Anthroposophical Spiritual Science and the Big Questions of Contemporary Civilization

GA 80c — 20 February 1921, Hilversum

2. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science and the Major Civilization Issues of the Present Day

Dear attendees,

Those who speak about a topic such as the one that is to be the subject of tonight's evening reflection must be seriously aware that there are numerous human souls in the present who, both out of the currents of knowledge of the present and out of the practical social directions of this present, long for a re-creation of things, for a re-creation of the world view, souls that feel that in a certain respect, with the ideas, with the feelings and also with the will impulses that have come down to people from the last centuries and in which we have been educated, it is no longer easy to continue in spiritual and social life.

We, as humanity in the civilized world, have experienced, on the one hand, the great, the tremendous progress of the natural scientific worldview and, on the other hand, we have experienced the tremendous results of this natural scientific worldview in the field of technology, in the field of practical life, which we encounter at every turn, so to speak, from morning till night. But we have also been influenced by the tremendous scientific results, by the practical consequences of these scientific discoveries in social life. Today, people can – and this is the case in every field, if they allow themselves to be influenced by scientific knowledge in one form or another, through their usual reading, through everyday life, through everything that otherwise brings us together with existence, from morning to evening – they cannot help but ask the eternal questions of the human soul and spirit, the questions about the immortal essence of the human soul, about the meaning of the whole world, about the meaning of human action itself; he cannot help but ask these questions, the answers to which have been given to him earlier through religious beliefs. He cannot help but is still so devoted to religious creeds, when he absorbs modern education, than to think and feel about these questions, to consider what the impulses for his actions are, and to link them to what science has been saying for three to four centuries, which has not spoken to people of earlier centuries in this way. And this modern human being cannot do otherwise than, by standing inside of life that has become so complicated, the tone of which depends entirely on modern technology, by being harnessed to it through this modern technology, he cannot do otherwise than look at how his life is dependent on this technology. And he cannot help saying to himself: Fundamentally, people have become quite different from the old, simpler conditions throughout the whole civilized world. And he must then become fully aware of it, he must sense that in this social relationship, in relation to the coexistence of people with one another, many things must be resolved as a question.

Yes, we can even say the following in a certain respect; we can say: scientific knowledge compels us to reckon with it. The practical technical results that our modern life has brought about, they compel us to live with them. But neither of these actually answers the big questions of human existence; basically, they raise new questions. For anyone who delves with an unbiased mind into everything that science has to say in such a great and significant way about man, his organization, his form of life on earth, and so on, anyone who deals with all this, who really delves into these things, does not receive answers about the eternal nature of man, about the meaning of the world and existence; on the contrary, he receives deeper, more meaningful questions. And he must ask himself: Where now are the answers to these questions, which have become deeper and more urgent through the newer life? For from the side of knowledge, we have not actually received solutions to the great riddles of the world through the achievements of science, but rather new questions, new riddles.

And what about practical life? Well, we have been placed in this practical social life, with the means of our powerful, extensive industry, the means of our widespread world trade, and so on. But it is precisely this practical life that presents us with ethical, moral, spiritual questions about the way people interact with each other. And precisely the riddle that presents itself to us in the interaction between people is what is stirring minds today as a social question, and what often appears before people who think seriously and take life seriously in an alarming way. So it is also the practical side of life that presents man with a riddle.

These riddles, which approach the human soul from two sides, are now confronted by what the speaker calls “anthroposophically oriented spiritual science”. It seeks to find those sources of human nature, starting from the foundations of knowledge and then from the foundations of practical life, which can lead to at least a partial solution to this riddle; to that solution of these riddles that is possible for man, but also necessary; necessary because it is obvious to anyone who is unbiased that life continues in this way, when souls face the pressing questions in this way and become inwardly desolate, if new impulses for social life are not found from the depths of the human soul, we as humanity will go into decline and will not be able to rise in relation to the great civilizational issues of the present.

The goal of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is not directed against scientific knowledge. Anything that was directed against the scientific knowledge that has brought humanity so much good would be completely amateurish and doomed to superficiality. But precisely because anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is completely serious about what natural science has really achieved for modern humanity, that is precisely why it comes to different conclusions than those that are still being achieved today by scientific investigations or the like, which are carried out everywhere in ordinary life.

The same path is followed in the field of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, but it continues in a certain way. And I would like to use a comparison to illustrate and make clear how anthroposophical spiritual science relates to scientific research. I am certainly not using it immodestly to pin what anthroposophy has been able to achieve so far to a world-historical event and to try to explain it in a similar way. It is just a comparison, and I can certainly leave it to those who want to scoff to scoff at such a comparison. When Columbus set out across the ocean, it was by no means clear where he would end up. In those days, the problem of world trade, which Columbus then introduced into civilization, was either met either by ignoring the great unknown that lay across the ocean, or by remaining with what one already had as a home place; or one faced it in such a way that one ventured out onto the wide ocean, like Columbus and his men, but even then one did not yet hope that one would discover an America or the like. One only wanted to find another way to India, from the other side. One wanted to reach what was already known. In this way, I would like to say, as it was with Columbus, who wanted to reach something already known from the other side, but then found something completely different along the way, found something new, so it is with the spiritual scientist who seriously engages in scientific research. Usually, when people engage with scientific research at home, they stick to what they already have, to the observation of sensory phenomena and the rational combination of what the sensory phenomena present. Or, when one is armed with the instruments, the tools that serve observation, with the telescope, the microscope, the spectroscope, the X-ray machine, and then, armed with the conscientious, excellent method of thought of the newer sciences – when one ventures out with all of this into the sea of research, then on the other side one only wants to find something familiar, which is similar, but only similar to what one already has: atoms, molecules with complicated movements, a world, then, behind the curtain that is spread out as the sense world; a world that one describes as small movements, small bodies and the like, but which is basically similar to what one already has here and sees with one's eyes, touches with one's hands and the like. For that is what then underlies this supersensible world of the natural scientist.

