The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The task underlying our present studies is, in the widest sense, to try to understand the Universe through the relations existing between it and Man. I am far from wishing to convey the idea to those who have had certain glimpses into the Universe during the foregoing lectures that the truth of these matters can be found in any quick and easy way such as one hears of in ordinary Astronomy when it tells of the celestial motions. I would, however, like the friends who have come to the General Meeting not merely to hear something that comes right in the middle of a consecutive series, but in these few lectures held during the General Meeting, also to have a self-contained picture. I will therefore continue our studies of yesterday, giving indications of how the conception of the nature of Man leads to the conception of the Universe, its being and its movements. Of course, this subject is so vast that it is impossible to exhaust it for the friends who are now present. It will be continued later. For the benefit of those here for the first time to-night, I should like to put before them at any rate a few of the salient features of the subject embodied in previous lectures.

From other lectures you all know of the relation existing in human life between waking and sleeping. You know that in the abstract the relation is something like this: In the waking condition, the physical, etheric and astral bodies, together with the Ego-being, are in a certain inner connection; whereas during sleep, we have on the one side, the physical and etheric bodies united, and on the other—separated from them at any rate in comparison with the waking state—we have the astral body and the Ego. This, as you know, is merely an abstract assertion, for I have often emphasised that as regards all that belongs to the limb-nature—which is continued into the inner organisation, and is also the real bearer of metabolism—all this part of man, connected as it is at the same time with the human will, is really in a perpetual state of sleep. We must be absolutely clear that this state of sleep continues in regard to our inner organism, when we ourselves are awake. We can therefore say that the ‘Limb-man’ as carrier of the ‘Will-man’, is in a permanent state of sleep. The Circulation or ‘Rhythmic-man’, which may be described as in the middle between the Head-organisation and the Limb-man (the latter extending into the interior of man) persists in a continuous dream state. This is at the same time the outer instrument for our world of feeling. The world of feeling is rooted wholly within man's rhythmic organisation and while the metabolic man, together with its outward extension—the limbs—is the vehicle of the will, the rhythmic man is the vehicle of the life of feeling, and is related to our consciousness in the same way as our dream state to our waking life. Between waking and falling asleep, we are only really awake in our life of ideation and thought.

In this way we have set before us the fact that man, in his life between birth and death, is in an intermittent waking state in respect to his life of thought, in a dream state regarding his emotions and feelings, of which the rhythmic man is the vehicle; and he is in a state of continuous sleep as regards his limbs and metabolic system. We must realise at this point that really to comprehend human nature, it is necessary to fix our attention upon the fact of the extension of the limb-nature into the interior of man. All the processes that are ultimately connected with the abdominal region, everything connected with assimilation, digestion, as also with the secretion of milk in females, and so forth, all these processes are a continuation of the limb nature, directed inwards. So that in speaking of the will-nature or metabolic-nature, we do not mean only the outer limbs, but the continuation inwards too of this limb activity. In respect to all this, intimately connected as it is with the will-nature, man is continuously asleep.

This complicates the abstract idea we gain in the first place of the departure of the Ego and astral body; and it also necessitates a corresponding comprehension of another important fact.

When the materialistic physiologist of today speaks of the will, saying for instance, that it manifests in the movement of the limbs, he has in mind that some kind of telephonic signal is sent from the central organ, the brain, proceeds through the so-called motor-nerves, and thus moves the right leg, for instance. This however is quite unproven—in fact, a quite erroneous hypothesis! For spiritual observation shows the following: If a man's right leg is raised or moved by the will, a direct influence of the Ego-being of man takes place, acting upon that limb, so that it is really raised by the Ego-being itself; only, the process takes place in a state like that of sleep. Consciousness knows nothing of it. The nerve merely informs us that we have a limb, it tells us of the presence of such a limb. This nerve as such has no part in the activity of the Ego upon that limb. A direct correspondence exists between the limb and the will, which latter is associated in man with the Ego-being, and in the animal with the astral body. All that Physiology has to say in respect, for instance, of the speed of transmission of the so-called will, needs to be revised; it should be impressed upon us that here we have to do rather with the velocity of transmission in respect of the perception of that particular limb. Naturally anyone initiated into modern physiology can challenge this assertion in a dozen ways. I am well acquainted with these objections. But we have to try to rise a really logical thought process in this matter, and we shall find that what I say here corresponds with actual facts of observation, while what is said in physiological textbooks does not.

Sometimes indeed these things are so obvious as to be evident to all. Thus at a meeting of scientists in Italy—I think it was in the 80's of the last century—a most interesting discussion took place concerning the contradictions which came to light between the usual theory of the motor-nerves and the movement of a limb. As however the tendency to take notice of the spiritual aspect of things is absent in the physiology of today, even during a discussion such as this little was arrived at, except that contradictions existed in the hypothetical explanation of a certain fact. It would be extremely interesting if our learned friends, and there are such among us, were to investigate and test the physiological and biological literature of the last 40 years. They would make extremely interesting discoveries, were they to take up these subjects. They would find facts everywhere, which merely need handling in the proper way to confirm the findings of Spiritual Science. It would form one of the most interesting problems of the Institutes of Scientific Research which ought now to be erected, to proceed in the following way: International literature on the subject should first be carefully studied. We must take the international literature, for in English, and particularly in American literature, most interesting facts are substantiated, although these investigators do not know what to make of them. If you look into the discovered facts and substantiate them, there is but one step more needed in the sequence of investigation—given the right kind of vision in response to which the thing will, as it were, come out and show itself—and magnificent results would be arrived at today. Once we have advanced sufficiently to possess such an Institute, furnished with adequate apparatus and the necessary material, the facts will be found all around us, waiting as it were. Today people fail to notice the universal urge towards an Institute such as I have in mind, for the series of tests and experiments commenced are always discontinued just at the most critical moments, simply because people are ignorant of the ultimate direction of such experiments. Really important foundations would be laid by such an Institute, foundations for practical work. People do not dream at the present time of the technique that would result if these things were actually done, first as experiments and then building up from them further. It is only the possibility of putting it into practical effect that is lacking.

