The Task of Anthroposophy in the Context of Science and Life

GA 77a — 28 July 1921, Darmstadt

3. The Spiritual Signature of the Present

Dear attendees, dear fellow students! Anthroposophy can be a matter that the individual deals with in his or her own little room, so to speak, as something that touches the most intimate questions of the heart and soul, something from which one can gain the conviction that it is connected with what binds the individual, in that he experiences himself in his full individuality and personality, to the eternal, to the divine. I spoke more from this point of view yesterday. Today I would like to speak to you about the other point of view, from which anthroposophical spiritual science can be a matter of our present age. This age, which has thrown a huge number of questions to the surface from the depths of human development, and which now not only concern the individual in his quiet chamber, but which are a common, a, if one may say so, thoroughly social affair of the whole of humanity.

If we wish to examine anthroposophical striving from this point of view, then we must first give some points of view about what I would call “the signature of our time”, which particularly characterizes certain forces and currents, certain aspirations in our time. Naturally I shall not have the opportunity to characterize the details of our age, but I would like to present the main lines of those aspirations and currents, which are of course well known in the widest circles, although unfortunately their full weight is all too rarely appreciated. These lines show how the individual moves, so to speak, in our age, without particular consideration being given to the individual.

Perhaps some people found it strange, even paradoxical, when I said something yesterday that actually contradicts a great deal of what has emerged in recent human history where worldviews are intended to be shaped. I have uttered the sentence that man, when he grows up in the scientific consciousness, which has long since become the general consciousness of mankind and which has also been incorporated into certain religious views, acquires a concept of being, a feeling of the existence of himself, which he can no longer hold on to when he looks back on his own thinking in his self-reflection. I have said that man can arrive at the proposition, “I think, therefore I am not”, only through the consciousness of time — and by that I mean the consciousness of the last three to four centuries. Man cannot apply the concept of existence, which he needs to justify his scientific view of the world, to what he opens up in his thinking, especially in his intellectual life. And perhaps in the striving for a world view that began with Descartes and has infected almost all of the world view striving of modern times, one must see in the sentence “I think, therefore I am” more of a kind of rescue attempt, a search for some kind of fixed point within oneself. One must grasp the emergence of this sentence “I think, therefore I am” psychologically, one could say. And psychology could tell us: philosophers and those who follow them occupy themselves with this sentence, believe in this sentence, because it offers them a certain illusory help against sinking into non-being, [which overtakes one] when one looks into one's own inner self and has been educated in the external scientific world view for one's existence. It might even seem paradoxical to anthroposophists when this sentence is spoken by someone who, with his Philosophy of Freedom, published in the early 1890s, sought to counter the dominant philosophy of the time. In my Philosophy of Freedom, I started out from pure thinking. It might therefore appear that what was said in the past about pure thinking, by means of which the general forces of the world are grasped as if by the corner of their cloak, should today be condemned. But that is not the case. And precisely because, starting from pure thinking, one rediscovers the being of the soul, precisely for this reason, in the sense of a matter of the times, it is for anthroposophical spiritual science. But one will only arrive at an understanding of what has just been said if, in the sense I have indicated, one familiarizes oneself a little with the signature of our time, with the most important characteristic properties of this our time.

And such a property, one can say, sheds light on all the others, and follows precisely from the way in which humanity of our age approaches scientific conviction, in which one has become accustomed to in the last few centuries. My dear audience, today man is so proud to say that he has cast off the belief in authority of the past centuries, as prescribed by the religious authorities. Man today is so proud to say that he only believes in what he can grasp in his own personal being. And yet, to the discerning, it seems as if the old authoritarian belief of the confessional religions has merely jumped to another area, and this area is precisely what is called “science” in the abstract, with a great deal of vagueness but with all the more conviction. Science. — As soon as a modern man hears the word “science,” everything within him that once went in quite different directions because of the old belief in authority is stirred. Nowadays, for reasons that people in wider circles do not really understand, anything that is said to be scientifically established is an authority of much greater power than any authority ever was. How often do we hear the answer to something that arises as a question from within the human mind: “Science says this or that.” This general power, science, has taken all authority for itself today. It has taken this authority from those people who consider themselves to be at the height of their time, including with regard to questions of world view.

