III. Fundamental Impulses in History

To work with clear consciousness towards a regeneration of Art, of Science, of Freedom, that is a work that should centre round this Building. In erecting this Building an attempt has been made to bid in a sort of way, defiance to the Past, in the shapes and lines of it, and so forth. And in the same way, practically, we must have the courage to grasp all that can be got from the fact that the Building actually stands here. We shall never get right, my dear friends, if we go on clinging to little remedies. We shall only get right by resolutely and consciously keeping before men's eyes the necessity for a new form of spiritual civilisation, for that alone can be the true starting-point for a new form of social civilisation. For the social order cannot any longer be evolved out of the economic order, but only out of a spiritual element that shall have sunk into the economic one. And we must clearly realise that the Economic type of man is played out, and that another type must come to the top,—the type of man who is a World-man, one who is conscious that there lives within him not only what he has inherited through earthly descent, but who is conscious that there live within him, also, forces of the sun and the heaven of stars, forces of the world above the senses. In such forms as people can understand, we must bring this to their consciousness; and then alone shall we be doing something towards the real progress of mankind. By merely transmitting all sorts of mystical teachings we can do no good whatever. Our mysticism must be actual spiritual life—active spiritual life.