# Social Questions

## GA 305 — 29 August 1922, Oxford

### Humans in the social order: individuality and community

Ladies and gentlemen, as I attempt today to conclude my description of contemporary social life and the social demands of our time, I am aware that everything I have been able to say and will be able to say about social life and social issues can only be very sparse guidelines. For the social question in our time is a very comprehensive, very universal one, and above all, two considerations are necessary for those who wish to gain a perspective on the social question. First, it is necessary to consider the present historical moment of humanity, and on the other hand, it is necessary to consider the immediate external, earthly-spatial conditions.

The present historical moment of humanity is one that must be viewed with the most impartial understanding possible. It is very easy to overlook what is happening in the depths, not even of human souls, but of human nature in the present, because of prejudices and, in particular, preconceptions.

It is very easy to be misunderstood when one says something like this, because people have said it at almost every time and continue to say it today: we are living in a time of transition. Certainly, we always live in a time of transition, namely from the past to the future, and it is not a matter of knowing that we live in a time of transition — that is self-evident, it is a triviality — but rather a matter of what characterizes the transition, what the transition consists of. And here we must say: the present does not encompass the current year or even the current decade, but rather a long period of time. This period has been in preparation since the 15th century, and the 19th century marked its culmination. We are now in the midst of this period, but humanity in general has yet to gain much understanding of the peculiar nature of this moment in world history in which we find ourselves.

It must be said that what is necessary to observe at present, if one wants to look into social life at all, is that human beings everywhere are striving to break out of old structures and simply want to be human beings, to be free human beings.

Therefore, what we need today above all else is a worldview – as we say in German – a worldview of freedom, because the word freedom has a different meaning here: a worldview of spiritual activity, of action, of thinking, of feeling, arising from human spiritual individuality.

In the early 1990s, I attempted to paint a picture of the human being as he currently strives, as he is when one looks not at his head but at his subconscious, in my “Philosophy of Freedom,” which has been translated into English here. In the past, human beings were bound by constraints that determined their thinking and acting. Consider a person from the Middle Ages: he is not a human being in the same sense as today; above all, he is a member of a class, a caste. He is not a human being, he is a Christian, he is a nobleman, he is a citizen. Everything he thinks is bourgeois or aristocratic or priestly. It is only in the course of the last few centuries that human beings have been freed from such constraints. In earlier times, when it came to integrating oneself socially into the human community as an individual, people asked: What is good for a priest? How does a priest behave towards other people? How does a citizen behave towards other people? How does a nobleman behave towards other people? — Today people ask: How does a person behave when they are fully aware of their human dignity and human rights?

But then people must find something within themselves. They must find within themselves the impulses that were previously given to them by the bourgeoisie, the nobility, and the priesthood, and which drove them to act socially. And they cannot find them in their bodies; they must find them in the spirit that is imprinted on their souls. That is why, in my Philosophy of Freedom, I described the moral impulse, which is at the same time the deepest social impulse, the moral impulse in human beings, as moral intuition. Something must arise within the human being that tells him in the most concrete cases of life: This is how you should act.

You see, everything is based on human individuality. One must look at the individual human being, at individuality, and assume that there are moral intuitions in this heart, in this soul. All education must aim at awakening these moral intuitions, so that every human being feels within themselves: I am not alone on this earth, I am not merely a product of physical heredity, I have descended from the spiritual worlds to earth and have something to do on this earth as this individual human being.

But one must know not only that one has something to do, but what one has to do. One must find within oneself, in each individual concrete situation, what one has to do. The soul must tell one this. The vague conscience must become moral individual intuition. That means: becoming free as a human being — that means: building only on what is within human beings themselves.

