4. Anthroposophy as a Moral Impulse and a Creative Social Force

One can say that this scientific nature has risen to its highest triumphs in the last few centuries, especially in the very last century. Not that one would believe that they already talk this way, that they say: you don't make social life with moral principles. That was considered almost the most outstanding axiom in the socialist-thinking circles of modern times, that all the social life drawn from moral or socially conceived maxims is an illusion. And the socialists' social attitude actually fed on this axiom. It was said that what really matters is not how some class, how some individual person thinks about what should actually happen socially, but that it matters that one turns to those people in whose egoism, in whose entirely natural, elementary egoism it lies to shape the world as it must be shaped – and that is the proletarian demand. I would like to say that, precisely because of the modern spirit of science, every moral principle, every social view not based on egoism, has been eliminated. And as long as we do not realize what this means for the whole course of the world in modern times, and as long as we do not want to see how our social needs arise from the feelings and thoughts of human beings, we will not be able to approach what our time particularly needs in this respect.