Spiritual and Social Changes in the Development of Humanity

GA 196 — 1 February 1920, Dornach

Ninth Lecture

In what I shall say today as a further elaboration of the considerations given last, it will be necessary to bear in mind that something very definite must also apply in spiritual scientific terms to the work of the individual personality in history. It is usually imagined that a personality, whether artistic, statesmanlike, religious or any other personality that is effective in history, works through that which spreads through consciously unfolding impulses, and that such a personality only works in this way. And then questions that are related to it are considered in such a way that one looks at them: What did such a personality do, what did he say, how did that reach people, and the like?

In the most significant cases of historical development, things are not so simple. Rather, what is effective in the development of humanity depends on the driving spiritual forces behind historical development. Personalities are, so to speak, only the means and ways through which certain driving spiritual forces and powers from the spiritual world work into our historical earthly development. This does not contradict the fact that much of the individuality and subjectivity of such leading personalities also has an effect on wider circles. That is self-evident. But one only acquires a correct concept of history when one is clear about the fact that when here or there a so-called great man expresses this or that, it is the leading spiritual powers of human evolution that speak through him, and that he is, so to speak, only the symptom that certain driving forces are present. He is the gateway through which these forces speak into the historical process.

If, for example, a personality from a certain historical period is mentioned and one tries to characterize this person's influence on the entire configuration of the time, this does not mean that one wants to awaken the belief, when speaking spiritually, that this man has only worked through the power of his personality, as is the case. I will give an example. Let us assume that for some period of time — as we will have to do shortly — a philosophical personality has to be cited as particularly characteristic. Then someone could come and say: Yes, this personality has written philosophical works, but they only had an effect on a certain circle; a wider circle of people did not experience any influence from this personality.

It would be quite wrong to raise this objection, because the personality in question, even if it is a philosophical personality, is merely the expression of certain forces that stand behind it, and it is these forces that have influenced and impressed the wider circles. In this personality one sees only what is working in time. For example, the following could be the case. At a particular time, some intellectual trend or school of thought could be operating in the subconscious of wide circles of human souls. This could find expression in a personality in such a way that what wide circles, perhaps entire nations, only sense, this individual personality formulates particularly characteristically clearly, but does not write down at all, perhaps only telling five or six other people or saying nothing at all. So it could happen that after centuries have passed we discover the memoirs of some personality and find things in them that were not spread by literary means, and yet these memoirs might contain the most characteristic ideas and forces of that particular time. In this sense I have always given characteristics when I have attempted to give such characteristics. I never wanted to give the impression that ideas of personalities only work through the usual channels of propaganda, but I always wanted to point out that one finds the effective ideas formulated in the individual personalities. Of course, the effective influence of such personalities can come in between. But the opposite can also be the case. A broad effect can emanate from a personality; but the other must be stated explicitly so that certain things are not taken to mean that one says, for example, that when someone characterizes a personality as significant for some time, he is characterizing something that is happening only in some corner, whereas one is interested in hearing what is going on in the broad masses. From these points of view, I ask you to consider what I will say today.

I have often discussed how there is a certain strong leap in the historical development of humanity in the 15th century. He who studies the soul life of civilized humanity finds that this soul life in the 16th, 17th century is radically different from the soul life in the 10th, 11th, 12th century. I have often pointed out how it is one of the most untrue statements, but it is repeated over and over again: nature or the world, world events do not make leaps. Such leaps are present precisely at the most significant points of development. And one such leap in the development of civilized humanity is precisely the transition from the fourth post-Atlantic period, which comes to an end in the 15th century, to the fifth, in which we now still live, at the beginning of which we are actually only just standing. In a certain sense, the whole mentality, the thought forms of European civilized humanity will be different after the 15th century; but it will be different in a different way for different nations, for different peoples. Certain transitional phenomena occur in a different way in different peoples.

