Healthy Thinking

Lecture 3

Peoples of the earth in the light of spiritual science

Stuttgart on 10 March 1920

My dear honourable friends! Recent years have revealed how great the sum total of feelings of hatred and antipathy has been able to go through the souls of the peoples on earth. No one can close themselves off, in their feelings, from the knowledge of what is actually the truth: on the path of hate and antipathy, earthly life can make no flourishing progress. So, among the many observations I have had the pleasure of making before you, I may well be allowed, according to spiritual scientific knowledge to speak about all which, according to the knowledge of mankind, can unite the whole civilized mankind at least.

Of course, knowledge is not feeling. However, spiritual knowledge — also this has been spoken of here — spiritual knowledge is more closely linked to all of humanity, to the innermost part of humanity itself, than outer, abstract truths coming from outer sensory facts. For this reason spiritual scientific truths are probably also suitable to release sensations, feelings and will impulses from people so that out of this strong inner power, which out of scientific spiritual knowledge the unity of peoples can reveal itself, feelings of sympathy can also be strengthened; feelings of mutual love among different peoples of the earth. Since during the course of human evolution, humanity has progressed more and more from the instinctive, unconscious life to conscious life, to the full, random grasp of the human task, it is already so that for the future, not the indefinite, emotional loving will alone will suffice to unite the peoples of the earth, but it must be the conscious, mutual knowledge of how the nature of one people has to differ from the nature of another people and what they can expect from the other.

It is relatively easy to see in one area how necessary the unification of humanity is on the earth; we only need to look at today’s terrible destruction of economic life. When we search for the ultimate reason why this economic life has suffered such damage, why it follows such a destructive path, we must first of all tell ourselves that out of an indeterminate urge from all of humanity, the striving tendency at present is to create a single economic area for the whole world. On the other hand, peoples of the earth don’t go as far as the point of ennobling their national egotisms in such a way that really, what these individual nations can produce can become the overall economic life of the earth, but that one nation will snatch something away from the other. As a result, and out of old instincts, peoples develop impertinent points of view while new instincts are creating a worldwide economy required for the whole of humanity. This is knowledge which today, I could say, needs to be grasped with both hands, which is repeatedly stressed by ruling minds of the present: that this striving is available for a unified earth economy, but it was opposed until into the 20^th century when the national economies, with their opposition to an overall earth economy, caused the process of decline of the economic life we face today.

This is to be hinted at only. This is not our essential concern today, something else is. We need to occupy ourselves with people’s spiritual and soul discouragement as a result of the frightening revelation of hate, the frightening manifestation of antipathy we have experienced over the last five or six years. Certainly these were around for a long time, but only revealed in such a terrible way as in the course of the last five to six years. Where it deals with the knowledge of one people to another, it is concerned with absorbing the soul-spiritual being of another earthly people, then, my dear friends, we can’t just go among these other people or be steered through our destiny, to, in this way — certainly through the communications which happen between one person and another daily — get to know the other people. To gain knowledge of a people, travel or living among other people has as little meaning as when, in trying to understand an individual, I merely observe his gestures and movements. If I have a sense for such things, his gestures and movements may let me guess something, only in order to get to know him directly, I will be in a better position if I allow his language to work on me, when I’m in the position to take from him what through his inner strength, he wants to convey.

Is there a similar communication of inner strength from within the being of one people to another? Purely the language and what can be observed on a daily basis from one people to another, can’t be it, for it is only valid in the exchange of one person to another. Something must come to the fore which goes beyond the mere individual-human, beyond the recognition coming out of the understanding of the other person. We're basically at a quandary if we even want to talk about uniform folklore in an understandable way. Is there actually something of uniform folklore which is as sensually real as external things or external beings, that allows us to speak of a unified folklore?

We can talk about single people, about individual beings, even if we only want to allow sensory observation. Sensory observation only takes us as far as the sum of so and so many individuals. If we want to recognise folklore as something real, we can’t do anything other than rise up to something supersensible.

