The Science of Human Development

GA 183 — 31 August 1918, Dornach

Seventh Lecture

Recently, I have presented a number of important facts about the human being that can be investigated by spiritual science. I attach less importance to the details of these facts being grasped – for I have often spoken about the nature of these facts – than to a certain impression being awakened by them: the impression of the nature of what may be called the deception of the physical physical world, so that you get a sense of what is actually meant when one speaks of the outer world as we see it around us - I say see, not have - is deception at first, and behind it lies the true, the real world. And I wanted to evoke a more thorough sense of what is meant when one speaks of the real world on the basis of spiritual science. So it is more about these general feelings. And with that, I have arrived at the point where we have, so to speak, another opportunity to tie our spiritual-scientific observations to important and significant interests in the spiritual life of the present, whereby I am thinking, of course, of a broader present, not just of today, but of the centuries in which we live.

Our intellectual life is caught in a conflict, a conflict that can be characterized in a variety of ways, that can be defined in many ways. But all these definitions must ultimately converge into a kind of feeling for two currents that we must form for ourselves as currents of ideas from the intellectual culture of the present, and that, to a certain extent, cannot be properly united. Two currents of ideas are present. One of them, we may call it in the broadest sense the scientific current, by which I do not mean merely what is thought and asserted in the circles of natural scientists, but that scientific current which today lives more or less in the perception of all mankind. This scientific current has gradually become a popular, widespread view. It produces concepts that have become deeply, deeply rooted in the soul life of people today. One can best see how this scientific world view has taken root when one considers that it is most deeply rooted where one believes one is penetrating to spiritual life. After all, what is commonly called spiritualism and what is advocated by very many as a theosophical theory is nothing more than an emanation of a materialistic worldview. What is generally known about the etheric body and the astral body, what is produced experimentally in spiritualistic séances, is entirely captured in concepts borrowed from the scientific world view, which is best demonstrated by people like du Prel, who believes he is addressing the spiritual world. But everything he says about the spiritual world, he thinks in scientific terms, that is, in terms in which one should think only about nature, not about the spirit. Similarly, it is downright laughable how materialistic the theories of most Theosophists are, how they positively endeavor to attach conceptions such as etheric body or even astral body to the scientific concepts that should only be applied to nature. The etheric body is very often imagined as something quite material, as a fine haze or the like. Now, I have often spoken about these things.

This is the one conceptual mass, I would say, that we have: the concepts of natural science. And, to avoid being misunderstood, I would like to emphasize once more that it is not so important that these scientific concepts be found in the natural sciences themselves, where they are largely justified. Rather, the important thing is that they creep into the general world and that they are used to understand spiritual matters, so that some people are even under the delusion that they are saying something special when they emphasize the similarity between the concepts they have in spiritual matters and the concepts of natural science.

The significant fact that we have to consider is that these scientific concepts can only capture a certain sphere of our world, a certain sphere of the world in which we live, in our understanding, that another world must remain beyond our understanding if we only apply scientific concepts. These scientific concepts thus form one current.

