World Mysteries and Theosophy

GA 54 — 12 October 1905, Berlin

Our World Situation, War, Peace, and the Science of the Spirit

Spiritual research cannot interfere in the immediate affairs of the day. Nor should one believe that spiritual knowledge is something that floats above all reality in the clouds and has nothing to do with the practicalities of life. We do not want to present the events that are currently stirring up the world in the same way that one might treat daily news, nor do we want to be among those who are blind and deaf to what directly moves the human heart, what directly concerns us. The spiritual researcher must always find a way between these two cliffs, so that he never loses himself in the opinions and views of everyday life; on the other hand, he must never become entangled in mere empty abstractions or fall prey to authorities. I have often said from this position: Spiritual science should make us practical, immediately practical, much more practical than everyday practitioners usually think. But it should make us practical by leading us into the deeper forces of life and enlightening us about things from these deeper forces, so that it guides our actions in harmony with the great laws of the world. For only then can one achieve something in the world, can one intervene in the workings of the world, if one does so in accordance with the great laws of the world.

With this premise in mind, let me first point out a few facts that should remind us of the importance of our questions today and, I would say, their topicality.

One fact that everyone may remember is that on August 24, 1898, the Tsar's representative sent a circular letter to the foreign representatives accredited in St. Petersburg, which included the following words: “The maintenance of general peace and a possible reduction of the excessive armaments that burden all nations represent, in the current situation of the whole world, an ideal toward which the efforts of all governments should be directed.”

The humane and generous aspirations of His Majesty the Emperor, my exalted lord, are entirely devoted to this task. Convinced that this lofty ultimate goal corresponds to the essential interests and legitimate desires of all powers, the Imperial Government believes that the present moment is extremely favorable for seeking, through international consultation, the most effective means of securing for all peoples the benefits of true and lasting peace and, above all, of setting a limit to the progressive development of present armaments."

This document also contains the following words: "As financial burdens continue to rise and affect the welfare of the people at its root, labor and capital are largely diverted from their natural purpose and consumed in an unproductive manner. Hundreds of millions are being spent to procure terrible machines of destruction, which today are considered the last word in science and tomorrow are doomed to lose all value as a result of some new discovery in this field . . . Therefore, as the armaments of each power increase, they correspond less and less to the purpose set by the government concerned." The document concludes by saying that, with God's help, a conference should be a favorable omen for the coming century. — Undoubtedly, this manifesto stems from a resolution. Recent events show us how this intention could have been fulfilled. This intention is not exactly new, for we can go back centuries and find a prince, Henry IV of France, who in the 16th and 17th centuries proposed the idea of such a general peace conference. Seven of the sixteen countries at that time had been won over when Henry IV was assassinated. No one continued his work. If we wanted to, we could probably trace the intentions behind this much further back.

This is one set of facts. The other is this: the Hague Peace Conference took place. You all know the name of the distinguished personality who pursued her ideal with rare dedication and rare expertise, the name Bertha von Suttner. A year after the Hague Peace Conference, she sought to collect the documents into a book in which she recorded the speeches, some of which were beautiful and magnificent. She prefaced the book with a foreword. Please bear in mind that a year had passed since Bertha von Suttner had seen this work of the Peace Conference. She already foresaw the consequences after a year had passed. In stark contrast to this, we had meanwhile had the bloody Transvaal War with rejected mediation, and today we have war again. If we look around the world today, we see the struggle of many noble people for the idea of peace, already in the hearts of high-minded idealists the love for universal world peace, and yet, on the other hand, in other times, hardly as much blood has been shed on our globe as now. This is a serious, very serious matter for anyone who is concerned with the great spiritual questions.