But what is the relationship of today's humanity to scientific authority? It has become the case that what is scientifically recognized is what everyone is believed to understand, given the way they have developed up to a certain point according to ordinary human education, the usual human education. Science should, in principle, establish nothing but what every human being, given the necessary preconditions, can affirm. Science should be something very general. Science should live in every human being in the same way. For one knows how it is received by those who, above all, cling to the authority of science when a single personality somewhere rebels against this general validity of scientific judgment. So that one could say: The ideal of a scientific world view is that it provides a set of judgments about world and human affairs that apply equally to every human being with complete uniformity. One might say that a gigantic uniformity is the ideal of this scientific conviction.

When one expresses something like this, it might at first seem trivial. In life, however, this triviality means an extraordinary amount. For with the great influence that science, especially in so far as it is based on natural scientific foundations, has gained in our time – and as I explained yesterday, rightly so in certain areas – one must assume that, where science increasingly uniforms people, it increasingly becomes the case that one person becomes just a copy of another. And indeed, if we do not take science in terms of its content, but rather in terms of what it has achieved in the most recent period of human development, we see how this uniformity, based on scientific conviction, seeks to be made a general human affair. One need only look at the terrible, destructive forces that are raging in the east of Europe today – forces whose significance here, unfortunately, is still not sufficiently appreciated in terms of their destructive power – to see how, after all, the people who today devote themselves to such forces of destruction with a certain fanaticism, actually started out from the assumption that certain teachings, which come from scientific foundations, or perhaps it would be better to say a certain state of mind that comes from these scientific foundations, should also be made the basis of social thinking. And what is striven for by this transfer of the scientific state of mind into social thinking, that great prison of humanity, where one man is supposed to be just a copy of another in the social sphere as well, as for example in Leninism or Trotskyism, there it is taken to the point of paradox, but indeed to the point of the most tragic paradox. Everywhere one looks – and I have only pointed to an extreme, a radical case – one sees, one could say, how the scientific state of mind seeks to achieve this levelling of humanity, as if it were flowing out in the developmental tendencies of our time. This is basically one of the main forces that can be found in the signature of current human development: this levelling from the perspective of theory, of thinking, of research. This is not to say anything against the justification of this research, as can be seen from my remarks yesterday. For on the ground of natural science this research is fully justified, and it has led science and technology to the great, fully justified triumphs, which I do not need to describe here.

However, this one pole of modern human development is juxtaposed with another one that is no less characteristic of the present spirituality of humanity. To the same extent that humanity strives towards this levelling out through intellect and intellectual observation of nature, to the same extent does the individual and the personal take revenge on human nature; polarities arise everywhere in the world, and here too there is an inner polarity. And we see how, in contrast to the levelling out just described, the instinctive forces of human nature come to the fore. One is tempted to say that the impulses of the will emerge from the individuality of the human being with instinctive force, right down to the animal level. While people strive towards a certain leveling with their heads, the most personal element in the human being asserts itself everywhere, that which distinguishes the individual human being from every other human being to the greatest extent. So that at the moment when we disregard the thoughts that people might have about the world in the indicated scientific sense, and move on to what people feel, what people recognize as the basis, as the impulse of their will, we can see how people completely miss each other, how the individual no longer has any kind of understanding for the other. Only in the narrowest circles is there still an understanding, often artificially cultivated, from one person to another. People do not understand each other today. We talk so much about social ideals, about artificial institutions that are supposed to bring about a social life, and this is mainly for the reason of deceiving ourselves about the elementary fact that we have actually become terribly anti-social in our instinct, in our development of will and feeling. An anti-social element runs through humanity as soon as one disregards the life of thought and looks at what actually lives in the depths of the emotional life and in the depths of the impulses of the will. This is the great controversy of our time, in which humanity is embroiled: on the one hand, it seeks to level the mind and, on the other, it develops a differentiation from the very depths of the human organization that has an incredibly anti-social effect.

This is basically the situation in which man finds himself. And from this question, which is one of the most important components in the signature of contemporary intellectual life, basically all other questions arise; basically, that is what has developed into such a terrible catastrophe in the second decade of the 20th century.