And some people took great offense at this because they thought that everything moral and social was then left to the arbitrariness of the individual. That is not the case, but rather it is based on the foundation on which social life alone can stand, namely, on the one hand, on the basis of trust. We must be able to gain this trust even in the great matters of life. We have it when it comes to the small matters of life, because when I walk out the door and meet Mr. K. outside, I have an unconscious trust that he will not come at me and knock me down as he goes on his way; I adjust myself to this trust and we avoid each other so that we do not collide. We do this in the small details of life. This is something that, if the free person understands it correctly, can be applied everywhere in all matters of life. But it is necessary that trust prevails from person to person. In this trust—which is a golden word—in the education toward this trust, toward belief in the individual human being, not merely in the nation or in humanity, in this education toward belief in the individual human being lies that which alone can be the impetus for the social life of the future; for on the one hand, only this trust leads from the individual human being to the community.

And the other basis is this: when there is no one to force us to do anything, we must find the motivation within ourselves. We must also find the emotional, mental, and spiritual motivation within ourselves.

What does that mean? When I used to be a priest, I knew how I was integrated into social life. I didn't need to look in a book to know how to behave. When I wore the religious habit, I knew that wearing it imposed certain duties on me. When I wore the sword of nobility, I knew that nobility determined my humanity. I was judged, I was ordered in social life. If I was a citizen, it was the same.

This is something that, whether you praise it or criticize it, is no longer relevant in the current moment of humanity. You can find as many people as you like who would like to have it all back, but world history tells a different story. It is no use setting up abstract programs for all kinds of communities; the only thing that helps is to look at world history.

And this brings us to the question: What should now be the emotional impulse for social action, if it is no longer the virtue of the priesthood, no longer the virtue of the bourgeoisie, no longer the virtue of the nobility, the virtue of the fourth estate, that drives us?

It can only be this: if we can have the same trust in what we have to do, especially towards other people, as we have in a person when we love them. To be free means to live out the actions that one loves.

Trust is the one golden word that must dominate social life in the future; love for what one has to do is the other golden word. And in the future, those actions that are done out of general love for humanity will be socially good.

But one must first learn to understand this universal love for humanity. One must not conveniently convince oneself that it already exists. It does not exist. And the more one tells oneself that it does not exist, the better. For this universal love for humanity must be love for action; it must become active; it must be able to express itself freely. Then it will gradually develop from a judgment of the domestic hearth or the church steeple into a universal, a world judgment.

And now I ask you from this point of view: How does such a universal judgment relate, for example, to what now speaks to us heartbreakingly as, I would say, the most terrible illustration of social chaos, to the terrible distress in Eastern Europe, in Russia? How does it relate to this?

The point is to ask the right question in relation to such a matter. And the right question is this: Is there too little food on earth today for the entire human race? Nobody will answer yes to that question. There is not too little food on earth for the entire human race! If the time ever comes when this happens, then people will have to use their ingenuity to find other means. Today, we still have to say that if countless people are starving in one part of the world, then it is the human institutions of the last few decades that have caused this. For then these human institutions are not such that the right food reaches the starving part of the world at the right time. It depends on how people on Earth distribute this food in the right way at the right moment.

What has happened? At a historic moment in Russia, a large area of the Earth has been cut off from the world, locked away, by a continuation of the tsarist regime born of pure intellectualism, of pure abstraction. A national sentiment that was great but nevertheless confined to a specific territory cut Russia off from the world and prevented those social institutions from prevailing across the earth that make it possible, when nature fails in one place, for human hands to intervene extensively in another place.

The eyes that see social misery today, if one has the right perspective, must lead people to say “mea culpa,” to each person to say “mea culpa.” For the fact that the individual feels himself to be an individual does not preclude him from also feeling connected to the whole of humanity. In the development of humanity, one does not have the right to feel oneself as an individual if one does not at the same time feel oneself as a member of the whole of humanity.

That, I would say, is the basic tone, the fundamental note that must come from any philosophy of freedom that must place human beings in a completely different way within the social order. The questions then become quite different.

What questions have been asked in social relations in recent centuries, particularly in the 19th century, and what has become of these questions, which first arose in the higher classes, among the millions of proletarians? Why are the millions of proletarians today on the wrong track, in the opinion of many? Because they have accepted false teachings from the higher classes. It was the pupil of the upper classes; the proletariat did not formulate these teachings itself.

