I. The Transforming of Instinctive into Conscious Impulses

This is a very law in the modern evolution of mankind. Take what I said before as an external characterization of the modern striving. Man strives to know what he is as Man, what he is worth as Man, what is his strength and potentiality as Man. Man strives to see himself as Man, to arrive at a picture of his own Being. But we cannot arrive at a picture of Man if we are determined to remain within the world of the senses, for he is no mere physical being. In times of instinctive evolution, when one does not ask for a picture of Man, when one does not ask what is the dignity and strength of Man, one may overlook this fact—that to know Man one must transcend the world of the senses and gaze into the spiritual world. But in our age of consciousness, we must make acquaintance, at any rate in one form or another, be it only intellectually, with the super-sensible world. The same thing that the Initiate has to overcome consciously is working in our age unconsciously. Unconsciously as yet, there lives in our contemporaries, and in the men whose social thoughts I have described today, this fear of the Unknown—the Unknown which they are nonetheless being driven to observe. Fear, cowardice, lack of courage, is dominating the humanity of today. And if it is declared: “Economic life is the tangible thing which determines all other things,” this view itself has arisen simply through the fear of the invisible and the intangible. This they will not approach, they will avoid it at all costs, and so they lyingly transform it into an ideology, a Fata Morgana. The modern world-conception, my dear friends, is born of fear and terror in relation to those points which I have characterized. However outwardly courageous some of those within the stream of the modern social world-conception may show themselves to be, they are afraid of the Spiritual, which must meet them in one form or another, and in whose domain, after all, they long to know the human being. But they are afraid of it; like cowards, they recoil from it.