In fact, for those who undergo the spiritual training we have more often spoken about here during the last weeks, who have in their human soul developed the otherwise slumbering powers of cognition, for them, what is called folklore, can indicate an actual being, certainly a real being of a supersensible kind. Then, however, for someone who is receptive for the spiritual world at all, for them what appears in the strange folklore is a spirit being, supersensible, which permeates the sensual being of people like a kind of cloud, which belongs to this folklore and envelops it. Only when one wants to try searching for such characteristics from one people to another people, which grows out of the supersensible, can one penetrate the being of a folk, like one never can penetrate in daily exchanges between single people. This is what I would like to try and sketch in a few lines for you today: how spiritual science wants to begin to recognise the togetherness of peoples of the earth across the globe in a truly profound way. This is important to me, that the single human being is really recognised out of the sources of spiritual science.

During my lecture in Stuttgart I have already pointed out that some years ago, in my written book, “Riddles of the Soul” I mentioned that this human being, as he stands before us in daily life, is no single being but that in fact the human organisation — I mean the direct, natural human organisation — is such that it appears in three clearly differentiable members.

First of all, we have in the human organisation that which relates to the head organisation as the central point of what one can call in the individual, the nerve-sense organisation. The human being experiences his sensory organs and his imaginations, his thoughts, ideas, through the tool of this nerve-sense organisation; a thinking person is a person of the earth through his nerve-sense organisation. Now, one gets an image from current science that the entire human soul spiritual organisation depends on the nerve-sense system which is to a certain extent set up like a parasite on the rest of the organism. This is not the case.

I ask for your forgiveness if I make a personal remark here, but I must say the following. A thirty-year-old follower in pursuit of human nature and being, a pursuit for the harmony of spiritual scientific knowledge with scientific knowledge, has made me want to reinforce this threefold division of the natural human being. It is the common judgement of today’s science that the entire soul-spiritual life runs parallel with the nerve-sense existence. In truth this is different. In truth only the life of thought is linked to the nerve-sense system, while the feeling life, emotional life, is linked to all that happens in the human rhythmic system. Not merely indirectly but directly, the emotional and feeling life are linked to the rhythm of breathing and blood circulation, just as the thinking and perceptive life is linked to the nerve-sense organism. Just as the feeling and emotional life is connected to everything in the human being which has its origin in rhythm, so the life of will is connected to everything related to metabolism. The seemingly most humble in the human being, metabolism, is the carrier of the life of will — as a process, not as matter.

So, the human being is a soul spiritual threefold being. The spiritual will, the soul’s frame of mind and the outer material expressions of organised thinking, imagination and observation; these are the three members of the soul-spiritual human being.

These three members of the soul-spiritual human being correspond to the three members of the human physical organism: firstly the nerve-sense apparatus, the nerve-sense mechanism, secondly, the organisation involved with the rhythmic life of blood circulation, which is given by breathing, and the third, metabolism, which creates all kinds of processes through both of them, within the human organism.

If we now look at people in a certain area of the earth, then they do not show in their threefold organisation that somehow, with all people in this threefold organisation all over the whole earth, they have to be essentially the same. This is again a big mistake in current thinking, that it is believed one can create something which can be commonly applied all over the world, for example with a social program, and that people must comply with such a common program, because people all over the world are individualised and specialized. For someone who wants to really understand the human earth wisdom, who really wants to learn to understand his gender on earth, he must be able to develop love, not only towards general humanity — which would only be the idea of humanity, the dead, empty idea of humanity — but love must be developed for individual configurations of human nature all over the various areas of the earth.

