Faust's Crisis: Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Freedom

Now the situation is such that, as I explained to you earlier, the first fifth of our cultural period, which will last into the 4th millennium, is over. Materialism has reached a certain peak. The social forms in which we live, which have led to such sad events in our years, are really such that they will no longer sustain humanity for fifty years without a fundamental change in human souls. For those who have a spiritual understanding of world development, the electrical age is at the same time an invitation to seek a spiritual deepening, a real spiritual deepening. For the spiritual power must be added to that power, which remains unknown on the outside for sensory observation, in the souls, which rests so hidden in the deepest interior, like the electrical forces, which must also first be awakened. Imagine how mysterious the electrical power is; it was only brought out of its secret hiding places by Galvani, Volta. Something similar is true of the hidden forces that lie in human souls and are the subject of spiritual science. The two must come together, like north and south poles. And just as the discovery of electricity as a hidden force in nature was inevitable, so the power that spiritual science seeks as the hidden force in the soul will inevitably be discovered. Although many people today what spiritual science wants, now, as roughly one would have confessed at the time when Galvani was preparing the frogs and noticed from the twitching of the leg that a force was at work in this twitching frog's leg. Did science know then that this frog's leg contained everything there is to be known about electricity, including static electricity? Imagine the time when Galvani was in his simple experimental house, hanging his frog's leg outside the window hook and it began to twitch, and he observed this for the first time! It is not a question of electricity, is it, which is excited, but of contact electricity. When Galvani first realized this, could he assume: With the power with which the frog's leg is attracted, one day trains will be driven over the earth, with that power one day one will be able to send thoughts around the globe? It is not so very long ago that Galvani observed this force in his frog legs. Anyone who had already said at that time what would flow from this knowledge would certainly have been considered a fool. So it also happened that today someone who has to present the first beginnings of a spiritual science is considered a fool. A time will come when that which proceeds from spiritual science will be just as significant for the world, but now the moral, spiritual and soul world, as that which proceeded from the Galvani frog's leg was for the material world, for material culture. This is how progress is made in human development. Only if we pay attention to such things do we also develop the will to go along with what can only be in its beginnings. If the other power, the electrical power, which has been drawn from its hiddenness, is only of importance for the outer material culture and only indirectly for the moral world, then that which comes from spiritual science will have the greatest social significance. For the social orders of the future will be regulated by what spiritual science can give to people, and everything that will be external material culture will also be indirectly stimulated by this spiritual science. Today, at the end, I can only point this out.