If you follow the judgments floating on the surface, how nations and people judge each other, how they assign guilt and innocence to each other, how they talk about what they want to recognize as right or wrong, then you have only a surface view of everything that is said on the surface. In the depths below, the antagonism and polarities of which I have just spoken rage.

In a certain sense, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is juxtaposed to this. It wants to become a matter for the whole human being, for the fully human being, and wants to take hold of his feelings and will. On the one hand, as I explained yesterday, it draws from sources of knowledge that learn to look into the human interior. It draws from certain abilities that can be developed beyond the everyday through the method I mentioned yesterday. From these latent powers of knowledge, dormant in ordinary life and in ordinary science, it draws out something that looks down into human nature, into those regions that are covered in ordinary life by the so necessary power of remembrance, by memory, just as the space behind a mirror is covered by the mirror. If we break through what our memory power faces, as I suggested yesterday, and develop powers of supersensible insight, then we will indeed, as I indicated yesterday, first of all gain insight into the human organs themselves in their vitality. We arrive at the point where a living medicine must search, where a living anthropology must search. But we then go beyond what we find in the present human being as the spiritual-material, to the prenatal human being, or rather to the human being as he was in the spiritual world before he entered this earthly life through conception. We arrive at a real expansion of those powers of the human soul life that would otherwise - filling the period of time that lies between a few years after our birth and our present moment - only extend to this life within our earthly existence. By breaking through memory, we attain a higher soul power, a higher power of knowledge; we attain the ability to behold the spiritual-soul essence of the human being as it was before the human being was conceived for this earthly life. And from there the current then flows, which is so difficult for today's man to think about: the current of penetrating from self-knowledge to world knowledge.

I know very well, my esteemed audience, how much paradox is found in what I have described of world knowledge in my “Occult Science”. But anyone who can find their way into this growth of a supersensible power of knowledge, into this — I would rather not use the expression at all because it is so often misused today — into this true, genuine clairvoyance, will find how what is otherwise only given for a small span of time in the ability to remember expands, how it expands into a power of knowledge of the world.

What is presented here – of course, people always say that it should be proven. But those who constantly speak of proving at every opportunity have never familiarized themselves with the nature of proving itself. Only what is at least suspected as a fact can be proven. All other so-called proving is a dialectical playing with concepts, a piling up of concept upon concept. And humanity only succumbs to great illusions when it comes to this kind of proof, which is so often demanded; this is not to object to justified proof, of course. The anthroposophical researcher simply has to point out what arises when the cognitive faculty is expanded in the way indicated. And I would like to suggest what happens in the following way.

If we look at our ordinary, earthly memory, we can say that this memory, together with all the experiences we have gone through from a certain point in our earthly existence, forms us. These experiences are initially mostly in the subconscious of the human organization at the present moment. We either bring them up voluntarily or they drift up into consciousness by their own power. Memories emerge from the stream of experiences we have gone through. And the possibility of remembering must be continuous in order for our soul life, our soul condition, to be a healthy one. We as human beings, by having this possibility of remembering, not only stand within ourselves, but we are also connected with everything with which we are connected through experiences in the outer life. Through our healthy reflection, we can already find out the difference between the image that emerges today as an after-experience in our memory, and that intense, saturated experience that was once there, that lives in our memory, the memory of which has remained with us from what had united us with the world. When we had an experience, we were involved in it as human beings; we were connected to the objects; the objects poured their essence into our personality. Everything that was experienced intensely, that we went through with the outside world, with nature or with other people, was transformed into images, and from these images we conjure up the experience again. Why can we conjure up what we have experienced in the present? Because we were once connected to it as human beings, because we were one with the outside world during the experience.

