Healthy Thinking

Lecture 7

Soul questions and life questions today

A lecture for present times

Stuttgart on 15 June 1920

My dear honourable friends present here today! When one observes today’s conditions of hardship, misery and hopelessness, and if one looks at the causes from which all these things have emerged, then one is forced — I think — to cast an unbiased view of life on what appears as the first riddle of our present day, which stands there as the most insistent mystery: How can humanity unite and in a thriving way build our social and other future conditions in such a way that it unites the ways of the soul with the ways of life?

Since I intend to provide a supplement to some of the things I have said for years here in Stuttgart from the point of view of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, you will forgive me if I connect it in an historical sense to something or other, and thus perhaps create the impression that these connections sometimes appear more personal than what I have presented here in the course of many years. Only, it will be merely apparent.

Right from the starting point of my lecture on the present situation, the fact is that I take the liberty of pointing out to this very question: How can contemporary humanity bring about harmony between the ways of the soul and the ways of life? — how this question hovered in my mind when in the end of the eighties and the beginning of the nineties of the last century I worked out my “Philosophy of Freedom,” published in 1894, as the basis of the world view that has emerged in the course of many years. Basically the way in which it could be given to me in those days, this “Philosophy of Freedom” already answers the starting point of considerations involving destiny questions of humanity. I don’t intend to discuss the content of this “Philosophy of Freedom” today, but I would like to touch upon the intensions underlying this writing with a few introductory words.

The intention was to answer the question: How a person, situated in the present, can face the great social demands of the present with the most essential feeling, the most crucial longing of the newer time, and manage with the feeling of freedom, the longing for freedom? The essential thing is that this consideration of the essence of freedom has broken away from the whole way in which one has always asked about the justification of the idea of freedom, the impulse of freedom. People ask: Is the human being a free being according to his natural disposition or is he not? — This kind of question appears to me to need revision due to the entire evolution mankind has gone through up to our time. Today we can, according to what humanity has gone through in the last three to four centuries, only really ask: Is man in the position to establish the basis of such a social order so that he, while he develops from childhood to a ripe old age, can find what he is entitled to call the freedom of his being? Not whether a person is born free, is asked in my “Philosophy of Freedom,” but in this book it concerns the possibility of discovering something in the depth of their being that lift up from the subconscious, or the unconscious foundations into full, clear light of consciousness, and whether by this lifting it up, a free being can be drawn up within it. Directed through this consideration I was led towards the most essential thing that human development in our newer time can only be justified by two things: firstly what I called at that time intuitive thinking, and secondly what I then called social trust. Since I am not referring to something abstract and theoretical but to things with reality, things of life, it was so that my writing was quite, quite slowly understood, because we simply live in a time of abstractions, as I have often mentioned here.

We live in a time of theorizing. If someone claims that only that which comes from a sense of reality is then validated into ideas, then people are exchanging what is actually taken out of reality and clearly appears in the form of ideas, with what appears in them as abstract and lives as unrealistic ideas. You see what actually is working in people as a real impulse, as something utopian or the like — for most of these people who have only the utopian in their heads, see something like this as utopian.

What was in this intention for a universal human education in the sense of “Philosophy of Freedom”? It was the idea that the human being will never become free if he only takes those ideas into his consciousness that have come out of the scientific viewpoint of the last three to four centuries, and is only filled with what he can learn from nature. Now, my dear friends, I have often said already that the objection is made: Yes, but how many people are there who today absorb into their whole consciousness those concepts borrowed from the observation of nature? — It could appear so, some people think, that only single persons educated in natural science, and then perhaps also those who experience something from natural science who then recruit those with a monastic — or how it is usually called — world view, but that this still won’t have an influence on the broad masses of mankind today.

It is not like this, my dear friends, it is different. It is so that we are slowly moving out during the course of the last three to four centuries into a spiritual life, have entered into a life which is essentially fed — already out into the outermost regions of the country, not only among the city dwellers or the so-called educated — through that which flows through our journal-, newspaper- and book literature: People, without realizing it, absorb into their imagination what comes from bookish, popular science, journalism and newspaper literature. This is what they fill their souls with. They can, when they go to church on Sundays, believe to be good Catholics or good Protestants, they could give themselves over to the idea that they quite honestly believe in everything that is preached to them. But in what they are, so to speak, in everyday life, the form of their thoughts, the whole configuration of her imaginative life is shaped by what is unconsciously flowing in from all the sources I have now mentioned. We can determine this through a kind of cross check.

I believe that actually a large number of you are of the opinion that a certain community which has ancient religious beliefs with very intensive powers, want to seep into the present — ancient religious ideas. Who actually doubts, for example, that what members of Jesuitism strive for in ancient religious beliefs, they want to trickle into present life? — It is the case certainly, when Jesuits write about what they believe, it is necessary to say that on the basis of confession, when they speak about what people should believe, when they speak about the relationship people express to the church and so on. When Jesuits however write about objects of nature today, about objects of human nature and believe that science is to be taken into account, what are these Jesuits then? They are just the most pronounced materialists. Whoever researches what a Jesuit presents as secular literature in addition to his theological and religious writers, finds that the entire aim of this secular literature attempts to establish materialism in the broadest sense.