Now, we cannot understand the spiritual life in which we live today if we do not have an idea of what has been gradually emerging in our spiritual life since the 15th century. We must grasp characteristic points of this newly emerging spiritual life. But of course one can only ever characterize individual currents and individual points of view. If we consider the time that precedes this fifth post-Atlantic period, from the Mystery of Golgotha to the 15th century, we must say that a large part of civilized humanity in Europe is trying to gain an understanding, a religious understanding of Christianity. Anyone who makes the attempt to study the individual views that have emerged in relation to Christianity in Europe from the 3rd, 4th century up to the 15th century will find that the people of this civilized Europe have applied all their conceptual capacity , their intuitive perception, everything they could draw from their soul, to understand Christianity in their own way, to gain an understanding of what had become of the world through the Mystery of Golgotha.

Now, after the 15th century, very special circumstances arise. It is only now that what is called scientific thinking in the broadest circles today is emerging. Before that, something quite different was actually there. What is regarded today as the true science only begins in this fifth post-Atlantic period. And a very specific configuration is imposed on it, and indeed, one can say, it is imposed in different ways. It is always the same imprint, but it is imprinted differently in the West, in areas of Western civilization, and somewhat differently in areas of Central European civilization. And the time has now come when these things should be considered quite impartially, without nationalist ideas influencing the way they are considered in the unfavorable sense that I characterized yesterday.

And so, if we want to look at a characteristic personality manifestation of how this newer time has acquired its spiritual signature, we come across such a personality as the one who is particularly characteristic of the transition from the 16th to the 17th century, the English philosopher Baco of Verulam. Among those people who consider themselves scientific, Bacon is considered a kind of innovator of human thinking. But this Bacon is an exponent, a symptom of something that has emerged in modern times in the sense in which I have just expressed it. The whole Western world is basically permeated by a certain wave of thinking, and Bacon is only the one who has most clearly formulated this wave of thinking in the Western world. Without people knowing it, this wave of thinking lives in individuals. The way they think, the way they express themselves about the most important matters of life, is in some areas of Western civilization Baconian, even if people fight Bacon when they say something contrary. What matters is not so much the content that one gives to any world-view idea, but the way in which such a world-view idea first presents itself to the heart of man, and then how it presents itself in the impulses of world-historical becoming.

To make what I have just said clearer, I would like to say, through a paradox: in our time, someone could be a blatant materialist and another a blatant spiritualist, and both could express their ideas quite well from our materialistic time - the difference would not be great. It does not depend so much on whether someone today professes spiritualism or materialism in the literal sense of the words, but rather on the spirit in which he does one or the other. For it is not the literal content that actually has an effect, but the spirit from which something is done. That is what has an effect; only if one is an abstraction does one give something solely and exclusively to the literal content.

Now it should be noted that if one really goes into what the spirit of Bacon's way of thinking is, Bacon has attempted to use the intellectual powers that had emerged particularly since the mid-15th century to found knowledge of humanity, to found science. The powers of knowledge that have been available to humanity in modern times should become sciences. It was an important time, the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period, when Bacon emerged. It was, so to speak, the time when everything was really called into question; for one could no longer spin any ideas about the riddles of the world in the old way, with the means of old alchemy, old astrology, with all the other old means, nor with the old religious way of thinking. There was an urge for renewal. How did this urge express itself most characteristically? — This urge expressed itself in the fact that just at this time there was a low point for all of humanity's real spiritual powers of comprehension.

Until the 15th century, it would have seemed impossible to want to grasp something like the Mystery of Golgotha with a mere intellect directed towards the sensual. It was rather taken for granted that something like the Mystery of Golgotha must be grasped only as the highest manifestation among others, grasped with higher powers of knowledge than those with which what extends around us as nature is grasped. These powers of knowledge were still at a certain height when the Mystery of Golgotha occurred. They declined more and more in the evolution of mankind. And when the newest time began after the 15th century, people no longer had any spiritual powers of comprehension; they only had a mind directed towards the sensual.

