Spiritual Knowledge Versus Empty Phrases in Social Crisis

GA 192 — 22 June 1919, Stuttgart

Tenth Lecture

Yesterday, when we were discussing the threefold order of the social organism from morning till night, the latest issue of the journal Das Reich arrived, in the middle of our deliberations. Under the general title of “Knowledge and Opinion” it contains material that I have never read before and that I have never seen before. These statements, however, stimulated a whole series of thoughts in me, thoughts, however, that are often stimulated in me anyway.

It is in Lower Austria, in a place from which, if you look south, you have a particularly beautiful view of the mountains in the evening glow, the Lower Austrian Schneeberg, the Wechsel, those mountains that form the northern edge of Styria, a small, very inconspicuous house. Above the entrance door was written: “In God's blessing all is included”. I myself was in this cottage only once during my youth. But there lived a man who was outwardly very inconspicuous. When you came into his cottage, it was full of medicinal herbs everywhere. He was a herbalist. And these herbs he packed in a knapsack on a certain day of the week, and with this knapsack on his back he then traveled the same route to Vienna that I also had to take to school back then, and we always traveled together, then walked a bit together through the road that leads from the South Station to the city center, “auf der Wieden” in Vienna. This man was, so to speak, the embodiment of the spirit that prevailed in the area, in everything he said, but how he, as that spirit, had survived from the first half of the nineteenth century, which was not that long ago at the time. This man actually spoke a language that sounded quite different from the language of other people. When he spoke of the tree leaves, when he spoke of the trees themselves, but especially when he spoke of the wonderful essence of his medicinal herbs, one realized how this man's soul was connected with all that made up the spirit of nature in that particular area, but also what formed the spirit of nature in the wider area. This man was a sage in his own way, through his own inner being, and from this inner being spoke much more than the inner being of a human being often reveals. This man, Felix was his first name, had a spiritual bond between his soul and nature, he also spoke a lot from all kinds of reading. For in addition to the medicinal herbs that, so to speak, stuffed his little house, he had a whole library of all kinds of meaningful works, but which were basically all related in their basic nature, in their basic character to that which was the basic character, the basic trait of his own soul. The man was a poor fellow. For one earned very little, extremely little, from the trade in medicinal herbs, which one laboriously gathered in the mountains. But this man had an extraordinarily contented face and was extraordinarily wise inside. He often spoke of the German mystic Ennemoser, who was his favorite reading, and who indeed contains much in his writings of what had passed through the German mind, but precisely through the German mind in the great times when the thought impulses of Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe and those who stood in the background were still alive. For behind these minds there stood the spiritual world, which they allowed to flow over into what they revealed to the world in their writings. But what was printed in the issue of “Reich” that came to me yesterday from the estate of Ennemoser was completely unknown to me until yesterday. It contains the final section of Joseph Ennemoser's “Horoscope of World History” - I note in addition: Ennemoser died in 1854 and this is the first of his works to be published from his estate. I would like to read a little from this work by Ennemoser to introduce today's discussion:

”...The winter that covers the German regions with snow and ice may last a long time before the real spring comes, but it will come, the seed of freedom has been sown and it will grow, the law of nature will not be repealed by either cunning or military power. Just as the idea of Christianity was implanted in the rough trunk of the Germanic nation and absorbed into its life, so will this vigorous trunk unfold green branches into fresh flowers; just as the body of the church in the German architectural style is already complete in its outlines, wherein the finished dogma of faith , the towers that are still missing almost everywhere will also rise to the sky with the incense of true devotion, and the ever-spiritual life and the organization of personal relationships with the divine will only mature into self-aware understanding, the symbolic framework must first be absorbed into the living movement of purpose , the heaviness of the church must be lightened, the stability of the dogma of separateness must be guided into the current of the universally human; just as freedom should move within the laws of justice, so religion must become an enlightened truth with the light of science, and art a cultivator of spiritual beauty in natural material!

Is it not a utopian dream and will Germany be even remotely able to fulfill such a requirement? Germany will fulfill its calling, or perish most ignominiously and with it European culture. The decision is approaching, time is pressing, the wind is blowing from the east and west, a storm can break out! The trunk of old politics stands on rotten roots, the calculations of diplomats would like to be destroyed, their art has become a distorted art that no one understands. Can you pick figs from thistles, grapes from thorns? True life of freedom sprouts only on the green branches of justice and from the warm spring of charity! Or can this unnatural state persist and the disharmony that has spread to all limbs return to the old order of withered bodies?