If you take a look at what anthroposophical spiritual science has achieved in the most diverse fields of knowledge, you will realize how, in everyday life, we only ever see part of what we are. We must indeed expand our powers of knowledge if we want to look down into our own inner being. Take just what I have already said: that when we break through our ordinary powers of remembrance, we first look down into the living context of our organization, and then, through the organization, we look beyond into the forces within which we lived in a purely spiritual and soul existence before our earthly existence. Man's entire being is connected with the entire existence of the world. And just as he, as a human being, who is enclosed between birth and death, is only connected with what he has enjoyed or experienced together with the world in the characterized way, so he is connected with the entire human development of the earth and also with the development of the earth itself, through what one then discovers through further research within oneself. It is nothing less than an overcoming, a breaking through of memory, and a re-emergence of memory power on a higher level. By overcoming the power of memory on a small scale, which preserves our earthly experiences, we arrive at a higher level of a new power of memory, through which we can develop images of the destinies that the earth itself has gone through in other planetary forms, as I have described in my “Occult Science”. And just as we conjure up in pictorial form what we have experienced since our birth through our everyday memory, so, if we get to know the whole human being through spiritual science, we can conjure up what the whole human organization has been through, what it was connected with: the entire development of the world. For the human being is a microcosm. We are not dealing with a different world from the one with which we ourselves were connected. This is what I have shown in my “Occult Science”.

Thus we see, my dear audience, how anthroposophical spiritual science becomes an expansion of human consciousness. We see how, by descending into the depths of the human being, we simultaneously ascend into the objective evolution of the world. To the same extent that we momentarily renounce the ordinary inner life, we enter into this inner life that would otherwise have remained the objective outer life. In the same moment that one submerges into the regions that are otherwise withdrawn from consciousness, one emerges into those regions that have formed us as objective beings, as human beings, out of the entire cosmos. This is the only way that the world knowledge that anthroposophical spiritual science seeks to provide can come about.

In view of the present situation, as I have characterized it, the objection of the modern human being to such world knowledge is: Yes, but there one enters a region in which subjectivity can assert itself in any arbitrary way. And it is always pointed out with a certain sense of well-being, one might say, by certain people that the most diverse spiritual researchers who were already there have given account in the most diverse ways of what they have seen in the universe. However, this diversity is mainly emphasized by those who have not really dealt with what is said by the most diverse spiritual researchers in an intimate way. Just as it seems understandable that a tree looks different when photographed from different sides – and that an overall picture of the tree is actually only formed in an external way when the tree is photographed from four or six sides, and these photographs are then viewed together – it should also be quite understandable that a person who applies the spiritual-scientific method to his own soul life naturally starts from his subjective point of view, but that as he advances in his research, the point of view from which he stands will surely become apparent. And just as photographing a tree from a certain side is objectively [correct], so too can the description of a spiritual scientist be objectively [correct] - even though it reads differently from that of another who has started from a different point of view. It will be noted, however, that the Anthroposophical spiritual science, which I have to represent, always endeavors to characterize that which is characterized from the most diverse sides, and that in this way it is to be compensated in a certain way for what can become one-sided through the description of only one point of view, which can occur when someone takes my books and compares them with each other in an abstract way and then says: Yes, this is what it says about one thing and that is what it says about another. This can easily be taken out of context and made to look like contradictions. But this arises from nothing other than the effort to describe things from the most diverse points of view, so that precisely through these particular turns of phrase in anthroposophical spiritual science a kind of comprehensiveness can be achieved.

Those who become thoroughly acquainted with what is sought and found on the inner path will be able to realize more and more clearly how an inner capacity develops there that is actually similar to what man has in the mathematical state of mind. It is the same in mathematics, where we have something that gives us a certain soul content that is derived entirely from the inner being. For mathematics is derived entirely from the inner being; we know that a mathematical truth is true when we have grasped it inwardly, even if millions of people say otherwise. What takes place in the soul when we know how to grasp a mathematical truth, which is both inward and outward at the same time, takes place in a similar way when we come to the inwardly objective through the subjective, which can really be present to us in anthroposophical spiritual science. Only the beginning of the research path is subjective, but the true anthroposophist remains silent about this. What then arises after the subjective idiosyncrasies of the researcher have been overcome is thoroughly objective, and one can speak of it as of an external observation made through the senses or also through the scales or with the measuring rod; just as one can speak of mathematical findings, only that these are formal, while the findings made through spiritual science are substantive.