Obviously, we can’t in the short time allotted to us, enter into all the singular, individual peoples and characterise them, but we could look into the main types in the human earth organisation. If we want to look at the oldest kind of human characteristics, we would firstly be directed to the oriental human type in the ancient people of the Indians and also other oriental people where it would be revealed in the most varied ways. It shows, namely in the characteristics of the Indian people, how the oriental human being has grown up alongside earthly nature, which he’s grown up with. Now, as far as it appears to us, this human soul has taken up, into his mind, the intense commitment to spiritual devotion, but as much as we are impressed by mysticism — we are studying the oriental person in hindsight of his folk characteristics — so we find that what is so admirable as the highest spirituality revealed within him is precisely dependent on the experience of the flowing will, which in turn is linked to the metabolism to which man is bound. As paradoxical as this may seem, precisely the elevated spirituality of oriental folk, also namely the Indian, is something which — if I could use this rough expression — “boiling up” out of the metabolism, the metabolism which stands in relation to his own being in the processes, the earthly nature surrounding these people.

Out there in the Indian countryside, out there are the trees, fruits, all that is the delightful, admirable nature for people — and particularly those of olden times — which came out of itself, and united in such a way with metabolism that what happens as the metabolic process is to a certain extent the continuation of what was happening outside, how the trees “cooked” their fruits, how the roots weaved under the earth and so on. I would like to say that these oriental people have completely grown through their metabolism with the earthly growth and its prosperity. That is how it is made up: while metabolism is the carrier of the will, will forces develop within people. However, what develops particularly in human beings, what is stuck in him completely and connects him to the environment, that doesn’t enter so much into his consciousness. Something quite different streams into consciousness. Here it is just that which in the feeling life and in the life of thinking, the Oriental — particularly characteristic in the Oriental, the Indians — stream what apparently is experienced in human metabolism but experienced in such a way that in its spiritual reflection it presents itself exactly as spiritual life.

So, it seems to us that what comes out of the mind, out of the thinking of the oriental peoples, what they produce spiritually, is like a spiritual product coming out of the earth itself. When we immerse ourselves intensively, let the spiritually permeated Vedas speak to our souls, when we immerse ourselves into the instinctive Vedanta philosophy, into the yoga philosophy, when we immerse ourselves in the works of those like Lao Tzu, Confucius, when we have a sense at all for oriental poetry, oriental wisdom, then nowhere in this wisdom do we experience a feeling that it flows from a particular individual human, formed out of a personality. Just like the Oriental through his metabolism has developed alongside the natural environment, like the surrounding nature continues to web and weave, boil and simmer, that’s how it is when we let its poetry, its poetic wisdom and its wise poetry work on us. It is as if the earth itself is speaking, as if the secrets of earthly growth would speak through the mouth of the Oriental to the whole of humanity on earth. One gets the feeling that the Oriental translates the inner spiritual secrets of the earth itself, in other words no other members of other peoples — no western people or people from the European centre — can translate or interpret what the secrets of the earth itself are.

Yes, if one wants to characterise the best members of the oriental folk it is as if they, when walking over the earth and wanting to express inner experiences of what is revealed as actually living under the surface of the earth, growing up from beneath this surface of the earth, blossoming and making fruit; it is revealed that what lives soul-spiritually in oriental humanity, is expressed at the same time in the inner earth. Through this we can understand why the Orientals, with all their being, for what is offered on the earth’s surface as physical appearances, what is revealed as outer sensory facts, have little meaning. Within them they simultaneously carry subterranean earth forces in their own nature, towards the phenomena and facts. For this reason, they have little interest for what happens on the surface of the earth. They are metabolic people. Yet we see that this metabolism is revealed in them in a soul-spiritual manner.

What happens when an ideal rises in these people? Or, when these people feel an ideal which the oriental teachers of wisdom want to present to their pupils as a particular goal for the soul, they will express it somewhat like this: ‘You must breathe in such and such a way, you must feel yourself in this or that way into the rhythm of human life.’ — Instructions for the particular breathing rhythms, for a particular blood circulating rhythm, are what they give their pupils. It is extraordinary what the oriental teachers of wisdom give their pupils in order to rise to a higher level of consciousness and principles of feeling. The Oriental, as he stands in ordinary life, namely in as far as he belongs to the southern Asiatic peoples — is constituted according to metabolism. When a concrete ideal rises before him, as to how he can become a higher being, then he develops his rhythmic system, he looks for what he voluntarily trains as something higher which does not have to be acknowledged in natural phenomena.

