The Rudolf Steiner Archive

During the last few days, we have spoken about many things connected with the existence of hidden depths in our soul-life; and we should now do well to consider various other aspects of this subject, which may be useful for the Anthroposophist to know. On the whole, it must be said that a complete clarification of these things is possible only when we work them through in the light of what Anthroposophy is able to give.

Now, we have already considered, from the most varied aspects, all that might be termed the organisation of man. Hence, it should be quite easy for each one of us—if we direct our attention in some measure, to the hidden depths of the soul to connect in the right way what thereby appears from a new standpoint, with the organisation of man as it is known to us through the more or less elementary presentation of the Anthroposophical world-conception. It has been repeatedly stated, during the last few days, that everything comprising our conceptual thoughts, our perceptions, the impulses of our will, our feelings and sensations—in short, everything that takes place in our soul during its normal state, from the moment of waking to the moment of falling asleep—may simply be termed the activities, the peculiarities, or the forces, of ordinary consciousness.

Let us now summarise graphically—by enclosing it between these two parallel lines (a—b)—everything that is included in the ordinary human consciousness: that is, everything that a human being knows, feels, and wills, from the time he awakes, till he falls asleep.

We then find—do we not—that our thoughts, and also every one of our perceptions, belong within this sphere enclosed by these two parallel lines. Thus, when we enter into relationship with the external world through our senses, and thereby form an image of this external world through all sorts of sense impressions—an image which is still in connection, or in contact, with the external world—this also forms part of our ordinary consciousness. At the same time, our feeling-life and our impulses of will belong here also—in short, everything that constitutes our ordinary consciousness. We might say that this sphere represented by these parallel lines (a—b), includes everything which the normal, every-day life of the soul makes known to us.

Now, the important thing is that we should know, quire clearly, that this so-called soul-life is dependent upon the instruments of the physical body -- that is upon all those instruments comprised by the senses and the nervous system. If we now draw two other parallel lines beyond the first two, we may say that the sense-organs and the nervous system in our physical organism serve as the instruments of this ordinary consciousness—the sense-organs being the more important, although the nervous system may also be included, to a certain extent.

And, below the threshold of our ordinary consciousness, lies all that may be enclosed between these other two parallel lines (b—c)—and which may be termed the hidden side of the soul's life, or the sub-consciousness. We obtain a clear conception of what is imbedded, as it were, in this sub-consciousness, when we remember, on the one hand, that the human being acquires, as we have learned, through spiritual training, imagination, inspiration, and intuition. Thus we see that, just as we have to include our conceptual thoughts, our feelings, and our will-impulses, in the ordinary consciousness, so we have to include imagination, inspiration, and intuition, in the subconscious life. But we know, also that the sub-consciousness is active, not only when such a spiritual training is carried on, but that it may also become active in the form of an ancient inheritance—as an original primitive state of human consciousness, or a kind of atavism. In this case, something arises which we may call visions; and these visions, arising—let us say—in the naive consciousness, correspond, in this primitive state of consciousness, to the Imaginations acquired by means of the right training. Moreover, forebodings may arise; and these would be the primitive inspirations. A significant example will at once show us the difference between a foreboding and an inspiration.

We have often mentioned the fact that, in the course of the 20th century, an event will occur, in human evolution, which we may call a kind of spiritual return of the Christ; and that there will be a number of people who will experience the influence of the Christ upon our world—when He enters it in an etheric form, from out the astral plane. A knowledge of this fact can be attained if we learn to know, through the right sort of training, just how evolution takes its course, and we then come to see—as a result of this training—that such an event must indeed take place, during the 20th century. It is also quite possible, on the other hand—and indeed this often happens, in our days—that certain people will be gifted with a natural, primitive clairvoyance, a mysterious kind of inspiration, which we may describe as a foreboding of the approaching Christ. These people will not even know, perhaps, exactly what is taking place; yet, nevertheless, an important inspiration such as this may quite well appear as a foreboding, if something takes place within the primitive consciousness which is more than a vision, more than a foreboding. A vision is experienced when the image or counterpart of a spiritual occurrence arises before us. Let us suppose, for instance, that someone has lost a friend—so that the Ego has passed through the portal of death and is now dwelling in the spiritual world. A kind of connection may be established, in this case, between the one living in the spiritual world, and the one dwelling on the earth; and yet, the one who is living in this world may not know, at all rightly, just what the dead friend desires of him—indeed, he may have a false idea of what the departed friend, yonder, is experiencing in his soul. Nevertheless, the very fact of such a condition may be experienced in the form of a vision; and—even if it should be wrong, as far as the picture is concerned—the vision may be based upon the true fact: namely, that the departed friend wishes to establish a connection with the one who is still alive. And this assumes the form of a premonition. Thus, one who has premonitions knows certain things concerning either the past or the future, which are not accessible to ordinary consciousness. Let us suppose, on the other hand, something arises before the human soul in the form of a clear perception (not merely as a vision which may, under certain circumstances, be misleading, but as a clear perception); and let us suppose that it represents either some event which takes place in the physical world—although not in a sphere which renders it accessible to the ordinary senses—or an event taking place in the super-sensible world. Such an appearance is usually designated by occultism as “deuteroscopy,” or second sight. And with this I have described to you something, whether it be described through regular training or whether it appears in the form of natural clairvoyance, that takes place in human consciousness—in the sub-consciousness, to be sure; yet at the same time in the human soul itself.

Now, when we speak of sub-consciousness, in contrast to ordinary consciousness, we find that everything that takes place here in the human soul differs very greatly from all processes in the ordinary consciousness. These processes of ordinary consciousness—with respect to those things with which they are connected—are in reality such, that we must speak of the impotence of this ordinary consciousness. The eye sees the rose; but this eye, which acts, to be sure, in such a way that the image of the rose arises in us, is quite powerless to picture to the ordinary consciousness—even with all its perception and its capacity to imagine the rose—such a thing as the growth, the growing and fading of the rose. The rose grows and dies again through its inherent natural forces; and neither the eye, nor the ordinary consciousness, can go beyond the sphere which is accessible to their perception. This is not the case, however, with the facts belonging to the sphere of the sub-conscious. And this is what we must bear in mind first of all; for it is extremely important. If we perceive something with our eye, during the normal act of vision—whether it be coloured pictures, or anything else—we are not only unable, through our perception, to change anything in the objective facts, but something else indeed arises, if our sight is normal. If nothing else takes place, for the eye, than the mere act of vision, the eye in this case remains unchanged by this process. Only when we go beyond the natural limits, by sometimes passing from a normal light to a blinding light, do we injure the eye. So that we may say: facts and processes of ordinary consciousness do not enable us even to react upon ourselves, if we simply remain in this ordinary consciousness. Our organism is indeed constructed in such a way that facts accessible to ordinary consciousness do not even cause any particular changes within us.

It is quite different, however, with those things which arise in the sub-consciousness. Let us suppose that we form an imagination, or that we have a vision. And let us now suppose that this Imagination, or this vision, corresponds to some good Being. This good Being, in that case, is not in the physical, sense-world, but in the super-sensible world; and let us now suppose that the world, inhabited by these Beings which we perceive through imagination or vision, lies enclosed, here, between these two parallel lines. Let us try to find in this world everything which may become object, or perception, for our sub-consciousness (b—e)—we shall refrain from writing anything in this space, for the time being. On the other hand, if we have an imaginary picture, or a vision, of some sort of evil or demoniacal Being in this super-sensible world, we are not powerless, as far as this Being is concerned, in the way the eye is powerless with regard to the rose. If, during the imagination or vision of an evil Being, we call forth the feeling that it should retreat from us—if we do this while seeing perfectly clearly this visionary, or imaginative, picture, such a Being in this other world, must actually feel as if it were pushed and driven away by a force proceeding from us.

The same thing happens, if we have the corresponding imagination, or vision, of a good Being. In this case, also, if we develop a feeling of sympathy, this Being will feel within itself a force which compels it to approach us and to connect itself with us. All Beings—whatever may be their place in this world—sense the forces of attraction, or repulsion, coming from us, whenever we form visions of them. Our sub-consciousness is therefore in a situation similar to that of an eye that would not only see a rose, but would develop, through the mere sight of the rose, the desire that the rose should approach it—could attract it to itself. Or, if upon seeing something repulsive, the eye were not only to come to the opinion, “This is repulsive,” but could eliminate this repulsive thing through mere antipathy. Our sub-consciousness is therefore connected with a world in which the sympathy and antipathy arising in the human soul can be active. It is necessary to place this quite clearly before our minds.

But sympathy and antipathy—and, generally speaking, all the impulses in our sub-consciousness—are not only active in this sphere, in the way already described; they are also active in what is more especially within ourselves, and which we must now think of as a part of man's etheric body—not only as a part of the etheric body, however, but also as certain forces of the physical body—enclosed, here, within these two parallel lines (b—c). We must imagine here, that is to say, first of all what lives in man as a force pulsating through his blood, or: the force of warmth in the blood. And then, we must imagine within this space still another force: namely, that force which is present in our healthy or unhealthy breathing depending, as it does, upon our entire organism in short, the more or less healthy force of breathing. We may also call it the constitution of the force of breathing. Furthermore, a great part of what we must term man's etheric body belongs to all that upon which the sub-consciousness is actively at work within us. Hence, sub-consciousness, or the hidden forces of the soul-life, work within us in such a way that they influence, in the first place, the temperature of our blood. Since the entire pulsation, the vitality, or lack of vitality of our circulation is dependent upon the temperature of our blood, we can realise that this whole circulation must be connected in some way with our sub-consciousness, Whether or not a human being has a more rapid, or a less rapid, circulation is essentially dependent upon the forces of his sub-consciousness.

Now, if the influence man has on all that exists in that other world, in the form of demoniacal of good Beings, takes place only when there arise out of his sub-consciousness with a certain clearness visions, imaginations, or other sorts of perceptions—that is if, things really stand clearly before him; and if, then, certain forces become as it were magically active in this world, through sympathy and antipathy, this clear way of facing himself, subconsciously, in his own soul, will not be necessary for the influencing of that inner organism which consists of what we have indicated here (b—c). Whether man knows, or fails to know, exactly what imaginations correspond to this or that sympathy within him—in either case, this sympathy works upon the circulation of his blood, upon his breathing-system, upon his etheric body. Let us now suppose that, for a certain period of time, someone is inclined to have only feelings of repulsion. If he were able to see visions, or if he were endowed with imaginative knowledge, he would have the kind of vision, or imagination, described day before yesterday, in the form of perceptions of his own being. These would be projected out into space, to be sure, but they would nevertheless belong only to his own world; these visions and imaginations would reveal what lives within him in the way of forces active in feelings of repulsion. Yet, even if he simply has these feelings of repulsion, so that they live within him—they nevertheless work upon him all the same. And they work in such a way, indeed, that they actually influence the force which warms his blood, and also the force in his breathing. Hence, if we now pass on to the other aspect, we find that the human being has a more or less healthy breathing—depending upon the feelings which he experiences in his sub-consciousness; and that he has a more or less healthy circulation, depending upon his sub-conscious experiences. It is especially the activity of the etheric body, and all its processes, that are dependent on the world of feeling that lives in man.

When the facts of sub-consciousness are really experienced by the soul, we can see, not only that there exists this connection (of the world of feeling—with the breathing, the circulation, and the activity of the etheric body), but that owing to it, there is a continual influence upon the entire constitution of man, with the result that there are certain feelings and sensations which reach down into the sub-consciousness. And because these call forth certain forms in the force of warmth in the blood, and a certain disposition in the force of breathing and of the etheric body, their influence upon the organism is either a furthering one, during the whole of a man's life; or it is one that retards and hinders it. Thus there is always something arising or passing away in man, through these forces which play into his sub-consciousness. He either diminishes his vital forces, or he increases them, through what he sends down into his sub-consciousness out of his ordinary conscious state. If a man takes pleasure in the thought of lies which he has told; if it does not fill him with repulsion—for this would be the natural feeling toward a lie—or if he is lazy and indifferent toward lies, and even takes pleasure in telling them, this feeling which accompanies the lie, is in that case sent down into his sub-consciousness. Whatever enters the sub-consciousness, in this way injures the circulation of the blood, the constitution of breathing, and the forces of the etheric body; and the consequence of this will be that the human being, when he passes through the portal of death with what then remains to him, will be stunted—will become impoverished in his forces—because something has died in him, which would have come to life had he felt abhorrence and repulsion toward lying—in accordance with the normal human feeling. If the feelings of aversion toward lying had dived down into his sub-consciousness they would then have been transferred to those forces indicated here, in our drawing, and the human being would have sent down into his organism something beneficial—something in the nature of forces of birth.

Thus we see how, in the first place, the human being works from out of his sub-consciousness upon his own growth and decay, because of the fact that forces are continually passing from his upper consciousness—from his ordinary consciousness—down into his sub-consciousness. Man, as he is constituted today, however, is not yet strong enough to cause injury through his soul-nature, as it were, to other parts of his organism also—besides his circulation, his breathing, and his etheric body. He cannot harm the coarser and firmer parts of his physical organism, as well. Thus, we may say that man is in a position to harm only a part of his entire constitution. What has thus been injured appears with especial clearness, when that part of the etheric body which has remained (for the etheric body is continually connected with the force of warmth in the blood, and with the constitution of breathing) has been influenced in the way we have mentioned; for in this case it deteriorates through wrong feelings. On the other hand it acquires fruitful, strengthening and beneficent forces through good, normal, true feelings. We may therefore say that what takes place in his sub-consciousness enables man to work directly upon the growth and decay, that is, upon the true processes, the reality, of his organism. He plunges down from the sphere of impotence of his ordinary consciousness, into the sphere where there is constant growth and decay, in his own soul, and consequently in his whole human constitution.

Now we have seen that, through the fact that our soul has more or less experience of our sub-consciousness—knows something concerning it: through this fact, the sub-consciousness also acquires an influence over that world which may be termed (according to an expression which was used for it throughout the Middle-Ages)—the elementary world. Nevertheless, man cannot enter into direct relationship with this elementary world, but only by the circuitous road, of experiencing, first of all in himself, the effects of his sub-consciousness upon his organism. If, after a period of time, the human being has learned sufficient self-knowledge to say to himself: “When you have this feeling within you, and when you send the one or the other result of your conduct down into your sub-consciousness, you destroy certain things in yourself, thereby, and cause them to be stunted; and when you experience other things, and send down certain accompanying experiences, you further your development,” if, for a certain period of time, he experiences within himself this fluctuation between destruction and furthering forces, he will then become more and more mature in self-knowledge. This is, in reality, the true self-knowledge; and it can be likened only to a “picture” with may be obtained as follows:—

Self-knowledge, attained in this way, may actually bring it about—through a lie, and through a wrong feeling toward the lie, which arises in our instincts—that we feel as if a scorpion were biting off one of our toes. We may be sure that, if human beings were to perceive some real effect of this sort, they would never lie as they do. Thus, if we were to experience at once, in the physical world, a crippling of our physical organism this would correspond to what actually happens in connection with things that usually remain invisible—through what we send down into sub-consciousness, out of our daily experiences. Any sort of lazy indifference toward a lie, which is sent down into the sub-consciousness, has the effect of biting off something within us, as it were—taking away something which we then no longer possess, so that we are stunted and must acquire it again, in the later course of our karma. And if we send down a right feeling into our sub-consciousness (of course, we must imagine an infinite scale of feelings which may plunge down in this way) we grow in ourselves thereby, and form new life-forces in our organism. The first thing which appears in a man who attains true self-knowledge is this ability to become a spectator of his own growing and fading.

I have been told that my listeners did not understand quite clearly, day before yesterday, how we may distinguish between a true vision or imagination which forms an objective experience, and one which is merely projected into space and belongs to our subjective life. Now, we cannot say—“Write down this or that rule, and then you will be able to distinguish the one from the other.” Such rules do not exist; on the contrary, we learn only gradually, in the course of our development. And we are able to distinguish between what belongs only to ourselves, and what arises as exterior vision and belongs to a true Being, only when we have passed through the experience of being continually devoured, inwardly, by sub-conscious processes that kill. This will equip us with a kind of certainty, and will be followed also by a state in which we shall always be able to face a vision or an imagination and say to ourselves: “If we can see into the vision through the force of our spiritual sight, the vision will remain; for, if we develop the active force of spiritual sight, this corresponds to an objective fact. If, on the other hand, the active force of spiritual sight obliterates the vision, this proves that it was merely a part of our own self.”

Thus, a human being who is not careful with regard to this may even see thousands and thousands of pictures from the Akasha Chronicle; yet, even so, if he does not apply the test as to whether or not these pictures are obliterated through an absolutely active sight, these Akasha pictures, in that case—no matter how many facts they may reveal—can be looked upon only as pictures of man's own inner life. It might happen, for instance—I repeat, it might happen—that someone who sees nothing more than his own interior, projected in very dramatic pictures, imagines these to be events, let us say, which extend over the entire Atlantean world, through whole generations of humanity. ... And, all the while—no matter how seemingly objective—this might, under certain circumstances, be merely a projection of his own inward being. Now, when a human being passes through the portal of death, it always comes to pass that whatever might hinder his subjective life from being transformed into visions or Imaginations now disappears. In the ordinary human life of our day, as we know, what man experiences within himself sub-consciously, what he sends down into his sub-consciousness, does not always become vision or Imagination. It becomes an Imagination if he undergoes the regular and necessary training; and it becomes a vision if he still possesses an atavistic clairvoyance. When the human being has passed through the portal of death, his entire inner life becomes immediately an objective world, and is there before him. Kamaloka is in its essence nothing else than a world erected around us out of all that we have experienced within our own souls. Only in Devachan does the reverse of this take place. Thus we can easily realise that what I have said regarding the activity of man's sympathy and antipathy, as contained in visions, Imaginations, Inspirations, and also premonitions, etc.—that this activity always, under all circumstances, influences the objective elementary world. And I said, in connection with this activity, that, in the human being who is incarnated in the physical body, only that which he brings as far as vision or Imagination can influence this elementary world. In the case of the dead, those forces also which existed in the sub-consciousness and which always accompany the human being when he crosses the portal of death, are active in the elementary world; so that everything which he experiences after death is in reality exceedingly active in the elementary world.

Just as certainly as we create waves in the river, when we lash its waters—with the same certainty do the experiences of the dead continue to influence the elementary world. Just as certainly, I repeat, as waves arise and ripple out from whatever point we happen to strike, in the water; and just as surely as a current of air continues to create itself, just so surely do these forces continue their influence in the elementary world. Hence, this elementary world is continually filled with forces which have been called into being through what human beings take with them, out of their sub-consciousness, when they cross the portal of death. The important thing, therefore, is always to be in position to create such circumstances as will enable us to see—to perceive—the things in the elementary world. It need not surprise us, when the clairvoyant rightly recognises the things that occur in the elementary world as Beings brought about through the activity of the dead. At the same time—and under certain specific conditions to be sure—we can pursue these activities, resulting from the experiences of the dead (and influencing, first, the elementary world) even as far as the physical world. For, when a clairvoyant has himself passed through all those experiences which I have described, and has attained the ability to perceive the elementary world, he will arrive at the point, after a certain length of time, when he has the most extraordinary experiences.

Let us suppose that a clairvoyant passes through the following process:—To begin with, he looks at a rose, let us say. He looks at it with his physical eye. Now, when he looks at it in this way, he will receive a sense-impression. And let us suppose, further, that this clairvoyant has trained himself to experience quite a definite feeling, with a certain definite nuance, when he sees the colour red. This is necessary; otherwise the process would not go any further. Unless we experience quite definite nuances of feeling, when we see colours, or hear sounds, we cannot progress in a clairvoyance that is directed at exterior objects. Now, let us suppose that the clairvoyant gives away the rose. If he were not clairvoyant, his perception would sink down into his sub-consciousness and would carry on its work, there—making him ill or healthy, as the case might be. If on the other hand, he is clairvoyant, he will now perceive just how his Imagination of the rose works upon his sub-consciousness. That is, he will have a visionary picture—an Imagination of the rose. At the same time, he will perceive how the feelings which the rose called forth in him have either a furthering or a destructive effect upon his etheric body—as well as upon what we have here described as the physical body. He will perceive in everything, the effect upon his own organism. And if he has now formed an Imigination of the rose, he will be able through this to exercise a force of attraction upon that Being which we may call the Group-Soul of the rose, and which is always at work in the rose. Thus, he will be able to look into the elementary world, to see the Group-Soul of the rose, in so far as it lives in that world. Now, on the other hand, if the clairvoyant goes still further—that is, if he has started by looking at the rose; has then given it away; and, finally, has pursued the inner process of his surrender to the rose, and of the effect resulting therefrom; and if he thus reaches the point of seeing something of the rose in the elementary world, he will then see, in the place where the rose appeared to him, a wonderfully luminous sort of picture, belonging to the elementary world. And then, if he has followed the process as far as this point, something new will take place. He may now ignore what is there, before him, and may command himself not to look with the inner eye at what appears before him as a living etheric Being, extending out into the world—he must not see this! An extraordinary thing then takes place: namely, the clairvoyant sees something which goes through his eye and which shows him the activity of the forces that construct his eye—those forces, that is, which build up the human eye out of the etheric body. He sees which are the constructive forces of his own physical body. He actually sees his physical eye as if it were an exterior object.

This is actually what may take place. He may follow the path leading from an exterior object to that point—otherwise a space containing absolute darkness—where, without allowing any other sense-perception to enter, he now perceives what his own eye looks like, in a spiritual picture. Thus he can see the interior organ itself; and he has now reached this region, here)—the region of what is truly creative in the physical world, or the creative physical world. Man perceives it first, by perceiving his own physical organisation. Thus he retraces the path and returns to himself. What is it that has sent into our eye forces which, in reality, cause us to see this eye, as if rays of light went out from it, corresponding completely with the nature of vision? As a next step, we then see the eye surrounded by a sort of yellow luminosity, we see it enclosed within ourselves. All this has been effected by the process of those forces which have brought man up to this stage.

The same course is followed by those forces which may proceed from a dead person. The dead man takes with him, into the world in which he lives after passing through the portal of death, the content of his sub-consciousness. As soon as we reach the interior of our own physical eye, we experience there the forces sent out by the dead, and coming from the elementary world back into the physical world. The one who has died may perhaps experience a special longing for someone he has left behind. This special longing was contained, at first, in his sub-consciousness; but it now immediately becomes a living vision; and through this he influences the elementary world. In the elementary world, what at first was only living vision becomes, now at once, a force. This force takes the path indicated by the longing for the one living on earth; and if it is in any way possible, there will be knocking and other noises in the physical world, in the neighbourhood of the living. One may hear these sounds of rapping, etc., or perceive them, just as one perceives any other physical thing. These very things, which are due to connections and circumstances of this sort, would be noticed far more often in the world than is generally the case, if people would only pay attention to the times most favourable for such influences. And the most favourable times are the moments of falling asleep, and of waking in the morning. People simply do not pay sufficient attention to such things—for, indeed, there cannot really be any human beings, anywhere, who have not, at some time or other, received messages from the super-sensible world, in the transition state between falling asleep and awaking again—messages that come in the form of rapping noises, or even of spoken words.

I wished to allude to this today, my dear friends, because I wished to point out the true reality of the connection between Man and the Universe. What man obtains from the objective sense-world, in his ordinary consciousness, is powerless, and devoid of any real connection with this sense-world. But, as soon as his experiences pass into his sub-consciousness a connection with Reality is established. The impotence of his preceding state of consciousness is transformed into a fine, imperceptible, magic force. And when man has passed through the portal of death, and is unhampered by his physical body, his experiences are such as to play into an elementary world; and, under favourable circumstances they may work down as far as the physical world—where they may be perceived even by the ordinary consciousness.

I have indicated the simplest sort of thing which can take place; because, after all, we must always begin with the simplest things. Naturally, in the course of time—for we have always allowed ourselves time to work out gradually whatever we need to know—we shall pass on to the more complicated things, which may lead us, in turn, into the more intimate connections, so to speak, existing between the Universe and Man.

The changes which take place in the pupil through his occult or theosophical development as regards his muscular system, and especially as regards his senses, his sense organs, lead over, as it were, from man's physical system of sheaths to the etheric-system, the etheric body. With respect to the muscular system, the pupil not only feels this muscular system gradually becoming more mobile—as may also be said with respect to the other physical organs—but, besides becoming more alive, he feels this muscular system permeated by a delicate inner consciousness. It is as though consciousness actually extended to the muscular system. And without inaccuracy, speaking as it were in paradox about this experience, we might say that in the course of his esoteric or theosophical development the student gradually becomes conscious of his several muscles and his muscular system in an inner dreamy way; he always carries his muscular system about with him in such a way that he entertains vague thoughts, dreams of its activity in the midst of his ordinary waking consciousness.

It is always very interesting to grasp the reason of this changing of the physical sheath because in this perception the student has something which informs him that in a certain direction he has made progress. When he begins to feel his several muscles, so that when for example, contracting and extending them he is faintly conscious of what is going on, he has a dim feeling of sympathy which means: something is going on in the muscles. When the movements of his muscles become ideas to him it is a proof that he is beginning gradually to feel the etheric body impregnating the physical body; for what he then actually feels are the forces of the etheric body which are active in the muscles. So that when a man begins to have a shadowy feeling of his several muscles, a dreamy consciousness of himself, as it were, just as in text-books on anatomy one may see the picture of a man whose skin has been removed so that only the muscles appear, that is the beginning of the perception of the etheric body. Indeed, when one begins to perceive the etheric entity, it is in a certain sense like this ‘drawing off one's skin’ and having a shadowy consciousness of one's several members as of a jointed doll.

Less comfortable, but nevertheless present, is the sensitiveness when the bone-system begins to draw upon the consciousness. This is a more uncomfortable feeling, because to become aware of this bone-system is to be forcibly struck by the fact of increasing age. It is not precisely pleasant to notice the faculty for sensation with respect to the bone-system—not usually felt at all in ordinary life; but a man begins to feel his bone-system as something like a shadow within him, when he is developing etherically. And he then realises that the symbolical representation of death as a skeleton was in accordance with a certain clairvoyant faculty of mankind in primeval times, for they knew that in his skeleton a man gradually learns to feel the approach of death.

But much more significant than all this is the experience which the student has during his esoteric or theosophical development with respect to his sense organs. Now we know that these sense organs must really be stripped off when the pupil undergoes an esoteric development; they must be silent, as it were. The physical sense organs thereby feel that during esoteric development they are condemned, as it were, to inactivity; they are disconnected. Now when they are disconnected as physical sense-organs, something else comes in their place. The student first becomes gradually conscious of the sense-organs as distinct worlds which penetrate him. He learns to feel the eye, the ears, even the sense of warmth, as if they had been bored into him. But what he thus learns to feel are not the physical sense organs, but the etheric forces, the forces of the etheric body, which act constructively upon the sense organs. So that when he shuts off the activity of the senses, he sees the nature of these sense-organs appearing as so many etheric organisations penetrating him. It is extremely interesting.

To the extent that during his esoteric development the student shuts off his eyes, for example, and no longer thinks of physical sight, to that extent does he learn to recognise something that penetrates his own organisation like organisms of light, he then really learns to recognise that the eyes have gradually come into being through the working of the inner forces of light upon our organism. For during the time that he withdraws from all the activity of the physical eyes, he feels the field of vision to be permeated by the etheric light-forces which organise the eyes. This is a peculiar phenomenon: when one shuts off the eyes themselves, one learns through them to know the forces of light. All physical theories are nothing as compared to the knowledge of the inner nature of light and its activity which the student experiences when he has accustomed himself to eliminate the physical seeing-power of the eyes, and gradually becomes able, in place of the physical use of the eyes, to perceive the inner nature of the etheric forces of light.

The sense of warmth is at a lower stage, as it were, and it is extremely difficult really to shut off sensitivity to heat and cold; this end is best attained during esoteric development, by trying not to be disturbed during the time of meditation, by any feeling of heat. It is therefore good to perform meditation while surrounded by a temperature which is neither hot nor cold, so that no irritation is produced by either feeling. If this can be done, the inner nature of the heat-ether which radiates through space can gradually be recognised, only then does a student feel himself in his own body as though permeated by the true activity of the warmth-ether. Having no longer the external perception of heat, he can learn the nature of the warmth-ether through himself.

By shutting off the sense of taste—of course, it is shut off during the esoteric exercises—but when he attains the faculty of calling up the sensation of taste as a memory, that becomes the means of recognising the so-called chemical ether, still finer than the light-ether. This also is not very easy, but it can be experienced.

In the same way, by shutting off the sense of smell, one may recognise the life-ether.

