The Rudolf Steiner Archive

You will now see the gradual emergence of the subjects on which you were good enough to put questions, in the course of these lectures. But there must be a certain foundation for rational answers to these inquiries. Now, it is my intention to start from the point to which we advanced yesterday, namely from the significance of splenetic functions in the human organism. These functions must be regarded as actually the main factors in regulating the subconscious life of the soul; so it is a misunderstanding of the whole nature of man, to regard the spleen as an organ of minor importance. This error may often occur, however, because of the case with which the spleen's functions can be taken over by its etheric equivalent, and this for the very reason that it is a highly spiritualised organ; and also because other organs may be called in to help do its work. Nevertheless the activity of the spleen becomes more remarkable, if raised out of the subconscious sphere into some degree of awareness. This brings us to the consideration of a remedial method which has aroused much interest of recent years. It is significant that we arrive at its consideration by way of the spleen. You may convince yourselves by experiment that mild massage in the region of the spleen regulates and benefits the instinctive activities in mankind. In a certain way, the patient thus treated obtains better instincts for suitable food and sounder and more beneficial organic habits;. Note that this method of local massage has strict and close limitations. In the moment that the massage becomes too vigorous it becomes apt to undermine completely the life of instinct. So that we must be most careful to observe the zero point. The gentle massage must not go too far.

Gentle massage of the regions round the spleen, brings something into those regions which is not there as a rule. In a sense, the consciousness of the person massaged is projected as it were into those regions. And very much depends on this displacement of consciousness, this letting it stream in, although it is often difficult to define these delicate workings of our organism in the crude terms of our speech. However strange the statement may appear, there is a powerful interaction between the unconscious activities of reason of which the splenetic functions rather than the spleen itself are the mediators, and the actual conscious functions of the human organism. What precisely are these conscious functions of the human organism? All those processes in the organism whose nature involves that their physical occurrences are accompanied by the higher processes of consciousness, especially by the conceptual processes, are toxic activities in the organism. This must not be overlooked. The organism poisons itself continually precisely through its conceptual activity; and counteracts these toxic conditions continually through the operation of the unconscious will. The centre for these conditions of the unconscious will is the spleen. If we stimulate the spleen and imbue it with a certain awareness, by means of massage, we take action against the powerful toxic effects caused by our higher consciousness. And this massage may be applied not only externally but from within as well. You may dispute the term massage in this connection, but you will understand what I mean. Let us take an individual case, in which we perceive an excessive inner organic activity caused by toxic conditions. The abnormal state of splenetic consciousness can be beneficially affected by the following advice, “Do not confine your intake of food to the chief meals of the day, but rather eat as little as you can at those meals, and take other nourishment in between meals; spread out your consumption of food, so that you eat little at a time but frequently, at short intervals.” The abnormal consciousness of the spleen can be influenced in this way. For to eat little and often is essentially an internal massage of the spleen, which considerably alters the activity of that organ. Of course, there is a “but”; all that concerns the organic processes under discussion has its “buts.” In our age of haste and hurry in which almost everyone is caught up in some exhausting external activity, the spleen and its functions are extraordinarily liable to impairment through this ceaseless round of work. Mankind does not follow the example of certain animals who keep themselves sound and “fit,” by lying down to rest after food, so that their digestive processes are not disturbed by external activity. These animals are really taking care of their spleen. Man does not take care of his spleen if occupied in some hurried activity at the expense of nervous energy. And therefore the splenetic function in the whole of modern civilised peoples gradually becomes thoroughly abnormal; so that especial significance attaches to its relief and recovery through the sort of remedies I have just indicated.

Such delicate processes as massage of the spleen, whether external or internal, draw attention to the relationship between those organs of mankind which transmit the unconscious experience. They illuminate the whole significance of massage. Massage has a certain definite significance and under some circumstances a powerful remedial effect, but above all it influences and regulates rhythm in man. The regulation of human rhythmic processes is the main office of massage. And to massage successfully, one must know the human organism well. You will find the way if you consider the following. Think for a moment of the immense difference between arms and legs in the human frame, as distinct from the animal. The arms of man, which are liberated from the oppression of weight and can move freely, have their astral body far less closely bound to the physical, than in the case of the feet. To the feet the astral body is closely bound. In fact we may say that in the case of the arms, the astral body acts from and inwards through the skin, enveloping arms and hands and working centripetally. In the legs and feet, the will works through the astral body very strongly in a centrifugal direction radiating powerfully outwards, from within. Therefore, if massage is applied to the legs and feet in man, the process is essentially different from that of massage applied to the hands and arms. If the arms are treated by massage, the astral element is drawn from outside inwards, and the arms become very much more instruments of the will than they would otherwise be. Through this there is a regulative effect on internal metabolism, especially on that part of the metabolic process taking place between intestine and blood vessels. In short, massage of the upper limbs acts to a great extent on the formation of the blood. If, on the other hand, the feet and legs are massaged the physical element is transmuted rather into something of a conceptual nature and a regulative action follows on the metabolism that is concerned with processes of evacuation and excretion. The extreme complexity of the human organism is most clearly revealed in these indirect and secondary effects of massage whether starting from the arms and mainly affecting the upbuilding internal processes of metabolism, or starting from the legs and feet and affecting the disintegrating processes of metabolism. If you investigate rationally, you will indeed find that every bodily region and part has a certain connection with other regions and parts; and that the efficacy of massage depends on an adequate insight into these interrelationships. Massage of the lower body will always be of benefit even to the function of breathing; a circumstance of special interest. And in fact the farther we go from above downwards, we find that the organs above the centre benefit progressively. For example, massage directly below the cardiac region influences respiration; if we go farther down, the organs of the throat are influenced. It is a reversed process; the farther we descend from the centre, in massage of the trunk, the greater the effect on the upper organs, and strangely enough, massage treatment of the arms is much helped by massage of the upmost region of the trunk. These facts illustrate the interlocking of the individual regions and limbs of the human body. This interaction of upper and lower organs, which may be quite distant but are nevertheless akin to another, is especially evident in such ailments as, e.g., migraine.

Migraine or sick headache is nothing but a transference to the head of the digestive activities in the rest of the organism. All conditions of special organic stress, such as the monthly period in women, are apt to influence migraine. When a digestive activity wholly foreign to the head thus takes place, the head nerves are loaded with a burden from which they should be, and normally are, free. If the normal digestive activity, i.e., only the absorption of substance, goes on in the head, then the local nerves are permitted to become sensory and perceptive. They are deprived of this character if there is a disorderly digestive activity in the head, as just indicated. They become, therefore, inwardly sensitive, and their receptivity for processes to which the internal organism should be quite indifferent is the basis of the pain typical of migraine and of its characteristic symptoms. It is easy to understand what the sensations must be, if someone is suddenly compelled to be aware of the interior of his own head, instead of the external environment. And true comprehension of the condition will mean that the best remedy can only be sought in “sleeping it off.” For all other “remedies,” which are applied and which one is sometimes obliged to apply, are actually harmful. Let us suppose you use the popular allopathic preparations; what is achieved is merely the culling and blunting of the sensitiveness of the over-stimulated nervous apparatus, that is to say, you lower its activity. Take an instance: suppose an attack of migraine occurs just before the sufferer has to appear in public, on the stage; he prefers to inflict some injury on himself rather than to break what should really not be blunted or dulled, can be especially well observed. In such cases it becomes obvious how extremely delicate our human organism is, and how we often through the pressure exercised by social life, are compelled to offend against the needs of our organism. That is an obvious and important factor which must not be forgotten and one is sometimes compelled to accept a harm, simply arising through the social conditions of the patient, and merely to cure its sequelæ.

The delicacy and sensitiveness of our bodily organisation become evident also by objective and systematic study of light and color treatment for disease. This use of light and color should be more considered in the future than it has been in the past. One must learn to distinguish here, between color which appeals exclusively to the upper sphere of the human being and light proper which has a more objective tendency and appeals to the whole human being. If we simply take the person into a room lit in a certain way, or even expose a portion of the body to the objective influence of color or light—we act directly on the human organs. We then have indeed an influence wholly external. But if the “exposure” is made in such a way as to affect consciousness through the sensation of color—as when instead of irradiation with colored light, the person is brought into a room draped and furnished throughout in a certain colour—the effect penetrates all the organs adjacent to those of consciousness. This “subjective color therapy” always works upon the ego; while in “objective color therapy,” the influence is primarily on the physical system, and through the physical vehicle on the ego, indirectly. Do not raise the objection that it is useless to bring a blind person into the environment of a room furnished in one color, because the patient can receive no visual impression and the result must be nil. Such is not the case. In such conditions the sensory effects which work under the sensory surface, so to speak, are very powerful. There is a difference to a blind person, according to whether a room is entirely red, or entirely blue. The difference is considerable. Take a blind person into a room with blue walls: the effect is to draw or deflect all functional activity from the head to the rest of the organism. If the same person is taken into a completely red room, the effect is reversed; the organic functions are deflected towards the head. From this it is evident that the main effect lies in the rhythm of changing the colour in the environment. The changes of color are the main factor rather than the colors themselves. The isolated influence of a blue room or red is less significant than the contrast in reactions, when the individual who has been in a red environment is brought into a blue, or after being surrounded with blue, into a red. This is significant. Suppose we see a patient, and diagnose the need of improving his upper organic sphere by stimulation of the functions of the head; we should take the patient into a blue room and afterwards into a red. If we wish to act indirectly, through the rest of the organism upon the head function, we should take the person out of a red environment into a blue.

In my opinion much importance should be attached to these methods in a not distant future. Color therapy, not only light treatment, will soon play a great part. The interplay of conscious and unconscious elements is important in itself, and should be given scope. Through this interplay, we shall also be able to form a sound judgment of the special effects of medicinal substances as administered in baths: there is a great difference according to whether the external application of any substance to the human organism produces the sensations of warmth or cold. If anything, whether compress or bath, acts in a cooling way upon me then the effect is to be ascribed mainly to the substance employed; if a cure follows, it will be due to the substantial remedy employed. But if the application produces a sensation of warmth, e.g., a warm compress, its effects are not due to the substance used, for that is almost a matter of indifference, but to the action of warmth itself; and the action of warmth is identical from whatever quarter it may operate. In applying cold compresses, care should be taken to mix the particular liquid employed, whether water or not with this or that substance. These substances can be made efficasious, if they are soluble at low temperatures, when used in cold water. On the other hand—with the exception of ethereal [etheric] substances which are powerfully aromatic and exercise their specific effects even at high temperatures—there will be little specific substantial effect in the case of materials which are easily soluble when in solid form. They do not easily operate even in warm compresses and hot baths. Substances which are phosphoric or sulphuric, as, e.g., sulphur itself, used as accessories to warm baths, exercise their peculiar healing properties most fully.

Such interactions as those I have just cited, must be minutely observed. And in this connection it will be of great service to you to establish a sort of “Primary Phenomena.” This method of establishing a kind of primary phenomena was much in use during the ages when the practice of medicine had its source in the Mysteries. Knowledge was not then expressed theoretically but in primary phenomena, as for instance: “If thou takest into thyself honey or wine, thou dost thereby strengthen from within the forces of the cosmos working into thee from outside.” This might be expressed in other terms: “by doing so thou strengthenest the actual forces of the ego”:—the meaning would be the same. This way of putting things makes them very easy to survey. “But if thou dost rub thy body thoroughly with an oily stuff thou dost weaken thereby the harmful action of the forces of earth”: that is to say, of the forces opposed to the action of the ego, within the organism. And these ancients, these physicians of old, have also said: “If thou findest the right measure between the strengthening by sweetness from within, and the weakening by oil from without, then thou shalt live long.” We might say: “Let the action of oil avert from your organism the harmful influence of earth; and if you are able to do so and not constitutionally too feeble, let the forces of your ego be strengthened with wine or honey; then you strengthen the forces that lead you to a green old age.” Such are the prescriptions and statements in axiomatic form. The aim was to guide mankind aright through facts, not doctrines. And we must return to this method. For among the multitudinous and various materials of the external world we can find our way far better in the light of primary phenomena than by abstract laws of nature, which always let the student down when he has to approach some concrete case.

Now some of these primary phenomena are most easily enunciated, and I should like to give you some examples; here is one: “Put your feet in water and you will stimulate forces in the lower abdomen, which will promote the formation of blood.” This is one which is full of suggestion. “If you wash your head you stimulate forces in the lower abdomen, which regulate evacuation.” Such rules are illuminating for they embrace law, reality. The human being is there, when I express something of this sort; for the things are of course meaningless unless one is thinking of the human being, and it is essential to keep man in mind in the case of all these things.

These matters are more connected with the spatial and regional interactions of forces in the human organism. There is, however, also an interaction in time which is unmistakably conspicuous in cases where a man has received such mistaken treatment during childhood or early youth, that throughout the whole of life, what should have been developed in childhood and youth, remains lacking, and only that is evolved which should be evolved in the adult. To put it in another way. It is the nature of man that he develops certain forces in early youth which then become formative for the organism. But not everything formed in the youthful organism finds its right use and place in life during the years of youth. We form and build up our bodies in youth, in order to obtain and conserve some things which can only be active and evident in later life. Thus, in childhood certain organs;—as I would call them—are built up, which are not meant for use during childhood; but in later life they can no longer be acquired. They are therefore held in reserve, so to speak, for use in adult age. Let us assume that no heed is paid to the fact that until the teeth are cut a child should be educated by imitation, and that after dentition, education and teaching should attach great importance to authority. If both imitation and authority are thus ignored, the organs which appertain to the adult may be used prematurely. Of course the materialistic attitude of today may deprecate the use of imitation or authority as principles of education. But their significance is great, because of their effects, and they reverberate throughout the organism. It must, however, be understood that the child must live with his whole soul within the act of imitation. Here is an example. Suppose you educate the child in liking and eating some wholesome food, by accustoming it to copy the adult's enjoyment of that food: in this manner you will combine the principle of imitation by action, with the cultivation of an appetite for suitable food. The imitative act is continued into the organism. The same suggestions holds good with respect to authority in education. If those organs (they are naturally subtle organisations) which should normally remain latent till the later age are called into activity during childhood, then the dreadful Dementia Præcox may result. That is the true origin of Dementia Præcox. And a sound objective education is a splendid remedial method. We are at present making efforts in this direction at the Waldorf School, but cannot as yet extend them to an earlier stage of growth before the sixth or seventh year. But when we are at last in a position to put the whole educational process at the service of the knowledge that spiritual science offers—on the lines of my booklet Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy, Dementia Præcox will be on the way to disappear. For such educational methods will avert the danger of premature and precocious employment of organs essential to the adult. So much for the general principles of sound education.

There is also the opposite phenomenon. It consists in this: we also tend to accumulate and conserve what should only be unfolded as an activity of the organs in youth. Throughout life there are, to be sure, calls on the organs which are destined to function mainly in childhood and youth; but this continued activity must become less vigorous, or harm may ensue. Here is the domain in which owing to different causes such theories as that of psychoanalysis have been able to confuse the whole of human thinking. Indeed it is true that the most harm in life is not done by the greatest mistakes, for such great errors can soon be refuted, but by conceptions containing a grain of truth, for this grain of truth is accepted, exaggerated and abused.

What are the facts which support the rise of conceptions of psycho-analytic lines? Because of the current habits of life today (which are in many respects opposed to nature, and in no way give man the necessary adaptation to the external environment)—much that makes a deep impression on the human mind in childhood, is not worked up. Thus there remain in the life of the soul, factors not adequately embodied by the organism; for all that operates in the soul's life, however slightly, has its continuance, or should have it, in some effect on the organism. Our children, however, receive many impressions so contrary to normal conditions that they remain confined to the soul, they cannot forthwith transmute themselves into organic impressions. Thus they remain, as it were, in the soul where they are and as they do not share in the whole development of man, they remain as isolated impulses of the soul. Had they kept pace with man's whole organic development, had they not remained isolated impulses, they would not take possession, at a later stage, of the organs which are destined only to function at maturity and which have no longer the task of turning to account the impressions of youth. Something wrong is thus brought about in the whole human being. He is obliged to let the soul's isolated impulses work upon organs which are no longer fitted for it. There then result the manifestations which may certainly be diagnosed by means of a psychoanalytic method, wisely employed. Careful interrogatories will bring to light certain things in the life of the soul which are simply not worked up, and which have a devastating effect on organs already too old for such working up. But the main thing for consideration is that by this route it is never possible to effect a cure, but only to diagnose a condition. If we keep to the purely diagnostic use of psycho-analysis, we are employing a method which has its justification when used with due discretion. Note well, with due and honourable discretion, so that there may be no such occurrences as I can testify have happened in some cases and for which there is corroborative written evidence. Such occurrences, for example as the employment of servants and attendants, as spies to furnish intimate particulars which are then used as bases for catechising the patients in question. That kind of thing happens sufficiently often to constitute a grave danger and gross abuse. But apart from this—for after all, in these matters so much depends on the ethical standard of the persons concerned—we can admit that from the standpoint of diagnosis, there is some truth in psycho-analysis. But it is impossible to achieve therapeutic results on the lines laid down by psycho-analysts. And that is again linked up with a characteristic of the present age.

It is the tragedy of materialism, that it leads directly away from the knowledge of matter; that it hinders the comprehension of the properties of matter. Materialism is in fact not so detrimental to the proper recognition of the spiritual as it is to the recognition of the spiritual in matter. The repudiation of the conception that spiritual activity is everywhere at work in matter, represses so much that must not be repressed if we are to form a sound conception of our human life. If I am a “materialist” I cannot possibly ascribe to matter all the characteristics we have discussed in these studies. For it is ruled out as merely preposterous to ascribe all those qualities to substances which they in fact possess. That means one is estranged from the knowledge of the material sphere. One no longer talks of phosphoric manifestations, saline manifestations, and so forth, because “all that sort of thing” is dismissed out of hand, as nonsense. This loss of the knowledge of spiritual factors in material substances deprives us of the systematic study of formative processes, and above all, it means the loss of the perception that every organ of man has actually a twofold task, one related to an orientation to consciousness, the other, its opposite, to an orientation to the purely organic process.

The recognition of this fact has been particularly obscured in a matter with which we must now briefly deal: in the study of teeth. From the materialistic point of view the teeth are more or less regarded as mere chewing implements. But they are more than that. Their double nature is easily apparent, for if they are tested chemically, they appear to be part of our bone system; but ontogenetically, they emerge from the skin system. The teeth have a double nature and office, but the second of the two is deeply hidden. Compare, for a moment, a set of human teeth with that of an animal. You will find most conspicuous in the latter what I pointed out in the first of our lessons here, the heavy down-draw weight, the massiveness characteristic of the whole skeleton, which I pointed out in the case of the ape. In man, on the other hand, the teeth themselves show in a certain way the effect of the vertical line. This is because our teeth are not only implements for chewing, they are also very essential implements of suction; they have a mechanical external action, and also an extremely fine, spiritualised inward sucking action. We must inquire: what is it that the teeth draw into the body by means of this suction? So long as they are able to do so, they suck in fluorine. Our teeth suck in fluorine. They are instruments of suction for that substance. Man needs fluorine in his organism in very minute amounts, and if deprived of its effects—here I must say something which will perhaps shock you—he becomes too clever. He acquires a degree of cleverness which almost destroys him. The fluorine dosage restores the necessary amount of stupidity, the mental dullness, which we need if we are to be human beings. We require constant dosage with fluorine in very small amounts as a protection against excessive cleverness. The premature decay of the teeth, which is caused by fluorine action, points to excessive demands on the process of fluorine suction. This indicates that man is stimulated to self-defence against dullness through some agency, with which we shall deal presently, although time forbids detailed treatment. Man as it were disintegrates his teeth so that the fluorine action should not go beyond a certain point and make him dull. The interactions of cause and effect are very subtle here. The teeth become defective in order that the individual may not become too stupid! Such is the intimate connection between what is of benefit to man on the one hand, and what tends to cause harm on the other. Under certain circumstances we have need of the action of fluorine, in order not to become too clever. But we can injure ourselves by excess in this respect, and then our organic activity destroys and decays the teeth.

I beg you to consider these suggestions thoroughly; for they are connected with things of the greatest significance in the human organism.

In the short time available to us for this therapeutic portion of our meeting, it will naturally only be possible to speak in a general way about specific therapeutic measures. On the other hand, it is always questionable whether one should speak in detail about specifics, especially in medicine, if one is not speaking to a purely professional audience, as was the case when I gave a series of lectures in the spring (see Note 1). For the future development of humanity, it will indeed be necessary that the widest circles are familiar with the guiding principles of healing in order that a trusting relationship, well-grounded in facts, may develop between physician and patient. Though it will be necessary for such an understanding of the guidelines for medicine and social hygiene to be sought in the widest circles, it will nevertheless remain undesirable for an excessively dilettantish and lay judgment to intervene in medical matters; due to the state of medicine in modern times, this happens far too frequently today.

It must be firmly stressed that I have absolutely no intention of encouraging any kind of quackery. Within our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science we must instead strive to bring spiritual scientific knowledge into a true medical art based on a methodical study of medical science. We therefore will not align ourselves with those who, out of an unlimited ignorance concerning what they are actually speaking about, attack nearly everything they call academic medicine and the like. We should certainly not align ourselves with these people.

Something else must also be considered in discussing matters like those that will be raised today. Though in a certain sense this has been the case for a long time, something has permeated medicine particularly in modern times; this aspect has asserted itself in our time with all the vehemence with which matters tend to assert themselves in our chaotic social order: this is the formation of partisan groups even within the medical field. And these parties struggling among themselves are no better than political parties. In general it is quite clear that this cannot support the development of medicine. The battle between the allopaths and the homoeopaths, between the so-called academic physicians and those using natural remedies and so on, has generated a great deal of confusion in the understanding of medicine that is required in the wider circles of humanity. I needed to make these introductory remarks today so that what I have to say will not be placed on false ground.

I have already directed your attention to how, on the one hand, the soul-spiritual stands within the human process of organization; this then proliferates, as it were, in the physical processes of illness so that the soul-spiritual cannot work separately from the physical organ, as it should, thus wreaking havoc in it. When this happens we are faced with all those illnesses that tend toward new formations in the organism .

By contrast, we are also concerned with illnesses in which the soul-spiritual develops in such a way that it does not take sufficient hold of the physical organism, whereupon certain parts of the physical organism are abandoned, not to processes taken hold of by the human organization but to subordinate processes of natural existence. In this way organs “physicalize”—if I may use such a word—to an excessive degree rather than permeating themselves soul-spiritually. The soul-spiritual then flows out without being encompassed in the right way by the ego-consciousness, and as a result all the forms of illness arise that we designate inaccurately as mental illnesses (see Note 2).

This view must be modified, however, the moment one proceeds from a sound physiology to a sound pathology and therapy; it must he modified by being developed still more precisely. It must incorporate the view of the nature of the human being that has been presented here repeatedly, though in very different connections from those we require today: this is the view of the threefold nature of the human organism.

On the one hand we have to do with a threefold nature of the soul being: in forming mental images, in feeling, and in will impulses. This threefold nature of the soul being, however, corresponds very precisely with a threefolding of the physical-bodily being: a kind of head system or nerve-sense system, a rhythmic system, and a metabolic-limb system. I must stress particularly that this constitution of the human organism must not be understood merely intellectually but through inner perception. A person would be unable to comprehend how matters actually stood if he remained with an external picture, if he understood the head system as something that simply ends at the neck, the circulatory or rhythmic system as being encompassed by the trunk, while the digestive system encompasses the limb system, the sexual system.

What is important here is that while the nerve-sense system is located primarily in the head, it nevertheless extends over the entire remaining organism as such. We may thus say that when we speak here with an anthroposophical purpose about the nerve-sense system, it is the system of functions in the human organism (for we are concerned here not with spatial limitations but functional limitations) that is located essentially in the head; nevertheless the head activity extends over the entire human being so that in a certain sense the whole human being is head. The same is true for the other systems. It was thus mere foolishness when a superficial professor of medicine, who did not intend really to study these matters but only wished to discredit them to the world, spoke about the “belly-system” in order to ridicule what is actually referred to by the metabolic system. He has merely shown his total lack of understanding for how the threefold constitution of the human being is functional, and not defined by spatial limitations.

