Healthy Thinking

Lecture 5

Healthier thinking for contemporary life

Stuttgart on 8 June 1920

My dear honourable friends! Today it is impossible to form an opinion about the great affairs of the day without before all else looking at the deeper forces regarding the work and aspirations of the whole of humanity, which has been continuing for decades and has reached quite a special culmination today. Under the current conditions it is not possible to create an opinion of important things going on in humanity, without at least looking at the deeper foundations of all human striving as it is expressed in the present time. Therefore, please allow me, in this first of my next two lectures, the continuation of which will be given the day after tomorrow, to give some sketched observations of the deeper seated longings in contemporary humanity.

It was in July 1909 when a momentous speech was held in America by Charles Eliot, who had been from 1868 and up to the time of delivering the speech, the chancellor of the Harvard University. At that time Charles Eliot spoke, as one can see from his speech, out of the consciousness of looking at the soul and spiritual concerns of all civilized humanity according to his point of view. He called his speech “The Religion of the Future” and wanted to give the impression what this religion of the future would not be, and what it would be. If I look back on this speech however, the content Eliot spoke about seems to me far less meaningful than the actual attitude of his words. Above all, the most important for me seemed to be that a representative of the people of the current civilization would look for a healthy way of thinking about great world views and questions about life.

Now, my dear friends, when one points out something like this one may never forget that between that which was pronounced by even the most outstanding people at that time, and that which today lies in that terrible world war catastrophe which teaches more than all such words can teach – what all these people called big questions about the world and about life, instantly lights up in a completely different way than they could have been dreamt of back then. Towards a healthy thinking about the world and life, Eliot wanted to guide mankind. He looked back at the manner and way religions were in those times when science did not illuminate the souls of the greater masses of mankind. What he found most disturbing in all old religions was that they relegated man to a God who in a certain sense lived outside the enormous insights provided by natural science which was so great in the modern age. The human being felt himself to completely be a person of his epoch. To him old imaginations of the spiritual world appeared as those which had been created in a childlike humanity. It was particularly important to him that this scientific age could no longer see daemonic, spiritual beings in mountains and rivers, in trees and clouds, that a scientific age no longer could maintain the old pictorial concepts of God. It was also important to him to show that the concept of life, the concept of the social world had often suffered damage because of the fact that religious confessions, which were the leaders of thought for the vast majority of the people, the depressed people, miserable people, unable to cope with life, were relegated from the physical-sensory existence to a supernatural existence in the beyond, so that instead of processing life, instead of courageous intervention in life, for many people it meant looking beyond their immediate physical social existence. Everything the various confessions had to say about the reasons why one person was struck by some or other fate, also everything the various old confessions had to say about the world wielding divine laws, appeared out of date for Charles Eliot, the modern man, the man positioned in a time which started with Darwin, a time which for him meant particularly great accomplishments in medical progress which physically called upon for the relief of sick humanity’s pain.

In a certain way he wanted old priests, who always pointed towards the indefinite super-sensory, to be replaced by a physical doctor able to alleviate even those pains a mother has to endure at the delivery of a baby into the physical world; he wanted to replace old priests with those able to help with the physical work because for him it was a matter of shaping the physical conditions of this earth in such a way that as many people as possible could experience joy and satisfaction from life. All of this - so it appeared to Charles Eliot – has in some way to take up healthy thinking and he hoped that from the views given by recent scientific developments humanity was provided with insight to bring them the goal they longed for.

I mention this especially because in this short speech about the religion of the future, everything is drawn together, so to speak, in a representative person what the so-called educated, namely learned educated, imagined as a path to modern healthy thinking.

Now this speech about the religion of the future, which I have just characterised, had a highly peculiar content. Because I had already said something similar before the war catastrophe as I’m saying now, I shall become – because I say this frankly – not one of those who can be accused for what many can be accused of today: that now, after the war has raged for so long, they are in a strange way right to reflect on what was before the war. Charles Eliot spoke like a man with a certain concept, like a man can have who stands within the modern scientific knowledge and who out of an honest heart wants to give humanity a view of life that leads to their happiness and satisfaction derived from these scientific notions. But how does he speak? If you choose to read between the lines, what can we say about the way he speaks? Observe his thoughts: they are born out of the spirit of the times but they can only be spoken when one is surrounded by a world in which first of all, in the social and in the direct living conditions, these thoughts don’t become reality. These thoughts can only be uttered when one is surrounded by a world whose view of life is based in a much older time, when one was surrounded by a world when in the souls of people there lived certain concepts which certainly hadn’t been created as is sought by such a scientifically educated religious person but which have a deep influence on the organisation of social life.