The shutting off of the hearing yields an unique experience. For this, however, such a power of abstraction must be attained, that even if something audible is going on around, it is not heard. Everything audible must be shut out. Then come towards one, as if piercing one's organism, the forces in the etheric body which organised our organ of hearing. Thereby a remarkable discovery is made. These matters really belong to the secrets of still higher and higher regions. Therefore, there is no difficulty in stating that it is not possible to understand all at once all that is said regarding experiences with such a sense as that of hearing. We make the discovery that this ear, as man bears it in its wonderful organisation, could not possibly have been formed through the etheric forces which play around the earth as such. The light-forces, the etheric forces of light which play around the earth are inwardly connected with the formation of our eyes; even though the foundations for the eyes were already in existence, yet by the formation of the eye, by its position in the organism, it is inwardly connected with the forces of the light-ether of the earth. In the same way, our sense of taste is connected with the forces of the chemical-ether of the earth, out of which for the most part it is developed. Our sense of smell is connected with the life-ether of the earth; it is organised almost exclusively from the life-ether which plays round the earth. But when our organ of hearing is met with in occultism during esoteric development, it shows us that it owes an infinitesimal part of its being to the etheric forces playing round the earth. It might be said that the etheric forces which play round the earth have given the finishing touch to our organ of hearing; but the latter has been so influenced by these etheric forces that they have really made it—not more perfect, but more imperfect; for they can only work upon the ear by their activities in the air, which continually offers resistance to them. Hence we may say—although a paradox—that our organ of hearing is the degenerate manifestation on earth of a much more delicate organisation previously existing; and at this stage, through his own experience, the developing student will know that he brought the ear, the complete organ of hearing, with him to the earth when he made his way from the ancient Moon to the Earth; indeed, he will find that this organ of hearing was much more perfect on the ancient Moon than it is upon the earth. With respect to the ear, we gradually learn to feel—we are often obliged to make use of paradoxical expressions—that we might be saddened by this thought, because the ear belongs to those organs which, in their entire arrangement, in their entire structure, bear witness to past perfections. And one who is gradually approaching the experience we have thus briefly indicated will understand the occultist who really gains his knowledge from still deeper powers, the occultist who tells him: on the ancient Moon, the ear had much greater significance for man than it has now. At that time the ear enabled him to live entirely, as it were, in the music of the spheres which still rang out, in a certain sense, on the ancient Moon. The ear was so related to the sounds of the sphere-music, which, although weak as compared to what it had been before, still rang out on the Moon; it was so related to these sounds that it received them. On account of its perfection on the ancient Moon, the ear was, so to say, always immersed in music. This music on the ancient Moon was still imparted to the whole of the human organisation; these waves of music still permeated the human organisation on the ancient Moon, and the inner life of man was in sympathy with all the music around him, adapted to the whole musical environment; the ear was the organ of communication, so that the outer sphere-music might be imitated in corresponding inner movements. On the ancient Moon, man still felt himself to be a sort of instrument on which the cosmos with its forces played, and the ears in their perfection were at that time on the ancient Moon intermediary between the players of the cosmos and the instrument of the human organism. Thus the present arrangement of the organ of hearing serves to awaken a remembrance, connected with the idea that by a sort of deterioration of the organ of hearing man has become incapable of hearing the music of the spheres; he has emancipated himself from it, and can only catch the reflection of the sphere-music in the music of the present day, which, however, can, in reality, only play in the air surrounding the earth.

Experiences also emerge with respect to other senses, but they become more and more indistinct, and it would be of little avail to follow the experiences connected with other sense-organs, for the simple reason that it is difficult to explain by means of ordinary human ideas these changes which take place in one through esoteric development. For example, of what use would it be as regards what man can now experience on earth if we were to speak of the sense for language—I do not mean the sense for speaking? Those who heard the lecture on Anthroposophy in Berlin already know that there is a special sense for language. Just as there is a sense for sound, so there is a special sense, which only has an organ inwardly but none externally, for the perception of the spoken word itself. This sense has deteriorated still further, so that to-day there remains but a last echo of what it was, for instance, on the ancient Moon. That which to-day has become the sense for language, the understanding of the words of our fellow-men, served on the ancient Moon to enable a man to feel himself consciously in the whole environment, with imaginative consciousness, to move round the ancient Moon, as it were. There the sense for language dictated the movements to be made, showed how to find the way. A gradual acquaintance with this experiencing the sense for language is made when the student acquires a perception of the inner value of the vowels and consonants, as exemplified in mantric sentences. But what the earthly man generally attains in this respect is but a faint echo of what the sense for language was at one time.

Thus you see how the pupil gradually gains the perception of his etheric body; you see how that from which he turns away in his occult development, namely, the activity of his physical senses, compensates him on the other side, for it leads him to the perception of his etheric body. But it is peculiar that when we experience the perceptions of the etheric body of which we have just spoken, we feel as if they did not really belong to us, but as we have already said—as though they penetrated us from outside. We feel the body of light as though it were drilled into us, we feel something like a musical movement inaudible on the earth penetrating us through our ear; the warmth-ether, however, we do not feel as penetrating but as permeating us; and we learn to feel in place of the eliminated taste the activity of the chemical ether working in us, etc. Thus as compared with what is known as the normal condition, the pupil feels his etheric body transformed, as though other conditions were grafted on to it from outside, as it were.

The pupil now, however, begins to perceive his etheric body more directly. The most striking change that takes place in the etheric body, which many do not appreciate at all, and which is not recognised as a change in the etheric body, although it is such, is that as a result of esoteric or theosophical development it becomes very distinctly evident that the power of memory begins somewhat to diminish. Through esoteric development, the ordinary memory almost invariably suffers diminution. At first one's memory becomes poorer. If the student does not wish to have a less efficient memory, he cannot undergo an esoteric development. Especially does that memory cease to be strongly active which may be described as the mechanical memory, best developed in human beings in childhood and youth, and generally meant when memory is alluded to. Many esotericists have to complain of the diminution of their memory, for it soon becomes perceptible. In any case, this depreciation of the memory can be observed long before one perceives the more delicate things which have just been explained. But as the student, by pursuing correct theosophical training, can never suffer injury in his physical body—in spite of its becoming more mobile—neither will his memory be injured for long. But care must be taken to do the correct thing. As regards the physical organisation, while the external body is growing more flexible, while inwardly its organs are becoming more independent, so that it is more difficult to bring them into harmony than before, inner strength must be sought. This is done by means of the six exercises described in the second part of my book, An Outline Of Occult Science (

Now, as regards the memory, we must also do the correct thing. We lose the memory belonging to the external life: but we need suffer no injury if we take care to develop more interest, a deeper interest in all that affects us in life, more concern than hitherto. We must especially acquire a sympathetic interest for the things which to us are important. Previously we developed a more mechanical memory, and the working of this mechanical memory was fully reliable for a time, even without any particular liking for the things observed; but this ceases. It will be noticed that when undergoing a theosophical or esoteric development it is easy to forget things. But only those things fly away for which one has not a sympathetic interest, which one does not particularly care for, which do not become part of one's soul, as it were. On the other hand, that which appeals to one's soul fixes itself in the memory all the more. Therefore, the student must try systematically to bring this about. The following may be experienced. Let us imagine a man in his youth, before he came to Theosophy when he read a novel he was quite unable to forget it; he could relate it again and again. Later, when he has come into Theosophy, if he reads a novel, it very often vanishes from his mind; he cannot recount it. But if a student takes a book, of which he has been told—or tells himself—that it might be valuable, and reads it through once and then tries directly afterwards to repeat it mentally, and not only to repeat it, but repeat it backwards, the last matters first and the first last; if he takes the trouble to go through certain details a second time, if he becomes so absorbed in it that he even takes a piece of paper and writes brief thoughts on it, and tries to put the question:—what aspect of this subject specially interests me—then he will find that in this way he develops a different kind of memory. It will not be the same memory. By using it, the difference can be accurately observed. When we use the human memory, things come into our soul as remembrances; but if, in the manner just described, we systematically acquire a memory as an esotericist or theosophist, then it is as though the things thus experienced had remained stationary in time. We learn to look back into time, as it were, and it really seems as though we were looking at what we were remembering; indeed, we shall notice that the things become more and more picture-like and the memory more and more imaginative. If we have acted in the manner just described—for instance, with a book—then, when it is necessary to bring the matter to mind again, we need only meet with something in some way connected with it, and we shall look back, as it were, at the occasion when we were studying the book, and see ourselves reading it. The remembrance does not arise, but the whole picture appears. Then we are able to notice that, while previously we only read the book, now the contents actually appear. We see them as at a distance in time; the memory becomes a seeing of pictures at a distance in time. This is the very first beginning, elementary to be sure, of gradually learning to read the Akashic Record. The memory is replaced by learning to read in the past. And very often a man who has gone through a certain esoteric development may have almost entirely lost his memory, yet he is none the worse for it, because he sees things in retrospect. He sees those with which he himself was connected, with special clearness. I am now saying something which, if it were said to anyone not connected with Theosophy, would only make him laugh. He could not help laughing, because he could not form any idea of what it means when an esotericist tells him that he no longer has any memory, and yet that he knows quite well what has happened, because he can see it in the past. The first man would say: ‘What you have is in reality a very excellent memory,’ for he cannot conceive of the change that has taken place. It is a change in the etheric body that has brought it about.

Then, as a rule, this changing of the memory is connected with something else, viz., we form, we might say, a new opinion about our inner man. For we cannot acquire this retrospective vision without at the same time adopting a certain standpoint as regards our experience. Thus when at a later date a man looks back at something he has done, as in the case described above about the book, for instance, when he sees himself in that position, he will, of course, have to judge for himself whether he was wise or foolish so to occupy himself. With this retrospect there is closely united another experience, viz., a sort of self-criticism. The pupil at this stage cannot do otherwise than define his attitude towards his past. He will reproach himself about some things; he will be glad he has attained others. In short, he cannot do otherwise than judge the past he thus surveys, so that, in fact, he becomes a sterner judge of himself, of his past life. He feels within him the etheric body becoming active, the etheric body which—as may be seen by the retrospect after death—has the whole of his past within it; he feels this etheric body as included in himself, as something that lives in him and defines his value. Indeed, such a change takes place in the etheric body that very often he feels the impulse to make this self-retrospect and observe one thing or another, so as to learn in quite a natural manner to judge of his own worth as a man. While in ordinary life one lives without being aware of the etheric body, in the retrospective view of one's own life it can be perceived, and this gradually rouses in the student an impulse to make greater efforts when he undergoes an esoteric development. The esoteric life makes it necessary for one to pay more attention to one's merits and demerits, errors and imperfections.

But something deeper becomes perceptible, connected with the etheric body, something that could also be perceived formerly, though not so strongly: that is one's temperament. Upon the changing of the etheric body depends the greater sensitivity of the earnest Theosophist or esotericist towards his own temperament. Let us note a special case in which this can be particularly observed, namely, in a person of a melancholic temperament, inclined to melancholy, a person of such a melancholic temperament who has not become an esotericist, nor studied Theosophy, and goes through the world in such a way, that many things make him surly and morose, many things draw forth his all too disapproving criticism, and he approaches things as a rule in such a manner that they arouse his sympathy and antipathy more strongly than they would perhaps in the case of a phlegmatic person. When a melancholy person of such a disposition, whether of the intense kind inclining to moroseness, turning away from, despising, hating the whole world, or the milder degree of mere sensitiveness to the world's opinion—for there are many grades and shades between these two—when such a person enters upon an esoteric or theosophical development, his temperament becomes essentially the basis from which to perceive his etheric body. He becomes susceptible to the system of forces producing his melancholy and perceives it clearly within him, and, while formerly he merely turned his discontent against the external impressions received from the world, he now begins to turn this discontent against himself. It is very necessary that in an esoteric development self-knowledge should be carefully exercised, and that the student inclined to melancholy should exercise this introspection, which enables him to take this change quietly and calmly. For while formerly the world was very often odious to him, he now becomes odious to himself; he begins to criticise himself, so that obviously he is dissatisfied with himself. We can only judge these things rightly, my dear friends, when we look at what is called temperament in the right way. A melancholy person is such simply because in him the melancholy temperament is accentuated; for fundamentally every human being has all four temperaments in his soul. In certain things a melancholy person is also phlegmatic, in others he is sanguine, in others again choleric; the melancholy temperament only stands out more prominently in him than the phlegmatic, sanguine, and choleric. And a phlegmatic person is not one possessing no other temperament but the phlegmatic, but in him the phlegmatic temperament is more prominent, and the other temperaments remain more in the background of his soul. It is the same with the other temperaments.

Now, just as the change in the etheric body of the decidedly melancholy person takes the form of turning his melancholy against himself, as it were, so do changes and new sensations appear with respect to the other temperamental qualities. But, through wise self-knowledge, esoteric development can bring about a distinct feeling that the mischief occasioned by the predominating temperament can be repaired by bringing about changes in the other temperaments also, changes which will, as it were, balance the principal change in the predominating temperament. It is only necessary to recognise how the changes in the other temperaments appear.

Let us suppose that a phlegmatic person becomes an esotericist—it will be difficult for him, but let us suppose that he can be brought to be a really good esotericist. The phlegmatic person who receives strong impressions is sometimes powerless against them; so that often the phlegmatic temperament, if not yet too much corroded by materialism, is in no sense a wholly bad preliminary condition for an esoteric development; only it must appear in a nobler form than its usual distorted manifestation. When such a phlegmatic person becomes an esotericist, the phlegmatic temperament then changes in a peculiar manner. The phlegmatic person then has a very strong inclination to observe himself very carefully, and for this reason the phlegmatic temperament to which this process gives the least pain is not a bad preliminary condition for an esoteric development when such can be entered upon, because it is practically adapted to a certain calm self-observation. What the phlegmatic person perceives within him does not disturb him as it does the melancholic person, and, therefore, when he makes self-observations, they as a rule go even deeper than those of the melancholic person, who is positively kept back by his wrath against himself. Therefore, a phlegmatic person is, as it were, the best pupil for serious theosophical development.

Now, as already stated, every man has within him all the temperaments, and in the case of a melancholy person the melancholic temperament predominates. He has also within him, for example, the phlegmatic temperament. In the melancholy person we can always find aspects which prove him to be a phlegmatic individual towards certain things. Now, if the melancholy person becomes an esotericist, while, on the one hand, he will certainly set to work severely on himself, so that self-reproaches are bound to come, if one is able to guide him in any way, his attention should be turned to the things with respect to which he was previously phlegmatic. His interest must be aroused in things for which he previously had none. If this can be accomplished, then the evils produced through his melancholy are to a certain extent paralysed.

The characteristic of the sanguine person in external life is that he likes to hurry from one impression to another, unwilling to keep to one impression. Such a one becomes a peculiar esotericist. He changes in a very peculiar way through the alteration of his etheric body: the moment he tries to acquire esotericism, or another tries to impart it to him, he becomes phlegmatic towards his own inner being, so that under certain circumstances the sanguine person is at first the least promising—as regards his temperament—for an esoteric development. When the sanguine person comes to esotericism or theosophical life—as he very frequently does, for he is interested in all sorts of things, and so, among other things, in Theosophy or esotericism, though his interest may not be serious or permanent—he must acquire a sort of self-observation; but he does this with great indifference, he does not care to look into himself. He is interested in this or that in himself, but his interest is not very deep. He discovers all sorts of interesting qualities within himself; but he is at once satisfied with that, and he speaks enthusiastically of this or that interesting quality, but he has soon forgotten the whole matter again—even what he had observed in himself. And those who approach esotericism from a momentary interest and soon leave it again are chiefly the sanguine natures. In the next lecture we shall try to illustrate what I am now explaining in words by a drawing of the etheric body on the blackboard; we shall then sketch, in addition, the changes in the etheric body through theosophical or esoteric development.

It is different, again, in the case of the choleric temperament. It is almost impossible, or, at any rate, very seldom possible, to make a choleric an esotericist; if the choleric temperament is especially prominent in him as personality, it is characteristic that he rejects all esotericism, he does not wish to have anything to do with it. Still, it may happen through the karmic conditions of his life that a choleric person may be brought to esotericism; but it will be difficult for him to make changes in his etheric body, for the etheric body of the choleric proves to be particularly dense, and can only be influenced with difficulty. In the melancholy individual the etheric body is like an india-rubber ball (this is a trivial comparison, but it will convey what I wish to say) from which the air has escaped: when one presses a dent made in it, it remains for some time; in the choleric, the etheric body is like an india-rubber ball well inflated, filled with air. An attempt to make a dent in it not only produces no permanent effect, but is perceptibly resisted. The etheric body of the choleric is not at all yielding, but knotty and hard. Hence the choleric himself has a difficult task to change his etheric body. He can do nothing with himself. Therefore, from the outset he rejects esoteric development, which is to change him; he cannot lay hold of himself, as it were. But when the choleric realises the seriousness of life, or similar things, or when there is a little melancholic ring in his temperament, then by means of this melancholy he can be led so to develop the choleric note in his human organism that he now works with all the intensity of his force on his resisting etheric body. And if he then succeeds in producing changes in his etheric body he rouses within him a very special quality; through his esoteric development he becomes more capable than other people of presenting external facts in an orderly and profound manner in their causative or historical connection. And one who is capable of judging a well-written history—which is not, as a rule, written by esotericists—a history which really depicts the facts, will always find the beginning, the unconscious, instinctive beginning of that which the choleric esotericist could do as an historian, as a narrator or describer. Men like Tacitus, for instance, were at the beginning of such an instinctive, esoteric development; hence the wonderful, incomparable descriptions given by Tacitus. As an esotericist, who reads Tacitus, one knows that this unique kind of history-writing depends upon the very special working of a choleric temperament into the etheric body. This appears especially in writers who have undergone an esoteric development. Even though the outer world may not accept it, this is the case with Homer. Homer owed his vivid glorious power of delineation to the choleric temperament working into his etheric body. And many other things could be pointed out in this realm which in external life would prove, or at least verify the fact, that when he undergoes an esoteric development the choleric renders himself specially capable of clearly representing the world in its reality, in its causative connections. When the choleric undergoes an esoteric development, his works, even in their external structure, one might say, bear the character of truth and reality. Thus we see that in the changes of the etheric body the life of man is very clearly expressed; the form it has hitherto taken is more perceptible than is otherwise the case in the present incarnation. In esoteric development temperaments become more strongly perceptible, and it is specially important in true self-knowledge to take this observation of temperaments into account. We shall speak further on these matters in the next lecture.

Dear friends, once again let us first of all remember those who are out there at the front, in the great arena of present-day events:

Spirits of your souls, guardian guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard here on earth.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.

And for those who because of those events have already gone through the gate of death:

Spirits of your souls, guardian guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard in the spheres.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.

May the spirit we are seeking as we work towards spiritual knowledge, the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of Golgatha for the good of the earth, for the freedom and progress of man, be with you and the hard duties you have to perform.

Dear friends, I want to begin today by reminding you of something I have told most of you, I think, on previous occasions. If the soul of man develops in the way I have clearly enough described in my public and other lectures, we arrive at a different image of the world. The essential point is that the soul takes the path, as it were, from the sense-perceptible into the spiritual world.

As the development of the soul progresses the physical world will gradually change in our eyes into the spiritual world. We might say that the peculiar features of the physical, sense-perceptible, world gradually disappear and the forms, entities and realities of the spiritual world makes their appearance within the horizons of our conscious awareness. Something important comes to conscious awareness in this way, something I might describe as follows: We ourselves become different—as far as our vision is concerned, of course—we ourselves become different, and the world which is around us to be beheld With our senses then also becomes different. Let us stay with what is nearest to us to begin with: the world that is our earth. Basically spealung, people know really very little of the world beyond this earth during their life on this planet, at least if we persist in the way in which W have grown together with our earthly life. As we advance into the spiritual world—in which case we are outside our bodies—we shall find, as we look back on the body, or the whole of our physical life, or the whole human being, that basically it is growing richer and richer. This human being is all the time gaining in content, is expanding into a world. Man is actually growing and becoming a whole world as we look back on him. That is the reality of words we often hear stressed—in that through spiritual development man grows identical with the world. He sees a new world, a world he normally Is within, and sees it as though arising out of himself. He expands into a world. As far as the earth is concerned, on the other hand, all that is solid in it, all we are used to seeing as its mountains, rivers and so on, disappears. It vanishes and we gradually come to feel ourselves within the earth—please note I am saying within the earth—as though within a great organism. We have left our own world and this inner world, this inner reality, becomes a wide world, whilst the earthly world that was spread out around us now becomes an entity, a being, we must imagine ourselves to be within. As we grow out of ourselves our human world expands into a wide world; at the same time we grow into the earth organism and feel ourselves to be within it just as our finger, say, would feel itself to be part of the organism if it were to have conscious awareness.

That is the experience human beings will have, an experience quite frequently brought to expression by more poetic natures. It is very common for instance for people to compare their awakening in the morning with the awakening of nature around them, their life in the course of the day with the ascent of the sun, and dusk with the need for sleep that develops as we get tired. Such comparisons arise with the feeling men have of being part of earthly nature. They are not worth much, however, for they do not touch on what really matters. As I have said on a number of previous occasions, if we want to choose a comparison that is really in accord with the facts we cannot compare what goes on when we go to sleep and wake up with the processes occurring in nature outside. Instead, we must compare 24 hours in our life with the seasonal cycle of the year. We must take the whole cycle of the seasons to make a fair comparison with what happens in us in a single waking-and-sleeping cycle of 24 hours.⁵⁷ It is quite wrong to compare the period during which a person is awake—between waking up and going to sleep—to summer for instance. This waking state has to be compared to winter in ouside nature whilst summer has to be compared to the sleeping state in man. Making the comparison we would therefore say: The human being goes to sleep and this means he enters into the summer of his personal existence, and in waking up he progresses into the winter of his personal existence. The waking state would approximately correspond to late autumn, winter and early spring. Why would this be in accord with the facts? Because, in evolving into part of the whole earth organism in the way I have indicated, we would indeed have to note that the spirit of the earth is asleep in summer. The earth is then truly asleep; the great conscious awareness of the earth's spirit is dimming. As spring comes the earth's spirit begins to go to sleep. It wakes up again in autumn when the first frosts come. Then it is thinking, it is awake and thinking. That is how a day for the earth's spirit corresponds to the cycle of a year.

Looking back upon a sleeping person we can indeed see how his going to sleep means that ego and astral body are leaving the body. A kind of plant-type activity does actually develop in the organism when astral body and ego have departed from it. Their departure initiates a particular activity in the inner man. We really experience the first stages of sleep as the onset of a vegetative process, and sleep progresses in such a way that to the clairvoyant eye the body is pervaded with vegetative growth processes that are genuinely apparent to imaginative perception. This vegetation has a different way of growing from that of the earth's vegetation, however. These things can be told and they can be much meditated on and in this way we continue to make progress.

The plants of the earth grow upwards from the soil. It is different when we observe this ‘plant growth’ in man. The plants have their roots outside and grow into the human being. This means that we have to look for the flowers inside the human being. The human betng is very beautiful when seen asleep by someone who has grown Clairvoyant. He is like a whole earth shooting and sprouting, with vegetation growing into it. The picture is to some extent marred, however, for we get the impression at the same time that the astral body is gnawing away at the roots. That is how the progress of sleep presents itself. The animal world consumes, eats up, the plants that grow in summer. And we find that our astral body acts like the animal world except that it gnaws at the roots. If this did not happen we would not able to develop that core which we take through the gate of death. what the astral body makes its own in this way is the harvest of life which we do, in truth, take with us through the gate of death. I am describing things the way they appear to clairvoyant awareness. And just as winter comes upon the fruits of the earth and its frosts kill those fruits of the earth, so the entry of our astral body and ego into the etheric and physical body is like a frost coming to kill the vegetation, the spiritual plant growth, that has come up in the organism during the night.

The entity I have called the earth's spirit is indeed an individual entity, just as we are, except that it has a different form of existences with a year being a day for it. Within the earth's spirit we are able to perceive everything I have said of the impulse of Golgotha,⁵⁸ for within it we find the life-giving energy that was not in the earth prior to Golgotha. In it we find ourselves secure, accepted by the spirit which has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha. We become aware of this when we are able to enter fully into the state where the earth has become a being, an entity, of which we are part of the way a finger is part of our organism. It is inevitable therefore that when modern man enters deeply into the world in an occult way there is also a touch to this of religious immersion in the divine element that streams through the world, filling it with spirit. It is a fact that genuine perception of the spiritual world will never deprive man of religious feeling but rather make such feeling more profound.

I wanted to give an indication of what it really looks like when we enter into the world of images of spiritual reality. What we seem to be to ourselves in our ordinary everyday physical awareness is mere semblance, is only an inner core. Yet at the same time it has to be said that this is not correct, for it is not easy to find the words for these significant truths. What we seem to be to ourselves is always at our periphery when we are outside the body with our soul element. It is therefore not correct to say it is a core, for a fruit has its shell or peel on the outside and its valuable part inside. But many things are the other way round when it comes to the spirit, and the valuable Part of man is outside and the shell or peel equivalent is inside. The inner part is shell-like by nature and the spiritual part is what may be called the shell-like part in terms of space. We come to see when we take the path into the spiritual world that the human being is far from simple and indeed very complex. Something we have already made our own to quite an extent is the knowledge that man bears within him something through which he takes part in all the worlds that are accessible to him. Through our physical body we are part of the physical world, through the soul element within us we are part of the soul world, and, through our spirit, of the spiritual world. We extend into these three worlds. We know that when a human being takes the path into the spiritual world he will in fact experience himself in a kind of multiple reproduction. This is what causes enxiety. Our comfortable feeling of being of one piece is broken up and one does indeed get the feeling of belonging to several worlds. This may be presented from many different points of view. Today I shall take one particular point of view, drawing your attention again to what has been the basis of my recent lectures.

Considering the life of man in its inner aspects we must think of it as based on a number of principles, and when we step outside the body man will indeed be found to be divided into four principles. First of all there is the power on which our memory is based. Through memory we raise into consciousness the things we experienced earlier on in life. Memory creates a context for our life, making this life between birth and death a whole. A second principle is the one we call thinking, the forming of ideas. I cannot define it in detail here, for that is not the point, but the activity of forming ideas takes place in the present. And moving further ahead we come to feeling and yet further on to will activity. Looking into ourselves, our own inner life apppears in the activities of remembering, thinking, feeling and exerting our will. Now we may ask: ‘What is the essential difference between these four functions of the soul?’ Psychologists will merely list these functions as a rule, making no further distinction between them. We shall arrive at the truth only by going into the essential nature of these four functions of the soul. We shall then find that will activity is more or less the baby among our soul functions; feeling activity is older, thinking still older, and the activity performed in remembering is th‘old man’, the oldest of our soul functions. You will understand this more clearly if I present the matter to you from the following point of view.

It has been said on a number of occasions that man's development has not been on this earth only but that his present evolution was preceded by evolution on the Old Moon, the Old Sun and on Old Saturn. Man did not just come into being on this earth. To become what he is now he needed to go through evolution on Saturn, Sun and Moon. Now, you see, any will activity we develop is a product of man's earth life. Will evolution is not yet complete, in fact, and it is entirely a product of earth evolution. During Moon evolution man was not yet endowed with an independent will. Angels willed for him. Will activity may be said to have radiated in only with earth evolution. Feeling on the other hand was already acquired during Moon evolution, thinking during Sun evolution and remembering during Saturn evolution. If you now take this together with the thoughts expressed in my Cosmic Memory and Occult Science,⁵⁹ you will discover an important connection. During Saturn evolution the first beginnings of man's physical body arose; during Sun evolution those of man's ether body; during Moon evolution those of man's astral body; and now, during earth evolution, the human ego is evolving.

Let us now take a separate look at the process we call remembering. What is this? The soul retains something of the image of an event we have experienced just as a book we are reading has within it something of the thoughts of the person who wrote it. When you have a book before you, you are able to read and to think—not always perhaps, but I'll ignore that—everything thought by the person who wrote the book. Remembering is a subconscious reading process; the record consists in signs the ether body has engraved into the physical body. If something happened to you years ago, you went through the experiences to be gained from that event. What remains of this are impressions made by the ether body in the physical body. When you recall the event now, the act of remembering is a subconscious reading process.