This is only by the way. To return to our subject, we have to do with a portion of man which sleeps even while he is awake. I now wish to bring to your notice a fact which has played an important part in all the older conceptions of the Universe. I refer to the assertion that the starting-point of the lower limbs is under the rulership of the Moon, while the region of the larynx, which we may consider as the meeting-point of the higher limbs, is associated with Mars. The man of today who is deeply involved in the modern conception of the Macrocosm, cannot of course make anything of such assertions; and the nonsense which hazy mystics and theosophists of today say or write about these things should not be awarded any special value, for these facts lie far deeper than, for instance, the repeated statements of materialistic theosophy that we have first coarse physical matter, and then other rather ‘finer’, then the astral still ‘finer’ and so forth. Those and similar things that pass for theosophy are in reality no spiritual teaching at all, but a spiritual untruth, for they are nothing more than a perpetuation of materialism.

Statements, however, that have come down to us as remnants of the ancient wisdom, have power to lead us to a state of real veneration and deep humility before that ancient knowledge of man, as soon as we begin to understand its meaning. These indications of an ancient wisdom persisted, not only till far into the Middle Ages, but even into the eighteenth century (where they may be found in the literature of the period), and perhaps into the nineteenth century, though here they have become merely copies, so to speak, and are no longer the direct result of an original primeval consciousness. And when these things are found introduced into quite modern literature, then they are still more certain to be copies. Up to the earlier part of the eighteenth century, however, we can still find traces of a certain consciousness of these things, and here again an association was thought of as between the nature of the Moon and this region of the human organism.

What I have just said—that man in relation to his will-metabolic nature is in a constant state of sleep—is most forcibly expressed in the lower limbs. In other words, through the metamorphosis which the arms and hands have undergone, man wrests from unconsciousness that which is really the sleep-nature of the limb-man. If to some degree we sharpen our sensitiveness for these things, we shall perceive what a really remarkable difference exists between the movement of a leg and the movement of an arm. The movements of the arms are free, and in a sense follow the feelings. The movement of the legs is not as free—I mean in respect to the laws by which we produce their movements. This, of course, is something which is not always noticed, nor sufficiently appreciated, as exemplified by the fact that the greater portion of the public attending our performances of Eurythmy are merely passive observers, and fail to notice that the leg movements are less articulated and the movements of the arms and hands more so. The reason for this is that, to understand the movements of the arms, a certain co-operation of the soul on the part of the observer is necessary. In our cinema age, people do not want to give this co-operation. While watching the movements of a dance where only the legs are in movement, and the arms at most are subject to arbitrary movements, there is little need either to think or feel in union with the dancer. This is by the way.

As we have seen, the most intensely unconscious process is in connection with the movements of the lower limbs. There, man is in a sense, fast asleep. How the will works into the legs or into the abdominal region, is entirely missed by man, owing to this state of sleep. In respect to this process, man's own nature sends back to him what is a reflection only of the process. Of course we follow the movement of our legs, but this observation does not make us conscious of the processes taking place in the nervous system as the will acts upon it; only the reflection of this becomes manifest to us. The nature of our lower man turns one side away, as it were, and only the other side is turned towards us. It is exactly the same with the Moon. She revolves round the Earth, and is altogether a most courteous lady, who never turns her back upon us, but shows us always the same side. She does not show us first one side, and then the other, while proceeding along her journey round the Earth. Nobody has ever seen her back. On account of this we never receive anything from the Moon which may be termed her own, but always a reflected light. In this fact we have an absolute inner parallel between the Moon-nature and the whole inner being of man. As we look up to the Moon, we understand her only as regards her outer formal side, but we should try to feel her inner relationship with the lower physical organisation of man. The deeper we go into these matters, the more we find this to hold good. It was the simple, instinctive observations of the Ancients which enabled them to realise these inner relations between human nature and the celestial bodies ...

Now let us take the other fact—that the arms, in their connection with the upper portion of the middle or rhythmic man, come awake in a sense in man; the movements of the arms can be taken as equivalent at least to the dream-state. We feel that the activity of the arms is related in a much nearer sense to human consciousness than is the activity of the lower limbs. Hence we find that a man who has elementary feelings, generally accompanies his speech, which is in close relation to the middle man, with a gesture of the arms, by way of emphasis or as a help in explaining his meaning. Speech is closely related to the upper part of the rhythmic-man. I do not suppose there are many speakers who use movements of the legs as a help for speech, or many audiences who would consider such movements attractive!

So if we feel in the right way this necessity or tendency in man's nature, we can also feel the real relationship between the hands and arms, which belong to the upper portion of the limb-man, and the middle-man or rhythmic-man, who has as his spiritual counterpart, the feeling nature. Quite naturally we try to support our speech, which is often in danger of becoming too abstract, by gestures of our arms and hands. We endeavour to project our emotional nature into our speech.