Now it is extraordinary, when we, the more we go over from the Asiatic peoples into those in Europe, namely Central Europe, that in everyday life one finds particularly that member of human development revealed in what we call the rhythmic system. Particularly those peoples who live in Central Europe, not in the east nor in the west but in the centre of Europe — and as a blossoming within this race, it particularly emerges among German people — these peoples have in their everyday characteristics that which the Indian strives for as his ideal of higher man. There’s a big difference between something first acquired through self-discipline, through freedom, or whether one has acquired it naturally, instinctively. The Central European person has in a natural way what the Oriental first must develop out of his metabolism which is closely linked with the earth. What is every-day and natural for the European is the ideal for the Asiatic, and so something else must become an ideal. The ideal for European people would be that which lie on a higher level: thinking life, as it is bound with the life of the nerves-senses.

These Central European people — how do they strive to express this externally in what seems to be bound to the spiritual scientific view as the tool of rhythmic life? The Oriental has something like unbridled imagination in his artistic creations; it really is something that rises like a haze from the inner earth process like mists from water. The rhythmic, inwardly united nature which is the essential thing in the life of Central Europeans, already appeared in the old Greek peoples, from whom so much came forth into the whole of modern civilization, specifically in what we regard as the art of Europe. What appears to us as the expression of inner harmony of earthly human beings, where neither the material on the one side nor the etheric-spiritual on the other side is particularly developed, where the central part of the human being comes into expression, is what the Greek strived for. Look at the creation of oriental imagination: it flows to the one or to the other side. In Greece first the human form, artistically conceptualised, take on its harmonious curve, its inner unity. That is so because the Central European person captures the central part of his being in the rhythmic system. If he now imagines an ideal, then it takes place through his striving in an inner soul search, through his dialectic logic, through his scientific education; it is through the use of his organs of thought, just as with the Indian it is through the use of the rhythm linked organs in his being.

Like the Indian yogi sits and tries to organise his soul-spirit through breathing, so that it will make him go beyond the ordinary person, so the Central European — whose rhythmic system of the blood circulation and breathing develops instinctively and make him into a person — so the Central European is educated out of the thinking life. These ideas take on a form in the best individuals of Central Europe and translate, interpret, what the human being as such, is. That is what we notice when we hear about the deepening in artistic creations of the oriental peoples going over into those of European humanity.

With oriental artistic creations it is so that we, even in the highest of spiritual creations, see something like a blossoming of earthly evolution; the human mouth is similarly only there to allow the earth to express itself. This is not the case with Central European peoples, already since the time of the Greeks. With today’s Central European people — if they follow their own nature and do not become untrue to themselves — it is so that when they want to echo their highest, express everything that they are as human beings, they would want to submit to acknowledging the fact that self-knowledge is the noblest fruit of human endeavour. The representation of the human being in the surrounding of people, in nature and history, that is the noblest human creation, which is finally what is essential when the Central European surrender to their own nature and essence.

Out of this we see how central Europe could actually allow such wonderful thoughts to develop as those we see in Goethe’s book about Winckelmann — I would like to say it is like the sun of modern cultural life. In his book about Winckelmann, Goethe expresses all that lives in the higher feelings, deep thoughts and strong will of these prodigies, and compiles it all into his world view, by saying: “Now artistry enters, because by making man appear as the highest accomplishment of nature, he sees himself once again in all of nature, and nature itself must produce a pinnacle. To do this, he is enhanced by permeating himself with all the perfections and virtues, calling up choice, order and meaning and finally rises up to the production of the work of art, which, in addition to other deeds and works, occupies a brilliant position.”