What matters is that we see clearly. People have said: Man is the product of circumstances; man is what the social circumstances and social institutions around him are. Others have said: Social circumstances are what people have made them. All these teachings are about as clever as someone saying or asking: Is the physical human being the product of his head or the product of his stomach? The physical human being is neither the product of his head nor the product of his stomach, but the product of the constant interaction between head and stomach. They must always work together. The head is cause and effect; the stomach is cause and effect. And if we delve deeper into the human organism, we even find that the stomach is made by the head; for in embryonic life, the head is formed first, and only then does the stomach develop; and then, in turn, the stomach makes the organism. So we must not ask: Are circumstances, the environment, the cause of people being this way or that way? Or is it people who have created the environment, the circumstances? We must be clear that everything is cause and effect, that everything interacts, and that today, above all, we must ask the question: What kind of institutions must exist so that people can have the right thoughts in social relationships? And what kind of thoughts must exist so that these right social institutions also arise in thinking?

When it comes to practical life, people tend to think: first this comes, then that comes. That way, you won't get ahead in the world. You can only get ahead if you think in circles. But most people think: that's like having a mill wheel turning in your head. They can't do that. You have to think in circles; you have to think that when you look at external circumstances, they are made by people, but they also make people; or when you look at human actions, they make external circumstances, but are also in turn supported by external circumstances. And so we have to constantly dance back and forth with our thoughts if we want to have reality. And people don't want that. When people arrange anything, they want above all a program: first, second, third, up to twelfth, for my sake, and twelve is the last and one is the first. But that is lifeless. For every program must be such that it can also be reversed, that one can also start at twelve and go back to one, just as the stomach nourishes the organism, and if the nerves that lie under the small brain are not in order, one cannot breathe properly. Just as this is reversed in life, so too in social life one must ensure that everything is reversed.

And so my book, “The Key Points of the Social Question,” had to assume that readers would be able to reverse their thinking based on social conditions. But people don't want that; they want to read from beginning to end and then know that they have reached the end. They don't want to accept that the end is the beginning. And so the worst misunderstanding of this socially-minded book was that it was read incorrectly. And people continue to read it incorrectly. They do not want to adapt their thinking to life, but want life to adapt to their thinking. However, this is not at all the premise of the social institutions that underlie these descriptions. I will continue this in the next part.

Ladies and gentlemen, when the threefold social order began to be discussed among people, I heard a strange judgment. The threefold social order focuses on the three currents in social life that I have characterized in recent days, on spiritual life as such, as it exists today as a legacy of theocracy; for all spiritual life can ultimately be traced back to what was initially the cause in theocracies. Secondly, to what I call legal and state life; thirdly, to what can be called economic life. When the three ideas of the threefold division, the impulse of the threefold division, were first considered, the first people to come forward were those who perhaps had a good place in the world with their bodies, who were perhaps even factory owners in their outer lives, pastors in their outer lives, that is, who were located somewhere in outer life with their physicality. They came and lectured: Oh yes, now we can be happy, now a new idea is emerging that finally brings the old grandiose idea of Plato back into prominence, because it is just a rehash of what Plato presented as the division of people into the productive, the defensive, and the educational classes. We have brought the old Plato back into favor.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I had nothing else to say but this: for all those people who, when a new idea emerges, first go to the library and look up where it is registered, that may be the case; but for those who understand the threefold social order, it is the opposite of what Plato described as the productive, protective, and intellectual classes – the exact opposite. This is because Plato lived so many years before the Mystery of Golgotha. For that time, the division into the productive, educational, and defensive classes was correct; to want to revive it today is absurd. For the threefold social organism is not about dividing people up again, so that one person is in the teaching class, another in the military class, in the legal and warrior class, and another in the nourishing class. Rather, it is about institutions in which everyone can be alternately involved, because in modern times we are dealing with people and not with classes. So that what is at stake is that there is an institution in which the spiritual life of human beings is universally cultivated, which must be based solely on the abilities of individuals; that secondly, there is the state-legal institution in its independence, without any intention of devouring the other members of the social organism; and that thirdly, there is an institution that is purely economic.

