Intellectuality and Will – The Necessity of New Cognitive Powers

But as I said, what does the learned mind of the present day make of this ancient wisdom? Perhaps in a similar way to the scholar who spoke the words: “The last and most important operation” by Basilius Valentinus “is the gradual heating of the philosophical mercury and gold in the Thus Theodor Svedberg in Uppsala, who has written a book about these things from the scientific standpoint of the present and who in this respect is only representative of all the learned minds who unfortunately cannot comprehend. It is still the best thing for them to say: Unfortunately, one cannot comprehend. For all of them, Basilius Valentinus has already written the necessary dismissive words himself, in that he writes in his “Twelve Keys to the Universe and Its Understanding”: “If you now understand what I am saying, then you have opened the first lock with the key and pushed back the bolt of the approach. But if you cannot yet fathom the light within, then no glass vision will help you, nor natural eyes be able to help you to find the last thing you lacked at the beginning. Then I will no longer speak of this key, as Lucius Papirius taught me. Thus speaks Basilius Valentinus to all those descendants who, when confronted with ancient wisdom, can only utter the words: Unfortunately, one cannot comprehend. But these people of the present have something else to do than to understand the spiritual! These people of the present must deal with all kinds of other things; and when there is any mention of the spirit, then they must, above all, deal with slandering this mention of the spirit. And an enormous amount of time is spent today on slandering this mention of the spirit. To the Berlin nonsense of Max Dessoir can be added – I have not yet been able to read the writing myself, but I have been told a few things – the Dutch counterpart of the philosopher Bolland, who has indeed earned some merit for the development of philosophy by inspiring the philosophical youth of Holland with his repetition of Hartmannian and Hegelian phrases, but also, as it seems, could not avoid using his philosophical unproductivity in recent times to defame our spiritual science with all kinds of untrue stuff. This must be emphasized again and again, because in order to truly take up spiritual science in our soul, we also need to pay attention to the way in which the present, in its spiritual-scientific impotence, relates to what is necessary for humanity. This present-day science - I am not talking about the external science, which, as you know, I fully recognize, even if I don't follow every naturalist - but what is often called philosophy and the like is, in the present day, not much more than abstract talk, conducted in complete confusion about the concepts of pumpkin and bottle. Unfortunately, it still happens far too often in our society that we repeatedly fall for the nonsense talk of contemporary philosophers in particular and are even occasionally glad when here or there some philosophical button finds this or that, let us say, not to be criticized by what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants. As if it were not, if he does not find it to be criticized, at least his duty and obligation! We need not be pleased at all when, as many of us are, a word of praise falls from this or that side. Even these words of praise are usually not exactly borne by a great understanding. But we must be prepared for the fact that such slanderers of the Dessoirs or Bolland type will arise again and again, and that they will even multiply in the near future. For these people must occupy themselves with something! And since they are far too lazy to concern themselves with what must be brought from the spiritual world for the salvation of mankind in the present age, they must occupy themselves with slandering what is brought. Basilius Valentinus, I said, still offered an ancient, atavistically inherited legacy, a science of the way in which man is created out of the cosmic All, which is above all the science of the soul freed from the body, but which must also be the science that wants to contribute to everything that is not merely external nature. This science can only be furthered if the realization of the will is added to the pure, and indeed materialistically oriented intellectual element of modern times. This will, which, when it is really recognized as will, can only be recognized in its spiritual nature, because it expresses itself only spiritually in the present stage of development of mankind. What the present time so urgently lacks is a courageous bringing forth of the impulses of life from the sphere of the will. Above all, the present time wants to talk, talk! That is good, but only on the basis of true knowledge. The present time does not want the latter – everyone wants to talk, everyone wants to talk, even on the basis of vain assumptions. And we have indeed seen that it is precisely in this disregard for the spiritual element in the world that the misfortune of our age lies. At the present time, one is only sincere about the evolution of humanity when one really wants to engage in the investigation of those impulses of the will that are necessary to push forward the waves of human evolution. Of course, these things should not be taken personally. In this or that place in life, everyone can naturally say: Yes, what should I do? - Certainly, that can never be the demand, that we should understand today what we should do in order to somehow take the first steps tomorrow, to undertake something that will make a world epoch. What we have to undertake, karma will bring to us. But what we have to do is to open our eyes – I mean the eyes of the soul – to really recognize, to really see through the time. What we have to do is not to oversleep this time, but to look into what is happening! What the materialism of the fifth post-Atlantean period has taken away from people, what it necessarily had to take away because people first had to orient themselves purely personally, are comprehensive ideas, as they are the outpourings of the Zeitgeist, and these are comprehensive ideas that we can have in common with the so-called dead. The intellectualistic stuff that has become so great in our time has not only