The human being gradually brings about a new nature out of his own spirituality. This directing of all human powers towards the comprehension of man himself, is what — according to folklore — is the most prominent in the Central European people when they are true to themselves; only in recent times this has withdrawn. There’s every reason in the people of Central Europe to reflect, as they do when they follow their own nature and appreciate and understand it and penetrate the truly human as it is and should become.

If we now look from a more spiritual side, with a spiritual point of view towards the East with its ethnic groups, then we find that these oriental peoples have a spirituality which makes them aware of the connection the human soul created with the divine, precisely developed through them being metabolic peoples, while within them, to be completely natural, they must oppose that which hasn’t come from the elementary world, because they must oppose what is the opposite in their consciousness; what is in their own nature. Through his heart the Oriental grasps and speaks about man’s connection with the divine as something obvious, that no other member of any other people on earth can speak about in the same way. As a result, members of other peoples of earth, when they subjugated and conquered the Oriental peoples, even taking away their idiosyncrasies and imposing their own laws and orders on them, they were absorbing what the Orientals in connection with the divine had said, and took it up as something defining for themselves as well. We see lately how western peoples who have sunk into materialism, take on such oriental philosophies like those of old Lao Tzu, seeking refuge in Chinese points of view, in Indian world views — not so much as to discover ideas but to find that fervour, that in man can be sensed in connection with the divine, simply and strongly. It is more to enkindle feelings in such a way as the Orientals do in their speaking about the divine, to deepen themselves in oriental literature, and less to experience their philosophic content. However, the abstract nature of Europeans sometimes makes the concept of the Oriental inapplicable to the Europeans.

I have repeatedly had to encounter people who have read the sayings of Buddha with its endless repetitions and they have told me this should be shortened and republished; each repetition of a sentence should be omitted so one would not need to read repetitions. — I could only respond, repeatedly, by saying: You will learn nothing essential of what is great for the Oriental peoples because it is precisely contained in what you now want to omit. — Because, by the oriental reader endlessly repeating the sayings of Buddha, he reaches his ideal: the rhythmic recurrence of the motif. He returns ever and again to that sentence. What is an everyday occurrence to him is what is going on in himself as ‘metabolic-man’; what is happening in him in the reoccurrence of Buddha’s sayings is the most free striving in his soul-spiritual as a counter image of breathing: the blood circulation system.

If one really wants to become one with what is holy and great for the Oriental, one learns to recognise that as a member of another people it is something which one can’t easily learn to recognise. The European has of course the need to eliminate repetition; because he lives in the rhythm of breathing, his ideal is to rise above it into thinking. Once a thought is grasped, he doesn’t want repetitions; the European strives to go beyond repetitions.

You need to have another kind of understanding, not an outer thought-applied understanding, if you want to allow yourself to enter into such oriental repetitions. You need to develop an inner love for the various differences expressed individually and stand in front of these so that you can feel: What is regarded great for the one, the other does not have. — This you will only discover when you can love the other peoples, when you accept what is great for the other peoples.

Only when we enter deeply into the inner nature and being of peoples of the earth, do we find individual beings as so different, that we must say: the comprehensive human element actually doesn’t appear through a single person, nor is it revealed by a member of a single nation, but it appears throughout all of mankind. If you, a single person, can recognise what you are as a total human being, so do peculiarities stroll in individual peoples all over the earth. Take in everything you can’t have yourself, and only then are you a whole human being. You have that person in you; you only have to take notice of what is within you. What is revealed to the other, you don’t have; you must seek it with him. You feel you need it. You feel it and now, when you find what is important for another person, what his peculiarity is, let it simply work into you. It becomes a need that you can’t be without, what you receive from him, because it corresponds to your inner soul-spiritual desire.

The disposition to become a whole person is already within everyone, but we must find fulfilment by understanding the peculiarities of the being of the different peoples as they are spread over the earth. When we come to this spiritually, we can say to ourselves that in the Orient this spirituality is man’s ability to express the divine as something natural in greatness.