In other words, my dear friends, one can say that such a man can talk, but you can sense in his thoughts that the moment the full consequence, unflattering forms which he says, are to be realized – then, when the old traditions no longer work in the surroundings – these ideas will actually turn out to be powerless. For those who can understand something of the horrific events in recent years, would say: These events since 1914 have significantly positioned themselves between what could have been spoken about at that time, and that which today appear to us as the great, overwhelming questions of the time. To a certain extent Charles Eliot pointed out at the end of his speech that he could not know how this, what he regarded as healthy thinking, could directly be realised in practical life, for that, only experience would have to show.

Now, my dear friends present here today, as strange, as paradoxical as it may sound to you, there is a part of the world today where these experiences can be submitted. What this educated, learned man could allow to be spoken about in the middle of an environment which no longer needed it, to show the final consequences of these thoughts, this is out of another kind of mind, out of another soul mood, being implemented in the east of Europe and already tried in a large part of Asia – as paradoxical as it might sound. While the thoughts of Eliot, meaning the last social consequences of a scientific world view could peacefully be expressed and with it still be valid for a good, brave citizen in the midst of an environment where people don’t even think about drawing on the latest consequences of reality, the existence of human beings are destroyed, destroyed the moment where tabula rasa is made of old relationships, where the environment is no longer created by old governmental traditions, where people don’t allow that to continue living in their environment based on old traditions, even originating through a particular tyranny.

When you reveal the consequences of these final thoughts to outer reality, you become a Leninist, or become a Trotzkyist; then you begin to actualize what should originate purely out of what Eliot was looking for as healthy thinking from what wants to be born out of the purely scientific world view point. However, when you try to turn it into a reality then you don’t build anything up, but only allow the destructive process to continue, which started in 1914, which will continue to make bitter, bitter experiences for humanity. That, my dear friends, is what a review teaches after a relatively short period of time, of what has become a sincere conviction of a man imbued with the entire education of the present day bringing his ideas into the open in 1909.

When we now ask ourselves what kind of connection exists between what a person, I could call him one with a certain materialistic Sunday sermon manner, could say in an otherwise quite different world, to another person about what has developed in Eastern Europe and over a large part of Asia? Then one has to, in order to examine the social connections at present and in the all of the conditions of life of modern man, one has to go even into deeper foundations. One learns by looking at the question: How has this materialistic world view which is so important to mankind, which should actually bring happiness and satisfaction, come about in the course of modern times?

If I want to designate what characterizes the most modern kind of thinking, the thinking that is now about to become a social reality, I must say: This thinking is characterized by its inability to build a bridge between what is knowledge of the natural side of the world and what is the moral world, what are ethical ideas, what are moral forces. On the one side is what consists of the natural side of the world, fixed in ideas that are immensely plausible for every person who has just heard of contemporary sentiments as they have developed over the last centuries and especially in the 19^th Century.

The other side, spoken out of the corresponding human focus, asks what moral demands are and what should uplift people’s perception to a view that these moral claims are rooted in the world order - a world order, where the moral and the immoral can have a consequence in shaping the world, where the moral and the immoral can intervene in the events of the world, just as a lightning bolt intervenes in the events of the world.

Here we have two worlds drifting apart for decades. Here lives the newer way of thinking which, according to healthy thinking, certainly strives to establish a natural religion with it. It is able to envisage what knowledge exists in the facts of nature. It is able, when a human being is conscientious, to also consider the other: from within the human breast speaks the voice of morality which should point the way to religious awareness.