When an individual really understands this constitution of the human being—about which many lectures could be given to describe it in full detail—he reaches the point of being able to perceive clearly the distinctions between the head system, and therefore the nerve-sense system, on the one hand, the metabolic-limb system on the other hand, and the mediating system, the rhythmic system, whose essential role is to bring about the balance between the two other systems.

If we thus wish to encompass the entire nature of the human being, we must consider the following. The actual conceptual and perceptual activity of the human being has as its basis—one cannot even say as its tool, but as its physical basis—everything that takes place physically in the nerve-sense system. It is not the case, as is suggested by modern psychology and physiology, that those processes connected primarily with the feeling and willing systems also take place in the nerve-sense system. Such an opinion does not hold up before a more precise study of the issue. You will find such a precise study, at least suggested in its outlines, in my book, Riddles of the Soul (see Note 3).

Much detailed work must still be done in this regard, however. Then what spiritual science has to say with certainty from its side will be elaborated from the other side, from the physical-empirical side. It will become clear that man's feeling is not connected in a primary way with the nerve-sense system but with the rhythmic system, that just as the nerve-sense system corresponds to mentally active perception, so the rhythmic system corresponds to feeling. Only through the interaction of the rhythmic system with the nerve-sense system, by the roundabout route of the rhythm in the cerebral fluid, pulsating against the nerve-sense system, is the nerve-sense system engaged as the carrier of the conceptual life. Then, if we raise our feelings to mental images, the dull, dreamlike life of feelings is perceived and pictured by us in an inner way. Just as the life of feeling is directly connected with the rhythmic system and is indirectly mediated by it, so the life of will is connected directly with the metabolic system. This connection in turn acts in a secondary way, since metabolism takes place also in the brain, of course, so that the metabolic system in its functions presses against the nerve-sense system. In this way we are able to bring forth the mental images of our will impulses, which otherwise would unfold in a dull sleep-life within our organism.

Thus you can see that in the human organism we have three different systems that carry the soul life in different ways. These systems do not simply differ from one another; they actually oppose each other (as I said, I can only sketch these matters today) so that on one side we have the nerve-sense system and on the other side all that constitutes the functions of the metabolic system, the metabolic-limb system (see drawing). Regarding the connection of the metabolism with the limbs, you can arrive at appropriate images if you simply consider the influence of the moving limbs on the metabolism. This influence is much greater than is ordinarily assumed in outer consciousness.

These two systems, however, the nerve-sense system and the metabolic-limb system, are in opposition, are polar opposites in a certain way. This polar opposition must be studied carefully in order to arrive at a sound pathology and therapy, particularly a pathology that could lead organically over into therapy; it must be studied carefully in all its countless individual details. If one enters into the detailed effects, it becomes evident that what I suggested yesterday is truly the case.

Within everything connected with the head system or nerve-sense system, we have breakdown processes, so that while our conceptual activity takes place in the waking state, when we perceive and form mental images, this activity is not bound up with growth and upbuilding processes but with breakdown processes, processes of elimination. This can be grasped if one looks in a sound way at what empirical-physiological science has already presented concerning this. There is already empirical evidence or to express it better, empirical corroboration—for what spiritual science provides through its perception. You need only pursue what certain inspired physiologists are able to present about the physical processes in the nervous system, which unfold as parallel phenomena to perceiving and forming mental images. You will see then that this assertion is certainly well supported, the assertion that when we think, when we think and perceive wakefully, we have to do with processes of elimination and breakdown, not with upbuilding processes. By contrast, where the will processes are mediated for the human being in the metabolic-limb system we are concerned with upbuilding processes.

All individual functions in the human being definitely interact with one another, however. If we look at the matter correctly, we must say that the upbuilding processes from below work up into the breakdown processes, and that the breakdown processes from above work down into the upbuilding processes. Then if you pursue this logically you have the rhythmic processes as a balancing system, as functions introducing the balance between the upbuilding processes and the breakdown processes, rhythmic processes that press breakdown into build-up and build-up into breakdown.

If we do not study the matter purely outwardly, we see that in the so-called blood circulation of the heart, in the aeration of the human body, we have everywhere special processes, as it were, that are somehow interrupted. I cannot go further now into this interruption, which has its purpose, but everywhere we have a specialization of this rhythmic curve that I have sketched here (see drawing). The course of breathing is a special aspect of this curve, the process that you draw if you follow the course of the blood from the heart upward toward the head or respectively toward the lungs and down to the rest of the body. Thus you have a specialization of these processes. In short, if you enliven what is suggested here, you penetrate into the functional tissue of the human organism, not in the dead way that is customary but in a living way. To do so you must enliven your own mental images. A mobile image of the human organism can thus be pictured. The human organism cannot be encompassed with static, abstract mental images, as modern physiology and pathology would like to encompass it today; it must instead be grasped with mental images in movement, with mental images that can really penetrate into the working of something that has inner movement, that is in no way merely a mechanical interaction of organs situated at rest in relation to one another.

We thus can see that within the human organism there is basically a continuous interaction between the breakdown processes, the deadening processes, and the upbuilding processes, the growth or proliferative processes. The human organization cannot be grasped without this activity.

What is actually present there, however? Let's look at the matter more precisely. If the breakdown process of the nerve-sense organization works into the metabolic-limb system through rhythm, something is present there that works against the metabolic-limb system, something that is a poison for this metabolic-limb system. The reverse is also the case, that what is present in the upbuilding system, working into the head system in rhythm, is a poison for the head system. And since, as I have indicated, the systems are spread out over the entire organism, a poisoning and unpoisoning are continuously taking place everywhere in the human organism, and this is brought into balance by the rhythmic processes.

We are therefore unable to regard such a natural process as taking its course one-sidedly, in the way that one normally pictures things, so that healthy processes are simply designated as normal. Rather we look into two processes working against one another, where one is a process that is thoroughly illness-engendering for the other. We simply cannot live in the physical organism at all without continuously exposing our metabolic-limb system to the causes of illness from the head system and exposing the head system to the causes of illness from the metabolic system. A scale that is not balanced properly is thrown out of balance by entirely natural laws so that the beam does not rest on the horizontal; similarly life, because it is in constant movement within itself, does not simply exist in a state of balanced rest but rather exists in a state of balance that can deviate in both directions toward irregularities.

Healing, then, means simply that if the head system, for example, is working in a way too strongly poisonous on the metabolic system, its poisoning effect is relieved, its poisonous effect is taken away. If, on the other hand, the metabolic-limb system is working in a way too strongly poisonous on the head system, which means working over abundantly: then its poisonous effect must also be removed.

It is possible to arrive at a comprehensive view of this realm, however, only if one now extends what can be observed in the human being to the observation of all nature, if one is able to grasp all nature in a spiritual scientific sense. If you look at the plant-forming process, for example, you can see clearly and macroscopically the upward striving of plant-forming processes, a striving away from the center of the earth. You may make a stimulating study of this metamorphosing formative striving of the plants, at least in a rudimentary way, on the basis of the guidelines offered in Goethe's Metamorphosis of the Plants. In Goethe's Metamorphosis of the Plants there is a sketchy rendering of the first composition, the first elements that are to be studied about the nature of the plant in this direction, but the direction of such a study must be developed further. The initial guidelines must be pursued, for then we may obtain a living view of everything involved in plant growth: when rooting in the soil the plant's upward-striving develops in a negative direction in the root; the plant begins to grow, then grows upward, overcoming the force of attraction of the earth prevailing in the root; then it wrestles through other forces in order to come ultimately to blossom, fruit, and seed formation. A great deal takes place upon this path.

On this path, for example, an opposing force once again intervenes. The opposing force that intervenes can be well observed if you study, simply to take an example, the common birch, betula alba. Pursue very precisely the process that takes place from the root formation through the trunk formation, particularly the bark formation. Consider how, on the basis of everything that works together in the trunk and bark formation, there develops what later comes into manifestation in the leaf formation. This can be studied particularly well in a spiritual scientific way if the still-brownish young birch leaves are studied in the spring.

If this is studied vividly, one also receives a view of forces self-metamorphosing, forces that are active there within the plant. One receives a view of how, on the one hand, there is a formative force active in the process of plant formation that works from below upward. On the other hand it is also possible to behold the force that retards, which in the root still, works strongly as the force of gravity but which, as the plant wrestles itself free from the earthly substance out into the air, is able to work together in another way with the upward-striving force. We then reach an interesting stage, a stage very helpful in understanding how in plant formation during this upward-striving process certain salts, potassium salts, are deposited in the birch bark; this is simply the result of the interaction of the forces working downward with the forces working upward, tending toward protein-formation, you could say, toward what I would like to designate as the albuminizing force formation.

In this way it is possible to penetrate into the plant-forming process. I can only indicate this here. By looking at how the potassium salts are deposited in the birch bark, how something wrestles itself free from this force drawing downward (a process somewhat comparable to what happens when a salt precipitates out of a solution), coming to the process that takes place when the solution rids itself of the salt, we come to see, to grasp in a living way, the process of protein formation, the process I would designate as the albuminizing process. We thus have a path to study what outwardly surrounds the human being, to study it vividly.

Then when we look back at the human being, we can see how, fundamentally speaking, the human being has the same form of forces in him—if we consider the breakdown process working from above downward—that work from below upward in the plant. We can see that in what is active in the forces working downward from the head system toward the metabolic-limb system there is something like an inverted plant element active within us. We can see that in fact those forces that we see sent upward in plant growth work in a downward direction in the human being. If the human being inappropriately holds back this process of plant formation active within him, so that he doesn't permeate the bodily life in the right way with what is active in the head—the astral, the ego-being—and if this then penetrates the bodily nature, this penetration expressing itself within the body, then something is held up there, something that should proceed into the human organism. We thus have to do with a pathological phenomenon like that which confronts us, for example, in cases of rheumatism or gouty conditions. If we study what is brought about in the human organism when this breakdown process is dammed up in a certain way, we discover its effects in the process of rheumatism, in the process of gout-formation, and so on.

Let us now shift our gaze again from within the organism to a process of plant formation like the one we have in the betula alba. From this we can arrive at the following. We look on the one hand into what takes place in salt formation and on the other hand into protein formation. We find, if we understand this process of protein formation in the right way, that the opposite process is within it and is held up there. We find held up in the organism that process which should take place in a way similar to the correct process of albuminizing in the leaves of the birch. We are thus able to come to the relationship between those processes that take place in the birch leaves, for example, and the processes within the organism if we process what is in the birch leaves into remedies. We can then give these remedies to the human being, by means of which we can bring about a healing, because the remedy correctly opposes this damming-up process that occurs in rheumatism and gout. In this way we look both at what is taking place outside in nature and at what takes place within the organism, and then we arrive at an idea of how we should guide the healing forces.

On the other hand we can see instances when the breakdown processes proceed in such a way that the organism cannot restrain them so that they pour themselves downward, and the rhythmic system does not press them back in the right way; they thus reach the periphery of the body pressing outward, as it were, toward the skin. Then we get inflammatory conditions on the outer portion of the human being, we get skin eruptions and the like. If we now look hack again to our plant, to the betula alba, we find the opposing process in the disposition of the potassium salts in the birch bark: we thus become able to see how we can fight against the process of skin eruption, which is an excessive function of exudation within the human being, by preparing a remedy from the birch bark.

We are therefore able to study how plant processes, how mineral processes, are active, and we grasp the connections between what is outside in nature and what is active within the human being. In other words, medical empiricism, therapeutic empiricism, ascends to what Goethe calls in his sense—not now in the intellectual sense but in his sense the rational stage of science. We arrive at a science as therapy, which is able really to penetrate into the connections.

These things are not so simple, for one must study things in detail, at least in accordance with certain types, at first in accordance with secret types of the human personality and in accordance with secrets of natural existence. It should not be assumed that if the process has been studied in an example such as the betula alba, an overview has already been reached of what needs to be considered. In each different plant-forming process—for example in the horse chestnut or whatever—these formative processes will manifest themselves in an essentially different way. What has been indicated here should not in any way lead to a generalized twaddle but to a very serious and extensive study.

Now I wish to direct my words particularly to the students here. If this study is undertaken in a rational way, it need not drive you into a panic regarding the extent of study necessary, for if everything now present as examination-ballast falls away—to speak in Paracelsus' terms—and is replaced by something active, leading in this way to a rational view of a therapeutic pathology and a pathological therapy, students will have to study not more but less. And because this study will permeate you with life, it will bring forth a much greater enthusiasm than what leads you to the human being today, yielding only the ability to see organs. Such organs are by no means at rest and can be understood only if they are grasped in their living function and in their interaction with other organs, can be understood only if this organization is studied and if one strives to enter completely into the functional element. We need an outer natural science that is also striving to reach the functional element.

It is absolutely necessary to study in parallel the inner process in the human being, that peculiar process taking place as poisoning and poisoning effects that have fallen out of balance, and those processes that take place in the natural order. And because the outer relates itself in a polar way to the inner, the outer processes must be used in a certain way polarically. By this means we can be guided into pathology, or, said better, into a therapeutic pathology and a pathological therapy.

I have only been able to suggest here what is necessary to direct the steps needed to heal medical study, and was only able to suggest how spiritual science wishes to work into this medical study. This evening I will give you a few more examples, to show you how intuitively looking together at the outer workings of nature and the workings of the inner organism can lead to therapy and to knowledge of pathology. At that time I would like to go into particular substances.

During the brief time available to me here, I have only been able to indicate the principle, as it were, concerning the example of betula alba, and this evening I will give some further indications, but in every instance I will try to hold myself to indicating only what can add to a general understanding of the human being. Proceeding from this, the physician must move into further specialization. He must enter into the specifics. To deal with specifics always requires an individual evaluation, and here it is only necessary, out of the laymen's understanding of medical directions, of medical principles, for an understanding to grow of what the physician has to undertake within the outer world.

If you consider rightly the course that an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wishes to pursue in medicine—and I will speak more about this tonight—you will really be able to say that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not wish to encourage quackery and dilettantism; rather it wishes above all to work toward a healing of science, toward a true, serious science that will itself engender social effects.

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Note 1:

Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Science and Medicine, twenty lectures given to physicians in Dornach, 1920. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1975.

Note 2:

In German, the illnesses, are called Geisteskrankheiten, diseases of the spirit as opposed to those of the body. As Steiner is speaking here of the role of the spirit in bodily-phenomena, it may be helpful to keep in mind the thought of spiritual illnesses, though in the translation we have chosen the more commonly used English equivalent, mental illnesses.

Note 3:

Rudolf Steiner, Von Seelenraetseln, 1917. Excerpts of this are published in English under the title, The Case for Anthroposophy. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1970.

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Dear friends,

Today I would like to insert into our studies a chapter of anthroposophy that we need for our examination of healthy responsibility and pathological irresponsibility as the physician and the priest must know them.

First of all it is important that we look into the question: What is really inherited by a human being? What is not inherited and must come to the human being in some other way? In evaluating healthy and sick individuals, a great deal depends upon whether one can differentiate between these two ingredients. Human beings come out of the spiritual, super-sensible worlds into the sense world: that means, they combine what is given them by heredity with what they bring from earlier earth lives and from life between death and the new birth. Then we see how they develop as a children, from day to day, from week to week. But if one does not perceive that they are four-membered beings, with physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego organization, one is not in a position to understand their development, for one does not see what part each member is playing in this development. They have different origins; they come from different worlds.

First, human beings have their physical organism. The most striking phenomenon in the physical organism is that in the first period of life they have what we call “first teeth,” which last until the time we call “change of teeth.” The teeth are only the most obvious thing that is changed at this time. For the fact is that human beings only keep the physical substance they received at birth until the change of teeth. They are constantly stripping that physical material from their form.

The process is, of course, more complicated than is implied in the brief statement that in the course of every seven or eight years a person pushes off all physical substance and replaces it. The truth is near to that, but one need only look at the change of teeth itself to realize that this picture must be modified somewhat. For if this abstract assertion were correct, we would have new teeth every seven years. We get new teeth only once. The teeth are changed once and do not undergo any other renewal. They belong in this category in the most extreme sense. As a matter of fact, the course of human life is such that the older one becomes, the more one retains of old physical substance. A replacement of by far the greatest part of the substance does indeed take place in seven- to eight-year periods; but we must distinguish what remains behind. At the seventh year it is only the adult teeth that remain. After each subsequent period there remain also certain parts of the substance that are not replaced, although the greater part is indeed replaced in the course of seven or eight years. Thus a basic statement can be made for the first seven years. Human beings strip away all the physical substance they had when they were born, keeping none of it, keeping only the forces that have lived and worked in it during those years. These forces have so appropriated the fresh new substance that was constantly being aquired that at seven the physical body has been completely renewed, even to the teeth. And from that statement the understanding must follow that the principle of heredity as our current natural science conceives of it really holds good only for the first seven years of life. Only for those first seven years is it true that a person's characteristics come from parents and grandparents. The physical body of those first seven years provides, in a certain sense, a kind of model from which the artist working in the human being (who consists now in these years of etheric body, astral body, and ego) fashions a new physical body. We see how what we bring down from spiritual worlds—our individuality, our own being—and what we receive from heredity work together in artistic reciprocal activity. If a human being is an inwardly strong individual and brings an intensely strong inner astrality and ego nature, which in turn makes the etheric body strong, then we will see a young person shooting up who from inner strength keeps very little to the model, only copies it for the general form. Naturally, the universal human model must be preserved, and therefore an affinity is already there for the inherited human form; features of it definitely remain beyond the change of teeth. Still, to thoughtful observation it will be apparent that in the case of inwardly strong individuals important changes come after the change of teeth because such individuals follow only slightly the model they inherited.

If we investigate such an individual as St. Teresa, we find that these particularly strong individualities resemble their parents very closely in the first seven years, but then in the ninth and tenth years they develop in surprising ways. Then the real individual is emerging. In the strongest sense of the word, heredity only holds good for the first life period. What seems to appear later as heredity is not really heredity but must be recognized as a copy of the inherited model. The copy may be more or less exact; even so, it is not heredity; it is a copy of the inherited characteristics. The ordinary natural scientist considers this to be simply the principle of heredity carried further. But someone who really studies the nature of humanity will perceive that there is a complete qualitative difference between the resemblance to parents before the change of teeth and the resemblance after the change of teeth. Before, the forces of heredity are active. After, the forces that copy the model are active. To be exact, one can no more say that a human being has inherited what is carried between change of teeth and puberty than one can say of an artist copying the Sistine Madonna in the Dresden Gallery that the painting has caught the qualities of the Madonna through heredity!

You can see the particular kind of work the etheric body has to do. For in the years up to the change of teeth, the astral body and ego organization participate very little. The etheric body forms a new physical human body in accordance with the model. Why? Because, like the child during the first seven years, it is not yet able to receive other than a very special kind of impression from the outer world. Here we come upon an important secret of human evolution, a secret that answers the question: What does a child really perceive? The answer lies far away from present-day ideas.

We live, shall we say, between death and a new birth (or conception) in the spiritual world. In the spiritual world we are surrounded by realities very different from those found here in the physical world. We come out of that world into the physical world and continue our life in a physical body that we receive. Now in this physical world the same forces work further, although they are hidden from human sense perception. If you look at a tree, the same spiritual forces are working in it as those you encounter between death and new birth, only they are covered over, veiled, by the physical material of the tree. Everywhere in the physical world in which we live between birth and death, spiritual forces are active behind the sense-perceptible physical entities. We can think of the activities of the spiritual world continuing into this world in which we live between birth and death.

Now in the first seven years of life the child's whole being cannot unite with anything except this spiritual reality in all the colors, all the forms, all warmth, all cold. The child is fully aware when entering this physical world of the continuing spiritual activity. This awareness gradually diminishes up to the change of teeth. A sense impression is quite different to a child than to an adult. This fact is never recognized. To a child the sense impression is something entirely spiritual. For this reason if a child's father has a fit of anger, the child is not conscious of the angry gestures but of the moral state behind the gestures. It is this that passes into the child's body. During this time, therefore, the child is working with the forces that build a physical body in accordance with the child's own model—the body that will now be the child's own—and during this time is turned entirely toward spiritual foundations and works out of spiritual forces.

What does that mean? What is really working when spiritual forces are working? Obviously colors, forms, warmth, cold, roughness, smoothness work upon the sense perceptions. But behind all that, what is the fundamental force that is working? In reality, whatever has to do with an ego nature. Only invisible spiritual beings make an impression on the child, beings who have something to do with an ego nature, above all, beings of the spiritual hierarchies higher than human beings, but also the animal group-souls, and the group-souls of the elemental beings. In reality, all this is working upon the child. And out of these spiritual forces, out of these mighty spiritual dynamics the child forms a second body from the original model. It grows and is finally present as a complete second body when the change of teeth takes place. This is the body that the human being has built for itself since birth, the first body that is it's very own, a physical body built out of the spiritual world.

Thus we have in this first life period very special laws working within all that activates the child, in all the awkwardness and uncertainty that are in the soul and with which it moves. They come from the fact that constant adjustment is having to be made to the physical world, since the child is still dreamily and half-consciously immersed in the other surrounding world: the spiritual world. Someday when medicine reaches a proper spiritual outlook, this interplay between the spiritual and physical worlds during the first seven years of life will be seen as the true cause of the so-called “children's diseases.” Then we will have the explanation for a problem that today is solved in the medical books by empty words and formal elucidations that do not lead to any reality.

The etheric body has a great deal to do in these first seven years of life. It works quietly and steadily to develop the faculties that it will possess in the second seven-year period: independent faculties of memory leading toward the intellect. Whoever has an eye for it can see the greatest transformation in the child's soul-life when the first life period goes over into the second. The etheric body is now relieved of the work it had to accomplish—in the full sense of the word—to build the second body. It is relieved, freed. How it is freed, one can only realize if one perceives that at fourteen years not only the teeth remain but still more that had to be renewed, like the teeth, in the first life period. This now remains in the physical-material substance. What remains frees the etheric body—itself becomes free in the etheric body. Quantitatively it is a small thing, but qualitatively it is something of tremendous importance. It is what now becomes tremendously active as soul attributes, soul characteristics. What the human being saves by not having to create a third set of teeth (and much else that is taken care of by evolution in the same way as the teeth) enables something of the etheric body to be “left over.” What flowed during the first seven years into the physical development and is now “left over” from the physical development works now purely in the realm of soul, its nature depending upon the individual. With the faculties upon which you call as a teacher in school, the faculties you train, the child accomplished the great change from milk teeth to second teeth, and much else. With the forces that are saved by not having to form a third set of teeth, the child begins to develop soul faculties. This takes place in the depths of human nature. During the first seven years these soul forces had been entirely embedded in the physical development. We have to comprehend physical development as a soul-spiritual activity just as much as a physical activity. We see a spiritual entity active in the body in the first seven years of the human being, in the fullest sense of the word.

How does this relate to general human evolution? Those forces with which the human soul works in the first seven years of life are in the cosmos; they are sun forces. It is not only physical-etheric rays that stream down from the sun: in those physical-etheric sun rays, forces are streaming down from the sun that are identical with the forces by which our etheric body renews our physical body in the first seven years of life. It is the Sun Being (Sonnenentität) that works there. Look at the child—how the child works at a second physical body, copying from the model! The child is absorbing pure forces from the sunshine. One must understand that—how humanity stands within the cosmos! And when the child has certain etheric forces released at the change of teeth, they then work back upon the astral organization and ego organization. Then in the second life period human beings have access to what could not reach them at all in the first period. They now have access to the moon forces.

The etheric forces in the first seven years of life are sun forces. At the change of teeth we have access to the moon forces; these are identical with the forces of our astral body. Thus at the change of teeth human beings move from the sun sphere—in which, however, we also still remain, for it remains active in us—into the moon sphere. And now between change of teeth and puberty we work on ourselves with the moon forces. With the moon forces we now build our second own body (the third earthly body), in which not so much is replaced as in the first life period, but even so a great deal. Again forces remain behind, but they are now of an astral nature, and they are now transforming the soul. They were freed from their work on the body when we reached puberty. We have now reached a period in which we manifest certain forces that are now free in the soul, forces that had to work in the physical body between the ages of seven and fourteen.