Today, in many circles—I will not name them—it is considered a sign of intellectual clarity to abstain as much as possible from using gesture in speech. We may however, look at the matter from another standpoint and say: If a person acquires the habit of putting his hands in his trouser pockets while speaking, it may not only mark him as a man of linguistic ability, but also perhaps as being somewhat blasé. That is another aspect of the matter. I am not speaking in favour of either of these points of view, but you will see how the nature of the arms clearly indicates their connection not only with the metabolic limb man, but also with the middle, the rhythmic or circulation man. This was understood and felt by the Ancients when they connected the combination of speech and arm-movement with the sphere of Mars. This planet is not so intimately connected with the Earth as is the Moon, nor is that which underlies the foundation of speech and the arm-organisation so intimately connected with the earthly man as is that which underlies the abdominal and leg-organisation. In a certain sense we can say: what in its activity corresponds to the lower limbs, works very strongly upon the unconscious man. What corresponds to the arms and hands, however, works very powerfully upon the semiconscious man. It is indeed a fact that no one with wholly unskilled hands, no one wholly unable to perform any dexterous movements with the fingers, can be a very subtle thinker. He would in a sense seek a coarse thought-mesh rather than fine links of thought. If he has coarse, clumsy hands, he is much more qualified for materialism than one whose hand movements are more adroit. This has nothing to do with having an abstract conception of the Universe, but with the true inclination to a spiritual view of the Universe, which always demands to be comprehended in finely-meshed thoughts.

All these matters are taken fully into consideration in a comprehensive educational science. You would probably be very pleased if you came to our Waldorf School and visited the classroom where, from ten o'clock, instruction is given in handicrafts. You would see the boys as well as the girls industriously absorbed in knitting or crochet. These things are the outcome of the whole spirit of the Waldorf School, for it is not a question of writing sundry abstract programmes, but of taking in earnest that for the whole training of human knowledge, one should as a teacher know the great difference it makes to the thinking whether I understand how to move my fingers dexterously, whether I am able in ordinary circumstances to cross the middle finger over the first, like a caduceus, or not. The movements of our fingers are to a great extent the teachers of the elasticity of our thinking. These things must be followed with understanding and discernment. It is comparatively easy to acquire facility in crossing the middle finger over the first with elasticity, making a serpent and the caduceus, but it is not so easy to do the same with the second and third toes. In this we see what great distinctions there are in the whole organisation of man. It is very important to bear this in mind, for the construction of the foot is intimately connected with our whole human earthly nature. By the organisation of our hands we raise ourselves above the earthly nature. We raise ourselves to the super-earthly. This was felt by the ancient wisdom, for it said that the lower man belonged to the Moon, but that the part of man which raised itself above the earthly nature belonged to Mars. Primeval Wisdom felt the organisation in the whole Universe in the same way as we feel the organisation there is in man. Materialism, however, has brought it about that we do not understand man any more. Again and again I must emphasise that the tragedy of materialism is that it turns its attention to matter, and all the time understands nothing at all of matter but simply loses connection with material existence. For this reason materialism can only cause social harm; for the socialistic materialists, the Marxists, are, as regards reality, just talkers. This they have learnt from the middle classes which have indulged in materialistic chatter for centuries; but they have not applied it to the social institution, and have remained satisfied with half-truths. A spiritual philosophy of life will once more reveal the nature of man, not in the abstract, but as possessing a concrete soul and spirit, which can work into each individual member of the human organisation.

One cannot advance in these things without constantly turning to the other side of life; for this development which our organisation manifests is two-fold, in so far as the upper man is a metamorphosis of the lower man from the last Earth-life. There is a point of time between death and rebirth when a complete reversal takes place, when the inner is turned to the outer, when what is presented as the connection between the organisation of the liver and that of the spleen is changed in the whole structure of its forces into, what becomes our hearing organisation when we are reborn. The whole of the lower man appears transformed. We have today in our lower man a certain relationship between the spleen and the liver. They slide into one another as it were. What is now the spleen slips right through the liver, and comes out, in a certain respect, on the other side, appearing again in the hearing organisation. So too with the other organs. People say that proofs should be found for repeated Earth-lives. Well, the methods by which such proofs can be found have first to be created. Anyone who is able to observe the human head in the right way, possessing a sense for such observation, comes to a way of understanding the transformation of the lower man into the human head; but he cannot understand it without filling in the intermediate stages of the experiences between death and rebirth.

In this connection very remarkable things are experienced. It may perhaps astonish some of you when I say that an artist who has become well acquainted with our conception of the Universe, said: “All that Anthroposophy says is very beautiful, but there is no proof. De Rochas, for instance, has given proofs, for he has shown how in certain conditions of hypnosis, reminiscences of former earth-lives may arise.” It seemed to he very remarkable that an artist of all people should have said such a thing. I might have assured him that it is as though I were to say to him: “My dear friend, your pictures tell me nothing; show me first the original of them, then I will believe that they are good”, or something of the kind. That of course, would be nonsense. As soon as he leaves his own domain, however, he has no power to understand how out of what he has before him, out of the true form of the human head, one can arrive at what is expressed in this human head. The picture must speak through itself, not through the mere likeness to the original. The human head speaks for itself. It corresponds to reality. It is the transformed lower man and points us back to the former Earth-life. One must however first provide what will make it possible to understand the reality aright.