However, today we find covered up as if by a layer that has to go away again, a layer of misunderstanding, something highly peculiar among the people of Central Europe, within the Central European people. If we look at all our great philosophers, among them those who thought about nature and god, I would like to say I have equally thought about it like this: There is nearly no great German philosopher, who has not in all intensity deepened the question: What is the law that prevails between one person and another? — The search for justice, however hidden and misunderstood, is a peculiarity of the Central European people. Whoever doesn’t recognise this, doesn’t understand these Central European people, and doesn’t find the enthusiasm, from present materialism, which comes from something quite different, to find his way back to what actually in truth characterises these Central European peoples, this true German nature, this true German idiosyncrasy and being.

Just as the Oriental, himself being like a flower or fruit of the earth bringing its spiritual life into expression, he becomes the interpreter, the translator of the earth; likewise, the German becomes the interpreter of himself. He asks the same questions to himself. By his doing so, he stands in front of every other person as an equal and thus the burning question for him becomes the question of rights. Not the acquisition of the Roman laws but the research into legal nature — you find this in Fichte, in Hegel, with Schelling — everywhere where German thinking goes into the depths of the world. Finally we find as the abstract pursuit opposes the legal question, with Fichte, Hegel, Schelling and Humboldt, basically the same in concrete terms as when Goethe, in the course of all his searches, finds the expressions and statements of the true, closed in on all sides, harmonious human nature.

In this regard Goethe is the representative, I would like to say, of the essence of Central Europeans, the representative of the Central European, of the German people. Just as the Oriental relates to the earth, so the Central European relates to self-knowledge. Should we now go to the west of Europe, and further, we find the same characteristic expressed, over to America, of the true Occidental; we find that their essential nature is given to abstract thinking in particular. Westerners are predominant head people; the Orientals are the heart people who experience their heart in the process of metabolism; the Central European man is the human being of breathing who relates through this rhythm with the outer world. If I may use an image — as I believe — the extraordinary spiritually imbued Rabindranath Tagore used, the spiritual Oriental, then I could say: The Western person, The Occidental, the head person is used by Tagore who compares it with a spiritual giraffe — he loved them, one should not attach any kind of antipathy to using such a characteristic. He compared them with a spiritual giraffe, so one gets the feeling — essentially-spiritually it is shown — the head is distanced from the rest of the bodily nature, a long neck separates the head from the rest of the body, a head, which then only grasps abstract concepts, such abstraction which could result in the four abstract points of Woodrow Wilson. It has a long way to go until these abstract terms, these husks of words and empty ideas find their way to the heart, the lungs, the respiratory system, until they find the way to those places where they can become feelings, then be passed over into the will.

Here we have people whose characteristics are, what I would call, a thinking system. What the Central European aspires to as an ideal, what he yearns to achieve in freedom, the Westerner, namely the American, does not strive for in freedom; this he has been given as an instinct. He is an instinctual abstractionist. There’s quite a difference whether a person is instinctive or whether this has been acquired. If it has been acquired, then it is quite differently connected to human nature — a person experiences it quite differently when he has freely acquired it than when his instincts have been granted through nature.

Here lies a great danger. You see, while the Indian can strive through his yoga philosophy through the rhythmic system, the Central European can aspire to the thinking system, but in the case of Western mankind, if it is not to lose its humanity, it should lose the “spiritual giraffe” of a head. Westerners are incumbent indeed upon what I have openly said where there is a gathering of Westerners: they are incumbent upon what must be characterised as the great responsibility of what present day Western humanity has. Western specification, Western folklore will be lost, obliterated, if it aspires through a system of thinking; if it reaches into the void or into empty spiritism, and where one finds a spiritual void, the spiritual is sought. Here lies the big danger but also the responsibility: the danger to reach the soul-void through aspiring beyond what has been given to human beings through natural causes, and the responsibility to reach up to real spiritual science — if you don’t let it, through its world dominance, contribute to the demise of humanity.