However today there is no bridge between the two worlds. There is the one world, the world of knowledge of natural facts. They believed a basic law was to be found which became the unshakable law as a result of the 19^th century, that of the unshakable law of the indestructibility of matter and substance – the law that is supposed to tell us that everything that is happening in space is the result of the sum of its forces, which may well be transformed but which will never increase or decrease, can’t be created or destroyed. With these forces cooperating, the form of the world is brought forth and world events which outwardly take place, seen by the senses, come about and from which we ourselves as physical people grow out of. Now if these forces can neither be created nor destroyed, if one can speak in the absolute sense of the preservation of matter and energy, then all the beliefs that appear in the wake of this view can’t be dismissed. From this we must accept – according to the same thinking habits in which humanity is forced to adhere to this law of the transformation of matter and energy – what would come about is that the earthly-cosmic, within which we find ourselves, is created out of the famous Kant-Laplace primal fog out of which the entire solar system originated through an agglomeration, and that in the course of this natural process man has also developed, after he has passed through the various animal forms. So we come to suppose that in the human soul the flashes, like inner life illusions, which appear in this human soul like the forces which alone can guarantee man his dignity are moral ideas and that which leads to a religious consciousness.

However, whoever clings with all its consequences to this world created out of the primeval fog of Kant-Laplace, has to also think about the end of the world along these lines. He has to think that this world is changing in which everything that humanity offers, including everything that has ever been offered in human souls and human spirits, disappears; he must think that within a grand cosmic scheme the whole human delusion of morality, of divinity is merely something that is born out of natural law - just as lightning and thunder, the alternation of day and night, and so on, is born out of natural law. As we look at a non-spiritual, non-soul like world creation; so we will look at a non-spiritual, non-soul world end. For someone who clings on to this world, with all the consequences, the best thing for him is that mankind thinks, dreams, is spun into the processes that take place between these two ends – the beginning and the end of the world; the best for him is for this mankind to think it’s just an episode, eventually vanishing into the pure natural universe.

My dear friends gathered here, with the best of will there is nothing to say about all the quackery that people still want to put forward for the validity of a moral and religious world when they argue for the one, with all the consequences, that is based on this scientific attitude. I know how much is preached in this direction today, that yes, despite this scientific attitude an ideal world view is still possible. It is only possible for those who don’t really want to go into all the consequences of their thinking. Man is quite motivated today to ask: why don’t people make this clear to themselves today, what has been hinted at here? Why this in particular, actually? About that you might get information if you remember, I could call it the springtime of that which has today become a general opinion, but which one does not admit to as a general opinion among the so-called enlightened when you refer back to this springtime of theoretical materialism, which flooded over the civilized world in the middle of the 19^th century. Today it has admittedly become modern to regard those who boldly pulled out the last consequences of the scientific attitude in those days, such as Moleschott, Büchner and so on, to be flat – which they undoubtedly are. But then even more is needed than what can be brought forward from the learned or unlearned side to characterize the whole relationship, which determines our stand towards them.

You only need to visualise a few facts to be able to appreciate all the seriousness and significance related to the social situation of contemporary man. I would like to mention one thing, for example what in the seventies (1870’s) a renowned cultural historian said: It is one of the most important results of modern times that scientific knowledge shatters everything that was born out of the old religions as an ethical ideal. – Yes, this cultural historian wrote it down drily, characterising it from the side of truth or untruth as only a scientific result could be, like the falling of rain, considered from this point of view.

But, of particular interest is a letter written from a very bold, inwardly daring personality to a former nature researcher. In the letter the following is stated: The modern worldview teaches us that everything which people live through is based on underlying natural causal laws which we see with our senses in the outer world. Everything coming from people out of their inner and so-called good deeds and good thoughts, what they bring forth as religious ideas, all this is nothing other than results of pure natural processes happening in people just like the gathering of clouds outside happen in nature. What holds true for me, this personality said, is that everything people have imagined as moral imperative is an illusion. I’m of the opinion that whoever is equipped to be a robber, a murderer, is entitled to live out his killing and robbing abilities to the full, just as another might be who is born to the contrary. I’m convinced, so this personality wrote, for the full worth of it, for its full moral integrity, people predisposed to impairment are therefore immoral, if they don’t live up to their abilities.

Obviously people are going to say today: This is a paradoxical truth. – But why would they do this? They say this on the basis of, on the one hand, having an unbelievable respect and complete faith in authority of above all what they’ve learnt from what’s cooking in the kitchen of science and on the other hand, they don’t have such equal courage as this personality who has written this letter, also handling its consequences. They remain standing half way, because they won't admit to themselves that if they once draw such conclusions, others must follow along the same path.