The physical is thus seen to be a direct expression of the Spiritual. It is possible to understand the physical man as an expression of the Spiritual which is experienced between death and re-birth. The physical world explains itself and brings the spiritual world into this explanation. But we must first know this, saying to ourselves: The phenomena of nature are only a half, as long as we have them as mere sense-phenomena. We must first know this. Then we can find the bridge and understand the event that gave Earth its true meaning—the event of Golgotha: then we can understand how a purely spiritual event can at the same time enter right into physical life. If a man is not prepared to see the relation of the physical to the spiritual aright, he will never be able to grasp the fact that the Event of Golgotha is both a spiritual Event and an Event of the physical plane. When in the eighth General Ecumenical Council, in the year 869, the Spirit was eliminated, it was made impossible to understand the Event of Golgotha. The interesting point is that while the Western Churches started from Christianity, they took great care that the essence of Christianity should not be understood. For the nature and essence of Christianity must be grasped by the Spirit. The Western creeds set themselves against the Spirit, and one of the principal reasons why Anthroposophy is prohibited from the Roman Catholic side is that in Anthroposophy we have to relinquish the erroneous statement that ‘man consists of soul and body’ and return to the truth that ‘man consists of body, soul and Spirit’. The prohibition indicates the interest taken on that side to prevent man from coming to the knowledge of the Spirit, and so arriving at the true significance of the Event of Golgotha. Thus the whole knowledge which, as we see, throws so much light on the understanding of Man, has been entirely lost.

How then is an educational science to be constructed for the humanity of today, when the vision of the true nature of Man has been lost? To be an educationalist means to solve those sublime riddles which the child propounds to us, as it gradually brings forth that which has been laid into it between death and re-birth. The creeds however, reckon only with the post-mortem life—in order to humour human egotism; they have not reckoned that human life on Earth should be regarded as a continuation of the heavenly life. To demand of man that he should prove himself worthy of the claim made on him before he entered earthly life through birth, requires a certain selflessness of view, whereas the creeds have chiefly reckoned with egotism up to the present. Here, in Anthroposophy, whatever is of the nature of creed or faith gains, as it were, a moral colouring. Here purely theoretical knowledge is made to flow out into the higher ethical view and conception of the Universe. This should be understood by the friends of Anthroposophy. They should understand that in a sense, a moral inclination to spirituality is the preliminary condition for a knowledge of spiritual beings. In our present difficult time, it is specially necessary that attention should be paid to this moral side of the nature of the conception of the Universe. If we glance at what is taking place in the external world, we must say that empty talk, which is the sister of falsehood, is what has resulted from materialism, even for the ethical experience of humanity. This would become stronger and stronger if humanity were not helped by knowledge which leads to the Spirit, and which must be united with a raising of man's inner moral sense. We ought to acquire a realisation of how a spiritual-scientific conception of the world stands to the tasks and the whole dignity of Man and we should take this feeling as a starting point of our knowledge. This is only too necessary to mankind today, and one would like to find new phrases, new forms of expression in which to describe this aspect of the task of Spiritual Science!

Our last lectures showed the fundamental difference between man's whole conception here, from birth to death, and in the spiritual world, from death to a new birth. We have already explained that in the present epoch; i.e., ever since the middle of the Fifteenth Century, man may gain freedom during his existence between birth and death; everything on earth which he fulfils out of the impulse of freedom, gives his being, as it were, weight, reality and life. When we emancipate ourselves from the necessities of earthly existence, when we rise up to free motives guiding our will; that is to say, if we do not take anything out of earthly life for our will, then we create the possibility of independence also between death and a new birth. But in the present epoch this capacity of preserving our own independent existence after death calls for something which we may designate as the connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, for the Mystery of Golgotha may be viewed from many different aspects. In the course of the past years, we have already studied quite a number of these aspects; today we shall view the Mystery of Golgotha from a standpoint arising from the study of freedom and its significance for the human being.

Here on earth, between birth and death, the human being really does not have in his ordinary consciousness any conception of his own self. He cannot look into his own self. It is, of course, an illusion to believe, as external science does, that it is possible to obtain a knowledge of the inner constitution of the human organism by observing man's lifeless parts, indeed sometimes by studying only the corpse. This is an illusion, a deception. Here, between birth and death, man only has a conception of the external world. But of what kind is this conception? It is one which we have frequently characterized as the conception of illusion (Schein), of semblance, and I have again emphasized this yesterday.

When our senses are turned to the things which surround us in the world in which we live from birth to death, then the world appears to us as a semblance, as an illusion. This semblance may be taken into our Ego being. We may, for example, preserve it in our memory, and in a certain sense make it our own. But insofar as it stands before us when looking out into the world, it is an illusion which manifests itself particularly—as I have already explained to you yesterday—by disappearing with death and by re-appearing in another form; that is to say, we then no longer experience it within us, but before or around us.

If, however, in the present epoch we were not able to experience the world as an illusion during our existence from birth to death, if we were unable to experience this illusion, we could not be free. The development of freedom is only possible in the world of illusion. I have mentioned this in my book, The Riddle of Man, and have pointed out that in reality the world which we experience may be compared with the images that look out at us from a mirror. These pictures cannot force us, for they are only pictures, only a semblance. Similarly the world which we experience may be compared with the images that look out at us from a mirror. These pictures cannot force us, for they are only pictures, only a semblance. Similarly the world which we perceive is a semblance, an illusion. But the human being is not completely woven into this illusion of the world. He is woven into it only in regard to his perception, which fills his waking consciousness. But when he considers his impulses, instincts, passions and temperament, and everything that surges up from the human depths without his being able to grasp it in the form of clear concepts, at least in the form of waking concepts, then all this is not only a semblance or illusion; it is a reality, but one which does not rise up in man's present consciousness.

