{"corpus":"steiner","locus":"GA 239/1924-06-12/p019","lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"text":"In an epoch when the highest human faculty capable of development was that of thinking in cold, barren abstractions, when men knew only the one, abstract God, they began more and more to identify this God with thinking, to deify the life of thought and the human intellect—forgetting that real thinking has an essentially *altruistic* tendency. In Mohammed's followers, this talent for thinking about the world in pure abstractions was expressed with a certain originality and grandeur. One of these followers was Muawija. I wish you could look him up in history. You would find there a strange mental configuration, the prototype, as it were, of men who think in pure abstractions, who want to shape the world according to tenets contained in a few simple paragraphs. Muawija, one of Mohammed's followers, appeared again in our time as *Woodrow Wilson*. A revival of the abstract thinking of Mohammedanism gave rise to the view that it is possible to shape a whole world by applying the principles set forth in fourteen prosaic, abstract paragraphs, void of any real substance. Truth to tell, there has been no greater illusion than this in all world-history; no other illusion has proved such a pitfall for well-nigh the whole of mankind. Before the war, when I spoke in the Helsingfors Lecture Course[^1] of Woodrow Wilson's shortcomings—his fame was then just beginning—people were unwilling to understand when over and over again, wherever I had the opportunity of speaking, I indicated that the calamity looming ahead was by no means unconnected with the idolisation of Woodrow Wilson then going on in the world. Now, since the impulse of our Christmas Foundation, the time has come when such things will be spoken of openly and without reserve, when our studies of history will also be connected with matters that are potent impulses at this very time. Esotericism must permeate the whole Anthroposophical Movement in order that what lies hidden beneath the shroud of external history may be brought into the light of day. Men will not be equal to the task of coping with world-events nor of doing what needs to be done until they begin to study karma and until individuals learn to observe their own being, as well as world-history, in the light of karma.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"title":"Lecture VI","site_heading":"Consciousness States and the Path to Karmic Self-Knowledge","site_heading_note":"A heading the site wrote for this unit from a summary of it; not in the edition, and not the words of Rudolf Steiner or of the translator. Cite the unit by its title and locus, never by this heading, and do not quote it.","date":"1924-06-12","location":null,"word_count":379,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/239/1924-06-12/p019","alignment_confidence":"medium","alignment_reason":"beads:length","two_voice_volume":false,"translation_credit":{"scope":"unit","status":"established","translator":"D. S. Osmond","identified_edition":"RSP1973","book_title":"Karmic Relationships: VII","publisher":"Rudolf Steiner Press","publisher_inferred":true,"match_score":1.0,"source_url":"https://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA239/English/RSP1973/19240612a01.html","evidence":"lecture_page_line","publisher_note":"The publisher is inferred from the edition code in this lecture's source URL, not stated by the source page. The translator IS verified for this lecture: its own source names the translator (evidence: the lecture's page, rsarchive's lecture list, or the cover of the book it was published in), and that page's text was matched against this unit (see match_score and source_url). Cite the translator with confidence; attribute the publisher only as probable."},"edition_coverage":{"de":["original"],"en":["English"]},"available_versions":[{"lang":"de","edition":"original","edition_basis":null,"is_original":true,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/239/1924-06-12/p019"},{"lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/239/1924-06-12/p019","paragraph_aligned":true}],"record":{"record_type":"unknown","scope":"volume","note":"How this text was taken down (shorthand transcript, listeners' notes or manuscript) is not on record here. Unknown is not an assurance of a stenogram: check the edition's own notes before resting an argument on one word.","evidence":null,"evidence_translation":null,"evidence_source":null},"german_anchor":{"de_prefix":"1924-06-12","de_passages":[{"locus":"GA 239/1924-06-12/p018","url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/239/1924-06-12/p018"},{"locus":"GA 239/1924-06-12/p019","url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/239/1924-06-12/p019"}],"bead_confidence":"medium","length_check":{"de_words":352,"en_words":379,"ratio":1.08,"partial":false},"correspondence":"established","note":"English passage numbering is edition-relative, so the same number need not name the same paragraph in the German. The German original passage(s) above are the edition-invariant anchor — fetch them (lang='de') to verify wording before quoting across editions."},"witness_completeness":{"ratio":1.01,"band":"comparable","note":null,"word_count":6058,"original_word_count":5991,"may_be_abridged":false},"witness_quality":{"translator":{"scope":"unit","status":"recorded","translator":"D. S. Osmond","identified_edition":"RSP1973","book_title":"Karmic Relationships: VII","publisher":"Rudolf Steiner Press","publisher_inferred":true,"match_score":1.0,"source_url":"https://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA239/English/RSP1973/19240612a01.html","evidence":"lecture_page_line","publisher_note":"The publisher is inferred from the edition code in this lecture's source URL, not stated by the source page. The translator IS verified for this lecture: its own source names the translator (evidence: the lecture's page, rsarchive's lecture list, or the cover of the book it was published in), and that page's text was matched against this unit (see match_score and source_url). Cite the translator with confidence; attribute the publisher only as probable."},"entity_parity":{"status":"discrepancy","checked_against":["GA 239/1924-06-12/p018","GA 239/1924-06-12/p019"],"missing_from_translation":[],"present_only_in_translation":["Christ"],"bead_confidence":"medium","bead_length_ratio":1.08,"likely_cause":"unresolved","note":"NAME MISMATCH between this English passage and its German counterpart. A name the German carries is absent here (or a name appears here that the German does not carry). Two things cause this and they need telling apart: the translation really drops or reassigns what the original distinguishes, OR the paragraph alignment paired the wrong passages. `bead_confidence` does NOT settle which: this corpus's embedding aligner pairs topically-related paragraphs at full confidence, and a sampled high-confidence mismatch proved to be a wrong pairing. Read the German passages listed and confirm they are counterparts BEFORE drawing any conclusion about the translation."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}}