With this mind directed towards the sensual, Bacon now sought to establish a scientific attitude. And so he rejected all those methods of research that had previously been recognized as legitimate, and first established the experiment as the only thing on which science should be built in the main. A large part of the world still takes this view today: you have to experiment, you have to create the equipment and experiment, and from the experiments you have to arrive at views about nature. Seen before the forum of the spirit, it means: I have a butterfly here; it is too complicated for me to examine this butterfly, I make a very deceptive reproduction out of papier-mâché and then examine the papier-mâché model. — That is basically the same as observing living nature through the dead experiment, which is nothing more than replacing living nature with the corpse for the purpose of observing nature. Even when we work in a physics laboratory, we should be aware that we are experimenting on the corpses of nature. Of course, experiments have to be carried out, and investigations have to be made on the human corpse. But with the human corpse, there can be no illusion that one is dealing only with a corpse. In the case of experiments, however, one succumbs to the illusion that the truth is handed over to one. But no one who does not already have the spiritual intuition within themselves to infuse the experiment with the living nature of the matter at hand can extract anything from the experiment, the dead experiment, that applies to the living nature.

This suggests, however, that Bacon's way of thinking was based from the outset on the idea of making the dead the explanatory principle of the world's nature. Now the peculiar thing is that in that imitation of the living, which one still achieves in the experiment, one has starting points for explanations of non-human nature, but one should not be under any illusion that one can really gain anything through any experimental method that sheds light on man himself. All experimentation leads away from the human essence.

Therefore, in the centuries that have passed since then, and in which the spirit of thinking, which reached a certain height in Bacon, has spread, understanding of the actual human being and his nature has been lost. Understanding of what is actually contained as a driving, active being at the very core of human nature has been lost.

Now no one can find the great impulses of moral and social will without going into the essence of human nature. Therefore, the understanding for the impulses of moral and social will has also disappeared in these centuries, disappeared precisely because of Bacon's thinking. Therefore, parallel to the killing of the understanding of the world, as it starts from Bacon, goes the mere utilitarian morality. It is almost a Baconian definition: good is that which is useful to man, either to the individual human being or to humanity as a whole.

Thus, proceeding from the Baconian attitude — and it was much more widespread than anyone today can imagine — on the one hand we have a scientific, thinking attitude that can only grasp what is extra-human, and on the other hand we have a morality that only focuses on the Ahrimanic useful. In Thomas Hobbes, a contemporary of Bacon, this was expressed to an even greater extent than in Bacon himself. But then this wave of utilitarian morality poured out into the mere sense of understanding the extra-human world, poured out into all the philosophers from Locke and Hume and so on up to Spencer and into the natural scientists from Newton to Darwin. Whoever wants to study most characteristically what came out of the leading Western world to constitute the latest wave of European sentiment must begin there, must start from the Baconian way of thinking.

But there is something very definite connected with this Baconian way of thinking and moralizing. With it one can grasp only what is extra-human; one can morally find only what is useful to man and to humanity. That is to say, with the means by which one here strives for science and natural morality, one does not at all enter into the region in which religion is found!

What is the consequence? The consequence is that among those who are the bearers of this attitude, there arises an endeavor to leave religion as it was before, that is, to develop it historically without adding new elements from a new science of the spirit. Bacon, of course, put forward the most characteristic view: science must not be brought together with religion in any way, because that would make science fanciful; and religion must not be brought together with science in any way, because that would make religion heterodox. - So religion is to be kept well away from the kind of striving that asserts itself in man as scientific striving. The new forces that have been active in civilized humanity since the 15th century are attributed to scientific endeavor. No new forces are added to religion. It is to be preserved along with the forces that were previously added to it, because people are afraid of the new forces that could be added to it. They fear that it would become heterodox, that it would lose its true content.