So we work entirely in the first life period with what comes to us from the sun. And with the school child between change of teeth and puberty, it is sun forces that have now become free for soul activity. That is the great powerful fact we find in human evolution, that if one is educating a child's soul between change of teeth and puberty, one has to do purely with sun forces. The child-soul is so intimately related to what lives in the sunshine! One's heart can rejoice in such knowledge. The knowledge really sheds light on the relation between humanity and cosmos.

Moon forces are active in this second life period in the bodily development; they are not yet freed for the soul-life. They become free at puberty, and then they join the work on the soul. The change that takes place in the soul-life at puberty is caused by the fact that moon forces are now impressing themselves into the soul-life. So what a young person does in all kinds of behavior after the onset of puberty is a working together of sun and moon forces.

Thus we see into the depths of human evolution. We will stay clear of speaking of heredity in the crude sense in which natural science speaks of it. We will look in the opposite direction, to see what lives in the human activity of the child. It is the sun that lives in all the human activity of the child, and in the child's human thinking.

It is the sun that streams to us from the stone—for a stone has no light of its own, it can only reflect the sun's light to us. The natural researcher grants you that fact—but that is the very smallest, the most abstract detail! The child also reflects the sun forces back to us, between the seventh and fourteenth years. Just as we can designate the light reflected from the stone as sunlight streamed back to us, so we can designate what the child does in the second life period as “sun.” Sun is not merely there where it seems to be concentrated. This physical notion, that the sun is only there is like the notion of someone who looks at the soup in a soup bowl and sees a blob of fat floating on the top of it and thinks that the blob of fat is the soup.

Yes, our physical ideas are often very childish, and if one uncovers them and shows them for what they are, then people laugh. One could wish there were the same reaction to much that is happening today in the name of science, because it is pretty laughable. When someone takes the blob of fat to be the soup itself, that's the same as when that gold ball up there above us is regarded as the entire sun. In reality the sun fills the whole world.

Now let us look into the connection between the moon forces and the forces of reproduction. The forces of reproduction now gradually form the child's own second body that is built up between the seventh and fourteenth years and is finished when puberty begins. The human being takes in the reproductive forces during this time; this is plainly moon activity. These forces relate entirely to moon activity. They are the result of moon activity.

And now we reach the life period in which we must form our own third body (the fourth when counted from an external view), the time from puberty to the beginning of the twenties. The division of time in the later years is no longer so exact as the time between change of teeth and puberty. Now there is always more physical substance remaining behind; it stays fixed in the human being, it becomes permanent structure. Gradually a great deal of permanent structure accumulates. The older a person becomes, the less material is stripped away from the bones and replaced. Also in the rest of the organism certain parts need a longer time to separate off. And one can see a simple fact in connection with the teeth: that once one has got one's second set of teeth, whether one still has them later depends upon how long they last—just as with a knife, one only has it as long as it lasts. The knife can't renew itself. Teeth can't renew themselves either, really.

Obviously everything is in flow: there is renewal in the first place, but then it goes over into the state of nonrenewal. The teeth maintain their life process at a much slower tempo than the rest of the organism, so far as intensity is concerned. But therefore in reverse, the tempo is faster so far as quality is concerned, for they actually become bad before the other parts of the organism—for the reason that the other parts can always renew themselves. If the teeth were subject to the same laws as many other parts of the human organism, there wouldn't have to be any dentists. On the other hand, if the other parts of the organism were subject to the same laws as the teeth, we would all die young in this modern civilization of ours.

But now to go on. We are active in our organism in the first seven years of life with the forces of the sun, in the second seven years with the forces of the moon. In this second period the sun forces remain and the moon forces combine with them. In the third seven-year period, from puberty into the twenties, much more delicate forces are taken in, coming from the other planets. These other planetary forces appear in the human growth process, and because they work much less strongly than the sun or moon, their influence is outwardly much less visible. They had been working in the body between the fourteenth and the twenty-first years. Now at twenty-one, although it is hardly noticeable, they begin to work in the area of soul and spirit. Whoever has insight can see this remarkable change. Up to that moment only sun and moon have spoken out of human deeds. Now planetary forces modify that sun and moon activity. Actually people's coarse methods of observation afford very little capacity for grasping this change. But it is there.

Knowledge of these connections is necessary for someone concerned with the human being in health and in illness. For what do we really know of a human being, shall we say in the eleventh or twelfth year, if we don't know that the moon forces are working there? After that period, even though there are continually fewer parts to be renewed, the person must still renew them. Up to the twenty-first or twenty-second year, the sun, moon, and planets are working in succession into human growth. Then from the twenty-first to the twenty-eighth year the constellations of the fixed stars work. To be sure, this escapes ordinary observation. Only mystery wisdom tells of the entire zodiac playing into the human being between the beginning and the end of the twenties. Then the world becomes severe. It no longer wants to work into a person; it becomes harsh. Of this strange new relation of the human being to the world in the twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth year—that the world hardens toward us—of this, today's science hardly knows anything. Aristotle taught it to Alexander when he told him that we push against the crystal heaven and find it hard. Thus “the crystal heaven,” beyond the sphere of the fixed stars, acquires meaning for human comprehension. And one begins to realize that when we come to the end of our twenties, we find no more forces in the cosmos for our own renewal. Why do we not die, then, at twenty-eight years? Well, the surrounding world does in fact let us die at twenty-eight. It is true. Whoever sees humanity's relation to the world, whoever looks consciously out into the world, must say, “O world, in reality you sustain me only until my twenty-eighth year!” Only when one realizes this does one finally begin to understand the real nature of the human being.

For now what happens when the world withdraws its formative forces—forces that previously we had always been free to use to build ourself up? At this remarkable moment, when in the twenty-eighth year we begin to show clearly that the earlier forces of growth are now completely gone, some people begin to die off. Some hold on a little longer to the forces of growth that are flowing away. But even Goethe had grown smaller when he measured himself carefully. This was when he began to work again on the second part of Faust. Earlier he had already begun to fade. From the moment when the world deserts us, we have to manage our renewal ourselves, out of forces we have received up to that moment. Certainly when the parts of our organism that can be renewed are becoming fewer and fewer, we cannot work to give ourselves a new body in the same glorious measure that children use up to the change of teeth, when they are forming their first very own body from the model. But we have collected many, many forces from sun and moon and stars which we are carrying within us and which we need when at twenty-eight we have to begin to renew our physical-material body ourselves. This is the moment in earth-life when we find that we are now given complete responsibility for our human form. This moment of our life when we are put entirely on our own is the point of time toward which we have been striving, and from which we must go on. (Plate III, middle) We strive from childhood when we are receiving many cosmic forces, strive more and more toward a point lying at the end of our twenties, when we no longer build our growth out of cosmic forces. Whatever we do after that moment, we do from forces out of our own body. In the middle is the point at which we stop working with cosmic forces and begin to develop forces out of our own body.

We often find a premature activity happening in some child from forces out of the child's own body. We become aware of it from certain pathological symptoms the child shows from the bones, for instance, becoming brittle, and particularly from becoming fat. But the connection between these things is not easily seen. In every moment of life a person is either striving toward this twenty-eighth-year point or away from it. You must realize that it is a kind of zero point, a kind of hypomochlion, a zero moment in time when we stand between ourselves and the world. Always in our inner dynamics we are striving toward it or from it. Whatever is happening in us is a striving toward a zero or away from a zero, something we do toward or away from nothingness. We are striving toward the point where the world is no longer active and we are not yet active. Between the two conditions is a kind of zero. There is something in us that is oriented toward nothingness. It is this that makes us free beings; that is why we can hold responsibility. It is rooted in the human constitution that we are responsible free beings, because at the moment of transfer from the world to ourselves we go through a point of zero. Just as the beam of a pair of scales goes through a point of zero from right to left, from left to right, and that point does not follow the laws to which the rest of the scales is subject. You can think when you have a pair of scales, (Plate III, right) here the mechanical laws you have learned are in force; this gives the scales an exact form—either this above and that below or the opposite. That is the law of scales, the law of leverage. You can carry the scales around; their relation remains the same everywhere, subject always to those mechanical laws wherever you take them—except at this point. This point is free. You can carry the point around as if it were not connected to a pair of scales: the scales remain unchanged. And so it is, when you take hold of yourself in your soul experiences at that point toward which first you strive, from which afterward you strive away: first the world is active, afterward you yourself, and here nothing is active. With the tendency toward and the tendency from, here where a hypomochlion sits, here can live freely that human capacity which is determined neither by nature nor by the world. Here is the point of origin of human freedom. Here is where responsibility is born.

If, therefore, one wants to be able to judge the degree of responsibility in, for instance, a person thirty-five years old—and I mean professionally, not merely a layman's opinion, or that of a dilettante—then one must ask oneself, has too much, perhaps, worked over from this person's abnormal development up to the point at the end of the twenties? Is the point moved more toward youth or more toward age? A person is properly responsible if the point is normal, if judging the whole individual from external life one can decide that the point is normal. If it lies too far back toward youth—that is, if the world ceased too soon to give its forces to some person—one may perhaps find that the person suffers easily, even though to a small degree, from compulsive ideas. The soul is becoming rigid and cannot be held fully accountable for its deeds.

If the point comes late, the question will be whether that person is hindered by his or her inner nature from developing complete freedom of soul and is too rigid physically, and for that reason cannot be held fully responsible. The physician and the priest are the ones who are competent to form this judgment, in the finest sense of the word. They will know that they can judge pretty accurately from people's appearance what their development has been, whether they are in balance, whether their life-hypomochlion is at the right spot, that is, at the right point of time, or is too early or too late. We will discuss physical appearance later, for even an intensive study of physiognomy belongs to pastoral medicine.

These are things that in the old mystery wisdom were regarded as very important for judgments of human life. They are things that have been forgotten and that must be brought again into our knowledge of the human being if that knowledge is to have any beneficial influence, if it is to be active in the right sense in medical and pastoral activity.

More about this tomorrow.

Continuing with yesterday's considerations concerning the inability of the scientific world conception to grasp the nature of man, we can say that in all domains of science something is missing that is also absent in the mathematical-mechanistic sphere. This sphere has been divorced from man, as if man were absent from the mathematical experience. This line of thought results in a tendency to also separate other processes in the world from man. This in its turn produces an inability to create a real bridge between man and world.

I shall discuss another consequence of this inability later on. Let us focus first of all on the basic reason why science has developed in this way. It was because we lost the power to experience inwardly something that is spoken of in Anthroposophy today and that in former times was perceived by a sort of instinctive clairvoyance. Scientific perception has lost the ability to see into man and grasp how he is composed of different elements.

Let us recall the anthroposophical idea that man is composed of four members—the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I-organization. I need not go into detail about this formation, since you can find it all in my book Theosophy.⁵⁹ When we observe the physical body and consider the possibility of inward experiencing one's physical body—we should begin by asking: What do we experience in regard to it? We experience what I have frequently spoken about recently; namely, the right-left, up-down, and front-back directions. We experience motion, the change of place of one's own body. To some extent at least, we also experience weight in various degrees. But weight is experienced in a highly modified form. When these things were still experienced within our various members, we reflected on them a good deal; but in the scientific age, no one gives them any thought. Facts that are of monumental importance for a world comprehension are completely ignored. Take the following fact. Assume that you have to carry a person who weighs as much as you do. Imagine that you carry this person a certain distance. You will consciously experience his weight. Of course, as you walk this distance, you are carrying yourself as well. But you do not experience this in the same way. You carry your own weight through space, but you do not experience this. Awareness of one's own weight is something quite different. In old age, we are apt to say that we feel the weight of our limbs. To some extent this is connected with weight, because old age entails a certain disintegration of the organism. This in turn tears the individual members out of the inward experience and makes them independent—atomizes them, as it were—and in atomization they fall a prey to gravity. But we do not actually feel this at any given moment of our life, so this statement that we feel the weight of our limbs is really only a figure of speech. A more exact science might show that it is not purely figurative, but be that as it may, the experience of our weight does not impinge strongly on our consciousness.

This shows that we have an inherent need to obliterate certain effects that are unquestionably working within us. We obliterate them by means of opposite effects (“opposite” in the sense brought out by the analogy between man and the course of the year in my recent morning lectures.⁶⁰ Nevertheless, whether we are dealing with processes that can be experienced relatively clearly, such as the three dimensions or motion, or with less obvious ones such as those connected with weight, they are all processes that can be experienced in the physical body.

What was thus experienced in former times has since been completely divorced from man. This is most evident in the case of mathematics. The reason it is less obvious in other experiences of the physical body is that the corresponding processes in the body, such as weight or gravity, are completely extinguished for today's form of consciousness. These processes, however, were not always completely obliterated. Under the influence of the mood prevailing under the scientific world conception, people today no longer have any idea of how different man's inner awareness was in the past. True, he did not consciously carry his weight through space in former times. Instead, he had the feeling that along with this weight, there was a counterweight. When he learned something, as was the case with the neophytes in the mysteries, he learned to perceive how, while he always carried his own weight in and with himself, the counter-effect is constantly active in light. It can really be said that man felt that he had to thank the spiritual element indwelling the light for counteracting, within him, the soul-spirit element activity in gravity. In short, we can show in many ways that in older times there was no feeling that anything was completely divorced from man. Within himself, man experienced the processes and events as they occurred in nature. When he observed the fall of a stone, for example, in external nature (an event physically separated from him) he experienced the essence of movement. He experienced this by comparing it with what such a movement would be like in himself. When he saw a falling stone, he experienced something like this: “If I wanted to move in the same way, I would have to acquire a certain speed, and in a falling stone the speed differs from what I observe, for instance, in a slowly crawling creature.” He experienced the speed of the falling stone by applying his experience of movement to the observation of the falling stone. The processes of the external world that we study in physics today were in fact also viewed objectively by the man of former times, but he gained his knowledge with the aid of his own experiences in order to rediscover in the external world the processes going on within himself.

Until the beginning of the Fifteenth Century, all the conceptions of physics were pervaded by something of which one can say that it brought even the physical activities of objects close to the inner life of man. Man experienced them in unison with nature. But with the onset of the Fifteenth Century begins the divorce of the observation of such processes from man. Along with it came the severance of mathematics, a way of thinking which from then on was combined with all science. The inner experience in the physical body was totally lost. What can be termed the inner physics of man was lost. External physics was divorced from man, along with mathematics. The progress thereby achieved consisted in the objectifying of the physical. What is physical can be looked at in two ways. Staying with the example of the falling stone, it can be traced with external vision. It can also be brought together with the experience of the speed that would have to be achieved if one wanted to run as fast as the stone falls. This produces comprehension that goes through the whole man, not one related only to visual perception.

To see what happened to the older world view at the dawn of the Fifteenth Century, let us look at a man in whom the transition can be observed particularly well; namely, Galileo.⁶¹ Galileo is in a sense the discoverer of the laws governing falling objects. Galileo's main aim was to determine the distance traveled in the first second by a falling body. The older world view placed the visual observation of the falling stone side by side with the inward experience of the speed needed to run at an equal pace. The inner experience was placed alongside that of the falling stone. Galileo also observed the falling stone, but he did not compare it with the inward experience. Instead, he measured the distance traveled by the stone in the first second of its fall. Since the stone falls with increasing speed, Galileo also measured the following segments of its path. He did not align this with any inward experience, but with an externally measured process that had nothing to do with man, a process that was completely divorced from man. Thus, in perception and knowledge, the physical was so completely removed from man that he was not aware that he had the physical inside him as well.

At that time, around the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, a number of thinkers who wanted to be progressive began to revolt against Aristotle,⁶² who throughout the Middle Ages had been considered the preeminent authority on science. If Aristotle's explanations of the falling stone (misunderstood in most cases today) are looked at soberly, we notice that when something is beheld in the world outside, he always points out how it would be if man himself were to undergo the same process. For him, it is not a matter of determining a given speed by measuring it, but to think of speed in such a way that it can be related to some human experience. Naturally, if you say you must achieve a particular speed, you feel that something alive, something filled with vigor, will be needed for you to do this. You feel a certain inner impetus, and the last thing you would assume is that something is pulling you in the direction you were heading. You would think that you were pushing, not that you were being pulled. This is why the force of attraction, gravity, begins to mean something only in the Seventeenth Century.

Man's idea about nature began to change radically; not just the law of falling bodies, but all the ideas of physics. Another example is the law of inertia, it is generally called. The very name reveals its origin within man. (There is a play on words here. The German term for inertia, Trägheit, really means laziness.) Inertia is something that can be inwardly felt but what has become of the law of inertia in physics under the influence of “Galileoism?” the physicist says: A body, or rather a point, on which no external influence is exercises, which is left to itself, moves through space with uniform velocity. This means that throughout all time-spans it travels the same distance in each second. If no external influence interferes, and the body has achieved a given speed per second, it travels the same distance in each succeeding second.

It is inert. Lacking an external influence, it continues on and on without change. All the physicist does is measure the distance per second, and a body is called inert if the velocity remains constant.

There was a time when one felt differently about this and asked: How is a moving body, traveling a constant distance per second, experienced? It could be experienced by remaining on one and the same condition without ever changing one's behavior. At most, this could only be an ideal for man. He can attain this ideal of inertia only to a very small degree. But if you look at what is called inertia in ordinary life, you see that it is pretty much like doing the same thing every second of your life.

From the Fifteenth Century on, the whole orientation of the human mind was led to such a point that we can fairly say that man forgot his own inward experience. This happens first with the inner experience of the physical organism—man forgets it. What Galileo thought out and applied to matters close to man, such as the law of inertia, was not applied in a wide context. And it was indeed merely thought out, even if Galileo was dealing with things that can be observed in nature.

We know how, by placing the sun in the center instead of the earth, and by letting the planets move in circles around the sun, and by calculating the position of a given planetary body in the heavens, Copernicus produced a new cosmic system in a physical sense. This was the picture that Copernicus drew of our planetary, our solar system. And it was a picture that certainly can be drawn. Yet, this picture did not make a radical turn toward the mathematical attitude that completely divorces the external world from man. Anyone reading Copernicus's text gets the impression that Copernicus still felt the following. In the complicated lines, by means of which the earlier astronomy tried to grasp the solar system, it not only summed up the optical locations of the planets; it also had a feeling for what would be experienced if one stood amid these movements of the planets. In former ages people had a very clear idea of the epicycles the planets were thought to describe. In all this there was still a certain amount of human feeling. Just as you can understand the position of, let us say, an arm when you are painting a picture of a person because you can feel what it is like to be in such a position, so there was something alive in tracing the movement described by a planet around its fixed star. Indeed, even in Kepler's⁶³ case—perhaps especially in his case—there is still something of a human element in his calculating the orbits described by the planets.

Now Newton applies Galileo's abstracted principle to the heavenly bodies, adopting something like the Copernican view and conceiving things somewhat as follows: A central body, let us say a sun, attracts a planet in such a way that this force of attraction decreases in proportion to the square of the distance. It becomes smaller and smaller in proportion to the square, but increases in proportion to the mass of the bodies. If the attracting body has a greater mass, the force of attraction is porportionately greater.

If the distance is greater, the force of attraction decreases, but always in such a way that if the distance is twice as great, the attraction is four times less; if it is three times as great, nine times less, and so forth. Pure measuring is instilled into the picture, which, again, is conceived as completely abstracted from man. This was not yet so with Copernicus and Kepler but with Newton, a so-called “objective” something is excogitated and there is no longer any experience, it is all mere excogitation. Lines are drawn in the direction in which one looks and forces are, as it were, imagined into them, since what one sees is not force; the force has to be dreamed up. Naturally, one says “thought up” as long as one believes in the whole business; but when one no longer has faith in it, one says, “dreamed up.”

Thus we can say that through Newton the whole abstracted physical mode of conception becomes generalized so far that is applied to the whole universe. In short, the aim is to completely forget all experience within man's physical body; to objectify what was formerly pictured as closely related to the experience of the physical body; to view it in outer space independent of the physical corporeality, although this space had first been torn out of the body experience; and to find ways to speak of space without even thinking about the human being. Through separation from the physical body, through separation of nature's phenomena from man's experience in the physical body, modern physics arises. It comes into existence along with this separation of certain processes of nature from self-experience within the physical human body (yellow in sketch). Self experience is forgotten (red in Fig. 1)

By permeating all external phenomena with abstract mathematics, this kind of physics could not longer understand man. What had been separated from man could not be reconnected. In short, there emerges a total inability to bring science back to man.

In physical respects you do not notice this quite so much; but you do notice it if you ask: What about man's self-experience in the etheric body, in this subtle organism? Man experiences quite a bit in it. But this was separated from man even earlier and more radically. This abstraction, however, was not as successful as in physics. Let us go back to a scientist of the first Christian centuries, the physician Galen.⁶⁴ Looking at what lived in external nature and following the traditions of his time, Galen distinguished four elements—earth, water, air and fire (we would say warmth.) We see these if we look at nature. But, looking inward and focusing on the self-experience of the etheric body,⁶⁵ one asks: How do I experience these elements, the solid, the watery, the airy and the fiery in myself? Then, in those times the answer was: I experience them with my etheric body. One experienced it as inwardly felt movements of the fluids; the earth as “black gall,” the watery as “phlegm,” the airy as “pneuma” (what is taken in through the breathing process,) and warmth as “blood.” In the fluids, in what circulates in the human organism, the same thing was experienced as what was observed externally. Just as the movement of the falling stone was accompanied by an experience in the physical body, so the elements were experienced in inward processes. The metabolic process, where (so it was thought) gall, phlegm, and blood work into each other, was felt as the inner experience of one's own body, but a form of inward experience to which corresponded the external processes occurring between air, water, fire and earth.

Here, however, we did not succeed in completely forgetting all inner life and still satisfying external observation. In the case of a falling body, one could measure something; for example, the distance traveled in the first second. One arrived at a “law of inertia” by thinking of moving points that do not alter their condition of movement but maintain their speed. By attempting to eject from the inward experience something that the ancients strongly felt to be a specific inner experience; namely, the four elements, one was able to forget the inner content but one could not find in the external world any measuring system. Therefore the attempt to objectify what related to these matters, as was done in physics, remained basically unsuccessful to this day. Chemistry could have become a science that would rank alongside physics, if it had been possible to take as much of the etheric body into the external world as was accomplished in the physical body. In chemistry, however, unlike physics, we speak to this day of something rather undefined and vague, when referring to its laws.⁶⁶ What was done with physics in regard to the physical body was in fact the aim of chemistry in regard to the etheric body. Chemistry states that if substances combine chemically, and in doing so can completely alter their properties, something is naturally happening.

But if one wants to go beyond this conception, which is certainly the simplest and most convenient, one really does not know much about this process. Water consists of hydrogen and oxygen; the two must be conceived as mixed together in the water somehow but no inwardly experiencable concept can be formed of this. It is commonly explained in a very external way: hydrogen consists of atoms (or molecules if you will) and so does oxygen. These intermingle, collide, and cling to one another, and so forth. This means that, although the inner experience was forgotten, one did not find oneself in the same position as in physics, where one could measure (and increasingly physics became a matter of measuring, counting and weighing.) Instead, one could only hypothesize the inner process. In a certain respect, it has remained this way in chemistry to this day, because what is pictured as the inner nature of chemical processes is basically only something read into them by thought.