From birth to death, man lives in a real world unknown to him, one which cannot ever give him freedom. It may implant in him instincts which deprive him of freedom; it may call forth inner necessities, but never can it enable him to experience freedom. Freedom can only be experienced within a world of pictures, of semblance. When we wake up in the morning, we must enter a perceptive life of semblance, so that freedom may unfold. But this life of semblance, which constitutes our waking perceptive life, did not always exist in this form in mankind's historical evolution.

If we go back into ancient times, which have so often been envisaged in our lectures, to times when people still had a certain instinctive clairvoyance, or remnants of this clairvoyance (which lasted until the middle of the Fifteenth Century), we cannot in the same way say that man was surrounded only by a world of semblance. Of course, everything which man saw in his own way as the world's spiritual background, spoke through this semblance. He perceived the illusion, but differently; to him it was an expression, a manifestation of a spiritual world. This spiritual world then vanished behind the semblance, and only the semblance remained. The essential thing in the development of mankind is that in older times the semblance was viewed as the manifestation of a divine spiritual world, but the divine spiritual vanished from the semblance, so that man was confronted only by illusion, in order that he might discover freedom in this world of semblance. Man must therefore find freedom in a world of illusion; he does not find it in the world of reality which completely withdrew to the darkened experiences of his inner being; there, he can only find necessity. We may therefore say that the world which man perceives from birth to death—but everything I say applies to our age—is a world of semblance, of illusion. Man perceives the world, but in the form of semblance.

How do matters stand in regard to the life between death and a new birth? In our last lectures we explained that after death the human being does not perceive the external world which he sees here, between birth and death, but between death and a new birth he essentially perceives the human being himself, man's inner being. Man's world is then the human being. What is concealed here on earth, becomes manifest in the spiritual world. Between death and a new birth, man obtains insight into the whole connection between man's soul life and his organic life, or the activity of the single organs; in short, into everything which, symbolically speaking, lies enclosed within the human skin.

But we find that in the present age man cannot live in a world of illusion after death. He can only live in a world of illusion from birth to death. But between death and a new birth he cannot live in an illusion. When he passes through death, necessity imprisons him, as it were. Here on earth, he feels that he is free in regard to his perceptions, for he may turn his eyes to the things he wants to see; he may collect his perceptions in the form of thoughts, so as to feel the freedom of action in the sphere of thought; but between death and a new birth he feels a complete lack of freedom in regard to the world of his perceptions. This world takes hold of him violently, as it were. It is just as if he perceived as he would perceive here on earth if every sense perception were to hypnotize him, as if every sense perception were to take hold of him so as to render him unable to free himself from them of his own accord.

This is the course of man's development since the middle of the Fifteenth Century. The divine spiritual worlds vanished from the semblance which confronted him, but between death and a new birth, the divine spiritual worlds imprison him so that he cannot maintain his independence. I said that if we really develop freedom on earth; i.e., if we submit completely to the semblance in life, we may carry our own being through the portal of death. By envisaging still another difference between the present time and older human conceptions, we shall realize, however, what is needed in addition to this.

Whether we consider mankind in general, or the initiates and the Mysteries of ancient times, we find that the whole conception of the world had another direction from that of today. If we remain standing by what the human being has acquired ever since the middle of the Fifteenth Century, through the form of knowledge which has arisen since that time, we come across certain definite ideas on the development of the earth and of the human race. But man lost track of the conceptions which might have given him satisfactory indications about the beginning and end of the earth. We might say that he was able to survey a certain line of development; he looked back into history; he looked back into the geological development of the earth. But when he went back still further, he began to construct hypotheses. He imagined that the beginning of the world was a nebula, a kind of physical structure. Out of it developed; i.e., not really, but people imagined that this was so—the higher beings of the kingdoms of Nature: plants, animals, etc. Again, in accordance with conceptions of physics, people thought that life on earth and the earth itself would end by heat—again, a hypothesis. A fragment was thus surveyed, which lies between the beginning and end of the earth. Beginning and end became a hazy, unsatisfactory picture.

But this was different in a more remote past. In past times people had very clear notions of the beginning and end of the world, because they still saw the divine spiritual in the semblance. Bear in mind, for example, the Old Testament, or other religious teachings of the past. In the Old Testament we find ideas which are above all connected with the beginning of the world, and they are described in a form accessible to man, which enabled him to grasp his own existence upon the earth. The Kant-Laplace nebula instead, does not enable him to understand human life on earth. If you take the wonderful cosmogonies of the various pagan nations, you will again find that they enabled man to grasp his earthly existence. The human being thus directed his gaze towards the beginning of the earth and obtained thoughts which encompassed man. Conceptions of the end of the earth remained for a longer time in human consciousness. In Michelangelo's “Last Judgment,” for example, we come across ideas connected with the end of the world, which were handed down as far as our own epoch and which encompass man; for although the conceptions of sin and atonement are difficult, they do not do away with man.

But take the modern hypothetical conception of the end of the world: viz. that everything will end in uniform heat. Man's whole being dissolves, there is no room for him in the world. In addition to the disappearance of divine spiritual life from the illusion of perception, man therefore lost, in the course of time, his conceptions of the world's beginning and end. Within these ideas he could still assert himself and view himself within the cosmos as a being connected with the beginning and end of the earth.

