What the world needs now is anthroposophy : The Different Ages of Human Development and their Influence on the Human Elements

 

Rudolf Steiner, January 5, 1911, Mannheim

Automated Translation

It has been some time since it has been possible to have a branch meeting here in Mannheim, and today we are once again able to fulfill such a task. In recent times, you, my dear friends, have attentively and eagerly acquired the knowledge that can be called the more important ideas and insights of our spiritual scientific worldview. Therefore, it is perhaps not inappropriate for us to speak today about something that, on the one hand, turns our gaze to the whole of our spiritual scientific movement and, on the other hand, also gives us the opportunity to utilize what we have acquired in spiritual knowledge, namely about the human being and his development , to utilize it, so to speak, in the service to which every human being should be devoted, and which, for anthroposophists in particular, should take on a special form through their insights, through the perceptions they can gain from the spiritual-scientific world view. You know, my dear friends, that the development of humanity is progressing, that epoch follows epoch, age follows age, and each age has its special task. We can distinguish between larger and smaller ages in the historical development of humanity, and in each age there are very special moments when it is necessary not to fail to penetrate the actual task, the actual mission of that age. We may note that in the successive periods of time, tasks are set for people from the spiritual worlds, tasks that are very special for this or that age, and for us humans it is then a matter of doing the right thing, of knowing something about these tasks, of absorbing into our soul a realization of these tasks. We really live in an age in which it is urgently necessary for a number of people to gain knowledge again of what is to be done today or in our presence, preferably in the spiritual realm. I would like to begin by bringing two periods of time that are very close to us to your mind's eye, two periods of time that are close to us because one of them belongs to the past and much of its spiritual wealth and products still extends into our present; but the second period has hardly begun. We are standing at the beginning of a new period, a smaller cycle or period of humanity, standing, so to speak, at the boundary. Therefore, it is of very special importance to understand these two periods a little. The one period covers approximately that epoch which began with Augustine and ended with the approach of the 16th century. In occult science it is said that this period covers the time from Augustine to Calvin. Then, following this, we have another period that covers the time from Calvin to the last third of the 19th century. And we are again at the starting point of a period with new tasks, the observance of which is extremely important for the immediate future of humanity. Let us now try to form a rough idea of what happens at the beginning of a new period. When one period ends and another begins, something is ending and something is beginning. Something is decaying and something is germinating, as if rooted, like a new dawn for a sunshine that is preparing as the sunshine of a new age. And the peculiarity of such a transitional age – you know that people speak of transitional ages in different senses, but we are really dealing with a transitional age today in a very meaningful sense – is that new forces of culture must be added to humanity.

To characterize this, I will consider a great task for all of humanity; that is the advent of Christianity. If we form an idea of the way in which Christianity arose, we have to say: Actually, it was rejected by precisely those who were at the forefront of culture. But at the same time, those who were at the forefront of culture had reached a state of decline. Try to imagine Roman culture in decline and try to imagine the communities to which Paul preached. These were people who, so to speak, naively but with fresh energies faced the culture, with a lively sense of what was to come, which one did not really count among the highest blossoms of the culture of the time. These were the new forces, but sometimes even born from the lowest layers of the people. Because the complicated social life of the upper leading circles, when it has developed for a time, must come down, but especially because science, with its concepts, ideas and so on, arrives at a point where it cannot develop further, something new, something popular, must intervene. We have put a major turnaround in front of us. In a sense, we are facing another turning point today. What has been achieved with great dedication as scientific thoughts and ideas has actually reached a point where everyone who is insightful must say: it really cannot go any further – the scientific concepts and ideas that are being pursued today in official currents are on the verge of decay. And the whole way in which spiritual life is approached, where the great currents of this spiritual life flow, is in full decline. I would like to describe with a few stark words how this decline could actually be observed with relatively rapid steps by those who observe such things at all.

