In his
autobiography
The Course of My Life
(chapters
35
and
36),
Rudolf
Steiner speaks as follows concerning the character of this privately
printed matter:
“The
contents of this printed matter were intended as oral communications and
not for print. ...
“Nothing has ever been said that was not the purest result of
Anthroposophy as it developed ... Whoever reads this privately printed
matter can take it in the fullest sense as that which Anthroposophy has
to say. Therefore it was possible, and moreover without misgivings ...
to depart from the accepted custom of circulating these publications
only among the membership. But it will have to be remembered that faulty
passages occur in the transcripts, which I myself did not revise.
“The
right to form a judgment on the content of such privately printed matter
can be admitted only in the case of one who has acquired the requisite
preliminary knowledge. And in respect of all these publications, this
is, at the very least, the knowledge of man and of the cosmos in so far
as it is presented in Anthroposophy, and of what is to be found as
‘anthroposophical history’ in the communications from the
spiritual world.”
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