Evening will come, the first time has passed, but Germany's end has not yet come; so far it has had childish attempts, there will come a second time when it will discard the 'childish' and have 'manly' attempts. The time of a nation is only at an end when it no longer has questions and does not care about life's higher goods, or when it is incapable of engaging in the solution of the issues of the time! The German has lost nothing but his resilience, his mind is clear, his courage firm, and who doubts the strength of his arm? Everywhere, living spirits are at work, not as imitators, but as originals. The true hunger of the Germans is the yearning for a higher freedom of the mind; the thirst and desire for the light of truth and justice are the main driving forces to set the vigorous hands to work, all of which are still unfinished, to strive for a goal that is still far from humanity. Or should the stream flow back to the sources of its origin? Are nations to become the family fiefdoms of princes again, or is it a matter of state and national rights? There is a higher law in nature and history that no nation can escape, none can go beyond its goal, but neither can any disturb the order of the whole and fall short of it, as its abilities and the spirit of language drive it to! And will not reaction guide the wheel back onto the old track? Fools, who delight only in the dreams of their youth! You can extinguish the fire that erupts in many directions, but you cannot extinguish the inner embers once they have been ignited; reaction itself becomes the means to freedom, pressure brings accelerated movement, the hatred of the parties has a stronger effect than love on the events of the future; perhaps only some kind of spark is needed, and the suppressed intellectual power of the whole nation breaks out in bright flames of enthusiasm. “Nescit vox missa reverti,“ the spirits of life slumber under a thin cover; no free action can be taken back by the spirit; foreign spirits, moods and earthly powers act alone or together on the human will, driving it with irresistible power to acts that, according to divine order, lead to the unification of opposites, to the reconciliation of parties and to the final fulfillment of the calling!”

These are the sentences of a man who died in 1854. I also had to think when I visited dear Felix in his little house one time, that I also visited the home of the schoolmaster's widow, the widow of the schoolmaster who had died several years ago, but I visited her for reasons that the Lower Austrian schoolmaster was also a highly interesting personality. The widow still had a wealth of literature that he had collected in his library. Everything that German scholarship had collected and written down about the German language, myths and legends, in order to sink it into the forces of the German people, could be found there. The lonely schoolmaster had never had the opportunity to go public until after his death; only after his death did someone dig up some of his estate. But I still have not seen those long diaries that that lonely schoolmaster kept, in which pearls of wisdom were written. I don't know what happened to those diaries. On the one hand, this lonely schoolmaster worked among his children; but on the other hand, when he left the schoolroom, he immersed himself—like many such people from the old days of German development—in what lived on in this way as the substance of the German essence. When one then went away from them and traveled to Vienna, one could see how the ancient and the most recent times merge. We live in these most recent times, and it is up to us to understand them a little, to understand them in order to find in them the possibility, as far as it is up to us, to participate in the great tasks that this time poses for humanity.

It is truly not an external matter that all these thoughts, in connection with the experiences of which I have given you a hint, passed through my soul yesterday, just after our meeting, because yesterday, too, was basically a piece of what is falling into our time, right out of the great questions that we must have. For the man said: “The time of a people is only at an end when it no longer has any questions and is no longer concerned about the higher goods of life, or when it is incapable of engaging in the solution of the questions of the time.” Yesterday, many things passed us by that could inspire the thought: How many are there still who have real questions about the time, who still care about the higher goods of life? Did we not experience it yesterday that when our Mr. Ranzenberger appeared in a good-natured way with something that could have touched the heart, he had to disappear? As in the Symbolum, one could encounter the treatment that what is anthroposophically intended experiences in the present. He was not allowed to finish speaking. Nor was the next speaker allowed to finish, who had no questions, who really had no questions, who is living out that senile youth that has no questions and which makes one fear for the future when one knows that only that which that has the strength and substance of the spirit behind it, that can only flourish in the present time if it still has questions and is concerned about the higher goods of humanity, that does not reel off abstract phrases about content-free ideals of youth and thinks itself great with them.