But the person who, with the same seriousness, but only going further into this sea of research, sets out on this journey with anthroposophical spiritual science, comes to something else. He does not encounter the familiar atoms and molecules along the way, but by becoming aware of: What are you actually doing by investigating nature in the way that the more recent centuries have done? What happens in you during the research? What does your soul accomplish at the observatory, researching in the clinic? Your soul – as someone who combines a little introspection with what he is doing would say to himself – your soul works entirely spiritually, but it works by trying to explore the development of animals up to the human being, by trying to penetrate the course of the stars, in a way that people did not work in the past. But then, humanity did not always observe it that way. They did not always say to themselves: By exploring nature, it is the spirit, the soul, that is actually working in me, and I must recognize this spirit, this soul.

Dear attendees, what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science presents as its results has actually been gained through the path of natural science. It is won, as was found by Columbus as an unknown America. But that which is carried out, that which becomes conscious as spirit, as soul, in the truly searching mind, can then be further developed, further cultivated. In this way one attains a real knowledge of what spirit is in the human soul. And the methods of developing what I have just hinted at, what is thoroughly active in the human soul in the modern natural scientist, these methods of developing that, that is the task of the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science meant here. But a very specific starting point must be chosen for this spiritual science. One must start from what one could call “intellectual modesty”.

Indeed, one must have this intellectual modesty to such an extent that the comparison, which I will now use only as a comparison, is entirely justified. One must say to oneself: If, for example, you give a five-year-old child a volume of Shakespeare, what will the child do with it? He will tear it up or play with it in some other way. If the child has progressed in his development by ten to fifteen years, he will no longer tear up the volume of Shakespeare, but will do with it what is appropriate for the volume of Shakespeare. The child already had certain abilities in his soul as a five-year-old child, which could be brought out of this soul and developed, and through the development of these abilities the child has actually become a different person than he used to be. Is it possible for an adult human being – a person who has already achieved the usual development of everyday life and ordinary science – to summon up the intellectual humility to say to himself: when faced with the secrets of nature, I am basically in the same position as the five-year-old child in front of the volume of Shakespeare. There are still abilities in me that are hidden, that I can bring out, that I can develop and unfold from my soul, and I must further my soul life through self-education, then I will be able to face all of nature anew in a similar way to how the child, in relation to its five-year-old state, faces the Shakespeare volume when it has reached fifteen or twenty years of age. And I have to talk to you about the methods by which such powers, lying in every human soul, can be developed out of this human soul. For by developing these methods, we do indeed gain a completely new insight into nature and into human existence. These methods, the modern, seeking human soul senses in a certain way, but one does not get beyond these intuitions in the broadest circles until now.

You see, it is still the case that there are many people among us who say to themselves: When we look back to ancient times or when we look across to the Orient, for example, where the remains, albeit the decadent remains, of an ancient wisdom, there is still something of the knowledge, of that which is called science, at the same time takes on a religious character, where one can bring the human soul to a certain satisfaction about the world and one's own existence. And because one sees such, because also the outer anthropological science has brought up realizations of very deep nature over old human world views within our civilized life, therefore many people long back to those earlier soul conditions. They want to bring ancient wisdom back to life, and they want to spread what has been preserved of such ancient wisdom in the East to our Western world, according to the saying “Ex oriente lux”. Such people, who long for a knowledge that is not that of our age, do not understand the meaning of human development. For every age has its special tasks for humanity in relation to all areas of life. We cannot today fill our souls with the same treasures of wisdom that our ancestors filled theirs with centuries or millennia ago. But we can orient ourselves in a certain way to how they did it, these ancestors, and then we can seek a path in our own way into the supersensible. For the human soul does sense that in the depths of its being it is connected not with the natural world, to which the body is connected, but with a supersensible nature, to which the soul's eternal nature and the eternal destiny of this soul are connected.

Now, in earlier centuries or millennia, our ancestors had a very definite view of man's relationship to that world to which man belongs outside of birth and death. These were very definite ideas that filled the soul with deep feelings and emotions, which were linked to entering this path into the supersensible world, to supersensible knowledge. And there is one idea in particular that filled those who heard it resounding in all its depth from ancient times with shivers. It is the idea of the Guardian of the Threshold, of the threshold that one must cross if one wants to ascend from ordinary knowledge, which guides us in everyday life and in ordinary science, to the actual knowledge of the spirit and soul. People in ancient times sensed: There is an abyss between ordinary knowledge and that which actually provides insights into the nature of the soul. And it was a very real feeling for these people that something stood at this threshold, a being not of human kind, a being of spiritual kind, that guarded them from crossing this threshold before they were sufficiently prepared. The leaders of the old wisdom schools, which are also called mysteries, did not allow anyone to cross this threshold who had not first been properly prepared, namely through a certain discipline of will. We can understand why this was so by looking at a very simple example.