By contrast, Central Europeans will have a healthy aspiration for freedom, which will lead them into spirituality, bring them to spiritual science. I might say: The peoples of Central Europe have a holy duty — because it’s in their system — to ascend the spiritual ladder to spiritual cognition. They acquire, by their moving from their rhythmic- and breathing system to the thinking system, always still in something which lies in the human condition. For the Westerners there is the danger that they forsake the purely human, especially if they have adopted an ideal form — hence all those who are now regarded as general human beings, sectarian aberrations and similar endeavours of the West. This is certainly not clearly seen at present.

As with the case of the Oriental whose metabolic system is turned to the earth, a spiritual process along natural paths appear, so with the Westerners who have primarily developed their thinking system, the regard to the world of the senses is revealed. With the Oriental it is like something which works beneath the earth’s surface; with the Westerner it is as if he only sees what is on the earth’s surface, what he can see as facts appearing through the sun, moon and stars, through air and water. What happens in the environment could not be explained by thinking. I have mentioned in previous lectures here, how that which is spiritual within people, can’t be explained by the outer world.

The Oriental knew himself, through what flowed as spiritual-earthly-blood through his own human condition, revealed what lived in him spiritually, as someone belonging to the entire cosmos, a member not only of the earth, but a member of the whole cosmos. What the Westerner developed particularly as a system of thinking — through modern science — was that nothing more of this cosmos remained for him except what he could calculate through formulae of mathematics and mechanics. Therefore the area in which the Westerner must see himself, from where his soul originated, if he must admit that as a thinking human being he couldn’t have come from cosmic origins, then, in this sphere, he must say to himself: I have no other science than dry, sober mathematics. —

The Oriental has grown out of what flooded from the earth itself, into his individual human condition. What he reveals in his poetic wisdom is the blossoming of the earthly. What the Central European recognises as human is the same as what another person reveals through himself: here the human being confronts himself.

In the Westerner the most valuable thing is just that which is not derived from the earthly, but what he has from the cosmos. However, he has no other means to acknowledge the super-earthly, other than through calculation or spectral analysis which is probably as dry as calculating and the like, or even by similar hypotheses. This way the Westerner searches for what the Oriental in his inner nature seeks as an expression of his relationship with the divine, what the Central European seeks as an expression of the human in the Goethean wholeness of being, or in the lawmakers who see equality for all, the Westerner seeks by devoting himself preferably to the economic life. What the Westerner means when he speaks about rights, through which he characterises the spirit, flowers in him only through economic life. For this reason it is quite natural that Karl Marx came out of Germany where he could have, if he was blessed with the ability, to, in a humanistic, in a Goethian sense, come to know what the human being is, that he had to go towards the west, towards England to be shown the way to the human being, to see over into actual human nature and come to the belief that what the human being can acknowledge is no more than an ideology, as something that rises out of economic life.

This is no absolute truth but it forms a foundation in a certain way in the nature of Western people, just as it is the foundation in the nature of Orientals, to regard nature as a minor planet in relation to human beings, and that they can speak of the connection of the human soul to divinity as if it is something self-evident. As a result of this so many Westerners who feel a need to look at the divine, develop a longing — then, if they extend their conquest beyond the Oriental peoples — they take what these people have to say regarding the relationship which human nature has with divinity, because in human beings, as I’ve already said, there’s a need to be full human beings.

So we see — and we could also extend this to smaller groups of peoples, to individual peoples, we can only refer to what is typical — we see, that actually a full human being is not expressed in the members of a people. We see that this full human being lies in us as a need and out of this need, only love to all other human beings must grow, particularly for these human qualities which we do not have, which we can only acquire by devotionally seeking the knowledge for that essence that lives in other peoples on earth, and to connect it with our own people.