One can have very clear ideas about why these are done. From this point of view one strives to withdraw everything that includes questions about the soul which are questions about the spiritual life, from human research, from direct human thinking. In relation to the questions about the soul and questions about life, people are not supposed to do research, but they should submit themselves to what is traditionally available. As a result everything regarding soul questions and questions of spiritual life, is to be removed from what research should cover. It should not be looked at from the view of the spirit, from the view of the soul in nature, at the real, true circle of life because such research, from their point of view, is unchristian, is not pious. When one is not allowed to research life from a spiritual viewpoint, then research becomes materialistic, and if the spirit is not brought into the research of matter, then the spirit remains outside the research into matter and one only has the most blatant materialism in hand. Therefore you will see the most blatant materialism next to the assertion of all traditional ideas on religious or theological grounds, if [besides theological literature also] secular literature comes out of this very circle. It is of no use today to indulge in any kind of delusion about these things, because only an unbiased look at these things can be useful.

So we can say: Even those who in a certain sense officially represent piousness — how could one not believe that Jesuitism obviously represent piousness officially — even they are crass materialists from what has happened in the course of modern times. So we can of course always see how people go to church on Sundays and adhere to what they do not understand, while during the week they only understand what comes to them from a materialistic world view. It is actually this situation — and I have often emphasized this here — that has led us into the distress in recent times. It is easy to see that such relationships will not lead a person to find his soul, which leads him to the ways of life. From what on the one hand is the misunderstood, only traditional and what’s more, traditionally incorrectly handed down spirit, and on the other hand, what is only materialistic, the soul can never build itself a path which leads on to a strong, into a secure, mobility on the paths of life.

For this reason my “Philosophy of Freedom” tries to point out how people must again not only infuse their consciousness with what can be eavesdropped from nature, what the newer science passes down, but it points out that in man himself a source of inner life can develop. When man grasps this source of the inner soul life, then he grasps that within the soul which does not come from outside through the contemplation of the senses, but what comes out of the soul itself, then he educates himself by this grasping of the intuitive soul content towards free decision, towards free will and free action. I try to show in my “Philosophy of Freedom” that a person is always dependant if he follows only nature’s impulses; I try to show that a person can only be free when he is in the position to develop what is revealed to him as his own intuitive thinking; intuitive, pure thinking in his human soul. This reference to what man in his soul through self-education must conquer, in order to really become part of freedom, this reference then led to the fact I necessarily sought to give in the continuation of the one indicated in “Philosophy of Freedom” and I have tried, in the course of the last decade, to give it through what I call Anthroposophically orientated spiritual science. If it is pointed out that the impulse of freedom, intuitive thinking, is to be lifted out from the depths of the human soul, then it must also be pointed out what comes from people who turn to this inner source within their soul life.

Basically, the sum of everything my “Philosophy of Freedom” points out, are statements of anthroposophical writings kept for the next few years. I have pointed out that in the soul are paths to be followed in spirit towards thinking, which do not just intellectually combine elements of the environment but out of inner vision lifts it to an experience of the spirit. In addition I was forced to show what one looks at there, when you look into the spiritual world.

Certainly, something may, indeed must, be emphasized today: This nebulous mysticism which people may refer to when they speak about this inner source of the soul, this unclear floating and rambling that gives itself over to inner reverie, is not meant here. However, this has resulted in a double situation. The one is that those people who do not want to apply themselves to what feels uncomfortable today by following the paths of clear thinking, feel so little attracted precisely by what lies in the direction of my “Philosophy of Freedom.” This is the one thing that has happened.

The other result is that, however, a sufficiently large number of hoverers and wafflers, who rely on unclear, nebulous paths, want to search for anything possible and get attached to what should be striven for with clarity through anthroposophically orientated spiritual science. It has happened that through this adherence enough evil-willed spirits have come to fight against what people say, with whom I have nothing to do, and who, by fighting, have attached all this to me, that the hoverers and wafflers, the nebulous mystics extract, as their own making, from what was just meant as a most intense need for the culture of the present.

This is exactly what we particularly need on the one hand: Clarity of inner striving -which distinguishes the true natural scientist today in his outer striving, but also in the clarity of his inner striving. This is what we need on the one hand. Not darkness and twilight, not twilight mysticism, but bright, light clarity in all that involves thinking. That’s the one thing. The other thing based on what I wanted to express through my “Philosophy of Freedom,” is social trust.

We live in an age when every individual within his own consciousness need to strive towards his own thinking, feeling and willing. We no longer live in a time in which people tolerate being led only by authority; neither do we live in a time when people truly want to endure their entire life as being organised. Organising only arose as a kind of counter pole. I tried to point out the underlying facts in 1908 in the following way. I said: On the one hand, for three to four centuries a general human power existed where people want to focus increasingly on their own individuality; wanting to find within themselves all the impulses they actually strive for in life.