On the one hand, we have the devoted apostles of peace in their energetic activity. We have the outstanding achievements of Bertha von Suttner, who with rare greatness understood how to expose all the horrors of battle and war; but let us not forget that there is also the other side. Let us not forget that there are also many among our discerning people who, on the other hand, assure us again and again that they consider struggle necessary for progress, as something that strengthens the forces. Only in the struggle against resistance do the forces grow. The researcher who has attracted so many thinkers to him, how often has he said that he desires strong war and that only strong war can advance the forces of nature. Perhaps he has not expressed this in such radical terms, but many still think this way. Even within our spiritual science movement, voices have been raised saying that it would be a weakness, indeed a sin against the spirit of national strength, to object to the war that has led to national honor and national power. In any case, opinions on this subject are still sharply, very sharply divided today. But the Hague Peace Conference did achieve one thing. It brought together the voices of a number of people who are at the forefront of public affairs. A large number of representatives of the states gave their approval at the time for the Hague Conference to take place. One would think that a matter which has found such approval from such quarters would be eminently promising.

Well, in order to really take a stand in the way that a spiritual worldview and outlook on life allows us to take a stand, we need to look a little deeper into the whole situation. If we pursue the question of peace as an ideal question, as it has developed over time, and at the same time pursue the facts of struggle and strife, we must say that perhaps the way in which this ideal of universal peace is pursued calls for attention and investigation. Many of those who have waged war are themselves filled with pain and perhaps even abhorrence at the consequences and effects of war. Such things prompt us to ask: Do wars arise from anything that can be eliminated from the world through principles and views? Those who look deeper into the souls of human beings know that two separate, very different paths lead to war. One is what we call judgment and reason, what we call idealism; the other is human desire, human inclinations, human sympathies and antipathies. Many things would be different in the world if it were possible to regulate desires, wishes, and passions according to the principles of the heart and mind. However, this is not possible; rather, the opposite has always been the case in humanity. The mind, and even the heart with its idealism, creates a mask for what passion wants and desire demands. And if you follow the history of human development, you can ask the question over and over again, when you see principles or idealism shining here and there: What desires and passions lurk in the background? When we consider this, it could well be that even today, the most beautiful principles are of no use in this question; it could be that something else is necessary, simply because human passions, drives, and desires are not yet far enough along to follow the idealism of the individual. You see, the question lies deeper, and we must also grasp it more deeply. We really need to look into the human soul and its fundamental forces if we want to judge the whole matter correctly. Human beings do not always see enough of their course of development; they often see only a small span of time, and so a far-reaching worldview must open our eyes, leading us deep into the past on the one hand and allowing us to survey the greater spans of time on the other, so that we can form a judgment about the forces that are to lead us into the future.

Let us take a look at the human soul, where we can perhaps study it deeply and thoroughly in one respect. Today we have something that we were able to touch on eight days ago from a different angle. We have a scientific theory, known as Darwinism. Within this scientific view, one concept plays a major role. And this concept is called the struggle for existence. For decades, our entire natural science, our entire view of the world, was dominated by the struggle for existence. Natural scientists said: Those beings in the world that are best able to survive in the struggle for existence, those that gain the greatest advantage over their fellow creatures, will remain, while the others will perish. So we should not be surprised that the beings around us are the best adapted, because they have evolved over millions of years. The most capable have survived, the incapable have perished.

The struggle for existence has become the watchword of research. And where did this struggle come from? It did not come from nature. Darwin himself, although he viewed it on a larger scale than his successors, took it from a view of human history spread by Malthus, the view that the earth produces food at such a rate that this increase is much smaller than the increase in population. Those who have studied these matters will know that it is said that the increase in food rises arithmetically, while the increase in population rises geometrically. This necessitates a struggle for existence, a war of all against all. Based on this, Darwin also assumed the struggle for existence to be inherent in nature. And this view does not correspond to a mere idea, but to modern ways of life. Even in the circumstances of the individual, this struggle for existence has become a reality in the form of general economic competition. People have seen this struggle for existence at close quarters, have considered it something natural in the human realm, and have then incorporated it into natural science.