This has been the kind of internationalism that prevailed in the time of Goethe. This has been the kind of internationalism which saturated Wilhelm von Humboldt’s “The limits of Effectiveness of the State.” This quest for cosmopolitanism is achieved by taking up, through love for all other peoples, the essence of one’s own people, ennobling and elevating what comes from one’s own people to find in other people what they find as great and good. So, even in Germany’s intellectual heyday, there emerged out of the rhythmic life what at that time, in the noblest cosmopolitanism, was found by Germans searching among all other peoples. See how Herder went on his quest to all nations, how he sought to unravel the deepest essence of all peoples of the earth! See how he permeated with what basically lives in us all — ensouling the single, individual flesh person that we each carry around — into a greater, more powerful, different ensouled human being who lives though us, but who can only be found when we pour ourselves out like this over all peoples.

One needs to note what happened at the turn of the 18^th and 19^th Century as the system applied to the largest part in Central Europe, to confront what is today known as internationalism, you can’t say it pulsed through the world but was preached through the world, seducing mankind, as Marxism — Marxism, which only believes in human thinking and that in a more or less weakened form, which didn’t have a clue of how all of humanity was differentiated all over the world, which believes that humanity, as human beings, can be forced into an abstract form. Marxism isn’t the first in the rise, it is the last in the decline, one of the last in the decline because it is devoid of all striving for true internationalism because precisely though taking up what can be gained through love of all peoples, it elevates one’s own folklore. This internationalism which appears in Marxism and all its derivatives, means getting immobilised in one-sided systems of thinking, in impractical thought systems, which are merely pinned to the sensual world and does not penetrate folklore.

By contrast, true internationalism corresponds to kindling the love which touch all peoples, the light which all peoples may receive in order for deeds, experiences, creations of individual people to become a great choir of all peoples on the earth, that this may contribute to the full understanding of peoples, an understanding which can only unite what comes out of true, essential, mutual knowledge of the peoples of the earth.

Now, my dear friends, today I wanted to speak of what kind of knowledge could unite peoples of the earth. I didn’t want to talk about other things which could be more programmatic or details of spiritual science itself. I wanted to speak about what as a spiritual scientific knowledge, is inspired through other spiritual research about the possible course of love flowing into community life of peoples on the earth. One can quite certainly characterise the most varied points of view needed for the future of humanity. One can certainly speak about those impulses. However one has to admit that to everything in the social political, in the legal state area, what can be said in the area of education has to join in — illuminating all this — that comfort, that soul comfort, that spiritual comfort that can come from such insights as have been tried today, I would like to say, suggested in a rather cursory sketch rather than something more comprehensive. Consolation can come from insights which are based on rhythm, the possible, I say explicitly possible, rhythm related to human factual life, which we want to get to know the day after tomorrow in all its peculiarities though spiritual science: that that, which has lived through history, shows how it directly stuck inside our immediate present.

Today’s considerations will show you that it is possible from the waves on which hate and antipathy have flooded over humanity, also healing from the knowledge of unity has emerged from a wave of international human love and a love of nations, just like new wave crests appear from out of the troughs. It is possible. However, we live in an epoch where what is possible in people must be consciously and wilfully aspired to. People must look at which conditions of unity among peoples of the earth exist so that each single one can contribute his knowledge to it, so that after the wave of hate, the wave of human love may follow. Only out of his human love can that be healed, that hate has destroyed. If love is not willed, then destruction will remain. That is the terrible alternative which confronts people’s souls, people of discernment. Whoever really experiences this dreadfulness would say to themselves: Souls dare not sleep otherwise it could happen that through spiritual powerlessness of the sleep of nations, they will be unable to rise from the wave of hatred up to the wave of love.

Whoever can see this through, will take in the knowledge which comes to him from a spiritual view of the relationships of peoples. He will take up this knowledge in his feelings and develop human love out of it. He will take this up in his will and develop human deeds out of it. He would say to himself: The development of time itself, everything that appears so frighteningly, so paralysing in the present, I will place before my soul as a duty: In the face of all that has in the most modern time right up to the present caused fragmentation in humanity, I will gather it all to be united through what is love in humanity. — This unity through love, to seek for this unifying through love, is not only a feeling which somehow or other develops in us, but it appears in those who look through relationships in the present, as the biggest duty of humanity in our present time.