However, while this exists in many people as something deeply unconscious which they not only don’t want to clarify because they basically fear their innermost being itself, now — I could call it, like a shadow beside a strong light — this striving for freedom, this striving for individual expression of the individual person towards what has been working against all that human nature has been forming over long periods of time, something emerged in the last three to four centuries that worked against all urges of human nature and is being done in the present to an ever greater degree.

I said: While it is actually natural for people to strive for individual expression, one sees how people, while they don’t understand themselves in their most modern striving, actually outwardly set the polar opposite goal. I characterised 1908 somewhat grotesquely, but people will today still understand me as they did at that time. I said: It looks as if people are not at all striving for the shaping of their individuality, but for the kind of a state, a societal organisation which makes nothing else possible for human beings than for all paths and bridges of life to move in such a way that there is a doctor on the left and a policeman on the right — the doctor for his continuous health care, without any personal judgement required regarding his own health, and the policeman, who sees to it that a person finds direction in his life without himself giving the direction.

One only pursues, despite all enlightenment, despite all alleged sense of freedom, what is oriented — more or less unconsciously — towards this ideal in modern times. It must have been said already: if we keep going in this direction, we will come to a terrible decline. We will only be able to rise up again if we strive to draw people gradually into a social cohabitation which is completely filled with mutual trust. We must gain faith in human beings; we must gain faith that, through a corresponding education, held in a genuinely human sense, through a development of our humanity it is made possible that in the affairs of life, that require a bit more than just passing each other along the street, but that we get along with each other when we meet. When we come across people on the street, one goes to the left and the other to the right; they pass one another, they don’t bump into one another. That is obvious. If that source is opened up in humanity of which I speak as the true intuition in my “Philosophy of Freedom,” then in the higher matters of life a social community is built on trust, just as one must ultimately base everyday life on trust, because it is unacceptable that when two people meet on the street, a policeman joins in and tells you: You must go there so that you don’t bump into the other person. — This matter of course in everyday life can be carried into the higher life, where seriousness of life exists, where seriousness concerning life is cultivated.

Admittedly two challenges regarding the path of the soul are then given in the “Philosophy of Freedom.” The one requirement is that one should not be satisfied with a thinking which is so popular today, even popular in everyday life, popular in science, but that one must rise up to educate what newer times require: to a thinking which flows from its own original spring in the human soul, to a thinking that is full of light and clarity itself. Here I must point out something again — disregarding the fact that I can be accused of saying things that are difficult to understand — here I must point out where traditional educations leads people to: it leads to the opposite of what I described in my last lecture here, as a necessary requirement for the future.

If a person is educated today from nothing other than what flows to him from traditional confessions and from the newer scientific world of ideas, if his everyday thought-forms are based on nothing other than what he has learned from representations of the scientific worldview, from popular literature and literature in general, journalism and the newspaper industry, then, my dear friends, then a person becomes a materialist. Why a materialist? He becomes a materialist on the basis that his thinking is not freed from his bodily nature, because he doesn’t strive to find that source in his soul that separates the soul from corporeality; through this the human being decays into a life dependant on corporeality.

Why are we materialists today? Not from the basis of falsely interpreting life, but because we live life falsely. We live and educate our children in such a way that they don’t think with the soul but with the brain because the brain can become an imprint of the thinking. We switch off the soul and think with the brain. No wonder that we then also talk about thinking this way, as if it is dependent on the brain, for the majority of people today, it depends on the brain. People are materialistic because they have become material in their whole life, because they don’t strive to achieve freedom though thinking that is detached from the body, that becomes bodiless — if I may use this expression which I have often justified. If someone wants to develop themselves in today’s demands, then he has to free his thinking from his bodily nature. He must transform thinking into unrestricted movement from out of his soul existing in itself. He must know that it means: to think within mere thoughts, not to think where the thought is only a result of the brain.

Today this question is absurd: Is thinking a result of the brain or not? — It comes out of the brain if we do not first free it from the brain. Here I point out a tangle of errors, in which today’s humanity is ensnared because today we are by what humanity has achieved in the course of historical development, able to detach our thinking with full, light clarity from corporeality. How does one free it? Not — I have often emphasized — because one would inevitably become spiritual researchers oneself, although to a certain degree anyone can become one, when he takes note of what is written in my book “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment,” in my “Occult Science” and what is given in other similar books, but you don’t even need that. You only need to accept from the spiritual researcher what he has to say to the world — as one does from the astronomer, from the chemist, receive from the physicist what the astronomer, the physicist has to say. You only need to approach and receive this with a healthy common sense. However, then you will make a certain discovery.

A person will discover that: If, for a long time, you research with your materialistic thinking based on science and present-day thinking and you then pursue what the spiritual scientist says, then it appears to you as fantasy, as infatuation, as something you have to reject. You only first understand what the spiritual researcher says when you are conscious that thinking can be untangled from corporeality, that you can delve into that thinking which is drawn in from spiritual worlds at birth or conception, which will draw in, into spiritual worlds when you pass through the gate of death. Making thinking free from the body is the first great goal on this path which needs to be followed by the soul in life today.

