Where and How Does One Find the Spirit?

GA 57 — 28 January 1909, Berlin

Tolstoy and Carnegie

What we are going to consider today may seem like a strange combination to some: on the one hand, Tolstoy, and on the other, Carnegie, two personalities about whom many would say that there could hardly be anything more different or more opposite; on the one hand, Tolstoy, the enigmatic seeker of solutions to the highest social and spiritual problems, drawing from the depths of spiritual life; and on the other, Carnegie, the steel magnate, the man who became rich, the man about whom we know little more than that he thought about how best to use the wealth he had accumulated. And then again, the combination of the two personalities with Spiritual Science or anthroposophy.

However, in Tolstoy's case, no one would think of doubting that it is precisely with the light of Spiritual Science that one can shine into the depths of his soul. But in Carnegie's case, many would say: What does this man, this man of purely practical, business activity, have to do with what is called Spiritual Science? If spiritual science were the gray theory, the worldview alien to and hostile to life, as it is so often regarded, if it cared little about the questions of practical life, as is sometimes believed, it might seem strange that such a man of practical life should be called upon to illustrate certain questions. But if one has understood to some extent what always underlies the lectures on Spiritual Science given here—that Spiritual Science is something that can flow into all individual areas, yes, into the most everyday areas of practical life, then it will not be surprising that this personality is also called upon to illustrate some of the things that are to be illustrated within Spiritual Science. And secondly, to speak in Emerson's terms, we have before us two representative personalities of our time. Both of them express in a typical and representative way the whole striving, the thinking on the one hand and the working on the other, as they prevail and weave their way through our time. The very opposite of the whole personality and soul development of these two men is, on the one hand, so characteristic of the diversity of life and work in our time, but on the other hand, it is also characteristic of where the fundamental nerve, the actual goals of our present time, lie.

On the one hand, we have Tolstoy, who grew up in a distinguished family, surrounded by wealth and abundance, in a sphere of life that contained everything that external present-day life could offer in terms of comforts and conveniences. In him we have a man whose spiritual development has led him to proclaim the worthlessness of everything he was born into, not only for himself but for all humanity, as if it were gospel. On the other hand, we have the American steel magnate, a personality who grew out of poverty and misery, out of a sphere of life where none of the comforts and conveniences that external life can offer are available. A personality who, one might say, had to earn dollar after dollar and who rose to the greatest wealth that can be acquired in the present day, a personality who, in the course of his soul's development, came to regard this accumulation of wealth as something quite normal and self-evident for the present day, and to think only about how this accumulated wealth could be used for the salvation and happiness of humanity, for its corresponding further development. What Tolstoy never desired when he had reached the height of his soul's development was given to him in abundance at the beginning of his life. What Carnegie ultimately acquired in abundant wealth, the external goods of life, was completely denied to him at the beginning of his life.

This is, albeit in an external way, the characteristic of both personalities and, to a certain extent, the expression of their essence. What can happen to a personality in our time, what can be reflected in these external processes on and around the personality, all this shows us in both of them what prevails in our present day in the depths of social and spiritual existence. We see Tolstoy, as I said, born out of a sphere of life in which everything that could be described as comfort, wealth, and elegance was present. Of course, we can only deal with his life in a very sketchy way, because today we are concerned with characterizing our time through these representative personalities and recognizing their needs in a certain way.

Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 into a Russian count's family, which he himself says originally immigrated from Germany. We then see Tolstoy lose certain higher goods of life. When he was barely a year and a half old, he lost his mother, and at the age of nine, his father. He then grew up under the care of a relative who was, so to speak, the embodiment of love, and whose state of mind meant that her beautiful, wonderful soul must have poured into his soul as if by itself. But on the other hand, he is under the influence of another relative who wants to educate him entirely according to the circumstances of our time, as they developed in certain circles, and according to the views of these circles. She is a personality who is completely absorbed in the external hustle and bustle of the world, which Tolstoy later came to hate so much and which he fought so hard against. We see how this personality strove from the outset to make Tolstoy what is called a “comme il faut” person, a person who, as was necessary at the time, could treat his peasants in such a way as to obtain titles, rank, dignities, and orders, and also play a corresponding role in society.

