The Circular Flow of Man's Life within the World Of Sense, Soul And Spirit

GA 68b — 6 November 1908, Munich

25. Tolstoy And Carnegie

Dear attendees! For many years now, I have had the honor of addressing you from this very spot about subjects related to spiritual science or, as it has become customary to call it, theosophy. Those of you in the audience who have attended several lectures over the past years will have seen that the basis of spiritual science as represented here is such that one can say: Spiritual science or Theosophy should not be considered merely as a dreamy, idle occupation of a few people who are far removed from life, but should rather shine more deeply into the tasks and riddles of life.

On the one hand, it is true that this spiritual-scientific world view is intended to direct our gaze up into the spheres of the spiritual foundations of the world, to convey knowledge of these spiritual foundations of the world; but on the other hand – and it need only be recalled here to the lecture on the education of the child from the point of view of spiritual science, which has been given here — on the other hand, this spiritual-scientific world view has the task of making life understandable, of giving guidelines and guiding stars to action and work in practical life, of providing orientation in the broadest sense precisely about what is going on around us before our eyes and ears, and of giving a deeper understanding of it by drawing precisely this understanding from the deeper, spiritual causes. What we are to deal with today can be considered a contribution in this direction.

What can initially confuse people, what initially causes people all kinds of conflict, is when their world view, when the affairs of life confront them with important personalities, with their opinions, with their thoughts, and when these personalities contradict each other so often. Many of you will have already felt how Theosophy or spiritual science, by broadening one's view, leads precisely to a harmonization of opinions through understanding.

Today we will deal with two contemporary personalities whose work is taking place right among us, whose opinions, so to speak, are going around the world from east to west and from west to east. These are personalities who are so well suited to leading us to the deep contradictions that run through our lives – for perhaps you will not find two personalities who are so opposed in all that they think and feel, in all that they express as being the right thing to do for our needs today – on the one hand we have Tolstoy, the much-mentioned, the effective one, a personality of whom one might say that no term is sufficient to properly encompass what he actually is for the present day; it will hardly suffice to say that Tolstoy is a moralist, if one believes a reformer in certain areas , if one wanted to use the term prophet or the like, but whoever pronounces the name of this personality will always be aware that something very inner to human nature is struck in this, that something lives in this personality that seems to emerge from other depths of the soul than those that move on the surface of existence today – and the other personality that is to be contrasted with it, so to speak, is the American millionaire Carnegie.

Why is Carnegie being contrasted with this personality today? Just as Tolstoy is trying to find a satisfactory solution to life and the riddles of life from the depths of his soul, so Carnegie, in his own way, is also seeking to gain principles of action and direction from the depths of our time, from his practical, one might say, “fundamentally intelligent” view of life. Perhaps one could say – but it sounds almost trivial – that just as idealism and realism have confronted each other in all ages – but with these shades as radically pronounced as possible – so do Tolstoy and Carnegie confront each other.

The great German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte once said: “What one's worldview is depends on what kind of person one is.” He was pointing out how a person's worldview is sometimes more subtly and sometimes more coarsely intertwined with their unique character and temperament, with their entire life. And if we first look at the life, the character traits, and the personality traits of the two people we want to talk about, we already have the greatest possible contrast.

The rich Russian aristocrat, who was born into the opulence of life, so to speak, who is virtually forced by his social position in life not only to get to know all sides of this life down to the most superficial outbursts of our present day, but to live with them and savor them, we see how, oversaturated to these contents of life, which are offered on the surface today, he takes refuge in the highest moral ideals, which seem to fly over life endlessly, and of which most people, even if they admire them, will be convinced today that they may be beautiful, but that they can only realize a little in life.

On the other hand, we see Carnegie, born, one might say, out of need and misery, at least educated out of need and misery, familiar with all kinds of privation, with the necessity of doing the most menial of work, endowed with none of the things that life offered to someone like Tolstoy on the surface of today's social order, endowed with an honest will to work, with an one might say, idealistically colored certain ambition to become a whole human being, he worked his way up; Carnegie works his way up through this sphere to a kind, one might say, of realistic idealism, also to a kind of moralism that counts on what is immediately apparent, what can be directly experienced in practical life.