How did the people of past epochs view history? No matter in what form they saw it, history was something which moved from the beginning to the end of the earth, and it obtained its meaning through the conceptions of the beginning and end of the earth. Take any of the pagan cosmologies: they will enable you to picture mankind's historical development. They reach back to ages when earthly life was still united with a divine spiritual weaving. History has a meaning. If we turn to the beginning and also to the end of the earth, history acquires a meaning. Whereas the conception of the end of the earth, as an imaginative conception contained in religious feeling, continued to exist even in more recent epochs; the conception of the end of the earth lived on in historical ideas, as a kind of straggler, even in more recent times. In historical works, such as Rotteck's “World History,” you may still find the influence of this idea of the world's beginning, which gives a meaning to history. The significant, peculiar fact is that at the same time in which man entered the stage of perceiving the world as an illusion, so that he perceived external Nature as an illusion, history began to lose its meaning and became inaccessible to man's direct knowledge, because he no longer had any notion of the earth's beginning and end.

Consider this fact quite seriously. Take the nebula at the beginning of the earth's development, from which undefined forms first condensed themselves, and then all the beings, rising as far as man. And consider the death by heat at the end of the earth's development, in which everything will perish. In between lies what we know, for example, concerning Moses, the great men of ancient China, the great men of ancient India, Persia, Egypt—and further on, of Greece and Rome, as far as our present time. In thought we may add all that has still to come. But all this takes place on earth like an episode, with no beginning and end. History thus appears to have no meaning. Let us realize this.

Nature may be surveyed, even if we cannot survey its inner essence. It rises up before us as a semblance together with the experience of our own self, between birth and death. Modern people simply lack the courage to admit that history has no meaning; it is meaningless, because man has lost track of the beginning and end of the world. He should really feel that mankind's historical development is the greatest of riddles. He should say to himself that the historical course of development has no sense.

Some people had an idea of this truth. Read what Schopenhauer wrote on the absence of meaning in history, when one sets out from occidental beliefs. This will show you that Schopenhauer really felt this absence of meaning in history. We should be filled with the longing to rediscover the meaning of history in some other way. The world of semblance enables us to develop a satisfactory knowledge of Nature, particularly in Goethe's meaning, if we give up hypotheses and remain by the phenomena; i.e., by the truths based on semblance, on illusion. Natural science may satisfy us, if we eliminate all the disturbing hypotheses connected with the beginning and end of the world. But we are then imprisoned, as it were, in our earthly cave and we do not look out of it. The Kant-Laplace theory and the end of the world by heat block our outlook into Time's cosmic distances.

This is after all the situation of present-day mankind from the standpoint of ordinary consciousness: consequently mankind is threatened by a certain danger. It cannot quite penetrate into the mere world of phenomena; above all it is unable to penetrate into this world of semblance with the forces of inner life. Man would like to submit to the inner necessity, to his instincts, impulses, and passions. Today we do not see much of all that may be realized on the basis of free impulses born out of pure thinking. But in the same degree in which man lacks freedom during his life from birth to death, he is overcome by lack of freedom, by the necessity of perception arising out of the hypnotizing coercion which exists between death and a new birth. Man is therefore threatened by the danger of passing through the portal of death without taking with him his own being and without penetrating into a free realm in regard to his perceptive world, but into something which submerges him into a state of coercion, which makes him, as it were, grow rigid in the external world.

The impulse which must in future enter the life of mankind is that the divine spiritual should appear to man in a new way, not in the same way in which it appeared in ancient times. In past epochs man could imagine a spiritual essence in the physical at the beginning and end of the earth, to which he was united and which did not exclude him. But this must take place in an ever-growing measure from the centre, instead of from the beginning and end. Even as in the Old Testament the beginning of the world was looked upon as a genesis of the human being, in which his existence was ensured, even as the pagan cosmogonies spoke of mankind's development out of a divine-spiritual existence, even as the contemplation of the end of the earth, which—as stated—was still contained in the conceptions of the end of the world and the final judgment, which do not deprive man of his own self, so modern times must find in a right conception of the Mystery of Golgotha, at the centre of the earth's development, that which again enables man to see divine life united with earthly life.

We should grasp in the right way that God passed through Man in the Mystery of Golgotha. This will replace what we lost in regard to the beginning and end of the earth. But there is an essential difference between the way in which we should now look upon the Mystery of Golgotha and the old way of looking at the beginning and end of the earth.

Try to penetrate into the way in which the pagan cosmogonies arose. In the present time we often come across conceptions stating that these pagan cosmogonies were thought out in the same way in which modern men freely join thought to thought and disconnect them again. But this is an erroneous University conception which has no reasonable foundation. We find instead that in the past, man gave himself up entirely to the contemplation of the world; he could see the beginning of the world only in the way in which it appeared to him in the cosmogony and in the myths. There was no freedom in this; it was altogether the result of necessity. Man had to envisage the beginning of the earth, he could not refrain from doing so. In the present time, we no longer conceive in the right way how in the past man's soul confronted the beginning of the world and, in a certain respect, also the end of the world with the aid of an instinctive knowledge. Today it is impossible for the human soul to envisage the Mystery of Golgotha in this way. This constitutes the great difference between Christianity and the ancient teachings of the Gods. If we wish to find Christ, we must find him in freedom and turn to the Mystery of Golgotha freely. But the content of the ancient cosmogonies was forced upon man, whereas the Mystery of Golgotha does not force itself upon him. He must approach the Mystery of Golgotha in freedom and his being must pass through a kind of resurrection.