If you took part in this life, as it was expressed in literature, through books and the like, in science, then you grew up with a seriousness, with a seriousness that is now regarded as old-fashioned, that is no longer understood. The tone of weekly magazines, for example, was quite different in the 1970s than it is today. It was, if we may use the expression, much, much more dignified. Back then, there were very specific views within this intellectual current regarding how to relate to drama, poetry, and so on. That has changed, as one thought back then. In those days there was also a certain way of writing poetry, in which one satisfied less strict demands, for example, writing plays for small festive occasions, more for fun, for a joke. Sometimes there was quite a bit of talent in it. In particular, the students at their assemblies performed plays in which there was quite a bit of talent. Now one got a little older and could look around at the literary currents, and one found among them esteemed products that were, however, exactly the same as what had previously been considered only good for the day. That became literary maturity for the intellectual movement. In order not to cause too much offence, I do not want to mention any names. Today we are already at the point that we have nothing but printed trivialities in the broadest sense – entire bookstores are filled with them. Just thirty to forty years ago, one would have been sorry for the ink to write them down. When a person is going through such a change, they do not judge things starkly enough, but this is how cultural history will have to characterize our late 19th century. Indeed, we are facing a decline of traditional intellectual life, and this could easily be demonstrated by the decline of scientific theories. Therefore, we should not be surprised if what is to emerge as a new spiritual movement, what is to bring something new to human development, finds little support among what is today called the official intellectual life; if the members of these circles say: There are such associations of half-wits who call themselves Theosophists, who are basically quite uneducated people mostly — and so on. These are necessities that are present in every transitional age. Fresh forces must come from below, and what springs up in this way will then become necessary for the later age in order to really create an ascending movement. Now I said: we have seen two ages go by. The age from Augustine to Calvin, for example, was an age that sought to internalize all the soul forces of man, all the forces of man. This tendency to introspection was to be seen in all fields during this time; external natural science was less practised, people's attention was less directed to the outer laws and phenomena of nature. In the starting point of Augustine himself, in which we see our spiritual-scientific structure of the human being prefigured in a certain way, we find the idea of the influence of supersensible powers that make use of the human being as an instrument. As this epoch continued, what strange phenomena we encounter: the mysticism of Meister Eckhart, Suso, Johannes Tauler and many others. Although outer science receded into the background during this epoch, we find in it another remarkable way of embracing nature with a genius-like intuitive gaze. We see how this is elevated in such people as Agrippa von Nettesheim, for example. Phenomena such as Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme present themselves to us as the fruits of this deepening of the human soul in those centuries. Such a current can only last for a certain length of time. It has an ascending direction, a culmination, a high point and a descending line. As a rule, such a direction is replaced by something that appears to be a counter-image in a certain way.

In fact, the following centuries are a counter-image to this trend. The internalized image of the human soul is gradually forgotten. Times are coming when natural science has achieved such infinite triumphs. The great phenomena of a Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei occur, right up to those of the 19th century such as Julius Robert Mayer, Darwin and so on. A vast amount of external facts is brought to light.

And yet, people at the beginning of the new epoch were different from those of later times. A man like Kepler, for example, who had such a significant impact on physical science, was a pious man, a man who felt deeply, deeply connected to Christianity in his innermost being. And Kepler, the discoverer of Kepler's three laws, which are basically nothing more than time and space laws clothed in mathematical formulas, something quite mechanical, oh, this Kepler - he spent much more time than on such explain how things were in the great world at that time, when the mystery of Palestine took place on earth; how Saturn, Jupiter and Mars were related to each other when Christ Jesus was born. Kepler's great thoughts were directed towards this. He was able to give mankind what he had to say about the science of the stars in purely mathematical terms. What he carried in his heart, in his deepest heart, remained his property in an age that only served the outer life.

Or take Newton. Where would you not refer to Newton as the discoverer of the laws of gravity? But where would it also be emphasized - when Haeckel, for example, talks about the epoch-making phenomenon of Newton - where would it be emphasized that Newton was so Christian that in his quietest and most sacred hours he wrote a commentary on the Apocalypse in his own way? But he could not give it to humanity. He was able to give humanity the purely mechanical law of gravity in the age dedicated to the external summarization of natural phenomena. And this age has just expired with the last third of the 19th century.

Now an age is beginning that must necessarily be a counter-image to the previous one. And the task of preparing this counter-image, which is to continue to work in such a way that everything we have often spoken of can come to pass, is the spiritual-scientific world view, which in turn must bring a deepening of the human soul. But each age must work differently than the one before. It would be wrong to simply study as it was done correctly from Augustine to Calvin. We may let such phenomena have their effect on us, but we must know that today, after such an age of natural science, we must seek the spiritual world differently than in the past. Is there anything else, apart from what man can think in the abstract, from which one can recognize that man is really compelled and forced to grasp the world anew in every age?