Now I would like to say: Just as Charles Eliot in 1909, in an environment that did not think of translating his thoughts into a social reality, could speak as he did, so also a personality in those days could rave about the full expression of criminal instincts because the complete acting out of the criminal instincts belong to the moral worth of the personality. In those days the time had not yet come for the creation of social facilities and social institutions which the people intended in this direction. However, now another question was asked: How should these institutions be created, which are now seen as a construction shaping our declining order of life that goes with it?

My dear friends present here today, when one really looks at the living situation of people in the present time, and then really looks at what actually lives within them – what is created out of what lives within are finally all that is expressed outwardly in economic, industrial and practical life – when one considers all of this, then one admittedly arrives at a bitter judgement of contemporary man’s life’s situation. What would it look like if a large enough number of people has the courage to awaken the soul, wake up the sleeping soul and say to themselves: If we take the totality of what has flowed from thinking during the last three to four centuries from scientific knowledge then everything that flows into social life will have to be shaped according to laws, empty and barren of everything that springs up in man as moral impulses or a religious world order because such laws can only be derived from the scientific point of view.

The real beginning of such a social order of life which divides the social society only as it appears in natural phenomena in outer life – we see this made in Eastern Europe and spreading over Asia; we see it theoretically learnt from Marxism, since decades. Marxism could also talk, as long as it didn’t involve the environment responding to its talk regarding the shaping of reality. Now the face of the world has turned more serious. Now it is important to raise the question in a comprehensive sense.

Could this way proposed to healthy thinking also be a way of life for mankind on earth? – For this reason, because the issue is so serous, it has to be really examined in the whole way people are, particularly because of those who believe in the achievements which are only good from a branch of knowledge of nature, to be able to construct social life. What have these achievement brought us?

I have often and for many years here in Stuttgart pointed out the greatness and importance of the scientific worldview, and those who have heard me more often will certainly not regard me as a despiser of this scientific world view – within the limits in which it is justified. But what this is about, is something else. Now there’s the question: Is a scientific worldview possible when it involves bringing in laws of human knowledge into shaping social life?

In order to answer this question one must go into the intended path to healthy thinking which this worldview has taken. Then one sees that this scientific worldview has based all its facts of nature on what it can encapsulate in the application of technology and industrial life. There one sees that, what has been achieved through the laws of nature in technical and industrial life, and in transport, has been expanded on a large scale. All of this achieved a pinnacle when the catastrophe of 1914 broke though which indicated how little social consideration had taken place in those who built machines based on the knowledge of science which created the world with means of transport clutter and so on. Indeed, what we see in technology is equal whether it leads to constructiveness or destruction, this is related in a certain direction to scientific thinking. This direction of scientific thinking wanted to become universal, wanted to be generally accepted, wanted to mean something for the whole human life.

There we see, however, isolated spirits I could call them, stand like eccentrics in the general development which had nevertheless proceeded from the conviction “how delightfully far we’ve come”. We see how they look at what is coming up and with tremendous concern look at the future. One only has to point out Soloviev, the Russian philosopher, who unfortunately only first became known in central Europe during the war years, and who had died already at the beginning of the century. He made profound observations of human life but he was also enlightened enough to consider practical life with his extraordinary good willing, mild soul and observe practical life as such. This philosopher Soloviev was overcome with bitter concern when he said to himself: Also over my Russia the inwardly rotten domination of all that the modern world view has derived from a scientific basis is spreading. Here Russia is flooded with all the delights – he’s not saying it ironically – all the delights of modern technology, modern transport and what is disappearing as if stolen from this world is what served as the basis for healthy Russian thinking. What disappears with each railway line set down, with every industrial plant, is where healthy Russian thoughts should be growing: on the earth and land. –

So one listens to how Soloviev speaks, how he has an understanding for human thinking being connected to the land, in a different way than the kind of thinking which has torn itself free from the earth and land, on an abstract level, as it were, even if it exists as a physical reality and is based on scientific foundations appearing as modern culture. Certainly, one can call it one-sided; it was after all one-sided in a certain way. How can anything after all be regarded from all sides when one lives in a world, where at the same time external forces strive to surrender everything in the world on to the basis of a scientific attitude? What is needed to achieve a healthy peaceful judgement against the materialistic dream of the whole of humanity, how can this one-sidedness be thrown out when he expresses his concern, which must have seemed in a certain way insane at a time when this modern culture was not yet so much in decline as now, after Soloviev has been dead for twenty years?