Today, we as human beings are quite proud of the fact that for centuries we have had a different external view of our planetary system and the rest of the starry world than the Middle Ages had, or than, in our view, ancient times had. We are proud of the Copernican worldview, and rightly so from a certain point of view. We say: We have the heliocentric world view in contrast to the geocentric world view of the Middle Ages and ancient times, when it was imagined that the Earth was at rest and that the Sun and the stars moved around the Earth. Today we know that the Earth orbits the Sun at a tremendous speed, and we then calculate from the observations that arise in connection with this what we then have as a world view of our solar or planetary system. And we look back to the Middle Ages and know that they had a world view that can be said to be childlike in a certain way in relation to this heliocentric system. But if we go further back, for example even to a few centuries before the birth of Christ, we find that in ancient Greece, for example with Aristarchus of Samos, a heliocentric world view was given; Plutarch tells us about it. This world view of Aristarchus of Samos does not differ at all in its main features from what everyone learns as the right thing in primary schools today. But in those days, Aristarchus of Samos only revealed it to a wider circle; otherwise it was only taught in the narrower circles of the mysteries. It was only brought to people who had first been prepared by the leaders of the wisdom schools. It was said: Man with his ordinary consciousness is not suited to receive such a world picture; between him and this world picture the threshold to the spiritual world must be erected; he must be guarded by the Guardian of the Threshold of the Threshold, from experiencing unprepared something like the heliocentric system or many other things that are known today by all educated people, but which were withheld from the ancients if they were not sufficiently prepared.

Why were people kept in the dark about these things back then? Well, our historical knowledge does not usually extend to the depths of human soul development. In this science of history, which is common practice today, people are not told how the souls of human beings have changed in their constitution over the course of centuries and millennia. In Greek and Roman times, and even in the early Middle Ages, people's souls were in a completely different state than they are today. People had a world consciousness, a world knowledge, that arose from their instincts, from very vague, half-dreamy states of soul. Today we cannot even begin to imagine this knowledge of the world. When we look at the works of that time that could be called scientific, we may think of them as we will. We may call them superstitious, and in terms of today's education we would be quite right to do so. But the peculiar character of these works was that people had never before looked at minerals, plants, and animals, at rivers and clouds, or watched the stars rise and set with such dryness and sobriety, and with such an emptiness of spirit. They perceived the spiritual soul in every stone, in every plant, in every animal, in the movement of the clouds, in all of nature. Man felt the spiritual soul within himself and what he felt within himself was also spread out for him in the outer world. He did not yet feel as separate from the outer world as man feels today. But his self-confidence was also weaker for that. And in the old days of human development, one could rightly say to oneself: If you told a person something of the nature of the heliocentric system, as it was communicated to the wise, as it were, if you told him that the Earth orbits through space at a tremendous speed, he would fall into a mental faint.

Yes, my dear attendees, this is an historical truth. It is just as much an historical truth as the historical truths we learn at school about Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian and the Persian Wars. But it is a truth that we usually do not learn, that the Greek soul was different from the human soul today. It was duller in relation to the powers of inner self-awareness. The wise leaders of the mysteries would have been right to fear that these souls, if led unprepared into supersensible knowledge, or even into the knowledge that is common to all educated people today, would have fallen into spiritual fainting. Therefore, it was said, the souls of men must first be made strong and courageous by a discipline of the will, so that they can endure when their self-consciousness is led into a very different world from the ordinary. And the souls must be made fearless in the face of the unknown into which they were to enter. Fearlessness in the face of the unknown, a courageous grasp of that which, according to the view of the ancients, literally causes one to lose the ground beneath one's feet — because when one is no longer standing on the resting earth, one the ground under your feet —, it was a courageous state of mind and fearlessness and many other qualities that prepared the students of the wisdom schools to cross the abyss into the spiritual, supersensible world.

And what did they learn then? They learned – and this is the surprising, the paradoxical – they learned what we [all] learn today in elementary school, what is considered to be an insight that is common to all educated people. This was what the ancients were actually afraid of, and they had to be courageously educated to it first. Thus, the human soul has developed over the centuries that it is now in a completely different state; that what could only be given to the ancients after difficult preparation is already given to us today in elementary school. Basically, we are well beyond the threshold that the ancients were only allowed to cross after long preparation. But we also have to bear the consequences of crossing this threshold. We stand before that which our ancestors feared, and for which they first had to train themselves to gain courage; but we have also lost something. What we have lost within our modern civilization is told to us, on the one hand, by those who, precisely as the serious researchers of our contemporary science, dwell on that which we cannot know. And why this is so, that must basically be explained to those who, from a serious spiritual science, confront such facts as I have just described to you.

Since the time of Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler, we have acquired a completely different self-awareness. We have progressed to abstract thinking. We develop intellectuality in such a strong way that the ancients did not develop it in their dull consciousness. That is why we have such a strong self-confidence that we can place ourselves in the world in which the ancients could only place themselves after preparation. But we enter this world, as shown by the most unbiased researchers, who speak of ignorabimus, of the limits of knowledge, and so on, by having a strongly developed self-confidence, a self-confidence that is strongly developed through thinking, through intellectuality, which the ancients did not have, but we lack the connection with the deeper reasons of the world in this strong self-confidence. We have acquired an insistence on ourselves, a strengthening of self-awareness; but knowledge of the world, we have lost that. We no longer gain such a connection from instinct as people could still achieve in the tenth or twelfth century. We must therefore speak of a new threshold into the spiritual world. We must in turn develop something through our increased self-awareness that will lead us into the spiritual, into the supersensible world, into which we cannot enter instinctively as the ancients [still] could. Just as the ancients developed self-awareness through self-discipline in order to endure in the world into which we come unprepared, we must prepare ourselves for something else. We must also prepare ourselves to develop the forces slumbering in our soul, which we become aware of through intellectual modesty.