If you study Paracelsus today, for example, you will find that he is an unfathomable spirit for today's trivial external research, a spirit who has particularly looked deeply into the secrets of healing and medicine. And anyone who delves into what he had to say about healing this or that form of illness will be able to learn something quite tremendous and magnificent from Paracelsus. Let us assume that a physician who is at the level of the real level of the spiritual life of our time would delve so deeply that he would want to apply what would result from Paracelsus' instructions. For certain great things, quite correct things would arise, but the physician of the present day could no longer acquire some of them. For if he were to apply some of the remedies indicated there, it would not help, because human nature has changed since the 16th century, because everything in the world changes and everything progresses. Things outside do not obey our arbitrary knowledge, which moves in steps. They move forward, and we have the task of investigating with our knowledge, our insight. We must learn anew, as Paracelsus learned. And if we most faithfully do as he did, we will find something quite different in many respects. Thus, we have very special spiritual tasks in our time.

Now I would like to characterize in a few broad strokes how it is written in the stars that human culture must progress in the near future. It is not left to the hand of man alone to give this culture a direction. The old views would not fit the change in the real circumstances. Things take their course, and spiritual science has the task of saying what course things are taking, it gives us the guidance to understand our time.

We are standing at the dawn of a completely new human life and thinking. Three things are of particular importance and significance in human spiritual life: firstly, religion; secondly, science; and thirdly, the way people live together, the feelings and perceptions that people develop for each other, and what takes place in the social sphere. These three are the most important, so that it is of particular importance to follow in the successive epochs what forms these three must take, that which comes into consideration as religion, as science or social life. And there are certain demands that man simply must understand, that are beyond his control.

Why must religion, science and social life change from epoch to epoch? Simply because human nature changes. We do not learn that human nature consists of different parts for the sake of learning that. We do not learn that the human being consists of a physical body, a life body and an astral body with sentient, intellectual and conscious soul so that a few people can have something to do with it and can acquire these classifications. We learn these classifications because they have a far-reaching significance for human life. And you can sense this far-reaching significance if you think back to the culture that was Egyptian-Chaldean, for example, when it was the sentient soul that was primarily important. There, the higher beings primarily worked through this. And in the Greco-Latin period, in the time of the emergence of Christianity, everything that came from the divine-spiritual heights and worked into humanity worked on the mind soul. And today it works on the consciousness soul. We understand nothing at all about the relationship between the human being and the great forces of the world if we do not know how this human nature is structured. What are we preparing today by devoting ourselves to spiritual-scientific insight? In our time, it is especially the consciousness soul that is cultivated. All external thinking and knowledge, all useful thinking, this thinking according to the principle of usefulness, is based to a certain extent on the development of the consciousness soul. But something like the light of the spirit self is already pushing its way into this. Now the remarkable thing is that in our time we have two parallel currents, one that rushes down into decay and one that rises to future glory. The one that rushes down into decay has not yet arrived at that decay. At the same time, it is the source of great discoveries that still have a tremendous future. This too has its beneficial effects. Certainly, for a long time to come mankind will benefit from that which is, after all, heading towards decay. But the kind of thinking that invents balloons is the thinking of decay. And the thinking that deals with the structure of humanity is the thinking of the future of humanity.

But these two do show a common transition. We can see that in all fields. I would like to start by giving you a very practical example: the field of monetary transactions. This changed quite considerably in the 19th century. A tremendous turnaround has taken place. If you follow the period immediately preceding the last third of the 19th century, all monetary speculation was tied to the individuality, to the personality. It was the purely financial and speculative genius of the Rothschilds that introduced money everywhere and led it back again to and from the money centers. And if we follow the history of the great banking houses, we have examples everywhere of how monetary transactions took place entirely out of the nature of the human being, based on the consciousness soul, on the individual human being. This has changed. We just do not talk much about it yet because it is only just beginning. Today, the consciousness soul no longer exclusively rules in monetary transactions; today, something of a kind of grouping prevails: the share capital, the company, the association, that which is supra-personal.

Try to follow what is only just beginning to emerge today and what will come more and more. Today it is almost irrelevant who stands as a personality here or there. What human beings have worked into the circulation of money is already working without personality, is already working by itself. In a descending current, you have the spread of the consciousness soul to the spirit self.

Here we have it in the current of decay; and we have it in the current of ascending life, where we seek that which the individual capable personality has achieved, where we seek to gain the help of those powers through inspiration, which will give us the inspirations from the spiritual world again. There, too, we go from the personal to the superpersonal. Thus, there are common characteristics for the ages with regard to both the declining and the ascending currents. In particular, however, one must be careful not to take into account in any age what authority is present in that age. As long as one does not have spiritual insight, one can go very far astray.