Also, this Charles Eliot, of whom I’ve spoken, roughly indicated what kind of futuristic religion he was thinking about when people would no longer believe in an super-worldly God or if in wider circles, they would no longer believe in daemonology. He said: The view of a unified God will be the rule, being inwardly in all things, also within the human soul and working in all of what is in laws of nature. –

One can see clearly stated in this speech, that there is also for such a well-meaning person like Charles Elliot, this God, connected with all he knows about the proliferation of matter, which is eternally changing, yet is an indestructible force. Basically the unified God was nothing other than a unity of matter and energy, for him. Out of such theoretical confessions he preached about the world which is to serve as the practical basis of life. He stressed: Eternally the saying must light up: “Serve your fellow human being”. Serve your fellow man – this is repeated again and again in his speech. However, with such a sentence, such a demand, it is certainly not only about the fact that words are expressed, but it is also about the question whether what is demanded from the people, can also be fulfilled by these people – fulfilled by allowing soul forces to be released from the depth of their souls which finally will find results in social human service, in social work according to the sentence: “Serve your fellow human being”. In other words one must ask: Is a worldview capable of providing a foundation to create true human love?

Is a worldview capable of being the root of a plant which, as it grows out of the earth will blossom and bear the fruit of human love? This question does not leave itself open to be answered in a logical, one sided and theoretic way. This question can only be allowed to be answered on the basis of what is happening historically. Had Eliot only waited for the experience which is now being shaped by European East and Asia, then he would have had his doubts. Because the historical result is that this socialistic teaching which only wants to build on the same scientific prerequisites, on which Eliot wants the world of the future and life in general, to be built on, that this socialistic direction is not capable of creating social life on what freely rises within people and turn into the fruits of love in the world. Out of this social doctrine and social tyranny nothing resounds which would awaken human love. Nothing resounds in us from the saying: “Serve your fellow man” because you love them – but what sounds in us is the encounter of dry, empty, man-killing words of duty to work which is driven into us like the military drills it into people.

I would like to mention that if one listens on the one hand to Charles Eliot of 1909 where the experience of the present was not yet available, where from the chair of the Harvard University he had held his pragmatic speech, it is like an echo against a later speech which the Russian socialist War Minister recently made, who said: Those people who are honest about the social order, will not fail to recognize what we owe to this war. It returned our sons as soldiers. They have become diligent soldiers. They have learnt to obey and comply with authority. Let us not fail to recognise what war has given us, that it has trained us as officers who can command, who by coercion can force people to know how to move up a position. Let us not forget war leaders who are capable of organising so that authority is added to this organisation. –

This speech sounds like an echo of transposing militarism on to social life contrary to what we – only as world view, because no one in this sphere thinks of making it a reality – derive as countered by Eliot’s speech. People don’t know that they have searched for healthy thinking on the way which the final consequences gave them, which is so clearly seen today. People don’t readily admit to the connection between what has for centuries, particularly in the last decades, presented to them in the world and life, what now appears as the will to form the social world - but which is completely powerless to shape this world in such a way that in it a worthy humane existence is actually possible. Out of this will-not-to-understand lies the very basis of searching for a path towards healthy thinking of life’s situation in contemporary man.

In my book “Key points of the Social Question at present and in the future” everything emerges from the efforts brought into being for the federation of threefoldness of the social organism. Here the way is sought for calling to life healthy social thinking without submitting to illusions, by keeping in mind what is involved in this question: Which thoughts underlie that which wants to be realised today as life-destroying? Which thoughts underlie the events that led to the absurdity of events that began in 1914? Whoever doesn’t want to create a clear, healthy judgement, can, in whatever position he might be standing, not participate with what is working today in every person according to the measure of his forces and his position in life. What is important today is clear, consequent thinking. This clear, consequential thinking only leads towards asking the question: Where does this so-called healthy thinking based on science, come from?

Anyone who knows about historical connections knows that in relation to airing our ideas, in relation to producing concepts in public life we have not brought them further than the Middle Ages. Much talk is raised about the darkness of the Middle Ages yet we still think in the thought forms of the Middle Ages. Where we have progressed, is in achievements of the knowledge of nature which has its counterpart in technology, in the achievements of knowledge regarding inanimate nature, actually only a part of lifeless nature which has its counterpart in technology. What we have achieved, what can be mastered by means of calculation, by means of geometry, that has become our worldview. This has gradually conquered such a position in the imaginative life of human beings, that it appears as the self-evident foundation of all of life’s views.