Chemistry will attain the level of physics only when with full insight into these matters, we can again relate chemistry with man, though not, of course, with the direct experience possessed by the old instinctive clairvoyance. We will only succeed in this when we gain enough insight into physics to be able to consolidate our isolated fragments of knowledge into a world conception and bring our thoughts concerning the individual phenomena into connection with man. What happens on one side, when we forget all inner experience and concentrate on measuring externals (thus remaining stuck in the so-called “objective”) takes its revenge on the other side. It is easy enough to say that inertia is expressed by the movement of a point that travels the same distance in each succeeding second. But there is no such point. This uniform movement occurs nowhere in the domain of human observation. A moving object is always part of some relationship, and its velocity is hampered here or there. In short, what could be described as inert mass,⁶⁷ or could be reduced to the law of inertia, does not exist. If we speak of movement and cannot return to the living inner accompanying experience of it, if we cannot relate the velocity of a falling body to the way we ourselves would experience this movement, then we must indeed say that we are entirely outside the movement and must orient ourselves by the external world. If I observe a moving body (see Fig. 7) and if these are its successive positions, I must somehow perceive that this body moves. If behind it there is a stationary wall, I follow the direction of movements and tell myself that the body moves on in that direction. But what is necessary in addition is that from my own position (dark circle) I guide this observation, in other words, become aware of an inward experience. If I completely leave out the human being and orient myself only out there, then, regardless of whether the object moves or remains stationary, while the wall moves, the result will be the same. I shall no longer be able to distinguish whether the body moves in one or the wall behind it in the opposite direction. I can basically make all the calculations under either one or the other assumption.

I lose the ability to understand a movement inwardly if I do not partake of it with my own experience. This applies, if I may say so, to many other aspects of physics. Having excluded the participating experience, I am prevented from building any kind of bridge to the objective process. If I myself am running, I certainly cannot claim that it is a matter of indifference whether I run or the ground beneath me moves in the opposite direction. But if I am watching another person moving over a given area, it makes no difference for merely external observation whether he is running or the ground beneath him is moving in the opposite direction. Our present age has actually reached the point, where we experience, if I may put it this way, the world spirit's revenge for our making everything physical abstract.

Newton was still quite certain that he could assume absolute movements, but now we can see numerous scientists trying to establish the fact that movement, the knowledge of movement, has been lost along with the inner experience of it. Such is the essence of the Theory of Relativity,⁶⁸ which is trying to pull the ground from under Newtonism. This theory of relativity is a natural historical result. It cannot help but exist today. We will not progress beyond it if we remain with those ideas that have been completely separated from the human element. If we want to understand rest or motion, we must partake in the experience. If we do not do this, then even rest and motion are only relative to one another.

• 59. Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1971), pp. 1–39.
• 60. Rudolf Steiner, Man and the World of Stars: The Spiritual Communion of Mankind (New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1963), pp. 141–172.
• 61. Galileo Galilei: Pisa 1564–1642 Arcetri by Florence. Discovered isochromism in pendulum, hydrostatic scales, laws of free fall, law of inertia. Numerous astronomical inventions with self-constructed telescope. An Inquisition trial resulted in a banning of the Copernican world system. See Riddles of Philosophy, The Spiritual Guidance of Man, and Laurenz Muellner's speech, “Die Bedeutung Galilei's fuer die Philosophie,” Vienna 1894. (Reprinted in Anthroposophie, 1933/34:29).
  
  His Sermons de Motu Gravium (About the Effects of Gravity) contain the results of his investigations in Pisa. They first only circulated in manuscript copies; first edition: 1854. The final version is in the Discorsi e Dimenstrazioni Mathematiche Intomo a Due Nuove Scieme, published 1638 in Leyden. Also see L. Muellner's speech.
• 62. Such opponents were Bacon, Bruno, Galilei. See Riddles of Philosophy and the speech of L. Muellner, p. 103.
• 63. Johannes Kepler: Weil der Stadt (Wuerttemberg) 1571–1630 Regensburg. Mathematician, physicist, astronomer, discoverer of the astronomical telescope. Astronomer and mathematician to three emperors. Persecuted as a Protestant. Totally exhausted through his life misery, he died prematurely at the “Reichstag” at Regensburg, where he hoped to secure his subsistence. To calculate his three laws of the motion of the planets he used the observation data of Tycho Brahe, whose follower he was at the court of Prague. On the other hand, the Copernican planetary system was the starting point for the finding of the three laws of the planets. Kepler was the first who tried to interpret the motion of the planetary orbit and moved the center of force to the sun. See The Spiritual Guidance of Man and, about the three planetary laws Das Verhaeltnis der Verschiedenen Naturwissenschaftlichen Gebiete zur Astronomie (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1981), GA Bibl. Nr. 323.
• 64. Galen: Pergamon, Asia Minor 129 A.D.–199 Rome. Physician and philosopher. Studies in Pergamon and travel for study to Corinth, Smyrna, and Alexandria. Personal physician of Emperor Marcus Aurelius. His one hundred and fifty medical texts with fifteen commentaries were the basis for future medicine and pharmacology. One hundred twenty-five texts concerning philosophy, mathematics, and jurisprudence.
• 65. Rudolf Steiner, A Road to Self Knowledge: The Threshold of the Spiritual World (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1975), pp. 19–27,100–106.
• 66. This is confirmed in chemical textbooks. They speak of chemistry as “a primarily empirical science.” In its laws one cannot come to mathematically definite values but to approximate numbers, whose limits are defined in tabular form. Therefore authors of chemical subject books need to add limiting explanations, such as “usually is valid,” or “generally one can say.” Chemical laws are mostly derived from physical laws, as for instance in the main theses of thermodynamics. It is thought unscientific to think otherwise than mechanically. Literature: H. Remy, Lehrbuch der Anorganischen Chemie, 7th ed., 2 vols. (Leipzig: 1954), Volume I, pages 14–23, 37, 50, 71–73.
• 67. See Georg Unger, Vom Bilden Physicalischer Begriffe, Volume 1, pages 41–49 and 57.
• 68. See Footnote 40.

My dear friends,

You will recall how yesterday we had here a block of ice which we would have expected to fall apart in two pieces when we cut it with a wire from which a weight was hanging. Although you only saw the beginning of the experiment, you were able to convince yourselves that such was not the case, because as soon as the pressure of the wire liquefied the ice below, it immediately froze together again above the wire. That is to say a liquefaction took place only in consequence of the pressure. Therefore, since we preserved the ice as ice, the heat entity acted in such a way that the block closed itself up at once. I am using the expression advisedly.

Now this surprised you considerably at first, did it not? But it surprised you only because you are not accustomed to the matter of fact observation necessary if you are really to follow physical phenomena In another case you are making the same experiment all the time and do not wonder at it at all. For when you take up your pencil and pass it through the air, you are continually cutting the air and it is immediately closing up behind. You are then doing nothing else than what we did yesterday with the block of ice, but you are doing it in another sphere, in another realm. We can learn quite a little from this observation, for we see that when we simply pass the pencil through the air (the conditions under which we do this will not be taken up) that the properties of the air itself bring about the closing up of the material behind the pencil. In the case of the ice we cannot avoid the thought that the heat entity enters into the process in such a way that it contributes the same thing as is contributed by the nature of the air itself when the pencil passes through. You have here only a further extension of what I said to you yesterday. When you picture the air to yourselves and imagine it cut and closing up at once, the matter composing the air is responsible for all that you can perceive. When you are dealing with a solid body, such as ice, then the heat is active in the same manner as the material air itself is in the other case. That is, you met here with a real picture of what goes on in heat. And again you have established that when we observe the gaseous or vapor condition—air is vaporous, gaseous in reality—we have represented in a material way in the phenomena of gases a picture of what takes place in the heat entity.

And if we observe heat phenomena in a solid body we have fundamentally nothing other than the solid existing alongside of something taking place in the realm of the heat being. We see, as it were, before our eyes, the phenomena within the realm of heat which we see also playing through gas. From this we can conclude or rather simply state, since it is only the obvious that we are presenting, we can state the following: If we wish to approach the being of heat in its reality we must seek as well as we can to force our way into the realm of the gaseous, into the gaseous bodies. And in what goes on in gases we will see simply pictures of the phenomena within the heat realm. Thus nature conjures up before our eyes, as it were, pictures of processes in the heat being by a manifestation of certain phenomena in gases. Notice now, we are being led very far from the modern method of observation as practiced in natural science generally, not merely physics. Let us ask ourselves where the modern method really leads us ultimately. I have here a work by Eduard von Hartmann, in which he treats a special field from his point of view, namely the field of modern physics. Here is a man who has built up for himself entirely out of the spirit of the times a broad horizon, and who we may say, is therefore in a position to say something as a philosopher about physics. Now it is interesting to see how such a man, speaking entirely in the modern spirit, deals with physics. He begins the very first chapter as follows: “Physics is the study of transformations and movements of energy and of its separation into factors and their resummation.” Having said this, he must naturally add a further statement. He says further: “Physics is the study of the movements and transformations of energy (force) and of its resolution into factors and its summations. The validity of this definition is not dependent on how we consider energy. It does not rest on our considering it as something final, ultimate, nor on our looking upon it as really a product of some more widely embracing factors. Nor is it dependent on whether we hold this or that view of the constitution of matter. It only states all observations and perceptions of energy to rest on the fact that it can change place and form and be analyzed within these categories.” (View of the World According to Modern Physics by Edw. V. Hartmann, Leipzig, 1902, Hermann Haake, page 3)

Now what does it mean when one speaks in such a fashion? It means that an attempt is made so to define what is before one physically that there is no necessity to enter into its real nature. A certain concept of energy is formed and it is said: all that meets us from without, physically, is only a transformation of this energy concept. That is to say, everything essential is thrown out of one's concepts, and one is thought to be quite secure, because it is not realized that this is precisely the most insecure sort of a definition. But this sort of thing has found its way to a most unfortunate extent into our physical concepts. So completely has it entered in, my friends, that it is today almost impossible for us to make experiments that will reveal reality to us. All our laboratories, which we depend upon to do physical research, are completely given over to working out the theoretical views of modern physics. We cannot easily use what we have in the way of tools to reveal the essential physical nature of things. The cure for this situation is that first a certain number of people should become acquainted with the effect on methods of entering into the real physical nature of things. This group then will have to find the experimental method, the appropriate laboratory set-up to make possible a gradual entrance into reality. We need, in fact today, not merely to overhaul our view of the world in its conceptual aspect, but we need research institutes working to our manner of thinking. We cannot proceed as rapidly as we should in getting people to consider anthroposophy unless we are able to take them out of the rut in which modern thinking runs. Just as the physicists can point to factories to show plainly, very plainly, that what he says is true, so we must show people by experiments that what we say about things is correct. Naturally however, we must penetrate to real physical thinking before we can do this. And to think in real physical terms it is necessary that we bring ourselves into the state of mind indicated in these lectures, especially yesterday's lecture.

Is it not true that the modern physicist observes what happens, and when he observes it, he at once bends every effort to strike out from the perceived phenomena all that he cannot reduce to calculation. Let us now make this experiment in order to place before our minds today something that we will build on in the course of subsequent lectures. We set up this paddle which can be turned in a liquid and arrange it so that the paddle rotated by means of this apparatus will transmit mechanical world. As a result of the fact that this mechanical work is transmitted to the water in which the paddle is immersed, we will have a marked rise in temperature. There is thus brought before us in the most elementary experimental way what is called the transformation of mechanical energy into warmth or thermal energy. We have now a temperature of 16° and after a short time we will note the temperature again. (Later the rise in temperature was determined.)

Let us now return for a moment to what has already been said. We have tried to grasp the destiny, so to speak, of physical corporeality, by carrying the corporeality through the melting and boiling points. That is, by making solid bodies fluid and fluid bodies gaseous. I will now speak of these things in the simplest terms possible.

We have seen that the fundamental property of solid bodies is the possession of form. The solids do not show form-building forces as these latter act in liquids before evaporation has had time to take place. Solids have a form of themselves. Liquids must be enclosed in a vessel, and in order to form a liquid surface, as they do everywhere, they require the forces of the entire earth. We have indeed, brought this before our souls. This requires us to make the following statement: When we consider the liquids of the whole earth in their totality, we are obliged to consider them as related to the body of the earth in its totality. Only the solids emancipate themselves from this relation to the earth, they take on an individuality, assume their own form. If now we bring to bear the method by which ordinary physics represents things on what is called gravity, on what causes the formation of the liquid surface, then we must do it in the following way. We must, if we are to stick to the observable, in some way introduce into individualized solid bodies the thing that is essential in this horizontal liquid surface. In some way or other, we must conceive of that which is active in the liquid surface, and which is thought of under the heading of gravity as within solids which, therefore, in a certain way individualize gravity. Thus we see that solids take gravity up within themselves. On the other hand we see that at the moment of evaporation the formation of liquid surface ceases. Gas does not form a surface. If we wish to give form to a gas, to limit the space occupied by it, we must do so by placing it in a vessel closed on all sides. In passing from the liquid to the gas we find that the surface formation ceases. We see dissipated this last remainder of the earth-induced tendency to surface formation as shown by the liquid. And we see also that all gases are grouped together in a unity, as illustrated by the fact that they all have the same co-efficient of expansion; gases as a whole represent material emancipated from the earth.

Now place these thoughts vividly before yourselves: you find yourselves on the earth as a carbonaceous organism, you are among the phenomena produced by the solids of the earth. The phenomena produced by the solids are ruled by gravity which, as stated, manifests itself everywhere. As earth men you have solids around you that have in some way taken up gravity for their form-building. But consider the phenomena manifested by the solids in the case I spoke of yesterday where you added in thought a liquid surface to the system—in this phenomenon you have a kind of continuum, something you can think of as a sort of invisible fluid spread out everywhere. Thus solids of the earth, in so far as they are free to move, manifest as a whole what may be considered as a fluid state. They constitute something similar to what is manifested in a material fluid. We can therefore say: since we are placed on the earth we are aware of this, calling it gravity. Working on the liquid it forms a surface.

Imagine now, that we were as human beings able to live on a fluid cosmic body, being so organized that we could exist on such a body. We would then live in the surface of this liquid, and we would have the same relation to the gaseous, striving outward in all directions that we now have to the fluid. This means nothing more or less than that we should be unaware of gravity. To speak of gravity would cease to have a meaning. Gravity rules only solid planetary bodies and is only known to those beings who live on such bodies. Beings who could live on a fluid planet would know nothing of gravity. It would not be possible to speak of such a thing. And beings who lived on a gaseous planetary body would regard as normal something which would be the opposite of gravity, a striving in all directions away from the center. If I may express myself somewhat paradoxically I might say: Beings dwelling on a gaseous planet instead of seeing bodies falling toward the planet would see them always flying off. We must think in really physical terms and not merely in mathematical terms, which stand outside of reality if we are to find the path here. Then we can state the matter thus: Gravity begins when we find ourselves on a solid planet. In passing from the solid to the gaseous planet, we go through a kind of null-point, and come to an opposite condition to that on the solid planet, to a manifestation of forces in space which may be considered negative in respect to gravity. You see therefore that as we pass through the material states, we actually come to a null-point in spatiality, to a sphere where the spatiality is zero. For this reason we have to consider gravity as something quite relative. But when we conduct heat to a gas (the experiment has been shown to you) this heat which always raises the diffusing tendency in the gas shows you again the picture I am trying to bring before you. Does not that which is active in the gas really lie on the far side of this null-point on this side of which gravity is active? Is it not possible for us to think the matter through further, still remaining in close contact with the actual phenomena when we say that going from a solid to a gaseous planet we pass through a null-point? Below we have gravity; above, this gravity changing into its opposite, in a negative gravity. Indeed we find this, we do not have to imagine it. The being of heat does just what a negative gravity would do. Certainly, we have not completely attained our goal but we have reached a point where we can comprehend the being of heat in a relative fashion to such an extent that the matter may be stated so: The being of heat manifests exactly like the negation of gravity, like negative gravity. Therefore, when one deals with physical formulae involving gravity and sets a negative sign in front of the symbol representing gravity, it is necessary to think of the magnitude in question not as a gravity quantity nor as a line of action of gravity, but as a heat quantity, a line of action of heat. Do you not see that in this way we can suffuse mathematics with vitality? The formulae as they are given may be looked upon as representing a gravitational system, a mechanical system. If we set negative signs in front of “g” then we are obliged to consider as heat what formerly represented gravity. And we realize from this that we must grasp these things concretely if we are to arrive at real results. We see that in passing from the solid to the fluid we go through a condition in which form is dissolved. The form loses itself. When I dissolve a crystal or melt it, it loses the form that it previously had. It goes over into that form which is imposed upon it by virtue of the fact that it comes under the general influence of the earth. The earth gives it a liquid surface and I must put this liquid into a vessel if I am to preserve it.

Now let us consider another general phenomenon which we will approach more concretely later. If a liquid is divided into sufficiently small particles there comes about the formation of drops, which take on the spherical shape. Fluids have the possibility, when they are finely enough subdivided, of emancipating themselves from the general gravitational field and of manifesting in this special case that which otherwise comes to light in solids as crystalline shape. Only, in the case of fluids, the peculiarity is that they all take on the form of the sphere.

If now, I consider this spherical form, I may regard it as the synthesis of all polyhedral shapes, of all crystal forms.

When I pass from the fluid to the gas, I have the diffusion, the dissolution of the spherical form, but in this case, outwardly directed. And now we come to a rather difficult idea. Imagine to yourselves that you are observing some simple form, say a tetrahedron, and you wished to turn it inside out as you might do a glove. You will then realize that in going through this process of turning inside out it is necessary to pass through the sphere. Moreover, all the form relations become negative and a negative body appears. As the tetrahedron is put through this transformation, you must imagine to yourselves that the entire space outside the tetrahedron is filled, within it is gaseous. With this outside space filled you must imagine in a tetrahedral hole. There it is empty. You must then make the quantities related to the tetrahedron negative. Then you have formed the negative, the opened-up tetrahedron, in place of the one filled with matter. But the intermediate condition between the positive and the negative tetrahedron is the sphere. The polyhydric body goes over into its negative only by passing through the spherical as a null-point.

Now let us follow this completely in the case of actual bodies. You have the solid body with definite form. It goes through the fluid form, that is the sphere, and becomes a gas. If we wish to look rightly on the gas we must look upon it as a form, but as a negative form. We reach a type of form here which we can comprehend only by passing through the zero point into the negative. That is to say, when we go over to the gaseous, the picture of the phenomena of heat, we do not enter into the region of the formless. We enter only into a region more difficult to comprehend than the one in which we live ordinarily where form is positive and not negative. But we see just here that any body in which the fluid state is in question is in an intermediate position. It is in the state between the formed and that which we call the “formless,” or that of negative form.

Do we have any example where we can actually follow this? Aside from what is in our immediate environment, an example which we observe but do not really enter into vitality? We can do it when we consider the phenomenon of the melting of a solid or the evaporation of a liquid. But can we in any way enter vitally into this? Yes, we can and as a matter of fact we do so continually. We experience this process by virtue of our status as earth men, and because the earth, or at least the part of it on which we live, is a solid upon which are other solids involving many phenomena which we observe. In addition there is embedded in the earthly and belonging to it, the fluid state. The gaseous also belongs to it. Now there comes about a great distinction between what I will call Wärmenacht and Wärmetag. (I use these terms in order to lead us nearer to an understanding of the problem.) What is Wärmenach? Wärmenacht and Wärmetag are simply what happens to our earth under the influence of the heat being of the cosmos. And what does happen? Let us take up these phenomena of the earth so that we can grasp what can be easily understood by our thinking. Under the influence of the Wärmenach, that is during the time when the earth is not exposed to the sun, while the earth is left to herself and is emancipated from the influence of the cosmic sun being, she strives for form as the droplet takes on form when it can withdraw itself from the general force of gravitation. We have therefore, when we consider the general striving of the earth for form, the characteristic of the Wärmenach as compared to ordinary night. It is quite justifiable for me to say in this connection that the earth strives toward the drop form. Many other tendencies are operative during the Wärmenach, such as a tendency toward crystallization. And what we experience every night is a continuous emergence of forces tending toward crystallization. During the day under the influence of the being of the sun, a continual dissolving of this tendency toward crystallization is present, a continual will to overcome form.

And we may speak of the “dawn” and “twilight” of this heat condition. By dawn we mean that after the earth has sought to crystallize during the Wärmenach, this crystallization process dissolves again and the earth goes through the sphere state in her atmosphere and seeks to scatter herself again. Following the Wärmetag comes a twilight condition where the earth again starts seeking to form a sphere and crystallize during the night. We have thus to think of the earth as caught up in a cosmic process consisting in a drawing together in the Wärmenach when the motion of the earth turns it away from the sun, a tendency to become a crystal. At the proper time this is checked when the earth is led through the dawn condition, through the sphere. Then the earth seeks to dissipate her forces through the cosmos until the twilight condition reestablishes the opposite forces. In the case of the earth we do not have to do with something fixed in the cosmos, but with something that vibrates between two conditions, Wärmetag and Wärmenach. You see it is with such things as this that our research institute should deal. To our ordinary thermometer, hygrometers, etc., we should add other instruments through which we could show that certain processes of the earth, especially of the fluid and gaseous portions, take place at night otherwise than during the day. You can see further that we have here a rational leading to a physical view by which we can finally demonstrate with appropriate instruments the delicate differences in all the processes in liquids and gases during the day and during the night. In the future we must be able to make a given experiment during the day and at a corresponding hour of the night and have measuring instruments that will show us the difference in the way the process goes by day and by night. For by day those forces tending toward crystallization in the earth do not play through the process, but by night, they do. Forces arise that come from the cosmos in the night. And these cosmic forces that seek to crystallize the earth necessarily have their effect on the process. Here is opened a way of experimentation which will show the relation of the earth to the cosmos. You can realize that the research institute that must in the future be established according to our anthroposophically oriented views of the world will have weighty problems. They must reckon with the things which today are taken into account only rarely. Naturally we do take them into account today, with light phenomena at least in certain cases when we have to darken the room artificially, etc. But in other phenomena that take place within a certain null sphere, we do not. Then, when we have made these facts obvious and have demonstrated them, we will replace by them all kinds of theoretical forces in atoms and molecules.

The whole matter as it is understood now rests on the belief that we can investigate everything during the day. In this new sort of investigation, we will, for instance, first find in crystallization differences depending on whether we carry out the same experiment during the day or during the night. This is the sort of thing our attention must be turned to especially. And on such a path will we first come to true physics. For today, physical facts really stand in a chaotic relation to each other. We speak for instance of mechanical energy, of acoustical energy. But it is not to be understood that when we think about these things in the correct way mechanical energy can only operate where there are solids. The fluid realm lies between the purely mechanical and the acoustical energies. Indeed, when we leave the region in which we observe most readily the acoustical energy, the gaseous region, then we come to the region of the next state of aggregation, as it is called, to heat. This lies above the gaseous, just as the fluid lies above the solid. We may tabulate these things as follows:

X
Heat
Gaseous-acoustical
Fluid
Solid mechanical

We find the mechanical as a characteristic of the solid state. In the gaseous we find acoustical energy as the characteristic. Just as we have left out the fluid here, so we must leave out the heat realm and above we find something that I will at this time indicate by X. Thus we have to look beyond the heat region for something. Between this X and our acoustic phenomena playing themselves out in the air would lie the being of heat, just as the fluid condition lies between the gaseous and the solid states. We are trying, you see, to grasp the nature of heat in all the ways we can, to approach it by all possible paths. And when you say to yourselves: the fluid condition lies between the gaseous and X, you must in a similar way seek to pass from the heat condition to the X condition. You must find something which lies on the far side of the heat region just as for instance the tone world as it is expressed in the air lies on this side of the heat region. By this means you see how to attempt to build such real concepts of the physical as will lead you out of the mere abstract. Geometry really comprehends space forms but can never comprehend the mechanical except as motion. The concepts we are forming attempt really to include the physical. They immerse themselves in the nature of the physical and toward such concepts must we strive. Therefore I would think these are properly the sort of thing that should belong to what lies at the foundation of the “Free Waldorf School.” The attempt should be made to extend the experimental in the manner indicated here today. What is very much neglected in our physical processes, time and the passage of time, will thus be drawn into physical experiments.

I would be very sorry if anything I have said here were to be taken dogmatically or to become one-sided in some way. That spiritual science can be fruitful for education is the basis of everything I have said. Anthroposophy could help teaching and education to gain a more living character, and the general directions I have described here can be put into practice in many ways. It would be good if there were an exchange of opinions among the listeners as well as others who are interested in some way in the further development of education as it is conceived here. It is important to arrive at what is necessary in our time through a living comprehension of human development as a whole and of present developments in education. We are not concerned with developing a new formal basis for education, but rather with extending the circle of people who have an interest in the perspective presented with regard to human development.