seized human souls, it has therefore also seized the social and historical development of the age itself. Faced with the necessities of history, man has, with a certain right – for these things are not to be criticized, but characterized – man has, with a certain right, handed over to the machine much of what he used to do out of his human initiative, and I also mean out of the organic human initiative. The materialistic age is, of course, at the same time the machine age. And this machine age not only forms with the machines what it needs for ordinary life, but war itself has become the maintenance of a great machine. It could not have happened otherwise, because in the course of the last few centuries, humanity has not only developed a certain class of humanity, but within this class of humanity it has also cultivated views that are above all concerned with only accepting as scientific that can be realized within the outer social order in the making of machines: either in the making of mechanical machines - if I may use this tautology, this pleonasm - or in the making of social machines. For example, until the war, the international financial management of the world was a large-scale machine. Everything was machine-like. Man has given up a great deal to the machine-like. A certain stratum of humanity retained only that which makes trivial necessities of life pleasurable. One could say: toiling in winter, bathing in summer and only as much thinking as is necessary, so that the world machinery toils for one, became the signature of the age. Not as if it could have been avoided. This world machinery had to come about, that is quite natural. To criticize what has happened is a dilettantism in which spiritual science cannot participate. But the matter must be seen through and recognized in the nature that it has, because only then will it be possible to develop the right impulses of will in response to it. Again and again, people have come along who have already expressed the appropriate ideas for this age. But these spokesmen for the appropriate ideas were actually regarded as impossible human personalities, especially in the second half of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century. Subsequent humanity has gone back to its daily routine without giving a thought to such clear-sighted minds as Bright's and Cobden's, who saw how the social structure of humanity must be on earth under the influence of the machine age. Subsequent humanity should have used some of its intellectual power to find out how appropriate Bright's and Cobden's ideas were for the machine age! But to force the will into the intellect in order to see through reality, that is an effort from which the people of the present shrink. They do not want to imbue their thoughts with will. They want their thoughts to be sentimentally directed towards that which, as they say, makes their hearts glow when they want to uplift themselves. And under the influence of such thought, divested of will, but which feels so warm and comfortable when prattling sentimentalities, one gets accustomed to seizing even the most important questions with a thought that is weak and lacking in will. Above all, one gets accustomed to learning nothing about the development of world history. Is humanity ready to learn at the present time? This, too, is not meant as a criticism but only as a characterization. All that I say is not inspired from the point of view of criticism, but is inspired from the point of view of stimulating the will. It must be made clear how to introduce the impulse of the will into one's thoughts, which can serve for the good of humanity. Unfortunately, people today are not inclined to learn enough. They let things pass by and talk about them, believing that by talking they can also master the element of will. How much has been chattered, insubstantial chatter in the time when the ominous causes of this world catastrophe were preparing! How much has been chattered at the suggestion of the Tsar's peace manifesto frippery! This could happen because it can be said that people had to be taught that these were peace manifesto shenanigans, and that all the chatter that was attached to them was millions and millions of miles away from the possibility of stimulating impulses of will in humanity. But learning should be done. Is learning taking place? No, for the time being learning is not taking place – and it is not a matter of criticizing the lack of learning, but of seeing through this lack of learning so that one may learn. What has taken the place of the chatter about all kinds of world goals in connection with the peace manifesto frippery of the now dismissed tsar? The other nonsense of the peace manifesto frippery of the chatterbox Woodrow Wilson! Exactly the same thing instead of the same thing! That is to be learned, that humanity does not want to learn. And in the realization of this unwillingness to learn, the holy will for the right volition will be kindled in our soul, which must arise from the right insight into that which works and lives in our time. In my public lectures, I have said that, fundamentally, what has developed over the course of the last four hundred years in the historical dream of humanity was enunciated as a world program in the course of the nineteenth century by people like Karl Marx and similar thinkers. The impulses had already passed when it was expressed, but what was basically the basis for the historical development of the last four centuries was expressed with it. What is the situation today? The situation today is that the broader sections of the population have abandoned all thought about social interrelations. They leave it to the professors of political economy, who have indeed talked enough nonsense over the last few centuries, and especially decades. Real social thinking, which has to emerge from the knowledge of the impulses coming from the spiritual world, has been lost in the so-called leading classes. Only one class has recently brought forth world-historical ideas: that class which, in occult conception, are brothers of the shadows as opposed to the brothers of the bourgeois parties of the last centuries. World-historical ideas, even if they are shadowy ideas, have been brought by Social Democracy, gray shadowy