Besides this, has humanity concerned itself about further developing its inner power of thought, inner power of the soul in any way? No, that can’t be said. Thought forms, the art of thinking, the entire configuration of thinking with which science apparently works in the most exact and strictest way, are the same as what had been applied by scholastics in the Middle Ages. With the scholastics of the Middle Ages these thoughts were great, these thoughts were astute. Why so? Because these thoughts set the task of looking over into a spiritual world. One may think about a content as I’ve just indicated as one likes, but what training and formation of scholastic thinking has brought about, this can’t be indicated in a different way than in the way I will try to do now, through a calm, objective observation of the course of more modern culture.

For someone who knows what astuteness, what control of thinking techniques require such observation for thoughts of the Trinity, how the Sacraments and Consecration of Man to Christ can be followed – which at that time was observed in social life within all of humankind – will know with what kind of acumen these views can be pursued, which have no corresponding image in the sense world, where thoughts must depend solely on thought, they would say: One may think about the Trinity as one wants – but what at that time had developed as thinking techniques and logic with an inner responsibility towards the forms of thinking, was grandiose. It lives on as an inheritance. We don’t think in any other way today than the scholastic catholic scholars thought and now we have transferred this way of thinking to scientific fields. We think within the medieval thought forms locked into materially developed fields of recent times. We just don’t think with the same sharpness, because we don’t develop this sharpness of thinking.

We renounce, if we’re enlightened people, training this thinking for ideas like the incarnation of Christ, the Trinity and so on, we don’t train this thinking for looking at the super sensory world. If we would ask on what basis we should train this scholastic thinking and inwardly sharpen the contours, then we have to admit: because – what positive religions may say, often hiding the true facts of the case – because this thinking developed itself out of that looking at the soul which in antiquity still existed up to Plato, yes, valid up to the New Platonists, because this thinking develops from the observation, the spirit-soul observation of a spiritual, supersensible world. If someone wants to reach this thinking, he must look into the spiritual world, he must develop his thoughts in such a way, that they don’t only vanquish what is before the eyes in a course sensual way, but also that which must be grasped with the same delicacy and sharpness like things of the supersensible world.

In an instinctive way, not in a conscious way, presented as a world view I have been lecturing about here for years – in an instinctive way, but still in a spiritual way, the thinking of those ancient times was founded in the ranks of Augustine, the university scholastics of Albert Magnus, of Thomas Aquinas - on a thinking that was trained in seeing the supernatural world, because this thinking was a germinal shoot for a kind of looking into the supernatural world, even if this is denied by the positive theologians.

This thinking was already weakened in the Middle Ages. In ancient times, this way of thinking sought to penetrate into a spiritual world through the inner strength of man. In the Middle Ages people regarded the spiritual world as something which was not to be researched but interpreted by the soul itself. Now we are, in relation to the schooling of thinking, heirs of scholastic thinking. We certainly stand within the same stream of thought, only we can’t bring it to perfection. No longer are we able to develop really sharp logical contours in thinking because we don’t train our thinking through spiritual problems where thinking is left over to its own forces; we can only pursue what is visible in experiment rooms.

Where, today, do we find the last shoot of Catholic scholastic thinking of the Middle Ages? Where has the last shoot come out of what was considered a social view from the God state of Augustine and his successors, from this constricted organization, this militaristic arrangement of human community living? Where is the last shoot of medieval Catholic theology in relation to forms of thought? – That is Marxism. It is what prepared the great masses for socialistic doctrines today. All forms of thought of what modern socialism is, is nothing more than the last, decrepit shoot of thinking, which in higher scholasticism still only reaches half its height, which was born out of super-sensible vision, but which is no longer suitable for a scientific age. We have come to the point of describing the wide world in its natural existence, we’ve geometricised and mechanised it - people like Charles Eliot do speak about this point of arrival, but we haven’t been able to find a way into this world via a thinking route. For this reason we had to speak as Du Bois-Reymond spoke about the limits of knowledge of nature and the seven world mysteries. At the time, what question did Du Bois-Reymond answer in his sensational speeches “Recognising the limits of Nature” and “The Seven World Riddles”? – It answered the question that inherited scholastic thinking cannot penetrate natural science. That is no wonder. Thomas Aquinas had the doctrine of revelation in front of him; he had the doctrine of supersensible worlds before him as it was then common practice. Modern science didn’t exist at that time, he couldn’t use the argument of a newer science.