We see how Tolstoy, in the most radical way, throws down the gauntlet, so to speak, to today's social order, how his criticism becomes not only harsh when he speaks of the current social order, but how it seeks to intervene, so to speak, in a devastating way in current thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will.

Carnegie sees how life has developed historically up to our present time and, for his soul, has the one word, so to speak, that expresses everything in relation to his first, most direct relationship to life: Yes, he says to everything that the present has brought us – a full satisfaction with what is around us! He sees how the gap between rich and poor has grown, how the ways of earning a living have changed, and everywhere he is permeated by the judgment: It does not matter whether we find this good or bad, but that it must be so, that we just have to reckon with it, and yet, working his way through – this is the characteristic feature of this personality – working his way through from a realistic view to a kind of idealism that sets itself the great goal of providing guidelines for a good life within these existing conditions, for a life that serves human progress in the most beautiful way, and for a social order that serves human progress and development.

Our consideration should not take sides with one or the other school of thought; it should be clear from the conditions of human development how such contradictions could have arisen. And if Theosophy has a task in relation to such phenomena as these two personalities present, then it is precisely to understand, from the deep foundations of existence, preferably of spiritual development, where such phenomena come from. It is not my intention to teach anything biographical about either of these personalities, only to say what the souls of both can reveal to us so that we can then penetrate to a deeper understanding of them.

From the outset, Tolstoy is a person who does not have to struggle with the external hardships of life, but is born into wealth and abundance, so to speak. He could easily have done so if he had harbored a superficial soul, as so many thousands and thousands more do, lost in wealth and abundance. But his individuality was not suited to that. From the very beginning, from childhood on, what could have an effect on this soul was always that which touched the deepest questions of the soul, of the world view. At first, he accepts life as it presents itself to him. As a boy, he is not yet able to think critically about what is going on around him; what later emerged in him in a monumental way as a critique of today's way of life is far from that. As a boy, he takes for granted what is around him and going on.

But there is already something in the boy like a lightning strike in his soul. One of his childhood friends once came home from high school with a strange message. He said something like, “Yes, someone – maybe a teacher – has made a new discovery, namely that there is no God.” This was something that struck like lightning into this young soul, which had actually taken for granted not only everything external but also the religious life as it played out around him.

That something like this is possible, that presented itself together with another thing to this youthful mind. You only have to put yourself in a child's shoes for once, and you will be able to know that a child's soul could actually believe that such a discovery could possibly be made. And such events have been incorporated again and again into this soul life. And we could give a long description of how Tolstoy, during his military service, in his dealings with the social classes to which he belongs, gets to know all the misery of today's life, how he becomes weary of it, how he the most diverse thoughts, how he, after he had got to know the misery of war and its social history, the literary life in Petersburg, how he became tired of what life is today in other areas of Europe. We could describe all this – it is well known today – but what can interest us are the questions that arose for Tolstoy.

First of all, the question increasingly and more sharply arises in his soul: What is actually a certain center of life in the face of all the confusing circumstances around us, where can a center be found? Gradually, religion becomes an important question for him, and this question becomes all the more significant for him as he is unable to break away from external customs for a long time. But the religious question becomes something deeply incisive for him. More and more clearly and distinctly he asks himself: What exactly is religion for man? And for a long time he is not really clear about how that connecting bond of the soul with some higher world, with an unknown spiritual source, what that bond looks like, where it goes from the soul, etc. Above all, the people he has met in his circles seem to him to be so detached from the religious mood of the soul, so parched in relation to the living source of life.

Not, as I said, to take sides, but only to describe this mood of the soul as clearly as possible. And then, in my opinion, he sees himself as a soldier in the Caucasus, during the siege of Sevastopol, among the lower classes of the population. He gets to know their souls; he delves into such souls in an intimate way. He finds that there is something original in such souls, that they are even less torn away from the original ground, and the problem arises before his soul as to whether there is not more truth and authenticity in the naivety of the existence of lower, subordinate social classes than in the circles in which he had to live. And lo and behold, here too, one mystery after another presents itself to him and he cannot solve any of them. You only need to read something like his unfinished novel “Morning Hours of a Landowner” to see how he wrestled with the question: Yes, now I have seen the people who have broken away from the original source of existence, who have withered away on the periphery; I have sought a path to religious depth from the soul of primitive people, but an answer to this question fails because today's so-called educated people can never communicate with these primitive original states of the soul. In short, there is no answer to the burning questions that existed for him either.

