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

What first developed in a one-sided way was that which guided human beings to let a conscious soul-life take the place of an old instinctive soul-life. No matter how much one may declaim about the fact that man has lost his naivety as a result of consciousness having taken the place of the old instinctive, such declaiming has no more value than if one complains that one used to be twenty years old and looked a certain way, and now one is older. These things cannot be criticized, but must simply be recognized in their necessity. From the 15th century onwards, humanity had to pass over into consciousness, and it did so first in the realm of imaginative life. But even this imaginative life was formerly placed in the instinctive life. Those who are truly familiar with the totality of civilization and cultural life that preceded the 15th century, including Greek civilization, know how all the powers of the human soul worked instinctively in those days, and how even what was called scientific worked, in certain respects, much more instinctively, out of the instinct-based human soul condition, than it does today. And in this human soul-condition, borne by instinct, in which a world necessity beyond human beings was at work, a kind of threefold structure of this social life has always emerged, approximately, until the 15th century, as human beings have worked in social life. The instincts have worked, I might say, with natural certainty – if I may use this not quite proper expression. People have integrated themselves into the social organism through their instincts, and through what they have done in the process, what they have achieved – whether in these or those life situations that arose from people acting on instinct – a certain structure of the social organism has emerged in the spiritual sphere, in the legal-constitutional sphere and in the economic sphere.