These things are worthy of attention. They are just as worthy of attention as when revolutionary phrases and philistinism are combined. For revolutionary phrases and radicalism are a mask for philistinism, for pedantry, for banality, which we have also encountered enough of, especially in recent times. It is necessary in our time not to speak, not even to speak in short sentences, of those things that mean compromise, but to speak in a clearly conceivable way – for one distinction should be written in the hearts of people of the present: the distinction between content and lack of content – that that which can be developed from here is the strongest opponent of lack of content. For, through the impulse of the threefold social organism, together with friends who have devoted themselves to this idea and sensed its substantiality, we have tried to bring into the world that which is backed by spiritual insight. But on the other hand, it must also be emphasized that the spiritual reality must not be confused with the phrase of the time, no matter how beautiful that phrase may be. The same sentences can be said today: one time they are empty phrases, the other time they are spiritual content. The latter must be present as reality; it is not yet present just because the words sound the same. But everything that is mere phrase, even if it ultimately seems to succeed, has no substance of reality. And it is the task of those united in the anthroposophical movement to recognize this difference between spiritual reality and insubstantial, meaningless phrase. It is not enough that people today say that humanity must show courage again, must straighten up again, must glow with new spiritual forces, and that spiritual life must break away from economic and state life and establish an autonomy of the spirit. We must distinguish whether there is any substance behind such things or whether they are mere empty phrases, born of the spirit of empty phrases of our time. No matter how beautiful they may sound, what matters is whether there is any spiritual reality behind them or whether they are just empty phrases.

I have often said here that it is not without reason that what we call anthroposophy has emerged in our time, what we call anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For decades we have tried to cultivate it in preparation for this serious 'time. But we must also understand it as such: as a preparation for this serious time. This time has very special characteristics. Outwardly, this time bears the mark of materialism, and the sister of materialism is empty talk. The more humanity clings to outward material things, the more that which it says about the outer world becomes empty talk. Empty talk and materialism belong together. Today we can only rise above empty talk by deepening our spiritual life. We can only rise above materialism by deepening our spiritual life. For, however strange it may sound, this age of materialism and empty phrases is the time when the spirit, with its content from the spiritual world, most strongly wants to communicate with humanity. The world lives in contradictions. Never before has man been as close to the spiritual world as he is today, although outwardly he is mired in materialism. Never before have people been so close to the spiritual world, but they do not realize it, they misunderstand it. And it is particularly strange when one is repeatedly told that one can only believe what anthroposophy brings, or that one must accept it on authority. However, there is nothing for which authority is less necessary, nothing for which it is less appropriate than for anthroposophy. For it speaks of that which today wants to enter into every human being, which wants to enter through the senses but is not allowed in by the materialistic attitude of the time. And this anthroposophy speaks of that which today wants to arise from within every human nature, but which people do not let up from the lower body through the heart to the head, and of which they naturally do not notice anything.

Not only do people today want to be approached by sensual external impressions, but these sensual external impressions want to flow in through the human senses in such a way that they become imaginations in the human being. Today, people are inwardly predisposed to develop imaginations, pictorial representations of the world. But he hates it, does not want it; he says: That is poetry, fantasy. He does not realize that science can give him many good things, but never the truth about man, and that he would experience the truth if he could come to his imaginations. And what lives in man's inner being reveals itself continually, only that man does not notice it as inspiration. Never before have people been so tormented by inspirations as they are today. For they notice that something from within them wants to rise to their hearts and minds; but they perceive it only as nervousness because they do not want to let it rise, or they anesthetize themselves with something else against these revelations of the spirit.

We have often spoken here of the fact that, in addition to his physical body, which can be seen with eyes and grasped with hands, man also has his etheric body. They also know that the etheric body can only be recognized by those who devote themselves to real imaginations. But today there is a way to truly grasp the human etheric body. This way consists in taking art in the Goethean sense seriously. Throughout his life, Goethe was convinced that truth comes to life in the artistic perception of reality, that art is a “manifestation of secret natural laws that could never be expressed without it.” But our school system is dripping a poison dew on everything that science should imbue with a productive artistic spirit. Our scientific humanity believes that it is getting closer to the truth by eradicating everything from its content that is imbued with the artistic spirit. In doing so, it is getting further and further from the real truth, not closer to it, and besides, the real truth is gradually being squeezed out of all the individual sciences that we have to hand down to young people. The only truth is what Richard Wahle says – in the sense in which I have expounded it – that in what is called science today, only ideas of a ghostly world live. Take everything that can be known through natural science: it gives man no conception of reality. Nature itself, with its true essential being, does not live in the conceptions of today's natural science, and the other sciences have formed themselves after natural science. What lives in these conceptions is not nature, it is a ghost of nature. The world spirit has taken its revenge on present-day people who no longer want to believe in a spiritual world, so that present-day humanity has fallen into the terrible superstition of taking the spectre of science as real science. Today, those who believe in ghosts are precisely those who call themselves monists, scientifically educated. And how could these ghosts of the world become reality?