Another great goal is necessary. When we develop willing, as it is methodically described in spiritual science — in the mentioned books it is presented — then this will goes in the opposite way as thinking. Thinking frees itself from the body, is loosened from the body. The will however, through schooling, as it is described in the books, seizes the body all the more. That’s the peculiar thing about people today; they indulge in abstractions regarding the will, indulge in abstract ideals with the will and they hear abstract commandments preached from the pulpit, but these abstract commandments are not in their arms, do not enter into their bodies, not enter into their actions. That man becomes one in what he calls the impulses of the will, experienced in his body itself, leads to the second link of that education and human development which is meant here. The spiritualization of the body with the will, the introduction of the will into all sensual, into all physical and into all social things, that is the second thing this spiritual science conveys.

What becomes of the ideals injected into the body, as it were, according to the method of spiritual scientific thinking? These ideals, they are seized, from what is otherwise only directed by ordinary sense far from this body. That which awakens gradually in the body in childhood, love, sensual love, when a person grasps spiritual science, results in all ideals no longer remaining abstractions, that they don’t remain mere thoughts, but that they are loved, loved by the entire human as a being; they become so that the spiritual at the basis of our moral, our ethics, our customs, our religious impulses are so loved, like one loves a loved one, that what otherwise remains abstract becomes completely real to one, like a being of flesh and blood.

With the help of my “Philosophy of Freedom” all of Kant’s categorical imperatives must be overcome; these disturbed Schiller very much already because these categorical imperatives intruded into human life like something which one submits to. The kind of consciousness that has to be overcome for us to progress is what Kant says: “Duty! You sublime, great name, which doesn’t grasp anything popular in you that ingratiates itself, but demands submission” that you “establish a law ... before which all inclinations fall silent, when they secretly counteract it” — this must be replaced by: Freedom, you wonderful spirit, that includes everything in itself, to which my humanity would like to surrender lovingly!

Schiller was upset by Kant’s inhuman categorical imperative, and he said: “I gladly serve my friends but unfortunately I do so through inclination, and it often troubles me that I’m not virtuous.” — “There is no other piece of advice; you must try despise them and then with disgust do as duty demands of you.” Schiller sensitively saw all that was philistine and inhuman in this categorical imperative. He wasn’t living in the time — like in the present — when one has to point out that beyond all natural foundations, in spiritual foundations, what must be searched for in spiritual science must unite with the being of man, is that which must live in us spiritually, made out of an impulse of love. If such an impulse of love among humans becomes a social impulse, then the social community is placed on trust. Then one person stands in front of another in such a way that what happens between them, what happens during an earthly life of individuals does not happen as if people live like a herd of animals in some kind of higher organisation to which they must obey all commands, that everything is ordered: what the direction, the path of their lives should be.

So one can say: At the beginning of the nineties with my “Philosophy of Freedom” I strongly wanted to raise the call for something which is the opposite today of the terrible, murderous opposite asserted in the east of Europe, and from there, further infecting others, right over to a large part of Asia.

We live in our newer time in social relationships in which — out of perverse human instincts — we are looking for the complete opposite of what man should aspire to for the realisation of the true, deeper goals of modern humanity — during this terrible tragedy of our recent time. It is also the unconditional necessity of the newest times in our striving in future that we recognize: This is the way the social order must be built as it can only be built on free thinking, on trust, on what Goethe meant when he wanted to define duty and said: Duty is when I love what I ask myself to do.

My dear honourable friends, when an education for the path of life and the path of the soul work so that people out of a stirring interest in their environment know how they should relate to others, through their whole existence being impregnated with human dignity, then alone can the ideal of the newer time be fulfilled. This can’t be accomplished through an organisation, because it removes so much from what people, in freedom, need to strive for if they follow their nature, and that need not be in freedom but lead into bondage, lead into decline.

I’ve never made it a secret that my “Philosophy of Freedom” and its foundation as Anthroposophically orientated spiritual science, is what I represent; I have never made a secret that I don’t care for this or that content, with regard to some or other detail. I have always spoken with a certain irony of those for whom it is the main thing to hear: Out of how many limbs does human nature consist of? What can one find in this or that district of the spiritual world? –

I’ve always spoken with a certain irony about such endeavours; on the other hand I have always been interested in answering the question: What will become of the whole man, of the human attitude, soul, physical and spiritual man when this man endeavours not to think in the way given by mere science today, not to think in the way organizations have inoculated him, but in such a way as is meant in “Philosophy of Freedom” and anthroposophically orientated spiritual science? — I always draw attention to the fact that thinking, simply through the absorption of this spiritual science, becomes mobile, that it opens up widely for interest in current affairs, that it gives a free and unprejudiced view for what is necessary and for that which restrains our forward progress in human development.