What had to happen under the influence of such a thinker's attitude? What happened? What happened was that out of a certain human truthfulness, science was sought for the extra-human world, out of a certain truthfulness, a utilitarian morality was sought, but that out of what science was sought, religion was not to be sought. It was not to be touched by it at all. It should have nothing to do with actual scientific endeavor, at most only to the extent that it is considered historically. This is how one can distinguish between science and revealed religion. This distinction can also be expressed somewhat more strongly, as follows. It is only more strongly expressed and therefore more unpleasant for people who do not like to hear the truth; it can be characterized as follows: One strives honestly for science, namely for that science that only extends to the extra-human. One also strives honestly, truly, for a utilitarian morality; but one does not apply this honest, truthful striving to religion, it must remain untouched, science must not touch it. Honest extra-human science, honest utilitarian morality – religion as hypocrisy, religion arising from dishonesty: this is only stated somewhat more sharply, and is therefore unpleasant for those people who do not want to hear the truth unvarnished, the difference between science and revealed religion. But it is only by stating such a thing very clearly and sharply that one gets to its essence. And so the most characteristic feature of this line of thinking is that one shrank from applying science to religion, that one did not want the power of knowledge, which one applies in natural science and the like, to play into religion.

This kind of thinking was, so to speak, natural to Western civilization. It is so natural to it that many people in this Western civilization do not understand anything other than that one should not use the same principle with which one wants to understand nature to turn to the religious. This is characteristic of the Western world, and it is quite appropriate for it.

But now let us imagine the same impulse transported to Central Europe. I can show this by a characteristic example. It does not always happen that this way of thinking is opposed as sharply as Goethe opposed Newtonism. Instead, it also happens that Darwinism, which is directed entirely towards the extra- and which at the same time can never found anything other than a utilitarian morality, has now been conceived by a man who was as quintessentially European, even Prussian-Central European, as Ernst Haeckel was. The matter does not remain what it is with Darwin. In Darwin we see the thinking of Bacon continuing to have an effect. He regards the natural world through Darwinism, but he remains a believer, just as Newton remained a believer. He quietly preserves the old way of thinking with regard to mere religion. But what about Haeckel? Haeckel takes Darwinism into his very soul. For him, there is no possibility of dichotomy; for him, there is no possibility of leaving religion untouched. He takes Darwinism, which can really only be used to understand things outside of humanity, but he applies it with a furor religiosus to precisely the human, and he makes a religion out of it. It becomes a unity, it becomes a religion out of it.

And so the impulses that are there work everywhere. The impulses are the same, but they work in a differentiated way, specified according to the different areas. In the West, Darwinism and religion are served together quite well in world development. Ernst Haeckel, the Central European, has to stir them up together and turn them into a unified dish because it is not possible for him to have them side by side. Bacon and his descendants up to Spencer and Darwin are afraid that religion will become heterodox if science is applied to it. Haeckel is not afraid of this. He makes religion as good as possible because he applies the same truthfulness that he asserts in science to his entire view and must also carry it into religion. This is the case in many fields. Goetheanism in Goethe himself already opposed the understanding of the merely extra-human. You only have to take the prose hymn 'Nature', which Goethe at least thought of around the 1880s, even if he did not write it down himself at the time. It has also been presented here in eurythmy. If you look at it, you will see that for Goethe, nature does not exist in the same sense as it does for Newton or Darwin. Rather, it is inwardly ensouled. It even has an active effect on him with humor: ' she has thought and is constantly pondering.” And so, throughout his life, Goethe only expanded on the maxims he set out in his “Fragment” about nature in more and more concrete terms. A strange essay was recently published here in a newspaper, which I believe was even continued in this Sunday paper. It said that when I published the “Fragment” about nature in the nineties in the new edition of the “Tiefurter Journal” in the writings of the Weimar Goethe Society, I had published the “Fragment” about nature with an explanation, I had emphasized too strongly that the properties that Goethe had processed in the prose hymn “Nature” then play a role in his scientific works. It is really funny what objection is made in that essay. It is said that this “Fragment” does not contain any natural philosophical ideas at all, but religious ideas, and one should not find the religious ideas of this prose hymn in Goethe's later scientific ideas in the way I have found them. — So there was a pedant – one doesn't know what else to call him – who took pleasure in splitting the human search for understanding by trying to persuade people to believe that Goethe's scientific ideas are different from his religious ideas. From the outset, the deduction is such that one can see how this gentleman, who wrote this essay, is steeped in Baconism in every limb!