We then see how Tolstoy enters university, how he is basically a poor student, how he finds that everything the professors at Kazan University say is of no interest. The only thing that still interests him in the sphere of science are Oriental languages. Nothing else interested him. On the other hand, he was fascinated by the comparison of a certain chapter of Empress Catherine's law book with Montesquieu's “Spirit of the Laws.” Then he repeatedly tries to manage his estate, and we see how he ends up throwing himself into the lavish life of an adult from his circles, how he throws himself into this life to such an extent that he himself has to describe it as a plunge into all the vices and trivialities of life. We see how he becomes a gambler, squanders large sums of money, but within this life repeatedly comes to moments when his own actions actually disgust him. We see how he comes together with his peers and with literary circles and leads a life that he describes in moments of reflection as worthless, even destructive. But we also see—and this is important for him, who likes to observe the development of the soul where this development is revealed in particularly characteristic features—how special peculiarities appear in the development of his soul, which even in his earliest youth can reveal to us what is actually inside this soul.

Thus, it is of tremendous significance what a deep impression a certain event made on Tolstoy at the age of eleven. At school — a boy who was a friend of his once brought this home — an important discovery, a new invention, had been made. It had been found, and a teacher had spoken about it in particular, that there was no God, that this God was only an empty invention of many people, an empty mental image. And everything we can know about the impression this boyhood experience made on Tolstoy shows us, from the way he took it in, that even then a soul striving and working its way up to the highest heights of human existence was already struggling within him.

But this soul was strange in other ways, too. Those people who are so fond of citing only outward appearances and do not pay attention to what emerges from the center of the soul, through all external obstacles, as the true individuality of the soul, tend to overlook such youthful experiences and fail to notice that something completely different affects one soul and something else affects another. One must be particularly careful when a soul shows a predisposition in early youth to what could be expressed in Goethe's beautiful sentence from the second part of Faust: “I love him who desires the impossible.” This phrase says a great deal. A soul that desires something which, in a very obvious sense, is clearly foolish from a philistine point of view, such a soul, especially if it reveals itself as such in early youth, betrays precisely through such eccentricities a breadth of vision and a breadth of aspiration. And so we must not overlook it when Tolstoy tells us such things in one of his writings, which is among the first of his literary works and in which he reflects his own development. We must not ignore it when he recounts things that must certainly be considered valid for him, such as when the boy takes pleasure in shaving off his eyebrows and thus disfigures his outward, not very extensive beauty for a time. This is something that can be considered a great eccentricity. But when one thinks about it, it becomes a hint. Another thing is that the boy imagines that humans can fly if they press their arms tightly against their knees. If he does that, he thinks he should be able to fly. So he goes up to the second floor and throws himself out of the window, holding on to his heels. He is miraculously saved and suffers nothing more than a slight concussion, which is remedied by eighteen hours of sleep. To those around him, he has proved nothing more than that he is a strange boy. But those who want to observe the soul and know what it means to stray from the path laid out for you in your earliest youth will not overlook such traits in the life of a young person. Thus, this soul appears great and expansive from the very beginning. Therefore, we can understand that when he was tired of the excesses of life that had once resulted from his status, he was filled with a certain disgust for himself, especially after a gambling affair.

When he then goes to the Caucasus, we can understand that his soul gains above all love and affection for the simple Cossacks, for the people he first meets there and from whom he realizes that they actually have completely different souls than all the people he had basically known up to that point. Everything about the principles and tenets of his peers seemed so unnatural to him. Everything he had believed until then seemed so foreign to him, so detached from the original source of existence. But the people he now got to know were people whose souls were as intertwined with the sources of nature as a tree is with its roots, as a flower is with the juices of the soil. This intertwining with nature, this not having become estranged from the sources of existence, the original transcendence of good and evil in these circles, that was what made such a powerful impression on him.

And then, when, seized by a desire for action, he became a soldier to take part in the Crimean War—it was probably in 1854 when he joined the Danube Army—we see him studying the whole inner life of the simple soldier with the most intense devotion. We see, however, how a more specialized feeling now takes hold in Tolstoy's soul, how he is deeply moved on the one hand by the simplicity of the common man, but on the other hand also by the misery, poverty, torment, and oppression of the common man. We see how he is filled with love and a desire to help, and how the highest ideals of human happiness, human salvation, and human progress already shine dimly in his mind, but how, on the other hand, he realizes quite clearly—from the relationship that has developed between him, with his views, and ordinary people, with their views—that he cannot be understood with the kind of ideals, goals, and thoughts he has. This creates a conflict in his soul, something that prevents him from reaching the core of his being.