This is particularly the case in one area of human culture, in the area of materialistic medicine, where we see how exactly that is decisive, which the authority has in its hands and more and more lays claim to, where that wants to lead to something much, much more terrible and dreadful than any rule of authority of the much-criticized Middle Ages. We are already living in it, and it will become ever stronger and stronger. When people mock so terribly at the ghosts of medieval superstition, one might well ask: Has anything changed in relation to that? Has the fear of ghosts gone away? Don't people fear many more ghosts today than they did back then? It is much more terrible than is generally believed what goes on in the human soul when it is presented with the fact that there are 60,000 germs on the palm of the hand. In America, it has been calculated how many such germs are in a single male mustache. Should we not, then, decide to say: These medieval ghosts were at least decent ghosts, but today's bacillus ghosts are too puny, too indecent ghosts, to justify the fear that is only just beginning and that makes people, especially here, in the field of health, fall into a terrible belief in authority. We must say that we see the character of the transition period everywhere. We must only look at the phenomena in the right way, and we see this character everywhere.

Now we ask ourselves: What do the stars, the teachings and revelations of theosophy tell us about further development in these three most important areas of life? What must it become in the future and how must we work so that the creative, fruitful spirit self can be guided over into the consciousness soul in the right way in the spiritual sense? The prophetic stars, that is, the teachings of spiritual science, tell us the following about this future form: According to the whole way in which people have tried to bring religion into the currents of humanity, in the past centuries, religion is an amalgamation of two things, one of which, in the strict sense of the word, cannot actually be called religion; the other is religion.

What then is religion in reality? It is something that we must characterize as an attitude of the human soul: an attitude towards the spiritual, towards the infinite. Basically, we can characterize it well if we start with the basics of these attitudes, which then only have to be developed to the highest degree. If we walk across a meadow and have an open soul for what is green and blooming there, we will feel something joyful for the glories that reveal themselves through the flowers and grasses, through that which is reflected in the landscape, which glistens in the dew. If we can muster such an attitude, if our heart opens up, then it is not yet religion. It can only become religion when this feeling intensifies for the infinite that is behind the finite, for the spiritual that is behind the sensual. When our soul feels in such a way that it senses communion with the spiritual, then this mood corresponds to what is alive in religion. The more we can intensify this mood for the eternal within us, the more we foster religion in ourselves or in other people.

But now the necessary development of the times has brought about a situation in which what should basically be impulses that direct human feeling and perception from the transitory to the non-transitory has been combined with certain ideas and views of what it is like in the realm of the supersensible. But through this religion has become connected in a certain sense with what is actually spiritual science, with what must actually be regarded as science. And today we see how religion in this or that form can only be maintained in this church belief if very specific dogmas are maintained at the same time. But this produces what can be called the rigid dogmatic adherence to certain ideas about the spiritual world. Such conceptions should naturally progress as the human mind progresses. And it is this progress that should give the truest religious feeling the greatest joy, for it shows the greater the glories of the divine spiritual world and the greater their significance.

True religious feeling would not have consigned Giordano Bruno to the stake, but would have said: Oh, it is great for God to send people of this kind down to earth and to reveal such things through them. - In this way, the field of scientific research would necessarily have been recognized alongside the religious field, a field that extends to both the external and the spiritual world. This must progress, it must be suited from epoch to epoch to the human spirit, which progresses. In regard to this scientific research, a great change occurred when the 16th century approached. Before the age of Copernicus, Kepler and Galilei, things looked very strange at the teaching institutions and universities. Aristotle is certainly a great sage, but what he did was the greatest thing for his time. What the Middle Ages did with him was a very strong misunderstanding of his spirit, and in the end they no longer understood it at all, had no more idea of what he meant. Nevertheless, they always taught according to him.

