Anthroposophy and its Opponents

GA 255b — 6 May 1921, Dornach

Religious Opponents VIII

Concluding Remarks after The Members' Meeting

Yes, my dear friends, that is what I wanted to take as my starting point today. I want to point out, however, somewhat stimulated by an article that was handed to me today, how unsuitable our present civilization is for such ideas to find their way into it, because, you see, this article asserts some peculiar things. I do not want to go into all the various stupidities that are said about anthroposophy. But I do want to draw your attention to the criticism that is expressed here about a section of my Theosophy. There the gentleman says:

Steiner has the most wonderful things to say about the spiritual world. All things in the physical universe have their images there, which are not only sensory but also spiritual. There is a “spiritual” space in which these spiritual images move, just as chairs and tables move in physical space.

Now, my dear friends, I have already seen that oxen, horses and “Traubs” move in physical space, but that tables and chairs move in physical space is an invention of this Mr. Traub. I suspect, however, that this Mr. Traub, who is a university professor, as indeed he should be, has perhaps interpreted the sentence on page 108 of my Theosophy in the following way:

When a person's spirit is awakened, it perceives these thought-beings just as the physical eye perceives a table or a chair.

Perhaps this sentence inspired him to this lavish fantasy that tables and chairs move in physical space. They do so for the spiritualists, but Professor Traub of the University of Tübingen obviously does not want to be a spiritualist. Who else does this? Yes, the person who saw the hat “twice,” the drunk; tables and chairs move for him as well. So I can only imagine this other alternative.

Another cute story is, for example, that Professor Traub comes up with a very special definition of what science is. And so he spins the cute sentence:

This brings us to the crucial question: ...

What came before actually has nothing to do with it, so Professor Traub says: This brings us to the crucial question – which is actually quite pointless. Professor Traub:

This brings us to the crucial question: Is Theosophy right when it deliberately claims to be a science? This question can only be flatly denied. It is not a science because it also wants to be a spiritual science. That is a contradiction in terms. Science is generally valid by its very nature. It seeks the truth and the truth is for everyone. A science that keeps some of its results secret is not a science.

Now I would like to know how a science could not know something and not keep its results secret; if you know something and knowledge is a science, it makes no difference to the essence of science whether you lock it in a desk or communicate it to someone! But a modern university professor makes a big deal out of something that is completely irrelevant to the essence of science. Basically, the whole article consists of nothing but such trivialities, and from such articles one can indeed summarize a little of what today must be called the terrible muddiness and incompetence of contemporary education, and it is certainly not suitable for enlightening the minds of our youth in any special way. Because when these things are presented to young people with the same common sense with which chairs and tables are made to dance through their own power in space – and the article already suggests that everything else is also in this way, from the same spirit – then truly not much can come of this youth.