While there is much which holds us back from our progress in human development — I can say, it confronted me early on, more than forty years ago, when I became more closely acquainted with Gervinus through one of his pupils about such people who within German intellectual life thought like Gervinus — Gervinus, this remarkable German who, under the impressions received in the revolutionary years around 1848, wrote his history of the German literature and his history of the German people of the 19^th century. Those who delve into the history of German literature of this Gervinus, even today, say: He actually indicated guidelines which later all literary historians followed. He gave broad outlines according to German antiquity, the German Middle Ages, Minnesang and Meistersang (traditional lyric- and love song writings — trsl), according to which the prehistoric times of the German classical period is to be assessed. He also indicated the guidelines for a healthy assessment of the Goethe-Schiller-time. One could find him somewhat pedantic today — those who followed him were even more pedantic. There are some who believe that they are standing on the heights of a particularly modern, expressionist era today; one can see how through this snobbery a pedantry appears that is much bigger than the old braids they had, but I do not want to protect their pedantry with this. However, something strange happened with Gervinus, with the Gervinus who became really bitter in his seventies, so that he — despite being owed so much — aroused offence among those who believed they were under the auspices of this seventy year old and sailing into the golden age of the German nation but anyhow did not suspect how the germs then already lay in what has now become actual.

This Gervinus, what has he pronounced as his own, well-intentioned result especially in his history of German literature? He said a strange thing: German poetry ends with Goethe’s death. — Just think, my dear friends, he who first described this German literature with all his deep love, he concluded his description with a final statement, that the German people should not further listen to what is said by all kinds of poets, writers and the like, but should become aware of that which until 1832 had wrestled itself to the surface from the deepest essence of Germanity. Further along, Gervinus believes, German people should no longer devote themselves to poetry and drama, no longer to fiction but to politics and practical applications. The time for practical application had arrived. In a strange way I encountered the first germ of this: I felt at that time, a good forty years ago, I was handed down the whole of Gervinism in this way at the Technical College, in Karl Julius Schröer, my dear old friend Schröer. At that time I felt something which was a germ of another, which I would say, you encounter today, in full formation.

There was quite a number of such people who, like Gervinus, out of a largely justified realization said: The time of inner meditation, the time when one closes off from outer practicalities and aspired to spiritual heights, is over. It is now a matter of devoting oneself to practical life. — However, one could, by taking note of this germ, already get a feeling for something: that now all these people who speak in this way, point to quite an abstract, a more unrealistic practical life, that they, to a certain extent regard old ideals as successful, so to speak, and point to a new, practical life but have no impulsive ideas, no impulsive forces for this practical life.

If you asked something of Gervinus like: What is the spiritual content you described already by 1832? You get an enormous, great tableau in the representation. If you ask: What should live in the hearts, live in the souls of those who are to move out into practical life, who are supposed to lead this practical life, who now are to find ways of life through the ways of the soul? — Nothing came, there were no new ideals! In the soul the thoughts must rise: First of all the spiritual world has to be found, and out of this, new ideals for practical life would be found: first this spiritual life must be explored scientifically, like the natural world has been scientifically explored for three to four centuries.

Basically, time has shown that the world, without drawing from these spiritual sources, wanted to establish practice, but practice without spirituality — and this need to establish practice without spirituality has led us into this time of decline, a time of distress, misery and hopelessness. Many things have been said again and again, about where we are actually heading. Yes, many passed through my lectures which I have been giving here in Stuttgart for two decades, and some of what seemed necessary for me, from the anthroposophically orientated spiritual science brought to human consciousness when things should go upwards — moving up should not be done by cannons and guns but by a practice of life carried by spirituality, but a kind of spirituality which must first be newly created. So I may point out something today which I have said from various points of view as belonging to our spiritual science.

I said: If someone applies the same observation method which has emerged from science, filling thought-forms with scientific delineation, if someone applies this method to history, then what is observed only leads to decline, because in history there are always forces that cause effects of decline. If one follows history only with the methods that are common in science, as for example as the English cultural historian Buckle did and his followers, then one only sees in history what leads to the downfall, then one only sees the afterglow of history. In order to see in history what caused advancement, one has to look into the spiritual world. What works in history as an ascent, are impulses which come out of the spiritual world.

I have already pointed out here that, for example, Gibbon gave an excellent history, written from the scientific age, about the decadence of the Roman Empire. However, what we still lack today is a historic presentation of the impulse of Christianity as it fell into the perishing Roman world. One can describe the fall of the Roman world in scientific thoughts; but one cannot describe what ascended in Christendom with scientific ways of thinking. I have pointed this out. What comes out of what I have indicated — apparently perhaps only idealistically, apparently only in thought, but in reality with regard to the paths of life? What follows from this?

The following happens: If someone would step forward in our age in which science has taken over all circles, all minds, even the circles of the Jesuits as I have indicated, if someone would come forward from this scientific mindset to give his view on historical life, what would he have to say? He could only show signs of decline because he is looking at our western culture out of scientific thinking. What should such a person write, if out of this scientific way of thinking, he would write about our present? He would write: “The Fall of the Western World.” And, don’t we have — in contrast to all healthy thinking through spiritual science — now also received this terrible literary product: “The Fall of the Western World” — a morphological view of history by Oswald Spengler?