The state-legal institution will have to deal with everything that individual human beings have to settle with each other, everything that has to be determined from person to person.

In intellectual life, not everyone can have a judgment; in intellectual life, everyone can only have the judgment to which they are capable. Everything must come from individuality. Intellectual life must be built on individualities. Intellectual life necessitates that it be a self-contained, unified body. — You will say: That is not the case. — But I will come to that in a moment.

State and legal life necessitates that people, in the spirit of the democracy that has already arisen, where people as human beings have the opportunity to communicate with one another about that which every human being must have a judgment about, about which there is no factual or specialist knowledge, but about which every human being must have a judgment. There is such an area of life, and that is the legal-state sphere.

And thirdly, the economic sphere. Here it becomes apparent how everything cannot be based on individual judgment—the judgment of the individual is irrelevant, because it can never be correct—but rather on associations, on communities of people who, from the confluence of their judgments, arrive at a collective judgment. It is not important to say that the state or any other community should be divided into three parts, but rather that each of these three parts can do what it is supposed to do so that the social organism functions properly.

With the way of thinking that I am advocating here, ladies and gentlemen, one can stand within the world. One can, under certain circumstances—I am only speaking hypothetically here—one can want this or that based on one's abilities, one can perhaps even have the skill, the technique to want this or that; but what one does oneself as a human being is continued by other human beings. I act; that matters, but not everything and not the main thing. What matters is that my action is continued intelligently by others, that it is continued by a third, fourth, xth person. To this end, however, the social organism must be guided in such a way that the traces of my action do not disappear. Otherwise, I do something in Oxford; it is continued, continued; but in Whitechapel there is no trace of it left. Then we see only the outward symptom, then we see only that there is misery there. But misery must emerge if human powers cannot enter into the social organism in the right way.

We look at Russia — misery. Why? Because the social forces cannot properly intervene in the social organism; because the social organism is not structured in the right way according to its three natural members. If a social organism is structured in such a way that spiritual life is freely placed on the individual, that there is a legal-state life that regulates all matters for which every person is competent, regardless of their level of education and so on, and if, thirdly, there is an independent economic life that only has to do with production, consumption of goods, and circulation, then this organism is structured in such a way that the individual action that one can perform really flows through the social organism like blood flows through the human body.

Yes, this is possible based on a real understanding of the world. But based on such a real understanding of the world, people must also understand it. When something like this is said today, and then someone comes along and explains it theoretically with doctrinaire Marxism and intellectualism, then of course it is not understood at all, then people do not know what he means, who does not remain on the surface and sees the misery on the surface and says: Nothing can be improved there; first, people must be brought into such social contexts that misery disappears from the contexts of human beings. That is what it is.

And we must be clear that what was originally theocracy has gradually moved away from life. For in those places where the original theocrats lived, there were no libraries, science was not classified in libraries; people did not sit down to prepare themselves to master a science and study old books, but lived with the living essence of human beings. They looked at people. There, people asked themselves: What is there to do with human beings out there? The library was the world. People did not look in books, but at human physiognomy; they paid attention to human souls, they read in them; they did not look in books, but at people. Our science has gradually entered libraries or been stored there in some other way, separated from human beings.

We need a spiritual life that is once again completely immersed in the world; we need a spiritual life where books are written from life, have an effect on life, and are only inspirations for life, only want to be means and ways for life. We must get out of the library. We must enter into life, especially in our spiritual life. And we must have an education system that does not follow rules, but follows the children who are actually there, based on knowledge of human nature; that gets to know the children from knowledge of human nature and reads from the child itself what needs to be done every day, every week, every year.

We need a state-legal life in which human beings face each other, where judgments are made only on the basis of the legitimate competence of each individual, as I have already said, regardless of their profession or other circumstances. This belongs to state-legal life; it is what makes all human beings equal.