You see, one starts from two well-known powers in the human soul, not from some obscure things or the like in the human soul. In serious spiritual science, one starts from two powers that are absolutely necessary in human life, but one develops them further. You say to yourself: they are only at the beginning of their development in ordinary life, you continue this development through your own work on yourself. One of the forces that is further developed in this way is what is called the human ability to remember. It is through this ability to remember that we are actually a self. It is through this ability to remember that we have ordinary self-awareness. We look back to a certain year in our childhood, and the experiences we have had emerge in memory images, more or less faded and shadowed, but they do emerge. And we know from ordinary medical literature – everyone can see for themselves that this is the case – we know what it means when an area of our lives is erased, when we cannot remember anything in the course of our lives. We are then mentally ill. Such an illness is one of the most severe mental illnesses. But this ability to remember, which is so necessary for ordinary life, is in this ordinary life quite bound to the body, to the body of the human being, as everyone feels. And those who are more materialistically minded point out how this dependence shows itself, how certain organs or organ members need only be injured, and the memory is also injured, interrupted, destroyed. But this faculty of remembrance can become the starting-point for developing out of him a new and higher soul power, and that happens in the way I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” in my “Occult Science” and in other writings. There I have shown how, through what I call meditation, what I call in the technical sense concentration on certain worlds of thought, of feeling, and of will impulses, the power of remembrance can be trained to something higher.

What is then the peculiarity of memory images? Otherwise we form our images and thoughts from the external world; they flit past like the external world flits past us. Through memory we constantly relive what we have experienced. Even years later we can still draw from the very depths what we have experienced. Through memory, images are constantly forming within us. We use this in meditation and in concentration when we want to become spiritual researchers. We form — or we let ourselves be advised by those who know about these things — easily comprehensible ideas; such ideas that cannot come from the subconscious, that cannot be reminiscences of life either, ideas that we can understand as precisely as we can understand mathematical or geometric ideas. Then we rest with our soul on these images. Training these methods is truly no easier than clinical research, research in a physics or chemistry institute or at the observatory. It is certainly an inner work of the soul, but it is a very serious work for this soul. It can take years, for some it can also take less time, depending on the inner destiny of the person, but it always takes some time until this repeatedly evoked resting on certain ideas can lead to something. Of course, the rest of life must not be disturbed by these exercises; one remains a reasonable, capable person, because these exercises only take up a short time. But they must be practised for a long time, then they will achieve what one might call a higher development of the power of recollection. We then become aware of something in our soul that lives like the thoughts of the experiences we have gone through. Only we know that what now lives in our soul does not refer to anything we have gone through in life since birth; but just as we otherwise have the images of such experiences, so we now have other images. I called them 'imaginations' in my writings. We have images as vivid as the memory images, but not linked to what we have gone through in our ordinary lives. Instead, we become aware that these imaginations do not relate to anything we have gone through in our ordinary lives, but to something outside of us, in the spiritual world.

And we learn to recognize what it means to live outside of the human body. With the ability to remember, we cling to our body. With this developed, trained ability to remember, we no longer cling to the body, and something occurs that we can call similar and yet quite different from the state that a person goes through from falling asleep to waking up. There he is usually unconscious, there is the consciousness extinguished, in this time from falling asleep to waking up, because man does not see with his eyes or hear with his ears. In this state one is when one uses the developed ability to remember. One does not perceive with eyes and ears, one does not even perceive the warmth in one's surroundings, but one does not live unconsciously as in sleep, but one lives in a world of perceptions, in a world of perceptions. One now perceives a spiritual world. It is really as if one were beginning to fall asleep, but not passing into the dullness of unconsciousness, but into another world. This other world is perceived through the developed ability to remember. And one now learns to recognize, as a first view, what I would like to call the 'memory tableau', but the developed memory tableau of this life up to the birth. That is, in a sense, the first supersensible perception.

Otherwise, one has memories of one's life, one lets images arise, memory images, from the stream of life. It is not the same when one looks at life through this supernaturally developed ability to remember. The whole stream of life is combined in a single moment — like something spatial — into a comprehensible image. What otherwise only emerges as individual memory fragments in the course of time becomes a coherent stream when we achieve this independence from our body. Then, once we have become accustomed to imagining independently of the body, just as a sleeping person would imagine if they could, what can be called a real contemplation of what it is to fall asleep, to wake up, and what it is to sleep in general develops. One learns to recognize how that which is in the human being spiritually and soulfully really comes out – not spatially, but dynamically. It is correct to say that it usually remains unconscious, but that the human being can develop his consciousness outside of the body and how consciousness consists of the spiritual and soulful re-immersing itself in the body. And once this has been developed, one can gradually ascend to further perceptions.

If you can imagine what a person is like when asleep as a living spiritual-soul entity, then you will also come to recognize how the spiritual-soul has lived in a purely spiritual world before descending into the physical world through birth or conception, if you keep working with the developed memory in the manner described. You learn to distinguish between: The sleeping person has a sensual and supersensory desire to return to the physical body lying in bed and to revive it spiritually and mentally. But this power is also known as a strong power in the soul, which first waits to be received by a physical body that comes from father and mother in the physical inheritance current, but one learns to recognize how this soul rises from the spiritual-soul world and permeates the body. One acquires knowledge of how our soul lives spiritually before birth. One gets to know the eternal in the human soul. It is no longer a belief that one clings to this eternal in the human soul, but a knowledge that is acquired through supersensible vision. And one also acquires knowledge of the great falling asleep that the human being experiences when he passes through the gate of death. Just as consciousness is only dulled, not lost, in sleep, so it is with the human soul as it passes through the gateway of death, only it is the other way around: while a person, when he falls asleep and wants to return to the body, clings to the body and thus, in ordinary sleep, his consciousness is dulled, when he passes through the gate of death, his consciousness is awakened because he has no desire for the body. Only after he has lived in the spiritual world for a long time does something occur that could be compared to the age of the physical body, which is reached in the 35th year of life. When the soul has lived for a time after death, a longing arises again to return to the body, and a transition to a new life on earth occurs. I have repeatedly described these experiences of a person between death and a new birth in more detail. When these things are described, they are still widely ridiculed and mocked by people today, seen as fantastic. But those people who consider what is gained in this way to be fantastic should at the same time consider mathematical concepts to be fantastic, because what is gained in this way is just as real as what is found through true and earnest natural research.