And so it goes on, and so he comes to see all the contradictions and contradictions in life more and more clearly, and one need only go through his original artistic work: “War and Peace”, his novellas, “Anna Karenina” and so on, and one will see how, although the artistic form is always the most important thing at first glance, these works are permeated by the desire to understand life in all its contradictions, and above all to understand the contradictory nature of human character, because that is what confronts him as contradictory. You feel how true it is, what he says later, when he has already turned to a kind of moral writing: “It has caused me unspeakable torment, and I know that it has caused many of my colleagues in literature just as much torment, to depict an ideally psychologically constructed character that is true to reality. It torments him that there can be such a contradiction between what one must imagine as ideal if there is to be salvation and order in the world, and what presents itself to his spiritual eyes in reality. That always tormented him as long as he was still artistically active.

There was something else. Tolstoy was not just an objective observer during the whole period in which the mental torments took place; he experienced life and took part in everything. He also experienced these things inwardly; he could feel the intimate pangs of conscience, the intimate reproaches that a person must make to himself when he suddenly realizes in a certain respect that he was born into certain circles and must take part in everything that happens there, and yet it seems contradictory to him when he judges it. Those personalities who felt this were driven to the brink of suicide; one need only sense what is going on inside such people. Man learns infinitely more through the opportunities he has to criticize himself than through criticism of his surroundings.

And so Tolstoy's view broadened more and more, until he went from a survey of the immediate circumstances to an overview, so to speak, of the entire developmental history of humanity, and there it became clear to him to what extent great and significant, namely religious impulses of humanity have come into decline. Thus, without any intention of being critical, he was confronted with the depth and intensity of feeling of the great impulse given to the world by Christ Jesus, and alongside it the Roman world, the Roman Caesaranism, which had completely subjugated Christianity to the service of power of things that do not serve the salvation of humanity, as the Christian impulse was to and could do, but which bring humanity into the confusion that presented itself to it, and so his view became more and more a criticism of everything that existed, and it is harsh enough. From his historical perspective, he believed that he had to perceive the contradictions of people as the most difficult. On the one hand, the greatest wealth, on the other, the most terrible poverty, which was particularly evident in the stunted development of the souls, so that people in this stunted development of spiritual matters are not able to find their way out of what they experience to the great spiritual treasures, especially to those that can be found in original Christianity, to which they must penetrate!

Thus, the most comprehensive problem for him was the contrast between the ruling upper class of society, with its power and luxury, and the downtrodden masses, oppressed in mind and body. This presented itself to him in the most comprehensive way. And he became a critic, perhaps in a more comprehensive way than any before him, who never tires of describing more and more the way things are, and who is so skilled at describing that the mere description can sometimes inspire shudder.

It is perhaps quite characteristic if we highlight a symptomatic feature from his view of the world, which will immediately show us how he approached the tasks of life. He once said that he would have liked to write a fairy tale with something like the following content: A woman had learned something very bad about another woman and had developed the deepest antipathy towards her as a result. She wanted to do something to her that could not really be compared to anything in terms of evil. She went to a magician and asked for advice. She stole a child from her enemy. The magician told her that she could satisfy her hatred in the most intense way if she could bring this child, who she had stolen from a woman living in the poorest of circumstances and who would have ended up in need and misery there, to a rich house. And indeed, she succeeds in bringing the child to a rich house. The child is adopted. It is cared for in every way in the manner of the rich – it is pampered, and has it pretty good, so to speak. The woman who had brought the child to the rich woman is furious when she finds out; because that is not how she had imagined the child would fare. She goes to the magician and complains that he has given her such bad advice. He, however, says she should just wait. More and more, the child is embedded in luxury. The woman says: The magician has deceived me. But he replied: Just wait. It is the worst thing you have done to your enemy.

The child continued to develop. It becomes conscious and feels an inner contradiction to the external situation. It says to itself: “Everything I long for must be in an unknown world; but I cannot find it. I know that the way I have been cared for has made me too weak to make the decision to take any reasonable path to the foundations of existence. All this becomes the worst inner torment for the developing human being.