The other current is formed by certain concepts that we form about the ideal or the ideal, and probably also today, for a long time, about the moral. Take a scientific concept such as the concept of inheritance or the concept of development. You think scientifically when you think these concepts purely and cleanly; you think in terms when you extend these concepts of inheritance and development, as they are commonly used in science, to spiritual matters. Take certain concepts that are needed in life, for example, the concept of the inner freedom of our soul, the concept of goodwill, the concept of moral perfection, or higher concepts, the concept of love and the like, and you again have a stream of ideas, of concepts, that are also justified because they are needed for life. But only by indulging in self-deception can one build a bridge from the way of scientific thinking today to the way of thinking in terms of ideals, ideas or morals today. If someone thinks purely scientifically, that is, if they seek a scientific world view, as is the ideal of many people today, then within a world that corresponds to this world view there is no place for anything that is understood by terms such as goodwill, or, for that matter, happiness, love, inner freedom, and so on. A certain ideal of scientific thinking is to bring everything, as they say, under the concept of causality, to think of everything in terms of cause and effect. And a very popular generalization is – I have already mentioned this here – the law of the conservation of energy and of matter. If you form a worldview using only the concepts of cause and effect in the scientific sense, or of the conservation of energy and matter, then you can only either be ideologically dishonest or you have to say: Within such an order of the world, in in which only the law of causality, only the law of cause, applies, or in which the law of the conservation of matter and force applies, in such a world everything that is an ideal, that is an idea, that is a moral concept, is basically just nonsense. For a worldview that universally conceives of the law of the conservation of energy and matter, nothing else makes sense except to say: our world order develops according to this law of the conservation of energy and matter. Out of certain causes, the human race has also emerged within this world order. This human race dreams of goodwill, of love, of inner freedom, but all these are concepts that people make up, and when the time comes that such a state of affairs must occur in our world system according to scientific conceptions, then there is actually a general grave for all such ideas of goodwill, inner freedom, of love and so on. These are dreams that people dream while they are completing their existence within the evolution of the earth in accordance with the pure natural-law order, and there is no point in speaking of anything else in terms of the validity of ideals and ideas other than that they are dreams of people, because within such a natural-scientific world view, ideas and ideals have no power to realize themselves. What then should become of ideas and ideals if the world really corresponds to the scientific world view, once the state has been reached that one must necessarily think if one thinks only in scientific terms? They are buried, the ideas and ideals! But today people think in such a way — even if they do not admit it — that they have no inner power to realize themselves. They are mere thoughts that are realized when people attach their feelings to them, when people behave towards each other in a way that corresponds to the ideas. But they have no inner power to realize themselves, as magnetism, electricity or heat have – they have inner power to realize themselves! Ideas as such – so always think of moral ideas for my sake – do not have such inner power to realize themselves within our world view if we think only scientifically.

Of course, very few people are aware of the dichotomy that exists between these two currents of our present time, but it is there, and the fact that it is at work in the subconscious of people is much more important than being aware of it in theory. Only one class of people is theoretically aware of what I have just said, and it is this one class of people that we should keep an eye on in the present day. Clearly stated, the fact of the matter is that the whole world is only scientifically ordered and that ideas and ideals only have a meaning because people feel that they must follow them in their mutual behavior, this view can only be found within the socialist theory of the present. Contemporary socialist theory therefore rejects all spiritual science, even regards the traces of old spiritual science that can still be found in jurisprudence, morality and theology as prejudices that belong to the infancy of human development, and it wants everything that could be called spiritual science to be understood as social science: it wants to form socialist social science as merely valid for the mutual behavior of people. The world is organized by natural science, and apart from the natural scientific explanation of the world, there is only one social science left. This is the fundamental conviction of every self-aware socialist.

If you want to get to the bottom of such things, you cannot indulge in confused concepts. Of course I know that one can come and say: Yes, but that is not how socialists think! But that is not the point. As I explained in the first few days of my return here, it is not the content of ideas that is important, but how ideas are put into practice, how they penetrate and take root. And the socialist idea takes root by rejecting any talk of any spiritual world content, by claiming that the world content is only scientifically organized and that spiritual science is to be replaced by mere social science.

Now man feels that mere ideas and ideals, if they are thought as they are thought in the present, really have no more power than to find their way into the human emotional life and thereby to realize themselves, to realize themselves as a dream that humanity dreams within the evolution of the earth. No idea, however beautiful or ideal, has the power to bring anything into being, to generate warmth anywhere, to move a magnet or the like. Thus it is already condemned to be a mere dream, because — as long as one thinks of the world order only as the sum of electrical, magnetic forces, of light forces, heat forces and so on — it cannot intervene in the structure of these forces, especially if one postulates the law of the conservation of force and matter, according to which force and matter are supposed to have eternal validity. Because then they are always there, and then ideas can't intervene anywhere, because force and matter then have their own eternal laws.

With this law - I say only in parentheses - of the conservation of force and matter, a lot of nonsense is done. As one finds spoken of in the literature today of the law of conservation of force and matter, namely of force and energy, it is also often attributed to Jz / ius Robert Mayer. Anyone who is really familiar with Julius Robert Mayer's writings knows that it is just as foolish to attribute the law of the conservation of energy and matter to Julius Robert Mayer, as is done in the literature today, as it would be to attribute the invention of the printing press to Gutenberg in the case of pulp fiction. For what is presented in textbooks and popular manuals as the law of conservation of energy and matter has nothing to do with the law of Julius Robert Mayer, who was locked up in an insane asylum for his work.