Ernst Haeckel starts from such views, seeing war as a lever of culture. Struggle is what makes us strong, the weak must perish, culture demands that the weak perish. National economics then applied this struggle back to the human world. Thus, we have grand theories within our economics, within our social theories, which regard the struggle for existence as something entirely justified and inseparable from human development. In these matters, people have gone back—not without prejudice, but with these principles—to the most ancient times, and there they have attempted to study the lives of barbaric, wild peoples. People believed that they could eavesdrop on human cultural development and find the wildest principle of war there. Huxley said: If we look at the nature of animals, the struggle for existence resembles a gladiatorial combat, and that is a law of nature. And if we look from the higher animals to the lower ones and consider the course of world development to date, the world of facts teaches us everywhere that we live in a general struggle for existence.

You see, this could be said, it could be represented as a general law of the world. Anyone who is clear that words do not come to the lips unless they are deeply rooted in the human soul will say to themselves that the feelings, the emotions, the whole state of mind of our best people today still stems from the view that war, struggle among the human race, indeed in the whole of nature, is something lawful, something that cannot be escaped. — You may now say: But the researchers may have been very humane people who, in their deepest idealism, longed for and desired peace and reconciliation. Yet their position, their science, convinced them that this was not the case, and perhaps they wrote down their theory with bleeding hearts. — This would be an objection if something else had not happened first. We can say that among all those who believed they were thinking scientifically and economically, the theory described above was commonplace throughout Western and Central Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. It was commonplace to say that war and struggle were a law of nature that could not be escaped. People believed that they had thoroughly done away with Rousseau's old view that it was only human unnaturalness that had brought struggle and war, opposition and disharmony into the general peace of nature. At the end of the 18th century, Rousseau's view was still widespread, namely that if one looks at the life and activity of nature, which is still uninfluenced by human overculture, one sees harmony and peace everywhere. Only humans, with their arbitrariness and culture, have brought struggle and strife into the world. That was still Rousseau's view, and researchers assured us in the last third of the 19th century: Yes, it would be nice if that were the case, but it is not. The facts teach us otherwise.

And yet let us ask ourselves seriously: Did emotion speak, or did the facts speak? We could hardly object if the facts spoke in this way. Then, in 1880, a remarkable man appeared, a man who gave a lecture at the 1880 Naturalists' Congress in St. Petersburg, Russia, a lecture that is of great and profound significance for all those who are thoroughly interested in this question. This man is the zoologist Keßler. He died soon afterwards. His lecture dealt with the principle of mutual aid in nature. For all those who take such things seriously, the research and scientific maturity that this inspires gives rise to a whole new approach. Here, for the first time in modern times, facts from all of nature were compiled that prove that all previous theories about the struggle for existence do not correspond to reality.

In this lecture, you will find discussed and proven by facts that animal species and animal groups do not evolve through the struggle for existence, that in truth there is a struggle for existence only exceptionally between two species, but not within the species itself, whose individuals, on the contrary, help each other, and that the species that are most durable are those whose individuals are most predisposed to such mutual aid. It is not struggle, but mutual aid that ensures long existence. This led to a new point of view. Only modern research has brought about the fact that, through a strange chain of circumstances, a personality who stands at the most incredible point of view for the present, Prince Kropotkin, has taken the matter further. He has been able to show, in animals and tribes, through a vast amount of established facts, the importance of this principle of mutual aid in nature and in human life. I can recommend everyone to study this book, which is also available in German translation, translated by Gustav Landauer. This book brings a sum of concepts and mental images into the human being that are a school for the ascent to a spiritual attitude. However, we only understand these facts correctly when we examine them from the perspective of esoteric thinking, when we penetrate these facts with the fundamentals of spiritual science. I could give you some clear examples, but you can read about them in the book I mentioned. The principle of mutual assistance in nature is that those who have developed this principle most fully will go the furthest. — The facts therefore speak clearly and will speak ever more clearly for us. In spiritual science, when we speak of a single animal species, we speak in exactly the same way as we speak of a single human being, of the individuality of a human being. An animal species is to us, in the lower realm, what the individual human being is in the higher realm. I have said it here before: one must keep this fact clearly in mind in order to understand the contrast between human beings and the entire animal kingdom. This contrast is expressed in the saying: human beings have a biography, animals do not. With animals, we are satisfied when we have described the species. With human beings, we say: father, grandfather, grandson, son; with lions, it is not so different that we should describe each individual separately. Certainly, I know that much can be objected to this; I know that those who love a dog or a monkey believe they can write a biography of the dog or the monkey. But a biography should not contain what others can know about the being, but what the being itself knew. Self-awareness is part of a biography, and in this sense, only humans have a biography. This corresponds to what in animals is a description of the entire genus or species. The fact that every group of animals has a group soul is the outward expression of the fact that every individual human being has a soul within them.