Tolstoy knew well how such psychological experiences appear; he wanted to show how this human being was driven to the brink of suicide by this inner turmoil. You can see symptomatically from such a thing how Tolstoy thinks. Much more than from definitions, we can see from Tolstoy's will about social order how he thought about social order. This was the attitude of one of the two personalities we are dealing with today towards the world.

Now let us add the opposite: Carnegie. He is the child of a master weaver. His father has some work as long as there are no large factories. Carnegie's childhood falls precisely during the boom of big industry in this area. His father no longer receives orders. He has to emigrate from Scotland to America. He can only earn the barest necessities with difficulty. The boy had to work in a factory as a schoolboy. He recounts it himself, and one senses the tone of such a description if one has previously delved into the psychological experiences that we have just explored in Tolstoy. He himself describes what an event it was when he received a wage of one dollar and twenty cents for his work for the first time. He later became one of the richest personalities of the present day, one of those who, as we shall see shortly, actually had to find ways of investing their millions; but he can say, and this is significant: No income later, no matter how large it was – and a lot of money passed through his hands – no income gave me as much joy as that first dollar.

And so it goes on. He works in this way for a long time and contributes to the family's upkeep. There is something in him like a hidden strength that works towards him becoming what, in the circles in which he now moves, is called a “self-made man”. This satisfies him, that as a twelve-year-old boy he had the feeling: Now you will become a man, because he feels that you are a man when you can earn something. That was the thought of his soul. Later he will go to another factory, work in an office, and later become a telegraph operator and earn more.

He recounts: “A telegraph operator in America had the task of knowing all the addresses by heart. I was worried about losing my job.” — He quickly learned all the names of an entire street. So he was a “made man” again. Now he sneaks into the office with other messengers before official duty begins. They practice telegraphing. His highest ideal is to become a telegraphist himself. He actually finds employment as such. Now his greatest joy is to find a patron from whom he can borrow a book every Saturday. He waits longingly for such a book.

Now events occur that are significant for him. A higher-ranking railroad official, who has played a major role, gives him the task of working his way out by taking shares in a certain enterprise. With great effort, he raises the $500 that is necessary; he has been contributing to the family's upkeep in the most arduous way for some time. It is only through the efforts of his mother that he is able to raise the $500 to buy ten shares. And now – again, we have to feel what this means emotionally – there comes a day when he receives the first small dividend corresponding to his shares. It strikes him as a mystery, like the solution to a mystery, which he could not have grasped before: that money can make money. The concept of capital dawns on him. This was now as important to him as any idealistic problem is to some thinker. Before that, he only knew the possibility of getting a wage in return for work. That capital can generate money now dawned on him.

And now it is interesting to see the intensity with which such experiences can be absorbed by such a soul. He is making progress. The right thing dawns on him at the right moment. When the problem of the sleeping car arises, he is ready to take part. Step by step, he advances until he finally knows how to exploit the situation in the right way. When the time came to change from building bridges of wood to bridges of iron, he adjusted himself to the new trend, grew richer and richer, and finally became the steel king, who must seek ways - and now he has a practical sense of morality - how he, in relation to his practical sense of morality, must behave with his wealth.

For him, as I said, there is none of what Tolstoy felt: no criticism of life, but an acceptance of life as a matter of course. What Tolstoy found so contradictory is what Carnegie imagines: If we look back at older phases of human feeling, we see that, in primitive conditions, princes do not differ particularly in terms of their lifestyle from those living around them. There is no luxury, no wealth in today's sense, but also none of the things that bring wealth; there is no contrast between rich and poor. In primitive times, however, as development was, this had to develop, and the contrasts became more and more pronounced. It is good, he says, that there are palaces next to the hut; because there is a lot in it that is supposed to be there, we have to understand its necessity.

But he notices how, in primitive conditions, there is a personal, human relationship between master and servant, how everything becomes impersonal in our relationships, how the employer stands in relation to the employee without knowing him, without knowing anything about the servant's spiritual needs, how hatred and so on must develop as a result; but that's how we have to accept it, that's just how it is. So an absolute yes to all outer life!