Now, for anyone who takes spiritual science seriously, the question arises from all that I have presented: what is the relationship, what is the connection between what can never be united within the present world view: moral idealism and naturalistic observation of the world? This question cannot be answered theoretically without further ado. In many cases, the present age craves theoretical answers, and even those who turn to theosophy or anthroposophy sometimes crave theoretical and dogmatic answers more than anything. But the answers that are to be given on the basis of spiritual science must be answers based on direct perception. In this respect, it is not acceptable to carry the present age's preference for dogmatism into spiritual science. Spiritual science demands something else. Of course, in many cases scholars demand that other dogmas be established, but spiritual science cannot agree at all with the view that other dogmas should be established than those that already exist. Rather, it demands that thought be approached differently and viewed differently, that certain things be thought of from completely different points of view. What is often practiced today as spiritual science, especially as theosophy, can often give the impression of a somewhat modified scholasticism of the Middle Ages. I do not want to speak out against scholasticism, because scholasticism has things in it that are much more significant than what is produced philosophically in the present. But the tendency of many people today is to have only other dogmas, about God and immortality and heaven and hell, and to think differently about these things, but only to think, not to arrive at views that are based on quite a different ground than earlier ideas. If one is truly grounded in spiritual science, one says to oneself: During the scholastic period, there was enough speculation about the Trinity, about the nature of man, about his immortality, about the Christ problem, if I do not use the term now with any kind of unpleasant connotation. For the real value of this scholasticism does not lie in the dogmas it has established, but in the technique of thinking, as I once described it in my writing 'Philosophy and Anthroposophy', which is now being republished in a new edition that has been significantly expanded; it lies in the way of thinking about things. But nowadays it is actually better to learn this thinking by going to the scholastics than by turning to the often confused ideas that have been called theological or philosophical in recent times. There has been enough theorizing about these things in the Middle Ages. For example, the Christ-problem was wrestled with in such a theoretical way. Those who know the nature of this struggle cannot derive much benefit from a somewhat modified scholasticism, as it has been practiced in theosophy, for example, where, instead of having, in the past, trinity, immortality or other things, one now has again physical body, etheric body, astral body. It is a different kind of theotizing, but basically it is qualitatively the same thing. Those who are well informed about this school of the Middle Ages know that it is a moot point to want to penetrate, let us say, to the Mystery of Golgotha. Today it is much more important, for example, to penetrate to the figure of Christ Jesus, which is being attempted by us here in the center of the structure, where we are trying to really find the figure of Christ Jesus again. Those who are really interested in earlier dogmas will be much more interested today in bringing the figure of Christ out of spiritual life, because today is the time to do so. The Middle Ages were the time for keen reflection and the spinning out of scholastic concepts; today — as I have already characterized many times — is such a point in the fifth post-Atlantic period, where man's view must be directed towards spiritual forms. What was previously sought as the form of Christ are, after all, fantastic forms. I have often spoken here about the development of the figure of Christ. The form of the Christ will be found again through spiritual vision. Each time has its special task. It is not important that something is fixed, but that humanity seeks in its development and thereby reaches ever further and further stages of its development.

What is important, then, is to find a kind of bridge where the modern world view cannot find a bridge, but where, if it understands itself correctly, it must necessarily come to socialism, that is, to socialist theory – not to socialism in its justification; I have spoken about this before. But this bridge can only be found if one has the honest will to penetrate into what happens between birth and death, and also into what happens between death and a new birth, if one does not just have the will to analyze the world here, so to speak, but if one has the will to really engage with the spiritual. One speaks of man and says: Man consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, the I and so on. That is certainly justified; but it is justified for the human being who lives here between birth and death. However, what I explained last time and the time before that can already point out to you that one can now speak in a similar way about the human being after death, about the human being between death and a new birth. If you want to ask: What does the human being consist of? you cannot merely ask: What does the human being consist of here on earth? And answer: He consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an ego. Rather, we must now also raise the question: What does the human being consist of when he is not on earth, but in a spiritual world between death and a new birth? How can one speak of the members of human nature there? One must be able to speak of the members of human nature in just as real a way there. And if one is completely honest with oneself in such a matter, one must realize that each age has its special task.