This shows, however, that this anthroposophical spiritual science is above all concerned with speaking directly to the human being. That is also its task. While present-day science strives for standardization, in a sense strives to make one human being an imitation of another, anthroposophical spiritual science cannot but speak to each human being as to an individuality. This, I might say, is the direct social trust that one acquires in working for this anthroposophical spiritual science, that one does not want to put forward something that, because one has researched it, should now apply to all people, but through which one only wants to appeal to people by saying: one has researched the content of anthroposophical spiritual science oneself. But this content is the true content of human nature. When I speak to individuals, I do so in such a way that I do not speak to them in a generalizing way, but address each one as an individuality. I count on the fact that, because man is man, because human beings have the same soul, spirit and body, related strings will resonate, and what is struck by one person will come back from the innermost being in an individual way. One does not speak to people through anthroposophy as one otherwise does in science, as if one were seeking followers for something that has now been established. Rather, one speaks through anthroposophy in such a way that you appeal to the inner being of each individual and say: If you look into your own inner being, you will discover in this way in your own being that which I want to communicate to you because I have researched it. The way of speaking from person to person about spiritual science, all kinds of teaching, takes on a different tone, a different attitude, by wrapping the messages in formulas of anthroposophical spiritual science. This is what is effective in anthroposophical spiritual science against the signature of our time, as I have described it: that which, in turn, appeals from thinking, but from thinking from the fully human being, appeals at the same time to every single human being. The opposite of this is what is striven for in levelling. The individualization of the human being through knowledge and the development of the content of a worldview is striven for. This content of anthroposophical spiritual science is intended to be the most subjective and at the same time the most objective, the most personal and at the same time the most generally valid content of human scientific endeavor. Contemporary humanity needs this contrast to levelling. What I have described to you, which is basically an anti-social element, because it asserts itself as the opposite pole, arises from this leveling: the lack of understanding of one human being towards another. From anthroposophical spiritual science, loving understanding of one person towards another should arise; and above all, not only a general knowledge of human nature, a general anthroposophy, will come, but through what this general anthroposophy and world knowledge will be, a state of mind will be stimulated that in turn also includes loving understanding for every single peculiarity of our fellow human being.

A social life cannot be founded if it is not founded on the deepest, most sacred roots of human existence itself; but for the present phase of human development, these are the individual roots, as I indicated yesterday. Therefore, spiritual science will essentially give this other slant to the spiritual signature of the present time, which we need so urgently.

This means, however, that the other pole, which had to be characterized with reference to the signature of the present, will also take on a different character. In practical life, something will happen that is not an anti-social element, but a social element. This anti-social element, where does it actually come from? It comes from the fact that, precisely because head culture has reached a high point, the instincts of human nature prevail and take hold of feeling and will. What anthroposophical knowledge is shines into feeling and into will; it does not blunt the elemental power of feeling and will, as people so easily believe; it does not take away people's original naivety. No, when anything beautiful is illuminated, it does not lose its peculiarity, but it comes out even more. That which lies in the depths of human nature does not become duller when it is illuminated anthroposophically, but it is unfolded in just the right way, without the person having to suffer from today's disease, nervousness. Thought, in turn, shines into feeling; feeling takes hold of it, and by shining into feeling with thought, the “I think, therefore I am not”, the “I am only in the picture by thinking” — thinking is transformed into being. And only by immersing ourselves in the realm of the will, which is otherwise only experienced in sleep — for in ordinary cognition, what does man know of the relationship that exists between a thought that is to lead to the will and the raising of the hand? By means of this thinking, which delves spiritually into this volition, there develops what might be called the path leading from one human being to another in the clear light of spiritual knowledge. Humanity can only become a social whole if feelings and volitional impulses are illuminated, not by abstract, intellectualistic knowledge, but by higher vision. And it is through this infusion of higher vision that a true social science, a social ethics, will arise. It is precisely such a social ethics that my book The Philosophy of Freedom seeks to provide. There I showed that man can only feel free if he develops an impulse for action, for willing, out of purest thinking. Man could never feel free if he had to draw impulses of the will from any other basis. If we stand before a mirror and merely have an image before us – the comparison is more than a mere comparison – then this image cannot force us. If something pushes me, then I am forced by causality. If I look at the image, I cannot be forced; the image has no power in itself to force me. If I grasp my volitional impulses in the pure pictorial thought, then these pictorial thoughts have no causal power, no momentum. By recognizing the pictorial quality of thinking, one recognizes how, in pure thinking, free will is truly absorbed, so that the impulses for free action can only be found in the most individual part of the human being. But it is precisely through the will entering into this pure thinking, which is initially an image for us, and the will entering in, as is the case with loving social action or with higher supersensible knowledge, as you can see in the explanations in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, that otherwise pure thinking is filled with what is man's very own eternal being. And the first clairvoyance, ladies and gentlemen, is already there when a free decision of the will flashes through the mind. And basically all that I then give as a method for ascending to the highest spiritual worlds is nothing other than a metamorphosed formulation of what I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom as underlying free will. When one recognizes how, in this pure thinking permeated by the will, there is something in which man can grasp world events as if at a corner, then one also gradually learns to see how one can expand this state of mind, which otherwise only exists in the free action of man, in the way described yesterday, and how one can thereby come to supersensible knowledge. If man wants to know himself as a free being, he must begin with this true supersensible vision, otherwise freedom will always be something impossible for him. Freedom is also irreconcilable with natural causality — not even for a Kantian or for someone who at least claims to be one. And there is no other way to harmonize natural causality and human freedom than to see things as I have just described.