In order to show you how knowledge must change from epoch to epoch as the human spirit progresses, so that misunderstandings do not arise, I would like to go into more detail about an event connected with Aristotle. Aristotle worked from a time when there was still an awareness that a body of ether was present in human nature, not just blood, nerve cords and so on. If one were to draw the etheric body, for example, one would get a very different drawing from what today's anatomists find and draw of this human being. How one draws it today was not given much importance in the time in which Aristotle created, because the etheric human being was still known. If you wanted to draw that, you would have to see a center here where the heart is, and draw rays emanating from there, important rays, but then going to the brain and having to do with the whole way a person thinks. Thinking is regulated when we look at the etheric body, from a center near the physical heart. Aristotle described this to illustrate the peculiar nature of thought. Later, people no longer understood what Aristotle meant, and they began to confuse the word for 'nerve' with the material nerve. It was believed that Aristotle meant the physical nerve cords when he described the etheric currents. With the transition to the materialistic period, Aristotle was no longer understood. So you can see that something completely wrong was learned. It was said that the main nerves emanate from the heart. Now came the scientific materialistic research, as inaugurated by Copernicus and Galileo, and then people came to the conclusion that the nerves emanate from the brain, namely the physical cords. And then they began to say: Aristotle is wrong. Thus Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno were opponents of Aristotle. The medieval Aristotelians did not adhere to the teachings of Aristotle, but to what they dreamt up about Aristotle. Thus it could happen that when Galileo showed a friend of his, who was an Aristotelian, the nerves running to the brain on a corpse, this friend preferred to trust Aristotle rather than his own observations. He believed in what he had imagined from the teachings of Aristotle. We see, then, how the stream of spiritual science was diverted in Aristotle's time into material science, the merits of which are not to be denied, and which has worked and continues to work for the benefit and salvation of humanity. But now we are in a time when we have to come up into the spiritual.

We are on the threshold of a time when science will again have to learn to understand the spiritual reality, when science will have to become what is called pneumatology in occultism, that is, spiritual teaching. What was science in the past century? The teaching of abstract ideas and natural laws that no longer had any connection with real spiritual life. Science is on the verge of becoming pneumatology, of returning to the spirit. This is written in the stars of theosophy. And since religion must always create an atmosphere for the spiritual, only in those ages can science and religion work in harmony when science works the spirit into pneumatology. Then science can be the right interpreter of spiritual life and support the mood that should in turn live in religion.

What is beginning is in such stark contrast to what has passed. Take, for example, what has passed in the various Protestant religious denominations: how they have tried not to let any scientific thinking into the area that should be dedicated to faith. Think of Luther and Kant. Kant said that he had to suspend knowledge so that he could have free rein for faith in freedom, immortality and God.

At that time, science was directed towards the external, sensual physical, it knew no interpretation of the supersensible, the spiritual. Therefore, what had been handed down in sacred documents had to be preserved as unadulterated as possible. This had its good justification. Now we are facing a different age, where theosophy guides us into the spiritual world, and now we will see how, little by little, a time is approaching when what is emerging is to be achieved by science being supported and enlightened precisely by theosophy. Religion and science will work together again in the next age. Science will become something that must gradually apply to all people. It will become understandable for everyone. Therefore, what is emerging as a parallel course of religion and science will, in the broadest sense, produce what could be called individualism in religion: every single heart will find its way into the spiritual world in an individual religious way. It is preordained for our age that that which can be common science in the spiritual will serve as an interpreter and guide in the religious realm in the most individual and personal way.

Again, it is shown in a remarkable way how, even here in decline, the personal moment points to something super-personal. The signs of decline also show this. And how does this pointing to a super-personal reality show itself in certain church conditions? What was it, then, when in a certain church those who are its custodians appealed to inspiration? [...] The things must be seen in relation to their spiritual character. Much of what is evident today, particularly in the religious life of the various denominations, points to this shining of the spirit self into what we call the consciousness soul, in both the ascending and descending sense.

This is particularly evident in the third of the three areas of human spiritual life. There will be a spreading of knowledge, knowledge of which today's practice of life has no real idea. One principle of this realization will be that the happiness of an individual human being can never be bought at the expense of the lesser happiness of others. In the future, the personal moment will be transferred into the transpersonal, and the egotistical into the trans-egotistical, into that which connects people. Gradually, a person will not want to be happy without knowing that others are equally happy. This mood, which is the opposite of our current way of life, is being prepared. There is only one way to create this mood, and that is through the realization of the real human essence and its composition, as spiritual science gives it to us. One must know man if one wants to be man.