Man is led to such freedom by an activity which I have recently designated in anthroposophical spiritual science as the cognitive activity. A clergyman who believes that he may gain knowledge of the “Akasha Chronicle” through an “illustrated luxury edition”, that is to say without any inner activity on his part, for the grasping of truths which should appear before his soul in the form of concepts and become images—such a clergyman would simply show that he is predisposed to grasp the world only in a pagan way, not in a Christian way; for Christ must be reached in inner freedom. Particularly the way in which the Mystery of Golgotha should be faced, constitutes the most intimate means of an education towards freedom.

If the Mystery of Golgotha is experienced rightly, it already tears us away from the world. What arises in that case? In the first place, we live in a world of apparent perception and in it surges up something which leads us to a spiritual life guaranteed by the Mystery of Golgotha. This is one thing. But the other thing is that history ceased to have a meaning, because beginning and end were lost; it obtains a new meaning when it receives it anew from the centre. We learn to recognize that everything before the Mystery of Golgotha tends towards the Mystery of Golgotha as its goal, and everything after the Mystery of Golgotha sets out from it.

History thus once more acquires a meaning, whereas otherwise it is an illusory episode without beginning and end; the world which we perceive outside faces us as an illusion for the sake of our own freedom and also changes history into something which it should not be—an illusory episode without any centre of gravity. It dissolves into fog and mist and theoretically we already find this in Schopenhauer's writings.

By tending towards the Mystery of Golgotha, all that was once mere illusion in history obtains inner life, an historical soul, connected with everything which modern man requires through the fact that he must develop freedom in life. He will then pass through the portal of death with the great teaching of freedom. Avowal of the Mystery of Golgotha throws into life a light which must fall on everything in man that is capable of freedom. And having the disposition to freedom in the illusory aspect of the world which is given to him, he has the possibility to escape the danger of failing to develop freedom, because after death he submits to instincts and passions, thus falling a prey to necessity. By accepting a religious faith which is quite different from those of the past, by allowing his whole soul to be filled by a religious faith which only lives in freedom, he becomes able to experience freedom.

In the present civilization, only a small number of people have really grasped that only a knowledge gained in freedom, a knowledge gained by inner activity, is able to lead us to Christ, to the Mystery of Golgotha. The Bible gave man the historical record so that he might have a message of the Mystery of Golgotha for the time when he could not yet take in spiritual science.

To be sure, the Gospel will never lose its value. It will have an every greater value, but the Gospel must be added to the direct knowledge of the essence of the Mystery of Golgotha. Christ should be felt and recognized also with the aid of human forces, not only with the aid of the forces working through the Gospel. This is what spiritual science strives for in regard to Christianity. Spiritual science seeks to explain the Gospels, but it is not based upon the Gospels. It is able to appreciate the Gospels so fully, just because it discovered, as it were, subsequently, all that lies concealed in them, all that has already been lost in the course of mankind's outer development.

You see, the whole modern development of mankind is thus connected on the one hand with freedom and the illusion of perception, and on the other, with the Mystery of Golgotha and the meaning of the historical development. The sequence of many episodes which constitutes history as it is generally described and accepted today, obtains its true weight if the Mystery of Golgotha can be set into the historical course of development.

Many people felt this in the right way and also used appropriate images for this. They said to themselves: Once upon a time, man looked out into the heavenly spaces; he saw the Sun, but not as we see it now. Today there are physicists who think that out there in the universe there swims a large sphere of gaseous matter. I have frequently said that they would be astonished if they could build a world airship and reach the Sun, for where they suppose the existence of a gaseous sphere, they would find negative space, which would transport them in a moment not only into Nothing, but beyond Nothing, far beyond the sphere of Nothing. The cosmologies developed today, the modern materialistic cosmologies, are pure fantasy. In past epochs, people did not imagine the Sun as a gaseous sphere swimming in the heavenly spaces, but they saw a Spiritual Being in the Sun. Even today the Sun is a Spiritual Being to those who contemplate the world in a real way; it is a Spiritual Being manifesting itself only outwardly in the way in which the eye is able to perceive the Sun. In Christ an older human race felt the presence of this central Spiritual Being. When speaking of Christ, it pointed to the Sun.

By recognizing the Sun as a Spiritual Being, it was possible to connect a conception worthy of man with the beginning and end of the earth. The conception of Jesus, who was Christ's abode, renders possible a conception worthy of man in regard to the middle of the earth's development, and from there will ray out towards beginning and end that which will once more make the whole cosmos appear in a light that gives man his place in the universe. We should therefore envisage a future in which hypotheses concerning the world's beginning and end will not be constructed on the basis of materialistic, natural-scientific conceptions, but in which the point of issue will be the knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha. This will also enable us to survey the whole cosmic development. In ancient times, the Christ was felt to be outside in the cosmos, where the Sun was shining. A true knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha enables us to see in the historical development of the earth the Sun of the earth's development shining through Christ. The Sun shines outside in the world and also in history—it shines physically outside, and spiritually in history; Sun here, and Sun there.

This indicates the path to the Mystery of Golgotha from the aspect of freedom. Modern mankind must find it, if it wants to come out of the forces of descent and enter the ascending forces. This should be realized fully and profoundly. This knowledge will not be abstract, not merely theoretical, but one that fills the whole human being. It will be a knowledge which must be felt and experienced in feeling. The Christianity which Anthroposophy will have to teach, will not only imply looking at Christ, but being filled by Christ.