Can we see from something else, I would now like to ask, that there is a differentiation in modern civilization between science and religion? - We can see it from something else. Of course, in England, in the land of Bacon, there was a Wycliffe and the like; but that did not have any influence on the actual configuration of civilization. In Central Europe, on the other hand, something asserted itself to a very special degree that did not have a significant influence to the west, for example, in France. This is because, when the more recent period, the fifth post-Atlantic period, emerged, in Central Europe there was no opposition of the kind that occurred in the western countries, where science was really founded in a very appropriate way, but this science was not allowed to encroach on the religious sphere, which was supposed to continue to , only the religion revealed in the old sense is to remain. But in Central Europe, in the religious sphere, the opposition arises in a sharp way, and from it all the misfortunes in the Central European development, the instigation of the Thirty Years' War by the Jesuits, everything else that happened as a result of this unfortunate war, and again everything that has come later. In this Central Europe, we see directly in the religious sphere that the impulse from the age after the 15th century was effective.

In the smallest and in the greatest historical phenomena, one sees that the same impulse is present, but shifted, welling up from the human soul, from the human heart, in a different way. But gradually the Western world is taking the lead, and gradually something very significant is happening. The further we see the intellectual life of Central Europe developing in the post-Goethean period, the more it moves away from Goethe. Goethe is still studied by literary historians and other people, well, there is even a Goethe research emerging. But Goethe does not live in all this. What Goethe actually wanted to bring as an impulse into Central European civilization, Goethe and his people, that gradually seeped away in the 19th century. And into this Central European world seeps slowly, just as Darwinism has become Haeckelism, that which is the impulses of the Western world. The Western world tolerates these impulses quite well, but the Central European world does not tolerate them. The Central European world is receptive to Western impulses, it absorbs them, but it cannot tolerate them. On the one hand, we see Darwin, who, although he drew a conclusion for humans from the principle that actually only applies to the non-human in his last work, did not by any means push this conclusion to the extent that Haeckel did. In Darwin's work, the scientific principle is, as it were, left behind in the extra-human realm. In Central Europe, however, the situation is the same as that of Haeckelism in relation to Darwinism: there is an attempt to permeate all of life with such an impulse. One does not want to leave aside the unpermeated religious realm, for example; one also wants to permeate that with the impulse. And so it is with the other areas, which follow the same path. Those who are now older have indeed experienced it themselves, how parliamentarism of English coloration has spread throughout Europe, with the exception of Prussian Germany, and how it has been received in Europe like Darwinism through Haeckelism. Parliamentarism, as it exists in England, is quite good for England. For those countries of Central Europe to which it has been transferred, it has been associated with such consistency as Haeckel has associated with Darwinism. Under such influence, the modern times have surrendered.

