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

But now came the newer time. It was the time when people developed their imaginative life one-sidedly. It was the first half of the 15th century, the 16th, 17th century, and partly still the 18th century. Beneath the imaginative life that had become conscious, there still glimmered what was left of the inheritance of the old instincts. And I would like to say that something instinctive was still at work in the moral and social spheres, while man passed over this world and looked at that which was now already emerging from his fully conscious life of ideas. But since then, since the 18th century, these instincts have completely died out, and what remains are only abstract traditions. We do not live today with an elementally generated morality and justice of the social world; we live because the instincts that used to establish social orders are no longer active. And as much as the Marxists believe that they live in Marxism, they live in the most ancient traditions, which can be seen from the fact that they always want to explain the conditions of social life from the prehistory of wild and barbaric peoples.