What is the state of the development of humanity today? What must we teach children if we are to take into account the perspective of the present state of humanity today and of the near future? If we do not recognize what has recently occurred as a clear indication of the need of a renewal in education, we do not understand our present time.

Of course there are an uncountable number of details to mention. Consider for a moment how appropriate it would be to include my characterization of arithmetic—to place analytical methods alongside synthetic methods, and to work with the sum and products and not simply from adding and factoring—along with what is normally done. You can see how appropriate it would be to treat fractions and everything connected with them from this perspective. When we move from working with whole numbers to working with fractions, we move in a quite natural way into the analytical. Moving from whole numbers to fractions means just that: analyzing. It is therefore appropriate to bring in another element when working with fractions than we use when working with whole numbers.

We certainly cannot object to the fact that in the nineteenth century computing machines were introduced into schools. Nevertheless computing machines should not lead to an overly materialistic valuation of illustrative materials. While we should be clear about the value of examples, what is important is that human capacities be developed through teaching. The primary task of the period from the change of teeth until maturity is to develop memory. We should avoid underestimating the value of examples as a basis for forming memory as well as the value of memory when viewing examples. We should begin in a simple way—and here for those who are capable of teaching in a living way, the ten fingers on our hands are sufficient—by presenting the number ten in all kinds of ways that show the various arithmetic operations. In doing so, however, we should present arithmetic in a way that is appropriate to life, to the life of the soul in a human being. There are certainly detailed discussions in philosophy, whole sections of philosophy, concerning what a number or fraction really is. This shows that as children, we may learn about numbers or fractions, but in later life, even if we were philosophers, we could say that we now need to research what a number signifies in reality, or what a fraction is in reality. It is not necessary to go into all kinds of minute details if we want to make this process clear to children. Instead we need to bring many other things to children that then become part of their memory and which only can be studied in more detail later, when they are mature enough. I have already spoken about such things from another perspective.

Working with fractions is another question. Since fractions are in a certain sense analytical, we need to take the need for analysis into account, as I mentioned in some of the previous lectures. For that reason, we would do well to make working with fractions as visual as possible. We could perhaps divide a large cube into smaller cubes, for example, taking a large cube and dividing it into sixteen smaller cubes. From that, we can go on to the concept of a quarter by dividing the large cube first into quarters, then each quarter again into a further quarter. In this way you can show the children all kinds of relationships between a sixteenth or an eighth and so forth. If, later, you give each of the portions a different color, you can then place the various fractions of the larger cube together again in different way, which then gives a very pretty picture.

I do not want to make the transition from normal fractions to decimal fractions in some irrational way, in a way that does not correspond to reality. From the very beginning, the children should gain a feeling that the use of decimal fractions is based upon human convention or convenience. They should also gain a feeling that the way we write decimal fractions is nothing more than a continuation of the way in which we write normal numbers: we first count to ten and then, when we go on to twenty, which is twice ten, the first series of ten is included in that so that by going to twenty, we have simply added a new series of ten, and so forth. If we work toward the left using the same principle that we used when working with decimal numbers to the right, the children will realize that all this is relative and that it would form a unity if I set the decimal point two places to the right. From the very beginning, we should teach children about these conventions, which are hidden in the way we divide things. In this way many other kinds of conventions then fit into the social fabric. Many erroneous beliefs in authority would disappear if we show the children that everything that is based simply upon tradition is nothing more than social convention. Most important, however, is that through a spiritual-scientific permeation of education, we attempt to work with children during the period from the change of teeth until puberty by taking into account everything that I have said here about that period of life and how different capacities appear in different periods.

In addition, we need to give children an idea of the practicalities of life. Each topic in our teaching should be used to guide the children to a view of practical life. If we understand children properly, we will begin to teach them about physics and chemistry at around the age of twelve as well as teaching them about minerals in the way I have discussed here. At about the same time, or perhaps one year earlier, we might attempt to present arithmetic similarly to the way we would teach about minerals, physics, or chemistry, namely, by always taking the practical into account. In arithmetic, the children should gain an idea about how monetary exchange rates work—what a discount rate is, how financial accounts are held. They should learn about writing letters describing business and financial practices or relationships with another business. Instruction from the ages of twelve until about fourteen or fifteen needs to be arranged that by the time children are fifteen years old and leave grammar school to go on to a higher school or into life, they have a real and practical idea about the most important areas of life.

Some may object by saying, where are we to find the time for all this? How are we to find time to give children a real idea of how paper or soap or cigars or such things are manufactured? If we are well-organized, we can take typical examples, such as typical industries or typical methods of transportation. We can enable children to go out into the world with an understanding of all the major areas in the environment that confront them. We can certainly see how children from the city have not the slightest idea of the difference between rye and wheat. We can also see how children who do not live near a soap factory do not have the slightest idea of how soap is made. But even children who live near a soap factory still have no idea how soap is manufactured because they have been taught nothing about what is in their neighborhood.

Consider how many people today step onto or leave a streetcar without having even the dimmest idea of how a streetcar is made or how it moves and so forth. Generally speaking, today we use the products of our culture without having the slightest idea of what these products actually are.1 For this reason we have become anxious. If we are continuously surrounded by things we do not understand, we become confused, and that confusion has an effect upon our subconscious. Of course it is not possible for people to understand everything in modern life in all details. But everything that is not directly connected with our own jobs or professions should not remain a mystery. If a person is not a bookkeeper, generally accounting is a mystery. Or if a person is not a teacher, how school is held is a mystery. All those things that fragment our modern society need to be overcome. We need to understand one another again.

We should not allow children’s capacities to understand practical life to lie fallow. During the period beginning at the age of twelve, when the capacities for human reason develop, it is possible to teach children about the most important aspects of practical life. I do not know what the subjects for essays are here in Switzerland (though I have read the school curriculum), but in the former monarchical countries, instead of writing essays about frivolous subjects such as the monarch’s birthday, essays should be written that somehow involve business life, sales practices, or industrial questions.

This is certainly not an area that should be based upon idealism or some intellectual perspective. A spiritual perspective does not need to continuously emphasize ideals and how they should be taught. Instead a spiritual attitude can be held by having the students work out of a spiritual impulse, that is, by allowing that which desires to arise out of the spirit from year to year to rise to the surface. In that way the overall perspective is connected with the individual details.

I have been asked whether it is possible to explain the late eruption of the wisdom teeth from a spiritual-scientific perspective. Is the growth of wisdom teeth connected with the freeing of certain cognitive forces in the same way as the regular change of teeth?

The change of teeth indicates that certain forces, which previously permeated the entire organism and gave it strength, have now become free and have become, as I have explained to you earlier, the forces of independent thinking. We certainly cannot strictly encapsulate everything that occurs in the organism, as that would certainly be contrary to the way things develop. The things that are primary during one period of human development continue to exist, but to a much lesser extent. We grow wisdom teeth much later because at a later time in the life of our organism there is something that continues to work that was particularly active up to the age of seven. Some small amount must still remain. If everything were suddenly completed, then people would experience a very strong jolt every time they would want to begin thinking of something. When we begin to think about something, we voluntarily activate those forces that were involuntarily active in the organism before the age of seven. Those things must exist as a bridge between the separated realms of the spirit soul. What was organic at that time must continue to exist to a certain extent. For imaginative thinking we need to become independent, but at the same time we still need to be connected to our organism. That is what is expressed by the late eruption of the wisdom teeth. Some of the strength that is freed for imaginative thinking still remains in organic development. We could discover all kinds of things in human development that are similar to the situation with wisdom teeth.

Another interesting question was posed: to what extent is it possible for teachers working out of a spiritual-scientific pedagogy to help children recognize their capacities and find their right place in social life?

From the perspective of spiritual science, such questions are of little importance, since they are based upon rationalistic and materialistic thinking. In fact we have to protect children from situations where they might pose such abstract questions as, how can I find my proper place in life based upon my own capacities? Children need to slowly come to such decisions through all the stages associated with feeling. If some day the abstract question of how can we utilize our capacities in the service of humanity should arise in our soul, that is actually an illness of the soul. We need to grow slowly into our relationship to the development of humanity and to other human beings. We will do that if we have been brought up in the way I described here. In that case, we would never fall into the unwholesome situation of asking, how can I be of social service with my specific capacities? We would have a healthy, practical understanding by the time we leave grammar school, so we would recognize that life itself will present us with our position in it. The fact that such questions arise and are seriously discussed shows how much we have fallen into an intellectual and materialistic way of thinking in our time.

For that reason, I would like to mention how concrete general rules can always be developed into practical action if we have the will to do so. I would therefore like to answer in detail a question given to me about what we should do about those who are weak in spelling where the weakness arises in words where what is written is not clearly indicated, for example, whether an h or an e is in the word to form a longer sound.

As I already mentioned, training in clear listening is the basis of proper spelling. Training in proper hearing will support proper spelling. Clear hearing, if trained properly, will also train precise seeing. The different capacities support one another. If one capacity is developed in the proper way, the others will also have to develop properly. If we accustom ourselves to exact listening, we will tend to retain the appearance of the word as such, that is, its inner appearance. Exact listening supports exact seeing. For words that appear to have an arbitrary spelling, such as those that have silent letters that make the preceding vowel long, we can support the child’s proper spelling by having the child repeat the syllables of the word clearly and with varying emphasis.

I would ask you not to take what I have just said in a dogmatic way. Instead you should take it so that it can be used in many various ways. For example, someone may view the position of the Greeks in the general course of Western culture differently than I did in my discussion of teaching history a few days ago. Someone could have a very different perspective but could nonetheless present it with the same methods I used. For me, it is not important to say something dogmatic about the Greeks. I wanted to show how a particular perspective about one topic or another could be taught through a symptomatological understanding of history. I believe that it is particularly necessary for teachers today to be aware of how much we need to allow the spirit and the influences of the spiritual upon the totality of human activity to flow into teaching. We need to look without prejudice at what children bring with them if we are to raise them as they need to be raised so that the next generation will move past the social ills that have such a terrible effect upon us at present.

If you objectively observe human life, you will see that by developing the intellect in children, something that is so terribly characteristic of human nature arises: the desire for comfort, even laziness. What is necessary in order to develop intellect is—and you may laugh at this paradox—the development of will. Children will have a healthy intellect if we develop a healthy will in them through the methods I previously discussed; that is, through an introduction to art at the earliest possible time in elementary school, since art strengthens the will. We develop the will and thus in a quite particular way take care of the intellect. The reverse is also true. If we widen the view of the child by presenting broad and noble pictures, as it is possible to do in teaching history and religion, we will also have an effect upon the will.

Strangely, the proper development of intellect activates the will, and the proper development of will activates the intellect. Because of the terrible materialism of the last few centuries, an enormous dark cloud has spread over such things. Today we hardly notice how in the depths of human nature there is a certain kind of inner laziness in the soul that acts against the development of thinking. We should study egotism because it has such a subtle yet strong effect on the development of feeling today. That is something we always need to be aware of. People can develop a strong will in the proper way only if we continue to enlarge their perspective and direct them toward those things that act spiritually in the world, those things coming from the stars that have a spiritual effect upon world history and upon the depths of the human heart. It is only when people’s worldview includes the spiritual that they can properly activate their wills.

We need to move beyond certain things. In the attitudes that we have toward teaching, there is still much too much Robinson Crusoe. Robinson Crusoe and everything connected with him is characteristic of all the narrow-mindedness, all the pedantry of life. Robinson Crusoe was created for the hard-hearted middle class worldview of the eighteenth century and was then imitated everywhere else afterward. The English Robinson was barely there and then came the Czech, Polish, German, even a Croatian Robinson? There are Robinsons in every European language. Robinson Crusoe is a person who is not actually a person, because in a certain way he is a person who was mechanically placed in a situation of need and left alone so that out of his own inner activity and out of his external circumstances only those things necessary for healthy human development could develop piece by piece.

We could go through page by page of the Robinson Crusoe story and show the narrow-mindedness that is expressed through his character. We could show the weakness of a rationalistic religious worldview, which says that God is a unity and that human beings are good only when they are not spoiled through one thing or another. This unimaginative view completely puts aside the fact that human beings need a living spirit, one that permeates their souls, one that can be found everywhere in history and which has an effect right up to the stars. This Robinson Crusoe view lives even where the book is not read as the general attitude. This narrow-minded attitude must be removed from humanity, as it has subtly formed life as it is today,so that we find everywhere only a sense for what is mediocre, and people today can no longer rise above a certain level. It is Robinson Crusoe who has brought about this feeling for only the average, for nothing that is special or spectacular.

By pointing to Robinson Crusoe and his imitators and by making people aware of the intellectual adventures of the European- American civilization that overvalues the Robinson Crusoe ideal, I realize I am going against the feelings of many people. We need to leave people with that feeling a little bit, the feeling that they have moved into a little bit of the realm in which they grew up. People grew up with a Robinson Crusoe attitude and now need to think about it a little, in order to rid themselves of that part of this attitude that has permeated modern humanity.

In one sense Robinson Crusoe was a kind of protest against something that has developed more and more in Christianity. Although this is not the original Christian impulse, Christianity has developed in such a way that it assumes human nature is spoiled. Rationalism and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment out of which Robinson was conceived and written assume that human nature is still good and that all that is needed is for its evil enemies to be removed so that that goodness can come forth. Both of these positions are terribly one-sided. It is certainly understandable that a prejudice toward the basic goodness of human nature arose to oppose the prejudice of the basic evil of human nature. Basically, it is nothing more than the last remains of narrow-mindedness, but a very severe form of narrow-mindedness in which Jean- Jacques Rousseau3 lives. It is essentially the opinion that if we allow people to grow as some child of nature, they will do everything just as Robinson Crusoe did in the best and most conscientious way (even though they may be under the influence of some French Baptist minister). That is about what people think.

From the present point of cultural development, we cannot progress if we allow ourselves to fall into either of these one-sided perspectives. This one-sidedness needs to be resolved through a normal synthesis. Human beings are certainly naturally good; human nature is good. Children as they enter the world as imitative beings certainly show that they unconsciously believe in the goodness of the world that has accepted them. Nevertheless, although it is true that human beings in their nature are good, it is just as true that human beings are a product of living. Fresh meat is good, but after eight days it is no longer good. It is bad because it then stinks, and something must be done to improve it if we are still to enjoy eating it after a week. Human beings are in their nature basically good. However, if they remain as they are when they entered the physical world from their pre-earthly existence, they become bad if the strength is not awakened in them to improve themselves.

There you have both: human beings are in their original nature good, but strengths must be awakened in them in order to retain the good. They are not bad in their origins, but can be spoiled if we do not awaken the forces in them that can enable them to retain their original strengths. It is just as erroneous to say that the good would shine through if we allowed people to be as they like as it is erroneous to say that people are basically not good. What is correct to say is that human beings by their nature are good, but the forces must be reawakened in them that enable what is good within to develop. If it is not supported with guidance toward the good, human nature will spoil.

We should always carry this attitude within us in regard to human development. It will be transferred to children when we tell a fairy tale or describe a ladybug or a star in such a way that it is possible to perceive, either in the details or in the general context, that we are convinced that human beings have something which is good. However, this goodness must be continuously cared for; the goodness of the world depends upon our care for human beings. It is the responsibility of human beings to participate in the formative development of the world.

In this regard we have moved away from the wisdom of our ancestors. This kind of wisdom genuinely exists in humanity. It is curious how even in ancient Greece, not to mention Egypt, it was common practice for all instruction, all activities of the priests or other religious people with the general population, to be connected with healing. In ancient times, providing knowledge was closely connected with healing. I could even say that in essence a physician was just another kind of priest and a priest another kind of physician. (Even today we find a deep-seated feeling among people that being a doctor is somehow connected with making better. “Dr. Mammon” is, of course, simply a product of the present.) All things connected with learning or understanding and providing it to others, such as being a teacher or a physician, were one in the original instincts of humanity, and the concept of healing was connected with all of them. Why is that? It was based upon a particular perspective, a perspective that we today in our materialistic times unfortunately no longer have, but one toward which we must turn again. It is the perspective that to the extent that natural forces play a role in the historical development of humanity, there is an element of demise, an element that leads toward decadence, and human beings are called upon out of their own strength to transform that decline continuously into ascent.

Culture continually threatens to become ill. Through teaching and activity, humans continually need to heal what tends to become ill in culture. History contains forces of decline, and we cannot expect these forces of decline to support humanity. The fact that Marxism today lives from the idea that everything is based upon economic forces and that which is spiritual is only a superstructure is fundamentally based upon the materialism of the past centuries. What would occur if these purely economic forces were left to themselves, if people did not continuously attempt to improve? Those forces would only make social life ill. Trotskyism and Leninism only mean to make the entire cultural development of Europe ill. If Marxism is realized, if Marxism permeates schools, then the East will become an artificial illness of European culture. It assumes that culture can develop only out of those things lying outside of human beings. But culture can only develop when human beings continuously heal what exists outside of humanity and which tends to decline.

We must revive the idea that a teacher, when he or she enters the school, acts as a kind of physician for the development of the human spirit and provides the medicine for cultural development to developing children. It is neither vanity nor arrogance when a teacher feels herself to be a physician for culture. If this is felt in the proper way, it gives us a feeling, particularly if we are teachers, to look toward those things that have always been of greatest interest to humanity. The teacher’s view cannot be broad enough. The teacher’s importance cannot be high enough. If we are aware of what education should achieve for humanity, the high-mindedness of the educator’s view will always bring with it the necessary sense of responsibility and humility.

During these lectures, you will have seen that I have attempted to make true for a spiritual-scientific foundation of education something Herbart said: he could not imagine instruction that was not at the same time upbringing, nor could he think of any upbringing without instruction. It is important to permeate ourselves with enough spirit that is sufficiently alive that we bring all the material available to us about the progressing development of humanity into school, so that in our hands it becomes an upbringing for the children. Humanity as a whole has given us a very high task. We need to recognize what humanity has achieved and transform it so that it is appropriate for even the youngest child. We can do this if we comprehend the spirit with such liveliness as it is presented in spiritual science, and as it should be perceived here when we speak of a fructification of education through spiritual science.

I do not want to bring these lectures to a conclusion with some kind of summary. Rather I prefer to let them resound with something that I say without sentimentality, but which arises out of what I have attempted to present to you. Education can only be properly practiced if it is understood as healing and when educators are aware that they are also healers. If these lectures have provided some insight toward deepening an awareness of education so that we can all again feel how we are healers; and how we must become physicians of the spirit if we are to teach and educate in the highest sense, then these lectures will have at least achieved a hint of their goal. I hope only for what the chairman of this conference has already spoken of, namely, for a working through of the material of these lectures. I am, of course, always ready to do what you wish so that what I have presented in an incomplete form in these fourteen lectures, and which I wish so much to enter into the awareness of humanity, can be realized so that it continues to pervade our consciousness.

My dear friends:

After almost two years of Waldorf education, and in view of the opening of yet another important class in September, we shall again consider a number of curriculum issues. I shall, however, leave this till tomorrow. Today I shall take a look at the results of our work so far. New ideas may arise from this review that could further improve our teaching.

In order to prevent a possible misunderstanding of what I am going to say today, I can assure you that I have noticed and appreciated the progress made during these two years. The way you are teaching—the presentation of subjects—is already such that it can be said: You have progressively come to grips with your tasks. You have, in an extraordinarily healthy way, fused with the goals of these tasks.

But it behooves us to consider such details as can provide the basis for a positive development of our work. I believe that in reviewing your work, all of you will have this initial feeling that our work with the children has kept helping us to improve our methods. There is, however, something we might have missed—perhaps with a degree of pain. It is relatively easy to mediate the subject matter to the children, to give them a momentary understanding for what we teach them. But we have not yet succeeded in making the subject matter last for them, in making it a part of their whole being, so that it can stay with them throughout their lives, so that we may achieve the same results with our teaching as with our talks at special festive occasions.

Our teaching must live. It must reach beyond the ideas, images, feelings, and skills the children have acquired. We must give them something that can—depending on their dispositions and possibilities—continue into their adult lives.

Just as the limbs of any living creature are developing during the growing stages, are becoming bigger and more complicated, so also should the ideas, feelings, and skills we give our children be not fully formed but rather capable of growth and development. We must see to it that our teaching does not remain rigid, static, but that it can grow with them, change as they change during the course of development, so that at the age of thirty or forty they will still have the benefit of what they learned at seven or eight, because the learning has grown and developed as their complicated limbs have developed, because it has slowed down at the appropriate time, and so forth. Our teaching must enter the children’s being deeply, so that it can continue to develop with them, can live or fade away. This means that the children will have to absorb whatever we present to them and make it their own. The question arising from this realization is: How can we achieve this? The answer will come from assumptions quite different from those we generally make.

My dear friends, what we need to do is to make every effort at understanding the human being in his or her totality—in our case, this is the child—as a being consisting of body, soul, and spirit. Such understanding will allow us to comprehend the inner processes in the children when we teach them various subjects, and, as a result, we shall learn to adjust our work to these processes. Today, therefore, we shall concentrate on gaining a complete picture of how we ought to teach and educate.

To begin, let me draw your attention to the many erroneous ideas that are current regarding the human being. Teachers, especially, are convinced that what and how we teach—be it through visual perception or stories or activities—will increase children’s skills, ideas, and concepts, will strengthen their feeling, and that the increase and strengthening will last throughout the children’s lives. But this is not so. Let us proceed by example. We give the children certain ideas and mental images—in a history lesson, in the history of literature, in mathematics, or in geography—assuming that they will retain them as lasting possessions. It is generally assumed that such concepts descend somewhere into the lower regions of the soul, into the sub- or unconscious spheres, and that there they remain in one way or another, to be called upon whenever a situation arises. This is the function of memory, so they say.

But this assumption is not true. The ideas, the mental images, which we produce in the children and which, with us, they elaborate and develop, immediately change when the children occupy themselves with other things after the lesson. In no way does a concept swim about in the unconscious in its original form, to be called up at random. This is certainly not the case. The ideas and concepts we produce in the children are, when the children are no longer thinking about them, no longer present anywhere. They are not swimming about; they are no longer there. The process by which children later recollect is quite different from what is generally assumed—namely, that the ideas and concepts are called forth from the unconscious.

Not only may the processes taking place in recollecting and perceiving be compared; in a certain respect, they may be considered as one and the same. When we perceive something, when in the case of children we direct their soul activity to some outer object and develop with them an idea or concept, the activity will certainly be the children’s very own; they are preoccupied, are working with the idea or concept. We call this process perception.

When the children remember something, the same process is involved, but now it is directed inward. Something is happening within the children. The children are working with, developing, something in the same way as in the perception of an outer object. These inner processes that continue when the original mental images of perception are no longer directly present are extremely complicated. It is very difficult to describe in any specific instance how a mental image prepares to reconnect with the human being in order to emerge as memory—so that the image may again be perceived, this time as an inner event. But when we remember, we really perceive inner events in the same way we perceive outer objects.

It is really not all that important to have an exact knowledge of these processes. We need to be aware of something else. We need to know that the continuing effects of mental images and ideas that, later, emerge in memory actually take place in the sphere of our feelings. It is our life of feelings—with its joys, pains, pleasures, displeasures, tensions, and relaxations—that is the actual vehicle for the enduring qualities of the ideas and mental images that we can recall at a later stage. Our mental images change into stirrings of feeling, and it is these stirrings of feeling that we later perceive and that enable us then to remember.