My dear friends, that this is possible, can only be understood from the fact that those who are saturated today with only scientific thinking can only see signs of decline, so that they must prophetically predict: all of culture must perish. — That is the content of Spengler’s book: the prediction of the fall of our culture. Must it perhaps not perish when everyone thinks the way Spengler thinks? Likewise one must become a materialist if one does not detach thinking from corporeality, that's how one must think about Western culture if one thinks the way Oswald Spengler thinks, if one only looks according to scientific specifications at western culture. If everyone looks at it that way, if everyone believes that we must perish, then we will perish as well. That’s why I call this a terrible book. For those who become infected by these ideas, by these impulses, and absorb them in an honest way, they must become carriers of decline from the deepest depths of their soul, they must move along soul paths which, on the path of their life, lead them down into the abyss. From time to time one has to look at such phenomena because it is an indication of what depths of human life phenomena of decline are present, right into which depths the ways of the soul are prepared for the rush down into the abyss.

Such things oppose anthroposophically orientated spiritual science. It keeps a gaze focussed on what is rooted in man in the spiritual world. This is precisely what is most attacked about it, that it asserts that man could come to seeing the spiritual world if only he develops the soul forces available in him. Today it is roughly regarded from all sides as effusiveness, yet you can easily follow those paths to the spiritual world which I have tried to reveal in my book “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment” and in my efforts toward meditations regarding self-knowledge and so on — that these ways are just as safe as those that lead through absolutely, clear, sharply defined thinking in the fields of mathematics. This spiritual research is not only thought about but other, actual, soul forces also come into consideration in this research, than they do in mathematics.

Spiritual research certainly must speak about the spiritual world; therefore it can’t be placed on the foundations which many traditional confessions are based on today. What do these traditional confessions claim? One thing they claim for instance, come quite naturally out of spiritual science: the indestructibility of the human soul, when the body is given over to the earth, the entry of man into the spiritual world, when man passes through the gate of death. However, it doesn’t only depend on that such facts are being realised but it depends on how these results are presented. How then is the idea of immortality cultivated? By relying on selfish instincts originating from the ways of the human soul.

Just read the innumerable sermons, read the innumerable views on this theme — everywhere you will find how people speculate that the human being has an intense interest that he will not perish in death. Basically all the talk about immortality is a concession for spiritual egoism. The way the idea is represented, characterises it. Sharply denied against this half immortality is what Origen (Adamantius) spoke about, which the church certainly regarded as heretical: the pre-existence of the soul to which the unbiased spiritual researcher returns to again. What is basically offered in today’s confessions? The conviction that two people come together in the world, conceive a child and that from the spiritual world the soul is newly conceived; that every time a sensual process takes place here, a spiritual process is added from the spiritual worlds.

My dear friends, this idea is not Christian. This idea is Aristotelian. Aristotle was the one who, out of the decadence of Greekdom, from the no-longer-understandable Platonism, taught about the development of the soul with the body and thus the one-sided immortality only after death. So Christian confessions, by denying pre-existence, do not represent something Christian, but represent something Aristotelian, something which in its depths certainly has nothing to do with Christianity. Now comes spiritual science, as it is meant here, and uncovers all the facts, along comes the “grapes” like the priest, the professor Traub ( Traub means grape), and declares that spiritual science is merely copying.

No, it is not that. In truth, in relation to certain elementary things one agrees with old truths, like today one agrees with old Euclid about geometry. People like Traub have every interest in throwing rubble about that existed in older times, because if one then is able to study in an unbiased way, one realises it has its own wisdom. Their wisdom is just what is borrowed from what they want to bury so that one is unable to get behind it. As a result they make people dull; as if Anthroposophy draws from the gnosis and the like, so that people consider the gnosis as something dangerous and do not look for themselves how this gnosis has not flowed into anthroposophically orientated spiritual science, but certainly into the content of the modern confession as that part living in the gnosis which has been brought into decadence.

This spiritual science must point out how man descends from the spiritual world, how not a whim of the physical world causes the divine-spiritual world to create a soul that humans on earth bear witness to, but as the soul descends from the spiritual world with experiences it has had there; it must indicate just how the physical life is a continuation of a spiritual life. To the half immortality is added the whole, full immortality through spiritual science. If one goes this way then one recognises how the spiritual flows out of the spiritual worlds into single individuals. One can recognise how the spiritual flows in from spiritual worlds — but through man — into cultural progress, and how these cultural advances have very specific delimited epochs and periods of time. Today we stand in a period, in terms of culture and civilisation, which must certainly lead to something new. That is so.

