have an experience something like the following. After taking part in some action they will withdraw from it, and will have before them a picture which arises from the act in question. At first, they will not recognise it; they will not find in it any relation to what they have done. In the end they will see that this picture, which appears to them as a sort of conscious dream-picture, is the counterpart of their own action; it is the picture of the action which must take place, in order that the karmic compensation of the previous action may be brought about.

Thus we are approaching an age in which men will begin to understand karma not only from the teachings and presentations of Spiritual Science, but in which they will begin actually to see karma. Whereas until now karma was to man an obscure impulse, an obscure desire, which could be fulfilled only in the following life, which could only between death and a new birth be transformed into an intention, man will gradually evolve to a conscious perception of the work of Lucifer and its effect. Certainly only those will have this power of etheric clairvoyance who have striven after knowledge and self-knowledge. But even in normal circumstances men will have more and more before them the karmic pictures of their actions. That will carry them on further and further, because they will see what they still owe to the world—what is on the debit side of their karma. What prevents us from being free is that we do not know what we still owe and so we cannot really speak of free will in connection with karma. The expression ‘free will’ itself is incorrect, for man only becomes free through ever-increasing knowledge, through rising higher and higher and growing more and more into the spiritual world. By so doing he fills himself with the contents of the spiritual world, and becomes in greater degree the director of his own will. It is not the will which becomes free, but man who permeates himself with what he can know and see in the spiritualised domain of the world.

Thus do we look upon the deeds and the disappointments of Lucifer and say: In this way, thousands of years ago, the foundations were laid for that on which we stand; for if we did not stand upon those foundations, we should not be able to evolve to freedom. But after we have enlightened ourselves about Lucifer and Ahriman, we can gain a different relation to these powers; we can gather the fruits of what they have done; we can, as it were, take over the work of Lucifer and Ahriman. Then, however, the acts of which Lucifer is the author, and which have always led to disillusions must be transformed into their opposite when they are performed by us. The deeds of Lucifer necessarily roused desires, and led man into that which could result in evil. If we ourselves are to counteract Lucifer, if we are to regulate his affairs in the future, it will only be the love in us which can take the place of the acts of Lucifer: but love will be able to do it.

In the same way when we gradually remove the darkness which we interweave into external substance so that we completely overcome the ahrimanic influence we shall recognise the world as it really is. We shall penetrate to that of which matter really consists—to the nature of Light. At the present day science itself is subject to manifold deceptions as to the nature of light. Many of us believe that we see light with our physical eyes. That is not correct. We do not see light, but only illuminated bodies. We do not see light, but we see through light. All such deceptions will be swept away so that the picture of the world will be transformed; for necessarily under the influence of Ahriman it was interwoven with error, but hence-forward it will be permeated with wisdom. Man, in pressing forward towards the light will himself develop the psychic counterpart of light—which is wisdom.

By this means Love and Wisdom will enter the human soul. Love and Wisdom will become the practical force, the vital impulse which results from Anthroposophy. Wisdom which is the inner counter-part of Light, Wisdom which can unite with Love, and Love when it is permeated with Wisdom; these two will lead us to the understanding of what at present is immersed in external wisdom. If we are to partake in the other side of evolution, and to overcome Lucifer and Ahriman, we must permeate ourselves with Wisdom and Love, for these elements will flow from our own souls as our offering to those who as the luciferic and ahrimanic powers in the first half of the evolution sacrificed themselves to give us what we needed for the attainment of our freedom. But it is indispensable that we should be aware of the following: Because evolution must be, we must accept the civilisations that are the expression of it. We shall gladly and lovingly devote ourselves to an Anthroposophical culture which will not be eternal—nevertheless we shall accept it with enthusiasm, and we shall create with love what was before created under the influence of Lucifer; we shall, too, develop within ourselves a superabundance of love, without which culture after culture could not be developed. We shall not be under the delusion that everything will last for ever, for by our attitude we shall counter-balance Lucifer's disappointments; we repay to Lucifer consciously the services he has done us and by this repayment we redeem him.

That is the other side of the karma of higher beings, that we develop a love which does not remain in mankind alone, but penetrates right into the cosmos. Love will stream into beings who are higher than we are and they will feel it as a sacrifice. This sacrifice will rise to those who once poured their gifts upon us; just as in early days the smoke of sacrifice ascended to the Spirits, when men still had spiritual possessions. At that time men were only able to send up the symbolical smoke of sacrifice, but in the future they will send up streams of love, and out of the sacrifice higher forces will pour down to men which will work, with ever increasing power, in our physical world as forces guided from the spiritual world. Those will be magical forces in the true sense.

Thus human evolution is the working out of human karma and the karma of higher beings. The whole plan of evolution is connected with individual karma. If a higher being or superhuman individuality in the year 1910 did this or that which was carried out on the physical plane by a human being, a contact is established between them. The person is then interwoven into the karma of the higher beings and human karma is fructified by the universal karma of the world.