The hidden processes in the organism which enable the ether body to engrave the signs on which memory depends were in-formed into it during Old Saturn evolution. It is a fact that our organism holds within it this hidden Saturn organism. This may be perceived as a genuine entity into which the ether body is able to enter the signs which record the experiences that come from outside, to recall them again in the process of remembering. Essentially, man owes this subconscious recording faculty to the fact that his body, and specifically the element within the physical body which is to receive those imprints, is still pliable during the first seven years of life. It is therefore important not to subject children to forced memory training. I have drawn attention to this in The Education of the Child.⁶⁰ During the first seven years the still pliable organism should be left to its own elementary powers and we should not use coercion. We should tell children as much as we can but not attach too much value to artificial memory development, rather leaving the child to itself where memory development is concerned. This is a point where spiritual science is of tremendous importance in educational life.

The ability to remember is thus one of the oldest elements in human nature. The activity on which thinking is based is part of what may be said to have evolved on the Sun. It, too, is relatively ancient. The Sun-forces contain a principle which organizes man's ether body in such a way that it is able to perform this specific function of thinking, of forming ideas. So you see that it is necessary to go far, far back in the cosmos in order to answer the question: Why is man able to remember, and why is he able to think? It is necessary to go back as far as the Saturn and the Sun stages of evolution.

To consider man's ability to feel we need only go back as far as the Moon, and for will activity to earth evolution. This will make many things clear to you. Certain individuals bear a particularly strong imprint of earlier incarnations; they are not pliable but clear cut. Much will imprint itself upon their organism. These are people with an almost automatic memory who however cannot be very creative in their thinking.

The faculty of remembering thus relates predominantly to the physical body; the ability to think to the ether body; man's feelings and emotions to the astral body; and his will activity above all to the ego. Man is only able to refer to himself as T because he is a creature of will. If he were only able to think, life would proceed as in a dream. All this means that we are an organic complex of soul functions which were imprinted into our soul life in the course of evolution. I have said that our will activity only evolved during earth evolution and that spiritually higher hierarchies, the Angeloi, willed for man on the Moon. The result was that during Moon evolution all will activity in man was such that if we recall it to clairvoyant consciousness we will indeed see it to have been at a higher level, yet it was involuntary will activity in man, as we see it in animal evolution on earth today. Animals will of necessity follow whatever seethes and boils up within them for they live within the common will of the species.

During Moon evolution, therefore, spiritual entities of a higher kind, the Angeloi, did our willing for us. Now, the spiritual entities of a higher kind are active in determining our karma from one incarnation to the next. The Angeloi are no longer active in our will but in the ongoing stream of our karma. During Moon evolution man did not feel his will to be his own; in the same way we do not, living on earth, believe that we make our own karma. It is controlled by spirits from the higher hierarchies. Only at times when our will is for once able to be still, as it were, will it be possible to have a glimmer of the progress of karma even for nonclairvoyant consciousness, a progress that normally stays hidden.

Please hold on to the fact I have stated—that a core forms in man which enters into the spiritual realm through the gate of death. This core is the vehicle for our karma. Karma has today already determined what each of us will be doing tomorrow. We would be able to see through our karma if it were not our mission on earth to develop the will. We would be able to see through it to the effect that we could under certain circumstances foresee our immediate future. But the will irrupts into the karmic stream and this obscures the prospect, say, of what will happen to us tomorrow. The will has to be completely silent; only then will it be possible for something to come through of what will happen not through us but to us.

As an example, let me give you a story told of Erasmus Francisci.⁶¹ This is based on the truth. As a young man Erasmus Francisci lived with his aunt. On one occasion he dreamed that a man whose name was shouted out to him in his dream was going to take a shot at him, but that he would not be killed, for his aunt would save his life. That was his dream. The next day, before anything had actually happened, he told the dream to his aunt. She got rather worried, telling him that someone had been shot dead quite recently in the neighbourhood. She strongly advised her nephew to stay at home so that nothing might happen to him. She gave him the key to the apple loft so that he might go up at any time and get himself some apples. The young man went up to his room and sat at his desk to read something. Yet what he had been reading was of less interest to him at the moment than the key to the apple loft which his aunt had given and which was in his pocket. He decided to go up there. Hardly had he got up from his chair when a shot rang out and the bullet went exactly to the place where his head had been. If he had not got up the bullet would have gone straight through him. A servant in the house next door—whose name was indeed the one called out to Erasmus Francisci in his dream, a name not known to him before—this servant had not known that the two guns he was supposed to clean were loaded and the gun went off as he started to handle it. If Francisci had not got up to go the the apple loft at that very moment, his aunt having given him the key, he would without doubt have lost his life. His dream therefore had shown exactly what was to happen the following day.

An event occurred of which we are able to say that the will was in no way involved, for Francisci would not achieve anything with his will. He could in no way protect himself; something irrupted into the karma of this individual to the effect that this life was to continue. The spirit controlling his karma had already had the idea that would save his life. The dream represented the pre-vision of the spirit guiding the young man's karma, perceiving what was to happen the next day. Francisci's state of soul was such that a certain depth had already been achieved through natural meditation as it were, and as a result something occurred which I might also compare with something in external life. I think you will agree that man's gift of prophesy with regard to external life on earth is rather limited. In a certain sense we are all prophets for we all know that dawn will come at a certain time tomorrow and so on, or someone walking across a field today will be able to say what that field is going to look like tomorrow. He will not be able to foretell whether rain is going to fall on that field the next day and so on. It is the same with regard to the inner life. Man lives according to his will, and his karma lies within that will. It is possible to develop a certain sense for what is coming next, and in the same way there are certain people whose inner soul has been deepened and for whom an inner point of light may arise for events where the will has to fall silent. It is important in the pursuit of spiritual science to consider such things on occasion, for we then see that there certainly is something alive within man that points to the future, something man is not able to encompass in his ordinary state of consciousness. Karma emerges through a will that has fallen silent.

All the things brought before our soul in this way through spiritual research are able to show us that what we call the great illusion consists predominantly in man being unable to perceive the full picture, in his ordinary consciousness, of what he is—that man is part of the whole world whilst his ordinary consciousness really only shows him the shell, as though he were enclosed within his skin, and so on. Yet what he is shown within this enclosedness is merely a fraction of what man really is, for he is as big as the whole world. We really only look back on man from the outside in ordinary life. In becoming fully aware of these things we can gradually develop a feeling for the presence in man of what is known as his ether body. It is indeed possible to make observations in ordinary life that show at least this second human being, the etheric man, within the physical human being. Imagine you are having a nice lazy lie-in one morning, not feeling inclined to get up as yet; you'd like to stay in bed and it is difficult to find the resolution to get up. If you depend entirely on what is within you it will be difficult to reach the point of getting up. But now imagine there is something in the next room which you have been waiting for during the last few days. The thought occurs of something out there and you will find that this thought can bring about a minor miracle. You will find that once you enter into this thought for a bit you will actually leap from your bed! What has happened? As you woke up, entering again into the physical body, you felt whatever the physical body made you feel and this was not likely to give rise to the thought of getting up. Your ether body then came to act independently, because you engaged it in something outside yourself. There you can see how you have been opposing your ether body to the physical body and how the ether body took hold of you and lifted you out of bed. You arrive at a very specific feeling regarding yourself, the feeling of being an onlooker and making distinction between two kinds of human actions which we perform. There are the actions we perform in the ordinary run of life and those where one is aware of inner activity coming to the fore. These are rather subtle observations and it is, of course, always possible to deny them. We have to attune our observations to life and really see through life and the way it presents itself. Then man's whole inner perception will move in the right direction. It has to be clearly understood that the path to the spiritual world cannot be achieved all at once. It gradually leads out of the world so that we ascend to the point I have just referred to, where what used to be the world for us loses its deadness and itself becomes a living entity.

Gaining in insight, man thus grows together with the spiritual world. He grows together with what we may call his portion which remains when he has put away from him everything gained through the instrument of the physical body, everything which essentially made up his life between birth and death. In going through the gate of death we grow into a world very similar to the one I have just spoken of as the one revealed to higher perception. And then we shall discover something that is very important. In the world we enter on passing through the gate of death, if we want to make ourselves at home in it in the right way, we shall just as we need a light to illumine a dark room—need whatever we have been able to develop within our innermost souls whilst here on earth. Earth life is not something to be regarded merely as a dungeon, a prison cell. It is certainly Part of the natural progress of evolution that man has to go through the gate of death. And he can of course live the life between death and rebirth. But life as a whole exists in order that every part of us adds something that is necessary, something new. As we go through the present cycle, life here is to give us something that ignites like a torch, so that we are not merely alive in this life of the spirit but gain insight and live so as to illumine the whole of this life. The light which illumines us is the one thing we gain between birth and and death that shall remain for our life between death and rebirth.

This is the one thing of which we must say again and again that as many people as possible must come to understand it, particularlY in the present time. All we come to understand of the spiritual world whilst here in the physical world in our physical bodies shall be as a flame to illumine the life of the spirit. In a certain sense all the difficult things the most developed part of mankind has to go through in the present time serve as a reminder that we need to deepen the life of the soul, and it will have to come about that from the depths of the human soul a longing is brought forth for the worlds of which man is part because of his soul. Let us hope that the present time will cause a longing to arise in which every soul says to itself: Man is something quite different again from what he appears to be in so far as he wears the garment of a body. May the events we are experiencing serve to remind us of the need to deepen our soul life, to let the soul become immersed in spiritual perceptiveness, spiritual vision.

Out of our awareness for this need to enter deeply into spiritual science in the present time, and the awareness that the difficulties of the present time are intended as a warning, let us again conclude the way we have always concluded these meetings. I hope it will be possible to continue in the not too distant future. For today let us conclude with the words:

Out of courage shown in battle,
Out of the blood shed in war,
Out of the grief of those who are left,
Out of the people's deeds of sacrifice
Spirit fruits will come to grow
If souls with knowledge of the spirit
Turn their mind to spirit realms.

• 57. See, for example, the lectures Rudolf Steiner gave (a) in Augsburg on 14 March 1913 and (b) in Stockholm on 8 June 1913, both in Die Welt des Geistes and ihr Hereinragen in das physische Dasein (GA 150). In English as (a) ‘The Interactivity of the Good Progressive Powers and of the Retarding Forces—The Significance of These Truths for Teachers’ in Anthroposophical News Sheet 16:45-8 (NSL 398) (tr. not mentioned); and (b) ‘Nature and Spirit in the Light of Spiritual Scientific Knowledge’ in Anthroposophical News Sheet 3:42-4 (NSL 147) (tr. not mentioned).
• 58. This is a subject frequently referred to, e.g. in the following lectures: (a) Nuremberg, 23 June 1908, in Die Apokalypse des Johannes (GA 104); in English as The Apocalypse of St. John (tr. Johanna Collis) (London) Rudolf Steiner Press 1977; (b) Kassel 6 and 7 July 1909 in Das Johannes¬Evangelium im Verhaltnis zum den drei anderen Evangelien, besonders zu dem Lukas-Evangelium (GA 112); in English as The Gospel of St. John in Relation to the Other Three Gospels, Particularly to the Gospel of St. Luke (tr. S. and L. Lockwood) Anthroposophic Press, New York and Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1948.
• 59. Steiner, Rudolf: Aus der Akasha-Chronik, 1904 (GA 11); in English as Cosmic Memory: Atlantis and Lemuria (tr. Karl E. Zimmer) Rudolf Steiner Publications, New York 1971. Die Geheiniwissenschafi im Umriss, 1910 (GA 13); in English as Occult Science: An Outline (tr. G. and M. Adams) Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1969.
• 60. Steiner, Rudolf: ‘Die Erziehung des Kindes vom Gesichtspunkte der Geisteswissenschaft’ (1907) in Lucifer-Gnosis: Grundlegende Aufsatze zur Anthroposophie aus den Jahren 1903–1908 (GA 34): in English as The Education of the Child In the Light of Anthroposophy (tr. M. and G. Adams) Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1975.
• 61. von Schubert, Gotthelf Heinrich: Die Symbolik des Traumes (Leipzig 1840) S. 10 f

During our reflections on education, we have had to emphasize that our work as teachers depends on the manner in which we ourselves develop and find our way to the world. And we have had to single out the frequently characterized age of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years—for which our own correct preparation for our lessons is especially important.

But we also have to organize all our educational activities in such a way that we prepare the children for this age. Everything depends on their developing a definite relation to the world. This relation to the world announces itself especially at the age we are now discussing, when both girls and boys begin to incline toward ideals, toward something in life that is to be added to the physical, sense-perceptible world. Even in their obnoxious teenage behavior we can see this inclination toward a supersensible, ideal life—toward, as it were, a higher idea of purpose: Life must have a meaning! This is a deeply seated conviction for the human being. And we have to reckon with this “Life must have a meaning, a purpose!”

It is especially important at this age that we do not channel this basic inner maxim—life must have a purpose—into the wrong direction. Boys at this age are often seen as being filled with all sorts of ideas and hope for life, so that they easily get the notion that this or that has to be so or so. Girls get into the habit of making certain judgments about life. They are, especially at this age, sharply critical of life, convinced that they know what is right and wrong, fair and unfair. They make definite judgments and are convinced that life has to offer something that, coming from ideas deep down in human nature, must then be realized in the world. This inclination toward ideals and ideas is indeed strongly present at this age.

It is up to us whether, during the whole of the elementary school years beginning in first grade, we manage to allow the children to grow into this life of ideals, this imaginative life. A necessary condition is that we ourselves be able to permeate our whole being with such principles that allow us a correct understanding of the way children develop. Through anthroposophy we get a theoretical knowledge of the three most important aspects. Up to the seventh year, when the change of teeth occurs, children are essentially imitators. They develop, we may say, by doing what they see done in their environment. All their activities are basically imitations. Then during the time of the change of teeth, children begin to feel the need for an authority, the need to be told what to do. Thus, while before the change of teeth children accept the things that are done in the environment as a matter of course, copying the good and the bad, the true and the false, now they no longer feel the need to imitate but know that they can carry out what they are told to do and not to do. Then again, at puberty the children begin to feel that they can now make judgments themselves, but they still want to be supported by authorities of their own choosing: “This person may be listened to; I can accept his or her opinions and judgments.”

It is important that we allow the children to grow into this natural relation to authority in the right way. To do this we must understand the meaning and significance of the imitative instinct. What does it actually tell us? The imitative instinct cannot be understood if we do not see children as coming from the spiritual world. An age that limits itself to seeing children as the result of hereditary traits cannot really understand the nature of imitation. It cannot arrive at the simplest living concepts, concepts capable of life.

The science of this age sees the chemical, the physical world, how the elements, enumerated in chemistry, analyze and synthesize; it discovers, in progressing to the sphere of life—but working with it in a synthetic and analytic way—processes that correspond identically with those in the human corpse. Such a science, applying the same process that can be observed during the natural decomposing of the corpse, finds the same elements in the living organism: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and the rest. And it discovers these elements living in the form we know as albumen. The scientists now try to discover how the carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen in the albumen can be synthesized in a living way. And they hope to discover one day how these elements—\(C\), \(N\), \(H\), and \(O\)—develop a definite structure by virtue of being together in albumen.

But this procedure will never lead to an understanding of albumen as the basis of life. In characterizing albumen in the cell in this way we follow a wrong direction. The reality is quite different. The natural, instinctive forces that hold the substances together, that bring about specific forms in, for example, a mountain crystal, a cube of pyrite, or other minerals, change to a chaotic condition during the creation of albumen. We should, in our study of albumen, instead of paying attention to more complicated laws, observe how these forces in their reciprocal relation paralyze themselves, cease to be active in the albumen, are no longer in it. Instead of structure, we should look for chaos, dissolution. We should tell ourselves: The substances in their reciprocal activities change to a chaotic condition when they pass to the stage in which they appear as albumen; then they enter an undefined, vague stage, cease to influence one another, enter a stage in which they become open to another influence.

In the general life processes, this chaotic condition is still kept somewhat in check through the mineral processes in the organism. The cells in our brain, lungs, and liver, as far as they are albumen, are still affected by the forces we receive from our food. There the chaotic condition is not present. But in the cells that later become our reproductive cells, the cell substance is protected from the influence of food, protected from the forces we receive from food. In our reproductive cells there is almost complete chaos; all mineral substances are completely destroyed, ruined. Reproductive cells are produced in human beings, in animals, and in plants by virtue of the fact that the terrestrial effects, the mineral activities, are through a laborious process destroyed, ruined. This process allows the organism to become receptive to the work of the cosmos. Cosmic forces can now work into the organism from every direction. These cosmic forces are initially influenced by the reproductive cells of the other sex, adding the astral to the etheric. We may say that as the mineral elements demineralize themselves, the possibility arises for the cosmic laws to enter on this detour through the chaotic condition of the albumen, whereas ordinarily in the mineral world we find the terrestrial influencing the terrestrial.

Natural science will never comprehend the nature of albumen as long as it endeavors to find in the organic molecule a structure that is simply more complicated than that which occurs in the inorganic molecule. Today’s chemistry and physiology are mainly concerned with discovering the structure of atoms in different bodies, atoms which assume ever more complex forms, culminating in that of the albumen. The molecule of albumen does not tend toward greater complexity, however, but toward the dissolution of mineral structure, so that extraterrestrial—and not terrestrial—forces can influence it.

Our thinking is here confused by modern science. We are led to a thinking that is—in its most important aspects—in no way connected to reality. Our modern knowledge of the properties of albumen prevents us from raising our thoughts to the reality that something enters the human being that does not come from heredity but via the detour from the cosmos. Today’s idea of albumen leaves no room for the concept of the pre-existence of the human being.

We have to understand the tremendous importance of learning, as teachers, to distance ourselves from the basic tenets of modern science. With the basic tenets of modern science one can bamboozle people, but one cannot teach with them. Our universities do not teach at all. What do they do? There is a faculty that enforces its position through the power of unions or associations. The students have to congregate there, in order to prepare themselves for life. Nobody would do this. Neither the old nor the young would do this, if it were left to them to develop their innate forces and potential. In order to make them study, compulsion is necessary. They are forced into this situation, incarcerated for a while, if they wish to prepare themselves for a profession. And because of this, these institutions do not think of relaxing their power. It is a childish notion to believe such institutions, the last outposts at which compulsory membership clings—the compulsory membership of all the other unions no longer existing—it is hard to believe such institutions are in the forefront of progress. They are the last place of recourse for finding answers. Everywhere else the enforced measures and rules of the Middle Ages have been done away with. In the way today’s universities are conducted, they are in no way different from the guilds of the Middle Ages. Our universities are the last remnants of the guilds. And since those concerned with these things have no longer any knowledge, any feeling about this development, they enlist the help of show business, especially during such highlights as graduation ceremonies—caps, gowns, and so forth. It is important to see behind these things.

One who today wishes to educate and teach must find other ways in which to become a true human being; one must acquire new ideas of the basic principles. Then one will arrive at the correct understanding of the nature of imitation during early childhood.

During the time in the spiritual world, before conception, the child’s soul accepts everything from its spiritual surroundings as a matter of course. After birth the child continues this activity that the soul became used to in the spiritual world. In the child’s imitating we can see that this habit from before birth has not been lost; it has only taken a different turn. Before conception the child was concerned with development from within; now the world outside is confronted. We may use the following picture to help us understand this difference. Before conception the child was as though within a ball; now the child looks at this ball from outside. The world one sees with one’s physical eyes is the outside of what one saw previously from within. Imitation is an instinctive urge for the child in all activities, a continuation of the child’s experience in the spiritual world; it is through imitation that the child develops an initial relation to the spiritual world in the physical world.

Just think what this means! Keep in mind that the very young child wants to face the outer world according to the principles that are valid in the spiritual world. During these early years, the child develops a sense for the true and, connecting to the world in this way, arrives at the conviction: “Everything around me is as true as the things I so clearly perceived in the spiritual world.” The child develops the sense for the true before beginning school. We still observe the last phases of this conviction when the child enters school, and we must receive the child’s sense for the true in the right way. Otherwise we blunt it instead of developing it further.

Consider now the situation of children entering first grade and forced to adapt to the conventional way people read and write today—an activity that is external to human nature. Our modern way of reading and writing is abstract, external to human nature. Not so long ago, the forms of the letters were quite different. They were pictures—that is, they did not remind one of the reality, but they depicted the reality. But by teaching the Roman alphabet, we take the children into a quite foreign element, which they can no longer imitate.

If we show the children pictures, teach them how to draw artistic, picture-like forms, encourage them to make themselves into pictures of the world through a musical element that is adapted to child nature, we then continue what they had been doing by themselves before starting school. If, on the other hand, we teach by instructing them to copy an abstract “I” or “O,” the children will have no cause to be interested, no cause for inwardly connecting with our teaching. The children must in a certain way be connected with what they are doing. And the sense of imitation must now be replaced by the sense of beauty. We must begin to work from all directions toward the healthy separation from imitation, to allow the children’s imitation to give way to a correct, more outer relation to the world. The children must grow into beings who copy the outer world beautifully. And we must now begin to consider two as yet rather undifferentiated aspects—namely, the teaching of physical skills and the teaching of such things that are more concerned with knowledge, with the development of concepts.

What are children actually doing when they sing or make eurythmic movements? They disengage themselves from imitating, yet the imitating activity continues in a certain way. The children move. Singing and listening to music are essentially inner movements—the same process as in imitation. And when we let children do eurythmy, what are we actually doing then? Instead of giving them sticks of crayon with which to write an “A” or an “E”—an activity with which they have a purely cognitive connection—we let the children write into the world, through their own human form, what constitutes the content of language. The human being is not directed to abstract symbols but allowed to write into the world what can be inscribed through his or her organism. We thus allow the human being to continue the activity of prenatal life. And if we then do not take recourse to abstract symbols when we teach reading and writing, but do this through pictures, we do not distance ourselves from the real being when we must activate it, we do not let the human being get fully away from it. Through effort and practice we employ the whole of the human being.

I want you to be aware of what we are doing with the children in regard to their activities. On the one hand, we have the purely physiological physical education lessons. There the children are trained and tamed—we merely use different methods—as animals are. But spirit and soul are excluded from our considerations. On the other hand, we have lessons that are unconnected with the human body. We have progressed to the point at which, in writing and reading, the more delicate movements of the fingers, arms, and eyes are made so active that the rest of the organism is not participating in them. We literally cut the human being in half.

But when we teach eurythmy, when the movements contain the things the children are to learn in writing, we bring these two parts—body and soul/spirit—closer together. And in the children’s artistic activities, when the letters emerge from pictures, we have one and the same activity—now, however, tinged by soul and spirit—as in eurythmic movements or in listening to singing, a process in which the children’s own consciousness is employed. We join body, soul, and spirit, allowing the child to be a totality.

By proceeding in this way, we shall, of course, find ourselves reproached by parents in parent/teacher meetings. We only have to learn to deal with them appropriately when they ask us, for example, to transfer their sons to a class with a male teacher. They would, so they say, have a greater respect for a male teacher. “My son is already eight years old and cannot spell correctly.” They blame the female teacher for that, believing that a male teacher would be more likely to drill the child in this subject.

Such erroneous opinions, which keep being voiced in our school community, must be checked; we have to correct them and enlighten the parents. But we must not shock them. We cannot speak to them in the way we speak among ourselves. We cannot say to them: “You ought to be grateful for the fact that your son cannot read and write fluently at the age of nine. He will as a result read and write far better later on. If he could read and write to perfection already at age nine, he would later turn into an automaton, because he would have been inoculated with a foreign element. He would turn into an automaton, a robot.”

Children whose writing and reading activities are balanced by something else will grow into full human beings. We have to be gentle with today’s grown-ups, who have been influenced by modern culture. We must not shock them; that would not help our cause at all. But we must, tactfully and gently, find a way to convince them that if their child cannot yet read and write fluently at the age of nine, this does not constitute a sin against the child’s holy spirit.

If in this way, we guide the child correctly into life—if we don’t “cut the child in half” but leave the child’s whole being intact, we shall observe an extraordinarily important point in the child’s life at the age of nine. The child will relate quite differently to the world outside. It is as though the child were waking up, were beginning to have a new connection to the ego. We should pay attention to this change, at the very beginning. In our time, it is possible for this change to happen earlier. We should observe the new relation to the environment—the child showing surprise, astonishment. Normally this change occurs between the ninth and the tenth years.

If, thoughtfully and inwardly, we ask ourselves what it is that has led to this condition, we shall receive an answer that cannot be accurately expressed in words but can be conveyed by the following analogy. Previously, had we given the child a mirror and had the child seen his or her reflection in it, the child would not have seen it very differently from any other object, would not have been especially affected by it. Imagine a monkey to whom you give a mirror. Have you observed this? The monkey takes hold of the mirror and runs to a place where it can look at it undisturbed, quite calmly. The monkey becomes fascinated by its reflection. Should you try to take the mirror away, that would not be to your advantage. The monkey is absolutely bent on coming to grips with what it sees in the mirror. But you will not notice the slightest change in the monkey afterward. It will not have become vain as a result; the experience does not influence the monkey in this way. The immediate sense impression of the reflected picture fascinates the monkey, but the experience does not metamorphose into anything. As soon as the mirror is taken away, the monkey forgets the whole thing; the experience certainly does not produce vanity.

But a child at the characterized age looking at his or her reflection would be tempted to transform his or her previous way of feeling, to become vain and coquettish. This is the difference between the monkey, satisfied with just seeing itself in the mirror, and the child. Regarding the monkey, the experience does not permanently affect its feeling and will. But for the nine-and-one-half-year-old child, the experience of seeing himself or herself in the mirror produces lasting impressions, influences his or her character in a certain way.

An actual experiment would confirm this result. And a time that wishes to make education into an experimental science—because it cannot think of any other way of dealing with it, because it has lost all inner connection to it—could well feel inclined to make experiments in order to discover the nature of the transition from the ninth to the tenth year. Children would be given mirrors, their reactions would be recorded, learned books would be written, and so forth. But such a procedure is no different for the soul and spirit than the assumption that our ordinary methods cannot solve the mystery of the human being. In order to get answers, we must decide on killing somebody every year, in order to discover the secrets of life at the moment of death. Such scientific experiments are not yet permitted in the physical, sense-perceptible world. But in the realm of soul and spirit, we have progressed to the point that experiments are allowed which paralyze the unhappy victims, paralyze them for life—experiments that ought to be avoided.

Take any of the available books on education and you will find thoughts the very opposite of ours. You will, for example, read things about memory and the nature of sensation, the application of which you ought to avoid in your lessons. Experimental pedagogy occupies itself precisely with such experiments that should be abolished. Everything that should be avoided is experimented with. This is the destructive practice of our current civilization—the wish to discover the processes in the corpse rather than those in life. It is the death processes that experimental pedagogy wishes to study, instead of making the effort to observe life: the way children, in a delicate, subtle way arrive at being astonished at what they see around them, because they are beginning to see themselves placed into the world. It is only at this stage that one arrives at self consciousness, the awareness of one’s ego. When one sees it reflected, rayed back from everywhere in the environment, from plants and animals, when one begins to experience them in one’s feeling, one relates consciously to them, develops a knowledge through one’s own efforts.

This awareness begins to awaken in children at the age of nine and ten. It does not awaken if we avoid the formative activities, if we avoid the meaningful movements in, for example, eurythmy. This is not done today. Children are not educated to do meaningful, sensible things. Like little lambs in a pasture, they are taken to the gymnasium, ordered to move their arms in a certain way, told how to use the various apparati. There is nothing of a spiritual element in such activities—or have you noticed any? Certainly, many beautiful things are said about such activities, but they are not permeated by spirit.

What is the result? At an age that affords the best opportunities for infusing the sense of beauty in children, they do not receive it. The children wish so very much to stand in awe, to be astonished, but the forces for this response are squashed. Take a book on current curricula and their tendencies. The six- and seven-year-old children, on entering school, are treated in a way that makes them impervious to the experiences they ought to have in their tenth year. They don’t experience anything. Consequently, the experiences they ought to have pass into the body, instead of into the consciousness. They rumble deep down in the unconscious regions and transform into feelings and instincts of which individuals have no knowledge. People move about in life without being able to connect with it, without discovering anything in it. This is the characteristic of our time. People do not observe anything meaningful in life, because they did not learn as children to see the beautiful in it. All they are to discover are things that in the driest possible sense somehow increase their knowledge. But they cannot find the hidden, mysterious beauty that is present everywhere, and the real connection to life dies away.

This is the course culture is taking. The connection of human beings to nature dies away. If one is permeated by this, if one observes this, then one knows how everything depends on finding the right words, words that will allow children at the age of nine to be astonished. The children expect this from us. If we do not deliver, we really destroy a great deal.

