The Human Being as a Spirit and Soul Being

GA 71b — 8 November 1918, Basel

Moral, Social, and Religious Life in Light of a Supernatural Worldview

Moritz Benedikt, the criminal anthropologist and well-known physiologist, found that the posterior cerebral lobe of criminals is relatively small, as in higher apes; he established atavism in this case. In this way, crime is attributed entirely to the physical constitution. Even the soul life is controlled quite mechanically by modern school psychology, the speed of absorption of sensory impressions, strength of memory and so on. The human being is treated like a machine. This has been happening increasingly for 50 years. Even social life should be shaped in this way, as it is through the sentence [...]: Act so that your motive can become the norm for all people. It's like saying, “Wear a skirt that fits all people.” It is Kant's categorical imperative. But even if one achieves excellence in the natural sciences, it does not follow that one could (transfer their results) to the moral field. So it is with Oscar Hertwig, who so brilliantly refuted Darwinism; in the social field, he has not only produced inadequate but also harmful results.

Spiritual knowledge is necessary to gain insight into the possibility and essence of human freedom; knowledge of what man's true nature is leads to love of the human being and is the only basis for true morality and social life of the future, based on brotherhood. Generalized morality, as we have it now, leads to the opposite of what is desired, as current events prove; moral preaching is like telling the stove: get warm without heating.

Thinking, feeling and willing find their correlate in the nervous system, in breathing and rhythm, for example in the blood circulation for digestion or metabolism, for reproduction. The nervous system is degenerative, leads to death, just as thinking in waking consciousness always destroys something. It must merge with imagination if it is to become viable. Volition, the metabolism, leads to life, to being born, when it is connected with intuition. The essence of intuition is love. Feeling in the middle then maintains the balance so that the pendulum does not swing in one direction or the other.

New religions no longer arise since the synthesis in the Christianity of all religions. Anthroposophy should not be confused with all kinds of obscurantism, but is common knowledge and should become more and more so, even if it is currently being rejected. From it will be born a realistic, benevolent socialism, in which all is salvation. Because people today are asleep, it has been possible for a few people to bring about these catastrophic events.