And when we consider how he is a thoroughly practical and sober-minded thinker of his kind, how he views this life, how he knows all the different chains that capital takes precisely because he is inside it, how he knows many a healthy things to say when you see that, then you have to say: this man, too, has tried to enlighten himself about life, and there is something complacent in him towards Tolstoy; and his practical morality – I use the word deliberately – it presents him with the question: How should our life be shaped if what has developed as a necessity is to have meaning? He says: Well, old conditions have led to wealth being inherited from ancestors to descendants. Is this still possible in our conditions, where capital shoots from capital in such an eminently necessary way? He asks himself this question vividly. He looks at life with penetrating meaning and says: No, it can't be done that way, and by considering all things, he comes to a peculiar view. He comes to the following conclusion; he says to himself that the only way this whole life of the rich man can make sense is if the rich man regards himself as the steward of wealth for the rest of humanity, that the owner of the wealth says to himself: I should not only acquire the wealth, not only have it and perhaps bequeath it to my family members, but rather, I should use what I have acquired, since I have used mental and other powers to bring it together, since I have poured industriousness into it, I should in turn use this industriousness to administer this wealth for the benefit of humanity.

Thus it actually becomes an ideal for him that man, while acquiescing in the conditions of the time, acquires as much wealth as possible, but leaves no wealth behind, but applies it for the good of mankind. Now he comes to a sentence that is characteristic of this world view; the sentence is: 'Died rich dishonored!' So, the ideal he sets for himself is that one may indeed become rich in order to gain the opportunity through wealth to work with it for the benefit of humanity, but he imagines that one must be done with the work of putting wealth at the service of humanity by the time of one's death. He says: It is honorable to leave nothing behind when one dies. Of course, this “nothing” is not to be taken pedantically; the daughters, for example, are to inherit enough to live on, but in radical terms he says: getting rich is a necessity, dying rich is dishonorable. For him, an honest man is one who, so to speak, comes to terms with life and does not leave to some uncertainty what he has acquired through his own hard work.

And now we have to feel the contrast between two such opposing personalities as Tolstoy and Carnegie are. Carnegie himself feels the contrast and he speaks out: Oh, Count Tolstoy wants to lead us back to Christ, but in a way that no longer fits with our lives. Instead of wanting to lead us back to Christ, it would be better to show what Christ would advise people to do today, under today's conditions. In his sentence: He who dies rich is dishonored, he finds the real expression of the Christian idea and lets it be known that he believes that if Christ were to speak audibly to people today, he would agree with him and not Tolstoy.

At the same time, however, we see that this man, Carnegie, is truly a noble nature, and not, as many are who accept circumstances and do not reflect on them, a lazy one. He has not only said what I have presented as the main point; he has sought the most diverse ways to use his wealth and more. It does seem strange at first when life can confront us with such contradictions, when two personalities arise in the same era who, from what one may call an objective world view, come to such different points of view, and the may be quite difficult for the human being, and it is not at all to be criticized from the outset if someone were to say today: Oh, my whole soul goes to where Tolstoy preaches his great ideals; how sublime this personality appears. But I also have to think about the practical demands of life, and if a person is not an abstract dreamer and idealist, but really goes through the thought processes of such a person with a realistic mind, as Carnegie offers them, then you have to say: that is perfectly justified. But it shows me how, for the person who lets the practical demands of life affect him, it is impossible to truly do justice to the ideals, to truly believe in the fulfillment of the great ideals. And so a new conflict can arise for such a person, as it did for Tolstoy.

And now let us try, I would like to say, to delve a little deeper into these two personalities, now from the perspective of the science of the soul. Tolstoy does indeed succeed in fully defending what he believes to be the original Christian teaching; he tries to criticize in the harshest possible way everything that has become of Christianity, that has emerged here and there, and he seeks to find the great impulses of Christianity. Tolstoy presents these impulses of Christianity in a relatively simple way. He says: When man understands these impulses, it is clear that he has within himself a spark of an eternal divine power that permeates the world. And the second thing that becomes clear to him is that this spark contains the essence of his own immortality and that, if he has understanding, he can no longer do anything other than seek a deeper human being in the ordinary earthly human being. And when he follows this feeling, when he realizes that he has to seek a deeper person in himself, then he cannot help but overcome what lies in his lower nature, and so he becomes a strict demands of the other nature, the development of the higher person in himself, the person who follows the Christ. How would a person - I will not say Carnegie himself, but someone who considers what might follow from Carnegie's view of life - how would such a person relate to Tolstoy's position on Christ? He would say: Oh, it is great and powerful to live in Christ, to let Christ come alive in oneself. But he would say to him: In the external circumstances, this cannot be realized. How should the state's circumstances be shaped if one lives according to this strict Christian demand?