People do not really realize that the way they think, imagine, even feel, yes, even look at the outside world – just remember certain statements I made in my “Riddles of Philosophy” about the relatively short period of six hundred years before our era to us – is only like this now. We cannot go back over the eighth century before the Mystery of Golgotha with the thinking and the feeling and the looking that we have now. I have given you the exact year: 747 BC before the Mystery of Golgotha is the true founding date of the city of Rome. If we go back beyond this 8th century BC, then the whole way of human life is different from the one we now know as the life of the soul. All ways of looking at the world become different. There is, however, one boundary that can be observed better than the others, which can actually be observed well, but not yet for the present-day human being: the boundary that lies in the 15th century. The 15th century is too close for present-day people; they cannot really put themselves in the place of the great change that occurred there. On the whole, people imagine: they have always thought and felt the same way as they do now, even if they go further and further back; but how little they go back! Well, the thing is that as soon as you go back beyond the 8th century BC, you have a completely different way of thinking. And now we can ask the question: why did they have a different way of thinking back then? Nowadays, when people imagine things, they come up with rather foolish ideas, one might say. When people of the present day hear how, let us say, in the Egyptian mysteries — which were the most sought-after in those days — it was taught, when they hear how the truths were discussed there, they think: Well, that corresponds to the fantastic times of yore, when people were not as clever as they are now, when they still had childish ideas; now we have the right thing! It is particularly easy for a modern person to think this way, because they cannot imagine anything different, since they have sunk so terribly into this way of thinking in the present. Let us assume that a Greek, Pythagoras for example, came to Egypt and studied there, just as someone today goes to a famous university to learn. But what did he learn? I will tell you something that Pythagoras really could have learned there: He learned that in primeval times Mercury once played chess with the moon, and in this chess game Mercury won. He won twenty minutes from the moon for each day, and these twenty minutes were then added up by the initiates. How much do these twenty minutes amount to in three hundred and sixty “days”? They amount to exactly five days. Therefore, the year was not counted as three hundred and sixty days, but rather as three hundred and sixty-five days. These five days are what Mercury won from the moon in the game and what he then gave to the other planets and to the whole human race, in addition to the three hundred and sixty days in a year.

Now, if you say that Pythagoras could have learned something like this from the wise Egyptians, then every person in the present will laugh, quite naturally. Nevertheless, it is only another clothing for a deep spiritual truth - we will speak of it again in these days - that the present has not yet rediscovered at all, but it is a truth.

You may ask: Why was it calculated quite differently in the past? Compare the lecture of such an Egyptian sage, who lectures the clever fox Pythagoras: Mercury has won twenty minutes from the moon for each day in the game of chess – with a lecture on modern astronomy, which is held in a lecture hall, you will better notice the difference. But if you ask yourself why there is such a difference, then you have to delve a little deeper into the whole nature of human development. For if we go back to the 8th century BC – Pythagoras does not belong to this early time, but in Egypt the remnants of a wisdom have been preserved that was founded well before the 8th century BC, when it could still be imprinted – if it was taught in this ancient time, there is a profound reason for it. The whole relationship of man to the world had been viewed differently, and had to be viewed differently in those days.

I would like to point out that various remnants of old views have been renewed again and again atavistically, whereby I do not mean or understand the word “atavistically” to mean anything derogatory. Anyone who, for example, reads a work like Jakob Böhme's “De signatura rerum” will, if he is honest, actually say today: he cannot do anything with it. For there are given very strange arguments that either have to be judged from a higher point of view – then they make sense – or that, from the point of view of a modern-thinking person, should actually be rejected as the unreasonable stuff of a layman who has gone a little crazy. All the fantastic talk that is often heard in immature theosophical circles about Jakob Böhme is actually harmful. Nevertheless, from a higher point of view, Jakob Böhme is reminiscent of modern science in his whole way of thinking, in the way he analyzes certain words, for example, when he breaks down words like sulfur and searches in the broken-down parts for something. We do not want to look at the material but on the way he proceeds in his work 'De Signatura rerum', he reminds us much more of a certain concrete connection of the human being with the entire spiritual world than any of the abstract sciences, which only exist in public today. He, Jakob Boehme, is much more immersed in this spiritual world. And this immersion in the spiritual world is characteristic of thinkers who lived before the 8th century BC, before our era. They did not think with the individual, separate reason with which we think today. We all think with our individual reason; they thought more with cosmic reason, with creative reason, with the reason that one must, I would like to say, still listen to in some of its creations if one wants to come upon it.