We must learn to observe children, must grow into them with our feelings, be inside them and not rest content with outer experimentation. The situation is really such that we have to say that the development of the human being includes a definite course of life that begins at the moment when in a lower region, as it were, from language, there emerge the words: “I am an ‘I.’” One learns to say “I” to oneself at a relatively early age in childhood, but the experience is dreamlike and continues in this dreamy way. The child then enters school. And it is now our task to change this experience. The child wishes, after all, to take a different direction. We must direct the child to artistic activities. When we have done this for a while, the child retraces his or her life and arrives again at the moment of learning to say “I” to himself or herself. The child then continues the process and later, through the event of puberty, again passes through this moment.

We prepare the children for this process by getting them at the age of nine and ten to the point that they can look at the world in wonder, astonishment, and admiration. If we make their sense of beauty more conscious, we prepare the children for the time at and after puberty in such a way that they learn to love correctly, that they develop love in the right way. Love is not limited to sex; sex is merely a special aspect of love. Love is something that extends to everything, is the innermost impetus for action. We ought to do what we love to do. Duty is to merge with love; we should like what we are duty-bound to do. And this love develops in the right way only if we go along with the child’s inner development. We must, therefore, pay attention to the correct cultivation of the sense of beauty throughout the elementary school years. The sense of truth the children have brought with them; the sense of beauty we have to develop in the way I have described.

That the children have brought the sense of truth with them can be seen in the fact that they have learned to speak before entering school. Language, as it were, incorporates truth and knowledge. We need language if we wish to learn about the world. This fact has led people like Mauthner to assume that everything is already contained in language. People like Mauthner—who wrote the book Critique of Language—actually believe that we harm human beings by taking them beyond the point at which they learn to speak. Mauthner wrote his Critique of Language because he did not believe in the world, because of his conviction that human beings should be left at a childlike stage, at the time when they learn to speak. Were this idea to become generally accepted, we would be left with a spiritual life that corresponds to that of children at the time when they have learned to speak. This manner of thinking tends toward producing such human beings who remain at the stage of children who have just learned to speak. Everything else is nowadays rejected as ignorance.

What now matters is that we can enter the concept of imitation with our feeling and then to understand the concept of authority as the basis, between us and the children, for the development of the sense for the beautiful. If we manage to do this up to the time of puberty, then as the children are growing into their inclinations toward ideals, the sense for the good is correctly developed. Before puberty it is through us that the children are motivated to do the good; through the reciprocal relationship we must affect the children in this way. It is necessary for the eleven-, twelve-, and thirteen-year-old girls and boys to have the teacher’s authority behind them, to feel their teacher’s pleasure and satisfaction when they are doing something that is good. And they should avoid bad actions because they feel their teacher would be disappointed. They should be aware of the teacher’s presence and in this way unite with him or her. Only at puberty should they emancipate themselves from the teacher.

If we consider the children to be already mature in first grade, if we encourage them to voice their opinions and judgments as soon as they have learned to speak—that is, if we base everything on direct perception [Anschauung]—we leave them at the stage of development at which they have just learned to speak, and we deny them any further development. If, in other words, we do not address ourselves to the very real changes at puberty—that the children then leave behind what they were used to doing through our authority—they will not be able later in life to do without it. Children must first experience authority. Then at puberty they must be able to grow beyond it and begin to make and depend on their own judgments.

At this time we really must establish such a connection to the students that each one of them may choose a “hero whose path to Mt. Olympus can be emulated.” This change is, of course, connected with some unhappiness and even pain. It is no longer up to the teacher to represent the ideal for the children. The teacher must recognize the change and act accordingly. Before puberty the teacher was able to tell the children what to do. Now the students become rather sensitive to their teachers in their judgments, perceive their weaknesses and shortcomings. We must consciously expose ourselves to this change, must be aware of the students’ criticism of their teachers’ unwarranted behavior. They become especially sensitive at this age to their teachers’ attitudes. If, however, our interest in the students is honest and not egotistical, we shall educate and teach with exactly these possibilities of their feelings in mind. And this will result in a free relationship between us and them.

The effect will be the students’ healthy growth into the true that was given to them by the spiritual world as a kind of inheritance, so that they can merge with, grow together with, the beautiful in the right way, so that they can learn the good in the world of the senses, the good they are to develop and bring to expression during their lives. It is really a sin to talk about the true, the beautiful, and the good in abstractions, without showing concretely their relation to the various ages.

Such a short reflection, my dear friends, can of course give us no more than a small segment of what the future holds for us. We can only gradually grow into the tasks we are given. But it really is true that we shall in a certain way grow into them as a matter of course, provided we let ourselves be guided in our work by the forces we can acquire if we see the physical, sense-perceptible world from the standpoint of soul and spirit and if, in observing the world, we do not forget the human being. These things we must do, especially as teachers to whom the young are entrusted.

We really must feel ourselves as a part of the whole universe, wherein the evolution of humankind is playing a major role. For this reason, I would always—at the beginning of the school year—like to see our feelings permeated, as it were, with a healthy sensing of our great task, so that we may in all humility feel ourselves as missionaries in human evolution. In this sense, I always wish such talks to contain also something of a prayer-like element by which we may raise ourselves to the spirit, so that we evoke it not merely intellectually but as a living reality. May we be conscious of the spirit spreading among us like a living cloud that is permeated by soul and spirit; may we feel that the living spirits themselves are called upon through the words we speak among ourselves at the beginning of a new school year, that these living spirits themselves are called forth when we beseech them: “Help us. Bring living spirituality among us. Insert it into our souls, our hearts, so that we may work in the right way.”

If you have the sensitivity to appreciate that our words at the beginning of the school year should also be a feeling experience, you will be open to the intention that is connected with our talks. So let me add for you this short meditative formula, to be spoken as follows:

We resolve to do our work by letting flow into it what from the spiritual world wishes to become human being in us, by way of the soul and spirit as well as of the corporealphysical organization.

[Wir wollen arbeiten, indem wir einfliessen lassen in unsere Arbeit dasjenige, was aus der geistigen Welt heraus auf seelisch-geistige Weise und auch auf leiblich-physische Weise in uns Mensch werden will.]

It is impossible to educate or teach without a spiritual grasp of the whole human being, for this whole human being comes into consideration even far more prominently during the time of a child's development than later on. As we know, this whole human being comprises within itself the ego, the astral body, the etheric body, and the physical body. These four members of the nature of man are by no means going through a symmetrical development, but rather they develop in very different ways; and we must distinguish accurately between the development of the physical and of the etheric body, and that of the astral body and of the ego. The outer manifestations of this differentiated development express themselves—as you know from the various elucidations—in the change of teeth and in that change which in the male appears as the change of voice at puberty, but which also proclaims itself clearly in the female, though in a different way. The essence of the phenomenon is the same as with the male in the change of his voice, only in the female organism it appears in a more diffused form, so that it is not merely observable in one organ as in the case of the male organism, but it extends more over the entire organism.

You know that between the change of teeth and the change of voice, or puberty, lies that period of teaching with which we have principally to do in the grade-schools; but the careful educator, in teaching and educating, must pay close attention as well to the years following the change of voice, or its analogy in the female organism.

Let us call to mind what the change of teeth signifies. Before the change of teeth—that is, between birth and the change of teeth—the physical body and the etheric body in the child's organism are strongly influenced by the nervous-sensory system, that is, from above downward. Up to about the seventh year the physical body and the etheric body are most active from the head. In the head are concentrated, as it were, the forces that are particularly active in these years—that is, in the years when imitation plays so important a role. And what takes place in the formative process in the remaining organism of trunk and limbs is achieved through the emanation of rays from the head to this remaining organism, to the trunk and the limb organism, from the physical body and the etheric body. That which here radiates from the head into the physical and etheric bodies of the whole child, right into the tips of his fingers and toes—this that radiates from the head into the whole child is soul-activity, even though it has its inception in the physical body: the same soul-activity that is later active in the soul as mind and memory. Later on this soul-activity appears in such a form that after the change of teeth the child begins to think, and that his memories become more conscious. The whole change that takes place in the soul-life of the child shows that certain psychic powers previously active in the organism become active as soul-forces after the seventh year. The whole period up to the change of teeth, while the child is growing, is a result of the same forces which after the seventh year appear as mental forces, intellectual forces.

There you have a case of actual co-operation between soul and body, when you realize how the soul emancipates itself in the seventh year and begins to function—no longer in the body but independently. Now those forces which in the body itself come newly into being as soul-forces begin to be active with the seventh year; and from then on, they operate through into the next incarnation. Now that which is radiated forth from the body is repulsed, whereas the forces that shoot downward from the head are checked. Thus, at this time of the change of teeth the hardest battle is fought between the forces tending downward from above and those shooting upward from below. The physical change of teeth is the physical expression of this conflict between those two kinds of forces: the forces that later appear in the child as the reasoning and intellectual powers, and those that must be employed particularly in drawing, painting, and writing. All these forces that shoot up, arising out of the conflict, we employ when we develop writing out of drawing; for these forces really tend to pass over into plastic creation, drawing, and so forth. Those are the forces that come to an end with the change of teeth, that previously had modelled the body of the child: the sculpture-forces. We work with them later, when the change of teeth is completed, to lead the child to drawing, to painting, and so on. These are in the main the forces in which the child's soul lived in the spiritual world before conception; at first their activity lies in forming the body, and then from the seventh year on they function as soul- forces. Thus, in the educational period following the seventh year, during which we must work with the forces of authority, we simply see that manifesting itself in the child which formerly he practiced unconsciously as imitation, when these forces still influenced the body unconsciously. If later the child becomes a sculptor, a draftsman, or an architect—but a real architect who works out of the forms—this is because such a person has the capacity for retaining in his organism, in his head, a little more of those forces that radiate downward into the organism, so that later on as well these forces of childhood can radiate downward. But if they are entirely used up, if with the change of teeth everything passes over into the psychic, children result who have no talent for architecture, who could never become sculptors.

These forces are related to the experiences between death and a new birth; and the reverence that is needed in educational activity, and that takes on a religious character, arises if one is conscious that when, around the seventh year, one calls forth from the child's soul these forces that are applied in learning to draw and to write, it is actually the spiritual world that sends down these forces. And the child is the mediator, and you are in reality working with forces sent down from the spiritual world. When this reverence permeates the instruction it truly works miracles. And if you have this reverence, if you have the feeling that by means of this telephone which transcends time you are in contact with the forces developed in the spiritual world during the time before birth—if you have this feeling that engenders a deep reverence, then you will see that through the reality of such a feeling you can accomplish more than through any amount of intellectual theorizing about what should be done. The teacher's feelings are the most important means of education there is, for this reverence can have an immeasurable formative influence upon the child.

Thus, we find in the change of teeth, when the child is entrusted to us, a process that directly represents a transfer through the child of spiritual forces out of the spiritual world into the physical world.

Another process takes place in the years of puberty, but it is prepared gradually through the whole cycle from the seventh to the fourteenth or fifteenth year. During this period something comes to light in those regions of the soul-life not yet illuminated by consciousness—for consciousness is still being formed, and something of the outer world which remains unconscious is constantly radiating into those regions not yet illuminated by consciousness—that only gradually becomes conscious, but that from birth has permeated the child from the outer world, that has co-operated in building the child's body, and that has entered into the plastic forces.

Those, again, are different forces. While the plastic forces enter the head from within, these forces now come from without. They are dammed up by the plastic forces and then descend into the organism. They co-operate in what takes place, beginning with the seventh year, in connection with the building of the child's body. I can characterize these forces in no other way than as those active in speech and in music. These forces are derived from the world.

The musical forces derive more from the outer world, the extra-human world, from the observation of processes in nature, particularly their regularities and irregularities. For all that takes place in nature is permeated by a mysterious music: I In- earthly projection of the “music of the spheres.” In every plant, in every animal, there is really incorporated a tone of the music of the spheres. That is also the case with reference to the human body, but it no longer lives in what is human speech—that is, in expressions of the soul—but it does live in the body, in its forms and so forth. All this the child absorbs unconsciously, and that is why children are musical to such a high degree. They take all that into their organism. While that which the child experiences as forms of movement, lines and plastic elements in his surroundings is absorbed by him and then acts from within, from the head, all that is absorbed by the child as tone-texture, as speech-content, comes from without. And this again, that which comes from without, is opposed by the gradually developing spiritual element of music and speech—only somewhat later: around the fourteenth year. This also is dammed up again now, in the woman in the whole organism, in the man more in the region of the larynx, where it causes the change of voice. The whole process, then, is brought about by the fact that here an element of the nature of will expresses itself from within in conflict with a similar element coming from without; and in this conflict is manifested that which at puberty appears as the change of voice. That is a conflict between inner music-speech forces and outer music-speech forces. Up to the seventh year, man is essentially permeated more by plastic and less by musical forces—that is, less by the music and speech forces that glow through the organism. But beginning with the seventh year what proceeds from music-speech becomes particularly active in the etheric body. Then this condition is opposed by the ego and the astral body: an element of the nature of will struggles from with-out against the similar one from within, and this appears at puberty. It is manifest even externally by the pitch of the voice that a difference exists between the male and the female. Only partially do the pitches of the voices of men and of women over lap: the woman's voice reaches higher, the man's goes lower—down to the bass. That corresponds with absolute accuracy to the structure of the remaining organism that forms itself out of the conflict of these forces.

These things show that in our soul-life we are concerned with something which at certain definite times co-operates also in the up-building of the organism. All the abstract discussions you find in modern scientific books on psychology, all the talk about psycho-physical parallelism, are merely testimony to the inability to grasp the connection between the psychic and the physical. For the psychic is not connected with the physical in the manner set forth in the senseless theories thought out by the psycho-physical parallelists; but rather we have to do with the recognition of this wholly concrete action of the psychic in the body, and then in turn with the reaction. Up to the seventh year what is plastic-architectonic works together with what is active in music-speech; only this changes in the seventh year, so that from then on the relation between music-speech on the one hand and the plastic-architectonic on the other is merely a different one. But through the whole period up to puberty this co-operation takes place between the plastic-architectonic, which emanates from the head and has its seat there, and speech-music, which comes from without, uses the head as a passage, and spreads itself into the organism.

From this we see that human language as well, but particularly music, co-operates in the formation of man. First it forms him, then it is dammed up as it halts at the larynx; now it does not enter the gate as it did before. For before, you see, it is speech that changes our organs, even down into the bony system; and anyone who observes a human skeleton from a psycho-physical thoughts of our present-day philosophers--and considers the differentiation between the male and the female skeleton sees in the skeleton an embodied musical achievement performed in the reciprocal action between the human organism and the outer world. Were we to take a sonata, and could we preserve its structure through some spiritual process of crystallization, we would have, as it were, the principal forms, the scheme of arrangement, of the human skeleton. And that will incidentally attest the difference between man and the animals. Whatever the animal absorbs of the music-speech element—very little of the speech, but very much of the musical—passes through the animal, because in a sense the animal lacks man's isolation that later leads to mutation. In the shape of an animal skeleton we find a musical image too, but only in the sense that a composite picture of the different animal skeletons, such as one can gain, for instance, in a museum, is needed to yield a musical coherence. An animal invariably manifests a one-sidedness in its structure.

Such things we should consider carefully in forming our picture of man: they will show us what feelings we should develop. As our reverence grows through feeling our connection, through fostering our feeling of contact, with pre-natal conditions, we acquire greater enthusiasm for teaching, by occupying ourselves intensely with the other forces of man. A Dionysian element, as it were, irradiates the music-speech instruction, while we have more of an Apollonian element in teaching the plastic arts, painting and drawing. The instruction that has to do with music and speech we impart with enthusiasm, the other with reverence.

The plastic forces offer the stronger opposition, hence they are held up as early as the seventh year; the others act less vigorously, so they are held up only in the fourteenth year. You must not interpret that to mean physical strength and weakness: it refers rather to the counter-pressure that is exerted. Since the plastic forces, being stronger, would overrun the human organism, the counter-pressure is stronger. Therefore, they must be held up earlier, whereas the music-forces are permitted by cosmic guidance to remain longer in the organism. The human being is permeated longer by the music forces than by the plastic ones.

If you let this thought ripen within you and bring the requisite enthusiasm to bear, conscious that by developing an appreciation for speech and music precisely during the grade-school period, when that battle is still raging and when you are still influencing the corporeality—not just the soul—then you are preparing that which man carries with him even beyond death. To this we contribute essentially with everything we teach the child of music and speech during the grade-school period. And that gives us a certain enthusiasm, because we know that thereby we are working for the future. On the other hand, by working with the plastic forces we make contact with what lived in man before birth or conception, and that gives us reverence. In that which reaches into the future we infuse our own forces, and we know that we are fructifying the germ of music-speech with something that will operate into the future after the physical has been stripped off. Music itself is a reflection of what is spheric in the air—only thus does it become physical. The air is in a sense the medium that renders tones physical, just as it is the air in the larynx that renders speech physical. That which has its being as non-physical in the speech-air, and as non-physical in the music-air unfolds its true activity only after death. That gives us the right enthusiasm for our teaching, because we know that when working with music and speech we are working for the future. And I believe that in the pedagogy of the future, teachers will no longer be addressed as they usually are today, but rather in ideas and concepts that can transform themselves into feelings, into the future. For nothing is more important than that we be able, as teachers, to develop the necessary reverence, the necessary enthusiasm. Reverence and enthusiasm—those are two fundamental forces by which the teacher-soul must be permeated.

To make you understand the matter still better I should like to mention that music has its being principally in the human astral body. After death man still carries his astral body fur a time; and as long as he does so, until he lays it aside completely—you are familiar with this from my book Theosophy — there still exists in man after death a sort of memory—it is only a sort of memory—of earthly music. Thus, it comes about that whatever in life we receive of music continues to act like a memory of music after death—until about the time the astral body is laid aside. Then the earthly music is transformed in the life after death into the “music of the spheres,” and it remains as such until some time previous to the new birth. The matter will be more comprehensible for you if you know that what man here on earth receives in the way of music plays a very important role in the shaping of his soul-organism after death. That organism is molded there during this period. This is, of course, the kamaloka time; and that is also the comforting feature of the kamaloka time: we can render easier this existence, which the Roman Catholics call purgatory, for human beings if we know that. Not, to be sure, by relieving them of their perception: that they must have; for they would remain imperfect if they could not observe the imperfect things they have done. But we furnish the possibility that the human being will be better formed in his next life if during that time after death, when he still has his astral body, he can have many memories of things musical. This can be studied on a comparatively low plane of spiritual knowledge. You need only, after having heard a concert, wake up in the night, and you will become aware that you have experienced the whole concert again before waking. You even experience it much better by thus awaking in the night after a concert. You experience it very accurately. The point is that music imprints itself upon the astral body, it remains there, it still vibrates; it remains for about thirty years after death. What comes from music continues to vibrate much longer than what comes from speech: we lose the latter as such comparatively quickly after death, and there remains only its spiritual extract. What is musical is as long as the astral body. What comes from speech can be a great boon to us after death, especially if we have often absorbed it in the form which I now frequently describe as the art of recitation. When I describe the latter in this way I naturally have every reason to point out that these things cannot be rightly interpreted without keeping in view the peculiar course the astral body takes after death: then the matters must be described somewhat as I have described them in my lectures on eurythmy. Here, you see, we must talk to people in the most primitive language, so to speak; and it is really true that, seen from the point of view beyond the Threshold, people are actually all primitive: only beyond the Threshold are they real human beings. And we can only work ourselves out of this primitive-man state by working ourselves into spiritual reality. This is also the reason for the constantly increasing fury against the endeavors of Anthroposophy to show the path to a spiritual reality.

Now I would call your attention to something that is very much in the foreground in the art of pedagogy and that can be pedagogically employed—namely, that in the first conflict which I described in connection with the adolescent child, the outer expression of which is the change of teeth, and in that later struggle whose equivalent is the change of voice, there is to be considered something peculiar that gives to each its special character: everything that up to the seventh year descends from the head appears as an attack in relation to that which meets it from within and which builds up. And everything is a warding off that acts from within toward the head, that rises upward and opposes the current emanating from the head and descending.

In the case of music in turn the conditions are similar; but here that which comes from within appears as an attack, and that which descends from above through the head-organism appears as the warding off. If we had not music, frightful forces really would rise up in man. I am completely convinced that up to the sixteenth or seventeenth century traditions deriving from the old Mysteries were active, and that even then people still wrote and spoke under the influence of this after-effect of the Mysteries. They no longer knew, to be sure, the whole meaning of this effect, but in much that still appears in comparatively recent times we simply have reminiscences of the old Mystery-wisdom. Hence, I have always been deeply impressed by the passage in Shakespeare :*

“The man that hath no music in himself,
Is fit for treason, murder and deceit!
Let no such man be trusted.”

Merchant of Venice, V, 1.

“The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted.”

Translator's Note: The third line of the German translation of this passage reads: “Is fit for treason, murder and deceit”, and thus it is quoted by Dr. Steiner. Thus, must be kept in mind to understand what follows.

In the old Mystery-schools the pupils were told: that which acts in man as an attack from within and which must be continually warded off, which is dammed back for the nature of man, is “treason, murder and deceit,” and the music that is active in man is that which opposes the former. Music is the means of defense against the Luciferic forces rising up out of the inner man: treason, murder and deceit. We all have treason, murder and deceit within us, and it is not for nothing that the world contains what comes to us from music-speech quite aside from the pleasure it affords. Its purpose is to make people into human beings. One must, of course, keep in mind that the old Mystery- teachers expressed themselves somewhat differently: they expressed things more concretely. They would not have said “treason, murder and deceit” (it is already toned down in Shakespeare) but would have said something like “serpent, wolf and fox.” The serpent, the wolf and the fox are warded off from the inner nature of the human being through music. The old Mystery-teachers would always have used animal forms to depict that which rises out of the human being, but which must then be transformed into what is human. Thus, we can achieve the right enthusiasm when we see the treacherous serpent rising out of the child and combat it with music-speech instruction, and in like manner contend with the murderous wolf and the tricky fox or the cat. That is what can then permeate us with the intelligent, the true sort of enthusiasm—not the burning, Luciferic sort that alone is acknowledged today. We must recognize, then: attack and warding off.

Man has within him two levels where the warding off occurs. First, within himself, where the warding off appears in the change of teeth in the seventh year; and then again, in what he has received from music and speech, through which is warded off that which tends to rise up within him. But both battlefields are within man himself, what comes from music-speech more toward the periphery, toward the outer world, the architectonic- plastic more toward the inner world. But there is still a third battlefield, and that lies at the border between the etheric body and the outer world. The etheric body is always larger than the physical body; it extends beyond it in all directions; and here also there is such a battlefield. Here the battle is fought more under the influence of consciousness, whereas the other two proceed more in the subconscious. And the third conflict manifests itself when everything has worked itself to the surface that is a transformation of what takes place on the one hand between the human being and what is plastic-architectonic, and on the other between him and what is music-speech, when this amalgamates with the etheric body, thereby taking hold of the astral body, and is thus moved more toward the periphery, toward the outer border.

Through this originates everything that shoots through the fingers in drawing, painting, and so on. This makes of painting an art functioning more in the environs of man. The draftsman, the sculptor, must work more out of his inner faculties, the musician more out of his devotion to the world. That which lias ils being in painting and drawing, to which we lead the child when we have it make forms and lines, that is a battle that lakes place wholly on the surface, a battle that is fought principally between two forces, one of which acts inward from without, the other on I ward from within. The force that acts outward from within really tends constantly to disperse the human being, tends to continue the forming of man—not violently but in a delicate way. This force—it is not so powerful as that, but I must express il more radically so that you will see what I mean—this force, acting outward from within, tends to make our eyes swell up, to raise a goiter for us, to make the nose grow big and to make the ears bigger: everything tends to swell outward. Another force is the one we absorb from the outer world, through which this swelling up is warded off. And even if we only make a stroke—draw something—this is an effort to divert, through the force acting from the outer world inward, that inner force which tends to deform us. It is a complicated reflex action, then, that we as men execute in painting, in drawing, in graphic activity. In drawing or in having the canvas before us, the feeling actually glimmers in our consciousness that we are excluding something that is out there, that in the forms and strokes we are setting up thick walls, barbed wire. In drawing we really have such barbed wire by means of which we quickly catch something that tends to destroy us from within and prevent its action from becoming too strong. Therefore, instruction in drawing works best if we begin its study from the human being. If you study what motions the hand tends to make—if, say, in eurythmy instruction you have the child hold these motions, these forms that he wants to execute—then you have arrested the motion, the line, that tends to destroy, and then it does not act destructively. So when you begin to have the eurythmic forms drawn, and then see that drawing and also writing are formed out of the will that lives there, you have something which the nature of man really wants, something linked with the development and essence of human nature.

And in connection with eurythmy we should know this, that in our etheric body we constantly have the tendency to practice eurythmy: that is something the etheric body simply does of its own accord; for eurythmy is nothing but motions gleaned from what the etheric body tends to do of itself. It is really the etheric body that makes these motions, and it is only prevented from doing so when we cause the physical body to execute them. When we cause them to be executed by the physical body these movements are held back in the etheric body, react upon us, and have a health-giving effect on man.

That is what affects the human being in a certain hygienic- therapeutic as well as didactic-pedagogic way, and which outwardly gives the impression of beauty. Such things will be understood only when we know that something which is trying to manifest itself in the etheric organization of man must be stopped at the periphery by the movements of the physical body. In one case, that of eurythmy, an element more connected with the will is stopped; in the other, in drawing and painting, an element more closely allied with the intellect. But fundamentally both processes are but the two poles of one and the same thing.

If we now follow this process too with our feeling and incorporate it in our sensitive teaching ability, we have the third feeling that we need. That is the feeling which should really always penetrate us especially in grade-school instruction: that, when a human being is placed in the world, he is really exposed to things from which we must protect him through our teaching. Otherwise he would become one with the world too much. Man really always has the tendency to become psychically rickety, to make his limbs rickety, to become a gnome. And in teaching and educating him we work at forming him. We best obtain a feeling for this forming if we observe the child making a drawing, then smooth this out a bit so that the result is not what the child wants, but not what we want either, but a result of both. If I succeed, while smoothing out what the child wants to scribble, in merging my feelings with those of the child, the best results obtain. And if I transform all that into feeling and let it permeate me, the feeling arises that I must protect the child from an over-strong coalescence with the outer world. We must see that the child grows slowly into the outer world and not let him do so too rapidly. That is the third feeling that we as educators must cherish within us: we constantly hold a protecting hand over the child.

Reverence, enthusiasm, and the feeling of protection, these three are actually the panacea, as it were, the magic formula in the soul of the educator and teacher. And if one wished to represent, externally, artistically, something like an embodiment of art and pedagogy in a group, one would have to represent this:

Reverence for what precedes the child's existence (before birth);

Enthusiastic looking forward to what follows it (after death);

Protecting gesture for what the child experiences (during life).

Rudolf Steiner accompanied each of these three sentences with a gesture.

This work of art would also best represent the external manifestation of the teacher-character.

When one says something thus derived out of the intimacies of the world-mysteries one always feels it as unsatisfactory when uttered in conventional speech. But if one must say such things by means of external speech one always has the feeling that a supplement is necessary. What is spoken rather abstractly always feels the urge to pass over into the artistic. That is why I wanted to give you that hint in closing.

The fact is, we must learn to bear something of mankind's future frame of mind within us, consisting of the knowledge that the possession of mere science makes the human being into something which will cause him to regard himself as a psycho-spiritual monster. He who is a scientist pure and simple will not have the impulse—not even in the forming of his thoughts—to transform the scientific into the artistic. But only through the artistic can one comprehend the world. Goethe's saying always remains true:

“He to whom Nature begins to reveal her manifest secret feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy exponent — Art.”

As educators we should have the feeling: as far as you are a scientist only, you are in soul and spirit a monster. Not until you have transformed your psycho-spiritual-physical organism, when your knowledge takes on artistic form, will you become a human being. Future development will in the main lead from science to artistic grasp, from the monster to the complete human being. And in this it is the pedagogue's duty to co-operate.

What I have to say today concerns primarily the physical education of children. It is in the nature of this subject that I can talk about it only aphoristically, mainly because people tend to have already formed their opinions in these matters. When it comes to talking about physical development, everyone seems to have definite likes and dislikes that too often strongly color people’s theories on this subject. But anything arising from personal sympathies or antipathies easily leads to fanaticism, which is far from the real goals and activities of spiritual science. Any form of fanaticism or agitation for some particular cause is entirely alien to the nature of the anthroposophic movement, which simply wants to point out the effects of various attitudes and actions in life and leave everyone free to relate personal sympathies and antipathies to the matter.