So we see that he is repeatedly thrown back from the life he leads, and that in the Danube Army in particular he is thrown from one extreme to the other. One of his superiors says that he is a golden person whom one can never forget. He seems like a soul who only exudes kindness and, on the other hand, has the ability to cheer others up in the most difficult situations. Everything is different when he is there. When he is not there, everyone hangs their heads. But when he throws himself back into life, he returns to camp with terrible remorse and regret. — This great soul, for there is no other way to describe him, was tossed back and forth between such moods. These moods and experiences also gave rise to the views and vivid narratives of his literary career, the works that earned him the most appreciative criticism even from Targenjew, for example, and which have been recognized everywhere. At the same time, however, we see how, in a certain way, this only accompanies the actual center, the core of his soul, how his soul is always focused on the great power, on the fundamental source of life, how he struggles for the concepts of truth and human progress, and how, even in the presence of a personality such as Turgenev, he cannot help but say: Ah, none of you actually have what one calls conviction. You really only talk to hide your conviction."

It can be said that life took a heavy toll on this soul by bringing it into serious, bitter conflicts. However, one of the most difficult things was yet to come. At the end of the 1850s, one of his brothers fell ill and died. Tolstoy had often seen death in wartime, had often watched people dying, but the problem of life had not yet dawned on him to such an extent as when he saw his beloved and esteemed brother dying. At that time, Tolstoy was not so filled with philosophical or religious content that this content could have sustained him. He was in such a mood that he expressed his attitude toward death by saying: I am incapable of setting a goal for life. I see life ebbing away, I see it rushing worthlessly by in my fellow men; they do things that are not worth doing. If you string one event after another and form long series, nothing valuable comes out of it. — And even in the fact that the lower classes were in need and misery, he could not see any meaning or purpose in life at that time. Such a life, the meaning of which one searches for in vain, is ended by the meaninglessness of death — so he said to himself at the time — and if the life of every person and every animal can flow into the meaninglessness of death, who can still speak of a meaning in life? Tolstoy had sometimes set himself the goal of striving for perfection of the soul, of seeking meaning for the soul. He had not progressed far enough for any meaning in life to be kindled in his soul from the spirit itself. That is why the sight of death had presented the mystery of life in such a gruesome form before his mind's eye.

We see him traveling through Europe at the same time. We see him visiting the most interesting cities in Europe — France, Italy, Germany. We see him getting to know many valuable personalities. He meets Schopenhauer in person, shortly before his death he meets Liszt and many others, many greats of science and art. He learns a lot about social life, gets to know court life in Weimar. Everything was accessible to him, but he sees everything through eyes that reflect the attitude that has just been described. From all this, he had gained only one thing: just as it is at home, in the circles from which he had outgrown, so it is basically also in Western Europe.

One goal now stands before him in particular, an educational goal. He wanted to establish a kind of model school, and he did so in his hometown, where every student was to learn according to his or her ability and where no one was to be molded into a template. We cannot go into detail about the educational principles that prevailed there. But it must be emphasized that he had an educational ideal in mind that was to do justice to the individuality of the child.

We see how a kind of interregnum now begins, in which, in a certain sense, a kind of standstill occurs for the stormy soul in which problems and questions have rushed in, in which sensations and feelings have flowed in contradictory ways from all sides. A quieter life prevails within it. This period begins with his marriage in the 1860s. It was the period that gave rise to the great novels in which he presented comprehensive, powerful images of contemporary social life and the period immediately preceding it: War and Peace and Anna Karenina. These are the works into which so much of what he had learned flowed.

He lived like this until the 1970s. Then came a point in his life when he found himself at a crossroads, when all the doubts and scruples and problems that had previously reigned in his soul as if from dark spiritual depths resurfaced. A comparison, an image he formed, is very characteristic of what this soul experienced. One need only bring this image to mind and know that it means something quite different for a soul like Tolstoy's than for another, much more superficial soul. One need only bring this image to mind and one can look deep into Tolstoy's spirit. He compares his own life to that of an Eastern fable, which he recounts something like this:

There is a man who is being pursued by a wild animal. He flees, finds a dry well, and throws himself into it to escape the wild animal. He holds on tightly to branches that have grown out of the sides of the well wall. In this way, he believes he is protected from the pursuing monster. But then he sees a dragon in the depths and feels that it will devour him if he tires even a little or if the branch he is holding onto breaks. He also sees a few drops of honey on the leaves of the bush, which he could feed on. But at the same time, he also sees mice gnawing at the roots of the bush he is holding on to.