Today there is actually only one area in which one can perceive a little bit of how something like creative reason still pours into and works in human life. One can still perceive something of a realization of the ideal in one area; but, I would like to say, there is only a shadow of it left, and this shadow is mostly not taken into account. Today, there are a number of naturalistic anthropological theories about the origin of language and how it is thought to have developed. As you know, there are two main theories, as I have mentioned before. One is called the 'wauwau' theory, the other the 'bimbam' theory. The woof-woof theory is advocated more by continental scholars, while the Max Müller school of thought favors the ding-dong theory. The woof-woof theory is based on the idea that humans started out in a very primitive state and that their internal organic experiences barked out like a dog when it goes “woof woof.” Through a corresponding development evolution - everything develops, doesn't it, from the primitive to the perfect - the dog's “bow-wow”, which can still be seen in humans at its primitive level, has become human language. If you follow the development from the baying of the dog to today's speech, in a similar way to the theory of evolution, Darwin or Haeckel, starting with the simplest monera, that is, from the simplest, most inarticulate form to today's language, then that is just the baying theory. Another theory says that one can develop a certain feeling of kinship with the tones of the bell: ding dong; one would have a certain inner sound each time that one imitates. According to this, one would follow more of an evolutionary theory with the woof woof, and more of an adaptation theory with the ding dong, an adaptation of the human being to the inner nature of the material words. Then you can also combine things in a witty way, the Bim-Bam theory with the Bow-Wow theory, which is then something more perfect, then you have combined development with adaptation. Well, these things are more or less common practice today. There are also those who laugh at these two theories and have other theories; but in principle they are not much different either.

From a spiritual point of view, there can be no question of the development of language being as it has just been characterized. Rather, purely externally, the structure of language shows that real reason prevails in the formation and development of language. And it is interesting to trace the workings of reason precisely in language, for the simple reason that it is still in language that an ideational element lives most vividly, that is to say, that which is observed in the one current today, and because language does not merely address itself to the human mind, but has its own laws, so that the ideational is already realized in it in a certain way, even if only shadowily, in relation to natural laws. Take, for example, a word – I will only draw your attention to a few very elementary cases – where you can see how inner reason prevails in the emergence of language; take a word like: oratio, speech. It is remarkable when we take a word like oratio, speech, and then observe what becomes of this word in the life of man after death, for there is a remarkable similarity with what has been the work of nascent reason in the development of language. This gives us a certain certainty that today can hardly be gained in any other way. At best, we can only arrive at hypotheses by other means. The dead person will rarely, at least after a certain time has passed since death, still understand the word oratio; he will no longer understand it, he loses the understanding of it. On the other hand, he will still understand a contemplation, an imagination that leads back to what can be expressed by the words: Os, Oris, Mund, and: Ratio, Vernunft. The dead man breaks down the word oratio into os and ratio. And in evolution the reverse process has actually taken place: the word oratio has actually come into being through a synthesis of original words, os and ratio. Oratio is not as original a word as os, oris and ratio, but oratio is formed from os and ratio.

I would like to give you a few more examples of such elementary things. These things can be most vividly studied in the Latin language because they are most clearly evident there, but the laws that can be found are also important for other languages. Take, for example, three original words: Ne ego otior; that would mean, if taken as a word: I am not idle. Ego otior: I am idle; ne ego otior: I am not idle. These three words are composed through the ruling cosmic reason in Negotior, that is, doing business. There you have three words put together into one, and you see the structure of the words in a rational way. You see reason at work in the development of language.

I would not, as I said, assert this so strictly if the remarkable fact did not occur that the dead dissolve what has been put together here in the world. The dead dissolve something like negotior into: Ne ego otior, and he understands only these three words or ideas, which he combines from this trinity, and he forgets that which was created by the combination.

Another obvious example is: unus, the one, and alterque, the other; this is combined into the Latin word uterque, each of the two. We would be quite happy if we had a word in modern languages like Uterque, which gives that concept; the Frenchman can only express it by staying with the upper one: I'un ct l'autre; he doesn't have a single concept to express that. But Uterque expresses it much more precisely.

Take an example to illustrate the principle I am talking about. You all know the word “se”, the French word “se”: to oneself. You know the word “hors” (out): you could also say “hors de soi” (out of oneself), and “tirer” (to draw) – I'll just keep the “tir” – “tir”: to draw, to draw away. If you then combine these three things according to the same principle, you get “sortir”, to go away, which is nothing more than a combination of “se hors tir”; “tir” is the rest of the word “tirer”. So you can still see the same governing reason at work in a modern language. Or take an example where the matter is somewhat obscured by the fact that different levels of language are at work: “coeur, the heart; ‘rage’, that is the lively, the invigorating, the enthusiasm that comes from the heart; composed: ‘courage’. These are not just any inventions, but real events that really happened. That is how the words are formed.