And a powerful and significant image appears. It is not the case that when we have a memory image, we actually have something that we experienced years before in front of our soul. We have that before us as an image that we have experienced. When we have that before us, which we do not have through ordinary memory, but through the developed ability to remember, we have that spiritual world before us in which we are as a sleeping person, but in which we are also before we descend to earthly life. We have that which does not appear to the senses in the external world around us, but which appears to the spiritual eye, the soul eye. We have the spiritual foundations, the world's width before us. We ascend again, past a new guardian of the threshold, over a new threshold, into the supersensible world, to the spiritual background of natural existence, to which we belong. There it emerges like a mighty memory of stone and clouds and of all that is in the realms of nature. This is what a stone looks like to the eye, a cloud. To the spiritual eye, something appears to which we are related because we have lived in it before our birth or conception. There is the great memory of the world. And as this world memory of our own superphysical existence before our birth arises, as our eternal self appears to us from the outer world before the spirit eye, we simultaneously receive a tableau of the spirit that is spread out in the world around us. We attain real spiritual knowledge of the world.

Spiritual science must speak of these things, because this is something that must enter into modern civilization, just as the Copernican worldview entered a few centuries ago, just as Galileo's worldview entered. Just as these things were rejected in those days, just as they were seen as paradoxical, as fantastic, so too is spiritual science seen as fantasy today. But these things will be taken up into the human soul and will have, as I will mention in a moment, an effect on the outer, social, and whole existence of man. But first I must point out that for full spiritual knowledge, another power of knowledge must be developed.

People will still admit that one can develop the power of memory into a cognitive faculty. But perhaps the strict scientists in particular will not accept the second power that I have to mention as a cognitive faculty, and yet it is, although not as it occurs in life, but when it is developed, a real cognitive faculty: it is the power of love.

In ordinary life, love is tied to human instincts and the human libido, but just as the ability to remember can be extracted from ordinary life, so too can this love. In terms of love, one can also become independent of the human body. The power of love can be developed by using it to achieve real objectivity. While in ordinary life one loves because the inner being of man encourages this love, one can develop this love by immersing oneself in external objects, by becoming one with the external object, forgetting oneself. When you perform an action not out of inner impulses that come from the drives, the instincts, but when you act out of love for external events, then that is the love that is at the same time the power of human freedom. That is why I already said in the book I published in 1893 under the title “Philosophy of Freedom” that in the higher sense the saying that love is blind is not true, but that love is precisely what enables us to see. And the one who finds himself in the world through love truly makes himself free, for he makes himself independent of the inner instincts and drives that enslave him; he knows how to become absorbed in the world of external facts and events and to let the world dictate his actions; but then he can act as a free human being in the sense of what should happen, no longer carried and led by what his instincts and drives are. Just as I wanted to provide a basis for a free social feeling within modern civilization in my Philosophy of Freedom, for that which can truly found a social life from the depths of the human being, so it must also be said that this love must be developed as a power of knowledge, for example, when one develops a keen power of observation for that which one becomes anew with each passing day.

Let us be honest, honored attendees, honest with ourselves: Are we not fundamentally different every day? Life drives us; what we experience in other people and what we experience in them, everything drives us. If we think back to how we were ten years ago, we will admit to ourselves: We were quite different from what we have become today and basically we are something different with each passing day. But we drift in our ordinary lives. This is what the spiritual researcher must do as a discipline of the will, that he must take this development of the will into his own hands, so to speak, observing himself: What have you been influenced by today? What has changed your inner life today? What has changed your inner life in the last ten or twenty years? What has occurred in you? On the one hand, you have to do this, but on the other hand, you have to do something else. You have to give yourself very specific impulses and drives so that you not only live in such a way that you are changed from the outside, that life is changed from the outside, but you also have to stand next to yourself as your own spectator, so to speak, and watch your will and your actions. If you do that, then you simply develop that higher love, which is completely absorbed in the objects, in a lawful way.

And when we develop these two soul powers: on the one hand, the memory that is freed from the body, on the other hand, the power of love, which actually makes us one with our true spiritual being and brings us to a higher self-awareness, then we cross the threshold to a spiritual world. Then the external knowledge of nature complements each other in such a way that we can fertilize all the individual sciences through this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

I have experienced it, how at a famous medical school, the great medical authorities were talking about medical nihilism. They spoke of medical nihilism because they had gradually come to the conclusion that, basically, no remedies can be found for typical illnesses. In more recent scientific life, the connection with nature has been lost; it is not understood. At most, one tries out this or that substance to see if it has a healing relationship to this or that disease, but one does not see the bigger picture. Through spiritual science, one sees through plant life, the individual plants, the great differences that exist between the root life, the leaf life, the flower life, and one sees through the relationships of the spiritual being that is behind it, behind the root life, the leaf life, the flower life, the herb life of plants. Knowledge is gained about how this relates to the human being, who, as a whole human being, has grown out of this nature. One gains an insight into the relationships of animals, plants, minerals to man, and one thereby gains a rational therapy. Medicine can be fertilized in this way. Last spring I myself gave a course for doctors, medical practitioners and medical students, in which I showed how spiritual knowledge can be used to enrich the study of remedies, but also pathology, the study of diseases.