It is important for us to understand this process because we must pay special attention to it in education. If in line with the convictions of most teachers today, we merely present to the children things to be looked at, to be accurately perceived by the senses, we are not giving them anything that will help them to remember later in life. Their memory will be greatly enhanced, however, if we put feeling into our words, if we teach with warmth, if we spice our lessons with the possibility of allowing the children to experience corresponding emotions, if we make them smile or feel sad, if we endeavour to go beyond the merely intellectual aspects to the life of feeling. I cannot overemphasize the importance of such an approach. It is, of course, more difficult. It demands great presence of mind. Mere intellectual instruction is easier than a teaching that wishes to stimulate the children’s feeling, that makes for an inner connection with a subject. We need not be pedantic in this teaching, need not necessarily always connect feeling directly to the subject taught. We may refer to something else in order to stimulate feelings. The important thing is that the children’s feelings are engendered during a lesson. Such stirrings of feeling aid memory. And this fact we must not lose sight of. Even in the driest of subjects, such as physics or geometry, we should try to appeal to the children’s feelings. If, for example, we interrupt a thought process and ask a child, “If you were to do this and something unexpectedly were to happen …?”—we add feeling to the lesson. We add tension, expectation, and relaxation that will permeate and benefit the thought process.

Never underestimate the effect of the unknown or half known. The effect of such on feeling is extremely important. If toward the end of a lesson we say, “and tomorrow we shall do this…”—the children need not know anything about “this”; their expectation and curiosity will still be aroused. If, for example, I have taught the properties of the square before those of the triangle and I conclude the lesson by saying, “Tomorrow we shall learn about the triangle”—the children do not yet know anything about the triangle, but it is exactly this fact that causes a certain tension, an expectation of what is to come, a looking forward to the next day’s lesson. The effect will carry the day. We ought to make use of the unknown or half known in order to facilitate the children’s effort at fitting the details into a totality. We really must not ignore such matters.

As we get used to working in this way we shall, on the one hand, in a quite elementary way, connect teaching with education and, on the other hand, feel the need to make ourselves ever more familiar with the nature of the human being, the child. And then, as out of our anthroposophical knowledge we ponder this nature, this wisdom of the human being, much will become clear to us and lead to increased teaching skills.

Developing such wisdom and teaching skills will ever more be of the gravest importance. It will allow the subject matter to fuse with the children, to become their very own possession. We have not yet achieved enough here.

Essentially our lessons consist of two interacting parts. We instruct, we exhort the children to participate, to use their skills, to be physically active. Be it in eurythmy, music, physical education, even writing or the mechanical processes in arithmetic—we try to engender activity. The other part of our lessons is concerned with contemplation. Here we ask the children to think about, to consider the things we tell them.

Although these two aspects always interact, they are fundamentally different. It is not generally appreciated how much the teacher of a contemplative subject, such as history, owes to a colleague who is more concerned with skills and aptitudes. Concentrating merely on contemplation leads the children to a stunted, prosaic adult life, with a tendency to boredom. They will have a superficial view of life, will not feel inclined to observe accurately, will not pay attention to events around them. Children who are trained predominantly in contemplation become benumbed, confused adults. We really owe a great deal, as teachers of contemplative subjects, to the teachers of handwork, music, and eurythmy. We can go so far as to say that the history teacher actually lives off the music or singing teacher and that, vice versa, the singing and music teachers live off the contemplative elements in history, and so forth.

In a situation that calls for directing the children’s attention to something of a contemplative nature, when they are sitting on their chairs listening to and concentrating on a story or on something that demands their judgment—however great our efforts may be to get them to think for themselves, if they merely sit and listen, this is no more than, if I may use the paradox, a “waking sleeping activity.” The children are, in a certain sense, outside the body with the soul and spirit, and it is only because the separation is not as complete as in sleep that the body’s participation continues. Indeed, especially during a contemplative lesson, we can observe the same phenomenon that is present in sleep—namely, an ascending organic activity. In children who are merely listening to stories, organic processes are called forth that are identical to those occurring during sleep, when the metabolic processes ascend to the brain. Making the children sit and listen, we engender in them, in the organism, a delicate sleep-like activity.

It is generally assumed that sleep strengthens and replenishes the organism. Waking up with a headache could correct this view. We must be clear about the fact that the unhealthy parts of our organism are kept back by the awake activity of the upper organs, so that they cannot ascend. But during sleep they rise, ascend. And this rising upward of what is amiss in the organism is continuously engendered by our insistence on making the children listen, think, and contemplate. When, on the other hand, we teach them eurythmy, when we make them sing, or play instruments, when we employ them in physical activities, as in handwork and gymnastics, even when we make them write something—when they are in fact doing things, the organic processes thus stimulated are an intensification of waking activity.

Even if the effect is not noticed, singing and eurythmy are hygienic, even therapeutic activities. This cannot be denied. This hygienic, therapeutic activity will perhaps be the healthier the less we approach it in an amateurish medical way, the more we simply do it out of our healthy imaginative conception of life.

Still, it is good for the teachers to know that they cooperate as partners, that the children owe the healthy ascent of their body fluids—essential during a contemplative lesson such as history—to the singing or eurythmy lesson of the previous day. We can only benefit from such a comprehensive overview of education, which will encourage us, should a problem arise, to cooperate with our colleagues. We shall discover that we can advise each other if, for example, as a teacher of history I can discuss a child with the music teacher.

Little, if anything, will happen if this consultation takes place in a didactic, routine way. Positive results will be achieved only when—from the comprehensive overview—we feel the urge to discuss a problem with a colleague. Then we may be convinced that when the physics teacher notices a problem and talks it over with the singing teacher, the problem will be lessened or solved when the appropriate steps are taken in singing. The singing teacher will know better what to do than the physics teacher and will be grateful to that teacher for having drawn attention to the problem. Only in this way will we establish a fruitful cooperation as teachers. Only in this way will we be enabled to consider the totality of the human being. The rest will follow, one thing developing from another.

This greater mobility in education will result also in something we cannot do without—humor. We need humor not only for thinking, at the right moment, of the unknown or half known, through which we evoke tensions and relaxations as memory aids, but for something else as well. As we make our teaching ever more mobile, as we get used to considering the whole human being instead of merely the subject matter, we shall in time learn to enlarge certain aspects of our lessons. This widening of subject in all directions is again of enormous importance, especially when it occurs in the direction I shall shortly speak about.

Consider a physics lesson. We are certainly not in favor of having apparati in our classrooms or of methodically developing experiments. Such methods can be employed, can even be very intelligent. It could be asserted that such an approach has proved itself and that a great deal is achieved by it. But the effect is short-term, and we cannot be concerned merely with short-term effects. What we intend to do is to provide the children with something that will benefit them throughout life. To succeed in this intent, we have continuously to enlarge concepts. We must, of course, teach the phenomena in optics and hydraulics. But we must also learn to be ready, at appropriate moments, to relate certain aspects of lessons to other things in life.

Let me give you an example. We could, at a given opportunity, spontaneously refer to the weather, to climatic conditions, to phenomena occurring across the globe in a distant country, so that the students realize that there are connections everywhere in the world. They will then experience the feelings that arise when we are led from one phenomenon to another; the tensions and relaxations that result will allow them to identify with the subject, grow together with it, make it their very own possession.

The most important connection we can establish is the one with the human being. We should never miss an opportunity for making this connection. Every situation—be it during a discussion of an animal, of a plant, or of the phenomenon of warmth—every situation presents an opportunity, without losing sight of the subject, without diverting the students from it, to connect with the human being. What, indeed, is there to prevent us, when talking about the phenomenon of warmth, from mentioning fever? What is to prevent us, when talking about elastic balls in physics, from mentioning the phenomenon of vomiting, a process similar to the repulsion in elastic balls? Vice versa, what is there to prevent us, during a lesson on reflexes in the human organism, from mentioning the simple phenomenon of repulsion in elastic balls, and so forth?

Such connections to life in general can be established already in the lower grades, can gradually get the children used to seeing the human being as the confluence of all world phenomena. When we teach the things that lie outside the human being as natural phenomena, they will always tend to be forgotten. When, on the other hand, we relate them to the human being, when we consider the corresponding phenomena in the human being, we shall notice another tendency: that it is really impossible to regard something that is connected with the human being without feelings. We cannot describe the functions of the ear or of the heart without evoking feelings in the children. By relating the outer world to the human being we always stimulate their feelings—and this is so very important.

Making this connection is, therefore, so very important in subjects treating the objective world, subjects that are usually taught “objectively,” as unconnected with the human being. We should always try to find such connections, and in fact, the most objective subjects are the ones that lend themselves most easily to our doing so, because all the world can be found within the human being.

Again, we have the means of aiding the children’s memory. We can be quite sure that the children will soon forget facts learned by rote in physics. They will not identify with them; the facts will not become inner possessions. But as soon as we relate such facts to the human being, demonstrate what is happening for the human being, the facts will remain, will become an intrinsic part of the children’s experience. What is explained to the human being about the human being becomes the human being’s very own possession. It is necessary for us to avoid abstractions, on the one hand, and on the other hand, what Schlegel referred to as the “crude-material-concrete.” Both should be avoided, especially in our lessons and education.

Let me give you another example. Recently I observed a lesson on comedy and tragedy in class eight. It is relatively easy to think of quite persuasive definitions of the comical, the humorous, the tragic, the beautiful, and so on. They can be found in current literature. But most, if not all, of them are abstractions and will not allow living mental images to arise. What actually happens is that our experience of a tragic, a sad event affects our metabolic processes, slows them down. Our experience of tragedy is, indeed, connected with our physical processes, as though something in our stomach cannot be digested, cannot pass into the intestine.

A deeply sad experience has the effect of literally hardening our metabolism, even though these processes are delicate. Indeed, if you happen to be unhappy, sad, or depressed, you are working against your digestion. The experience is identical to the feeling one has when food lies like a lump in the stomach, a crudely material but qualitatively comparable phenomenon. In a healthy digestion, the food passes naturally from the stomach to the intestine, is absorbed by the villi, passes into the blood, then penetrates the diaphragm, so that it can be distributed in the upper organism. This physical process is, qualitatively understood, identical to the effect of laughing, when we artificially induce the vibrations of the diaphragm. Laughing is a process that makes us organically healthy; its effect is similar to that of a healthy undisturbed digestion.

Such knowledge will allow us to relate the humorous to the digestive processes. We are learning to think in the way the ancient Greeks did, are beginning to understand the Greeks’ concept of hypochondria, of abdominal ossification. An objective observation will confirm this connection. Living toward the upper organism, getting the diaphragm into movement, stimulated by a healthy digestion and passing to the world outside—this physical process does, indeed, provide the connection of a humorous, happy mood to the physical body. By avoiding such abstract explanations as “humor allows us to rise above a situation,” we shall succeed in establishing the confluence of the abstract with the concrete. We establish a totality. We show the children how to combine, in their minds, spirit and soul with the physical, corporeal. We repress the absolutely harmful modern ideas of continuously teaching the human cultural aspects—soul and spirit—without relating them to the physical and, vice versa, at the other pole of the pendulum, of speaking about the physical in crudely materialistic ways. Taken separately, neither approach is truthful; for the ideas interact, flow into each other.

It behooves us to evoke total, comprehensive ideas and images, by binding humor and tragedy not to abstract concepts but to the diaphragm. A possible objection is that doing so might encourage a materialistic view of the world. This is certainly not so. It is exactly by showing how spirit and soul are living in the physical that we bring people to the point of seeing that the whole of the material world owes its existence to soul and spirit. As soon as we can imagine—when somebody is laughing, when somebody experiences laughter in the soul and spirit—that the event is connected with the diaphragm, we shall also gradually arrive at the idea of the effects of spirit and soul in rain, thunder, and lightning. We are led to these realizations by relating everything to the human being.

In relating everything to the human being it is important not to dwell too much on the egocentric—because much or exclusive self-interest, egocentricity, would result in contemplative egotism. If, on the other hand, in our contemplative lessons, we connect everything to the human being, we produce in the human being—simply by making one see oneself as consisting of body, soul, and spirit—a disposition that provides the best basis for one’s working from the depths of one’s being during physical activities. If our lessons allow the contemplative thinking elements to connect with the human being, we shall educate our students through history, geography, physics to become singers, to become truly musical people. Affecting our students in such a way that we let them think what they themselves physically want, we produce something in them which we really ought continuously to be creating.

In order to achieve this creation, we must acquire certain concepts. As you well know, it is not possible to remain well fed without the need of eating again. We cannot feed a person and say: “This is it, you need no longer be hungry!” Living processes proceed in rhythms. This truth applies to music, to everything in life. A human being must live in rhythmic alternations, so that one’s “being led back to oneself” is subjected to the highest tension and, in turn, to relaxation. The concepts we teach our students about stomach, lungs, and liver will produce in them a disposition that will again be offset in singing, in the way hunger alternates with eating—a rhythmic process. Only rhythm maintains life. The correct handling of the contemplative subjects will produce faculties that will correspondingly manifest in the other subjects.

If instead of merely enumerating Julius Caesar’s actions, successes, and failures, we would at the same time give the children imaginative pictures of the man, paint as it were a historical situation, so that the children feel impelled to have in their imagination a kind of shadowy picture of him, see him walk, follow his walk in their minds—if they were to imagine Julius Caesar in such a way that they did not merely copy the image in a painting but actually modeled it in their minds, and if they then proceeded to a handwork lesson, you may be absolutely sure that they would knit better than they would have without Caesar.

Such connections are as mysterious as those between hunger and satiation. Ignoring the connections produces different results. For example, if we teach for an hour without stimulating the imagination of the children, their stomachs will be filled with acid, will have excessive pepsin. This cannot be avoided in a contemplative lesson. It is, however, not only a matter of acidifying the food in the stomach; there is also a spiritual dimension. All matter is at the same time spirit. When the children are singing, the pepsin’s role is to produce in them the inner prickling they should feel during singing. This prickling cannot occur if the pepsin remains stuck in the folds of the stomach. And it does remain there if one only talks, without stimulating the imagination. When the imagination is stirred, the pepsin is distributed throughout the body, with the result that the singing teacher will be confronted by children whose organs are permeated by this prickling, this effervescent sensation. Without such experience—especially in the speech organs—the children will be lethargic and lazy, and they will sing without enthusiasm.

I tell you these things so that you can appreciate the importance of considering the totality of the school organism, of seeing it as a unit. Interfering in things that do not concern one does not help. Of course, each teacher must feel free to do what he or she thinks best. But one will gradually acquire the necessary skills by studying the nature of children and by appealing to their imagination. The children long for this attention, need it. And the teacher will greatly benefit from a preoccupation with this aspect of education.

A lively interest in human nature is, of course, the condition for succeeding in this endeavor. Such interest can be developed, and anthroposophy will provide you with all the hints you need. What I especially recommend to you—from a direct pedagogical/didactic point of view—is that you avoid getting stuck in abstractions when you develop your own concepts. You should instead endeavor to understand the human being in regard to organization.

You must actually become pioneers in a certain sphere, must tell yourselves: “We have today, on the one hand, the abstract sciences—history, geography, even physics, and so on. They are practiced in the most abstract ways. People acquire concepts. On the other hand, we have the sciences of the human being—anatomy, physiology—by means of which we learn about the human being, as though the organs were cut out of leather and reassembled.” Truly, as cut from leather—because there is really no difference between the descriptions of living organs presented by our anatomists and cut-out leather pieces. The human being is not described as a totality. The spirit is ignored.

You can, however, be pioneers. You can contribute positively to education by making use of both the abstractions, the lifeless concepts propagated today, and the crudely materialistic approach. You may teach both, but only in order to combine them in a living way, by interweaving them. You could teach history in such a way that it enlivens anatomy, and anatomy in order to bring life to history. The function of the liver could, for example, give you an idea for treating the history of the later Egyptian culture, because the nuance, this special nuance in the presentation, the (let me say) aroma one has to spread across the later stages of Egyptian history, one acquires during the contemplation on the function of the liver in the organism. The effect is the same.

By interweaving subjects in this way you will not only give humanity something that is culturally interesting; you will also meet an educational need by bringing together the so-called physical, which does not as such exist, and the abstract spiritual, which again has no meaning as such. Thus you may enter the classroom in such a way that your words carry weight and, at the same time, acquire wings. You will not torture the children with words that merely fly away, nor will you teach them skills and aptitudes that weigh them down.

In yesterday’s introduction I wanted to show the importance of the teacher’s understanding of the human being and of the school as organic unit. Everything else really depends on this understanding. Today I shall touch on several issues that may then be further developed.

If we wish to have a correct picture of the human being, what really matters is that we rid ourselves of all the prejudices in the current scientific world conceptions. Most people today—even those who are not materialists—are convinced that the processes in logical thinking are carried out by the soul, an inner organism, and that the brain is used as a kind of mechanism for carrying out these processes. All logical functions and processes, they say, are cerebral. The attempt is then made to explain these processes in three stages—the forming of mental images, judgments, and conclusions. It is true, is it not, that we must apply these processes in our lessons, that we must teach and practice them?

We have been so conditioned to this way of thinking that all logic is a function of the head that we have lost sight of the real, the actual nature of logic. When we draw people’s attention to the truth of the matter they demand proofs. The proof, however, lies in unprejudiced observation, in discovering the development of logic in the human being. Of the three stages—mental images, judgments, conclusions—only in the first is the head involved. We ought to be conscious of this: The head is concerned only with the forming of mental images, of ideas, and not with judgments or conclusions.

You may react by saying that spiritual science is gradually dismissing the head and diminishing its functions. But this is in accordance with the truth in its most profound meaning. The head really does not do all that much for us during our life between birth and death. True, in its outer appearance, its physical form, it is certainly the most perfect part of our body. But it is so because it is a copy of our spiritual organism between death and rebirth. It is, as it were, a seal, an impress of what we were before birth, before conception. Everything that was spirit and soul impressed itself on the head, so that it represents the picture of our prenatal life.

It is really only the etheric body—besides the physical—that is fully active in the head. The astral body and the I fill the head, but they merely reflect their activity in it; they are active for their own sake and the head merely reflects this. In the shape of the head we have a picture of the supersensible world. I indicated as much during last year’s lectures when I drew your attention to the fact that we are really carrying our heads as special entities on the top of our bodies. I compared the body to a coach or horse and the head to the passenger or rider. The head is indeed separated from the world outside. It sits, like a parasite, on the body; it even behaves like a parasite. We really must get away from the materialistic view of the head that attaches too much importance to it. We need our head as a reflecting apparatus, no more. We must learn to see the head as a picture of our prenatal spirit and soul organism.

The forming of mental images and ideas is indeed connected to the head. But not our judgments. These are actually connected to arms and hands. It is true—we judge with our arms and hands. Mental images, ideas we form in our heads. But the processes leading to judgments are carried out by the mechanism of arms and hands. The mental images of a judgment do, as its reflection, take place in the head.

You can develop a feeling for this distinction and then recognize its important didactic truth. You can tell yourselves that the task of our middle organism is to mediate the world of feelings. The rhythmical organism is essentially the basis for the mediation of feelings. Judgments are, you will agree, deeply related to feelings, even the most abstract of judgments. When we say “Carl is a good boy,” this is a judgment, and we have the feeling of confirmation. The feeling of confirmation or negation—any feeling actually that expresses the relation between predicate and subject—plays a major role in judgments. It is only because our judgments are already strongly anchored in our subconscious that we are not aware of our feelings’ participation in them.

There takes place for us as human beings, inasmuch as we judge, a phenomenon that we must understand. The arms, although in harmony with the rhythmic organism, are at the same time liberated from it. In this physical connection of the rhythmical organism with the liberated organism of the arms, we can see a physical, sense-perceptible expression of the relation between feelings and judgments.

In considering conclusions, the drawing of conclusions, we must understand the connection to legs and feet. Our contemporary psychologists will, of course, ridicule the idea that it is not the head that draws conclusions but the legs and feet. But it is true. Were we, as human beings, not oriented toward our legs and feet, we could never arrive at conclusions. What this means is that we form ideas and mental images with the etheric body, supported by the head organism; we make our judgments—in an elementary, original way—with our astral body, supported by our arms and hands; and we draw conclusions in our legs and feet—because we do this with our ego, and the ego, the I, is supported by legs and feet.

As you can thus see, the whole of the human being participates in logic. It is important to understand this participation. Our conventional scientists and psychologists understand but little of the nature of the human being because they don’t know that the total human being is employed in the process of logic. They believe that only the head participates in it. We must now understand the way in which the human being, as a being of legs and feet, is placed on the earth—a way quite different from that of the human head being. We can illustrate this difference in a drawing.

By imagining the outline of the human being we may arrive at the following concept. Let us assume that the person in the diagram is lifting a weight by hand, in our case a heavy object weighing one kilogram. The object is lifted by hand. Let us now ignore the person and, instead, tie the object (A) to a rope, pass the rope over a pulley, and tie another object of either identical or heavier weight to the other end (B). If B happens to be heavier, it will draw the original weight (A) up. We have here constructed a mechanical device the achievement of which is identical to that of hand and arm. I can replace hand and arm with a mechanical device—the result is the same. I unfold my will and, in so doing, I accomplish something that can equally be achieved by some mechanical device, as shown in the illustration.

What you can see in this diagram is a happening that is quite objective. The employment of my will does not alter the outer picture. With my will I am fully placed into the objective world. I impart myself into the objective world; unfolding my will, I no longer differentiate myself from it.

What I have demonstrated can be observed especially clearly when I take a few steps or use my legs for something else. What the will accomplishes during the use of my legs and feet is a process that is quite objective, something that takes place in the world outside. As seen from without, there is no difference between a mechanical process and my own personal effort of will. All my will does is to direct the course of events. This is most strongly the case when I employ functions that are connected with my legs and feet. I am then really outside myself, I flow together with the objective world, I become part of it.

The same cannot be said of the head. The functions of the head tear me away from the world. What I call seeing and hearing, what ultimately leads to the forming of ideas and mental images, cannot in this objective way impart itself to the world outside. My head is not part of that world; it is a foreign body on earth, a copy of what I was before I descended to earth.

Head and legs are extreme opposites and, between them, in the center—because there the will is already active, but in conjunction with feelings—between them we have the organization of arms and hands. I ask you to keep in your mind this picture of the human being—through the head, as it were, separated from the earth, having brought the head from the spiritual world as a witness, the proof of belonging to the spiritual world. One imparts oneself into the physical world by adapting the organs of will and the feelings to the outer laws, to environment and institutions. There is no sharp boundary between outer events and the accomplishments of the will. But a sharp boundary is always drawn between outer events and the ideas and mental pictures mediated to us through the head.

This distinction can give us an even better understanding of the human being. The head develops first in the embryo. It is utter nonsense to regard it as being merely inherited. Its spherical shape tells you that it is truly a copy of the cosmos, whose forces are active in it. What we inherit enters the organism of our arms and legs. There we are our parents’ children. They relate us to the terrestrial forces. But our heads have no access to the earth’s forces, not even to fertilization. The head is organized by the cosmos. Any hereditary likeness is caused by the fact that it develops with the help of the other organism, is nourished by the blood that is affected by the other organism. But it is the cosmos that gives the head its shape, that makes it autonomous and individual. Above all, the work of the cosmos—inasmuch as it is connected to the head—can be seen in those things that are part of the nerve-sense organism. We bring our nerve-sense organism with us from the cosmos, allowing it to impart itself into the other organism.

This knowledge is important because it helps us to avoid subscribing to the nonsensical idea that we are the more spiritual the more we ignore the physical and to avoid talking in abstractions about spirit and soul. We become truly spiritual when we learn to see the connection between the physical/corporeal and the soul and spirit, when we understand that our head is a product of the cosmos, is organized by it, makes us part of it. The organism of our legs is inherited; there we are our parents’ and grandparents’ descendants.

This knowledge, being true, will affect our feelings, while all the current concepts—be they about spirit or matter—are abstract, in no way related to reality. They leave us cold, cannot stir our feelings. I would therefore like to ask you to take to your hearts, to ponder deeply, and to develop for your educational work the fact that there is really no difference whether the human being is regarded as a physical/corporeal being or as a being of spirit and soul. Once we have learned to observe spirit and soul in the correct way we shall see them as creative elements from which flows the physical/corporeal. We shall recognize spirit and soul in their creative activity. And if, as artists, we reflect on this activity in the right way, we shall gradually lose sight of the material altogether as it becomes spirit all by itself. The physical/corporeal transforms into spirit in our correct imagination.