But the possibility of forming words in this way no longer exists today. Today, man has stepped out of the living connection with cosmic reason, and therefore there may be a possibility at most in very sporadic cases of venturing to approach language in order to extract from it words that are, as it were, in the spirit of language. But the further back one goes, and especially the further back one goes behind the 8th century BC, also in the Greek and Latin languages, the more the principle is active in real life that language develops in this way. And what is significant here is that one has to point to this as if it were eurythmic, by discovering in the dead person: he pulls the words apart again, he breaks them down again into their parts. He has more feeling, the dead man, for these parts of the words than for the whole words. If you think about it consistently, you would break the words apart into the sounds, and if you then translate the sounds, not into movements in the air but into movements of the whole human being, then you have eurythmy. Eurythmy is therefore something that the dead can indeed understand very well when it is practised perfectly. And you can see that such things, like eurythmy, cannot be judged externally, but that one can only understand their place in the overall structure of human development if one is also able to enter into this overall development of the human being.

Much more could be said about what eurythmy actually aims to achieve, but there will be an opportunity to do so later. For now, I wanted to draw your attention to a field, however shadowy, where, even in ancient times, the ideal was still reflected in the real through the living activity of human beings themselves. I said at the beginning today: In today's world view, we no longer find the possibility of building a bridge between the ideal, the moral, and that which lives in nature. The bridge is missing. It is also quite natural for the bridge to be missing in the current cycle of human development. The ideal no longer creates. I wanted to show you an example in the human realm itself, even if, as I said, it is a shadowy one, where something ideal still exists in the human being himself. For in the composition of such words, it was not the agreement of people or the consideration of a single human individuality or personality that was at work, but reason, without the human being being really present. Today, people want to be present in everything they do: Now, if something as beautiful, great and meaningful as this were to be done – you should see what would come of today's human wisdom if language were to be formed today! But it was precisely in those times when man was not yet so self-aware that these great, wise, significant things happened in humanity, and they happened in such a way that in this event, a close coexistence of the ideal and the real interacted, namely, ideal, that is, rational becoming, and real movement of air through the human respiratory organs. Today we cannot build a bridge between the moral idea and, for my sake, the electrical force; but here a bridge is built between something that happens and something that is rational. Of course, this does not lead us to build the same bridge – I will elaborate on this tomorrow – it must be built in a completely different way today. But you can see from this that humanity has progressed to its present state from a different state: from being inside a living web that was close to what, in a certain way, takes place in reverse post mortem, that is, after the death of human beings. Today, after death, in order to find his way between death and a new birth, man must again take apart what has been so joined together by forces - we will speak of this again tomorrow - that this joining together can still be clearly seen if one goes back to the older stages of speech formation.

These are important things, things that we really must consider when we turn our attention to the question of how spiritual science can be integrated into the whole structure of contemporary spiritual life. We have often spoken about this, and it is something we must consider. And if we repeatedly speak of the importance of integrating spiritual science into the whole of evolution, then we must also think concretely in this field. In these lectures I would now like to contribute something to this concrete thinking. If it were possible for spiritual science to be carried by a certain movement in the present day, by a human movement, then this spiritual science would be able to have a fruitful effect in all fields. But above all, there would have to be the will to respond to such subtleties, as they are often emphasized here. For it is on these subtleties, which always relate to the relationship of our spiritual science to contemporary spiritual culture, that we must base what we can call our own engagement with the spiritual movement of the present day through spiritual science. It is truly the case that the sad, catastrophic events of the present should make people aware that old worldviews have gone bankrupt. Not from spiritual science alone, but from its relationship to these old worldviews, one could see what has to happen for us to emerge from the bankruptcy of the present time.