When one peruses a book — it is rather thick — like that of Oswald Spengler, then one sees how he looks at individual cultures from a scientific viewpoint. He says: Cultures always develop: they have a childhood, a youth and a mature to dying age. That is the case with oriental cultures; they come into being, they grow, mature and die. The same with Greek culture. It is the same with our culture; it is now its time to die. Because, he says , we are required to look at cultures in this way like we look at the oak tree or the pine. An oak tree comes about, grows, ripens and dies away. Cultures are to be looked at in the same way. — Sure, we look at them in this way if we are completely vaccinated by a mere scientific way of thinking. If, in addition, we learn about spiritual looking and learn how to nurture it in the right way, then we know how to look at cultures in a different way. Then what comes into our souls is what I gave in my last sojourn in Stuttgart as a summary of the historical life of mankind, by me pointing out that once in primeval times people were instinctive beings, had instinctive spiritual lives, but something higher than what we can achieve with our intellectuality today. Compared to what was there in the beginning out of instinctive human wisdom, however, today we certainly are in a period of decline. However if we understand, as it is meant through spiritual science, how to open the source in our souls for a free, light filled thinking, for freedom which equals love, for social trust, for spiritual insight in general, that penetrates through our soul, through that which lives in us, that into this earth culture, in the earth civilisation, can in turn cause an ascent. If we are merely filled with what the scientific view offers of our observation of nature, that we can only believe what is presented today through this point of view, then there would be an inevitable decline.

There will be no decline when we become aware of this source of thinking which can loosen itself from corporeality, that in us this source is one of will, that one can just as much love the rise-into-the-spiritual world as one can love through physical love. Letting us lift into freedom the wisdom old mankind received as instincts and what today can be lifted only by what physicality can no longer give, letting us lift this into freedom, we present that which wants to descend with impulses of ascension. This is a fact that the question is put to mankind today: Is the world not in a descent? — Yes, it is in a decline if people want to only follow what is given from outside, if they are clamped down in an organisation, natural or social, imposed from outside.

The downfall will not occur if mankind creates a new world founded from within. The Lenins and Trotskys, who in all extremes want to build a new world based only on science, they take the quickest, most intensive route to decline. Whoever wants to create a new world based upon spirituality, moves towards social ascent — but only they do. For all those who today believe that the world can be cured through external institutions, through all kinds of external means, Marxism or the like, Oswald Spengler spoke about truly.

If only these people work with their power in the world, if only they direct the world’s development, then Spangler’s prophecy will be fulfilled, because he has only drawn consequences from where he must, filled with a scientific world view. Today the ways of life are serious, and it is necessary that the greatest seriousness seize the ways of the soul, but one must be serious about such great concerns. You need to get into the position to judge from the symptoms.

I told you that a good forty years ago, when as a young man, through the mediation of Schröer, I was able to understand Gervinus’ way of thinking, and even then approached Gervinus. It made a deep impression on me how Gervinus demanded practice but had no idea about how to practice in the world in which those ideas were about which he alone knew how to speak, and wanted to find a conclusion in 1832 with the death of Goethe. It left a deep impression on me how he called people to do it, not to continue to lyricise, to dramatise, not to do fiction but be devoted to practical tasks of life, as he points people out to practice, with no idea for these practical tasks of life. That’s how people behaved. The poets were there only for the school, at most in the concert hall; there they could sprout forth. What flowed from spiritual life could not intervene in the ways of life. A discord has come about between the way of the soul and the way of life. We have allowed this to develop. Now people like Oswald Spengler come and say: All that which is western culture, western civilisation, is finished, is doomed. — So, what can be done?

Now this is particularly interesting, and we want to take Spengler's own words to explain to our souls why he actually wanted to write his book, for which minds he actually intended it. He says himself: If, under the impression of this book, the people of the newer generation turn to technology instead of poetry, to the navy instead of painting, to politics instead of epistemological criticism, they do what I want, and one can’t wish them anything better.

Now, my dear friends, I think that in the age in which one believes to have applied practice so wonderfully, people involved with technology instead of poetry, with the navy instead of painting, politics instead of criticism of knowledge, even before Spengler wrote his book — all that was there already, and of politicians, there were not too few of those either, up to today. To now make prophets of decadence regarding the decline of the western culture, to have to confess now that one wants to urge people to turn away from spirituality, to turn to a practice for which one has no ideas, yes, in principle does not want to have any ideas, to now proclaim the decline of the western world, because it is believed to be at an age of death — that is spoken out of the heart in the time of decline.

Perhaps I may, without falling into immodesty — because I have a wish, an attempt, to characterise a beginning — I may perhaps point out that which is brought forward from what is called anthroposophically orientated spiritual science, out of this spirituality, want to take on a practical form just here, from its centre, from Stuttgart, but from the opposite point of view. We don’t tell people: Turn yourselves away from all spirituality, because that is in decline, and turn to the coming day. — We say to people: New spirituality has to be created; we need enter into new sources of spiritual life. We need to step into soul paths of spiritual seeing so that we can find just that practical life that is supported by real ideas. Admittedly it seems as if it can’t go so quickly because what shows up in the bigger picture also shows up in the small details. However I only want to talk about that symptomatically.