Just consider the fanaticism that argues for or against vegetarianism today, each using unassailable, scientific proofs. And yet we cannot help noticing that never before has superficiality flourished so much as when people defend various movements of a similar nature. It is a fact that anthroposophy does not have the slightest leaning toward extremism in any form. It cannot go along with ardent vegetarians who wish to enforce their views on others whose attitudes differ, and who, in their fanaticism, go so far as to deny meat eaters a fully human status in society. If fanaticism occasionally creeps into the anthroposophic movement, it does not at all reflect the true nature of spiritual science.

Now, there is another aspect we must consider within the context of these lectures. Perhaps you have noticed that until now we have emphasized appropriate educational methods in the realm of children’s soul and spirit, which also allows the best possibility for physical development in a natural, healthy way. One could say that we are studying an educational system that—if it is practiced correctly and effectively—offers the best means toward healthy physical development. So the fundamentals of a sound physical education have already been presented. Nevertheless, it will be useful to review and summarize them again, although we must do this aphoristically because of a shortage of time. To do justice to this subject I would have to devote a whole lecture cycle to it.

Our theme falls naturally into three main parts: the way we feed children; the way we relate children to warmth or coldness; and our approach to gymnastics. Fundamentally, these three categories comprise everything important for the physical education of children.

Modern methods of knowledge, based as they are on an intellectualistic approach, do not offer the possibility of coming to terms with the complex nature of the human organism. Despite the scientific attitude that people are so proud of today, we need to acquire a certain instinctive knowledge of what nurtures or damages health and includes the whole spectrum between these two poles. A healthy instinct for such matters is immensely important. After all, isn’t it true that our natural science is generally becoming more dyed-in-the-wool materialistic? Consider how many secrets have been drawn from nature through research under the microscope or by dissecting various lower animals to investigate the functions of their parts. How many times has human behavior been determined by observing animal behavior, without considering the fact that the human organization in its most important characteristic differs radically from that of all lower animal species? In any case, there has not been enough emphasis placed on this significant difference, primarily because science today depends on investigating every detail separately, thus getting only a partial view of life.

Let me try to illustrate this by a comparison. Imagine that I meet two people at nine o’clock one morning. They are sitting on a bench, and I stop for a while to talk to them about various things, thus gaining a general impression of their characters. Then I go on my way again. At three o’clock in the afternoon I see them still sitting on that bench. Now, there are various possibilities of what may have happened in the meantime. It may be that they have been sitting there talking the whole time. Or, according to the different ways that people of various ethnic groups or nationalities behave, other things may have happened. Perhaps they sat together in silence. Or, unknown to me, one of them might left right after I did, while the other stayed on the bench. The first may have returned just before I reappeared, and so on. Externally, nothing appears to have changed between 9 A.M. and 3 P.M., despite the fact that the two seemed very different in temperament and lifestyle.

Life will never reveal its secrets if we observe only outer appearances. Yet, with today’s scientific methods, this happens far more frequently than is generally realized, as anyone can discover. Present scientific attitudes can indeed lead to a situation such as I witnessed not long ago. In my youth, I had a friend whom I knew lived a normal and healthy life. Later, we went our different ways and did not meet for many years. Then, one day, I visited him again. When he sat down to his midday meal, the food was served in an unusual way, and a scale was placed on the table. He weighed the meat and the vegetables, because he had begun to eat “scientifically.” He had complete faith in a science that prescribed the correct amounts of various foods one eats to be healthy. Needless to say, such a method may be perfectly justified under certain conditions, but it thoroughly undermines one’s healthy instincts.

An instinct for what is wholesome or damaging to health is an essential quality for any teacher worthy of the calling. Such teachers surely know how to elaborate and use all that was given in the previous lectures, and this includes the physical education of children.

We have seen, for instance, that before the change of teeth children live entirely in the physical organism. This applies especially to babies, particularly with regard to nourishment. As you know, when babies begin to take in food, they are completely satisfied with a totally uniform diet. If we, as adults, had to live every day on exactly the same kind of food for breakfast, lunch, and any other meal, we would find it intolerable, both physically and mentally. Adults like to vary their food with a mixed diet. Babies, on the other hand, do not get a change of food at all. And yet, only a few people realize the bliss with which babies receive their “monotonous” diet; the whole body becomes saturated with intense sweetness from the mother’s milk. Adults have the possibility of tasting food only with the taste buds and adjacent organs. They are unfortunate, since all their sensations of taste are confined to the head and thus they are very different a baby, whose entire body becomes one great organ for the sense of taste.

At the end of the baby stage, tasting with the whole body ceases and is soon forgotten for the rest of life. People who live with ordinary degrees of consciousness are completely unaware of how different their sensations of tasting food were during infancy. And, sure enough, later life does its best to wipe out this memory. For example, I once took part in a conversation between an “abstainer” and a person of the opposite position. (I won’t tell you the whole story, since it would take us too far from our theme.) The abstainer, like so many of these people, was inclined to be a fanatic and tried to convert the gourmand, who replied, “But I was completely temperate for two full years.” Greatly surprised, the abstainer asked him when this was, to which the other answered, “During the first two years of my life.” In this humorous, though rather frivolous way, important facts of life were discussed. Few people have a deeper and correct knowledge of these things.

Babies are related to the physical body in such a way that they can eat only with their entire physical organization, deriving the greatest benefit and pleasure from this condition. The gradual transition to the next stage involves forces that begin to concentrate in the head and finally lead to the change of teeth. These forces are so powerful that they can force out the milk teeth as the second teeth push through. This slow and gradual process takes place between birth and second dentition, affecting various other regions. After babyhood, the sense of taste withdraws into the head. Children no longer eat only with their physical organization, but with their soul forces as well. They learn to distinguish various tastes through their soul forces. At this stage it is important to watch carefully children’s reactions to different foods. Their likes and dislikes are valuable indicators of their inner health. But, to judge such matters, we need at least an basic knowledge of nutrition.

When talking about this today, people typically think of the aspect of weight. But this is not so important. What really matters is the fact that each kind of food contains a certain amount of forces. Each item of food holds a specific amount of forces through which it has adapted to the conditions of the outer world. But what takes place within the human organism is something entirely different. The human organism must completely transform the food it takes in. It must transform the processes that various foods have gone through while growing—forces that will become active within the human organism. What occurs there is a continual conflict, during which the dynamic forces in food are completely changed. We experience this inner reaction to the substances we eat as stimulating and life sustaining. Consequently, it is no good to merely ask how many ounces of this or that we should eat. Rather, we should ask how our organism will react to even the smallest amounts of a certain food. The human organism needs forces that generate resistance to outer natural processes.

Though somewhat modified, processes in certain areas of the human organism (between the mouth and the stomach) can still be compared to forces in the external world. However, those in the stomach and in the subsequent stages of digestion are very different from what we find outside the human being. When it comes to what happens in the head, however, we find exactly the opposite processes from those in outer nature. This shows how the human organism, in its totality, must be stimulated in the right way through the food we eat.

I must be brief, so there is no time to get into the terminology of the deeper aspects of this subject. For now, however, a less specialized and more popular terminology will do. As you know, in ordinary life there are foods we consider rich in nutrition, and others considered poor in nutrients. It is possible to live on food of poor nutritional value—just think of how many people are fed mainly on bread and potatoes, both of which are certainly low in nutritional value. On the other hand, you have to remember that, in cases of ill health, one must take great care not to overburden the digestion with foods having little nourishment. Bread and potatoes make great demands on the digestive system, with the effect that very little energy is left for the remaining functions. Consequently, a diet of bread and potatoes is not likely to promote physical growth. So we look for other foods that do not put unnecessary strain on the digestive system, foods that work the digestive system very little. If these things are taken to extremes, however, an abnormal activity begins in the brain, which in turn begins other processes that have absolutely no resemblance to those of outer nature. These again affect the rest of the human organism, and as a result the digestive system will become sluggish and too slack. All this is extremely complicated, and it is very difficult to understand all the ramifications of what happens. It is one of the most difficult tasks of a thorough scientific investigation—not the kind so common today—to know what really happens when, for instance, a potato or a piece of roast beef is taken into a human mouth. Each of these two processes is very complex, and each is very different from the other. To investigate the subsequent stages of digestion with scientific precision, a great deal of specialized knowledge is needed.

A mere indication of what happens there must be enough. Imagine that a boy eats a potato. First the potato is tasted in his head, the location of one’s organs of taste, and then the sensation of taste induces further responses. Although the sense of taste no longer permeates the boy’s whole organism, it nevertheless affects it in certain ways. A potato does not have an especially stimulating taste and, consequently, leaves the organism somewhat indifferent and inactive. The organs are not particularly interested in what happens with the potato in the child’s mouth. Then, as you know, the potato passes into the stomach. The stomach, however, does not receive it with alacrity either, because it has not been stimulated by the sensation of taste. Taste always determines whether the stomach takes in food with sympathy or aversion. In this case, the stomach will not exert itself to incorporate the potato with its dynamic forces. Yet, this must happen, since the potato cannot be left there in the stomach. If the stomach has the strength, it will absorb the dynamic forces of the potato and work on them with a certain distaste. It allows the potato to enter without developing any significant response to it, because the potato has not stimulated it. This process continues through the rest of the digestive tract, in which the remains of the potato are again worked on with a certain reluctance. Very little of what was once the potato reaches the head organization.

These few indications—which ought to be deepened considerably for any proper understanding—are intended as a mere suggestion of the complex processes that occur in the human organism. Nevertheless, educators should acquire a working knowledge of these things, and to do this I believe it is necessary to go into the whys and wherefores. I can imagine that some listeners might think it good enough just to be told what they should give children to eat and which foods to avoid. But this is not enough, because to do the right things—especially when physical matters are involved—teachers must have sufficient understanding of the problems. There are so many approaches to these things that one needs guidance to see what each case requires. And for this, teachers need at least a simplified picture of how children should be fed.

In physical education, we see in particular how far educational principles have deviated from prevailing social conditions. Unless students happen to live in boarding schools, where it is possible to practice what I have been indicating, it will be necessary to win the cooperation of parents or others in charge of children, and, as we all know, this can cause considerable difficulties. It may not be possible to implement measures one deems right and beneficial for students until tremendous resistance has been overcome.

Let me give you an example. Imagine you have a student in your class who has an excessively melancholic disposition. Extreme symptoms of this kind always indicate an abnormality in the physical organization. Abnormalities in the soul region always originate with physical abnormalities of one kind or another, and physical symptoms are a manifestation of the soul and spiritual life. So let us imagine such a child in a day school. In a boarding school, of course, one would deal with such a problem in cooperation with the dormitory. So what would I have to do? First I must contact the child’s parents and—if I am absolutely certain about the real causes of the problem—I may ask them to increase the child’s sugar consumption by at least 150 percent, or in some cases by as much as 200 percent, compared to what one gives a child who behaves normally. I would advise the parents not to withhold this additional sugar, which could be given, for instance, as sweets.

Why would I do this? Perhaps the opposite example will make it clearer to you. Imagine that I have to deal with a pathologically sanguine child. If I am to make sense, we must assume this is an excessively sanguine child. Again, the symptoms betray an abnormality in the physical organization, and here I would have to ask the parents to decrease the amount of sugar given to the child. I would ask them to greatly reduce the amount of sweets given to the child.

What are my reasons? One discovers whether to increase or decrease the amount of sugar only by becoming aware of these facts; all milk and milk products, but mother’s milk in particular, spread their effect uniformly throughout the entire human organism, so that each organ receives what it needs in a harmonious way. Other foods, however, have more influence on a particular organic system. Please note that I am not saying other foods exercise an exclusive influence, but that they influence some organs more than others. The way a child or an adult responds to a specific taste or a certain food depends on the general condition of a particular organic system. In this respect, certain luxury foods play as important a part, as do ordinary foods.

Milk affects the entire human being, whereas other nutrients affect a particular organic system. With regard to sugar, we must look at activity in the liver. So, what am I doing by giving an abnormally melancholic child lots of sugar? I diminish the activity of the liver, because sugar, in a certain sense, takes over the activity of the liver. This causes the liver to direct its activity more toward something extraneous, and thus the activity is reduced. Under certain circumstances, pronounced melancholic symptoms may be the result of a child’s liver activity, so it is possible, purely through diet, to decrease an overly melancholic tendency in a child—which can also manifest as a tendency toward anemia. And why, in the case of an overly sanguine child, do I recommend a reduction of sugar intake? Here I try to decrease the stimulating effect of sugar and cause the liver to become a little more active on its own. In this way, I stimulate the child’s I-being, which helps the child overcome the physical symptoms of an excessively sanguine temperament.

If we pay close attention over a period of time, we generally discover the necessary preventive measures. As a rule, this faculty develops only when it has become second nature in alert and dedicated teachers to spot even slightly unusual symptoms in students. Obviously, we must never allow abnormalities to deteriorate too much before taking action. To achieve this ability, teachers must be willing to continually deepen their understanding and to overcome numerous personal hindrances. Otherwise, I am afraid that teachers will not gain the necessary thoroughness until they reach retirement.

This example illustrates the possibility of counteracting certain abnormalities if we observe the human physical organization as a whole. Thus, the whys and wherefores are important. Naturally, we must always contend with countless details, but it is not impossible to relate these to the broader aspects that generally lead to polarities. Truly good teachers (even better than those who already exist), through close contact with their students, know instinctively and beforehand how to handle children when specific circumstances present themselves. In any case, if they are to take the appropriate action, it is extremely important for teachers to perceive any deviation from the normal, healthy behavior of children.

We must watch very closely how children—as beings of body, soul, and spirit—show an interest not only in themselves, but also in their environment. We have to develop an instinctive awareness of the children’s interest, or their lack of it. This represents the one side. The other is a teacher’s awareness of the first signs of fatigue in students.

What is the source of each child’s characteristic interest? It arises in the metabolic and limb system, but mainly in the metabolism. I will know that there is a problem of improper diet if I see that a child is losing interest, for example, in mental activities (and this is the most obvious sign); or if a child shows little interest in outer activities and no longer wants to participate in games or similar pursuits; or if I see that a child has lost interest in food (which is the worst sign of all, since children are naturally interested in various tastes and should learn to distinguish between the various flavors); or if a child suffers from lack of appetite (since a lost appetite also means a lack of interest in food). Here, food demands too much of the child’s digestive system. So, I must find out what food this child is being given that has relatively little nutritive value, since such food burdens the digestive system. Just as I can determine the weather by reading the barometer, similarly I can deduce an improper diet when I see a marked lack of interest in a child. Interest and apathy are the most important indicators with regard to a correct diet for children.

Now let’s take a look at the opposite pole. If I notice that a child tires too quickly because of mental or physical activities, again I can trace the cause to physical conditions. In this case, a child may eat with a normal appetite, but after eating, such a child may become drowsy, not unlike a snake after feeding. If a child has an abnormal desire to curl up on the sofa after eating, it shows an inability to cope with digestion, which causes the child to become tired. It is a sign that a child has been given too much of the sort of food that does not stimulate the digestion enough, with the result that the unfulfilled demands of the digestive system now enter the child’s head region, causing fatigue.

So, I must give food having concentrated nutritional value to a child who shows a noticeable lack of interest. But there is no need to become a fanatic about these things. Fanatical vegetarians will say that this lack of interest in children is caused by a diet of meat, and that they must now get used to a diet of raw fruits, so they can recover a normal interest in the world. This may be true. But those who believe in giving meat to children will maintain that, if they tire too easily, we must stimulate them with a meat diet.

These things should not provoke too much discussion, simply because it is possible to balance various foods through appropriate combinations that, in this case, might very well take the place of meat. Nor is it essential to turn children into vegetarians. The important thing is to recognize that, on the one hand, children who lack a healthy interest can be helped by an improved diet, one that contains especially nutritious foods and, on the other, that a tendency toward fatigue can be overcome by working in the opposite direction. This is one way to simplify and easily understand a very complex subject. If, for example, I find that a child tires too easily, I must realize that the digestion is not sufficiently engaged, and so I alter the diet accordingly. We must develop a kind of human symptomatology that helps us in a concrete and practical way. It is not always necessary to go into all the details. In matters of nutrition, if we interpret certain symptoms correctly, we begin to see through the situation and recognize what steps to take.

Closely related to all this (though opposite in a certain sense) is the whole question of warmth in childhood. Here, external phenomena guide us even more clearly than does nutrition; we just need the correct interpretation. On the other hand, they easily lead to extremes and become harmful. I am referring to “hardening,” or “toughening.” Under certain circumstances, this can be good, and much has been done in its favor. Yet, if we are well grounded in our knowledge of the human being, we cannot help feeling a sense of alarm when we see adults who were systematically hardened as children, and now cannot cross a hot and sunlit square without feeling oppressed by the heat. This can reach a point where both their psychological and physical makeup prevents them from ever crossing a sunny, open square. Surely, hardening is inappropriate if does not enable a person to endure any kind of physical hardship.

When considering the question of warmth or cold, two facts need to be kept in mind. First, nature has given us a clear directive; we have a sense of well-being only so long as we are unaware of the temperature surrounding us. If we are exposed to too much heat or cold, we quickly lose our sense of wellbeing. Obviously, we need our sensory perception of outer temperatures, but this must not adversely affect our whole organism. To protect ourselves from heat and cold, we neutralize their effects by the use of clothing. When exposed to too much cold, a person loses the ability to maintain normal functioning in certain inner organs. If, on the other hand, outer temperatures are too high, the body reacts with an excessive functioning of those organs. So we can say that, if a person is exposed to very low temperatures, the inner organs tend to coat themselves with a layer of mucus, giving rise to the type of illnesses I would call (in the vernacular) internal mucositis. Organs become lined with metabolic excesses, and this results in a hypersecretion of mucus. If, on the other hand, a person is exposed to too much heat, those organs respond by drying up. A tendency develops to form crusts, while the organs themselves ossify and become quite anemic.

This way of looking at the human organism provides the correct indications for moving ahead in matters of education. Every symptom and phenomenon teaches us something. For example, as human beings, it is safe to expose our faces to much colder temperatures than we could other parts of our bodies. And because the face is exposed to colder temperatures, it prevents other organs from drying out by stimulating them. There is a continuous interplay between the face, which readily accepts certain degrees of cold, and the other members of the human physical organization. However, we must not confuse the face with a very different part of the human anatomy. Forgive me for putting it so crudely, but we must not confuse people’s faces with their calves. This is the sort of mischief we encounter so frequently today, because in cold weather children are allowed to walk around with their legs bare up to their knees, and sometimes even higher. This truly confuses the two ends of the physical human body. If people were only aware of the hidden connections here, they would realize how many cases of appendicitis develop later on because of this confusion between the two human extremities.

On the other hand, it also needs to be said that we should not be too sensitive to minor changes of temperature, and that children should be brought up to bear them with equanimity. When children overreact to slight changes of temperature, again we must know that we can help by making corresponding changes in the diet. These things show us that warmth and nutrition must work together, for eating and keeping warm complement each other. Those who are oversensitive to temperature changes should be given food with a high caloric content, which generates the inner strength needed to withstand these changes. Again, you can see how a real knowledge of the human being also helps in such situations, and how, fundamentally, not only must everything in the human organism work harmoniously together, but mostly those entrusted with educating young people must be able to recognize this cooperation among the various organs.

The third major aspect of physical education involves various forms of movement. The human makeup is such that we must be active in more than our bodily functions; we must also participate in the outer world. People must be able to experience a connection with the outer world. It is true that not one human organ can be understood when considered only in a state of rest. We must relate it to the inherent activities and movements of its functions; then we can understand an organ even in a state of rest. This is true whether it is an outer organ—whose form, even at rest, indicates its normal movements—or an inner organ, whose shape and configuration express the function and movement that make it part of the overall human organic processes. All this is considered when we introduce various forms of movement to children in the right way. Again, bear in mind the wholeness of the human being. We must try to give the physical, soul, and spiritual aspects their due. With children, we do this only by allowing them to perform the right kinds of movements, which bring satisfaction because they are in harmony with children’s innate intentions. Such movements are always accompanied by a sense of well-being.

In an education based on knowledge of the human being, the first step in this direction is to learn the particular ways children want to move when given freedom. Typical games with their inhibiting rules are quite alien to the nature of young children, because they suppress what should remain freely mobile in children. Organized games gradually dull their inner activity, and children lose interest in such externally imposed movements. We can clearly see this by observing what happens when the free movements of playing children are channeled too much into fixed gymnastic exercises. As I said, I do not wish to condemn gymnastic lessons as such, but in general it must be said that when young students are doing gym exercises, their movements are being determined externally. Anyone working out of a real knowledge of the human being would much rather see young children play freely on parallel bars, on a horizontal bar, or on rope ladders, instead of having to follow the exact commands of a gym instructor shouting “one two three” as the children step on the first, second, and third rungs of a rope ladder or perform precise movements on gym apparatus—movements that tend to impose stereotyped forms on their bodies.

I realize that these remarks go a little beyond the general trend of modern gymnastics, whose advocates are often a bit fanatic. One easily rouses antipathy by shedding light on the kind of gymnastic exercises that are imposed externally, and by comparing them with the natural movements of children arising from their own involvement in free play. Yet it is exactly this free play that we should observe and study. One must get to know children intimately, and then one sees what to do to stimulate the right kind of free play, in which boys and girls should, of course, participate together.

In this way, through the inner flexibility that accompanies children’s outer movements, their organic functions work together harmoniously. This method also opens our eyes to what lies behind certain symptoms, such as those indicating anemia in young girls. In most cases such symptoms are simply the result of having been artificially separated from the boys, because it was considered unseemly for them to romp with the boys during free play. Girls, as well as boys, should be allowed to be boisterous when they play, although perhaps in slightly different ways. Conventional notions of what is “ladylike” are often are held up to young girls, but they frequently contribute to anemia in later life. However, I must ask you not to take this remark as a personal criticism of an established way of life, but simply as an objective observation. We can obviate a tendency toward anemia simply by allowing young girls to engage in the right kind of free play. In this way, we safeguard their inner functions from becoming so sluggish that they can no longer form the right kind of blood from their digestive activity.

These days, it has become difficult to fully understand these matters, simply because the kind of knowledge fostered today is not the outcome of observing inner human nature, but comes from collecting detailed data. Through so-called induction, these facts are then turned into a hodge podge of general knowledge. Of course, by following this method it is possible to discover all kinds of interesting facts, but it is more important to observe what has real significance for life. Otherwise, an ardent admirer of modern science might argue by saying, “You told us that anemia can manifest because young girls have not been allowed to play freely; yet I have encountered several cases of anemia in a village where young girls had never been restrained in their play.” One would have to look into the causes of anemia in this particular situation; perhaps as a child, one of these girls nibbled an autumn crocus (Colchicum autumnale), thus developing a tendency toward anemia in later life.

Another important aspect of our theme concerns the consequences of mental strain in children. If we overburden their mental powers, we definitely exert a harmful influence on their general health. If we prevent children from discovering their natural tendency toward movement and play, the metabolic organization will not be sufficiently stimulated. By burdening children with too much knowledge of the world, we artificially increase metabolic activity in the head. Although human beings have a threefold nature, any activity that dominates one of the three spheres is, to a certain extent, also present in the other two systems. When we overload students with facts about the external material realm instead of with spiritual matters, we divert some of the normal digestive activity from the metabolism into the head, thus causing abnormal activity in the whole metabolic system.

This, too, can cause anemia during puberty. Someone might argue that, in a certain village, students were never subjected to intellectual stress, but there were nevertheless cases of anemia in that town. Again we would have to look at the particular situation. For instance, we might discover that one of the houses in this village was covered by Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia), and that a child whose curiosity had been roused by its black, glistening berries had eaten a few that were overripe, in this way increasing an innate tendency toward anemia.

To conclude, I would like to say this: It might be correct to collect separate data from which one then extracts general knowledge. But if we want to gain the kind of knowledge that is closely allied to practical life, we have to observe real life carefully, so that we can discover where and how to tackle problems as they arise. Only a real knowledge of the human being offers educators this kind of insight. It enables them to fulfill their task by guiding children into the right forms of movement and by guarding against stressing the mental capacities of the children in their care. The realization of these possibilities is our first and foremost task.

Of course, we cannot necessarily prevent a child from sucking on an autumn crocus or eating black berries from a Virginia creeper, but we can infuse intuitions into children—and at the right time. And this will enable them to develop physical powers in a well-rounded way and to cultivate greater flexibility.

It is to be hoped that my discussions of the boundaries of natural science have been able to furnish at least some indications of the difference between what spiritual science calls knowledge of the higher worlds and the mode of knowledge proceeding from everyday consciousness or ordinary science. In everyday life and in ordinary science our powers of cognition are those we have acquired through the conventional education that carries us up to a certain stage in life and whatever this education has enabled us to make of inherited and universally human qualities. The mode of cognition that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science terms knowledge of the higher worlds has its basis in a further self-cultivation, a further self-development; one must become aware that in the later stages of life one can advance through self-education to a higher consciousness, just as a child can advance to the stage of ordinary consciousness. The things we sought in vain at the two boundaries of natural science, the boundaries of matter and of ordinary consciousness, reveal themselves only when one attains this higher consciousness. In ancient times the Eastern sages spoke of such an enhanced consciousness that renders accessible to man a level of reality higher than that of everyday life; they strove to achieve a higher development, similar to the one we have described, by means of an inner self-cultivation that corresponded to their racial characteristics and evolutionary stage. The meaning of what radiates forth from the ancient Eastern wisdom-literature becomes fully apparent only when one realizes what such a higher level of development reveals to man. If one were to characterize the path of development these sages followed, one would have to describe it as a path of Inspiration. For in that epoch humanity had a kind of natural propensity to Inspiration, and in order to understand these paths into the higher realms of cognition, it will be useful if First we can gain clarity concerning the path of development followed by these ancient Eastern sages. I want to make it clear from the start, however, that this path can no longer be that of our Western civilization, for humanity is in a process of constant evolution, ever moving forward. And whoever desires—as many have—to return to the instructions given in the ancient Eastern wisdom-literature in order to enter upon the paths of higher development actually desires to turn back the tide of human evolution or shows that he has no real understanding of human progress. In ordinary consciousness we reside within our thought life, our life of feeling, and our life of will, and we initially substantiate what surges within the soul as thought, feeling, and will in the act of cognition. And it is in the interaction with percepts of the external world, with physical-sensory perceptions, that our consciousness First fully awakens.

It is necessary to realize that the Eastern sages, the so-called initiates of the East, cultivated perception, thinking, feeling, and willing in a way different from their cultivation in everyday life. We can attain an understanding of this path of development leading into the higher worlds when we consider the following. In certain ages of life we develop what we call the soul-spirit toward a greater freedom, a greater independence. We have been able to show how the soul-spirit, which functions in the earliest years of childhood to organize the physical body, emancipates itself, becomes free in a sense with the change of teeth. We have shown how man then lives freely with his ego in this soul-spirit, which now places itself at his disposal, while formerly it occupied itself—if I may express myself thus—with the organization of the physical body. As we enter into ever-greater participation in everyday life, however, there arises something that initially prevents this emancipated soul-spirit from growing into the spiritual world in normal consciousness. As human beings, we must traverse the path that leads us into the external world with the requisite faculties during our life between birth and death. We must acquire such faculties as allow us to orient ourselves within the external, physical-sensory world. We must also develop such faculties as allow us to become useful members of the social community we form with other human beings.

What arises is threefold. These three things bring us into a proper relationship with other human beings in our environment and govern our interaction with them. These are: language, the ability to understand the thoughts of our fellow men, and the acquisition of an understanding, or even a kind of perception, of another's ego. At first glance these three things—perception of language, perception of thoughts, and perception of the ego—appear simple, but for one who seeks knowledge earnestly and conscientiously these things are not so simple at all. Normally we speak of five senses only, to which recent physiological research adds a few inner senses. Within conventional science it is thus impossible to find a complete, systematic account of the senses. I will want to speak to you an this subject at some later time. Today I want only to say that it is an illusion to believe that linguistic comprehension is implicit in the sense of hearing, of that which contemporary physiology dreams to be the organization of the sense of hearing. just as we have a sense of hearing, so also do we have a sense of language. By this I do not mean the sense that guides us in speaking—for this is also called a sense—but that which enables us to comprehend the perception of speech-sounds, just as the auditory senses enable us to perceive tones as such. And when we have a comprehensive physiology, it will be known that this sense of speech is analogous to the other and can rightfully be called a sense in and of itself. It is only that this sense extends over a larger part of the human constitution than the other, more localized senses. Yet it is a sense that nevertheless can be sharply delineated. And we have, in fact, a further sense that extends throughout virtually all of our body—the sense that perceives the thoughts of others. For what we perceive as word is not yet thought. We require other organs, a sensory organization different from that which perceives only words as such, if we want to understand within the word the thought that another wishes to communicate.