The two things Tolstoy held on to were family love and art. Otherwise, he saw life as being pursued by all the tormenting worries of life. One escapes from one and is met by another monster. And then one finds that the little one still has is being gnawed away by mice. — One must take the image deeply enough to see what is going on in such a soul, what is shown there and what Tolstoy experienced in the most comprehensive way in all his thinking, feeling, and willing. It was the branches that still gave him pleasure. But little by little he also found many things that gnawed away at his joy in them. Yes, if life as a whole is such that one cannot find any meaning in it, that one searches in vain for the meaning of life, what then is the point of having a family, raising and educating offspring, to whom one basically passes on the same meaninglessness? That, too, was something that weighed on his mind. And art? Yes, if life is worthless, what about the mirror of life, art? Can art be valuable if it is only capable of reflecting that in which one searches in vain for meaning?

That was what now, after an interregnum, was once again so very much on his mind, what was burning so intensely in his soul. Wherever he looked, among all those who tried to fathom the meaning of life in great philosophies and in the most diverse worldviews, he found nothing that could fundamentally satisfy his search. And recently, he had turned his gaze to those people who, in his opinion, were originally connected to the sources of life. These were the people who had preserved a natural meaning, a natural religiosity. He said to himself: The scholar who lives like me, who overestimates his reason, finds nothing in all his research that could explain the meaning of life to him. When I look at the ordinary person who joins a sect, he knows why he lives, he knows the meaning of life. How does he know this, and how does he know the meaning of life? Because he experiences the feeling within himself: there is a will, the eternal divine will, as I call it. And what lives within me submits to the divine will. And what I do, what I accomplish from morning to night, I do as part of the divine will. When I move my hands, I move them in the will of the divine. Without being led to abstract concepts by reason, the hands move. That was what struck him so strangely, what moved him so deeply: when the human element in the soul is moved. He said to himself: there are people who can give themselves an answer to the meaning of life that they need. — It is even magnificent how he contrasts these simple people with those he has met in his surroundings. Everything is conceived from the monumental nature of the paradigms. He says: I have met people who understood nothing about awakening or conceiving a meaning in life. They lived out of habit, even though they could not find any meaning in life, but I have met people who, precisely because they could not find any meaning in life, committed suicide. — Tolstoy himself came close to doing so.

So he examined the category of people about whom he had to say: There can be no question of a meaning of life or a life with meaning. But the person who is still connected to the sources of nature, whose soul is connected to the divine forces as much as a plant is connected to the forces of life, can answer the question: Why do I live? — That is why Tolstoy went so far as to seek communion with those simple people in religious life. He became a believer in a certain sense, even though the outward forms made a repulsive impression on him. He even went back to communion. There was now something in him that can be described as follows: he strove with every fiber of his soul to find a goal, to feel a goal. But everywhere, his thoughts and feelings stood in his way in a certain way. He could pray together with people who were believers in the naive sense and who answered the question of the meaning of life. He could pray—and this is tremendously significant—to the point of a unified way of feeling. But he could not go along with them when they prayed further: And we shall confess the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. — That made no sense to him. It is significant that he could go along to a certain point, because before his soul stood a religious life that caused people in a community to brotherly express and reveal what lives in the soul. Harmony of feelings, harmony of thoughts, that was what was to be brought about by this life of faith. But he could not rise to the positive content, the knowledge of the Spirit, to spiritual insight that gives reality. The dogma that had been handed down meant nothing to him. He could not attach any meaning to the words given in the Trinity.