To do this, it would of course be necessary to finally address the intentions that I have often expressed as those of the spiritual scientific movement. It would truly be necessary to recognize the reasons why, for example, working on the building has become so fruitful within certain circles, while other endeavors of the Anthroposophical Society have remained equally fruitless, so to speak; why, if one disregards what it has really achieved, namely the Dornach building, the Society often fails. On the one hand, if it is not to evoke the opposite, such an achievement always requires that many other things happen. It is necessary that the Anthroposophical Society should not fail in other respects, as it has completely failed in during the years of its existence. This failure need not be emphasized again and again if the opinion were much more widely spread that one must reflect on why the Anthroposophical Society fails in so many other respects. If people would reflect more deeply, they would recognize, for example, why the opinion keeps spreading in the world that I only lead the Anthroposophical Society by the hand and give everything away; while there is hardly a society in the world where less happens that a so-called leader wants than in the Anthroposophical Society! As a rule, the opposite of what I actually intend happens. So, it is not true that the Anthroposophical Society in particular can show how far reality is from its so-called ideals in practice. But then one must also have the will to stand on the ground of reality. In a society, there are naturally personal issues; but one must also understand these personal issues as personal. If people in some branch are fighting for purely personal reasons, one should not make black out of white or white out of black, but one should calmly admit: We have personal reasons, we do not like so-and-so for personal reasons. Then one is speaking the truth; there is no need to distort reality into an ideal. It is therefore necessary to recognize that while on the one hand I am endeavoring to lift everything of an intellectual nature out of the sectarian, to strip away everything that is sectarian, the Anthroposophical Society is increasingly sinking into sectarianism and has a certain love for the sectarian. If there is anywhere an effort to get out of the sectarianism, then this very desire to get out of the sectarianism is hated.

Of course, I do not want to criticize anyone, nor do I want to be ungrateful for the beautiful aspirations that are everywhere, I fully recognize everything, but it is necessary to reflect a little on some things, otherwise things will arise again and again, and I have been told about them again in these days. Isn't it true that the personal is also intimately entwined with the matter? If some kind of disaster occurs in a country, the constitution of the Anthroposophical Society is such that I might say the Society has the sensation of quarreling a little, and from all this quarreling, I myself am personally insulted in the most disgraceful way. Yes, if this repeats itself over and over again, we will not get anywhere. If I am always insulted in the most vicious way because the others quarrel and I am played out, if it always comes down to me being played out, then of course I can no longer hold the anthroposophical movement in the world. It would be possible to work in a positive way if one wanted to focus more on the positive, which I am always hinting at enough. It would be possible to keep such things in the background, which are mostly based on terribly inferior things. But in many circles there is much more desire to quarrel, much more desire for dogmatic disputes, out of which personal quarrels often develop. And then it happens that the cursing usually turns against me – which of course leaves me personally highly indifferent, but the movement cannot continue if it is to go on like this. It is not that I am criticizing what the friends have done in such a case, but I would point out that they have not done something else, which is not for me to suggest in a blunt way, but which would much more surely prevent what is constantly happening than the way it is constantly being attempted. Today it is already the case that one can say: We have only given cycles to members of the Society, and I know how I myself am often strangely approached by this or that member of the Society when I am much more liberal than members on the fringes often want to be in giving cycles. Yes, what has been brought into the world through the cycles could never have fared worse through outsiders than it has through members of the Anthroposophical Society! This must also be taken into account. Today we have already reached the point where the cycles are being abused by members, by apostate members of the Anthroposophical Society, to such an extent that it may soon be said that we no longer set any limits, we sell the cycles to anyone who wants them. It cannot get much worse.

I am not saying that it will happen tomorrow, but I am merely hinting that society does not work as a society at all – always except for the building and except for individual circles – that it does not actually do what a society would otherwise do. As a result, society is of no help at all; it is not at all what a movement would result in.

Here it is so clear that I cannot mean anyone personally, that I can discuss this here quite impartially, for the simple reason that this is precisely the place where work is being done fruitfully out of society, namely on the building. This is already a real thing that has emerged out of society. And if other things that could be much cheaper than construction were to be worked on by such a social spirit as the workers on our construction site, then the Anthroposophical Society would be able to produce tremendous blessings. But then one must call white white and black black. One must also really say when personal matters are at hand: these are personal matters — and not inflate them into lofty idealism; otherwise one will just have to consider what needs to be put in the place of the Anthroposophical Society. A society could not be substituted, because it would be the same old misery all over again! Right? The society cannot be just a means to an end, a way of dealing with all kinds of inferior personalities. But it has become a means that forces you to take into account all kinds of inferior stuff.

Well, I don't want to bore you any longer with this matter today, but I just wanted to add it after the time was up. I finished the lecture beforehand; I only say such things when the lecture time is up, afterwards as an appendix.