Consider Miltiades, or some important personality, who played a part in the history of his nation. This part was necessary to the karma of the higher powers and so each man is placed at his post. Into the individual karma is poured part of the karma of humanity which then becomes his own karma as soon as he performs some action connected with it. Thus do we also live and weave into the macrocosm the individual karma of a microcosm.

We have now reached the end of this course of lectures, although not the end of the subject. But that cannot be helped. I may just add a few words more, namely, that I have given this course of lectures on those very human questions which are able to stir the human heart so deeply, and which again are connected with the greatest destiny, even of the higher beings. When I say that I have given this course really from the depths of my soul and am happy that it was possible for once to speak of these things in an anthroposophical circle, among anthroposophical friends, who have come here from all directions in order to devote themselves to these considerations, these words come from the bottom of my heart. Those who will have the opportunity of hearing further courses, will see that much will be answered of what someone may have in his soul in connection with this course. But those also who will not be able to hear the summer courses, will later have the opportunity to discuss something of the sort with me. And so I may again say on this occasion that I have endeavoured to speak of the things which have been discussed in such a way that they should not be mere abstract knowledge, but so that they should pass over into our thought, feeling and will, into our whole life, so that one should be able to see in the Anthroposophists who are out in the world a likeness and picture of that which we may call the deepest Anthroposophical truths. Let us endeavour to bring ourselves completely to this, for only then shall we have an Anthroposophical movement which in our small circle exists for the study of spiritual knowledge. Then, however, this knowledge must—first of all in the circle of our members—become life and soul to us, and as such pass over into the world. And the world will gradually see that it was not in vain that at the turning-point of the twentieth century there were honest and upright Anthroposophists—people who honestly and straightforwardly believed in the might of the spiritual powers. And when they themselves believed in it, they became filled with the force with which to work for it. Faster and faster will civilisation proceed in our lives, if we within ourselves transform that which we hear into life, into action and into deeds—and not by trying to convince other people. The present age is not yet ready for that. Those only will be convinced who come to Anthroposophy out of the deepest impulse of their hearts; the remainder will not be convinced. We have karma in the mental sphere too, it was something called forth by materialism; and we must look upon these defects as that against which Anthroposophy must show itself to be a spiritual power.

Therefore that which we have to give to the world must be given out of the conviction that it is the most important thing. Each one who has transformed Anthroposophy into an inner force of his soul will be a spiritual source of strength. And whosoever will believe in the super-sensible may be absolutely convinced that our Anthroposophical knowledge and convictions work in a spiritual way, that is to say, they spread invisibly into the world if we make ourselves truly into a conscious instrument, filled with the life of Anthroposophy.

As a complement to the art of eurythmy, to which we were pleased to introduce you earlier, I will be speaking today about its pedagogical aspect. This subject has become an established and organic part of Waldorf pedagogy. When it was my task, on previous occasions, to justify including eurythmy as a compulsory subject in our curriculum, it seemed appropriate to speak of it in terms of an “ensouled and spirit-permeated form of gymnastics.” However, I wish to emphasize right from the start that this remark must in no way be taken as derogatory as far as conventional gymnastics is concerned. It arose from the lack of a gymnasium, which initially prevented us from giving gymnastics its rightful place in the curriculum, in addition to eurythmy. Now that we are fortunate enough to have a gymnasium, gymnastics also is an obligatory subject.

I do not share the view once expressed to me by a very famous contemporary physiologist, after he had heard the introduction I often make before a school eurythmy performance. I had said that eurythmy was to be presented as an ensouled and spirit-imbued form of gymnastics, to be practiced along with the more physically centered conventional gymnastics, which also had its proper place. Afterward, the famous physiologist came to me, saying: “You declared that gymnastics, the way it is practiced today, has a certain justification. But I tell you that it is sheer barbarism!” Perhaps his words are justified, if they imply that this whole subject of gymnastics ought to be reviewed, having fallen prey to the materialistic attitude of our times. This, however, would be a very different issue. The point is that gymnastics, as it is taught in our schools, deals with physical movements and efforts of the human organism, which place the human body into a position of equilibrium relative to the outside world. The aim of gymnastics is that the human body, with its system of blood circulation and its potential physical movements, find the proper relationship to an outside space, which has its own forms and internal dynamics. Gymnastics is primarily concerned with adapting internal human dynamics, the human system of movement and blood circulation, to the dynamics of outside space. Gymnastics will find its proper and justified place in the school curriculum if and when one can find, both in freestanding exercises and in those using an apparatus, the appropriate orientation into world dynamics, seen also as human dynamics, for the human being stands as microcosm within the macrocosm.

On the other hand, eurythmy as an educational subject for children is very different. Eurythmy belongs more to the inner realm of the human organization. It can be seen as furthering and enhancing what is done in gymnastics. In eurythmy, the person works more with the qualitative and inner dynamics that play between breathing and blood circulation. The person doing eurythmy is oriented toward the transformation, into externalized movements of the human organism, of what is happening between internal breathing and blood circulation. In this way, the eurythmist gains an intimate relationship of body and soul to the self, and experiences something of the inner harmony inherent in the human being. This experience, in turn, brings about greater inner stability and firmness because the essence of the ensouled and spirit-imbued movement works on the entire human being. Conventional gymnastics mainly activates the physical part of the human being and, in its own way, indirectly affects the soul and spirit of the athlete, whereas eurythmy activates the whole human being as body, soul, and, spirit. Eurythmy movements cause the human soul and spirit to flow into every physical movement. Just as speech and song embody laws inherent in one part of the human being, so eurythmy embodies laws inherent in the whole human being; similarly, eurythmy works on the young child as a matter of course just as the organic forces inherent in speech work and flow through the young child.