I have already had occasion to discuss here that a hidden world is directly connected to our physical world, the astral world, which does not consist of objects and beings that can be perceived with the senses, but is woven from the fabric of our passions and desires. If you examine human beings, you can see that they have brought their souls down to the physical plane or the physical world. In this physical world, there is no individual soul for animals. However, you will find an individual soul for animals on the so-called astral plane, the astral world hidden behind our physical world. Animal groups have individual souls in the astral world. This is the difference between humans and the animal kingdom. If we now ask ourselves: What is really fighting when we observe the struggle for existence in the animal kingdom? — then we must say: The truth is that behind this struggle, which is fought between the species in the animal kingdom, lies the astral struggle of soul passions and desires, which is rooted in the species or group souls. But if there were to be talk of a struggle for existence within the species in the animal kingdom, it would be as if the human soul were to fight itself in its various parts. This is an important truth. It cannot be the rule that there is struggle within an animal species, but rather that the struggle for existence can only take place between species. For the soul of the whole species is one, and because it is one, it must rule over the parts. The mutual assistance within the animal world that we can observe among species is simply the expression of the unified activity of the species or group soul. And when you look at all these examples, which you will find in the interesting book mentioned above, you will gain a beautiful insight into the way in which group souls work. For example, if an individual of a certain species of crab is thrown onto its back by accident so that it cannot get up again by itself, a large number of animals in the vicinity will come and help the animal up. This mutual support comes from a communal soul organ of the animals. And if you observe the way beetles support each other in caring for or protecting a communal brood, in dealing with a dead mouse, and so on, how they connect, support each other, and carry out communal work, then you will see the group soul at work. You can observe this all the way up to the highest animal species. It is true that anyone who has a sense for this mutual assistance among animals will gradually gain an insight, a concept, an idea of the workings of group souls. And it is precisely there that they can learn to see with the eyes of the spirit. There, the eye becomes sun-like.

In humans, we are dealing with a group soul that has become individual. Such a group soul dwells in every single human being. And so it is possible for humans, as it is for the various animal species, to enter into a struggle as individuals against every other individual. But now let us look at the purpose of the struggle, whether the struggle for the sake of struggle exists in the development of the world. What has become of the struggle of the species? Those species that support each other the most have survived, and those that are most warlike among themselves have perished. Such is the law of nature. Therefore, we must say that in the external world, progress in development consists in peace replacing struggle. Where nature has reached a certain point, a great turning point, there is indeed equilibrium; the peace to which the whole struggle has led is present. Consider for a moment that plants, as species, wage a struggle for existence among themselves. But consider how beautifully and magnificently the plant and animal kingdoms support each other in their joint process of development: animals breathe in oxygen and breathe out nitrogen, while plants breathe out oxygen and breathe in nitrogen. In this way, peace in the universe is possible.

What nature produces in this way through its power is intended for human beings to consciously produce from their individual nature. Human beings have progressed step by step, and step by step they have formed what we recognize as the self-consciousness of our individual soul. We must view our world situation in such a way that we think it through and then follow its tendency toward the future. If you go back to earlier times, you will see that in the human realm, at its dawn, group souls still ruled, existing in small tribes and families; so we are also dealing with group souls in humans. The further back you look in the world, the more compact and unified the people who are grouped together appear to you. It is like a spirit that permeated the old village community, which then became a primitive state. You could study how things were different when Alexander the Great led his masses into war, compared to how crowds of people with their much more developed individual wills are led into war today. This must be properly illuminated. For it is the course of progressive culture that people are becoming more and more individual, independent, and conscious, more self-aware. The human race has developed out of groups, out of commonalities. And just as we have group souls that guide and direct the individual animal species, so the peoples were guided and directed by the great group souls. Through their progressive education, human beings are increasingly outgrowing the guidance of the group soul and becoming more and more independent. This independence has led to a situation where, whereas in the past people were more or less hostile to their fellow human beings within their groups, today they are actually in the midst of a struggle for existence that permeates the whole of humanity. This is our world situation, and this is the fate of our race in particular, that is, of our immediate present.