When one stands firmly on the ground of spiritual science, of anthroposophy, it no longer matters if one is a materialist or a spiritualist. It really doesn’t matter. The harm done by materialism is not the study of material phenomena. If this study were performed thoroughly, the phenomena would transform into spirit and all the materialistic concepts would be recognized as absurdities. The harm done is the feeble-mindedness that results when we do not complete thought processes, when we do not concentrate enough on what the senses perceive. We thus lose sight of reality. If we were to pursue thoughts about the material world to the end, we would arrive at the picture, the idea of the spirit.

As for spirit and soul, as long as we enter their reality when we reflect on them, they will not remain as the abstractions we are given by our current sciences but will assume form, will become visible. Abstract understanding becomes an artistic experience that will ultimately result in our seeing spirit and soul as material, tangible reality.

Be one a materialist or a spiritualist both perspectives will lead to the same result, provided the thought process is completed. Again, it is not the spirit that is the problem in spiritualism but rather this uncompleted thought process that so easily turns the spiritualist into an idiot, a nebulous mystic, a person who causes confusion and who can only vaguely come to grips with reality.

There is yet another essential and important task for you. Equipped with a sound understanding of the nature of the child, you must develop an eye for distinguishing the child with a predominant cosmic organism from the one with a predominant terrestrial/physical organism. The former will have a plastically formed head, the latter a plastically structured trunk and, especially, limbs.

What now matters is to find the appropriate treatment for each. In the more earthly child, the hereditary forces are playing a major role; they permeate the entire metabolic limb system in an extraordinarily strong way. Even when the child does not appear to be melancholic, there is, nonetheless, alongside the apparent temperament a nuance of melancholy. This is due to the child’s earth nature, the “earthiness” in the child’s being.

When we notice this trait in a child, we shall do well to try to interest him or her in music that passes from the minor to the major mood, from the melancholic strains of the minor to the major. The earthly child especially can be spiritualized by the movements demanded by music and eurythmy. A child with a distinct sanguine temperament and delicate melancholic features can easily be helped by painting. And even if such a child appears to have but little talent for music or eurythmy, we should still try our best to develop the disposition for it that is certainly there.

A child with a distinctly pronounced head organism will benefit from subjects such as history, geography, and the history of literature. But care must be taken not to remain in the contemplative element but, as I already pointed out yesterday in another context, to evoke moods, feelings, tension, curiosity that are again relaxed, satisfied, and so on.

Again, it is a matter of habitually seeing the harmony between spirit and body. The ancient Greeks had this knowledge, but it got lost. They really always saw in the effects of a work of art on human beings something they then also applied to the physical. They spoke of the crisis in an illness, of catharsis, and they spoke in the same way of the effects of a work of art and of education. The Greeks observed the processes that I described yesterday, and it is up to us to rediscover them, to learn to unite soul and spirit with the physical/corporeal in our thinking.

It is thus important that we use all our own temperamental energies, in order to teach history with a strong personal accent. Objectivity is something the children can develop later in life. To worry about objectivity, when we tell them about Brutus and Caesar, at the expense of expressing the feeling engendered in us during the dramatic presentation of their differences, their polarities—this would be bad teaching. As teachers, we must be involved. We do not need to wax passionate, to roar and rage, but we do need to express at least a delicate nuance of sympathy or antipathy toward Caesar and Brutus in our characterization. The children must be stimulated to participate.

History, geography, geology, and so on must be taught with real feeling. The latter subject is especially interesting—to feel deeply about the rocks beneath the earth. Goethe’s essay on the granite can here be of great help. I strongly recommend it to you. Read it with feeling, in order to see how a person could humanly relate—not merely in thinking, but in his whole being—to the primal father, the age-old, holy granite. This approach must, of course, then be extended to other subjects.

If we cultivate these responses in ourselves, we shall also make it possible for the children to experience and participate in them. This is naturally a more difficult approach, as it takes greater effort. But our teaching will be alive, a living experience. Believe me, everything we mediate to the children via feelings allows their inner life to grow, while an education that consists of mere thoughts and ideas is devoid of life, remains dead. Ideas and thoughts are no more than mirror images. With them we merely address the head, whose value lies in its connection with the past, its time in the spiritual world. When we give the children images and ideas that are made living through our strong feelings, we make a connection to what is significant for the earth, to the elements contained in the blood.

Let me give you an example. It is absolutely necessary for us to develop the appropriate feeling for the hostile, destructive forces in an airless space. The more graphically we show this—after the air has been pumped out—the more dramatically we can describe this terrible airless space, the more we shall achieve. In earlier times people referred to it as horror vacui. They experienced this horror streaming from it; their language contained it, and we must learn to discover this feeling again. We must learn to see a connection between an airless space and a thin, dried up person. Shakespeare indicated this in Julius Caesar:

Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’nights:
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.

It is the well-padded whom we trust, rather than the lean, skinny, bald-headed person with cold intellect. We must feel this relation of a lean person or a spider to airless space. Then we shall be able to pass on to the children, through imponderables, the cosmic feeling that must be an integral part of the human being.

Again and again, when speaking of education, we must emphasize the necessity of connecting the totality of the human being to the objective world, because it is only then that we can bring a healthy element also to those aspects in education that are so harmfully influenced by materialistic thoughts. We cannot, my dear friends, be as outspoken as Herr Abderhalden who—after having been invited to a eurythmy performance where in my introduction I also mentioned the hygienic and other aspects of physical education—said: “As a physiologist I cannot see anything in physical education that is physiologically justified. On the contrary, physical education is, in my opinion, the most harmful activity imaginable; it has no educational value whatsoever. It is a barbarity.”

We cannot afford to be so direct. We would be attacked from every side, as happens today. It is so, isn’t it, when you really think about it, that all the exercises and activities of physical education, wherein the worst of materialistic concepts are applied to the physical body, have become idols, fetishes—be they systems concentrating on the strongly physical, the superphysical, or the subphysical; be it the Swedish method or the German. What the systems and methods have in common is the belief that the human being is no more than a physical organism—a belief resulting from the very worst ideas developed by the age of materialism, not in accord with the thoughts I have outlined.

The exercises are generally based on an assumption describing the ideal posture for the human being—the correct curvature of the spine, the form of the chest, the manner of moving the arms and hands. What we actually get from the exercises is certainly not a human being but merely the picture these people have made themselves of the human being. No wonder there are so many diagrams in the manuals. This picture of the human being lends itself to being modeled in a papier-mâché figure. Everything that is said of the human being in Swedish gymnastics can be found in such a papier-mâché doll. The living human being can then be used like a sack and made to imitate the lifeless dolls. The real human being is ignored, is lost sight of in such practices. All we have are papier-mâché figures.

In spite of the fact that they have become so popular and influential, these practices must be seen as infamous, really quite reprehensible, because of this exclusion of the real human being. The human being is theoretically excluded in the sciences; in modern gymnastics the human being is practically excluded, reduced to a papier-mâché figure. Such practices should never find their way into education. In good physical education, the students should only carry out movements and assume postures that they can also actually experience within. And they do experience them.

Let’s take a look at the breathing processes. We must know that we must bring the children to the point where the breathing- in bears a faint resemblance to tasting some favorite food. This experience should not go so far as to the actual perception of taste but merely to a faint resemblance of it; the freshness of the world ought to be experienced when breathing in. We should try to get the child to ask: “What is the intrinsic color of the air I am breathing in?” We shall indeed discover that as soon as breathing is correctly experienced, the child will have the feeling that “it is greenish, really actually green.” When we have brought a child to the point of experiencing inbreathing as greenish we have accomplished something. Then we shall also always notice something else: that the child will ask for a specific posture when breathing in. The inner experience stipulates the correct corresponding posture, and the right exercises will follow from it.

The same procedure will lead to the experience of the corresponding feeling in breathing out. As soon as the children, when breathing out, can feel that they really are fine, efficient boys and girls, as soon as they experience themselves as such, feel their strength, ask to apply their strength to the world outside, then they will also experience, in a way that is healthy and appropriate to their age, the corresponding abdominal movement, the movement of the limbs and the bearing of the head and arms. This rich feeling during breathing out will induce the children to move correctly.

Here the human being is employed. We can see the human being before us, no longer allowed to be a sack, imitating a papier-mâché figure. We are moving in accordance with the soul that then pulls the physical body after it. We adapt the physical movements to the children’s needs, to their inner, soul and spirit experience.

In the same way, we should encourage the inner experience the children’s physical nature asks for in other areas—in the movements of arms and legs, in running, and so forth. We can thus really connect physical education directly to eurythmy, as it should be connected. Eurythmy makes soul and spirit directly visible, ensouls and spiritualizes everything that moves in us. It makes use of everything human beings have developed for themselves during their evolution.

But—also—the physical can be spiritually experienced. We can experience our breathing and metabolism if we advance far enough in our efforts. It is possible to do this—to advance to the point that we can experience ourselves, including our physical organism. And then, what the children are—on a higher level, I would say—confronting in eurythmy can pass into physical education. It is certainly possible to connect the two activities, to build a bridge from the one to the other. But this kind of physical education should be based on the development of movements not from the mere experience of the physical/corporeal but rather from the experience of soul and spirit, by letting the children adapt the physical/corporeal to their experiences.

Of course, in order to achieve this we ourselves must learn a great deal. We must first work with these ideas before we apply them to both ourselves and especially before we apply them to our teaching. They don’t easily impress themselves on our memory. We are not unlike a mathematician who cannot remember formulae or theorems but who, at a given moment, is able to redevelop them. Our situation is the same. We must develop these ideas about the total human being—spirit, soul, and body—and we must always make them livingly present. Doing so will stand us in good stead. By working out of the totality of the human being we can have a stimulating effect on the children.

Again and again you will find that when you have spent long hours in preparing a lesson, when you have grappled with a subject and then enter the classroom, the children will learn differently than they would when taught by a “superior” lecturer or instructor who spent as little time as possible in preparation. I actually know people who on their way to school quickly read up the required material. Indeed, our education and teaching are deeply affected by the way we grapple not only with the immediate subject matter but also with all the other things connected to skills and methods. These things, too, should be worked and grappled with.

There are spiritual connections in life. If we have first heard a song in our mind, in the spirit, it will have a greater effect on the children when we teach it to them. These things are related. The spiritual world works in the physical. This activity, this work of the spiritual world, must be applied especially to education and didactics. If, for example, during the preparation for a religion lesson, the teacher experiences a naturally pious mood, the lesson will have a profound effect on the children. When such a mood is absent, the lesson will be of little value to them.

In the future all teaching must be founded on a real psychology—a psychology which has been gained through an anthroposophical knowledge of the world. Of course it has been widely recognised that instruction and education generally must be built up on psychology, and you know that Herbartian pedagogy, for instance, which has influenced great numbers of people, founded its educational standards on Herbartian psychology. Now during the last few centuries and up to recent times there has been something present in the life of man which prevents a real practical psychology from coming into being. This can be traced to the fact that in the age in which we now are, the age of the Consciousness Soul, man has not yet reached the spiritual depth which would enable him to come to a real understanding of the human soul. But those concepts which have been built up in past times in the sphere of psychology—the science of the soul—out of the old knowledge of the fourth Post-Atlantean period, have become more or less devoid of content to-day: they have become mere words. Anyone who takes up psychology or anything to do with psychological concepts will find that there is no longer any real content in the books on the subject. They will have the feeling that psychologists only play with concepts. Who is there to-day for instance who develops a really clear conception of what mental picture or will is? In psychologies and theories of education you can find one definition after another of mental picture and of will, but these definitions will not be able to give you a real mental picture, a real idea, either of mental picture itself or of will. Psychologists have completely failed—owing to an external, historical necessity, it is true—to make any connection between the soul life of the individual human being and the whole universe. They were not in a position to understand how the soul-life of man stands in relation to the whole universe. It is only by perceiving the connection between the individual human being and the whole universe that it is possible to arrive at the idea of the being “man.”

Let us look at what is ordinarily called mental picture. We must develop this, as well as feeling and willing, in the children, and to this end we must first of all gain a clear conception of the mental picture. Anyone who looks with an open mind at what lives in men as this activity will at once be struck by its image character. The mental picture is of the nature of an image. And those who try to find in it the character of existence or being are subject to a great illusion. What would it be for us if it were “being”? We certainly have elements of being in us also. Think only of our bodily elements of being: to take a somewhat crude example: your eyes, they are elements of being, your nose or your stomach, that is an element of being. It will be clear to you that you live in these elements of being, but you cannot make mental pictures with them. You flow out with your own nature into the elements of being, and you identify yourself with them. The possibility of understanding, of grasping something with your mental pictures arises from the fact that they have an image character, that they do not so merge into us that we are in them. For indeed, they do not really exist, they are mere images. One of the great mistakes of the last period of man's evolution during the last few centuries, has been to identify being with thought as such. Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am), is the greatest error that has been put at the summit of recent philosophy, for in the whole range of the Cogito there lies not the sum but the non sum. That is to say, as far as my knowledge reaches I do not exist, but there is only image.

Now when you consider the image character of mental picturing you must above all think of it qualitatively. You must consider its mobility, one might almost say its activity of being, but that might give too much the impression of being, of existence, and we must realise that even activity of thought is only an image activity. Everything which is purely movement in mental picturing is a movement of images. But images must be images of something; they cannot be merely images as such. If you think of the comparison of mirror images you can say to yourselves: out of the mirror there appear mirror images, it is true, but what is in the mirror images is not behind the mirror, it exists independently somewhere else. It is of no consequence to the mirror what is to be reflected in it; all sorts of things can be reflected in it. When we have thus clearly grasped that the activity of mental picturing is of this image nature, we must next ask: of what is it an image? Naturally no outer science can tell us this, but only a science founded on Anthroposophy. Mental picturing is an image of all the experiences which we go through before birth, or rather conception. You cannot arrive at a true understanding of it unless it is clear to you that you have gone through a life before birth, before conception. And just as ordinary mirror images arise spatially as mirror images, so your life between death and re-birth is reflected in your present life and this reflection is mental picturing. Thus when you look at it diagrammatically you must mentally picture the course of your life to be running between the two horizontal lines bounded on the right and left by birth and death.

You must then further represent to yourself that mental picturing is continually playing in from the other side of birth and is reflected by the human being himself. And it is because the activity which you accomplish in the spiritual world before birth or conception is rejected by your bodily nature that you experience mental picturing. For true knowledge this activity is a proof, because it is an image, of life before birth.

I want to place this first before you as an idea (we shall come back to a real explanation of these things later) in order to show you that we can get away from the mere verbal explanations which you find in psychologies and theories of education, and arrive at a true understanding of what the activity of mental picturing is, by learning to know that in it we have a reflection of the activity which was carried on by the soul before birth or conception, in the purely spiritual world. All other definitions of mental picturing are of absolutely no value, because they give us no true idea of what it is.

We must now investigate will in the same way. For the ordinary consciousness will is really a very great enigma. It is the crux of psychologists simply because to the psychologist will appears as something very real but basically without content. For if you examine what content psychologists give to will you will always find that this content comes from mental picturing. As for will itself it has no immediate real content of its own. Then again the fact is that there are no definitions of will: these definitions of will are all the more difficult because it has no real content. But what is will really? It is nothing else but the seed in us of that which after death will be reality of spirit and of soul. Thus when you picture to yourself what will be our spirit-soul reality after death, and picture it as seed within us, then you have will. In our drawing our life's course ends with death on the one side, and will passes over beyond it.

Thus we have to picture to ourselves: mental picturing on the one hand, which we must conceive of as an image from pre-natal life; and will, on the other hand, which we must conceive of as the seed of something which appears later. I beg you to bear clearly in mind the difference between seed and image. For a seed is something more than real, and an image is something less than real; a seed does not become real until later, it carries within it the ground of what will appear later as reality; so that the will is indeed of a very spiritual nature. Schopenhauer had a feeling for this truth, but naturally he could not advance to the knowledge that will is a seed of the Spirit-Soul as it unfolds after death in the spiritual world.

Now we have divided man's soul-life into two spheres, as it were: into mental picturing, which is in the nature of image, and will, which is in the nature of seed, and between image and seed there lies a boundary. This boundary is the whole life of the physical man himself who reflects back the pre-natal, thus producing the images of mental picturing, and who does not allow the will to fulfil itself, thereby keeping it continually as seed, allowing it to be nothing more than seed. Now we must ask: what are the forces that really bring this about?

We must be quite clear that in man there are certain forces which reflect back the pre-natal reality and hold the after death reality in seed. And now we come to the most important psychological concepts of facts which are reflections of the forces described in my book Theosophy—reflections of sympathy and antipathy. Because we can no longer remain in the spiritual world (and here we come back to what was said yesterday) we are brought down into the physical world. In being brought down into the physical world we develop an antipathy for everything spiritual so that we radiate back the spiritual, pre-natal reality in an antipathy of which we are unconscious. We bear the force of antipathy within us, and through it transform the pre-natal element into a mere mental picture or image. And we unite ourselves in sympathy with that which radiates out towards our later existence as the reality of will after death. We are not immediately conscious of these two, sympathy and antipathy, but they live unconsciously in us, and they signify our feeling, which consists continually of a rhythm, of an alternating between sympathy and antipathy.

We develop within us all the world of feeling, which is a continual alternation—systole, diastole—between sympathy and antipathy. This alternation is continually within us. Antipathy on the one hand changes our soul life into picture image: sympathy, which goes in the other direction, changes our soul life into what we know as our will for action, into that which holds in germ what after death is spiritual reality. Here we come to the real understanding of the life of soul and spirit. We create the seed of the soul life as a rhythm of sympathy and antipathy.

Now what is it that you ray back in antipathy. You ray back the whole life, the whole world, which you have experienced before birth or conception. That has in the main the character of cognition. Thus you really owe your cognition to the shining in, the raying in of your pre-natal life. And this cognising, which possesses great reality before birth or conception, is weakened to such a degree through antipathy that it becomes only a picture image. Thus we can say: this cognising comes up against antipathy and is thereby reduced to mental picture.

If antipathy is sufficiently strong something very remarkable happens. For in ordinary life after birth we could not picture mentally if we did not do it in a measure with the very force which has remained in us from the time before birth. When you use this faculty to-day as physical man you do not do it with a force which is in you, but with a force which comes from a time before birth, and which still works on in you. You might suppose it ceased with conception, but it remains active, and we make our mental pictures with this force which continues to ray into us. You have it in you, continually living on from pre-natal times, only you have the force in you to ray it back. You have this force in your antipathy. When in your present life you make mental pictures, each such process meets antipathy, and if the antipathy is sufficiently strong a memory image arises. So that memory is nothing else but a result of the antipathy that holds sway within us. Here you have the connection between the purely feeling nature of antipathy which rays back in an indefinite manner, and the definite raying back, the raying back of the activity of perception in memory, an activity which is carried out in a pictorial way. Memory is only heightened antipathy. You could have no memory if you had so great a sympathy for your mental pictures that you could devour them; you have a memory only because you have a kind of “disgust” for them, you fling them back and in this way make them present. That is their reality.

When you have gone through this whole process, when you have produced a mental picture, reflected this back in the memory, and held fast the image element, then there arises the concept. This then is one side of the soul's activity: antipathy, which is connected with our pre-natal life.

Now we will take the other side, that of willing, which is in the nature of a germ in us and belongs to the life after death. Willing is present in us because we have sympathy with it, because we have sympathy with this seed which will not be developed until after death. Just as our thinking depends upon antipathy, so our willing depends on sympathy. Now if this sympathy is sufficiently strong—as strong as the antipathy which enables mental picturing to become memory—then out of sympathy there arises imagination. Just as memory arises out of antipathy so imagination arises out of sympathy. And if your imagination is sufficiently strong (which only happens unconsciously in ordinary life), if it is so strong that it permeates your whole being right down into the senses, then you get the ordinary picture forms* through which you make mental pictures of outer things. This activity has its starting point in the will. People are very much mistaken when in speaking psychologically they constantly say: “We look at things, then we make them abstract, and thus we get the mental picture.” This is not the case. The fact that chalk is white to us is a result of the application of the will, which by way of sympathy and imagination has become picture form.¹ But when we form a concept, on the other hand, it has quite a different origin; for the concept arises from memory.

Here I have described to you the soul processes. It is impossible for you to comprehend the being of man unless you understand the difference between the elements of sympathy and antipathy in man. These elements, as I have described, find their full expression in the soul world after death. There sympathy and antipathy hold sway undisguised. I have been describing the soul-man who, on the physical plane, is united with the bodily man. Everything pertaining to the soul is expressed and revealed in the body, so that on the one hand we find revealed in the body what is expressed in antipathy, memory and concept. All this is bound up with the nerves in the bodily organisation. While the nervous system is being formed in the body all that belongs to the pre-natal life is at work there. The pre-natal life of the soul works into the human body through antipathy, memory and concept, and hereby creates the nerves. This is the true concept of nerves. All talk of classifying nerves as sensory and motor is meaningless, as I have often explained to you.

Similarly, in a certain sense, the activity of willing, sympathy, picture-forming and imagination works out of the human being. This is bound to the seed condition; it can never really come to completion but must perish at the moment it arises; it has to remain as a seed, and the seed must not evolve too far. Thus it must perish in the moment of arising. Here we come to a very important fact about the human being. You must learn to understand the whole man, spirit, soul and body. Now in man there is something continually being formed which always has the tendency to become spiritual. But because out of our great love, albeit selfish love, we want to hold it fast in the body, it never can become spiritual; it loses itself in its bodily nature. We have something within us which is material but which is always wanting to pass over from its material condition and become spiritual. We do not let it become spiritual, and therefore we destroy it in the very moment when it is striving to become spiritual—I refer to blood, the opposite of the nerves.

Blood is really a “very special fluid.” For it is the fluid which would whirl away as spirit if we were able to remove it from the human body so that it still remained blood and was not destroyed by other physical agencies—an impossibility while it is bound to earthly conditions. Blood has to be destroyed in order that it may not whirl away as spirit, in order that we may retain it within us as long as we are on the earth, up to the moment of death. For this reason we have perpetually within us: formation of blood—destruction of blood—formation of blood—destruction of blood: through in-breathing and out-breathing.

We have a polaric process within us. We have those processes within us which, working through the blood and blood-vessels, continually have the tendency to lead our being out into the spiritual. To talk of motor nerves, as has become customary, does not correspond to the facts, because the motor-nerves would really be blood-vessels. In contrast to the blood all nerves are so constituted that they are constantly in the process of dying, of becoming materialised. What lies along the nerve-paths is really extruded, rejected material. Blood wants to become ever more spiritual—nerve ever more material. Herein consists the polaric contrast. In the later lectures we shall follow these fundamental principles further and we shall see how this can give us help to arrange our teaching in a hygienic way, so that we can lead a child to health of soul and body, and not to decadence of spirit and soul. The amount of bad education now prevalent is because so much is unknown. Although physiology believes it has discovered a truth when it talks of sensory and motor nerves, it is nevertheless only playing with words. Motor nerves are spoken of because of the fact that when certain nerves are injured, i.e. those which go to the legs, a man cannot walk when he wants to do so. It is said that he cannot walk because he has injured the nerves which, as motor nerves, set the leg in motion. In reality the reason why he cannot walk is that he has no perception of his own legs. This age in which we live has been obliged to entangle itself in a mass of errors, so that, through having to disentangle ourselves from them, we may become independent human beings.

Now you will have seen, from what I have here developed, that really the human being can only be understood in connection with the cosmos. For when we make mental pictures we have what is cosmic within us. We were in the cosmos before we were born, and our experience there is now mirrored in us; we shall be in the cosmos again when we have passed through the gate of death, and our future life is expressed in seed form in what rules our will. What works unconsciously in us works in full consciousness for higher knowledge in the cosmos.