And so all the individual sciences can be enriched by spiritual knowledge. By attaining this spiritual knowledge, by truly growing together with what we were, with the spiritual and soul life, but which now works in our physical body, we acquire a completely different knowledge of human nature than through ordinary science. This ordinary science only wants to have logical, abstract, and delimited concepts about nature and human existence, and it is said that it is not a true science where such abstract laws cannot be derived. Yes, my dear audience, if nature does not work according to such abstract laws, then we humans can declaim about such laws for a long time; we only limit our knowledge if we only want to proceed logically and abstractly in science, if we can only indulge in abstract experiments. Then nature could easily say: Under such circumstances, I will not provide any insights into humans.

By approaching the subject with spiritual science, we learn to recognize that nature does not create according to laws, but according to principles that can only be attained through artistic observation, through real imaginations. We cannot fathom the wonderful secret of the human form, of the entire human organization, through abstract laws or through observation as it is done in ordinary science. We have to develop and grow into that which we gain in elementary knowledge for imaginative observation. Then true human nature is revealed, and thus an artistic view of the human being springs forth out of spiritual knowledge.

This is how the bridge is built from spiritual knowledge to art. For anyone who devotes themselves to knowledge in the sense of the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here, knowledge is not something external. And if he is an artist, he does not create dry symbols, didactic theories or the like, but he sees forms in spiritual life and can impress them on the material. In this way, a renewal of art is created at the same time. We can experience it if we are open-minded. The old artists created great and powerful things. How did they create? In the past centuries, they first looked with their senses at external matter. Take Rembrandt or Raphael, they looked at the external matter in their age; they knew how to grasp the spiritual from the external sensual reality and depict it. The essence of their art consisted in the idealization of reality. The person who looks at this art with an open mind and sees how it has developed knows that the hour of this art has passed and that nothing new can be created along these lines. Spiritual science leads to spiritual insight. Spiritual forms are seen in spiritual and soul-like vitality. And with the same reality, with the same sense of reality, as was previously created artistically, where reality was idealized, artistic creation is now beginning through the realization of the spiritual and the spiritual. In the past, the artist extracted the spirit from matter; now the spirit is being carried into matter. But not in an allegorical or symbolic way. Only those believe this who cannot imagine how immediately real that can be which can be created as new art.

Thus we see how this spiritual science actually leads to real art. But it also leads to a real religious life. It is remarkable that today there are critics of this spiritual science who say: spiritual science wants to bring down into everyday life that which should only be felt at lofty heights as the divine world. Yes, that is what this spiritual science wants. It wants man to be so imbued with spiritual and soul existence through the knowledge of the supersensible worlds that the spirit is not only grasped in a mystical fog, experienced in an asceticism alien to life, but that this spirit can be carried into every practical existence. People believe that they have already achieved a great deal if they have given the other person an education. So that when they close the factory gate behind them, they are finished with their work; that they can then have all kinds of beautiful ideas outside. But a person cannot yet feel fully human if they first have to close the factory gate behind them in order to then devote themselves to elevating their soul. No, if we want to solve the great problems of civilization to some extent, we must proceed to carry the spirit into the factory when we enter the factory through the factory gate, by permeating with the spirit what we work with in our daily lives. This is what deserts life, this is what the catastrophic time has finally brought about, that we have created an external spiritless life, a mere mechanism of life.

Spiritual science fulfills the full human being. It will be able to carry the spirit from within the human being into the most practical, seemingly sober areas of life. And so everyday life - where we work for others, where we stand at the machine, where we participate in the totality through the division of labor - will become spiritualized when spiritual science, which can be knowledge and religious fervor at the same time, enters into life. It will be a social force in itself. It will stand by people as they work. Economic life, practical life in the outer world, will be seized by a science that has not only an abstract spirit in concepts and ideas, but a living spirit, and that can therefore also fill life with this living spirit.

My dear attendees, what only wants to reshape external institutions cannot lead us to a solution of the social question. We live in an age in which social demands are being made. But we also live in an age in which people are highly unsocial. A realization as I have described it will also bring social impulses among people that can solve the great riddles of life in a different way than the abstract way of thinking, which appears as Marxism and the like, which can only destroy because it arises from the abstract, because it kills the spirit, but because only the spirit can make life come alive. This is what spiritual science promises in a certain sense, that it can not only give satisfaction to the soul in its connection with the eternal, but that it can also infuse forces into social life.

This has led to the fact that one did not want to remain in spiritual science with mere mystical views. We do not have abstract mysticism. We have that which does not shy away from crossing the threshold into the spiritual world and leading people into the supersensible world in a new way. But at the same time we bring down into the physical, sensory world what we gain in this way. This has led to the practical view of life that is set forth in my book 'The Core of the Social Question' and in other writings, and that is represented by the 'Federation for the Threefold Social Organism'. There are still some people who say that spiritual science leads away from the old religion; for example, that it is anti-Christian. But anyone who takes a closer look at this spiritual science will find that it is precisely suited to present the Mystery of Golgotha and the true meaning of Christianity to people once again. For under the influence of the modern, naturalistic world view, what has become of the Christ, who must surely be a supersensible being drawn into a human body, who has given the earth a new meaning? The simple man of Nazareth; a mere human being, albeit the most outstanding human being in world history. Once again, supersensible knowledge is needed to understand Christianity in a way that is absolutely necessary for modern humanity. And through this spiritual science one will be able to arrive at an understanding of Christianity that is appropriate for the modern human being. Those who speak of a hostility of spiritual science against Christianity, even if they are often the official representatives of Christianity, seem to me to be fainthearted, not as true understanders of Christianity. When I hear such faint-hearted representatives of Christianity, I always have to remember a Christian Catholic theologian, a friend of mine, who, in a speech about Galileo, as a professor of Christian said: No scientific knowledge can ever belittle Christianity, but the knowledge of the divine can only win if the knowledge of the world continues to progress and presents this divine in ever higher glory. Therefore, one should think highly of Christianity and say: It is so well founded that extra-spiritual and spiritual knowledge will enter humanity by the thousands. But we need a Christianity that intervenes in life, that does not limit itself to saying, “Lord, Lord!” but that lives out the power of the spiritual in outward action. And such a practical Christianity should live in that which is striven for through the threefold social organism.

