Multilingual AI translation:

Rudolf Steiner on “spiritual vaccination” (1917)

“Just don’t fool yourself. One stands before a quite certain movement. Just as the spirit was abolished at that Council in Constantinople, that is, as it was dogmatically determined: Man consists only of body and soul, to speak of a spirit is heretical -, so one will strive in another form to abolish the soul, the life of the soul. And the time will come, perhaps not at all in the distant future, when at such a congress as the one that took place in 1912, something quite different will develop, when quite different tendencies will appear, when one will say: It is already morbid in man, if he even thinks about spirit and soul. Only those people are healthy who only talk about the body. – It will be regarded as a symptom of illness if man develops in such a way that he can come to the concept: There is a spirit or a soul. – These will be sick people. And one will find – you can be quite sure – the corresponding remedy through which one will work. At that time one abolished the spirit. The soul will be abolished by a medicine. Out of a “healthy view” one will find a vaccine by which the organism will be worked on in such a way in the earliest possible youth, if possible right at birth, that this human body will not come to the thought: There is a soul and a spirit. – This is how sharply the two world-view currents will confront each other. The one will have to think about how concepts and ideas are to be formed so that they can cope with the real reality, the reality of the spirit and the soul. The other, the successors of today’s materialists, will look for the vaccine that will make the body “healthy”, that is, make it so that this body, through its constitution, no longer talks of such silly things as soul and spirit, but talks “healthy” of the forces that live in machines and chemistry, that constitute planets and suns in the nebula of the world. This will be brought about by physical procedures. The materialistic physicians will be given the task of expelling the souls from mankind. Yes, those who believe that one can see into the future with playful concepts, they are very much mistaken. With serious, thorough, deep concepts one must look into the future. Spiritual science is not a gimmick, is not merely a theory, but spiritual science is a real duty towards the development of mankind.”

~RUDOLF STEINER (Collected Works; page 97-98)

rudolf steiner gesammelte werke

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