Steiner wrote:We will always, and in every field, need the stimulus of spiritual science. It alone will be able to let new life arise from the dying forms of the present life of mind and intellect—new life which can act as a stimulant in the way I have described, especially for the minds of children. Without the stimulus of spiritual science, one will be a dried-up school teacher who also dries up the children's minds. Worst of all, people will increasingly have the idea, especially with regard to educating the young, that the best we can do with everything we learn is to forget it again as quickly as possible. If a situation is created where in later life people do not want to miss any of the things they were given in their childhood, this will not merely be a pleasure but prove a wellspring, a true wellspring of human life. I would ask you to take this to heart.
Science itself also needs new stimulus. Yesterday I spoke of how difficult it is to bridge the gap between spiritual science in general and the special fields in which people are engaged in scientific life. Yet this will be absolutely one of the most essential things in future. You must have realized from some of the things said here and elsewhere that paucity and impoverishment of concepts and ideas have led to the conditions we have today.
I have said it in my public lecture in Basle and I have also repeated it here, that people who considered themselves competent believed, when this war started, that it would last no longer than four months. They thought they had studied the social and economic structure and they formed the idea on that basis. Their ideas of this kind did not relate to reality, and reality has proved them wrong. It is strange how little people are prepared to learn from events. Someone who had arrived at such an idea on the basis of their own scientific understanding surely ought to say to himself now: "The premises on which I based my conclusions were clearly quite inadequate." Surely, he must now be inclined to learn something. But he sleeps on, drawing further conclusions from those same premises, which have only changed a little under the pressure of experience, because he does not want to consider the inner connections. Of course, anyone who wishes to consider the inner connections in life will have to take this hurdle, which is such a problem, particularly to people who are involved in scientific issues. The last thing they want is to be bothered in the limited field in which they are active; they do not want to establish links with related fields.
This type of specialization was quite a good thing for a time. But
if it continues, and if our university students continue to be ruined by the bias which comes with specialization, the calamities which result when people's ideas are divorced from reality will get worse and worse. We will have people in municipal, rural and national representative bodies who simply have no real grasp of the issues they are supposed to regulate according to law, because their ideas are too limited to encompass reality. Reality is far richer than those ideas.
There can be no question, then, of being inclined to leave specialized areas as far as possible to "experts", nor of using Anthroposophy to satisfy subjective and egotistical needs. It has to be a matter of knowing how to unite these two opposites, and let one prove fruitful for the other.
Something we find again and again—you would also find it so if you were to focus your attention on these things—is that if you speak about special subject-areas to people who are sincerely devoted to anthroposophy, they do find the matter rather tedious. The request is always to speak about central issues—soul, immortality, God, and so on. This will, of course, satisfy their immediate egotistical religious needs, but it leaves no opportunity to give them what is needed more than anything for the near future, namely that people make themselves a real part of this real life. This is why we must take note when someone seeks to make a real connection between impulses to look at things on the basis of spiritual science and the specialist areas.
I have previously drawn attention here to the important book our friend Dr. Boos has written on the Collective Agreement. The book is now generally available and I should like to draw your attention to it, for
it is a perfect example of building bridges between the general approach used in anthroposophy and a whole specialist field, the sphere of law. The point is that our friends
will not, I hope, consider special investigations of this kind as something outside their sphere but rather give them their attention, for in the time which lies ahead,
life itself will have to be the subject for anthroposophical consideration. If you read the book carefully and work through it, you will find aspects of everyday life are taken up in a living way, and also in such a way that one can see two things coming into play here: first, impulses to consider life in a truly comprehensive way, impulses altogether attuned to cosmic laws, and then also great historical perspectives.
The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness GA 177 - Lecture XI: Recognizing the Inner Human Being
(before Ahriman takes hold of it)
retrieved from the
Rudolf Steiner Archive 
1. PHYSICAL PLANE
2. ETHERIC PLANE
3. ASTRAL PLANE (Kama-loka)
4. SPIRIT WORLD – LOWER DEVACHAN
5. SPIRIT LAND – HIGHER DEVACHAN
6. NIRVANA PLANE
7. PARINIRVANA PLANE
8. MAHAPARANIRVANA PLANE