Even if the question has not been asked from a different angle, Tolstoy gives the answer as definitely as possible. He says: “What such a view leads to in the external order, for the state, for external historical events, I do not know, that is beyond my knowledge; but that one must live in the spirit of this Christian faith, that is a certainty for me.” And so for Tolstoy the words: “The kingdom of God is within you!” (Luke 17:21) into a deep and significant view of the kind of certainty that a person can have about the highest things. The view of an inner certainty gradually takes shape in him, and so he seeks to find this foundation stone in the soul, which makes it possible for the soul to become ruthlessly certain about certain things, about this or this soul says to itself: however strange it may seem, what will become of it if only the outer world view is maintained, because this inner certainty is the only one, it must be fulfilled. It eludes my observations what may follow, but they must be good because under certain circumstances they must arise from the eternal good source of all things.

Perhaps in no other contemporary personality is there such a strong reliance on inner certainty and the firm belief that, in this reliance, whatever may come, good must come. Perhaps in no other contemporary personality is this belief as intense as in Tolstoy. Therefore, no other personality with such a personal, individual share, with such inner truth, has professed such a world view.

And here we have another opportunity to illustrate the state of mind of both. Carnegie reflects: How should people behave towards each other, how should the rich behave towards the poor? And then the thought goes through his mind: It is not always good to give something to someone who begs for it; because it is possible that you might make the beggar lazy - says Carnegie; maybe you are not doing any good by doing so. You should look at the people you support. Actually, only those who have the will to work should be supported. And Carnegie implements this in a whole system. He says he understands very well that the man who gives something just to get rid of the beggar does more harm than the miser who gives nothing at all.

We do not want to judge such things, we want to characterize them, but let us look at a similar situation in Tolstoy: He meets a person who becomes his friend. This friend does not form a worldview, but feelings within himself. Tolstoy sees a peculiar behavior in him – many people today cannot believe such things; but they are true nonetheless. His friend is robbed. Thieves steal sacks from him; they leave one behind. What does the friend do? He doesn't chase after the thieves, but carries the one sack to them as well and says: They certainly wouldn't have stolen if they hadn't needed the things. And in other circumstances, Tolstoy sees this friend – and he becomes his admirer, he understands this very clearly. There you have the view of people who are considered parasites, so to speak, on one side and on the other. Life views intervene in life in this way, and the symptoms on the surface can characterize the mood of the soul.

But now we have to say: Tolstoy is not only a harsh critic of life in relation to all that we have mentioned; but by grasping the fundamental source of human certainty, he is also led to a remarkable point in his soul development, and that is where Tolstoy actually appears to us in his full greatness for the first time – for those who can appreciate such greatness. One thing that flows from this view of certainty, which one cannot admire enough, is Tolstoy's position on the value of science, contemporary science, and then a certain world of ideas about life and other important problems and questions flows out. Because he tried so hard to look inside the human being, he was able to see through all the futility in the methods of our worldly sciences. Of course, it is easy to understand what these sciences achieve, to follow the paths they take, but what these sciences – and here I am speaking entirely in the spirit of Tolstoy – can never do is answer the question: How do these various external, chemical-physical processes fit into life? What is life?