The person who introduced what I had to say today with a few words said that I had already spoken in Holland in 1908 and 1913. At that time I could only speak of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science as something that wants to come from one or more human souls to solve the questions of modern civilization.

But since that time, despite the bitter war years in between, a great deal has happened: since 1913, when we laid the foundation stone, the Free University for Spiritual Science, the Goetheanum, has been built in Dornach near Basel. This School of Spiritual Science is intended not only to serve abstract spiritual science, but also to fertilize all sciences through spiritual science. That is why, last fall, despite the fact that the Goetheanum is not yet finished and still needs a great deal before it is finished, we held the first course, and we will also hold a second course at Easter, which will be shorter. During the autumn courses, thirty prominent individuals have spoken, some of whom are scholars in their respective fields: mathematics, astronomy, physiology, biology, history, sociology, and jurisprudence. But practical people of life have spoken as well, people who are industrialists, people who are merchants; artists have spoken. As I said, thirty personalities have spoken, who have shown that what can be gained as spiritual knowledge can be carried into the individual sciences. It could be shown that this science does not thereby acquire a superstitious character, but rather a rational, an inner, spiritual character and thereby a true character of reality. And so we will try to work in this Goetheanum. This Goetheanum, when you will see it one day, is built in a new art form, a new art style. In the past, if a scientific centre was to be built, negotiations would have taken place with this or that architect as to whether it should be built in Greek, Gothic or Renaissance style. This could not be done by spiritual science, because it shapes out of itself what it recognizes as reality, not only in ideas, not only in laws of nature and of the spirit, but also in artistic form.

One would simply have committed a sin against one's own spiritual life if one had applied a foreign style, not the style that flows artistically from spiritual science itself, to this building. And so you see the attempt at a new architectural style embodied in Dornach, so that you can say to yourself when you enter the building: every column, every arch, every painting speaks to you the same spirit. Whether I stand at the podium and express the content of this spiritual science, or let the columns, the capitals or something else speak for me, they are different languages, but it is the same spirit that is to be expressed in all of this.

This is the answer that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to give to the great civilization questions of humanity. For the first of these civilization issues is the question of a real self-knowledge appropriate to the new times. This is gained by crossing the threshold in a new way, as I have described it, by gaining powers of knowledge through the developed ability to remember and the developed power of love to behold the eternal in human nature. And in this way one arrives at a new sense of what the human being actually is, one that is worthy of the human being. One approaches one's fellow human being in such a way that one respects in him that which is born of the spiritual world, that one sees in him a piece of this spiritual world. In this way, human life is ennobled anew in a moral sense, human interaction is ennobled by the spirit. This is the answer to the second question, the question of social interaction.

And the third great question of civilization in the present time is this: Man can know that in his deeds and actions here on earth, he is not merely the being that stands there and whose actions have a meaning only between birth and death. Rather, what I do on earth has a world significance; it is integrated into the whole world. By developing moral ideals in me, I develop something that has world significance.

Let me summarize: modern natural science separates the outer nature from the inner life of man. It sees in the development of the earth and the whole planetary system something that has emerged from a kind of primeval nebula. Man was also produced. But then, after some time, man will disappear. The earth will sink back into the sun as slag. A field of corpses will spread out. This is what natural science must say when it only looks at its own field. But from the human soul arise moral ideals. They are that which is most valuable in the human soul. The school of thought that has brought it to such a high level of sophistication knows no place for ideals. The ideals will disappear like smoke. Therefore, what is called the ideological world view has already taken shape in millions and millions of people. The modern proletariat speaks of custom, law, religion, and science and art as an ideology because the sense of the living spirit has been lost. If we come to recognize this living spirit, we will know that what lives in the human soul as moral ideals, as spiritual, is related to what is the germ in the plant. When what is a plant this year falls away, a new plant develops from the germ.

Thus, we know from spiritual scientific knowledge: the clouds, stars, mountains, springs, stones, plants, animals and the physical human being too, will disappear as the withered leaves fall off and decay from the plant. But just as a new germ comes out of the plant, so too, and not only for the next year but for an eternal future, that which rests as a germ in the human soul will come to life as moral ideals. And we can repeat the wonderful words of Christ:

“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words” — that which we develop in the human soul as spiritual knowledge — “it will not pass away”.

We can speak of the fact that, once again, a unity stands before us: the passing physical world, the arising spiritual world. Man acquires world significance through this. His social life also acquires weight. And the empty solutions that so torment humanity today, that carry such heavy social storm clouds in the East, will disappear when the social question is made a world view question; when one tries to find the impulses for solving this social question also in what the human being can fathom within himself as a living spirit.

In this way, the modern questions of civilization will receive their impulses from spiritual science. We have already made educational attempts in this direction. In Stuttgart, Emil Molt founded the Freie Waldorfschule, which I run. It seeks to develop and bring to children, in an educational and artistic way, that which can be derived from living spiritual science.