This could happen if one seriously develops the artistic sense in oneself, as Goethe wanted to educate it in his nation, if one could absorb what comes to life in a productive capacity for contemplation – Goethe called it “contemplative judgment” – if one could dissolve the specter of contemplating nature into the productive, creative power of the spirit. In the middle of the last century, this creative power of the mind was treated in German intellectual life as the fantasy of the wild man who comes to this fantasy in my fairy tale in the one mystery drama. Thus we live with our ideas today as people in a ghostly world, we are superstitious without knowing it, we mock the superstition of others and are three times more entangled in this superstition than those we mock as superstitious people.

The etheric body of the human being is not built according to what we know as natural laws, but according to artistic laws. No one can grasp it, either in themselves or in others, unless they have an artistic spirit within them. And it is the lack of artistic spirit in the present that is so devastating, so destructive, so devastatingly interfering with the worldviews of the present. And in addition to his etheric body, we know that the human being also carries the astral body within him. This astral body is of particular importance in the present.

My dear friends, I know of no more poignant event for world development than the fact that the most important decisions regarding this world catastrophe were taken on a Saturday, on August 1, 1914 in Berlin, in the late afternoon, even into the night. For those who understand the basic laws of human life from the point of view of anthroposophy, many things are obvious, but for these others stand and mock at the superstition of others, but they are three times as superstitious as those they mock. For these people do not want to know anything about the deeper laws that prevail in the life of the world. They believe that gravity rules, that atomic forces rule. But they do not know that world history is ruled by deep-seated laws, of which the outer phenomena are only symptomatic expressions, that from epoch to epoch people have to enter ever different spheres and live in ever different ways. And so we have arrived in the present time because we, of all times in the development of mankind, are closest to the spiritual world, we just do not realize it yet. We have arrived at the point where we have to take into account man's relationship to the spiritual world. Oh, earlier people did not need to take this into account; their poor brains were still agile enough to receive the spiritual revelations they needed. But in the course of time these revelations have become empty shadows and phrases. And what is called Christianity today is often nothing more than a collection of empty shadows and meaningless phrases, not filled with the spirit. But mankind hates the real spirit; it repeatedly succumbs to its tendency towards complacency, in that which has been called Christianity for centuries and millennia, and which Christ repeatedly and repeatedly repels. It is always said: If you go among today's workers and talk to them about Christianity, they don't want to hear it. I can only say: I believe that. For just as you speak today, so you have spoken and thought for centuries and millennia, and now you want to heal the people to whom you have spoken in this way with the same thing that has brought about the misery of the time and of which you have proven that it has no hope.

Today, man is compelled to take his relationship with the spiritual world seriously, to feel that he really does not only live in the physical world, but also in a spiritual world. And until we take this attitude seriously, rivers of blood will still have to flow over poor Europe. For men hate the truth, and the hatred very often changes into fear; therefore, the people of the present are afraid of the truth. Today it is so that we cannot come to the truth at all when we make our decisions. I am going to tell you something extremely paradoxical, but I am only saying it because it is necessary that these things be said in our very serious times, because today man needs real self-knowledge, not empty self-knowledge. Man today is close to the spiritual world. When he is in his physical body, he is separated from the spiritual world; there he sees through his physical eyes, hears through his physical ears, and feels with his physical sense of touch. From falling asleep to waking up, however, he is in the spiritual world, where he lives the life that remains largely unconscious to him today, and that plays into his daily life with its impulses. But for the modern man it is so that he cannot come to fruitful decisions if he wants to make these decisions in the time from morning to evening, but he must have lived them prophetically the night before. It was not like that in the past, when people, through the different nature of their brains, still had spiritual revelations. Today, the human brain has dried up, even in youth it speaks in a senile way. For man must know: when he wakes in the morning, he has already prepared as an inner prophet what he must decide upon during the day. Only that is of real fruitfulness, what he has ready when he wakes in the morning. Everything else will lead more and more to need and misery for those who live in the superstition that one must come to one's decisions during the day, when one is in the physical body. Man should take this into account. For we live today in a time when he should make his relationship with the spiritual world real. That is why it is so distressing that the decisions leading up to the events that marked the beginning of the world catastrophe for Germany were not prepared by the corresponding personalities through what they could have experienced in the preceding night, but were made under the immediate impressions of Saturday, out of the mind of the day, until late into the evening.