But one can go deeper and characterize the phenomena much more deeply as they have unfolded. In the Western world, we have, in addition to Bacon, a personality in Shakespeare who has a great influence on modern civilization. For those who are able to study spiritual life, Baconism and Shakespearianism point to the same extraterrestrial source, but one that is represented in the earthly. Both take the same path into the newer development, and it is known that the inspiration for Bacon and Shakespeare comes from the same source. In modern times, when everything is taken roughly, this has even led to the well-known Bacon theory being put forward, which, of course, is complete nonsense as it has been put forward. But the source from which the inspiration of Bacon and Shakespeare originates for Central Europe is the same, and the same initiates personality is the source of the spiritual currents of Jakob Böhme and the South German Jacobus Baldus. And much more than one would think lives in Central European spiritual life that comes from Jakob Böhme – again, a personality who only formulated that which was already working as fact in the widest circles, even if it did not happen in Jakob Böhme's words. One must only be aware that a good deal of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis comes from Jakob Böhme, that a good deal of what is in Goethe's entire organic system came to him via Jakob Böhme, in certain roundabout ways that can easily be proven. And even if Jacobus Baldus lived in lonely Ingolstadt, he is just such a personality who did not influence many contemporaries, but who expressed in a characteristic way what was thought and felt in the broadest circles of this newly emerging modern age.

But let us consider the remarkable depth that lies in these things: Baconism and Shakespeareanism, Böhmetum, Balderum, all come from the same source of inspiration. What comes from Jakob Böhme is still noticeable at the bottom of Central European striving today, but it is seeping away. On the other hand, Baconism, whether in its own form or in the form of the later Darwin, has had a significant influence in Central Europe, and Shakespeare has also had a significant influence. Consider, for example, that the entire second half of the eighteenth century, at least the latter part of it, was strongly influenced by Shakespeare, and that in the nineteenth century, Central European intellectual life was strongly influenced by Shakespeare. Goethe was deeply impressed by Shakespeare in his youth and only from the 1880s onwards did he emancipate himself from Shakespeareanism.

The same path can be seen everywhere, the impulses are the same everywhere. But they work in different ways. In Central Europe, the impulses work in such a way that they seep away; the western impulses pour out over the non-human. They make religious life, in the first instance, a hypocritical thing alongside scientific striving. And since this Western element pours out over the whole of modern civilization, we see how people have not yet come to apply the spiritual forces - spiritual science, which in recent times has to present itself as coming from human nature, just like the scientific forces that go beyond the human - to the religious. Christianity is to be newly comprehended, because one can never continue to work with what has been left untouched. The old spiritual powers have been exhausted, and anyone today who thinks they can somehow grasp Christianity with the old spiritual powers that are recognized in the West for religious matters is living in the most terrible illusions. This must be said today: that a new epoch of humanity must come, through which the mystery of Golgotha itself must be grasped anew with new spiritual powers. For everything that has been said about it has been used up, has reached its own absurdity, can be glued here or there, treated here or there in such a way that it is treated as a scientific “don't touch me”, but humanity cannot go on living with these things. Mankind needs the strength to draw from its own inner being the new spiritual forces that will now grasp the mystery of Golgotha in a new way.

The Western world has realized that it is incumbent upon it to look around for these new spiritual forces. For in this Western world, people have limited themselves to a mere understanding of the extra-human. This extra-human will never be able to reach people. A new spiritual science will have to be understood by people, but only then will new perspectives on the Mystery of Golgotha open up. A mere utilitarian morality can be applied to the mere extra-human world; but such a utilitarian morality will never bring man to his own dignity. Only a morality that man knows is poured into him through supersensible forces that work in his soul can bring him to this dignity. But these can never be grasped with the means that have been left to religious revelation in Western countries. A renewal is necessary.

The questions that I have touched upon here seem to live in areas very, very far removed from everyday life, but they are not. These questions are the basis of the most important, world-shaping questions of today, and no one will be able to answer the big question: What is the relationship between East and West, between Europe, Asia and America? — who does not want to go back to these things. Because what we are experiencing today is ultimately the consequence of what has been going on in human souls over the centuries.

It is only human convenience to not want to go back to these things. Therefore, one can experience what I would call that terrible heartbreak that overcomes one when one hears people today talk about the great misfortunes of the time, about other configurations of the present political or economic or other life, about the affairs of Asia, Europe and America – but hear them speak as the blind speak of color, because they do not want to enter into what actually underlies these great questions as the inner pulsation.