Ninth Lecture

But this means that human development has reached an extreme, an extreme. For as soon as money reigns as such, as soon as money is the actual driving force, the time has come when it must be replaced, I might say, by mere cash figures in money through realities. Now money is the most spiritual part of the economy. It is that part of the economy that can only be grasped spiritually. It has only a spiritual value, money, only a value in human recognition. You can eat bread and meat, but you cannot eat money. You can really acquire something useful for people with money, if the money is recognized. It has only a soul, a spiritual value, a conceptual value, a value of imagination. The time has come when the development of the purely economic spirituality of money must change into something that is truly grasped in the spirit. And what is to be demanded through the threefold order as social understanding is that which must follow directly on from the domination of the most abstract economic factor, namely money. For as dark and dim as social understanding, as I have described it, lives among people, so must it actually become. For just imagine that (see drawing) would be a human life in the present from birth to death. This life would be lived in such a way that the human being acquires social understanding within himself, that the social life, the social structure, would not be built on the monetary value that he has, but on social understanding. Then the human being would go through the gate of death, live through the time until the next birth and then again live through his life from birth to death. What a person acquires here between birth and death in the way of social understanding also lies within him. Above all, it goes into the sleeping will, of which I spoke yesterday; this is carried through the gate of death. So that the person carries his social understanding through the gate of death until world midnight and then carries it again through birth into the next life on earth.