I often said to friends when this war broke out: we will not be able to talk about this war in the same way as about the other wars that have taken place in history. We can talk about these other wars by collecting documents from the archives and then judging the facts. On the other hand, we will not be able to talk about this war and its origins in the same way. For at the time when this tempest broke out, all hell was let loose and the gates were sought by the confused human beings. And it will be possible to prove that of the forty to fifty people who were involved in the events that led to the war in July 1914, a large number did not have full use of their consciousness when they made those fateful decisions during the day. But that is the time when consciousness is silent during the day, and when people are not asleep, that is when the demons hostile to humanity intrude into human consciousness. We are therefore dealing with the playing into the world catastrophe of spiritual causes, and anyone who sees through the laws of the world can recognize how, through the fact that the most important decisions are only made on the basis of the events of the day, disaster occurs. Thus one will find less and less the possibility of getting out of the distress and misery if people do not strive to make their relationship with the spiritual world real, that is, to take their relationship with the spiritual world seriously in the facts that take place within. What use is it if you are a mystic, no matter how good, if you sit down half the day or sometimes the whole day and immerse yourself inwardly, trying all kinds of things to evoke an inner sense of comfort and pleasure What use is it if the spirit does not come to life in you, whereby you create living relationships between yourself and the real spiritual world and its laws, which are then expressed in the destinies in which we humans are involved?

All that is expressed in these words was one of the reasons why reading Ennemoser's words had inspired particular thoughts in me. For it was in the middle of German intellectual life between East and West. Ennemoser himself uses these words: “The wind blows from the east and the west.” He thus points first to a special relationship to the Orient and Occident, which I recently pointed out in a public lecture. He points this out as a man of the old Germanic times and shows that in the old days the German spirit was still connected to the world spirit, and that the German spirit was actually called upon to understand the great world connections a little. Oh yes, it goes to the heart when you read such a sentence in our time, written more than half a century ago: “Germany will fulfill its destiny or perish most ignominiously, and with it European culture.” “ One feels that others in the past have thought the same thoughts that have been expressed here and in other places to you and other people. Because basically much of it was a paraphrase of the words: Germany will either fulfill its destiny or perish, and with it European culture. — This Germany must have questions again, it must regain a connection with the higher goods of life. For this question hangs over us: can we still have questions of deeper significance? Can we still concern ourselves with life's higher goods? The question is one of being or not being. If we concern ourselves with higher goods and can still pose questions to the spiritual world, then we will find a way, starting from Central Europe, to prevent the downfall of world culture. If, on the other hand, we continue along the path of a senile youth and a philistine phrase that masquerades as revolutionary, then we will descend into barbarism. If people in Germany know how to spiritualize, then they are a blessing for the world; if they do not know how, then they are a curse for the world. Today the situation is such that the way that will lead to the salvation of mankind in the future runs between right and left like the sharp edge of a razor, and that anyone who wants to recognize things in their reality cannot love comfort and choose comfortable paths.

Remember that I have been telling our friends for a long time that he certainly counted, clearly counted, on generous historical impulses, but in a sense that was only beneficial in those places where he lived out the nationalistic impulses in such a way that their bearers saw them as universal human impulses. The Anglo-American world has its initiates, its people who appreciate intellectual power. Here you could preach and preach about intellectual power, and those three times superstitious people thought you were superstitious yourself. That is why the three times superstitious people have become the victims of the Anglo-American West, which saw through things. In the 1880s, or perhaps even earlier – I am only familiar with the period up to that time – this Anglo-American West spoke to the public about what it considered appropriate for the intellectual and spiritual state of that public. But he spoke from the lodges of his initiation in such a way that he said: The world war will come - that was a spiritual-scientific dogma among the English-speaking population - and its only goal can be that socialist experiments are being carried out in the east of Europe that we do not want and cannot want in the west. I am not telling you a fairy tale, but what was said in the 1880s by English-speaking people who were connected to those who knew about these things. But here these things were not taken for what they are, namely as explorations of a real reality. And so one was overtaken by what the others knew, who therefore could never draw the short straw, precisely for the reason that they knew. And in these mysterious lodges themselves, what kind of people were there? There were people who had their ramifications into all those areas that were important to work on. One has only to study what has been going on at various points, for example, on the Balkan peninsula, for decades, and try to see the connection. In the lectures I gave in various places during the war, I pointed out many symptoms in this regard. Everything was geared to the socialist experiments in the East coming through the world war and flooding Central Europe. In the lodges of the initiates, these people said: We in the West are preparing everything so that in the future, using all the means that can be gained from the spiritual world – but can be gained in an unlawful way – we will get such people for the exaltation of national honor, who can become their rulers, individual people on a plutocratic basis.

