I. Social Impulses for the Healing of Modern Civilization

All this is the reason why to-day there is so much talk about things which are peculiar to the civilisation that is dying, but which people talk about as though they stood for something that could be effective as an ideal. For years, we have had it proclaimed that “Every nation must have the possibility of ...” well, I don't quite know of what, living its own life in its own way, or something of that sort. Now, I ask you: For the man of to-day, if he is frank and honest about it, what is a “nation”?—Practically just a form of words, certainly nothing real. If one talks about the Spirit of a Nation, in the sense in which we speak of it in Anthroposophy, then one can talk about a Nation, for then there is a reality at the back of it; but not when it merely signifies an abstraction. And it is an abstraction that people have in mind today when they talk of the “freedom” of nationalities, and so forth. For they certainly don't believe in the reality of any sort of national Being. And herein lies the profound inward falsity to which men to-day do homage. They don't believe in the reality of the national Being, yet they talk of the “Freedom of the Nation,” as if to the materialist man of our day, the “nation” meant anything at all. What is the German nation? Just ninety millions of persons, who can be added together and summed up, A plus A plus A. That is not a National Being—a self-contained entity—for men to believe in. And it is just the same with the other nations. Yet people talk about these things and believe that they are talking about realities, and all the while are lying to themselves in the depths of their souls.