Thus, with all these things coming together, he entered what he must describe as the mature period of his life, the period in which he tried to immerse himself completely in what he could call true, genuine Christianity. He strives as if he wanted to embrace and penetrate the liveliness of the Christ soul with his own soul. And he wanted to permeate himself with this spirit of the Christ soul. From this, a worldview was to grow, and from this, something like a transformation of all present life was to result, which he subjected to the harshest criticism as it presented itself to him. Now that he believes he feels with his own soul what Christ thought and felt, he feels strong enough to throw down the gauntlet to all ways of life and feeling and all forms of thought of the present, to exercise harsh criticism of everything from which he has grown out and which he could see in the wider environment of his present. He feels strong enough to demand, on the other hand, that the Christ spirit be allowed to reign and that a renewal of all human life be brought about from the Christ spirit. With this, we have, so to speak, characterized his maturing soul and seen how this soul has outgrown what many of our contemporaries call the heights of life. We have seen how this soul has come to exercise the harshest criticism of these heights of life, and in the renewal of the Christ spirit, which it finds alien to everything that currently lives, in the renewal of the Christ life, which it finds nowhere in reality, to set itself the next goal. So, in a certain sense, we see Tolstoy becoming a denier of the present and an affirmer of what he could call the Christ spirit, which he could not find in the present, but only in the early days of Christianity. He had to go back to the historical sources that were available to him. So here we have a representative of our present who has outgrown the present, denying this present.

And now let us look at the other who, just as Tolstoy comes to the most intense denial of the present, also comes to the most intense affirmation; who basically arrives at the same formula, only that it is applied in a completely different way. We see Carnegie, the Scotsman, growing out of that borderline of modern culture, which we can characterize by the fact that large-scale commerce, large-scale industry, sweeps away everything that is small-scale commerce in the social order. We see Carnegie truly emerging from that watershed of modern life, which a more recent poet so beautifully characterizes with the words:

Decaying in the forest floor
A blacksmith's shop on the footpath,
The hammer no longer sounds
To the labor-loving song.
Not far away, rises into the air
An elongated building,
Where there prevails in the engine room
Sooty hammer workers.
With nails from the steam factory,
A coffin was nailed together,
Which the impoverished nail smith
Carried to his grave.

One need only evoke such a mood to shed light on that watershed in modern cultural development that has become so important for so many lives. Carnegie's father, a Scotsman, was a master weaver who initially made a good living. He initially worked for a factory. Everything went well until large-scale industry flooded the market. Now we see the last day approaching when Carnegie's father can still deliver the manufactured goods to the dealer, when he delivers the last order. Poverty and misery now descend on this master weaver. He sees no way of getting ahead in Scotland. It is decided that the two boys should emigrate to America so that they do not live in poverty and perish.

The father finds work in a cotton mill, and the boy we are talking about is hired as a spooler at the age of twelve. He has to do hard work. But after a week of hard, heavy work, there is a joyful day for the twelve-year-old boy. He is paid his first wage for the first time: $1.20. Never again, says Carnegie, did he receive any income with such delight as he did that dollar and twenty cents. Nothing later gave him such joy, even though many millions passed through his fingers. We see the representative of practical ambition in our present day, who rises out of poverty and misery, who is determined to live in the present as it is and become a self-made man. He works hard. He earns his dollar every week.

Then someone finds him a job in another factory with a better wage. Here he has to work even harder, he has to stand in the basement and heat a small steam engine and keep it running in the intense heat! He feels that this is a responsible job. The fear of turning the tap on the machine the wrong way, which could spell disaster for the whole factory, is terrible for him. He often finds himself sitting in bed at night, dreaming all night about the valve he turned, making sure he did it the right way.

Then we see how, after some time, he gets a job in Pittsburgh as a telegraph messenger. He is already delighted with the modest salary of a telegraph messenger. He has a job in a place where there are books he has hardly ever seen before. Sometimes he even has newspapers to read. He now has only one concern: telegraph messengers are not needed in the city unless they know all the addresses of the companies that receive telegrams by heart. He really manages to learn the names and addresses of the Pittsburgh companies by heart. He also develops a certain independence. His awareness is coupled with extraordinary intelligence. He now goes to the telegraph office a little earlier and learns to telegraph himself through practice. This allows him to envision the ideal that every telegraph messenger in a young, up-and-coming community can aspire to: to become a telegraph operator himself. He even succeeds in performing a special feat. One morning, when the telegraph operator is not there, news of a death arrives. He picks up the dispatch and delivers it to the newspaper for which it was intended. There are contexts where such an action, even if successful, is not viewed favorably. But Carnegie rose to the position of telegraph operator as a result.