This was prepared by the West. The Ahrimanic spirits were involved in this, and it is in this world that those personalities are to be sought who can wait, who prepare their actions not by years but by decades, if these are the actions of great politics. In these English-speaking areas, there is not the militaristic discipline that is known in Central Europe, but rather a spiritual discipline, but to the highest degree. It is so strong that it can turn men like Asguith and Grey, who are basically innocent hares, into its puppets, into its marionettes. Grey is truly not a guilty person, but what a fellow minister said about him a long time ago is true: he is a person who always makes a concentrated impression because he has never had any thoughts of his own. But such people are chosen if you want the right puppets for the world theater. Things were well initiated and well prepared.

But today it is the case that man must not only take into account that which connects him to the spiritual world, which is so close to him, but he must also know that great cosmic laws are at work in the evolution of the world, in which humanity is enmeshed with its destiny, and that these can also be experienced through a spiritual science. One must only be able to finally break away from that stupidity which today is called history; for this history of today is stupidity. It believes that what follows is always determined by what has gone before.

But such a view is just as if you had a sea in front of you and said of it: Waves are washed up on the shore; each one is caused by the one before; the fifth comes from the fourth, the fourth from the third, the third from the second, the second from the first. But the truth is that forces are at work beneath the surface of the water, causing the individual waves to arise. In the same way that someone today looks at the sea, people today also look at history, and they are still proud to write pragmatic or causal history and to present these spectres to people, who in turn react to them superstitiously and take this stupidity of causal history as reality. But anyone who knows how things really are, how forces work from below, how every single event is driven to the surface, must say to himself: Unless this stupidity, which we call history today, is removed from people's minds and views, no salvation can come into human development and evolution. These are the serious thoughts that should fill the mind of anyone today who is really serious about what is happening today as a result of the fire signs.

Oh, it could be painfully soul-stirring when one tried to bring humanity to its senses on specific issues. In the 1880s, for example, I had to think: Oh, we have a physics that exerts its devastating effects on the whole world view with its absurd atomic theory, and that believes in the spectre of the external world of which I spoke earlier. How can one, I thought, teach this world again that it is a spectre? And I said to myself: If you make the world aware that what reaches us as color and light is not only quantity, as physics today with its atomistic stupidity believes, but also quality in the Goethean sense, then you could bring people from one corner to self-awareness in this regard. And I wanted to make people understand that Goethe's Theory of Colors is not dilettantism, but reality in the face of today's atomistic physical foolishness. But the time for that had not yet come. The German mind was still bowing to the English Newtonian theory of colors, which is just as suited to the Anglo-American mind as Goethe's theory of colors is to the German mind. If we had found the opportunity to take up what we needed, who knows what might have come of it! But we should not have tried to find it by taking the easy way out; instead, we should have taken the path of taking the spirit seriously. And then: Goethe's theory of metamorphosis was already a theory of the connection between humans and the rest of the living world. This theory of metamorphosis should have been developed further. But what happened? People did talk about it, but those who spoke had no idea of the real circumstances: what was said was mere empty phrases. People did not distinguish the phrases from what had substance, and so they adopted Anglo-American Darwinism instead of Goethe's metamorphosis theory.