What will then enter into spiritual life if spiritual life is understood as I have just described? From economic life, capital management will gradually enter into spiritual life of its own accord. People complain about capitalism today — but there is nothing we can do about capitalism; we need capitalism. It is not a question of whether capital exists, whether capitalism exists, but rather of what social forces are at work in capital and capitalism. Capitalism arose from the spiritual inventiveness of humanity. It arose from the spiritual realm through the division of labor and spiritual knowledge. I only said in my “Key Points,” by way of illustration, because I did not want to present a utopia, how this flow of capital to the spiritual limb of the social organism could happen, namely, that those who have initially acquired capital and thereby have capital at work, and who are personally involved in this work of capital, by doing so, as is done today with books, which after thirty years pass into the public domain, ensure that the capital passes into the public domain. I did not present this as a utopian standpoint, but said that this might be a way of giving capital this flow, so that instead of stagnating everywhere, it enters into the blood circulation of social life. Everything I have said is said by way of illustration; it is not dogma, not utopian concepts, but I wanted to cite something that might happen through association.

But something completely different may happen. Those who think in a lively way do not set down dogmas to be carried out, but count on people who, when placed in the right way in the social organism, will bring out of their context that which is socially meaningful and purposeful. Everywhere, people are counted on, not dogmas. But I have had to experience that what was actually meant by the “key points” was not discussed at all. Instead, people asked: How can we ensure that capital is inherited by the most capable after so many years? And so on. People don't want anything real, they only want utopias. But that is precisely what speaks against the unbiased acceptance of an impulse such as that presented in the threefold social order.

And so we will see that when legal and state life can have the right effect, this legal and state life will above all incorporate human labor. Human work today is completely embedded in economic life. It is not treated as something that is determined from person to person. Around 1905, I wrote an essay on the social question, in which I wanted to make it clear that under our current division of labor, work only becomes a commodity when it flows into the rest of the organism. For us ourselves, our work actually has only an apparent value. Only what others do for us has value, while what we do is supposed to have value for others. This is something that technology has already achieved. Only our morals have not yet caught up. Technically, within today's social order, one cannot make anything for oneself, not even a skirt. Even if you make the skirt yourself, it has the same price as it would have if it were made by someone else within the overall social order. In other words, what puts the skirt into the economic sphere is universal; it is determined by the community. It is only an illusion to think that a skirt made by a tailor for himself is cheaper. You can calculate it with numbers, and it appears to be cheaper. But if you were to include it in an overall balance sheet, you would see that just as you cannot step outside your own skin, you cannot change or eliminate the economic aspect by making a garment for yourself. Even the garment you have made for yourself must be paid for in full. Work is what people do for other people, and it cannot be measured by how much working time is needed in a factory. The evaluation of work leads, in the most eminent sense, into the realm of law, of the state-legal order.

You can see that this is not outdated, but rather contemporary, from the fact that work is protected and secured everywhere, and so on. But these are all half measures, quarter measures, which can only come into full effect when there is a proper threefold structure of the social organism. For only then will human beings stand face to face with one another, and only then will work find its proper regulation, when human dignity speaks against human dignity, out of which all human beings are competent.

Then you will say: Yes, there may not be enough work if work is determined in this way in a democratic state. Yes, this is one of the points where the social leads into the general historical, into the general development of humanity. Economic life must not determine work. It must be enclosed on the one hand between nature and on the other hand between the work determined by the state. Just as a committee cannot now determine how many rainy days there should be in 1923 so that the economy can function properly in 1923, just as one must accept and reckon with what nature provides as a given, so too must one reckon with the given as a quantity of work that arises within the state-legal organism in the independent economic organism. I can only mention this in general terms as a characteristic.