But then something else is established. What I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom as the basis of social will has been much, much misunderstood. People have objected: How are people supposed to work together in the social organism if everyone only follows the inner impulses of their individual being? — But that is not the point at all. The point is that through a real, genuine, true spiritual development of the human being, what I would call real social trust can be cultivated. A dignified existence in social life is only possible if we are not forced to act from the outside by commandments or other means, but if we are free to act from the innermost urge of our being. But then we must be able to develop this great trust in the other person, the trust that he will gradually come to act from the innermost urge of his human nature as well. And as man progresses to the innermost part of his nature and gradually such an understanding develops from one to the other, a social ethic, a social organism, will be able to arise out of the individual shaping of the individual will through full mutual trust. - So what conscious trust is depends on what, in the sense of man's striving today, can only be seen as social will.

One can best see how anthroposophical spiritual science relates to the current signature of spiritual life by looking at what has gradually become of the religious conception of humanity from the underground movements that I have just characterized. Spiritual science is repeatedly attacked from this very quarter, with the accusation that spiritual science seeks to enter the supersensible worlds through knowledge, but that precisely in this, it is said, the essence of religious life consists: that one does not know that in which one has trust as a divine world order, that one therefore has a merely subjective trust. So, according to this, the essence of religion would consist precisely in developing a mere belief in it, and in excluding the certainty of knowledge. But my dear audience, this certainty of faith, which is identical with what we might call trust, cannot be established in the religious life by anyone who honestly reflects on these matters, except through what follows from a truly supersensible knowledge. A historical consideration could teach humanity this. Where do today's people, who rebel against anthroposophy in the manner indicated, take their religious trust from? Is it something truly elementary? That is a mere illusion. It is the remnants of the historical religions. They are the remnants of what has developed in history as the historical religions. In the sense of anthroposophical spiritual science, these religions have their full justification, and their ultimate height, through which the development of the earth has received its true meaning, has received its highest height in Christianity. Christianity contains what can be regarded as the original religion, the last form of religion to which humanity has been able to ascend, and which must continue to be the one for the rest of humanity's time. Anthroposophical spiritual science not only does not touch Christianity, but it is the first to establish it in a deeper sense. But on the other hand, it must be said: where did religions get their content from? They got it — this can be historically proven — from spiritual visions, albeit from ancient instinctive spiritual visions. Religions have acquired their supersensible content from ancient instinctive visions in no other way than that which spiritual science in anthroposophical orientation now seeks to show scientifically. This content has been handed down and is to be found in scripture and tradition. Religions would have no content if there had not once been instinctive supersensible visions of human beings. From this, and from many other things, it can be seen how wrong it is to say that the anthroposophical side should not point the way to the supersensible worlds, for the supersensible worlds must be preserved for the religions precisely as the distant unknown, to which one cannot come through knowledge, but only through naive trust and belief. The value of religions will reveal itself when it is illuminated by the light of knowledge. Those who believe that the greatness and significance of Christianity could be affected by any kind of spiritual-scientific discovery are fundamentally weak Christians. In my opinion, those who believe that one should not approach Christianity with any kind of science because it could suffer from it are weak Christians. Just as there is nothing about America in the Gospels, but America must be accepted as a reality, so must the repeated lives on earth be accepted, even though the Gospels say nothing about them.