The manner and way in which one can judge such an intention as it starts from here — had to be characterised in number 50 of our newspaper “Threefolding of the Social Organism” by Eugen Kolisko under the title “Theological criticism and Conscientiousness.” It had to be characterised, based on the book of a university professor, Dr. Philipp Bachmann, professor of theology at the University of Erlangen. This book “Death or Life” appeared here in Stuttgart. If you read the article by Dr Kolisko, you will see that he correctly summarizes his discussion at the end, in the following sentences, which are quite characteristic of those with diplomas and outer views given by external science, which is hollow inside and always develop those very forces that are derived from the alleged minds which have to lead into decline. Today one must have the courage not merely characterise in general, in abstract concepts of decline, but one has to throw a bright light on so-called spiritual life which acts even with the simplest things without conscientiousness that only parallels thoughtlessness and ignorance. That, my dear friends, must not be concealed if we want to speak today about the harmony between the ways of the soul and the ways of life.

So Dr Kolisko had to characterise what such an insignificant booklet is:

“It would not be necessary to study this book in such depth if it hadn’t been written by a university professor. Such a person must know what the task of objective criticism is. The present criticism is frivolous.”

It is particularly frivolous how the train of my thought in “Occult Science” is reproduced in this book.

“One can likewise proceed in the area of theosophy without damage, because here one isn’t checked regarding the most absurd claims. Anthroposophy, Theosophy and Spiritism applies equally to many, and according to the saying that all cows are gray in the night, one can bring everything together with impunity and make snide criticism. If a critique is given in any other scientific area in such a reckless way, without sufficient knowledge of the area criticized, then only in one case instead of disfiguring in many cases, such senseless trains of thought of writers would appear, bypassing this way the literature available and mixing up opinions of various writers, so in scientific circles the decaying will be called to account, the reputation, and may lose its standing.

“For anyone who gives his readers the content of what is in my book “Occult Science — an outline” about the members of the human being with the words: “The physical body dies, the ether body sleeps, the astral body forgets, the I (the sentient soul) is the memory” is either unable to reproduce a foreign train of thought or does it to maliciously disfigure it. Likewise, he is judged as a critic. For today’s educational system it is a sign of poverty that a university professor is unhindered by putting such a concoction in the world. What a theology professor has to say about Christianity and writes such criticism, I leave you to judge, you who can still summon up some indignation about such frivolously unscrupulous procedures.”

This is namely what this Bachmann in his “Bachmanic adhesion” has found as the content of my book “Occult Science.” This is how university professors read today. My dear friends, this is the one thing that today, from all corners, resists the desire for ascent; these are the ones who do not want to let anything come near them which can somehow lead to an ascension. These people are available to the broad masses, they educate our youth. Then there are the “Spenglers” who write that we must necessarily fall into a decline. Why do these “Spenglers” write like this? Because they are unable to focus their eyes on anything other than the “Bachmen” with their ignorance and frivolity. These things we must in all earnestness consider.

I now may, after having preceded three lectures, say in conclusion: After I tried to show in my first two lectures last week something about the ways that, in a cognitive sense, in a social way, the anthroposophically orientated spiritual science wants to proceed — proceed scientifically, not like these “Bachmann adherents” and “(grape) clusters” slander, having spoken also of what is to be artistically trained in Dornach, I may say today that those who strive in such a way for science and art be reminded of the beautiful saying brought across by Goethe and remain true forever: “Whoever has science and art, also possesses religion.” Spiritual science and its art has religion but not a religion created from blind faith, but from a clear, light, real spiritual scientific knowledge, on a spiritually deepened striving of artistic will. After Goethe said: “Whoever has science and art also possesses religion” he continued: “Whoever possesses neither, has no religion!”

In our time it is perhaps possible for spiritual scientists and representatives of three-fold thinking, from their deepest affairs of the heart within spiritual science still say: Indeed, whoever has science and art, has religion also.- But today religion can only lead to an ascent if it creates itself out of a living science, not out of a science based on the dead; it can only lead to an ascent when it grows out of an artistic will connected to such spiritual knowledge so that one can say: Whoever today has a science rooted in spiritual seeing, whoever today endeavours, even if no matter how weak the beginning, to create an art connected totally in this spiritual seeing in the most intensive will, one should not reproach them for having given the religious element a chance on the way to life in the present. Because, in searching for the spiritual, in wanting to incorporate spirituality in art, one certainly also has the will to lead it over into social life, by connecting the value of human beings and human dignity in a social community, truly the insight into divine guidance of the world, to the divine primordial forces of life — a true perspective which does not only speculate on the egoism of people but in the context of people in the great eternal laws of existence.

A religion can only lead to an ascent if it does not want to speculate about egoism but point to the deepest harmony of individuals in relation to the whole cosmos.

To the same degree that such a religion, such a science, such art can permeate the human soul, to this extent will we advance socially. To the same degree, in spite of need and misery — but perhaps, if the resisting forces are too strong, still through much need and much misery — we will not face a decline in the culture of the western world, but an ascent of true human life — a life on the path of the soul and the path of life, the religious, the scientific and artistic can be done because through the spiritual, out of spiritually filled art, out of spiritually carried religion, work is done for humankind’s present and for its future.