In the economic link of the social organism, there will be associations in which consumers, producers, and traders will make associative judgments based on their life experiences—not individual judgments, which have no meaning at all—but associative judgments. This cannot be achieved today if one only pursues the small approaches that exist. The fact that these small beginnings exist proves that humanity unconsciously has the intention to do so. Cooperatives, trade unions, and all kinds of communities are being founded. Certainly, this testifies to the existence of this urge. But if you found a cooperative today alongside the rest of the social order, this cooperative must either grow into the rest of the social order, have the same prices, and bring the same goods to market as is customary, or it must perish. The threefold social order is not about creating realities out of utopian ideas, but about addressing what is real; the institutions that currently exist, those that consume, those that produce, the entrepreneur, what is there without re-founding, should be brought together in associations. One should not ask: How does one found new associations? — But rather: How does one bring together the economic associations, the economic institutions that exist, into associations? Then, above all, within these associations, something will happen correctly out of economic experience, from which a social order can actually emerge — just as human health emerges from a healthy human organism in human life — an economic circulation: production money, loan money, and donation money, foundations. Without these three elements, there is no social organism. Today, people can rail against foundations and donations as much as they like, but they have to exist. People are only deceiving themselves. They say to themselves: Yes, in a healthy social organism there are no donations. But they pay their taxes. Taxes are only a detour; for in them are the donations we give to schools and so on, those are the donations.

But people should have a social order in which they can always see how things work and not deceive themselves. If they gradually extract social life from what is now confused and contains everything within itself, then they will see money flowing as production money, loan money, and donation money, just as they now see blood flowing in a healthy human organism. And they will see how, on the one hand, the money that is invested in trade, circulation, production, and earnings is connected with human beings, so that it is transferred back into production by way of lending, with interest, and, on the other hand, the gift money that must flow into what is free spiritual life.

Only when people see in free association that this is how life works can they participate in social events, and then health can enter into the social organism. All abstract thinking is frowned upon in relation to this threefold idea. There is only living thinking.

But today we no longer have living thinking in economics either. We have abstract thinking everywhere. For where does today's economy live? How did it begin, when it emerged from the time when people still took some dirty scrap of paper and wrote down their income and expenses? When things became more complicated, they took those who were in the priesthood, the clerics; they became the scribes. They used their knowledge to manage what they understood of external life. Today, who is the successor to the cleric, the scribe who was taken from the church to record the prince's economy? It is the accountant. The accountant has only a very small reminder of this in his cash book, in his ledger, which is only still found in a few areas. When you open the first page — I don't know if it's still the case here — it says: “With God.” Such accounting books exist in certain areas. “With God” is written there. It is a reminder of old times. If you turn the page, you will find little that is “with God.” Well, everything that must be full of life, that must stand as life in our associations, that cannot be entered in the books, is abstracted into it.

And so the threefold social order is really not a matter of returning to the old way of thinking about the concepts we have: spiritual life, state life, economic life, and to rearrange them a little differently than has been attempted in recent times; rather, it is a matter of grasping the concept of the organism in the first place and bringing back to life that which has gradually become so strongly entrenched in the abstract. This bringing back to life is what matters. For everyone will be sitting in the associations of economic life; the representatives of spiritual life will also be sitting in, because they eat. The representatives of the state will be sitting in. And conversely, everyone will be in the other members.

But then something happens that shocks people terribly when you talk about it in the present day — of course, sometimes you have to say something paradoxical in order to characterize the matter more accurately. I once said to an industrialist who is an outstanding figure in his field: We will really get into life when you have a person in the factory who puts himself into the full life of the factory, who is there with his whole being; then some university, a technical university, comes along and takes this person out of the factory, not the one who is already prepared, but the one who is taken out of life. They put him there so that for five or ten years he can tell the boys and girls what needs to be said from life. Then, when that has become a little stale, he may go back to the factory. Life becomes complicated, but that is what the times demand; there is no other way.

Just as new life will always flow through the social order, or the social order will fall into decadence, so we must say: Either man must truly become human, that is, he must be able to circulate with his abilities in the social organism, or we will fall into decadence. One can choose decadence if one wants to, if one wants to remain at the old point of view; but evolution does not allow us to stand still. That is what matters.