If one were to continue working in spirit – not in the sense of warming up Catholic scholasticism, of neo-Thomism (developed by Thomas Aquinas – trsl) - then one would have to say: This has become obsolete, something that in Lenin's and Trotsky's theoretical socialism consists of scholastic, over-scholastic thought forms out in the east of Europe and in Asia, which wanted to become realized. All this thinking, which has become decrepit, must again be transformed into a thinking rooted in perceiving inside the supersensible worlds. Just as at that time there was scholastic thinking which now has turned decrepit, has become weak, to really manage social relationships, which can’t form the roots in which love can blossom and bear fruit, this thinking has to be replaced with such a thinking whose roots are within the realization of supersensible worlds.

As Charles Eliot complained that what he imagined healthy thinking to be, was not quite popular in the widest circles because most people only want to deal outwardly through hypocrisy, he said: On the one hand there are those people who are serious about science and would seek such a natural religion for the future and expand it later, yet we still see how a part of these people, who also count as part of the educated ones, in all possible secret societies seek substitutes for old traditions, like in the Masonic Lodges, in the Odd-Fellows-Lodges. We see – Charles Eliot says – how a large portion of people are honestly looking for the supernatural, in spiritism, where Christian Science is looking for a way to reach the spirit. We see how the broad masses out of old habits cling to traditional confession – this Charles Eliot complained about. This is what he regarded as opposing the pursuit of this path to healthy thinking. He doesn’t realise that what he is developing is outside the reality of science. He doesn’t even think of telling himself that what has been raised must be grasped with a different thinking than the thinking which is only the legacy of medieval scholastic thinking, which is a thinking newly born from the spiritual world.

Truly, what has been raised today as socialism - is anything but what has lived through the centuries during the Middle Ages, which has not been overcome in the minds of the masses until today, by the newer culture. Even if these people appear as opponents of the confessions - their thought forms are quite in keeping with these confessions. With the same thought forms which the medieval human being wanted to penetrate God, with the same thought forms they now turn to today’s researcher of nature, who popularises today’s worldview layman, the theoretical socialist regarding the unity of matter and energy.

What must be achieved as a new seeing – will be represented for many years from this position and certainly in Stuttgart. It is important to perceive how that which is nurtured through the Threefold Social Organism is a necessary result of this new seeing – being necessary for the renewal of thinking, a rebirth of thinking coming out of the spiritual world. Only this rebirth of thinking can direct us towards building this bridge which could not have been built in the last century until into our time: this bridge built between the world, which stands there as the world of natural facts which one can observe as natural causalities, and that world which springs forth within, the moral world, the religious uprising, the religious world plan. Only by man having the courage to try hard to express thoughts in relation to this world view, through this alone man will reach clarity about what is important, both in terms of the view of life and also the social direction for the present.

My very dear friends, so inwardly - while based on knowledge - so inwardly permeated by the existence of a spiritual-divine world is this spiritual-scientifically oriented world view that is meant here. It is completely clear that in all knowledge living within man, what man inwardly experiences as his thoughts about the world, also what rises in him as human will in individual or social relations, that in all this the divine also lives as it lives in the outer existence of nature. This is what my “Philosophy of Freedom” already at the beginning of the nineties wanted to express and which has again been expressed in the publication of the new edition of this book. This is something which really wants to create a bridge between the observation of nature and the observation of those impulses in humankind, which need to come out of human freedom and absolutely only out of freedom must a justified structure of social coexistence be created. One thing is necessary: it is necessary to summon up a little more inner thinking courage than what the sleeping souls of the present have in common. For this reason it is necessary to seriously work with the question: What is at the root of what we expect as the future of mankind?