In spiritual science, we distinguish in the current world development first five successive great races, then so-called sub-races. The first sub-race developed in ancient times, in distant India. At first, this sub-race was permeated by a priestly culture. This priestly culture gave our present race its first impulses. It had come over from the Atlantean culture, which was located on land that now forms the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. This race set the tone; then it was followed by other sub-races, and we are now the fifth. This is not a classification borrowed from anthropology or racial theory, but one that will be explained in more detail in the sixth lecture in this series. The fifth race is the one that has brought human beings furthest in their special nature, in their individual consciousness. Christianity has prepared human beings to attain such a special consciousness: human beings had to achieve this self-consciousness. When we look back to the time before Christ, when the gigantic pyramids were built in ancient Egypt, an army of slaves carried out work whose difficulties and hardships no one today can form a true mental image of. But for the most part, these workers built with a sense of naturalness and tremendous peace. They built because at that time the doctrine of reincarnation and karma was a matter of course. No book will tell you this, but it will gradually become clear to you as you delve into spiritual science. Every slave who worked his hands raw and was in need and misery knew exactly: this is one life among many, and I have to bear what I am now suffering as a consequence of what I have prepared for myself in previous lives! But if that is not the case, then in a future life I will experience the effects of my present life; the one who commands me today has been in the same position as I am today, or will be in the future.

Under this attitude, however, the whole self-conscious earthly life would never have developed, and the high powers that guide the destiny of the human race in the great scheme of things knew what they were doing when they allowed the consciousness of reincarnation and karma to fade away for a time, over thousands of years. That was the great development of Christianity up to now, that it made people stop looking up to an afterlife that was supposed to have a balancing effect, and drew their attention to the tremendous importance of this life.

It may have gone too far in its radical execution, but it had to happen, because the things of the world do not develop according to logic, but according to other laws. An eternity of punishment has been derived from this earthly life; the tendency toward development has led to this, even if it is incongruous. Thus, humanity has learned to be conscious of this one earthly existence. As a result, the earth, this physical plane, has become infinitely important to human beings. And it had to be this way, it had to come to this. Everything that is happening today, everything that has conquered the globe in material terms, could only develop from a mindset based on an education for this earth, apart from the idea of reincarnation and karma. Thus, we see the consequence of this education: the complete descent of human beings onto the physical plane. For only there could the individual soul develop, for there it is separated, enclosed in this body, and can only look out as a closed, separate existence through its senses. Thus we have brought more and more human competition, more and more of the effect of separate existence into the human race. We should not be surprised if the human race is still far from being ready to eliminate what had to be brought up. We have seen that the present species of animals have developed to perfection through their mutual assistance, and that the struggle has only been between species. But if human individuality is the same as the group soul of animals, then the human soul can only attain self-consciousness by going through the same struggle as the animals out in nature. As long as humans have not yet fully developed their independence, the struggle will continue. But humans are called upon to consciously achieve what exists out there on the physical plane. Therefore, it will lead them to mutual help and support on the levels of consciousness of their realm, because the human race is a single species. And the lack of struggle, as found in the animal kingdom, must first be achieved in relation to the entire human race: a complete, all-encompassing peace. It is not struggle that has made the individual animal species great, but mutual help and support. That which lives as a group soul in the animal species as an individual soul is at peace with itself; that is the unified soul. Only the human individual soul is special in this physical existence.