Now something else presented itself to him. A man who had a lot to do with the railroad recognized the young man's talent and one day made him the following proposal. He told him to buy $500 worth of railroad stock that had just become available. He could make a lot of money if he did this. And now Carnegie tells the story—it's delightful how he tells it—of how he actually raised $500 through his mother's care and love, and how he bought his shares. When the first return came, the first check for five dollars, he went out into the woods with his companions. They looked at the check and thought about it and learned to recognize that there is something else besides being paid for work, something that makes money out of money. This awakened great perspectives in Carnegie's life. He grew into the basic character of our time.

So we see how he immediately understood when another proposal came along. It is significant how he grasped with complete presence of mind what appeared before his soul for the first time. An inventive mind shows him the model of the first sleeping car. He immediately recognizes that there is something tremendously fruitful in it, so he gets involved. Now he emphasizes again what actually made his consciousness grow. He did not have enough money to participate in the world's first sleeping car company in an appropriate manner. But his ingenious mind enabled him to actually obtain money from a bank: he issued his first bill of exchange there. That's nothing special, he says, but it is special that he found a banker who accepted this bill of exchange as “good.” And that was the case.

Now he only needed to build on this to become the man of the present. So we need not be surprised that when he had the idea of replacing the many wooden bridges with iron and steel bridges, from that moment on he became the great steel magnate, the man who, in a certain sense, set the tone for the steel industry and acquired untold riches. Thus, we see in him the very type of person who grows into the present, the present that unfolds the most external life. He grows into the very exterior of exteriority. But he grows into it through his own strength, through his abilities. He becomes an immeasurably rich man out of poverty and misery, having truly acquired everything himself from the very first dollar. And he is a thoughtful person who, for his part, also connects this whole impulse of his own life with the progress and life of all humanity.

Thus we see how a different, remarkable gospel grows out of a way of thinking, a gospel that, in essence—and this is very interesting—is also based on Christ. Only Carnegie says right at the beginning of his gospel that it is a gospel of wealth. Thus, the book came into the world as a representation of how wealth can best be used for the salvation and progress of humanity. In it, he immediately turns against Tolstoy, of whom he says: He is a man who takes Christ in a way that is not at all acceptable for our time, who takes him as a foreign being from the distant past. One must understand Christ in such a way that one instills him into the life of the present. Carnegie is a man who fully affirms the whole of present-day life. He says: If we look back to the times when people were even more equal than they are today, when they were even less divided into those who had work to give and those who had work to take, and compare those times with today, we see how primitive the individual cultures were back then. In those ancient times, the king was unable to satisfy his needs in such a way—because they could not be satisfied—as even the poorest person can satisfy them today. What happened had to happen. It is therefore right that goods are distributed in this way.

Now Carnegie formulates a remarkable doctrine of the distribution or application of wealth. Above all, we find that he is preoccupied with thoughts about purely personal competence, about the nature of the competence of people who have worked their way up in life to become what they ultimately are. At first, Carnegie sees only external goods, but then he also sees that man must be capable, externally capable. And his capability must be used not only to acquire wealth, but also to manage it in the service of humanity.

Carnegie intensively draws attention to the fact that completely new principles must, so to speak, enter into the social structure of humanity if salvation and progress are to spring from new progress and the distribution of goods. He says: We have institutions from earlier times that make it possible for goods, rank, titles, and dignities to be passed on from father to son and grandson. In the old days, that was possible. — He thinks it is right that routine can replace what personal ability does not provide: rank, titles, dignities. But he is convinced that the life he has grown up in requires personal, individual competence. He points out that of seven bankrupt houses, five of them went bankrupt because they were passed on to the sons. Rank, titles, and dignities were passed on from fathers to sons, but never business acumen. In those areas of modern life where business principles prevail, they should not simply be passed on from the progenitor to the descendants. It is much more important to bring in a personally capable person than to bequeath one's wealth to one's children through inheritance. From this, Carnegie draws the conclusion, which he expresses with the grotesque sentence: “He who has acquired wealth must ensure that he also uses that wealth during his lifetime, applying it to such institutions and foundations that will benefit humanity to the greatest extent possible.” — And the sentence with which he formulates this, which may seem grotesque but which nevertheless emerges from Carnegie's entire way of thinking, is this: “He who dies rich dies disgraced.” In a certain sense, one could say that the steel magnate's sentence sounds even more revolutionary than many of Tolstoy's. “He who dies rich dies disgraced” means: Those who do not use the goods they have accumulated to establish foundations through which people can learn something, through which they have the opportunity to educate themselves, if a person does not use his wealth to make as many people as possible capable, but leaves it behind so that his descendants can use it in their own way and without talent, and it only serves their personal well-being, those who do not die having used their wealth during their lifetime for the good of humanity die dishonored.