In addition, we are equipped with an analogous sense extending throughout our entire bodily organization, which we can call the sense for the perception of another person's ego. In this regard even philosophy has reverted to childishness in recent times, for one can often hear it argued: we encounter another man; we know that a human has such and such a form. Since the being that we encounter is formed in the way we know ourselves to be formed, and sine we know ourselves to be ego-bearers, we conclude through a kind of unconscious inference: aha, he bears an ego within as well. This directly contradicts the psychological reality. Every acute observer knows that it is not an inference by analogy but rather a direct perception that brings us awareness of another's ego. I think that a friend or associate of Husserl's school in Göttingen, Max Scheler, is the only philosopher actually to hit upon this direct perception of the ego. Thus we must differentiate three higher senses, so to speak, above and beyond the ordinary human senses: the sense that perceives language, the sense that perceives thoughts, and the sense that perceives another's ego. These senses arise within the course of human development to the same extent that the soul-spirit gradually emancipates itself between birth and the change of teeth in the way I have described.

These three senses lead initially to interaction with the rest of humanity. In a certain way we are introduced into social life among other human beings by the possession of these three senses. The path one thus follows via these three senses, however, was followed in a different way by the ancients—especially the Indian sages—in order to attain higher knowledge. In striving for this goal of higher knowledge, the soul was not moved toward the words in such a way that one sought to arrive at an understanding of what the other was saying. The powers of the soul were not directed toward the thoughts of another person in such a way as to perceive them, nor toward the ego of another in such a way as to perceive it sympathetically. Such matters were left to everyday life. When the sage returned from his striving for higher cognition, from his sojourn in spiritual worlds to everyday life, he employed these three senses in the ordinary manner. When he wanted to exercise the method of higher cognition, however, he needed these senses in a different way. He did not allow the soul's forces to penetrate through the word while perceiving speech, in order to comprehend the other through his language; rather, he stopped short at the word itself. Nothing was sought behind the word; rather, the streaming life of the soul was sent out only as far as the word. He thereby achieved an intensified perception of the word, renouncing all attempts to understand anything more by means of it. He permeated the word with his entire life of soul, using the word or succession of words in such a way that he could enter completely into the inner life of the word. He formulated certain aphorisms, simple, dense aphorisms, and then strove to live within the sounds, the tones of the words. And he followed with his entire soul life the sound of the word that he vocalized. This practice then led to a cultivation of living within aphorisms, within the so-called “mantras.” It is characteristic of mantric art, this living within aphorisms, that one does not comprehend the content of the words but rather experiences the aphorisms as something musical. One unites one's own soul forces with the aphorisms, so that one remains within the aphorisms and so that one strengthens through continual repetition and vocalization one's own power of soul living within the aphorisms. This art was gradually brought to a high state of development and transformed the soul faculty that we use to understand others through language into another. Through vocalization and repetition of the mantras there arose within the soul a power that led not to other human beings but into the spiritual world. And if, through these mantras, the soul has been schooled in such a way and to such an extent that one feels inwardly the weaving and streaming of this power of soul, which otherwise remains unconscious because all one's attention is directed toward understanding another through the word; if one has come so far as to feel such a power to be an actual force in the soul in the same way that muscular tension is experienced when one wishes to do something with one's arm, one has made oneself sufficiently mature to grasp what lies within the higher power of thought. In everyday life a man seeks to find his way to another via thought. With this power, however, he grasps the thought in an entirely different way. He grasps the weaving of thought in external reality, penetrates into the life of external reality, and lives into the higher realm that I have described to you as Inspiration.

Following this path, then, we approach not the ego of the other person but the egos of individual spiritual beings who surround us, just as we are surrounded by the entities of the sense world. What I depict here was self-evident to the ancient Eastern sage. In this way he wandered with his soul, as it were, upward toward the perception of a realm of spirit. He attained in the highest degree what can be called Inspiration, and his constitution was suited to this. He had no need to fear, as the Westerner might, that his ego might somehow become lost in this wandering out of the body. In later times, when, owing to the evolutionary advances made by humanity, a man might very easily pass out of his body into the outer world without his ego, precautionary measures were taken. Care was taken to ensure that whoever was to undergo this schooling leading to higher knowledge did not pass unaccompanied into the spiritual world and fall prey to the pathological skepticism of which I have spoken in these lectures. In the ancient East the racial constitution was such that this was nothing to fear. As humanity evolved further, however, this became a legitimate concern. Hence the precautionary measure strictly applied within the Eastern schools of wisdom: the neophyte was placed under an authority, but not any outward authority—fundamentally speaking, what we understand by “authority” First appeared in Western civilization. There was cultivated within the neophytes, through a process of natural adaptation to prevailing conditions, a dependence on a leader or guru. The neophyte simply perceived what the leader demonstrated, how the leader stood firmly within the spiritual world without falling prey to pathological skepticism or even inclining toward it. This perception fortified him to such an extent on his own entry into Inspiration that pathological skepticism could never assail him.

Even when the soul-spirit is consciously withdrawn from the physical body, however, something else enters into consideration: one must re-establish the connection with the physical body in a more conscious manner. I said this morning that the pathological state must be avoided in which one descends only egotistically, and not lovingly, into the physical body, for this is to lay hold of the physical body in the wrong way. I described the natural process of laying hold of the physical body between the seventh and fourteenth years, which is through the love-instinct being impressed upon it. Yet even this natural process can take a pathological turn: in such cases there arise the harmful afflictions I described this morning as pathological states. Of course, this could have happened to the pupils of the ancient Eastern sages as well: when they were out of the body they might not have been able to bind the soul-spirit to the physical body again in the appropriate manner. One further precautionary measure thus was employed, one to which psychiatrists—some at any rate—have had recourse when seeking cures for patients suffering from agoraphobia or the like. They employed ablutions, cold baths. Expedients of an entirely physical nature have to be employed in such cases. And when you hear on the one hand that in the mysteries of the East—that is, the schools of initiation, the schools that led to Inspiration—the precautionary measure was taken of ensuring dependence on the guru, you hear on the other hand of the employment of all kinds of devices, of ablutions with cold water and the like. When human nature is understood in the way made possible by spiritual science, customs that otherwise remain rather enigmatic in these ancient mysteries become intelligible. One was protected against developing a false sense of spatiality resulting from an insufficient connection between the soul-spirit and the physical body. This could drive one into agoraphobia and the like or to seek social intercourse with one's fellow men in an inappropriate way. This represents a danger, but one which can and should—indeed must—be avoided in any training that leads to higher cognition. It is a danger, because in following the path I have described leading to Inspiration one bypasses in a certain sense the path via language and thought to the ego of one's fellow man. If one then quits the physical body in a pathological manner—even if one is not attempting to attain higher cognition but is lifted out of the body by a pathological condition—one can become unable to interact socially with one's fellow men in the right way. Then precisely that which arises in the usual, intended manner through properly regulated spiritual study can develop pathologically. Such a person establishes a connection between his soul-spirit and his physical body: by delving too deeply into it he experiences his body so egotistically that he learns to hate interaction with his fellow men and becomes antisocial. One can often see the results of such a pathological condition manifest themselves in the world in quite a frightening manner. I once met a man who was a remarkable example of such a type: he came from a family that inclined by nature toward a freeing of the soul-spirit from the physical body and also contained certain personalities—I came to know one of them extremely well—who sought a path into the spiritual worlds. One rather degenerate individual, however, developed this tendency in an abnormal, pathological way and finally arrived at the point where he would allow nothing whatever from the external world to contact his own body. Naturally he had to eat, but—we are speaking here among adults—he washed himself with his own urine, because he feared any water that came from the outside world. But then again I would rather not describe all the things he would do in order to isolate his body totally from the external world and shun all society. He did these things because his soul-spirit was too deeply incarnated, too closely bound to the physical body.

It is entirely in keeping with the spirit of Goetheanism to bring together that which leads to the highest goal attainable by earthly man and that which leads to pathological depths. One needs only slight acquaintance with Goethe's theory of metamorphosis to realize this. Goethe seeks to understand how the individual organs, for example of the plant, develop out of each other, and in order to understand their metamorphosis he is particularly interested in observing the conditions that arise through the abnormal development of a leaf, a blossom, or the stamen. Goethe realizes that precisely by contemplating the pathological the essence of the healthy can be revealed to the perceptive observer. And one can follow the right path into the spiritual world only when one knows wherein the essence of human nature actually lies and in what diverse ways this complicated inner being can come to expression.

We see from something else as well that even in the later period the men of the East were predisposed by nature to come to a halt at the word. They did not penetrate the word with the forces of the soul but lived within the word. We see this, for example, in the teachings of the Buddha. One need only read these teachings with their many repetitions. I have known Westerners who treasured editions of the Buddha's teachings in which the numerous repetitions had been eliminated and the words of a sentence left to occur only once. Such people believed that through such a condensed version, in which everything occurs only once, they would gain a true understanding of what the Buddha had actually intended. From this it is clear that Western civilization has gradually lost all understanding of Eastern man. If we simply take the Buddha's teachings word for word; if we take the content of these teachings, the content that we, as human beings of the West, chiefly value, then we do not assimilate the essence of these teachings: that is possible only when we are carried along with the repetitions, when we live in the flow of the words, when we experience the strengthening of the soul's forces that is induced by the repetitions. Unless we acquire a faculty for experiencing something from the constant repetitions and the rhythmical recurrence of certain passages, we do not get to the heart of Buddhism's actual significance.

It is in this way that one must gain knowledge of the inner nature of Eastern culture. Without this acquaintance with the inner nature of Eastern culture one can never arrive at a real understanding of our Western religious creeds, for in the final analysis these Western religious creeds stem from Eastern wisdom. The Christ event is a different matter. For that is an actual event. It stands as a fact within the evolution of the earth. Yet the ways and means of understanding what came to pass through the Mystery of Golgotha were drawn during the first Christian centuries entirely from Eastern wisdom. It was through this wisdom that the fundamental event of Christianity was originally understood. Everything progresses, however. What had once been present in Eastern primeval wisdom—attained through Inspiration—spread from the East to Greece and is still recognizable as art. For Greek art was, to be sure, bound up with experiences different from those usually connected with art today. In Greek art one could still experience what Goethe strove to regain when he spoke of the deepest urge within him: he to whom nature begins to unveil her manifest secrets longs for her worthiest interpreter—art. For the Greeks, art was a way to slip into the secrets of world existence, a manifestation not merely of human fantasy but of what arises in the interaction between this faculty and the revelations of the spiritual world revealed through Inspiration. That which still flowed through Greek art, however, became more and more diluted, until finally it became the content of the Western religious creeds. We thus must conceive the source of the primeval wisdom as fully substantial spiritual life that becomes impoverished as evolution proceeds and provides the content of religious creeds when it finally reaches the Western world. Human beings who are constitutionally suited for a later epoch therefore can find in this diluted form of spiritual life only something to be viewed with skepticism. And in the final analysis it is nothing other than the reaction of the Western temperament [Gemüt] to the now decadent Eastern wisdom that gradually produces atheistic skepticism in the West. This skepticism is bound to become more and more widespread unless it is countered with a different stream of spiritual life.

Just as little as a creature that has reached a certain stage of development—let us say has undergone a certain aging process—can be made young again in every respect, so little can a form of spiritual life be made young again when it has reached old age. The religious creeds of the West, which are descendants of the primeval wisdom of the East, can yield nothing that would fully satisfy Western humanity again when it advances beyond the knowledge provided during the past three or four centuries by science and observation of nature. An ever-more profound skepticism is bound to arise, and anyone who has insight into the processes of world evolution can say with assurance that a trend of development from East to West must necessarily lead to an increasingly pronounced skepticism when it is taken up by souls who are becoming more and more deeply imbued with the fruits of Western civilization. Skepticism is merely the march of the spiritual life from East to West, and it must be countered with a different spiritual stream flowing henceforth from West to East. We ourselves are living at the crossing-point of these spiritual streams, and in the further course of these considerations we will want to see how this is so.

But first it must be emphasized that the Western temperament is constitutionally predisposed to follow a path of development leading to the higher worlds different from that of the Eastern temperament. Just as the Eastern temperament strives initially for Inspiration and possesses the racial qualities suitable for this, the Western temperament, because of its peculiar qualities (they are at present not so much racial qualities as qualities of soul) strives for Imagination. It is no longer the experience of the musical element in mantric aphorisms to which we as Westerners should aspire but something else. As Westerners we should strive in such a way that we do not pursue with particular vigour the path that opens out when the soul-spirit emerges from the physical body but rather the path that presents itself later, when the soul-spirit must again unite with the physical organism by consciously grasping the physical body. We see the natural manifestation of this in the emergence of the bodily instinct: whereas Eastern man sought his wisdom more by sublimating the forces at work between birth and the seventh year, Western man is better fitted to develop the forces at work between the time of the change of teeth and puberty, in that there is lifted up into the soul-spirit that which is natural for this epoch of humanity. We come to this when, just as in emerging from the body we carry the ego with us into the realm of Inspiration, we now leave the ego outside when we delve again into the body. We leave it outside, but not in idleness, not forgetting or surrendering it, not suppressing it into unconsciousness, but rather conjoining it with pure thinking, with clear, keen thinking, so that finally one has this inner experience: my ego is totally suffused with all the clear thinking of which I have become capable. One can experience just this delving down into the body in a very clear and distinct manner. And at this point you will perhaps allow me to relate a personal experience, because it will help you to understand what I really mean.

I have spoken to you about the conception underlying my book, Philosophy of Freedom. This book is actually a modest attempt to win through to pure thinking, the pure thinking in which the ego can live and maintain a firm footing. Then, when pure thinking has been grasped in this way, one can strive for something else. This thinking, left in the power of an ego that now feels itself to be liberated within free spirituality [frei und unabhängig in freier Geistigkeit], can then be excluded from the process of perception. Whereas in ordinary life one sees color, let us say, and at the same time imbues the color with conceptual activity, one can now extract the concepts from the entire process of elaborating percepts and draw the percept itself directly into ones bodily constitution.

Goethe undertook to do this and has already taken the First steps in this direction. Read the last chapter of his Theory of Colors, entitled “The Sensory-Moral Effect of Color”: in every color-effect he experiences something that unites itself profoundly not only with the faculty of perception but with the whole man. He experiences yellow and scarlet as “attacking” colors, penetrating him, as it were, through and through, filling him with warmth, while he regards blue and violet as colors that draw one out of oneself, as cold colors. The whole man experiences something in the act of sense perception. Sense perception, together with its content, passes down into the organism, and the ego with its pure thought content remains, so to speak, hovering above. We exclude thinking inasmuch as we take into and fill ourselves with the whole content of the perception, instead of weakening it with concepts, as we usually do. We train ourselves specially to achieve this by systematically pursuing what came to be practiced in a decadent form by the men of the East. Instead of grasping the content of the perception in pure, strictly logical thought, we grasp it symbolically, in pictures, allowing it to stream into us as a result of a kind of detour around thinking. We steep ourselves in the richness of the colors, the richness of the tone, by learning to experience the images inwardly, not in terms of thought but as pictures, as symbols. Because we do not suffuse our inner life with the thought content, as the psychology of association would have it, but with the content of perception indicated through symbols and pictures, the living inner forces of the etheric and astral bodies stream toward us from within, and we come to know the depths of consciousness and of the soul. It is in this way that genuine knowledge of the inner nature of man is acquired, and not by means of the blathering mysticism that nebulous minds often claim to be a way to the God within. This mysticism leads to nothing but abstraction and cannot satisfy anyone who wishes to become a man in the full sense of the ward.

If one desires to do real research concerning human physiology, thinking must be excluded and the picture-forming activity sent inward, so that the physical organism reacts by creating Imaginations. This is a path that is only just beginning in the development of Western culture, but it is the path that must be trodden if the influence that streams over from the East, and would lead to decadence if it atone were to prevail, is to be confronted with something capable of opposing it, so that our civilization may take a path of ascent and not of decline. Generally speaking, however, it can be said that human language itself is not yet sufficiently developed to be able to give full expression to the experiences that one undergoes in the inner recesses of the soul. And it is at this point that I would like to relate a personal experience to you.

Many years ago, in a different context, I made an attempt to give expression to what might be called a science of the human senses. In spoken lectures I succeeded to some extent in putting this science of the twelve senses into words, because in speaking it is more possible to turn language this way and that and ensure understanding by means of repetitions, so that the deficiencies of our language, which is not yet capable of expressing these super-sensible things, is not so strongly felt. Strangely enough, however, when I wanted many years ago to write down what I had given as actual anthroposophy in order to put it into a form suitable for a book, the outer experiences an being interiorized became so sensitive that language simply failed to provide the words, and I believe that the beginning of the text—several sheets of print—lay for some five or six years at the printer's. It was because I wanted to write the whole book in the style in which it began that I could not continue writing, for the simple reason that at the stage of development I had then reached, language refused to furnish the means for what I wished to achieve. Afterward I became overloaded with work, and I still have not been able to finish the book. Anyone who is less conscientious about what he communicates to his fellow men out of the spiritual world might perhaps smile at the idea of being held up in this way by a temporarily insurmountable difficulty. But whoever really experiences and can permeate with a full sense of responsibility what occurs when one attempts to describe the path that Western humanity must follow to attain Imagination knows that to find the right words entails a great deal of effort. As a meditative schooling it is relatively easy to describe, and this has been done in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. If one's aim, however, is to achieve definite results such as that of describing the essential nature of man's senses—a part, therefore, of the inner makeup and constitution of humanity—it is then that one encounters the difficulty of grasping Imaginations and presenting them in sharp contours by means of words.

Nevertheless, this is the path that Western humanity must follow. And just as the man of the East was able to experience through his mantras the entry into the spiritual nature of the external world, so must the Westerner, leaving aside the entire psychology of association, learn to enter into his own being by attaining the realm of Imagination. Only by penetrating into the realm of Imagination will he acquire the true knowledge of humanity that is necessary in order for humanity to progress. And because we in the West must live much more consciously than the men of the East, we cannot simply say: whether or not humanity will gradually attain this realm of Imagination is something that can be left to the future. No—this world of Imagination, because we have passed into the stage of conscious human evolution, must be striven for consciously; there can be no halting at certain stages. For what happens if one halts at a certain stage? Then one does not meet the ever-increasing spread of skepticism from East to West with the right countermeasures but with measures that result from the soul-spirit uniting too radically, too deeply and unconsciously, with the physical body, so that too strong a connection is formed between the soul-spirit and the physical body.

Yes, it is indeed possible for a human being not only to think materialistically but to be a materialist, because the soul-spirit is too strongly linked with the physical body. In such a man the ego does not live freely in the concepts of pure thinking he has attained. If one descends into the body with pictorial perception, one delves with the ego and the concepts into the body. And if one then spreads this around and suffuses it throughout humanity, it gives rise to a spiritual phenomenon well known to us—dogmatism of all kinds. Dogmatism is nothing other than the translation into the realm of the soul-spirit of a condition that at a lower stage manifests itself pathologically as agoraphobia and the like, and that—because these things are related—also shows itself in something else, which is a metamorphosis of fear, in superstition of every variety. An unconscious urge toward Imagination is held back through powerful agencies, and this gives rise to dogmatism of all types. These types of dogmatism must gradually be replaced by what is achieved when the world of ideas is kept within the sphere of the ego; when progress is made toward Imagination, the true nature of man is experienced inwardly, and this Western path into the spiritual world is followed in a different way. It is this other path through Imagination that must establish the stream of spiritual science, the process of spiritual evolution that muss make its way from West to East if humanity is to progress. It is supremely important at the present time, however, for humanity to recognize what the true path of Imagination should be, what path must be taken by Western spiritual science if it is to be a match for the Inspiration and its fruits that were attained by ancient Eastern wisdom in a form suited to the racial characteristics of those peoples. Only if we are able to confront the now decadent Inspiration of the East with Imaginations which, sustained by the spirit and saturated with reality, have arisen along the path leading to a higher spiritual culture; only if we can call this culture into existence as a stream of spiritual life flowing from West to East, are we bringing to fulfillment what is actually living deep within the impulses for which humanity is striving. It is these impulses that are now exploding in social cataclysms because they cannot find other expression.

In tomorrow's lecture we will speak further of the path of Imagination and of how the way to the higher worlds is envisaged by anthroposophical spiritual science.

To-day I have to add to what I said yesterday concerning old ways to spiritual knowledge yet a further example, namely the way of asceticism as practised in former ages, asceticism in the widest sense of the word. And here I shall be describing a way that is even less practicable in our own times than the way described yesterday. For in our time, in our civilisation, men's thoughts and customs are different from those of the days when men sought high spiritual knowledge by means of asceticism. Hence just as we must replace the way of Yoga to-day by something more purely spiritual and psychic, so must we replace the way of asceticism by a modern way. But we shall more easily apprehend the modern way into spiritual life if we train our ideas in grasping the way of asceticism.

Asceticism essentially is a matter of certain exercises. These exercises can extend to spiritual and psychic things, I wish, for the moment, to deal with the use made of these exercises for eliminating the human body in a special way, at certain times, from the sum of human experience. It is just by eliminating the body that experience of spiritual worlds is called up. These exercises consisted in training the body by means of pain and suffering, by mortification, until it was capable of enduring pain without causing too much disturbance to the mind; until the ascetic could bear physical suffering without his whole mind and soul being overwhelmed in the suffering. Mortification and enhanced en-durance were pursued because it was a matter of experience that as the physical was repressed so the spiritual nature emerged, got free and brought about immediate spiritual perception, direct experience.

Now it is a matter of experience—notwithstanding that these methods are not to be recommended today—it is yet a matter of experience that in whatever measure the physical body is suppressed in the same measure man is enabled to receive into himself psychic and spiritual being. It is simply a fact that spirit becomes perceptible when the activity of the physical is suppressed.

Let me make my meaning clear by an example: Suppose we observe the human eye. This human eye is there for the purpose of transmitting impressions of light to the human being. What is the sole means whereby the eye can make light perceptible to man? Imaginatively expressed: by wanting nothing for itself. The moment the eye wants something for itself—so to speak—the moment the organic activity, the vital activity of the eye loses its own vitality, (if some opacity or hardening of the lens or eyeball sets in)—namely, as soon as the eye departs from selflessness and becomes self-seeking, in that moment it ceases to be a servant of human nature. The eye must make no claim to be anything for its own sake. This is meant relatively of course, but things must be stated in a somewhat absolute manner when they have to be expressed. Life itself will make it relative. Thus we can say: The eye owes its transparency to light to the fact that it shuts itself off from the being of man, that it is selfless.

When we want to see into the spiritual world—this seeing is meant of course in a spiritual-psychic sense—then we must, as it were, make our whole organism into an eye. We must now make our whole organism transparent—not physically as in the case of the eye,—but spiritually. It must no longer be an obstacle to our intercourse with the world.

Certainly I do not mean to say that our physical organism as it stands to-day would become diseased—as the eye would be diseased—if it claimed life on its own account. For ordinary life our physical organism is quite right as it is, it is quite normal. It has to be opaque. In the lectures that follow we shall see how it is that our organism cannot be an “eye” in ordinary life, how it must be non-transparent. Our normal soul-life can repose in our organism just because it is non-transparent, and because we do not perpetually have the whole spiritual world of the universe about us when we gaze around. Thus, for ordinary life, it is right, it is normal for our organism to be non-transparent. But one can know nothing of the spiritual world by means of it,—just as one can know nothing of light by means of an eye that has cataract. And when the body is mortified by suffering and pain, and by self-conquests, it becomes trans-parent. And just as it is possible to perceive the world of light when the eye lets the light show through it—so it is possible for the whole organism to perceive the spiritual world surrounding it when we make the organism transparent in this way.

What I have just described is what took place in ancient times, the times which gave rise to those mighty religious visions which have come down to our age in tradition, not through the independent discovery of modern men; and it is this that led up to that bodily asceticism that I have been attempting to elucidate.

Nowadays we cannot imitate this asceticism. In earlier ages it was an accepted thing that if one sought enlightenment, if one wanted tidings of the super-sensible, the spiritual world, one should betake oneself to solitary men, to hermits—to such as had withdrawn from life. It was a universal belief that one could learn nothing from those who lived the ordinary life of the world; but that knowledge of spiritual worlds could only be won in solitude, and that one who sought such knowledge must become different from other men.

It would not be possible to think like this from our modern standpoint. Our tendency is to believe only in a man who can stand firmly on his feet, who can use his hands to help his fellow men, one who counts for something in life, who can work and trade and is at home in the world, That solitude which former ages regarded as the pre-requisite of higher knowledge has now no place in our view of life. If we are to believe in a man to-day he must be a man of action, one who enters into life, not one who retires from it. Hence it is impossible for us to acquire the state of mind of the ascetic in relation to knowledge, and we cannot learn of spiritual worlds in his way.

Now this makes it necessary for us to-day to win to clairvoyance by psychic-spiritual means without damaging our bodies' fitness by ascetic practices. And this we can do. And we can do it because through our century-old natural-scientific development we have acquired exact concepts, exact ideas. We can discipline our thinking by means of this natural-scientific development. What I am now describing is not something antagonistic to the intellect. Intellectuality must be at the basis of it all, there must be a foundation of clear thinking. But upon the basis of this intellectuality, of this clear thought, there must be built what can lead into the spiritual world.

To-day it is exceptionally easy to fulfil the demand that man shall think clearly. This is no slight on clear thinking. But in an age which comes several centuries after the work of Copernicus and of Galileo clear thinking is almost a matter of course.—The pity is that it is not yet a matter of course among the majority of people.—But in point of fact it is easy to have clear thought when this clear thought is attained at the expense of the fullness, of the rich content of thought. Empty thoughts can easily be clear. But the foundation of our whole future development must be clear thoughts which have fullness, clear thoughts rich in content.

Now, what the ascetic attained by mortification and suppression of the physical organism we can attain by taking in hand our own soul's development. By asking ourselves, for instance, at some definite stage of our life “What habits have I got? What characteristics? What faults? What sympathies and antipathies?” And when one has reviewed all this clearly in one's mind, one can try imagining—in the case of some very simple thing to start with—what one would be like if one were to evolve a different kind of sympathy or antipathy, a different content of soul.

These things do not come as a matter of course. It often takes years of inward work to do what otherwise life would do for us. If we look at ourselves honestly for once we shall concede: “What I am to-day I was not ten years ago.” The inner content of the soul, and the inner formation of the soul also, have become quite different. Now what has brought this about? Life itself. Unconsciously we have given ourselves up to life. We have plunged into the stream of life. And now: can we ourselves do what otherwise life does? Can we look ahead, for example, to what we shall be in ten years' time, and set' it before us as an aim, and proceed with iron will to bring it about? If we can compass all life within the confines of our own ego—that vast life which otherwise works on us,—if we can thus intensify in our own will [Literally—“in the will of our own ego.”] the power which is usually spread abroad like a sea of life,—if we can work at our own progress and make something out of ourselves:—then we shall achieve inwardly what the ascetic of old achieved by external means. [By Translator—It is interesting to read Kipling's “If” in the light of this knowledge.] He rendered the body weak so that will and cognition should arise out of the weakened body, and the body should be translucent to the spiritual world. We must make our will strong, and make strong our powers of thought, so that they may be stronger than the body, which goes on its own way; and thus we shall constrain the body to be transparent to the world of spirit. We do the precise opposite of the ascetics of old.

You see, I have treated of these things in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. And what is there described, which differs completely from the old ascetic way, has been confused by many people with asceticism, has been taken to be the old asceticism in a new form. But anyone who reads it carefully will see that it differs in every respect from the way of asceticism in the past. Now this new “asceticism” which does not require that we should withdraw from life and become hermits, but keeps us active in the world—this new way can only be achieved by looking away from the passing moment to Time itself.

One has to consider, for instance, what one will be like in ten years' time. And this means that one has to take into consideration the whole span of a man's life between birth and death. Man is prone to live in the moment. But here the aim is: To learn to live in time, within the whole span of life. Then the world of spirit will become visible to us. We do indeed see a spiritual world around us when our body has thus become transparent.

For instance, everything described in my book Occult Science, rests entirely on knowledge such as this I obtained when the body is as transparent to spirit as the eye is to light.