This is the great achievement for our soul, which we acquire through spiritual development, that we truly recognize the communal soul that pervades the entire human race, the unity in all humanity, which we do not receive as an unconscious gift, but which we must consciously achieve. To truly and really develop this unified soul in the whole human race is the task of the spiritual-scientific worldview. This is expressed in our first principle: to establish a brotherhood across the whole earth, regardless of race, gender, color, and so on. This is the recognition of the soul that is common to all humanity. Purification must take place even in the passions, so that it becomes natural for human beings to recognize that the same soul lives in their brothers and sisters. Physically we are separate, but spiritually we are one as the ego of the human race. But only in true, real life can we grasp this and find our way into it. Therefore, it can only be the cultivation of spiritual life that permeates us with the communal breath of this unified soul. Not the people of the present with their principles, but the people of the future, who will develop more and more consciousness of this unified soul, will be the ones who lay the foundation for a new race, a new species, which will blossom in mutual help. Therefore, our first principle means something quite different from what has usually been said. We do not fight, nor do we fight against war or anything else, because fighting does not lead to higher development at all. Through fighting, each animal species has developed into a distinct race. Leave all the fighting around us to those who are not yet mature enough to seek what the communal soul seeks in the human race in spiritual life.

A true peace society is one that strives for spiritual knowledge, and the true peace movement is the spiritual scientific movement. It is the peace movement, as only a peace movement can be in practice, because it is based on what lives in human beings and faces the future.

Spiritual life has always developed like a train coming from the East. The East was the area where spiritual life was cultivated. And here in the West was the area where external material culture developed. That is why the East is also seen as an area where people dream and sleep. But who knows what goes on in the souls of those we call dreamers or sleepers when they ascend into worlds unknown to Western peoples? — Now we must step out of our material culture, taking into account everything that is in the physical world around us. With what we have conquered on the physical plane, we must ascend into the spiritual. It is, to a certain extent, more than symbolically significant that Darwinism still found a representative in England in Huxley, who, from his Western perspective, felt compelled to say: Nature shows us that the apes fought each other, and it was the strongest who remained on the plane — while from the East came the slogan: Support, mutual aid, that is what secures the future! We have a very special task here in Central Europe. It would not help us to be one-sidedly Eastern or one-sidedly English. We must unite the dawn of the East and the physical science of the West into one great harmony. Then we will understand how the idea of the future is united with the idea of the struggle for a special existence.

It is more than coincidental that in that fundamental work of theosophy, the book from which those who want to delve deeper into spiritual life can find light on the path, the second chapter significantly concludes with a sentence that coincides with this idea. It is not just a phrase in “Light on the Path,” but because the development toward the spirit will lead people to a place where they will recognize that the common soul, which lives within the individual human soul, which revives and illuminates it, is in harmony with the beautiful words with which the two chapters in “Light on the Path” conclude. Those who immerse themselves completely in this wonderful little book, which not only fills the soul with content that makes us inwardly pious and good, but also gradually gives people true clairvoyance through the power of words, will see the balance in the details once they have lived through what is written in each chapter. And then the last words sink into the soul: “Peace be with you.” This will be communicated to all of humanity at the end through what we cherish and nurture as spiritual power. Then the human genius will descend spiritually upon the human race, whose main words will be: Peace be with you. — This opens up the right perspective for us. We must not only speak of peace, set peace as an ideal, conclude treaties, and long for arbitration awards; we must also cultivate spiritual life, the spiritual, and then we will evoke within ourselves the power that pours out over the entire human race as the power of mutual assistance. We do not fight, we do something else: we cultivate love, and we know that by cultivating love, fighting must disappear. We do not oppose fighting with fighting. We oppose fighting with love, by cherishing and nurturing it. That is something positive. We work on ourselves in the outpouring of love and establish a society built on love. That is our ideal. Then, when we penetrate this spiritually and vividly, we will fulfill an ancient saying in a new way, in the way Christianity wants. And a new Christianity, or rather the old Christianity, will awaken for the new humanity. Buddha gave his people a saying that promises such care. But Christianity also has such care of love, perhaps in even more beautiful words, if one understands them correctly: It is not through struggle that one overcomes struggle, it is not through hatred that one overcomes hatred, but struggle and hatred are overcome in truth only through love.