This is what makes anthroposophy a matter of time, out of a certain state of mind. I have presented this in my “Riddles of Philosophy”, where I have shown how the individual philosophical views up to the present day tend to converge into the anthroposophical view. So that in fact from the signature of the spiritual present one can read how one can ascend to the anthroposophical worldview.

I would now like to sketch this signature of the spiritual present for you with a few strokes, from anthroposophy itself, so that you can see that the one who stands on the ground of anthroposophy does not shy away from to communicate the results of his research, which he has explored along the path I have described to you, and which are as certain to him as the results of astronomy, physiology, biology, and botany.

If we look back over a relatively short span of human development with an anthroposophically sharpened eye, we find, for example, that we cannot understand Greek culture. In the previous lecture, Dr. Heyer pointed out how human consciousness has changed in the course of historical development. In order to substantiate this purely empirically, we need only look at the special nature of the Greek consciousness. Herman Grimm, who, although challenged in many respects, had retained the keen eye of a historical observer for such things, pointed out our relationship to the Greeks with the following sharp words. He said: What the Romans have experienced, how a Caesar, a Brutus has lived, that we can understand. Our elements of consciousness have not changed so much since then that we could not understand that. What is told to us by Alcibiades, by Pericles, by Plato, by Sophocles, people only imagine they understand if they remain on the standpoint of today's understanding of humanity. The figures of Pericles and Alcibiades, who only emerge shadow-like before the ordinary ideas of humanity, are actually like fairy-tale heroes. Herman Grimm sees fairy-tale figures throughout Greek history. Spiritual science is called upon to bring about what can expand consciousness, so that one can truly change one's inner soul state, so that one can in turn stand within this particular inner experience of the Greeks. And here we must say: this experience of the Greeks was based on a historical law, the full extent of which is only now being recognized by anthroposophical spiritual science. It is the law that I will now characterize in the following way.

The further we go back in human development, to Greek, Egyptian, Persian and Indian cultures and prehistoric times, the more we find that the entire human constitution is actually different. We see today that in childhood life develops in such a way that the soul life is bound to a high degree to the bodily organization. Take my little book The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy or other things I have said about education, and you will see how, with the change of teeth in the seventh or eighth year, the whole soul constitution of the child changes. And from ordinary life we know how the whole soul constitution of a human being changes when he reaches sexual maturity. It is less noticeable that similar changes take place at the beginning and the end of the twenties; these take place more inwardly, but they are quite clearly still present even for the modern human being. When we come to the later years, to the thirties, the soul and spiritual life of the human being becomes highly independent of the physical. We enter a stage of our development in which we change our soul through external experience, through being with the world. We no longer change our soul through what happens in us in such a way as the change of teeth, sexual maturity, or the changes after the age of twenty. But what extends in us more during the youthful years until the end of the twenties, in ancient times extended up to the high age of man. This law is a historical law. This can be observed by those who have acquired the ability to observe the inner soul life, which shows us, in the remnants that still occur today in old people, that such a development was once present. If we know this, then we can look back, for example, to the ancient Indian times, to times that lead into prehistory, where man's soul and spiritual life was dependent on physical development up to the fifties. One became a patriarch at the same time through physical development and in spiritual development, just as today one becomes a sexually mature person both physically and spiritually. This harmony of the physical with the soul-spiritual went up into old age in ancient times. In those ancient times, man also experienced the descending line of physical development, which begins around the age of 35. Until then, our organism grows and sprouts; from then on, it goes downhill, from then on, there is a descending development. Today, we do not go through this descending development in the same way; we are certainly weighed down by old age, but that is different from what it was in ancient times. In ancient times, as the external physical body became stiffer and drier, there was a simultaneous bright illumination of spirituality, so that in the patriarchal age one grew into a certain spirituality through natural development. What was still present in older times for older ages was still present for the Greeks until their mid-thirties. What the Greeks still went through until about the age of 35, we as human beings in our thirties simply no longer go through and therefore no longer radiate it into our social lives. This brought into the whole social life of the Greeks what, for example, Goethe felt when he was driven by longing in Italy to relive Greek culture and where he said: But when I look at these Greek works of art and see how the Greeks, in creating their works of art, followed the same laws that Nature herself follows in creating her works of nature, then I feel necessity, then I feel God. The Greeks were only able to reproduce the laws of nature in their works of art by feeling themselves in the harmonization of the spiritual and mental and the physical and bodily, which occurs when a person reaches the middle of their life in full, physical development. They were only able to do this in their most excellent exemplars [...] because they were able to experience this themselves. From this organization of body and soul there arose the Greek way of artistic creation, the Greek way of religious feeling, and also the Greek way of thinking in medicine. That was the signature of the spiritual life in humanity, which simply arose from the fact that in the thirties what I have described was experienced. One could say: Just as the equilibrium of the balance-beam is experienced in the middle of the beam, so the Greeks experienced the equilibrium of human life in that they still grasped the interplay of soul and spirit into the middle of their thirties. We no longer grasp it. If I am to continue in the same vein, we only achieve physical development that still has an influence on the soul until the end of our twenties in today's age. As a result, in our later years, what arises from the depths of human nature and permeates the world view ceases. But this has also brought about the necessity that what no longer develops naturally in humanity after the age of 28 must be consciously achieved through anthroposophical spiritual education, that what used to arise from human nature itself must now actually be inwardly achieved by the soul. This has become the signature of our time: we only live within the physical realm in our younger years. This is what has now also, and in fact - now I may say it without being misunderstood - legitimately led into materialism. For the child, in looking at itself, must be materialistic, because spirituality first breaks away from matter. We have become materialistic as humanity in the newer centuries to the extent that we are bound to the age that is in the ascending material, organic development, and the less we still receive from nature in the descending development after the age of 35.