These are the individual facts in a specific area, by which one can see what we have sinned against the individual facts, and what should be done, for example, with such individual facts. Today is a serious time, and it is necessary that we reflect on the great impulses of the Central European spirit, which gave the signature to the period from the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. If we can summon up the forces that were at work in that time, then there may be hope that we will again see questions arise and that we will again find goals and access to the spiritual forces of the world. For what Ennemoser wrote more than half a century ago is as true for our time as it is for his: “The decision is approaching, time is pressing, the wind is blowing from the east and the west, a storm can break out!” Today you can feel it. “The trunk of the old policy stands on rotten roots, the calculations of the diplomats would like to be destroyed, their art has become a distorted art that no one understands. Can you get figs from thistles, grapes from thorns?” And I ask: Can you make revolutions with philistines who act radically? Can the spirit be emancipated and left to its own devices with senile youth? We need true spiritual substance, not that which merely behaves in a radically phrase-filled manner. We need truly enthusiastic youth for everything that young people can be enthusiastic about, but not a youth that spouts senile phrases and has programs for everything and confuses these phrases and programs with spiritual content. One would like to see a ray of spiritual power penetrating into their hearts, so that it might prepare people to distinguish between thoughtless phrase and substantial content. But when substantial content comes to people, they say they do not understand it, it is not quite clear to them. And when the attitude lives in something: you have to form your sentences in a way that befits the truth - and it is not always convenient for it to fit into every cheap phrase - then people say: you write convoluted sentences. How often have I said: Those who take the truth seriously must write some sentences in such a way that they deal with the next sentence while formulating one, and that they place what is said in one sentence in its proper light with the next. If we take this seriously, we will develop the kind of attitude that enables us to understand anthroposophy in its deepest inner sense. Above all, we will develop the ability to distinguish, to really distinguish. Are people today really able to distinguish between things that are, for example, dawning and things that are setting? They are not. And it is here, in this power of discernment, that the big questions we have to ask ourselves must arise. We must ask ourselves what Goethe wanted for natural science. Was Goethe's theory of colours a morning light to recognize the essence of colour more deeply than physics can, or do we want to turn it into an evening glow that testifies that the sun of Goethean culture has already set? Was Goethe's theory of metamorphosis a morning light, or do we want to turn it into a Darwinian law that makes the sun of Goethean culture set? These things must be thought through and felt through today. Without this, it cannot continue.

Take the experiences of the last few weeks: you can become hopeful and hopeless at the same time. We have begun to work here in the spirit of the threefold social order. We began in such a way that we took no account of a certain stratum of humanity. We spoke to the humanity that makes up the broad masses, and we had found that no one can deny our understanding of the souls of the broad masses. During the war I once spoke a word of warning: We were condemned during the war to have healthy roots of the people, and that out of these roots of the people individualities developed, which were the German greats; but what the middle class was, that was what could fill one with doubt, that was what so easily wanted to take the easy way out in relation to truth and education. And so it came about that in our movement for threefolding, what had emerged from the roots of the people was brought into a rather alarming view: the party leaders. And the party leaders, who no longer belong to the people, are now presenting the people with a choice: either to remain reasonable and listen to what is truly based on spiritual foundations, but what can be understood in a reasonable way by human understanding, like everything that is based on spiritual foundations, can be understood by the mind, if one only wants to, or to follow the leaders and to lead Europe little by little to the fate of the ten to twelve million people who were killed during the war catastrophe, and the so-and-so many millions who were crippled, and to bring ten to twelve more millions to death or to starve them. This choice has been made today. And anyone who cannot grasp this idea cannot raise their thoughts to the level of strength necessary for the seriousness of the times.

A few weeks ago, we tackled what - it may not be aptly described as the cultural council. For three weeks we have been fiddling with the matter, and it has not been resolved. The matter had to be presented in the way it was presented, because it was also necessary to appeal to what remained of healthy instincts in the general wilderness. What was said from this point of view need not be national-chauvinistic, nor need it have the hostile point against another people. The English themselves know very well that as individual Englishmen they are something different than as a people. The man, who I have often quoted, who is one of the finest art critics, once said a beautiful word, in which he said something like the following: Oh, that's where we make history. There you examine how events actually developed and resulted and how peoples get into wars. But all that has been written is only there to praise the one that we need, according to our subjective point of view, and to condemn or defame the other. And it is true that when nations wage war, they wage war everywhere like savages and do not ask why. lerman Grimm says that the moment people wage war, they become savages. When people become a state, a nation, they do not become higher, but lower. This is the great misfortune of our time, that the state or the sense of belonging to a nation is valued higher than the individual human being. But people today are so enmeshed in the esteem of communities rather than of the individual that they feel quite comfortable being dehumanized, being a state template. It is naturally difficult to create something that can truly emancipate intellectual life. But in our time, humanity is closer to the spirit than one might think, despite its materialism. Inspiration and imagination rule in us. But because of our lack of productive imagination, we transform our imagination into all kinds of ghostly images about the world's interrelations, with which we defame the real world's interrelations. If you tell someone: Europe hangs together in such and such a way – as I did a few years before the outbreak of this war in the lecture cycle in Kristiania; if you look at the world in such a way that you judge it with inner psychology, with inner vision, then the dreamers regard it as a superstition, and if you set about putting it into practice, then these same people consider it utopian or ideological. But what matters is that we see clearly in these matters today. In their sense, the members of the Anglo-American world have seen clearly, and we have seen dimly. —- And inspirations also change, turning into wild animalistic emotions that want to live it up in blood. Look at the blood that is flowing today, look when people are lined up against the wall and shot: these are the inspirations that want to come to people with the good will of the spiritual world, which is hated by people and which therefore transforms into wild animal instincts. Because if a person does not want to allow what wants to come to him from the spiritual world as inspiration, then it transforms into wild emotions, into animalistic drives.

