Lecture V

Thus, all the impulses holding good on the surface of the social movement, secretly issue from the sources I have described. Therefore at the time Fichte was working, a time not then ripe for developing Spiritual Science, nothing more could appear than a thinking that awaited the approach of the spiritual world and had no power to serve external reality. For when thinking that really should be concerned with the spiritual world, is applied instead, powerfully, logically and fundamentally, to the external reality of the senses, it does not work upon this reality constructively but destructively. Now I have often spoken to you of the function of evil. I have told you what forces are really active in what we call the evil in man. I have said that, from a plane higher than that of the senses, from the spiritual plane that is nearest to ours, we can with the perception we then have see what is at work in evil. For the forces living in thieves, robbers, murderers, would not then be experienced in their unlawful aspect as here in the sense-world, but on the higher plane they would be metamorohosed, transformed, and thus fully within their rights. That is where evil belongs. Evil is misplaced good. Only because the ahrimanic powers force upon our world something belonging to a quite different world, does what we see as evil arise. And thus arises also destructive thinking, when social ideals are spun out of what is within man, and the pure thinking does not wait to be filled by the spiritual world.