We see these three things at the starting point of their development. What is the purpose of spiritual science? It should teach us to understand everything that must come. Now I want to say radically how people can relate to this. I will hypothetically assume for a while that what is today Theosophy and still represents a very small current would be seen by those who come into contact with it as a fantasy and reverie, and that it would be suppressed. Those who hold the anti-theosophical point of view would simply make it impossible for theosophy to flourish, because anti-theosophy is heading towards science. Then it would be impossible to gain an understanding of what has been described to you as the necessary development of science, religion and human life practice, written in the stars. Then people would exclude themselves from understanding these things. In which case, what would people be like? People would then be on Earth like a herd of some kind of animal that had ended up in completely alien climatic conditions that it cannot adapt to. The consequence of this would be that the animals would wither away and gradually perish. In this way, people would all fall prey to decay, decadence, premature destruction. Not through extinction, for instance. They would become more beast-like, which would be much worse than extinction, so that only the base passions and instincts and desires would really still be alive; that people would only desire to eat this or that, and they would use all their thinking to be able to produce that food. They would build factories to produce the best flour and the best bread, ships and balloons to bring fruit from the most distant regions and to deliver the products they want to enjoy. They would use tremendous ingenuity for the “rise of culture” – that is what they would call it. They would use infinite intelligence and mental power for this, but only to set the table in the end. Just think about what the phrase “rising culture” means from this point of view! Isn't the essential thing that infinite mental power is applied to it? If we only use it to telegraph: I need so many sacks of flour - then great intellectual power is used to produce something that ultimately only serves what we might call the animal in man. Materialism has led to a peak of intelligence and intelligent culture. But that has nothing to do with spirituality. Let us assume that people would be eliminated. What would the gods have to do? They would say to themselves: Now we have had a generation that did not understand the mission on earth. So we have to send down another generation, a generation of souls that will accomplish the mission on earth.

But small circles will already find understanding for what spiritual life of the future must be, and therefore the earth mission will be completed by people, and that which our fifth post-Atlantic culture, dedicated to the consciousness soul, will replace as the sixth, will already be achieved by a small circle of people who will spread throughout the rest of humanity. But this can only be achieved if people's free will intervenes. For once the ego has taken hold in human nature, man must also develop free will for the development of the ego. So it depends on each individual whether he wants to show understanding for spiritual development, or whether he wants to steer the descent that humanity is taking today.

A way of life must be developed that is based on the principle that the happiness of the individual cannot be attained at the expense of the happiness of another. If man does not want to understand this, he promotes the downward, withering, brutalizing development of humanity. Today we as human beings stand before this decision in a certain respect: to want or not to want spiritual science, and that means to want either the ascent or the decline of humanity. We should feel this in everything we do, we should feel that through our karma we have been placed like a new material in the development of humanity, like those who are to give up their powers as elementary powers, who must work their way up.

When we feel this way, we already have a practical sense of theosophy, a practical feeling, and we are aware of what we are actually doing when we develop the seemingly insignificant activity that we develop in such anthroposophical branches. Not as a hobby, a quirk of individuals, but as an understanding of the deepest needs of a newly emerging age.

I wanted to show you how things are interrelated so that we can truly understand the progress of humanity. Think for a moment about the sentence that man is a self-conscious being, that he must therefore know what he is, and only by knowing himself in his essence can he fulfill his destiny in the world; that therefore all those who do not want to know anything about the essence of man do not have the will to place themselves in the world in the right way. Do you remember how a spirit spoke that had an inkling of much of what is emerging today as Theosophy? Johann Gottlieb Fichte once spoke of his lofty ideas in the lectures 'On the Destination of the Scholar'. When he wanted to write a preface to these lectures, it occurred to him that now this will reach people who will just say: Yes, very nice ideas, but impractical. How can one introduce into life what is being said here? Yet Fichte was well aware that life is constantly guided by ideas.

Let us point out one example here. Who built the Simplon Tunnel? No engineer today can work without differential and integral calculus. Leibniz, who invented differential and integral calculus, is basically building all the tunnels and bridges in our time. The spiritual is everywhere the guiding force in all of life, and we can learn from what Fichte wrote, learn to strengthen ourselves in our theosophical consciousness when people say, “Oh, those are such eccentric ideas, nothing practical.” Fichte says in response: We know that ideas cannot be directly translated into life, and so do those who hold this against us. Perhaps we know it even better. But the fact that others do not want to know anything about ideas at all merely proves that the wise world government, the divine world government, will not be able to count on them. May a benevolent Nature, in which they believe, give them, at the right time, rain and sunshine, good digestion and, if possible, some good thoughts. In a way, we can strengthen ourselves by saying: we do know that, as Theosophists, we must cultivate an understanding for what must come. May a kind nature give them what Fichte said, but also what they need in spirit, what they believe they do not need. May the spirit give them ever wiser and wiser thoughts, so that they too will see spiritual science not as a reverie, but as an important impulse for humanity!

Source: January 5, 1911