This is the signature of our time. It has led us into materialism, as we as humanity have abandoned ourselves to unconscious forces in the last few centuries.

What anthroposophical spiritual science wants is for us to receive from the spirit what nature no longer gives us, just as naively as we used to receive it from nature, to develop the courage to receive from the spiritual realm what we can no longer receive from the natural realm. The spiritual signature of our time points out to us the necessity of developing our full humanity, which we can no longer obtain from nature, out of spiritual, free will activity. This does not establish a decadence. No, decadence is established precisely by the fact that in a time that demands the spirit, one only wants to abandon oneself to nature. Materialism has emerged as a necessary phenomenon. Overcoming materialism must likewise occur as a necessary phenomenon. Anthroposophical spiritual science believes it can read this from the signs of the times, from the signature of the times. From this consciousness of the world and humanity, it wants to have an effect.

People who have delved a little deeper into the signature of our time and who have spoken out in recent times have basically only ever pointed out in a negative way what forces of decline are at work in our time and what must basically be the case if we consider the development of the human race that we have just characterized. There is no need to refer to Spengler, who is much referred to today, but one can refer to one of our best philosophers, Gideon Spicker, who wrote his work out of a broad-minded consciousness and who repeatedly pointed out how man in our time can no longer create the connecting bridge to that which, in full consciousness, gives him his true humanity, that which in turn connects him to the eternal, that which allows him to be permeated by the divine-eternal. And Gideon Spicker spoke words worth heeding in 1909, in which he described the signature of our time in his own way. He said: We have come to have metaphysics without supersensible conviction; a theory of knowledge without objective meaning; a logic without content, a psychology without soul, an ethic without commitment and a religion without reason. —

Now, my dear attendees, dear fellow students. Anthroposophy wants to give people a theory of knowledge again that leads to reality, because reality is both material and spiritual. Anthroposophical spiritual science wants to give people a real conviction of the supersensible world by showing the way to see this world. Anthroposophical spiritual science wants to establish a logic that in turn delves into the reality of things. Anthroposophical spiritual science wants to speak of a soul life as reality, not just of the soul life that we interpret pictorially from the scientific results of anthropology. Anthroposophical spiritual science aims to create a binding social ethic from the foundations of humanity. And anthroposophical spiritual science aims to provide a religious conviction that is based on knowledge, on the vision of that which must exist in religious life as the divine existence.

In this way, anthroposophical spiritual science aims to have an effect on the signature of our time, but not because it arises from some utopian sense or arbitrary decision, but because it appears necessary in the most essential sense for our age to those who are now able to observe the greatest need and deepest longing of our time.