Thus, we see a very remarkable principle emerging in Carnegie. We see that he affirms contemporary social life and activity, but that he derives a new principle from it: that man must stand up not only for the use of wealth, but also for its administration, as stewards of goods in the service of humanity. This man has no belief that anything can be passed on from ancestors to descendants through heredity. Even though he only knows the outer life, it is clear to him that within man there must sprout the forces that make him capable of his work in life.

So we see these two representatives of our present age: one who harshly criticizes everything that has gradually developed and who wants to lead the soul to higher things out of the spirit, and we see the other who takes material life as it is and who, from his observation of material life, is led to the conclusion that the source of work and health in life lies within the human being. Strange as it may sound, one could find something in Carnegie's teaching that justifies the following statement: If one does not look at this soul life thoughtlessly and meaninglessly, but looks at it in such a way that one gradually sees the forces flowing out of the souls, sees the individual, and is quite clear that it is not propagated in the line of inheritance, what must one then look at? One must look at the real origin, at that which comes from other sources. And one will find, when one comes to the sources of present talents and abilities through Spiritual Science, that these lie in previous lives. Through the law of reincarnation and spiritual causation, karma, one will find the possibility of thoughtfully processing such a principle as practical life has imposed on a practical person.

No one can hope that anything could come from a mere externalization of life that could satisfy the soul and bring culture to its highest heights. One can never hope that anything other than a distribution of wealth that is beneficial in the external sense would come from those paths. The soul would become desolate, it would exhaust its powers, but find nothing within itself if it could not penetrate to the sources of the spirit that lie beyond external material life. Rejected by a material view of life, the soul must find the source that can flow only from a spiritual view of life. In order for souls not to become desolate, Carnegie's approach to life must be combined with the deepening and spiritualization of life that comes from Spiritual Science. While Carnegie demands from the individual soul that which makes it capable of living in the outer world, Tolstoy wants to give the individual soul that which it can find in the deep wells of spiritual being.

Just as Carnegie grasps the essence of the present from material life with a sure eye, so on the other hand we find Tolstoy able to grasp the nature of the soul with a sure eye. Up to a certain point, we see Tolstoy coming, who indeed touches us strangely when we compare everything that lives in Tolstoy's worldview with what we encounter in Western European culture in particular. One can look through work after work from the enormously long series of works that Tolstoy wrote, and one will see one thing shining out above all else: things that here in the West are brought together with an enormous effort of philosophical reflection, scholarly musings, and the shifting back and forth of conclusions and inferences, are presented by Tolstoy in such a way that they appear in five or six lines like flashes of insight and become convictions for those who can grasp such things. Tolstoy shows us, for example, how we must find something in the human soul that is divine in nature, something that, when it shines within us, can bring the divine into the world. Tolstoy says: Around me live the learned natural scientists; they investigate what is real out there in the material world, in so-called objective existence. They are searching there for the divine origins of existence. Such people then try to piece together the human being from all the laws, substances, atoms, and so on that they seek out scattered throughout space. They then ultimately seek to understand what the human being is by believing that they must combine all external science in order to find the origin of life. Such people, he says, seem to me like people who have trees and plants of living nature around them. They say: I'm not interested in that. But there is a forest in the distance, which I can hardly see; I want to explore and describe this forest, then I will also understand the trees and plants that are next to me, and I will be able to describe them. — That's how I see people who use their instruments to explore the nature of animals in order to learn about the nature of humans. They have it within them, they just need to see what is closest to them. But they don't do that. They look for distant trees, and they seek to understand what they cannot see, the atoms. But they do not see the human being itself.

This way of thinking is so monumental that it is more valuable than dozens of insights and theories written about ancient cultures. This is characteristic of Tolstoy's entire way of thinking. He came to such conclusions, and one must look into such things. For Western Europeans, this is highly unsatisfactory; only by taking a detour via Kant do they arrive at this conclusion. With a certainty of the workings of the soul, Tolstoy is driven to express what is not proven but is true, what is recognized through immediate observation, and what one knows to be true when it is expressed. This monumental, original wellspring of deepest truths, as if from the source of life he sought, is evident in his work “Life.” This is what we often see in his last writings, and what is such that it can shine like the dawn of a rising future.