This should be borne in mind by those who have been involved with anthroposophically oriented spiritual science for decades. They should bear in mind that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is not just about collecting knowledge. Whether you ultimately know something about the astral body and etheric body and I, purely conceptually, or whether you copy out a cookbook and just juxtapose what is in the cookbook in your mind, it makes no difference; one is no more valuable than the other. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must pass over into the human soul as knowledge, but one must not confuse this knowledge with the dull, muffled mystical feeling. Ennemoser has already said this very rightly in this essay, for he says: “Just as freedom should move within the laws of justice, so religion must become an enlightened truth with the light of science.” But people today do not want to illuminate religious feeling with anthroposophical science; they want to have an abstract divinity in the mystical feeling. And above all, they do not want art to become a cultivator of spiritual beauty in natural material.

But this is what anthroposophy must aim to achieve: it must not only impart knowledge; admittedly, knowledge, but knowledge that can become inner enlightenment, that spurs on our power of discrimination. If it can do that, then much will be served in Central Europe. For we must be able to look to the west and to the east with a gaze that sees and recognizes the world. We in the west must be able to distinguish between what rises hostile to us and what is hostile only in the declining. Here too I recall from my boyhood, when I was in the area where the Styrian mountains are, how every week, twice, I had before me in the train that Count Chambord, who lived in Frohsdorf Castle, on whose face lay the most ancient catholicity, the most ancient ultramontane Jesuit education and at the same time that which was the reflection of the French “L'Etat c'est moi”. That was still truth. Everything else is no longer truth. No matter how much France may develop her power today, she is in decline, just as the Anglo-American element is in the ascendant. But these things must be properly assessed. We must see through them so that we can fertilize ourselves with the laws of spiritual life, so that we can transform thoughts into will and find the courage to really place ourselves in the present, which demands so much seriousness and so much significance from us. We must always renew the attempts and make these attempts again and again to knock on the door of our contemporaries: Do you want a free spiritual life, do you want a soil in which a free spiritual life can develop? For these attempts must always be made. If we want to let some truth and wisdom flow into humanity, then we must put it to the test, whether people want to accept it or not; it can very well impair the matter that people do not want to accept it. Therefore, I ask you not to lie down on a lazy bed by saying to yourself, according to Ennemoser's sentence: “Germany will fulfill its destiny or perish in the most disgraceful way, and with it European culture. “ These words are not to be understood in this way; rather, you must say to yourselves that Germany will fulfill her calling if there are people who have enough strength to revive the German spirit in themselves, unchauvinistically, unnationally, as a part of the world spirit, in whose sense we have to work between East and West. And if the world rejects what can come from Central Europe, then the time should have come for us, those who for decades have committed themselves to anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, not only with our heads but also with our hearts and with all our willingness to make sacrifices, to remember and say: We are here! And that we are here to cultivate the spirit should not be a lie of the soul, but should unfold as a truth of the soul! And when others are ready to accept the call for truth, as it can come from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, then, when this understanding occurs, what was intended as the Anthroposophical Society could become what it was intended for. Today, the call for the emancipation of spiritual life goes out to all people of good will. But those people who have laid claim to it from the standpoint of the spirit should be honest about it and say: If the others leave the path of the spirit, if they do not have the courage to do so, then we will take it upon ourselves. We have the courage to do so. We do not want the spirit to be an empty phrase for us; we want it to pulsate as reality in our blood; we want to say what has to be done for the spirit.