And now we come to what must actually be meant here. Tolstoy comes to a peculiar way of exploring a deep, scientific problem, the problem of life. Please, my dear attendees, look around you at our Western science, where life is spoken of, and make only one comparison to that, which Tolstoy uses in relation to this riddle of life. He says: “People who try to solve the riddle of life in the sense of today's science seem to me like people who want to get to know the trees in their uniqueness and do it this way: they are in the middle of the trees, but don't look at them, but take a telescope and point it at distant mountain slopes, where, as they have heard, there should be trees whose essence and nature they want to explore. “That's how people strike me who carry their soul, the source of their life, within themselves, who only need to look within themselves to see through the mystery of life, but what do they do? They make instruments for themselves, build methods for themselves and try to dissect what is around them, and there they see even less what life is. Through such a comparison, a thinker like Tolstoy - an eminent thinker - shows us that he feels what is important in relation to this question. Those who work their way into this side of Tolstoy's worldview know that what his book “On Life” has to say about the exploration and evaluation of life is worth more than entire libraries of Western Europe written from the standpoint of today's science on the problem of life. And then one also learns to feel what it means to have such spiritual experiences as Tolstoy, what it means to think about certainty as he did. One then learns to admire how things that one, when one is, so to speak, in the scientific method of our present time, has to go through with long-folded trains of thought, has to write whole books, as Tolstoy's are completed in five lines. The value of such a book as this one about the life of Tolstoy cannot be overestimated. Today's scientist may find it to be mere feuilleton; but anyone who is able to adapt their way of thinking to the spirit of these discussions will find a solution to the problem of life that is not available elsewhere.

And so we see, as this observation shows more and more, how Tolstoy's spirit becomes something that concentrates more and more, that with a few strokes is able to conjure up and solve great problems not in many words, but with radiant words of power, in contrast to the long discussions of a scientific and philosophical nature that are otherwise common. Here we are confronted with the very depths of Tolstoy's soul, and only when we know him from this point of view can we begin to understand the profound spiritual reasons why a person can become someone like Tolstoy on the one hand or someone like Carnegie on the other, who seems very plausible to us and is an important personality. We shall understand the spiritual foundations that lead to Tolstoy on the one hand and to Carnegie on the other if we now characterize from the point of view of spiritual science how this spiritual development takes place and is expressed in certain personalities.

The spiritual researcher sees something quite different from the ordinary in the course of human development. Just as spiritual science sees a multi-faceted being in the person standing before us, and sees in the physical body only one facet, only the effect of higher spiritual facets, with the etheric, astral and ego bodies behind them, so she also sees in what confronts us in the social order, in human life, what confronts us externally visible as a people, as a tribe, as a family, the physical body, the physical body of the people, the physical body of the tribe, the physical body of the family, a spiritual reality behind it. When one speaks of the spirit of the people, the spirit of the time, in today's science, these are words that do not mean much. What is the person thinking who speaks of the German, French or English national spirit? For the modern thinker, it is really only the sum of so and so many people; they form the reality, and the national spirit is a complete abstraction, something that one forms in one's mind when one seeks the concept from the many details. People have no idea that what appears to us as so many people is just as much the expression of an etheric body, an astral body and an ego as it is of the human body, and that it is truly also the expression of a spiritual. Today we have lost what we used to possess; it is no longer easy to explain how this spiritual reigns behind the sensual.

An old friend of mine, a good Aristotelian, tried to make his audience understand how the spiritual can be objectified in the sensual appearance by means of a simple example. Vincent Knauer – that was the man – tried to make it clear that spirit prevails in form, by saying: Let us consider a wolf that eats nothing but lambs for a whole lifetime for my sake; it then consists of nothing but lamb matter; but it has not become a lamb because of that. It does not depend on the matter, but on the fact that there is something in the wolf, which stands behind it as the spiritual, which is the essential, which structures and builds up the matter. This is a very real thing, something that one must know, otherwise all study of the external world moves in the insubstantial. No matter how much you examine in the sensual world, if you do not penetrate to the spiritual, then you do not come to the essential.