Children learn to speak because of the stimulation of sounds coming from outside, and the children’s innate impulse to form sounds. Experience has shown that when children are introduced to eurythmy at the right age, they feel at home in its movements, with the same natural readiness as children finding their way into speech. An essential human feature—or, as I would like to call it, the most essential human feature—is developed and widened in this way. And since all education and training should aim at getting hold of the innate human being through the pupil’s own self, we feel justified in using eurythmy as a form of ensouled and spirit-imbued gymnastics in its own right, even though it originated and was at first cultivated only as an art form within the anthroposophical movement.

The following may seem a little difficult to understand at first, but if we can recognize how, in accordance with human nature, the child incorporates into the organism what is derived from eurythmy lessons—complemented by musical and sculptural activities—one can see how all these elements affect the child’s organism, and how they all work back again upon the entire nature of the child. One sees the child’s faculty of cognition becoming more mobile and receptive through the influence of eurythmic exercises. Children develop a more active ideational life, opening with greater love toward what comes to meet them; and so, by using eurythmy in appropriate ways, the teacher has the possibility of training the children’s powers of mental imagery.

Eurythmy also works back very powerfully on the will, and especially on the most intimate traits of the human will. For instance, it is easy enough to lie with words, and there are many ways of counteracting such a weakness in children, merely by speaking to them. But in such a case one can also make profitable use of eurythmy, for if, as a eurythmist, one lets words flow directly into physical movements so that they become visible speech, it becomes very evident that the use of this medium simply cancels out the possibility of lying. The possibility of lying ceases when one begins to experience what is involved in revealing the soul through one’s physical movements. Consequently one will come to see that, with regard to the human will, truthfulness, which is of such great ethical importance, can be developed particularly well with the aid of eurythmy exercises. To sum up, one can say that eurythmy is a kind of gymnastics developed out of the domain of the human soul and that it gives back to the soul, in turn, very much indeed. This is the reality of eurythmy and its specific character. Eventually it will be regarded quite naturally as an intrinsic part of education. We have no doubt that it will happen. However, these things take their time because the public first needs to overcome built-in prejudices. There will be those who say, “Look at this handful of crazies,” but such has always been the way of the world. There once were a handful of people among whom one crazy fellow actually maintained that the Sun stood in the center of the universe and that the planets, together with the Earth, were revolving around it. Such a crazy idea was at first totally rejected, for no one of a sane mind would contemplate such nonsense. Nevertheless, during approximately the first third of the nineteenth century there was quite a following for this “crazy” idea, which Copernicus had asked to be taken as the truth. Why should one not wait patiently until something that cannot even be proved as convincingly as the Copernican system of the universe is accepted by society at large!

Eurythmy feeds back into the child’s cognitive faculties, endowing them with greater mobility, causing a keener interest and a sense of truthfulness; it feeds back into the human emotional disposition, which lives between the faculties of cognition and a person’s will capacity. It is tremendously important that the human being, with the aid of eurythmy, be able to keep hold of the self as a whole, instead of living in the dichotomy of soul and spirit on one side, and human physical existence on the other.

One could keep asking forever, “What is the relationship between body and soul?” It is downright comical to see the question coming up again and again! There have been no end of attempts to construct theoretical explanations of how the one side affects the other. But if this matter can be experienced directly—which happens when one does eurythmy—the question immediately assumes a different character. The question then becomes: How does an intrinsic unity composed of body, soul, and spirit come to work in separate ways, on the one side as soul element and on the other side as physical element? Getting hold of these interactions completely forces one to reshape the question altogether. Then, there is no need for theorizing, for everything is founded on practical experience and in accordance with reality. Some people have the opinion that anthroposophy deals with “cloud-cuckoo-land,” whereas in fact, anthroposophy aims at working directly into practical life.

Nowadays, the spirit in matter is no longer perceived; as a result, the nature of matter is no longer understood. This nature can be comprehended only by doing. This may suggest how eurythmy affects the child. One can say that, when doing eurythmy, children, through the will, gets hold of the inner harmony between the upper more spiritual side of the human being and the lower more physical side, so that will initiative is being created. And will initiative is the very thing that needs to be cultivated in today’s education. Those who observe the psychological development of our times know very well that there is a great lack of will initiative. It is badly needed in the social sphere, and the art that will bring it about os most needed in pedagogical practice.

The things I have indicated briefly, you will be able to witness for yourselves while watching the children of the Waldorf school perform eurythmy. I hope that what you see on the stage, done with youthful joy and vigor, confirms what I have tried to put into words for you.