Fourth Lecture

May it be so today within our spiritual movement, may it be so spiritually! For there is a certain difficulty in this word “spiritual.” This difficulty is expressed in the fact that, when one considers the actual circumstances, one might sometimes be tempted — I say “might,” not “may” — to wish that the harsh and strong compulsion to inner contemplation might still be present today, which would mean that we would have been forbidden by all means of contemporary culture to build on the Dornach hill and would have had to work our way into caves and live there in seclusion. Then, as soon as we entered, we would feel more keenly how our own impulses, which are supposed to be the impulses of spiritual science, must differ from what drives and rumbles above it.