Now you will say: Yes, but we cannot require every teacher to attain such spiritual cognition before he can become an educator or instructor. But, as I said yesterday in the case of Yoga, let me repeat: This is not in the least necessary. For the body of the child itself is living witness of spiritual worlds and it is here that our higher knowledge can begin. And thus a teacher with right instinct can grow naturally into a spiritual treatment of the child. But our intellectual age has departed very much from such a spiritual treatment and treats everything rationally. So much so that we have reached the stage of saying: You must so educate as to make everything immediately comprehensible to the child at whatever stage he may be. Now this lends itself to triviality—no doubt an extremely convenient thing to those engaged in teaching. We get a lot done in a given time when we put as many things as possible before the child in a trivial and rudimentary form, addressed to its comprehension. But a man who thinks like this, on rational grounds, is not concerning himself with the whole course of man's life. He is not concerned with what becomes of the sensation I have aroused in the child when the child has grown into an older man or woman, or attained old age. He is not taking life into consideration; for instance, he is not considering the following: suppose it is evident knowledge to me that it is advisable for a child between the change of teeth and puberty to rely mainly on authority; and that for him to trust to an example he needs to have an example set: In that case I shall tell the child something that he must take on trust, for I am the mediator of the divine, spiritual world to the child. He believes me; and accepts what I say, although he does not yet understand it. So much of what we receive in childhood unconsciously we do not understand. If in childhood we could only accept what we understood we should receive little of value for our later life. And Jean Paul, the German poet and thinker, would never have said that more is learned in the first three years of life than in the three years at the university.

But just consider what it means when, say, in my thirty-fifth year some event or other brings about the feeling: “Something is swimming up into your mind. Long ago you heard this from your teacher. You were only nine or ten years old, may-be, at the time, and you did not understand it at all. Now it comes back. And now, in the light of your own life, it makes sense. You appreciate it.”

A man who in later life can thus fetch from the depths of his' memory what he now understands for the first time has within him a well-spring of life. A refreshing stream of power continually flows within him. Such a thing—this swimming up into the soul of what was once accepted on trust and is only now understood—such a thing as this can show us that to educate rightly we must not merely consider the immediate moment, but the whole of life. In all that we teach the child this must be kept in view.

Now I have just been told that exception was taken to the image used for showing the child how man partakes of immortality. I was not speaking of “eternity,” but of “immortality.” I said “The image of the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis is there to be seen.” This image was only taken to represent the sensation we can have of the soul leaving the physical body.

The image itself refutes this objection; it was expressly used to meet the objection that the emerging of the butterfly is not a right concept of immortality. In the logical sense, naturally, it is not a right concept. But we are considering what kind of concept we are to give the child, what image we are to place before his soul so as to avoid confronting him with logic prematurely. What is thus given in picture form to a child of eight or nine years, (for it was of children we were speaking, and not of introducing things in this way to a philosopher)—what is thus given can grow into the right concept of immortality.

Thus it all depends on the what (on what is given)—on having a living grasp of existence. It is this that is so terribly hard for our rationalistic age to grasp. It is surely obvious that the thing we tell the child is different from that into which it is transformed in later years—what would be the sense of calling a child unskilled, immature, “childish” (zappelig) if we were simply speaking of a grown man? An observer of life finds not only younger and more grown-up children, but childish and grown-up ideas and concepts. And to a true teacher or educator it is life we must look to, not adulthood.

It seems to me a good fate that not before 1919 did it fall to me to take on the direction of the Waldorf School—founded that year by Emil Molt in Stuttgart. I had been concerned with education professionally before that time; nevertheless, I should not have felt in a position to master so great an educational enterprise earlier to the extent that we can master it now, with the college of teachers of the Waldorf School—(master it, that is, relatively speaking—to a certain extent). And the reason is this: before that time I should not have dared to form a college of teachers consisting so largely of men and women with a knowledge of human nature—and therefore of child nature—as I was able to do that year. For, as I have already said, all true teaching, all true pedagogy must be based on knowledge of human nature. But before one can do this one must possess the means of penetrating into human nature in the proper way. Now,—if I may say so—the first perceptions of this entering into human nature came to me more than 35 years ago.

These were spiritual perceptions of the nature of man. Spiritual, I say, not intellectual. Now spiritual truths behave in a different manner from intellectual truths. What one perceives intellectually, what one has proved,—as it is called, one can also communicate to other men, for the matter is ready when the logic is ready. Spiritual truths are not ready when the logic is ready. It is in the nature of spiritual truths that they must be carried with a man on his way through life, they must be lived with before they can fully develop. Thus I should never have dared to utter to other men certain truths about the nature of man in the form in which they came to me more than 35 years ago. Not until a few years back, in my book “Von Seelen Ratzeln” (Riddles of the Soul) did I venture to speak of these things for the erst time. A period of thirty years lay between the first conception and the giving out of these things to the world. Why? Because it is necessary to contemplate such truths at different stages of one's life, they have to accompany one throughout different periods of life. The spiritual truths conceived when one was a young man of 23 or 24 are experienced quite differently when one is 35 or 36, or again at 45 or 46. And as a matter of fact it was not until I had passed my fiftieth year that I ventured to publish these outlines of a Knowledge of Man in a book. And only then could I tell these things to a college of teachers; and give them so the elements of education which every teacher must make his own and use with every single child.

Thus I may say: when my little booklet The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy appeared, I was speaking on education there as one who disagrees with much in modern education, who would like to see this or the other treated more fundamentally, and so on. But at the time this little book was written I should not have been able to undertake such a thing as directing the Waldorf School. For it was essential for such a task to have a college of teachers with a knowledge of man originating in a spiritual world. This knowledge of man is exceedingly hard to come by to-day; in comparison it is easy for us to study natural science. It is comparatively easy to come to see what the final member of organic evolution is. We begin with the simplest organism and see how it has evolved up to man. And man stands at the summit of evolution, the final member of organic development. But we know man only as the end product of organic development. We do not see into man himself. We do not look into his very being. Natural science has attained great perfection and we have every admiration for it and intend no disparagement—but when we have mastered this natural science we only know man as the highest animal, we do not know what man is in his essential nature. Yet our life is dominated by this same natural science. Now in order to educate we need a human science,—and a practical human science at that—a human science that applies to every individual child. And for this we need a, general human science.

To-day I will only indicate a few of the principles which became apparent to me more than thirty years ago, and which have been made the basis for the actual training of the staff of the Waldorf School. Now it must be borne in mind that in dealing with children of elementary school age (7-14) we have to do with the life of the soul in these children. In the next few days I shall have to speak also of quite little children. But, much though it grieves me, we have as yet no nursery school preliminary to the Waldorf School because we have not the money for it, and so we can only take children of 6 and 7 years old. But naturally the ideal thing is for children to receive education as early as possible.

When we receive them into the primary school, the elementary school, it is their souls that concern us;—that is to say their essentially physical education has been accomplished—or has failed of accomplishment—according to the lights of parents and educators. Thus we can say: The most essential part of physical education (which will, of course, be continuous as we shall see when I describe the particular phases of education), the most essential part belongs to the period ending with the change of teeth. From that time on it is the soul of the child we have to deal with, and we must conduct the development of his soul in a way that strengthens physical development.

And when the child has passed the age of puberty he enters upon the age in which we must no longer speak of him as a child—the age in which young ladies and gentlemen come into full possession of their own minds, their own spirits. Thus man progresses from what is of the body, by way of the soul, into the spiritual. But, as we shall see, we cannot teach what is of the spirit. It has to be freely absorbed from the world. Man can only learn of spiritual things from life.

Where we have children of primary school age we have to deal with the child's soul. Now soul manifests, roughly speaking, through thinking, feeling and willing. And if one can thoroughly understand the play of thinking, feeling and will—the soul's life—within man's whole nature, one has the basis for the whole of education.

To be sure the multiplication table is not the whole of mathematics, but we must learn the multiplication table before we can advance as far as the differential and integral calculus. In education the matter is somewhat different; it is not a wonderfully advanced science that I am now about to set forth, but the elements, the fundamentals. The advanced science here, however, cannot be built up as the differential and integral calculus is built up on elementary mathematics,—it must be founded on the practical use made of these elementary principles by the teachers and educators.

Now when people speak of the nature of the human soul to-day, in this materialistic age—if they allow the existence of the soul at all (and one even hears of a psychology, a science of the soul, devoid of soul), but if they allow the existence of the soul, they commonly say: The soul, now, is a thing experienced inwardly, psychically, and it is connected somehow—I will not enter into the philosophical aspect—with the body. Indeed, if one surveys the field of our exceptionally intelligent psychology one finds the life of the soul—thought, feeling and will—related, for the most part, to the human nervous system—in the broadest sense of the word. It is the nervous system which brings the soul to physical manifestation—which is the bodily foundation of the soul's life.

It is this that I realised 35 years ago to be wrong. For the only part of our soul life as adult human beings (and I expressly emphasize this, since we cannot consider the child until we understand the man), the only part of our soul life bound up with the nervous system is our thinking, our power of ideation. The nervous system is only connected with ideation.

Feeling is not directly bound up with the nervous system, but with what may be called the Rhythmic system in the human being: it is bound up with rhythm, the rhythm of breathing, the rhythm of blood circulation, in their marvellous relation-ship to one another. The ratio is only approximate, since it naturally varies with every individual, but practically speaking every adult human being has four times as many pulse beats as he has breaths. It is this inner interplay and relationship of pulse rhythm and breath rhythm, and its connection in turn with the more extended rhythmic life of the human being, that constitutes the rhythmic nature of man,—a second nature over against the head or nerve nature. The rhythmic system includes the rhythm we experience when we sleep and awaken. This is a rhythm which we often turn into non-rhythm nowadays—but it is a rhythm. And there are many other such rhythms in human life. Human life is not merely built up on the life of nerves, on the nervous system, it is also founded in this rhythmic life. And just as thinking and the power of thought is bound up with the nervous system, so the power of feeling is connected immediately with the rhythmic system.

It is not the case that feeling finds its direct expression in the nervous life; feeling finds its direct expression in the rhythmic system. Only when we begin to conceive of our rhythmic system, when we make concepts of our feelings, we then perceive our feelings as ideas by means of the nerves, just as we perceive light or colour outwardly. Thus the connection of feeling with the nerve life is an indirect one. Its direct connection is with the rhythmic life. And one simply cannot understand man unless one knows how man breathes, how breathing is related to blood-circulation, how this whole rhythm is apparent, for instance, in a child's quick flushing or paling; one must know all that is connected with the rhythmic life. And on the other hand one must know what processes accompany children's passions, children's feelings and the loves and affections of children. If one does not know what lives immediately in the rhythmic life, and how this is merely projected into the nerve life, to become idea (concept) one does not understand man. One does not understand man if one says: “The soul's nature is dependent on the nerve-nature”, for of the soul's nature it is only the life of thought, thinking, that is dependent on the nerves.

What I say here I say from out of direct observation such as can be made by spiritual perception. There are no proofs of the validity of this spiritual observation as there are proofs for the findings of intellectualistic thinking. But everyone who can entertain these views without prejudice can prove them retrospectively by normal human understanding, and, moreover, by what external science has to say on these matters.

I may add to what I have already said that a great part of the work I had to do 35 years ago, when I was engaged in verifying the original conception of this membering of man's nature which I am now expounding, was to find out from all domains of physiology, biology and other natural sciences whether these things could be verified externally. I would not expound these things to-day if I had not got this support. And it can be stated in general with certainty that much of what I am saying to-day can also be demonstrated scientifically by modern means.

Now, in the third place, over against thinking and feeling, we have willing,—the life of will. And willing does not depend directly on the nervous system, willing is directly connected with human metabolism and with human movement.—Metabolism is very intimately connected with movement. You can regard all the metabolism which goes on in man, apart from movement proper, as his limb system. The ‘movement system’ and ‘metabolic system’ I hold to be the third member of the human organism. And with this the will is immediately bound up. Every will impulse in man is accompanied by a particular form of the metabolic process which has a different mode of operation from that of the nerve processes which accompany the activity of thinking. Naturally a man must have a healthy metabolism if he wants to think soundly. But thinking is bound up directly with an activity in the nervous system quite other than the metabolic activity; whereas man's willing is immediately bound up with his metabolism. And it is this dependence of the will on the metabolism that one must recognise.

Now when we conceive ideas about our own willing, when we think about the will, then the metabolic activity is projected into the nervous system. It is only mediately, indirectly, that the will works in the nervous system. What transpires in the nervous system in connection with the will is the faculty of apprehending our own will activity.

Thus, when we can penetrate the human being with our vision we discover the relationships between the psychic and the physical nature of man. The ACTIVITY OF THOUGHT in the soul manifests physically as NERVOUS ACTIVITY; the FEELING NATURE in the soul manifests physically as the rhythm of the BREATHING SYSTEM and the BLOOD SYSTEM, and this it does directly, not indirectly by the way of the nervous system, not through the nervous system. THE ACTIVITY OF WILL manifests in man's physical nature as a fine METABOLISM. It is essential to know the fine metabolic processes which accompany the exercise of the activity of the will, a form of combustion process in the human being.

Once one has acquired these concepts, of which I can here only indicate to you the general outline—they will become clear in the next few days in all their detail, when I show their application,—once you have these elementary principles, then your eyes will be opened also to everything which confronts you in child-nature. For things are not as yet in the same state in child nature. For instance the child is entirely Sense Organ, namely, entirely Head; as I have already explained the child is entirely SENSE ORGAN. (Note by Translator: i.e. a baby, or child under 7.)

It is of particular interest to see by means of a scientific spiritual observation how a child tastes in a different manner from an adult. An adult, who has brought taste into the sphere of consciousness; tastes with his tongue and decides what the taste is. A child—that is to say a baby in its earliest weeks—tastes with its whole body. The organ of taste is diffused throughout the organism. It tastes with its stomach, and it continues to taste when the nourishing juices have been taken up by the lymph vessels and transmitted to the whole organism. The child at its mother's breast is wholly permeated by taste. And here we can see how the child is—as it were—illuminated and transfused with taste, with something of a soul nature, (Note by Translator: i.e. the sensation of taste.) which later we do not have in our whole body, which later we have only in our head.

And thus we learn how to watch a tiny child, and how to watch an older child, knowing that one child will blush easily for one thing or another and another child will easily turn pale for this or that cause, one child is quick to get excited, or quick to move his limbs; one child has a firm tread, another will trip lightly, etc. Once we have these principles and can recognise the seat in the metabolic system of what comes to psychic expression as will, or in the rhythmic system of what comes to psychic expression as feeling, or in the nervous system of what manifests in the soul as thought, then we shall know how to observe a child, for we shall know whither to direct our gaze.

You all know that there are people who investigate certain things under the microscope. They see wonderful things under the microscope; but there are also people who have not learned how to look through a microscope; they look into it and no matter how they manipulate it they see nothing. First one must learn to see by learning how to manipulate the instrument through which one sees. When one has learned how to look through a microscope one will be able to see what is requisite. One sees nothing of man until one has learned to fix the gaze of one's soul, of one's spirit, upon what corresponds to thinking, to feeling and to willing. The aim was to develop in the staff of the Waldorf School a right orientation of vision. For the teachers must first of all know what goes on in the children, then they achieve the right state of mind—and only from a right attitude of mind can right education come.

It was necessary at the outset to give some account of the three-fold organisation of man so that the details of the actual educational measures and educational methods might be more readily comprehensible to you.

My dear friends,

I would have liked to carry out for you today some experiments to round out the series of facts that lead us to our goal. It is not possible to do so, however, and I must accordingly arrange my lecture somewhat differently from the way I intended. The reason for this is partly that the apparatus is not in working order and partly because we lack alcohol today, just as we lacked ice yesterday.

We will therefore take up in more detail the things that were begun yesterday. I will ask you to consider all these facts that were placed before you for the purpose of obtaining a survey of the relationships of various bodies to the being of heat. You will realize that certain typical phenomena meet us. We can say: These phenomena carry the impress of certain relations involving the being of heat, at first unknown to us. Heat and pressure exerted on a body or the state of aggregation that a body assumes according to its temperature, also the extent of space occupied, the volume, are examples. We are able on the one side, to see how a solid body melts, and can establish the fact that during the melting of the solid, no rise in temperature is measurable by the thermometer or any other temperature-measuring instrument. The temperature increase stands still, as it were, during the melting. On the other hand, we can see the change from a liquid to a gas, and there again we find the disappearance of the temperature increase and its reappearance when the whole body has passed into the gaseous condition. These facts make up a series that you can demonstrate for yourselves, and that you can follow with your eyes, your senses and with instruments. Yesterday, also, we called attention to certain inner experiences of the human being himself which he has under the influence of warmth and also under the influence of other sense qualities such as light and tone. But we saw that magnetism and electricity were not really sense impressions, at least not immediate sense impressions, because as ordinary physics says, there is no sense organ for these entities. We say, indeed, that so far as electrical and magnetic properties are concerned we come to know them through determining their effects, the attraction of bodies for instance, and the many other effects of electrical processes. But we have no immediate sense perception of electricity and magnetism as we have for tone and light.

We then noted particularly, and this must be emphasized, that our own passive concepts, by which we represent the world, are really a kind of distillation of the higher sense impressions. Wherever you make an examination you will find these higher concepts and will be able to convince yourselves that they are the distilled essence of the sense impressions. I illustrated this yesterday in the case of the concept of being. You can get echoes of tone in the picture of the conceptual realm, and you can everywhere see showing through how these concepts have borrowed from light . But there is one kind of concept where you cannot do this, as you will soon see. You cannot do it in the realm of the mathematical concepts. In so far as they are purely mathematical, there is no trace of the tonal or the visible. Now we must deceive ourselves here. Man is thinking of tone when he speaks of the wave number of sound vibrations. Naturally I do not refer to this sort of thing. I mean all that is obtained from pure mathematics. Such things, for instance, as the content of the proposition of Pythagoras, that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180°, or that the whole is greater than the part, etc. The basis of our mathematical concepts does not relate itself to the seen or the heard, but it relates itself in the last analysis to our will impulse. Strange as it may seem to you at first, you will always find this fact when you look at these things from the psychological point of view, as it were. The human being who draws a triangle (the drawn triangle is only an externalization) is attaining in concept to an unfolding of the will around the three angles. There is an unfolding of action around three angles as shown by the motion of the hand or by walking, by turning of the body. The thing that you have within you as a will-concept, that in reality you carry into the pure mathematical concept. That is the essential distinction between mathematical concepts and other concepts. This is the distinction about which Kant and other philosophers waged such controversy. You can distinguish the inner determination of mathematical concepts. This distinction arises from the fact that mathematical concepts are so rigidly bound up with our own selves, that we carry our will nature into them. Only what subsists in the sphere of the will is brought into mathematical operations. This is what makes them seem so certain to us. What is not felt to be so intimately bound up with us, but is simply felt through an organ placed in a certain part of our make-up, that appears uncertain and empirical. This is the real distinction. Now, I wish to call your attention to a certain fact. When we dip down into the sphere of will, whence came, in a vague and glimmering way, the abstractions which make up the sum of our pure arithmetical and geometrical concepts, we enter the unknown region where the will rules, a region as completely unknown to us in the inner sense, as electricity and magnetism are in the outer sense. Yesterday I endeavored to illustrate this by asking you to imagine yourselves living, thinking rainbows with your consciousness in the green, in consequence of which you did not perceive the green but perceived the colors on each side of it, fading into the unknown. I compared the red to the dipping down inwardly into the unknown sphere of the will and the blue-violet to the outward extension into the spheres of electricity and magnetism and the like.

Now I am inserting at this point in our course this psychological-physiological point of view, as it might be called, because it is very essential for the future that people should be led back again to the relation of the human being to physical observations. Unless this relationship is established, the confusion that reigns at present cannot be eliminated. We will see this as we follow further the phenomena of heat. But it is not so easy to establish this relationship in the thinking of today. The reason is just this, that modern man cannot easily bridge the gap between what he perceives as outer space phenomena in the world, or better, as outer sense phenomena and what he experiences within. In these modern times there is such a pronounced dualism between all which we experience as knowledge of the outer world and what we experience inwardly, that it is extraordinarily difficult to bridge this gap, But the gap must be bridged if physics is to advance. To this end we must use the intuitive faculties rather than the rational when we relate something external to what goes on within man himself. Thus we can begin to grasp how we must orient ourselves, in observing phenomena so difficult as those arising from heat. Let me call your attention to the following:

Suppose you learn a poem by heart. You will, as you learn it, first find it necessary to become acquainted with the ideas that underlie the poem. At first you will always have the tendency, when you recite the poem, to let those ideas unroll in your mind. But you know that the more frequently you recite the poem, especially when there is a lapse of time between the recitations, the less intensely you are obliged to think of the ideas. There may come a time when it is not necessary to think at all, but simply to reel off the recitation mechanically. We never actually reach this point; do not wish to, in fact, but we approach the condition asymptotically as it were. Our feelings as human beings prevent us from reaching this stage of purely mechanical repetition, but it is thinkable that we would get to the point where we needed to think not at all, but when we spoke the first line the rest of the poem would follow without any thinking about it. You recognize the similarity between such a condition and the approach of the hyperbola to its asymptotes. But this leads us to the conception that when we speak a poem we are dealing with two different activities working simultaneously in our organism. We are dealing with a mechanical reeling-off of certain processes, and along with this go the processes included in our soul concepts. On the one hand, we have what we can properly speak of as playing itself out mechanically in space, and on the other hand, we have a soul process which is entirely non-spatial in nature.

When now, you fasten your attention simply on that which reels itself off mechanically, and you do this in thought, for instance, if you imagine you recited a poem in an unknown language, then you have simply the mechanical process. The instant you accompany this mechanical process with thinking, then you have an inner soul activity that cannot be brought out into space. You cannot express in space the thinking with which a man accompanies the recitation, as you can the mechanical processes of actual speaking, of the pronouncing of words.

Let me give you an analogy. When we follow the heating of a solid body up to the time it arrives at its melting point, the temperature becomes higher. We can see this on the thermometer. When the body begins to melt, the thermometer stands still until the melting is complete. There is an analogy between what we can follow with the thermometer, the outer physical process, and what we can follow physically in the spoken word. And there is an analogy also between what escapes us, and lies in the concepts of the reciter and what happens to the heat while the melting goes on. Here you see, we have an example where we can, by analogy, at least bridge the gap between an outer observation and something in the human being. In other realms than that of speech we do not have such ready examples to bridge the gap. This is because in speech there is, on the one hand, the possibility imaginable, at least, that a person could mechanically speak out something learned by heart. Or on the other hand, that the person would not speak at all but simply think about it and thus remove it entirely from the realm of space. In other spheres we do not have the opportunity to make this cleavage and see precisely how one activity passes over into another. Especially is this difficult when we wish to follow the nature of heat. In this case we have to set out to investigate physiologically and psychologically how heat behaves when we have taken it up into ourselves.

Yesterday, by way of illustration, I said to you: “I go into a room that is comfortably warmed, I sit down and write.” I cannot so directly find the inter-relationships between what I experience or feel when I go into the warm room. What goes on within me parallels the outer warmth, when I write my thoughts down. But I cannot determine the relationship so readily as I can between speaking something and thinking about it. Thus it is difficult to find the something within that corresponds to the outer sensation of warmth. It is a question of gradually approaching the concepts that will lead us further in this direction and in this connection I want to call your attention to something you know from your anthroposophy.

You know, when we make the attempt to extend our thinking by meditation, to increase its inner intensity, and so to work with our thoughts that we come again and again into the condition where we know we are using soul-forces without the help of the body, we notice a certain thing. We notice that in order to do this, our entire inner soul life has to change. With ordinary abstract thoughts man cannot enter the higher region of human soul life. There thoughts become picture-like and they have to be translated out of the imaginative element in order to get them into abstract form, if they are to be brought into the outer world which is not grasped by the imaginative element. But you need to understand a method of looking at these things, such as is presented, for instance, in my Occult Science. In this book the endeavor is to be as true to the facts as possible, and it is this which has so disturbed the people who are only able to think abstractly. For the attempt must be made to get things over into picture form, as I have done to some extent in the description of the Saturn and Sun states. There you will find purely picture concepts mixed in with the others. It is very hard for people to go over into the pictures, because these things cannot be put into the abstract form. The reason for this is that when we think abstractly, when we move within the narrow confines of concepts, in which people today are so much at home, and especially so in the realm of natural science, when we do this we are using ideas completely dependent on our bodies. We cannot, for instance, do without our bodies when we set out to think through the things set forth as laws in the physics books. There we must think in such a way that we use our bodies as instruments. When we rise to the sphere of the imagination, then the abstract ideas must be completely altered, because our inner soul life no longer uses the physical body.

Now you can take what I might call a comprehensive view of the realm of imaginative thought. This realm of imaginative thought has in us nothing to do with what is tied up in our outer corporeality. We rise to a region where we live as beings of soul and spirit without dependence on our corporeality. In other words, the instant we enter the realm of the imaginative, we leave space. We are then no longer in space.

Note now, this has an extremely important bearing. I have in the previous course, made a very definite differentiation between mere kinematics and what enters into our consideration as mechanical, such as mass, for instance. As long as I consider only kinematics, I need only think of things. I can write them down on a blackboard or a sheet of paper and complete the survey of motion and space so far as my thinking takes me. But in that case I must remain within what can be surveyed in terms of time and space. Why is this? This is so for a very definite reason. You must make the following clear to yourselves: All human beings, as they exist on earth, are as you yourselves, within time and space. They are bounded by a definite space and are related as space objects to other space objects. Therefore, when you speak of space, you are not able, considering the matter in an unprejudiced way, to take seriously the Kantian ideas. For if space were inside of us, then we could not ourselves be within space. We only think space is inside of us. We can free ourselves of this fancy, of this notion, if we consider the fact that this being-within space has a very real meaning for us. If space were inside of us, it would have no meaning for a person whether he were born in Moscow or Vienna. But where we are born has a very real significance. As a terrestrial-empirical person, I am quite completely a product of space facts. That is, as a human being, I belong to relations that form themselves in space. Likewise, with time, you would all be different persons if you had been born 20 years earlier. That is to say, your life does not have time inside of it, but time has your life within it. Thus as experiencing persons, you stand within time and space. And when we talk of time and space, or when we make a picture of will impulses, as I have explained we do in geometry, this is because we ourselves live inside of spatial and temporal relations, and are therefore quite definitely conditioned by them, and so are able, a priori, to speak of them as we do in mathematics. When you go over to the concept of mass, this is not so. The matter must then be put otherwise. In respect to mass, you are dealing with something quite special. You cannot say that you cut out a portion of time or space, but rather that you live in the general space mass and make it into your own mass. This mass then, is within you. It cannot be gainsaid that this mass with all its activities, all of its potentialities, is active inside of you; at this moment it falls into a different category from time and space so far as its relations to you are concerned. It is precisely because you yourself take part, as it were, with your inner being in the properties of the mass, because you take it up into your being, that it does not allow itself to be brought into consciousness like time and space. In the realm where the world gives us our own substance, we thus enter an unknown region. This is related to the fact that our will is, for instance, closely connected with the phenomena of mass inside us. But we are unconscious of these phenomena; we are asleep to them. And we are related to the will activity and accompany mass phenomena within us in no other way than we are to the world in general between going to sleep and waking up. We are not conscious of either one. Both these things are hidden from human consciousness, and in this respect, there is no immediate distinction between them.

Thus we gradually bring these things nearer to the human being. It is this that the physicists shy away from, the bringing of such things near to man. But in no other way can we obtain real concepts except by developing relationship between the human being and the world, a relationship that does not exist at the start, as in the case of time and space. We speak of time and space, let us say, out of our rational faculties, whence comes the remoteness of the mathematical and kinematical sciences. Of the things experienced merely through the senses, in an external fashion, things related to mass, we can at first speak only in an empirical fashion. But we can analyze the relation between the activity of a portion of mass within us and outer mass activity. As soon as we do this we can begin to deal with mass in the same way that we deal with the obvious relation between ourselves and time or ourselves and space. That is, we must grow inwardly into such relation with the world in our physical concepts, as we have for the mathematical or kinematical concepts.

It is a peculiar thing that, as we loosen ourselves from our own bodies in which all those things take place to which we are asleep, as we raise ourselves to imaginative concepts, we really take a step nearer the world. We approach always nearer to that which otherwise reigns in us unconsciously. There is no other way to enter into the objectivity of the facts than to push forward with our own developed inner soul forces. At the same time that we detach ourselves from our own materiality, we approach more and more closely to what is going on in the outside world.

However, it is not so easy to obtain even the most elementary experiences in this region, since a person must so transform himself that he pays attention to things that are not noticed at all under ordinary circumstances. But now, I will tell you something that will probably greatly astonish you. Let us suppose you have advanced further on the path of imaginative thinking. Suppose you have really begun to think imaginatively. You will then experience something that will astonish you. It will be much easier than it formerly was for you to recite in a merely mechanical way a poem that you have learned by heart. It will not be more difficult for you, but less so. If you examine your soul organism without prejudice and with care, you will at once find that you are more prone to recite a poem mechanically without thinking about it, if you have undergone an occult training than if you have not undergone such a training. You do not dislike this going over into the mechanical so strongly as you did before the occult development. It is such things as this that are not usually stated but are meant when it is said over and over again: The experiences you have in occult training are really opposed to the concepts that are ordinarily had before you enter occult training and thus it is, when the more advanced stage is reached, that one comes to look more lightly on the ideas of ordinary life. And therefore, anyone who advances in occultism is exposed to the danger of afterwards becoming a greater mechanist than before. An orderly occult training guards against this, but the tendency to become materialistic is quite marked in the very people who have undergone occult development. I will, by example, tell you why.

