Lecture I

On what - this must be asked again and again - have the present leading people formed their concepts, their ideas, their feelings, also their social will? They have trained them on the scientific ideas that played such a great, such a decisive role in the 19th century. One must not be deceived about this. Scientific ideas have penetrated everywhere. But scientific ideas, as they have emerged in the last four centuries, are only applicable to the dead, to that which has died, to that which no longer has life. It is not an extraordinariness, but it is deeply rooted in the essence of the matter that the present ideas about the essence of man can only be applied to what is gained from the corpse, to what is gained in general outside the context of life. What scientific conceptions can give about man, that does not lead to man, not to Homo, that leads only to the homunculus. And that is why people, when they begin to think socially today, always think past reality. They think only of that which basically destroys the social organization, which dismantles it, and not of that which brings new fertilizing life to the social organization. Because people have not absorbed any ideas about the living during the last four centuries, they have not learned to supply fruitful life to the healthy organism. It is the tragedy of the present time that we live only from concepts about the dead, and that the social organism demands from us to assert impulses that are valid for life. But we have no concept of the living precisely within that which is today regarded as the formation of mankind. Does anyone today ask about the social organism as if it were a living thing? He does not.