We have a threefold expression of this sympathy and antipathy revealed in our physical body. We have, as it were, three centres where sympathy and antipathy interplay. First we have a centre of this kind in the head, in the working together of blood and nerves, whereby memory arises. At every point where the activity of the nerves is broken off, at every point where there is a gap, there is a centre where sympathy and antipathy interplay. Another gap of this kind is to be found in the spinal marrow; for instance, when one nerve passes in towards the posterior horn of the spinal marrow and another passes out from the anterior horn. And again there is such a gap in the little bundles of ganglia, which are embedded in the sympathetic nerves. We are by no means such simple beings as it might seem. In three parts of our organism, in the head, in the chest and in the lower body, there are boundaries at which antipathy and sympathy meet. In perceiving and willing it is not that something leads round from a sensory to a motor nerve, but a direct stream springs over from one nerve to another, and through this the soul in us is touched; in the brain and in the spinal marrow. At these places where the nerves are interrupted we unite ourselves with our sympathy and antipathy to the soul-life; and we do so again where the ganglia systems are developed in the sympathetic nervous system.

We are united with our experience with the cosmos. Just as we develop activities which have to be continued in the cosmos, so does the cosmos constantly develop with us the activity of antipathy and sympathy. When we look upon ourselves as men, then we see ourselves as the result of the sympathies and the antipathies of the cosmos. We develop antipathy from out of ourselves, the cosmos develops antipathy together with us; we develop sympathy, the cosmos develops sympathy with us.

Now as human beings we are manifestly divided into the head system, the chest system, and the digestive system with the limbs. But please notice that this division into organised systems can very easily be combated, because when men make systems to-day they want to have the separate parts neatly arranged side by side. If we say that a man is divided into a head system, chest system, and a system of the lower body with the limbs, then people expect each of these systems to have a fixed boundary. People want to draw lines where they divide, and that cannot be done when dealing with realities. In the head we are principally head, but the whole human being is head, only what is outside the head is not principally head. For though the actual sense organs are in the head, we have the sense of touch and the sense of warmth over the whole body. Thus in that we feel warmth we are head all over. In the head only are we principally head, but we are secondarily head in the rest of the body. Thus the parts are intermingled, and we are not so simply divided as the pedants would have us be. The head extends everywhere, only it is specially developed in the head proper. The same is true of the chest. Chest is the real chest but only principally, for again the whole man is chest. For the head is also to some extent chest as is the lower body with the limbs. The different parts are intermingled. And it is just the same in the lower body. Some physiologists have noticed that the head is “lower body.” For the very fine development of the head-nerve system does not really lie within the outer brain layer of which we are so proud; it does not lie within but below the outer layer of the brain. For the outer covering of the brain is, to some extent, a retrogression; this wonderful artistic structure is already on the retrograde path; it is much more a system of nourishment. So that in a manner of speaking, we may say a man has no need to be so conceited about the outer brain for it is a retrogression of the complicated brain into a brain more used for nourishment. We have the outer layer so that the nerves which are connected with knowing may be properly supplied with nourishment. And the reason that our brain excels the animal brain is only that we supply our brain nerves better with nourishment. We are only able to develop our higher powers of cognition because we are able to nourish our brain nerves better than the animals are able to do. Actually the brain and the nervous system have nothing to do with real cognition but only with the expression of cognition in the physical organism.

Now the question is: why have we the contrast between the head system (we will leave the middle system out of account for the present) and the polaric limb system with the lower body? We have this contrast because at a certain moment the head system is breathed out by the cosmos. Man has the form of his head by reason of the antipathy of the cosmos. When the cosmos has such aversion for what man bears within him that it pushes it out, then the image or copy arises. In the head man really bears the copy of the cosmos in him. The roundly formed head is such a copy. The cosmos, through antipathy, creates a copy of itself outside itself. That is our head. We can use our head as an organ for freedom because it has been pushed out by the cosmos. We do not regard the head correctly if we think of it as incorporated in the cosmos as intensively as is our limb-masses system, in which are included the sexual organs. Our limb system is incorporated in the cosmos and the cosmos attracts it, has sympathy with it, just as it has antipathy towards the head. In the head our antipathy meets the antipathy of the cosmos; there they come into collision. And in the rebounding of our antipathies upon those of the cosmos our perceptions arise. All inner life which rises on the other side of man's being has its origin in the loving sympathetic embrace between the cosmos and the limb system of man.

Thus the human bodily form expresses how a man, even in his soul nature, is formed out of the cosmos, and also what he then takes from the cosmos. If you look at it from this point of view you will more easily see that there is a great difference between the formation of the mental picture and the formation of will. If you work exclusively and one-sidedly on the building up of the former, then you really point the child back to his pre-natal existence, and you will harm him if you are educating him rationalistically, because you are coercing his will into what he has already done with—the pre-natal life. You must not introduce too many abstract concepts into what you bring to the child. You must rather introduce imaginative pictures. Why is this? Imaginative pictures stem from picture-forming and sympathy. Concepts, abstract concepts, are abstractions; they go through memory and antipathy, and they stem from the pre-natal life. If you use many abstractions in teaching a child, you involve him too intensely in the production of carbonic acid in the blood, namely in processes of the hardening of the body, and decay. If you bring to the child as many imaginations as possible, if you educate him as much as possible by speaking to him in images, then you are actually laying in the child the germ for the preservation of oxygen, for continuous growth, because you point to the future, to what comes after death. In educating we take up again in some measure the activities which were carried out with us men before birth. We must realise that mental picturing is an activity connected with images, originating in what we have experienced before birth or conception. The spiritual Powers have so dealt with us that they have planted within us this image activity which works on in us after birth, If in our education we ourselves give the children images we are taking up this cosmic activity again. We plant images in them which can become germs, seeds, because we plant them into a bodily activity. Therefore, whilst as educators we acquire the power to work in images we must continually have the feeling: you are working on the whole man; it echoes, as it were, through the whole human being, if you work in images.

If you yourselves continually feel that in all education you are supplying a kind of continuation of pre-natal super-sensible activity, then you will give to all your education the necessary consecration, for without this consecration it is impossible to educate at all.

To-day we have learnt of two systems of concepts: cognition, antipathy, memory, concept: willing, sympathy, picture-forming, imagination: two systems which we shall be able to apply practically in all that we have to do in our educational work. We will speak further of this tomorrow.

• 1. Imaginationen

I have already shown that the Apocalypse is built up on the number principle—one of the occult principles—from a certain view point. From my explanations about the fundamental rhythmic numbers in the universe and in man earlier today you may have seen how deeply numbers are grounded in the universe, to the extent that they can disclose rhythmical things.

The buildup in accordance with numbers is quite natural with occult revelations which are written in the way that the Apocalypse of John is. According to the modern principle of initiation the visions that the Apocalypticer speaks about arise if one has Imaginations before one and Inspiration speaks into them. Then one sees the Imaginations spread out before one in a pictorial way and Inspirations speak through them. However, when this occurs one has a number principle whereby the number 7 is always the most perfect one for all occultists. This is practically a tenet of occultism: 7 is the most perfect number. The number principle enables one to follow things up. You shouldn't think that this number 7 has much content or that its content is very important for one. But it is of very great importance when one is listening to Inspirations. If one lives in the number seven one can understand Inspirations in many different ways. I will give you an example. Let's suppose someone feels that there are important spiritual backgrounds behind his own age. Of course most people around the world feel the spiritual backgrounds in their own time; this is only natural from a human point of view, but it is rather arbitrary nevertheless. For if I am an observer in 1924, the observation year is 1924, whereas if someone else is an observer in the year 1905, that is the observation year, and so on. However, if I am the observer at any time and I know what I'm observing, and I'm able to go 7 impressions back from any given impression, then according to the laws of the spiritual world whatever makes the seventh impression explains the first one, and the fourteenth one explains both of these. So this is really a methodic principle to find one's way into what something can tell one. Just as one has to know the language which someone is speaking in order to understand him, so the main thing is to be able to live in this number seven.

This is the way one has to look at these things. For this revelation of the number seven is very complicated. All kinds of things in the universe are arranged in accordance with the number seven, and to a lesser extent according to twelve and other numbers. One can follow up the events which explain things from every point through multiples of 7.

We can do this precisely in connection with the fact that we indicate such an important point yesterday, which really seems to be extremely important in our age where Michael is regulating things in the world. We pointed out that John's significant vision of the woman clothed with the sun, the dragon under her feet, giving birth to a little boy will appear to men in a particular form in the near future. Therewith we have gained an extremely important point of departure; and from this point of view an apocalypse, every apocalypse and especially John's Apocalypse is the most impressive if one grasps what one is standing in in this way.

When I tried to interpret the Apocalypse in Nuremberg in 1908 it was an entirely different time in the entire Anthroposophical movement. The main thing then was to interpret Anthroposophy by means of the Apocalypse, as it were. One can interpret a great deal through the Apocalypse, and the events in the world which it was important to mention at that time could already be seen in the Apocalypse. However, as I already mentioned a number of times, you should identify yourselves with the Apocalypse and realize that the Apocalypse describes a large number of events which proceed in accordance with multiples of seven. Since I pointed to the events which are connected with the woman clothed with the sun and the dragon under her feet, you will be able to tell in which Apocalyptic point of time we're living from the point of view of the experiences of the consciousness soul.

My lectures in 1908 dealt more with the evolution of mankind in general, and with the evolution of the astral body, but with respect to the consciousness soul which doesn't run parallel with the other evolutionary processes, but pushes into them we're really living in the age of the trumpet sounds today.

We're standing at the beginning of the development of the consciousness soul, and we only hear the trumpet sounds if this consciousness soul elevates itself to the point where it can have supersensible visions, because people do not interpret what goes on down below in a supersensible way today. The significant thing today is that people accept things indifferently and that they do not interpret them in a supersensible way. In Anthroposophical lectures I have often referred to a particular point in the 19th century in this connection, namely to the beginning of the 1840s. I said that the beginning of the forties is a significant incision into the development of the civilized world, from a spiritual viewpoint. It is the culmination of materialism, as it were. Everything that is connected with materialism was already decided in 1843/44. What happened after this until now is basically only an after effect of this, and everything that happens in the future will also be an after effect. This point in time at the beginning of the forties is really extremely important for what has happened to the civilized population of Europe and its American appendage, for the breaking in of Ahrimanic powers into human affairs was a tremendously intensive one. You can say: yes, but there were even worse events after the years 1843/44. However, this only seems to be the case. You have to remember that Ahriman is smarter than human beings. Ahriman did his most important work in 1843/44, and he arranged things in the way that he does this in accordance with his intelligence. This is the low point in the materialistic path, or the summit, if you prefer. Then men continued to go about their business, and the things they did later on are sometimes seemingly nastier, but they are not as terrible for the totality of human evolution. If one looks at them from a spiritual viewpoint, they are the after effects of what was projected at the beginning of the forties. The sixth angel began to blow his trumpet at the beginning of the forties and he will continue to sound until the events of which I spoke yesterday will begin at the end of the 20th century, when the seventh trumpet will begin to sound.

We are definitely in the midst of the three woes. This is the second woe that civilized humanity is going through in the age of the consciousness soul, which was preceded by the fifth trumpet back to 150 years earlier. And if we follow the trumpets back with respect to the seven-foldness of the consciousness soul, we arrive at a somewhat earlier point in time. The consciousness age begins in 1413 down below here on earth; but things have shifted, and earlier times work into them. The trumpet sounds go back to about the age of the Crusades. In real occult centers one always looked upon this time of the Crusades up to our time as the age of the trumpet sounds, in a certain sense. You will be able to connect the stages which are described in the Apocalypse' with outer events. For instance, when Copernicanism takes hold and when materialism sets in one third of the human beings are killed, that is, they stop developing their full spirituality. And the plague of locusts which is described in the Apocalypse is really very shocking.

Here one comes to something which one doesn't like to talk about, although of course it belongs to the things that priests must deal with. This plague of locusts is with us in a very prominent way from a purely consciousness standpoint. Of course such things should not be discussed when we speak in a theoretical way or when we speak to humanity in general, where cures for sick conditions can always occur. But if it's a question of priestly activities, then of course one must know with whom one is dealing, just as one has to know this for normal humanity.

As a rule, the people who call themselves liberals or democrats are very glad if they can point to evidence that the number of people in a particular region on earth is increasing tremendously. An increase in the population is something which is very much desired, especially by politically minded democratic and liberal people, and also by people who think that they are free thinkers and intellectuals.

Now first of all this is not quite correct, because the statistics are based on errors; people usually look at one part of the earth and they don't realize that the other parts of the earth were more densely populated in previous times than they are today. It is not quite correct; however, on the whole it is correct in the sense that there is a kind of a surplus of human beings who are already appearing in our time who have no egos, who are not really human. This is a terrible truth. They walk around and are not incarnations of an ego; they enter into the physical line of heredity and receive an etheric body and an astral body. In a certain way they are equipped with an Ahrimanic consciousness, and they look human if one doesn't look too closely, but they are not human beings in the full sense of the word.

This is a terrible truth, which is present, it's a truth, and when the Apocalypticer speaks about the plague of locusts during the trumpets epoch he is referring directly to human beings. Here again one can see how good the Apocalypticer's vision is, for such men in their astral body look exactly the way the Apocalypticer describes them—like etheric locusts with human faces. One definitely has to think about such supersensible things in this way, and priests must know about such things. For a priest is a minister. Hence he must also be able to find words for everything that happens in such a soul. They're not always bad souls; they can just be souls who get to the soul stage but are lacking an ego.

One will certainly realize this when one runs into these human beings. A priest has to know this, for after all there is fellowship among men with regard to such matters. People with normal souls suffer through their association with such persons who really go through the world like human locusts. The question can and must arise: How should one behave towards such human beings? It is often very difficult to relate to such people because they feel things deeply, they can feel things very deeply, but one notices that there is no real individuality in them. However, one must of course take care to keep the fact that they have no individualities from them, otherwise insanity will necessarily result. But even though one has to conceal this from them, it's a question of arranging things for such souls—after all they are souls, even though they're not spirits—in such a way that these people can develop in the company of others, that they can make connections with others and go along with them, as it were. These human beings display the nature and essence of human beings fairly closely until their 20th year. The intellectual or mind soul only emerges around age 20, and this makes it possible for the ego to live out its life on earth.

Anyone who says that one shouldn't act in a sympathetic way to such ego-less, individuality-less people, since they won't incarnate again and because they have no individuality—is very much mistaken. He would also have to say that one shouldn't behave in a sympathetic way towards children. One must decide what is really inside such men in each individual case. Sometimes such men contain posthumous souls, that is, posthumous with respect to the actual or normal human souls that arose at a particular time in evolution and which incarnate repeatedly as men. These are souls which remained behind, or they are souls which returned belatedly from other planets, to which almost all human beings went during a certain age. Such souls may be present in such human bodies. Thus we must consciously educate such men like permanent children.

All of this is really secreted in the Apocalypse. And if one takes these ideas in the Apocalypse that are given as Imaginations, they sometimes cut into one's heart in a terrible way. It's really horrible the way he talks about all kinds of suffering that will befall mankind on earth with regard to our age; we can only say that a great deal of this is already here as far as the spiritual aspects go.

Then of course there are mildly grand ideas like the angels who come down with incense and a censer. There's a reference to the smoke of incense. Then our gaze immediately falls upon a great deal which happened at the time of the Crusades. The trumpets go back to the Crusades. What we see in the sphere of the consciousness soul enters the consciousness soul of humanity during the Crusades epoch.

Here one finds that consciousnesses of individual personalities arise during the time of the Crusades and what is connected with this, who really had tremendously strong impressions from their experiences of the spiritual world. Here we really meet what I would like to call geniuses of piety. It's very important for us to realize that we meet geniuses of, religiousness there.

If we go further back, we find that for the consciousness sphere the period between the Mystery of Golgotha and the time of the Crusades and everything that is connected with this is a smaller epoch that corresponds to the opening of the seven seals. One can only understand this completely if one realizes the following. Just think of how many personalities arise during the time of the Crusades who direct almost all of their religiousness into their depths, into their intensity of feeling, into an inner mystical experience. This begins at that time, whereas previously one looked up into the whole universe when one wanted to perceive the divine world; the previous state of affairs also existed in tone-setting places, although there was a continual battle with the stream that proceeded from Rome. They had an understanding for the God who lives, weaves and works in the sensory phenomena to which they looked up. However, at some point everything was more or less directed within. The great geniuses of mysticism appear. Previously one received divine revelations through the perception of the universe; afterwards we have a feeling of the, inner kindling of light which the human heart can feel, so that divine things can be illuminated from within men.

The stages which the Apocalypse describes are also present here. We have the first, quiet, victorious advance, where the spreading out of Christianity depends on the victorious spirit and word, where Christianity spreads out in the sub-depths of the social life at that time. Then we have a second epoch, where the spread of, Christianity takes away a lot of what one could call peace from the world. Christianity participates quite a bit in the wars which take place in a second epoch. Then we see an epoch where a gradual dying out of the inner impulse of Christianity occurs, where Christianity becomes the state religion, which of course is a dying of the real Christian impulse. Then we have the period which corresponds to the fourth seal, when Islam breaks in in the way I described. And so it goes; seal after seal is opened, and then what occurs under the influence of significant religious geniuses and under the influence of the Crusades is something that one can observe if one follows up what really happened more exactly. In this respect all the history books are really a falsification of history.

Up till the Crusades the spread of Christianity in a good sense through the repeated efforts of countless members of monastic orders and also in a more external and bad sense, occurred through the direct inspiration of the Palestinian stories. Of course, the gospels were only referred to by priests and not by laymen, but the things that happened were definitely influenced by what the priests learned from the gospels. The priests had the gospels and the cultic rites; the cult gradually became something that reflected the supersensible world in a sensory way. The priests looked upon the sacrifice in the mass as a direct portal to the supersensible world, and therefore they looked up to the starry heavens less and less for their divine, spiritual inspiration. All of the wonderful prophecies and wisdom which I mentioned this morning in connection with ancient astrology and astrosophy disappeared almost entirely by the time of the Crusades.

During the time of the Crusades we suddenly see people appearing who travelled from east to west. Some of them are coming back from the Crusades, and others who came a little later had taken a deep interest in the secrets of the Orient. A large number of writings were brought from the east that were later lost or destroyed. They were definitely brought, but not many of them survived because people didn't watch their literary possessions as vigilantly then as one does today. However, the cosmic Christianity which they contained was handed down by word of mouth from about the time of the Crusades. People began to develop a deep interest in this at the time of the Crusades.

A kind of 7th seal is opened here. And one could say that things have really changed with regard to people's respect for written things. For instance, it's still uncertain at the moment, but if this Italian professor really did find handwritten things by Livius, you can imagine what a storm the Italian state will kick up in order to acquire them. And yet you wouldn't have to go back too far to get to a time when the state would have been quite indifferent to whether or not this or that had been found. This is something which has only developed rather recently.

I once witnessed a find like this. When I was at the Goethe and Schiller archives we received a letter by Goethe which looked rather odd; it was dirty and terribly torn. To us this was a real crime; that was no way to treat Goethe's letters. We tried to find out what was behind this. And we discovered that the letter had once been in the possession of Kuno Fischer, and he had simply sent Goethe's original letters to the printers with his notes and comments in the margins, without bothering to copy them. It was a bit miraculous that this letter had survived, since one generally doesn't keep manuscripts.

Thus it's not too surprising that the Christianity that was still alive in the Orient, or the orientalism that helped to explain Christianity were spread by the Crusades. What we would call cabalistic truths spread and a few people who might have known much more than Jakob Boehme lived at a time when no one thought that this was strange, whereas during Jakob Boehme's time the fact that someone like him existed created a sensation.

It is the time of the Crusades, where we want to point to what was going on in men's consciousnesses, and not so much to the outer events that are described in history books,—it's the time when the seal age gave way to the trumpet age. People with a little depth to them have always had a feeling about the time of the Crusades which made them say: Ah yes, the trumpet sounds; if I look at the thing from supersensible viewpoints it's really terrible what is going on there with respect to human souls. However, men on earth don't hear the trumpets, even though they're there.

A great many people should be aware of this trumpet period, since we're living at the time of the 6th trumpet, and you know what the most important effects and characteristics of this trumpet are. We're told that a third part of the men are killed, as I mentioned. Of course this doesn't happen all at once. But this killing refers to the absence of an ego in those men who had already been prepared previously through their locust forms.

These are things which force priests to look more deeply into the structure of what actually occurs. After all, priests are supposed to be dealing with supersensible things. We are surrounded by supersensible things in all directions, and what one can observe in human beings through the fact that they have a physical body is only one segment of human life. As soon as we press into the supersensible world we see that people do things of which they are often not aware. It could be that it's in someone's karma to behave in a particular way towards another human being in this earth life; and one can sometimes not know what it does to the other person's life if he goes by him without paying any attention to him. Of course later on karma will exert much more force and the thing will be adjusted; but maybe it could have been adjusted in this lifetime already. Someone who should have had something to do with another human being in this life cannot be moved to do it and he passes him by. One doesn't necessarily have to notice this in outer life on the physical plane. No real objections to this can be made, since the person concerned has done all of his duties, from a conventional outer viewpoint, but perhaps he did something that can strike terribly deep wounds into something which is connected with world evolution. Then one cannot say that one is dealing with super-terrestrial things, but with supersensible things, for supersensible things are constantly happening on earth.

It will be necessary to understand the Apocalypse in a serious way, to the extent that the one whom I called the etheric Christ will make himself visible within humanity. Therefore, it was due to a very healthy feeling which came up out of your deepest sub-consciousness that you wanted to make the Apocalypse into the object of these studies. Perhaps you initially had a different idea about what I can give about the Apocalypse at this time, but that you wanted to hear something about the Apocalypse from me was definitely the voice of the times in your hearts. And one can say that the fact that the need arose in you to understand the Apocalypse shows that you have a certain relationship with John the Apocalypticer, since you priests belong together and have become united in such tendencies. Since this permeation with the spirit of the Apocalypse is very necessary for you, you will not find any contradiction in the fact that one can find various sevenfold epochs, that one can really begin them anywhere and that one then discovers how things proceed; but if one cannot look upon the number principle as the methodic thing one won't find any connections in world evolution at all. Therewith we have really touched upon the productive side of the Apocalypse for our time.

Now we usually find other events sprinkled into the Apocalypse at the places where one set of seven goes over into the next one. that we run into here is very much in need of an explanation. If one only reads the Apocalypse in an external way one might think that there are so and so many numbers of human beings who have the seal of God on their foreheads in a particular epoch, so that they are among the fortunate ones who are rescued, or saved, or, however one wants to put it, whereas the others cannot be saved. This, is something which can be depressing if one reads the Apocalypse in a thoughtful way.

However, one should realize that there is always a difference between racial development and individual development in ancient writings. One should realize that no one felt at all depressed in earlier times when one said that so and so many will be saved in a particular race, whereas the others will be destroyed. No one included himself among these because one thought in a realistic way. It's just like today, where everyone is anxious to have his life insured.

Here one calculates how long one will probably live. Insurance companies don't accept people who will probably die soon because if they insured a lot of people who will soon die, their cash boxes would soon be empty. They want to have people who live a long time and make a lot of payments. Hence one must calculate the insured's probable life expectancy on the basis of past experience through probability calculus, which is a very interesting method of calculation. I have never found that anyone felt that he had to die at the moment he was supposed to according to the no doubt correct methods of the insurance companies. There's no such thing. One doesn't feel obliged to die. And this is based on a reality. As soon as one gets into numbers one is not grasping the stage of spirituality at which a particular human individuality is.

When one says such things, one is touching upon a certain mystery and an occult secret. This is based on the fact that one thinks that if one has 1,2,3,4,5 individualities and one counts them and then uses the number—already in counting them—that this must also be of importance for the spiritual world. But it is not important in the same way. Numbers enter in at the moment when the spiritual world breaks through and becomes manifest. As for instance when it becomes manifest in the world year or in breathing, or wherever the spiritual world breaks through. So that if one ascends to a spiritual consciousness, one needs the number at the boundary or threshold into the spiritual world. One doesn't get further there if one doesn't have a number or something similar to a number. But once on has crossed the threshold and one wants to do something with numbers, nothing fits. Therefore, when an occult writer like the Apocalypticer speaks of racial development which takes place on earth, he can very well say that there are so and so many people in this category—and we will see next time what these numbers mean—but a single human individuality cannot feel that he is affected by this, because these numbers refer to the development of races and not to human individualities. We will go into how all of this is possible the next time.