You see, in ordinary life, it is really, as the theorists say it is, the brain thinks. But ordinarily, a man does not actually experience this fact. It is quite possible in this ordinary life to carry out such a dialogue as I did in my childhood with a youthful friend who as a crass materialist and became more and more so. He would say, “When I think my brain does the thinking.” I would say to that: “ Yes, but when you are with me you always say, I will do this, I think. Why do you not say, my brain will do this, my brain thinks? You are always speaking an untruth.” The reason is that for the theoretical materialist, quite naturally, there does not exist the possibility of observing the processes in the brain. He cannot observe these physical processes. Therefore, materialism remains for him merely a theory.

The moment a person advances somewhat from imaginative to inspirational ideas, he becomes able really to observe the parallel processes in the brain. Then what goes on in the material part of the brain becomes really visible. Aside from the fact that it is extremely seductive, the things a person can observe in his own activity appear to him more and more wonderful to a high degree. For this activity of the brain is observable as something more wonderful than all that the theoretical materialists can describe about it. Therefore, the temperature comes to grow materialistic for the very reason that the activity of the human brain has become observable. Only one is, as has been said, protected from this.

But as I have explained to you these steps in occult development, I have at the same time showed you how this development creates the possibility of a deeper penetration into material processes. This is the extraordinary thing. He who functions in the spirit simply as an abstract thing, will be relatively powerless in the face of nature. He grows into contact with other natural phenomena as he has already grown into contact with time and space.

We must now set up on the one side, all the things we have just tried to place before our minds, and on the other side, those things that have met us from the realm of heat.

What has come to us from the realm of heat? Well, we followed the rise of temperature as we warmed a solid body to melting point. We showed how the temperature rise disappeared for a time, and then re-appeared until the body began to boil, to evaporate. When we extended our observations, another thing appeared. We could see that the gas produced passed over in all directions on its surroundings. (Fig. 1a), seeking to distribute itself in all directions, and could only be made to take on form if its own pressure were opposed by an equal and opposite pressure brought to bear from the outside. These things have been brought out by experiment and will be further cleared up by other experiments. The moment the temperature is lowered to the point where the body can solidify, it can give itself a form (Fig. 1b). When we experience temperature rise and fall, we experience what corresponds externally to form. We are experiencing the dissolution of form and the re-establishment of it. The gas shows us the dissolution, the solid pictures for us the establishment of form. We experience the transition between these two, also, and we experience it in an extremely interesting fashion. For, imagine to yourselves the solid and the gas and the liquid, the fluid body standing between. This liquid need not be enclosed by a vessel surrounding it completely, but only on the bottom and sides. On the upper side, the liquid forms its own surface perpendicular to the line between itself and the center of the earth. Thus we can say that we have here a transition form between the gas and the solid (Fig. 1c). In a gas we never have such a surface. In a liquid such as water, we have one surface formed. In the case of a solid, we have that all around the body which occurs in the liquid only on the upper surfaces.

Now this is an extremely interesting and significant relation. For it directs our attention to the fact that a solid body has over its entire surface something corresponding to the upper surface of a liquid, but that it determines the establishment of the surface on a body of water. It is at right angles to the line joining it to the center of the earth. The whole earth conditions the establishment of the surface. We can therefore say: In the case of water, each point within it has the same relation to the entire earth that the points in a solid have to something within the solid. The solid therefore includes something which in the case of water resides in the relation of the latter to the earth. The gas diffuses. The relation to the earth does not take part at all. It is out of the picture. Gases have no surface at all.

You will see from this that we are obliged to go back to an old conception. I called your attention in a previous lecture to the fact that the old Greek physicists called solid bodies Earth. They did this, not account of some superficial reason such as has been ascribed to them by people today, but they did it because they were conscious of the fact that the solid, of itself, takes care of that which is the case of water is taken care of by the earth as a whole. The solid takes into itself the role of the earthly. It is entirely justified to put the matter in this way: The earthly resides within a solid. In water it does not reside within, but the whole earth takes up the role of forming a surface on the liquid.

Thus you see, when we proceed from solid bodies to water, we are obliged to extend our considerations not only to what actually lies before us but in order to get an intelligent idea of the nature of water, we must extend them to include the water of the whole earth and to think of this as a unity in relation with the central point of the earth. To observe a “fragment” of water as a physical entity is absurd, just as much so as to consider a cut-off garment of my little finger as an organism. It would die at once. It only has meaning as an organism if it is considered in its relation to the whole organism. The meaning that the solid has in itself, can only be attached to water if we consider it in relation to the whole earth. And so it is with all liquids on earth.

And again, when we pass on from the fluid to the gaseous, we come to understand that the gaseous removes itself from the influence of the earth. It does not form surfaces. It partakes of everything which is not terrestrial. In other words, we must not merely look on the earth for the activities of a gas, we must bring in the environment of the earth to help us out, we must go out into space and seek there the forces involved. When we wish to learn the laws of the gaseous state, we become involved in nothing less than astronomical considerations.

Thus you see how these things are related to the whole terrestrial scheme when we examine the phenomena that we have up to this time simply gathered together. And when we come to such a point as the melting or boiling point, then there enter in things that must now appear to us as very significant. For, if we consider the melting point we pass from the terrestrial condition of the solid body where it determines its own form and relations, to something which includes the whole earth. The earth takes the sold captive when the latter goes over into the fluid state. From its own kingdom, the solid body enters the terrestrial kingdom as a whole when we reach the melting point. It ceases to have individuality. And when we carry the fluid body over into the gaseous condition, then we come to the point where the connection with the earth as shown by the formation of a liquid surface is loosened. The instant we go from a liquid to a gas, the body loosens itself from the earth, as it were, and enters the realm of the extra-terrestrial. When we consider a gas, the forces active in it are to be thought of as having escaped from the earth. Therefore, when we study these phenomena we cannot avoid passing from the ordinary physical-terrestrial into the cosmic. For we no longer are in contact with reality if our attention is not turned to what is actually working in the things themselves.

But now another phenomena meets us. Consider such a thing as the one you know very well and to which I have called your attention, namely that water behaves so remarkably, in that ice floats on water, or, stated otherwise, is less dense than water. When it goes over into the fluid condition its temperature rises, and it contracts and becomes denser. Only by virtue of this fact can ice float on the surface of the water. Here we have between zero and four degrees, water showing an exception to the general rule that we find when temperature increases, namely that bodies become less and less dense as they are warmed up. This range of four degrees, where water expands as the temperature is lowered, is very instructive. What do we learn from this range? We learn that the water sets up an opposition. As ice it is a solid body with a kind of individuality, but opposes the transition to an entirely different sphere. It is very necessary to consider such things. For then we begin to get an understanding as to why, under certain conditions, the temperature as determined by a thermometer disappears, say at the melting or boiling points. It disappears just as our bodily reality disappears when we rise to the realm of imagination. We will go into the matter a little more deeply, and it will not appear so paradoxical when we try to clear up further the following: What happens then, when a heat condition obliges us to raise the temperature to the third power, or in this case to go into the fourth dimension, thus passing out of space altogether? Let us at this time, put this proposition before our souls and tomorrow we ill speak further about it. Just as it is possible for our bodily activity to pass over into the spiritual when we enter the imaginative realm, so we can find a path leading from the external and visible in the realm of heat tot he phenomena that are pointed to by our thermometer when the temperature rise we are measuring with it disappears before our eyes. What process goes on behind this disappearance? That is the question which we are asking ourselves today. Tomorrow we will speak of it further.

We will now speak of some further details of method, though of course in this short time I can only pick out a few examples to give you.

When we consider the whole period between the change of teeth and puberty we can see that it divides itself again into three sections, and it is these three sections that we must bear in mind when we have to guide the children through these early years of school life.

First we have the age up to the point of time which I have described to you here, when the child begins to differentiate himself from his environment and makes a distinction between “subject”—his own self, and “object”—the things which surround him in the outside world; up to this point of time it is essential for us to teach in such a way that everything within the child or without him bears the character of a unity. I have shown you how that can be done artistically. Then, in the second period, we saw how the transition to descriptions of the outside world can be made through our teaching of plant and animal life. You can treat these things in quite an elementary way up till the twelfth year. The third section extends from the twelfth year up to puberty, and it is really only at this time that we can pass on to lifeless nature, for it is only now that the child really begins to understand the inanimate world.

We might indeed say that from the seventh year to about nine-and-a-half or nine-and-one-third the child takes in everything with his soul. There is nothing that the child would not take in with his soul. The trees, the stars, the clouds, the stones, everything is absorbed by the child's soul life. From about nine-and-a-third to about eleven-and-two-thirds the child already perceives the difference between the soul quality which he sees in himself and what is merely “living.” We can now speak of the whole earth as living. Thus we have the soul quality and the living quality. Then from eleven-and-two-thirds to about fourteen the child discriminates between what is of the soul, what is living, and what is dead, that is to say, what is based on the laws of cause and effect.

We should not speak to the child of Inanimate things at all before he approaches his twelfth year. Only then should we begin to speak about minerals, physical phenomena, chemical phenomena and so on. We must make it clear to ourselves that this is really how things are: in the child between the change of teeth and puberty it is not the intellect but the fantasy that is predominantly active; we must constantly be thinking of the child's fantasy, and therefore, as I have often said, we must especially develop fantasy in ourselves. If we do not do this, but pass over to all kinds of intellectual things when the child is still quite young, then he cannot go through his development rightly even in his physical body. And much that is pathological at the present day arises from the fact that in this materialistic age too much attention has been paid to the intellect in children between the change of teeth and puberty.

We should only very gradually introduce the lifeless world when the child is approaching his twelfth year, for this lifeless world must be grasped by the intellect. At this time we can introduce minerals, physical and chemical phenomena and so on. But even here we should connect it up with life as far as possible, not simply start, for instance, with a collection of minerals, but start from the earth, the soil, and first describe the mountain ranges, how they bring about the configuration of the earth; then we can speak of how the mountains are surrounded with soil at their foot, and the higher we go the more bare they become and the fewer plants there are. So we come to speak of the bareness of the mountains and point out that here there are minerals. Thus we start with the mountains and lead on to the minerals.

Then when we have given a clear description of the mountains we can show the children a mineral and say: this is what you would find if you were to take this path up the mountain. This is where it is found. When you have done this with a few different minerals you can pass on to speak of the minerals themselves. But you must do the other first, here again proceeding from the whole and not from the part. This is of very great importance.

For physical phenomena also it is just as important to start from life itself. You should not begin your teaching of Physics as set forth in the text books of today, but simply by lighting a match for instance and letting the children observe how it begins to burn; you must draw their attention to all the details, what the flame looks like, what it is like outside, what it is like further in, and how a black spot, a little black cap is left when you blow out the flame; and only when you have done this, begin to explain how the fire in the match came about. The fire came about through the generation of warmth, and so on. Thus you must connect everything with life itself.

Or take the example of a lever: do not begin by saying that a lever consists of a supported beam at the one end of which there is a force, and at the other end another force, as one so often finds in the Physics books. You should start from a pair of scales; let the child imagine that you are going to some shop where things are being weighed out, and from this pass on to equilibrium and balance, and to the conception of weight and gravity. Always develop your Physics from life itself, and your chemical phenomena also.

That is the essential thing, to begin with real life in considering the different phenomena of the physical and mineral world. If you do it the other way, beginning with an abstraction, then something very curious happens to the child; the lesson itself soon makes him tired. He does not get tired if you start from real life. He gets tired if you start from abstractions.

The golden rule for the whole of teaching is that the child should not tire. Now there is something very strange about the so-called experimental education of the present day. Experimental psychologists register when a child becomes tired in any kind of mental activity, and from this they decide how long to occupy a child with any one subject, in order to avoid fatigue.

This whole conception is wrong from beginning to end. The truth of the matter is as follows: you can read about it in my books, especially in the book Riddles of the Soul and in various lecture courses; all I shall do now is to remind you that man consists of three members—the nerve-senses man, that is, all that sustains man in the activity of his mind and spirit; the rhythmic man, which contains the whole rhythm of breathing, the circulation of the blood and so on; and the metabolic-limb man, in which is to be found everything that is metamorphosed by means of the different substances.

Now if you take the physical development of the child from birth to the change of teeth you will find it is specially the head-organisation, the nerve-senses organisation that is at work.¹ The child develops from the head downwards in the early years of his life. You must examine this closely. Look first of all at a human embryo, an unborn child. The head is enormous and the rest of the body is still stunted. Then the child is born and his head is still outwardly the largest, strongest part, and out of the head proceeds the whole growth of the child.

This is no longer the case with the child between the seventh and fourteenth year. Rhythm of breathing, rhythm of the blood, the whole rhythmic system is what holds sway between the change of teeth and puberty. Only rhythm!

But what is the real nature of rhythm? Now if I think a great deal, particularly if I have to study, I get tired, I get tired in my head. If I have to walk far, which is an exertion for my limb organism, I also tire. The head, or the nerve-senses organism, and the metabolic-limb organism can get tired. But the rhythmic organism can never tire.

For just think; you breathe all day long. Your heart beats at night as well as in the day. It must never stop, from birth to death. The rhythm of it has to go on all the time, and cannot ever tire. It never gets tired at all.

Now in education and teaching you must address yourself to whichever system is predominant in man; thus between the change of teeth and puberty you must address yourself to rhythm in the child by using pictures. Everything that you describe or do must be done in such a way that the head has as little to do with it as possible, but the heart, the rhythm, everything that is artistic or rhythmic, must be engaged. What is the result? The result is that with teaching of this kind the child never gets tired, because you are engaging his rhythmic system and not his head.

People are so terribly clever, and in this materialistic age they have thought out a scheme whereby the children should always be allowed to romp about between lessons. Now it is certainly good to let them romp about, but it is good because of the soul qualities in it, because of the delight they have in it. For experiments have been made and it has been found that when the children are properly taught in lesson time they are less tired than when they play about outside. The movement of their limbs tires them more, whereas what you give them in their lessons in the right way should never tire them at all. And the more you develop the pictorial element with the children and the less you exert the intellect, by presenting everything in a living way, the more you will be making demands on the rhythmic system only, and the less will the child become tired. Therefore when the experimental psychologists come and make observations to see how much the child tires, what is it they really observe? They observe how badly you have taught. If you had taught well you would find no fatigue on the part of the children.

In our work with children of Elementary School age we must see to it that we engage the rhythmic system only. The rhythmic system never tires, and is not over-exerted when we employ it in the right way, and for this rhythmic system we need not an intellectual but rather a pictorial method of presentation, something that comes out of the fantasy. Therefore it is imperative that fantasy should hold sway in the school. This must still be so even in the last period of which we have spoken, from eleven-and-two-thirds to fourteen years; we must still make the lifeless things live through fantasy and always connect them with real life. It is possible to connect all the phenomena of Physics with real life, but we ourselves must have fantasy in order to do it. This is absolutely necessary.

Now this fantasy should above all be the guiding principle in what are called compositions, when the children have to write about something and work it out for themselves. Here what must be strictly avoided is to let the children write a composition about anything that you have not first talked over with them in great detail, so that the subject is familiar to them. You yourself, with the authority of the teacher and educator, should have first spoken about the subject with the children; then the child should produce his composition under the influence of what you yourself have said. Even when the children are approaching puberty you must still not depart from this principle. Even then the child should not just write whatever occurs to him; he should always feel that a certain mood has been aroused in him through having discussed the subject with his teacher, and all that he then himself writes in his essay must preserve this mood.

Here again it is “aliveness” that must be the guiding principle. “Aliveness” in the teacher must pass over to “aliveness” in the children.

As you will see from all this, the whole of your teaching and education must be taken from real life. This is something which you can often hear said nowadays. People say that lessons must be given in a living way and in accordance with reality. But first of all we must acquire a feeling for what is actually in accordance with reality. I will give you an example from my own experience of what sometimes happens in practice even when in theory people hold the most excellent educational principles.

I once went into a classroom—I will not say where it was—where an Arithmetic example was being given which was supposed to connect addition with real life. 14 2/3, 16 5/6 and 25 3/5 for example, were not simply to be added together, but were to be related to life. This was done in the following way: The children were told that one man was born on 25th March, 1895, another on 27th August, 1888, and a third on 3rd December, 1899. How old are these three men together? That was the question. And the sum was quite seriously carried through in the following way: from the given date in 1895 to 1924 [The date of this Lecture Course.] is 29 3/4; this is the age of the first man. The second one up to 1924 is about 26 1/2 years old, and the third, from 1899, as he was born on 3rd December, we may say 25. The children were then told that when they add up these ages they will find out how old they all are together.

But my dear friends, I should just like to ask how it is possible that they can make up a certain sum together with their ages? How do you set about it? Of course the numbers can quite well be made up into a sum, but where can you find such a sum in reality? The men are all living at the same time, so that they cannot possibly experience such a thing together in any way. A sum like this is not in the very least taken from life.

It was pointed out to me that this sum was actually taken from a book of examples. I then looked at this book and I found several other ingenious examples of the same kind. In many places I have found that this kind of thing has repercussions in ordinary life, and that is the important thing about it. For what we do at school affects ordinary life, and if the school teaching is wrong, that is if we bring such an unreality into an arithmetical example, then this way of thinking will be adopted by the young people and will be taken into ordinary life. I do not know if it is the same in England, but all over Central Europe when, let us say, several criminals are accused and condemned together, then you sometimes read in the papers: all five together have received sentences of imprisonment totalling 75 1/2 years. One has ten years, another twenty and so on, but it is all added up together. This you can find repeatedly in the newspapers. I should like to know what meaning a sum like that can have in reality. For each single prisoner who is sentenced, the 75 years together certainly have no meaning; they will all of them be free long before the 75 years are over, so that it has no reality at all.

You see, that is the important thing, to make straight for the reality in everything: you simply poison a child to whom you give a sum like this which is absolutely impossible in real life.

You must guide the child to think only about things that are to be found in life. Then through your teaching reality will be carried back into life again. In our time we suffer terribly from the unreality of men's thinking, and the teacher has need to consider this very carefully.

There is a theory in this age which, though postulated by men who are considered to be extraordinarily clever, is really only a product of education. It is the so-called Theory of Relativity. I hope you have already heard something of this theory which is connected with the name of Einstein; there is much in it that is correct. I do not want to combat what is right in it, but it has been distorted in the following way. Let us imagine that a cannon is fired off somewhere. It is said that if you are so many miles away, after a certain length of time you hear the report of the cannon. If you do not stand still but walk away from the sound, then you hear it later. The quicker you walk away the later you get the impression of the sound. If you do the opposite and walk towards the sound you will be hearing it sooner and sooner all the time.

But now if you continue this thought you come to the possible conception, which is however an impossibility in reality, that you approach the sound more quickly than it travels itself, and then if you think this out to its conclusion you come to the point of saying to yourself: then there is also a possibility of hearing the sound before the cannon is fired off!

That is what it can lead to, if theories arise out of a kind of thinking which is not in accordance with reality. A man who can think in accordance with reality must sometimes have very painful experiences. For in Einstein's books you even find, for instance, how you could take a watch and send it out into the universe at the speed of light, and then let it come back again; we are then told what happens to this watch if it goes out at the speed of light and comes back again. I should like to get an actual sight of this watch which, having whizzed away at this speed, then comes back again; I should like to know what it looks like then! The essential thing is that we never lose sight of reality in our thinking.

Herein lies the root of all evil in much of the education of today, and you find, for instance, in the “exemplary” Kindergartens that different kinds of work are thought out for the child to do. In reality we should make the children do nothing, even in play, that is not an imitation of life itself. All Froebel occupations and the like, which have been thought out for the children, are really bad. We must make it a rule only to let the children do what is an imitation of life, even in play. This is extremely important.

For this reason, as I have already told you, we should not think out what are called “ingenious” toys, but as far as possible with dolls or other toys we should leave as much as we can to the child's own fantasy. This is of great significance, and I would earnestly beg you to make it a rule not to let anything come into your teaching and education that is not in some way connected with life.

The same rule applies when you ask the children to describe something themselves. You should always call their attention to it if they stray from reality. The intellect never penetrates as deeply into reality as fantasy does. Fantasy can go astray, it is true, but it is rooted in reality, whereas the intellect remains always on the surface. That is why it is so infinitely important for the teacher himself to be in touch with reality as he stands in his class.

In order that this may be so we have our Teachers' Meetings in the Waldorf School which are the heart and soul of the whole teaching. In these meetings, each teacher speaks of what he himself has learnt in his class and from all the children in it, so that each one learns from the other. No school is really alive where this is not the most important thing, this regular meeting of the teachers.

And indeed there is an enormous amount one can learn there. In the Waldorf School we have mixed classes, girls and boys together. Now quite apart from what the boys and girls say to each other, or what they consciously exchange with each other, there is a marked difference to be seen in the classes according to whether there are more girls than boys or more boys than girls or an equal number of each. For years I have been watching this, and it has always proved to be the case that there is something different in a class where there are more girls than boys.

In the latter case you will very soon find that you yourself as the teacher become less tired, because the girls grasp things more easily than boys and with greater eagerness too. You will find many other differences also. Above all, you will very soon discover that the boys themselves gain in quickness of comprehension when they are in a minority, whereas the girls lose by it if they are in the minority. And so there are numerous differences which do not arise through the way they talk together or treat each other but which remain in the sphere of the imponderable and are themselves imponderable things.

All these things must be very carefully watched, and everything that concerns either the whole class or individual children is spoken of in our meetings, so that every teacher really has the opportunity to gain an insight into characteristic individualities among the pupils.

There is one thing that is of course difficult in the Waldorf School method. We have to think much more carefully than is usually the case in class teaching, how one can really bring the children on. For we are striving to teach by “reading” from the particular age of a child what should be given him at this age. All I have said to you is directed towards this goal.

Now suppose a teacher has a child of between nine and ten years in the class that is right for his age, but with quite an easy mind he lets this child stay down and not go up with the rest of the class; the consequence will be that in the following year this child will be receiving teaching which is meant for an age of life different from his own. Therefore under all circumstances we avoid letting the children stay down in the same class even if they have not reached the required standard. This is not so convenient as letting the children stay in the class where they are and repeat the work, but we avoid this at all costs. The only corrective we have is to put the very weak ones into a special class for the more backward children.²

Children who are in any way below standard come into this class from all the other classes.

Otherwise, as I have said, we do not let the children stay down but we try to bring them along with us under all circumstances, so that in this way each child really receives what is right for his particular age.

We must also consider those children who have to leave school at puberty, at the end of the Elementary School period, and who cannot therefore participate in the upper classes. We must make it our aim that by this time, through the whole tenor of our teaching, they will have come to a perception of the world which is in accordance with life itself. This can be done in a two-fold way. On the one hand we can develop all our lessons on Science and History in such a manner that the children, at the end of their schooling, have some knowledge of the being of man and some idea of the place of man in the world. Everything must lead up to a knowledge of man, reaching a measure of wholeness when the children come to the seventh and eighth classes, that is when they have reached their thirteenth and fourteenth year. Then all that they have already learnt will enable them to understand what laws, forces and substances are at work in man himself, and how man is connected with all physical matter in the world, with all that is of soul in the world, with all spirit in the world. So that the child, of course in his own way, knows what a human being is within the whole cosmos. This then is what we strive to achieve on the one hand.

On the other hand we try to give the children an understanding of life. It is actually the case today that most people, especially those who grow up in the town, have no idea how a substance, paper for instance, is made. There are a great many people who do not know how the paper on which they write or the material they are wearing is manufactured, nor, if they wear leather shoes, how the leather is prepared.

Think how many people there are who drink beer and have no idea how the beer is made. This is really a monstrous state of affairs. Now we cannot of course achieve everything in this direction, but we try to make it our aim as far as possible to give the children some knowledge of the work done in the most varied trades, and to see to it that they themselves also learn how to do certain kinds of work which are done in real life.

It is, however, extraordinarily difficult, in view of what is demanded of children today by the authorities, to succeed with an education that is really in accordance with life itself. One has to go through some very painful experiences. Once for instance, owing to family circumstances, a child had to leave when he had just completed the second class and begun a new year in the third. He had to continue his education in another school. We were then most bitterly reproached because he had not got so far in Arithmetic as was expected of him there, nor in Reading or Writing. Moreover they wrote and told us that the Eurythmy and Painting and all the other things he could do were of no use to him at all.

If therefore, we educate the children not only out of the knowledge of man, but in accordance with the demands of life, they will also have to know how to read and write properly at the age at which this is expected of them today. And so we shall be obliged to include in the curriculum many things which are simply demanded by the customs of the time. Nevertheless we try to bring the children into touch with life as far as possible.

I should have dearly liked to have a shoemaker as a teacher in the Waldorf School, if this had been possible. It could not be done because such a thing does not fit into a curriculum based on present-day requirements, but in order that the children might really learn to make shoes, and to know, not theoretically but through their own work, what this entails, I should have dearly liked from the very beginning to have a shoemaker on the staff of the school. But it simply could not be done because it would not have been in accordance with the authorities, although it is just the very thing that would have been in accordance with real life. Nevertheless we do try to make the children into practical workers.

When you come to the Waldorf School you will see that the children are quite good at binding books and making boxes; you will see too how they are led into a really artistic approach to handwork; the girls will not be taught to produce the kind of thing you see nowadays when you look at the clothes that women wear, for instance. It does not occur to people that the pattern for a collar should be different from that of a belt or the hem of a dress. People do not consider that here for example (see drawing a.) the pattern must have a special character because it is worn at the neck. The pattern for a belt (see drawing b.) must lead both upwards and downwards, and so on.

Or again, we never let our children make a cushion with an enclosed pattern, but the pattern itself should show where to lay your head. You can also see that there is a difference between right and left, and so forth. Thus here too life itself is woven and worked into everything that the children make, and they learn a great deal from it. This then is another method by which the children may learn to stand rightly in life.

We endeavour to carry this out in every detail, for example in the giving of reports. I could never in my life imagine what it means to mark the capacities of the children with a 2, or 3, or 21-. I do not know if that is done in England too, giving the children numbers or letters in their reports which are supposed to show what a child can do. In Central Europe it is customary to give a 3, or a 4. At the Waldorf School we do not give reports like this, but every teacher knows every child and describes him in the report; he describes in his own words what the child's capacities are and what progress he has made.

And then every year each child receives in his report a motto or verse for his own life, which can be a word of guidance for him in the year to come. The report is like this: first there is the child's name and then his verse, and then the teacher without any stereotyped letters or numbers, simply characterises what the child is like, and what progress he has made in the different subjects. The report is thus a description. The children always love their reports, and their parents also get a true picture of what the child is like at school.

We lay great stress upon keeping in touch with all the parents so that from the school we may see into the home through the child. Only in this way can we come to understand each child, and to know how to treat every peculiarity. It is not the same thing when we notice the same peculiarity in two children, for it has quite a different significance in the two cases.

Suppose for instance that two children each show a certain excitability. It is not merely a question of knowing that the child is excitable and giving him something to help him to become quiet, but it is a question of finding out that in the one case the child has an excitable father whom he has imitated, and in the other case the child is excitable because he has a weak heart. In every case we must be able to discover what lies at the root of these peculiarities.

This is the real purpose of the Teachers' Meetings, to study man himself, so that a real knowledge of man is continually flowing through the school. The whole school is the concern of the teachers in their meetings, and all else that is needed will follow of itself. The essential thing is that in the Teachers' Meetings there is study, steady, continual study.

These are the indications I wanted to give you for the practical organisation of your school.

There are of course many things that could still be said if we could continue this course for several weeks. But that we cannot do, and therefore I want to ask you tomorrow, when we come together, to put in the form of questions anything which you may have upon your minds, so that we may use the time for you to put your questions which I will then answer for you.

• 1. Dr. Steiner is here speaking of the process of organic development, not of the child's mental growth. There is no question of approaching the child's intellect during this first period of childhood when the head and nerves system is performing a function entirely different from later years. See Rudolf Steiner: The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy.
• 2. Dr. Steiner then added that these children were at that time being taught by Dr. Karl Schubert who had a very special task in this domain and was particularly gifted for it.