So we must say: the less we are inclined to take Tolstoy dogmatically, the more we are inclined to take in the golden grains of primitive paradigmatic thinking, the more fruitful he will be. Of course, those who only accept a personality in such a way that they swear by their dogmas and cannot allow themselves to be inspired by it will not gain much from him. Some things will not suit them at all. But those who can allow themselves to be inspired by him, by what flows from a great personality, will be able to receive much from Tolstoy. We see that truth works in him, paradigmatically, and that this truth flows into his personal life with great force. How does it flow in? It is quite interesting to see that different views exist and are tolerated within his family. But how was he able to introduce his principles into daily life? Through work and action, and not just with principles. This makes him a true pioneer for many things that are yet to sprout in the future. But on the other hand, we see how Tolstoy, despite being a pioneer of the future, is still a child of his time.

Perhaps nothing illustrates how he fits into the present more impressively than that remarkable picture from 1848, when he was twenty years old. Just look at the face of the twenty-year-old, which expresses energy and strength of will, but at the same time also reserve. The witty sparkle in his eyes, however, reveals something that questions the mysteries of life. He is volcanic inside, but unable to bring the volcano to eruption. However, we see mysterious depths of the soul expressed in his physiognomy, and we thus see in his physiognomy the expression of something powerful living within him, which he cannot yet fully express in this organism that he has inherited.

The same is true of the manifold forces that live in Tolstoy and that could not really find expression. It is as if they had to express themselves in a caricatured, distorted way in some respects. One must also recognize the character in him that is sometimes distorted into the grotesque. Therefore, it is quite wonderful when he is able to point out what is usually called transience in human beings: Look at the human body. How often its substances have been replaced! Nothing material remains of what was there in the ten-year-old. And what is ordinary consciousness, take it and compare it with the mental images of the fifty-year-old: it has become something completely different, right down to the structure of the soul. We cannot call it permanent, but everywhere we find in it the center point, which we must say is reached in the mental image by the following. The objects of the external world are there. This one is there, that one is there, and a third one is there. Two people step in front of the objects. The eye sees the same things, but they are different for one person than for the other. One says, “I like that”; the other says, “I don't like it.” — When everything in the external world is the same, the same impressions are there, and one soul says, I like it, — the other says: I don't like it, — so if the way of life is different, there is a center that is different from everything external, that remains unshakeable despite all the changes in consciousness and body. There is something that was there before birth and will be there after birth, my special self. This special self of mine did not begin with birth.

What matters is not how one feels about such a statement in relation to Western European customs, but that one has the feeling that such a statement can be made. This reveals the greatness of the soul. It shows that the soul is alive and how it lives. This is where immortality is guaranteed.

Thus we see how Tolstoy comes close to the limits of what we, through spiritual scientific study, come to know as the innermost essence of the soul. He is constrained by the world he himself fights so hard against and cannot advance to the true knowledge of what exists before birth and what comes after death. He does not arrive at the teaching of reincarnation and karma. Nor does he arrive at the inner impulse of the soul like Carnegie, who demands it outright. So we see whether a person is in deep inner conflict with everything that lives, works, and strives in the present, or whether, as a yes-man, he agrees with all forms of life in the present: he is led to the gates of what we call the anthroposophical view of life. Tolstoy would be able to find his way to Carnegie, but Carnegie would never find his way to Tolstoy.

This lecture was intended to show that a worldview and outlook on life can be provided that leads directly into practical life, that can transfer what has been newly learned to what is known, to what has been accomplished. And so we will see, as we delve deeper and deeper into this Spiritual Science, how it brings to people of both shades what Tolstoy ultimately found in his own way, what Carnegie found in his own way: a life that is satisfying in itself. But what matters is not that the immediate seeker finds a satisfying life, and that those who seek with him can also find it. What Tolstoy found satisfying for himself and what Carnegie found satisfying for himself can only be found in an impersonal, pure way and through a recognition directed at the level of the spirit for all people who seek in this way, when true spiritual knowledge of what passes from life to life, what carries the guarantee of eternity within itself, will be found for all people.