In conclusion, I would like to say that I was able to develop more of a feeling for what needed to be said from the point of view I have been discussing here. This point of view should not be understood in a one-sided way as a spiritual one, but it is called spiritual only because it wants to come from the spirit of life. So I was able to characterize more by feeling the impulse that should live through this social idea. One cannot say more in three lectures.

But, ladies and gentlemen, the fact that I was able and allowed to do this here is what I would like to thank you most sincerely for now that I am concluding these lectures. I feel this gratitude truly and deeply in my heart, first and foremost toward Mrs. Mackenzie at the head of this committee, without whose efforts the entire Oxford undertaking would not have been possible. First and foremost, I would like to express my most sincere and heartfelt thanks to Mrs. Mackenzie, and then to the entire committee that has stood by her side. I am particularly grateful that what we were able to classify as artistic, the striving that we would like to send out into the world from Dornach, that the eurythmic-artistic has also been able to come into its own in a concrete way here in Oxford during this meeting. For this, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to all those who have contributed to this achievement! You will feel that this gratitude must be sincere when I tell you that the Goetheanum in Dornach was established as a starting point for what only becomes real when things like what has happened here in Oxford happen. And you will be able to see from what I am about to say, which I do not mean as an allusion, really not, but would nevertheless like to mention, that we will probably have to interrupt our construction in November, will not be able to continue, because we do not have the necessary funds. However, we believe that they are still available in the world, and that therefore something is also stalling somewhere. If things continue as they would in a properly functioning social organism, then — but this is something that weighs on us in Dornach with the greatest concern — this work was undertaken and, due to the unfavorable circumstances of the times, would have to be interrupted if understanding for its continuation is not found at the right time. I mention this so that you can see how heartfelt the thanks I express to you here are.

Having attempted to distinguish between education on the one hand and social issues on the other, I would like to point out that this should be cultivated in Dornach as a universal concept. When the anthroposophical movement was founded, it was based on a worldview and a state of knowledge. And only when people saw and felt in our time, from what is alive in our time in terms of forces of decline, that something must be done in terms of education and also in social terms, did people come to me with the question: What does anthroposophy have to say about founding schools that reckon with full life, with a future that emerges from the deeper human forces? For nothing can be gained for the future from the surface of human forces. The educational movement did not arise out of some whim, nor out of an abstract idea, but because people came who asked anthroposophy this question, who wanted to know what anthroposophy had to say about this out of life, not out of some sectarian endeavor.

And this was even more the case with the social question. Here, too, people whose hearts were broken by what is leading to decline in the present came and wanted to know what anthroposophical knowledge, with its real insight into reality, has to say about impulses that should be sent from the present into the future.

I would like to express my heartfelt thanks for the understanding I found here, emphasizing that what needs to be said depends on being taken up into full life, that it has an effect beyond the college, in the world where people live, that it is not antiquated science, but that it is precisely in the places of intellectual life that the impulses arise which ensure that the right people are also in the factories, managing the capital, from whom life emanates. That this was characterized with examples that present themselves will not be held against me if I repeat on the other hand what I have already said several times, that it was a very special feeling of happiness for me to be able to discuss these impulses here in Oxford, where every step on the street is inspiring because of its venerable age, where what is needed by those who want to speak from the spirit has a particularly powerful effect.

In earlier times, the spirit that must come alive today and that should have an effect in the future was not alive, but there was a spirit that was alive. And this spirit can have an inspiring effect. That is why it was deeply satisfying for me to be able to give these lectures and offer these suggestions here in Oxford, under the impression of the venerable and venerable.

Finally, I must express my gratitude. You will all understand that I am extremely grateful to Mr. Kaufmann, who has done the translations here with great love. When you know how much effort it takes to translate relatively difficult material, how much energy it can take out of a person even in a short time, then you can appreciate the work that Mr. Kaufmann has done in recent weeks in Oxford for this holiday conference. I would like to express my gratitude to him here, and I hope that many others will do the same, and I ask him to do me one last favor as a translator and to translate what I have just said here as faithfully and literally as he has translated the previous parts.