In short, my dear audience, the task of reconciling religion, art and science, of introducing real science, real religion and real art into the most practical of lives, is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science feels called to do. The Goetheanum in Dornach was built for this purpose, to be a first place where such a science can be cultivated in free scientific, free spiritual life. In the beginning and up to the present stage, people willing to make sacrifices have ensured that the Goetheanum could be built; but as I said earlier, the Goetheanum is not yet finished. Its completion will depend on whether there are already enough people who understand the need for progress in this world; whether the Goetheanum remains a torso and humanity says: we do not want to reawaken the spirit, or whether, through understanding of the living spirit, its first home can be completed. Then others will follow. For this much is certain: in the long run, the cultivation of a knowledge of the living spirit will be necessary in modern civilization. For it is certain that even those people who hate the spirit as such, who regard spiritual research as something fantastic, even they need the spirit. The seeking souls need the spirit, and those who do not seek need it even more. And this fact cannot be eliminated. One will seek the spirit because, if one truly wants to be human, one needs the spirit.

Answering Questions

Question: Is it your intention to establish schools in different countries based on the model of the Waldorf School or should the Waldorf School remain as one?

Rudolf Steiner: Well, we would not be able to muster the necessary strength to establish the Waldorf School if we did not actually want such a school to be established wherever there are schools. Because the Waldorf school is not based on some quirk or personal agenda, but on what can be gained as the right pedagogical art from the knowledge of man, also the knowledge of the developing human being, the child, which can be gained through spiritual science. This means that an attempt has been made to fathom what one has to do with the child until it is an adult, so that body, soul and spirit develop in equal measure. Of course, I cannot develop the art and science of education on which the Waldorf school is based in a few words here; I will do that in other places in Holland, where I will speak about practical education and the art of living from the point of view of spiritual science. But if one is of course convinced that true, all-round educational theory can be found in this way, and if one has based the Waldorf School on this, then one cannot but intend to do at least as much as one can for the establishment of such schools. Now, of course, we are not yet allowed to do very much, because for the Waldorf School it is enough for the time being, but it is not enough for any other schools. And what is not enough, I may perhaps pose as a puzzle question this evening. You can easily imagine what is not enough at the moment. However, something else is not enough at the moment. When the Waldorf School was founded, it was necessary for me to hold a pedagogical seminar for the Waldorf teachers first. And so, in turn, the pedagogical must first be worked out from the spiritual scientific. All this could happen in the broadest circles throughout the civilized world, because the pedagogical question is primarily a question of civilization in the present day. If the civilized world were to come to the conclusion that something must be done for the education of the child.

Dear ladies and gentlemen, I said that we live in a world in which great social demands are made, but in which people's inner impulses and instincts are not particularly socially minded. We have to rely on the coming generation in many ways. And this coming generation, we must educate differently in a certain way, unlike the people who have led the world into the current catastrophes. We need a new education and, above all, we need to recognize that social people must be educated, that the general humanity of human nature must be brought out in the child.

If I may mention just one detail: in ordinary schools – and I am sure the Netherlands is no different in this respect – we find the examination system to be very strange. The Waldorf School has only existed for a year. We have thoroughly implemented it in the Waldorf School: we do not need exams, we have achieved something different. We have held conferences throughout the year that have had real psychological content. In a sense, each individual child became an object of study. We were able to study the largest classes. Strange things came to light. For example, it became clear what imponderables are at work. It was shown that a class looks quite different due to imponderable forces, where there are more girls than boys, than a class where the number of girls and boys is the same or where the majority are boys. All these things must be carefully studied. The old educators say that one should bring out what is right in the individuality of the child. But it is only through spiritual science that one will be able to recognize the individuality of the child. This changes from year to year, from month to month. One must become a careful observer of human beings. And instead of the certificates saying “almost satisfactory”, “almost sufficient”, which means nothing if you can't bring these things into concordance with the real individuality, instead of that we gave each child a real description of his or her nature, which can also be used, and a saying that was entirely from the soul of each individual child, which is a power saying, a motto for the child for the whole of the following school year. The child has a kind of mirror. And the children who receive these reports are most intensely happy about them, even if they have been criticized.

And we have experienced many things. When I repeatedly come to the school for inspections, not as a cliché but because it is part of a vibrant life, I quiz the children, and sometimes I ask them: Children, do you love your teachers? And you should see how, not as something learned, but wholeheartedly from the soul, the children answer with their “Yes”, even though they are not educated in a philistine way in some special philistine discipline, they are honest, so that they fully understand: You can only be educated in love. And so, for example, we achieved that the children, although they liked going on vacation, longed to be back at school. We were able to observe many interesting details. A boy who used to be a grumpy urchin and never wanted to kiss his mother gave his mother his first voluntary kiss on the day he was able to go back to school after the holidays, he was so happy. This shines a light into the whole imponderable life. We need something like this from the living spirit. Therefore, it seems to me to be a necessity that the ideas of the Waldorf school be understood in the broadest circles. If a world school association could be established, which consists almost entirely of consumers – that is, of those people who have children, and also those who have an interest in the development of future generations, because all people are actually interested in that – then such a world school association, which could be completely international, could establish such schools wherever possible. And that is actually the idea of the Waldorf school: to be a germ cell radiating forces of growth in all directions. The Waldorf school should be a model, although we should not try to make it as perfect as possible; things only reveal their true perfection when they are spread further. That is why I say: certainly, the Waldorf school should not be isolated; it does not arise from a single ideal, but from general world ideals. Therefore, the World School Association should establish as many schools as possible in the shortest time, even if we have to struggle with many old traditions.