Outer observation of nature says: What we expect for the future of the earth, for the future of the entire solar system, must result from the transformation of matter and energy of what we see around us, what is here already, today. It is calculated, by applying mechanics, applying mechanics to atoms, about which so much is being said, formerly in absolutes, now in the hypothetical sense or in the sense of fictions. Now one reaches the conclusion: what we see as the end of the world happens through the transformation of matter and energy but without what happens in humanity because this is only one episode in these world facts. This is the inevitable consequence of a purely naturalistic view of the world.

This naturalistic world view appears to be the kind of world view I have for decades represented, so, as if someone were to look at a plant root and say: everything that is there must originate out of the plant root. That means, he would assume: there is the root which shoots into stem, leaf, stem, leaf and so on. He will only look at what can develop out of this root and he would not see that this root in front of him, is rotting away, decomposing, and from the plant grown out of the root, a new seed is created in which the plant is already invested.

If you read what is available in the literature of the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, you would see: In this way this spiritual science evaluates the great world view relationships as it is created from supersensible vision, as it is portrayed in my book “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment”. You say to yourself: on the basis of us now having the physical sensory world in front of us, there arises, as if sprouting within it, what is developing within our souls as moral impulses, as ideal observation, as ideal thought forms, as religious courage for the truth – one must only see this in the right light. There it develops like a small shoot developing in a plant. When once this entire world which surrounds us as a world of matter and energy, would decay, become corpses, turn to dust in the world realm, what will the end be then?

The end, when everything around us is atomised in the world, will be what now is emerging as a germ of the spirit in the human soul. This atomising, this destruction of matter, destruction of energy, is what we look at but just as from the human corpse in death the human soul lifts, so what lifts out of this atomising is what lives as the germ in the human soul, in what lives as the moral impulse, what is ethical idea, what is elevated to the Divine; this forms the future, this is the new world. Not by the transformation of apparently transformed matter and the apparently transformed energy does the future world come into being, but through what lives in our soul as soul knowledge, as spirit knowledge.

There in the human breast, there lies the future, also as a germ. When one now looks at the future of the cosmos, which lives in us as an inner germ, one must have the courage to combat this Law of the Conservation of matter and energy. One must have the courage to redirect what in the 19^th century spread as a view of the world and of life from a scientific view, back to its true foundation. One has to build a bridge between what is external and sensory, to what is internal and spiritually real. One can’t build this bridge as long as the illusion of the conservation of matter and energy prevents it. One can only build it through a new looking spiritual world which opens up a new way of thinking which has also grown out of social life.

This social life, it makes man, if he is able to look into his inner being, so that he can see with all inner conscientiousness, with all his inner strength and emotion, say to himself: when everything disappears, which my eyes see, what my ears hear, what I feel in the outer world – that is, everything which science only talks about – then as a metamorphosis everything that I now have kindled in my inner being will live on, then that which is of moral value, which gives man his dignity from within, will live. – This is how spiritual science establishes the reality of the ethical, the reality of the moral, the reality of the religious, because it does not indulge in the illusion of the eternity of matter and energy.

If you look at the metamorphosis of matter and energy as Charles Eliot presented it in 1909, you would see that such a spiritual world view which we represent here, has within it the power to say Yes to life as a germ of the future. Let us imagine such a humanity, living with such souls. Let’s imagine that the people with this responsibility – don’t come with illusions of causality in social life – step into social life, then we dare hope that such inner conscientiousness, out of the sense of a cosmic responsibility what comes about would be able to bring the social organism back to health. What comes from the newer spiritual science is the way to healthy thinking. It is also what can create the right relationship with life’s situation for present day humanity, if it is present in a sufficiently large number of people.

For those who can’t create this bridge, for whom the moral world order only appears as one episode, that will – in order to have validity on its own, while it pushes back everything else that wants to oppose it with a spiritual scientific world view – that will still ad absurdum continue, how all that we have progressed with so extensively, have been brought ad absurdum by the terrible catastrophes of recent years. Anyone who cannot learn from the lessons of recent years, cannot have insight into the social forces that lie within thought that comes from looking at a new way of thinking – a thinking which equips a sufficiently large number of people which can begin to cope with what we know today as the great questions of the world view.

My dear honourable friends here today! With this I have basically, even if only as a sketch, brought an impression of what I wanted to present as an introduction today to what I want to express more concretely the day after tomorrow. After that, so that my task is done, perhaps I may come back to say a few words about some of the things I said here last time, otherwise the wrong conclusions will always be drawn if one keeps quiet about certain things.