But it is the same with terms such as 'popular spirit' or 'zeitgeist'. For the spiritual researcher, a group of people is not just what can be observed in the physical world; there is something spiritual living behind it. And so, for the spiritual researcher, there is a spiritual reality, a real spiritual reality, not a mere, insubstantial abstraction in the Christian development, for example. Besides the Christian, there is a spirit of Christianity, which is a substantial reality. Such a spirit works in a very peculiar way; it works in such a way that we can make it understandable in the briefest way by means of a parable. Imagine that a farmer has brought in some kind of harvest and is now dividing it up. He sells one part, one part goes aside to be consumed, one part he keeps back; this is to form the next sowing. It then comes to light again as something new. It would be bad if nothing were kept back; what lies within would die. This is a comparison that leads us to a real law in human development. Development takes place so rapidly that at a certain point in time certain impulses are given; these must become established and spread. If at a certain point in time a spiritual impulse such as Christianity were given, it would become established in the outer world and take on this or that form, but it would dry up and die in the same way that the outer parts of a tree merge into the bark. These outer forms are destined to gradually wither away, no matter how fruitful the impulse is. However, just as the farmer retains something, something of the spiritual impulses must remain, flowing as it were through underground channels and then reappearing with original strength as a fertilizing influence in the development of mankind. Then personalities appear to us in whom such an impulse, perhaps going through centuries, is embodied. Such personalities appear to us in strong contrast to the environment; they must indeed stand in contrast because the environment is what is withering away. Such personalities are often inclined not to take the environment into account at all. From a spiritual point of view, Tolstoy is such a personality in whom the Christian impulse has been kindled for our time. And things are happening powerfully in the world so that they can achieve far-reaching effects. If we seek them out at their source, they appear radically; for they must radiate. And we will no longer be surprised when we know such a law that such personalities appear to us in this one-sidedness, and on the other hand, not be surprised at personalities who cannot have anything at all in them of these central currents, who are completely within the peripheral effects of the world. One such personality is Carnegie. He can see the whole picture and think out the best way to find one's way in it. Carnegie does not see what is pulsating through humanity as the spiritual. Tolstoy, because he seeks inner certainty so strongly, can seek the kingdom of God within, but because that which has spread as a real current under the surface is embodied in him, he can, to a certain extent, have no heart or mind for what is happening around him as it dies away. And so we see such contradictions that cannot come together. We have an external material aspect, and the observer, who is important to us, does not see the spiritual that prevails in it; we have the spiritual that wells up powerfully from the depths of a personality, and we cannot grasp how this can be realized in the external world. Humanity would increasingly come to such contradictions if another spiritual current did not also arise, a spiritual current that can look equally at underlying spiritual causes and at what these spiritual causes become in external reality. And if we follow theosophy from this point of view, it leads into the deepest depths of spiritual life; it does not seek this merely in such powerful impulses that do not organize themselves into ideas and facts, it seeks to get to know this spiritual life in concreteness. Thus it can see how the spiritual flows into reality; it is able to build the bridge between the most spiritual and the most material, and in this way can bring these points of view together in a higher balance. — We shall see another example of this coming together tomorrow.

Today we want to present such contrasts in two personalities and learn to understand them from the point of view of spiritual life. Thus, Theosophy appears to be called upon not only to preach tolerance in an external way, but to find that inner tolerance that looks with admiration into a soul that gives great impulses from the center of life, which today must seem improbable, impossible, and radical because it contains in a concentrated way what must be spread out over a whole area in the future, and what must then look quite different.

Theosophy can see this; it can also look at reality objectively and do justice to another personality like Carnegie. Life is not a monotonous phenomenon, life is a many-voiced phenomenon, and it is only through the expression of all contrasts that it can develop in its richness. But it would be bad if these did not find their harmonious balance. Man's nature will tend to crystallize one or other of the contradictions, and so it must be, but in order that people may not lose their way in human life, there must also be a central world-view that can, in a sense, identify with all contradictions and thereby gain understanding for what appears to be so contradictory.

If Theosophy works in this sense, harmonizing souls in their contradictions, then it will be able to truly establish what external harmony in the world should be. External harmony can only be the reflection of the inner harmony of the soul. If Theosophy can achieve this – and that is its real goal in relation to cultural life – then it will find the proof it seeks. It does not want theoretical proofs, it does not want to be called crazy; it wants to establish what it has to say, to introduce it into life, and then to see how life becomes harmonious and blissful as a result, as what it has to say becomes established in life as guiding principles. When Theosophy can see in life how what it incorporates is reflected back to it and how it makes life appear in such a way that it becomes harmoniously balanced within despite the contradictions, then it sees this as the proof of its principles, its true evidence.