ideas of a particularly dangerous kind, since they are completely impregnated with the spirit of the last centuries. But world-historical ideas are what the other strata of humanity have completely lacked. For the other strata of humanity, they would have had to borrow them from the spiritual world; they would have needed to develop their religious, social, and historical ideas not in a general, unctuous way, but to see through social development on a firm foundation of knowledge. No one will understand social evolution in reality who is not willing to place himself in a position to do so from the starting points on which these reflections have been based in recent weeks. The best that the so-called living can receive from the spiritual world today, the best that the dead reveal to us from their life between death and a new birth, speaks for this. The new understanding of the mystery of Golgotha, which we must approach through the deepening of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, speaks for this. Everything that we should allow to pass through our souls as serious Christmas thoughts in these serious times speaks for this. For it was for the salvation of mankind that the Being whose birth is celebrated at Christmas entered into the evolution of the earth, not merely for the comfortable talking to of the soul, but so that this human soul might be imbued with – if I may use the paradoxical word – the will to will, the will to want. If this will to want permeates human souls, then this will mean the impulse for a longing for truly new ideas, because the old ones have been used up. Sometimes we can no longer even use the words. We live in catastrophic times. To call what is happening war is almost anachronistic, arising only from the old habit of still calling a bottle a pumpkin. But just as little as what is happening should be called war, just as little should the comfortable hope speak of peace in the old way, in a careless manner! Mighty portents are announced in our time, and it is incumbent upon humanity to try to understand these portents. In the events themselves, events are changing. 1914 marked the beginning of a world event that could perhaps be called a war between the Entente and the European Central Powers. But something essentially different prevails under what is so-called, and completely different enemies face each other! And in our days a serious symptom of what smolders beneath what we still call, rather inappropriately, a war between the Entente and the Central Powers, is looming for us, a symptom which consists in the sad clash of the populations of northern and southern Russia, a significant symptom, even if it may fade away for the time being, a significant symptom of what is smoldering beneath the surface of events. People do not like the fact that things are being called by their right name today, because they do not want the volition, because they prefer to ignore the seriousness of the times as long as possible, as long as the stomach does not growl too loudly. What is at stake is whether we really develop the will to see the deeper foundations of events, whether we finally develop the will to cast off all superficiality and look things in the face with the eyes of the soul. In the next lectures, we will have to supplement what we have now let pass through our soul in a kind of overview with a variety of additional points that are connected with the deeper impulses to which we have devoted ourselves in these reflections. But I believe that in this time, if we do not want to weave a veil before our eyes, we most honor the mysterious threefold necessity that passes through world-becoming and is the brother of human freedom and the freedom of the other creatures. Here on this earth we must grasp freedom. In this respect, too, the modern man's gaze learns a great deal when he turns to the dead; for the dead man knows that in the life between death and a new birth, freedom comes to him through what he brings with him from the life between birth and death. To be embedded in the intelligences of the higher hierarchies is something that becomes for us a natural necessity when we pass through the portal of death. When we live on the other side, we are embedded in the intelligences of the higher hierarchies and follow their impulses, just as a natural phenomenon here on earth necessarily follows natural impulses. Then we are still free after we have passed through the gate of death, if we carry over into the spiritual world with us in our soul that which we can acquire here as knowledge of spiritual becoming and spiritual essence. This is something that is now also most intimately connected with the Mystery of Golgotha. And because this is so, I believe that even Christmas meditations at this time must not be sentimental, but must appeal to the will-wish. For take the Gospels: how much there is in the Gospels of the appeal to the will to will! The Gospels are not sentimental writings; the Gospels are writings that speak to the very humblest of human nature, but they are also writings that seek to awaken in man the strength of will that he can muster. Christmas candles should not only burn so that we indulge in voluptuous contemplation in a certain way, but they should also burn so that they are symbols for kindling the light of will that serves the salvation of the world. Humanity has a lot of catching up to do; and it must catch up! For by developing the strength that lies in this catching up, it will develop the right healing powers to emerge from the present catastrophic time. It was not man's task merely to enter these times; the task of getting out of them is much more important. This task stands as a sacred sign, I believe, written in letters of fire behind all the Christmas candles that have been burning before our souls for four years now in a different way than in many earlier years! Tomorrow we will meet at four o'clock at the Basel branch for a Christmas party. On Monday at four-thirty we will gather here for the first performance of the “Paradeis-Spiel,” and I will then give a Christmas reflection for those of our friends who are not at home for some reason, but who are here right now, devoting themselves to work and the like, and who might prefer to spend their Christmas here on this day.