People always want to know the difference between the teachings of the older Theosophy and the truths that live in Anthroposophy. Is this difference not evident? The older Theosophy warmed up the pagan cosmology. In the theosophical literature you will discover everywhere warmed-up pagan cosmologies, which are no longer suited to modern men, and although Theosophy speaks of the world's beginning and end, this no longer means what it meant in the past. What is missing in the writings of an older Theosophy? The centre is missing, the Mystery of Golgotha is missing throughout. It is missing to an even greater extent than in external natural science.

Anthroposophy has a continued cosmology which does not blot out the Mystery of Golgotha, but admits it, so that it is contained in it. The whole evolution, reaching back as far as Saturn and forward as far as Vulcan, will take its course in such a way that the light enabling us to see it, will ray out from our knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha. If we but recognize this fundamental contrast, we shall no longer have any doubt as to the difference between the older Theosophy and Anthroposophy.

Particularly when so-called Christian theologians again and again put together Anthroposophy and Theosophy, this is due to the fact that they do not really understand much about Christianity. For it is deeply significant that Nietzsche's friend, Overbeck, the truly conspicuous theologian of Basle, wrote a book on the Christianity of modern theology, in which he tried to prove that modern theology; i.e., the Christian theology, is no longer Christian. One may therefore say: Even in regard to this point, external science has already drawn attention to the fact that modern Christian theology does not understand anything about Christianity and knows nothing about it.

One should thoroughly understand all that is unchristian. Modern theology, in any case, is not Christian; it is unchristian through love of ease, through indolence. Yet people prefer to ignore these things, which should not be ignored, for to the extent in which they are ignored, people will lose the possibility to experience Christianity in a real way, from within. This must be experienced, for it is the other pole of the experience of freedom, which must appear. Freedom must be experienced, but the experience of freedom alone would lead us into the abyss. Only the Mystery of Golgotha can lead us across this abyss.

Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends! It is incumbent upon me to open this third official members’ meeting of this association for an independent school system, the Waldorf School Association. It gives me great satisfaction to be able to welcome you warmly in the name of the Board, and I would also like to express my pleasure in the fact that you intend to discuss with us the future fate of the Waldorf School Association. Before we embark on today’s official agenda, please allow me to preface the report from the Board with some remarks on the affairs of the Waldorf School and on the course of the Waldorf School movement as such, to the extent that you are involved in this process.

Just a short time ago, an extremely gratifying pedagogical and artistic conference¹ took place, at which the aspirations of the Waldorf School movement (actually, of any educational movement that does justice to the demands of the present and the near future) were graphically presented to an audience that probably included all of you as well as many other interested parties. For the moment, therefore, in speaking of the current status of the Waldorf School movement, it is only necessary to point to what came to light at this pedagogical-artistic conference.

However, I would like to still allow myself the luxury of emphasizing a few things that were important for the basic tone of this gathering. We held this last conference at a time when, as I was able to make you aware, the will of the Waldorf School movement had been able to prove itself and demonstrate its spread, as was apparent from the fact that I myself had been invited to speak on the nature of this movement on the occasion of the Shakespeare festival in Stratford in 1922. As a result of this, the Waldorf School movement became known in England, and this in turn resulted in an invitation to hold the vacation lecture series in Oxford. This put me in a position to speak at some length in England on what the Waldorf School is actually trying to accomplish. These Oxford lectures then resulted in the founding of an English school association that will focus for the time being on transforming the Kings Langley School into a Waldorf School of sorts. It will also work to disseminate the idea of the Waldorf School in England. This demonstrates, however, that ideals and impulses that are inherent in the Waldorf School movement engage current interests in a very intense way. And here, too, the fact that a number of teachers from England visited the Waldorf School over a longer period of time at the beginning of this year shows how strongly this interest has taken hold in England in particular.

A further consequence of the spread of the Waldorf School idea was the course that I held in Dornach just a short time ago for a number of Swiss teachers and educators who organized it.² In addition to the Swiss teachers, however, seventeen Czech teachers took part in the course. At this course in particular, it was evident that in the hearts of people involved in education, it is a matter of course that something such as what is being attempted by our school movement needs to come about. In everything you heard at this course in Dornach, you could really recognize the educational professionals’ deep longing for something to enter the art of education that would aim very strongly at both spiritualizing the art of education and making it truly practical.

It is also very understandable that a quite specific feeling should have come up and been expressed by the participants in this last educational course in Switzerland. Those who experience strongly what such a course attempts to accomplish come away with a feeling of consternation; they feel overwhelmed. Now, I am only recounting what was expressed to me at the course in Dornach: Someone who was stating the view of many of the attendees said that the serious-minded among them were overwhelmed to see how little they were in a position to cope in their own souls with all the pedagogically necessary impulses that assailed them over a period of just a few days.

You can see that I then had to respond to this objection, which seemed totally justified to me. A thought such as this expresses what is present in many people today. Many people of the present day know perfectly well that some incisive intervention must take place if our system of education is to be able to meet the social demands placed on it and to extricate itself from the circumstances into which it has fallen. We really do not often take stock of how necessary an incisive reform of our educational impulses is. But if we think about it, we find that in their heart of hearts, parents and teachers are half-consciously or fully consciously convinced of the need for such incisive impulses to enter the system of education. Then people hear what we have to say. In fact, at the artistic and pedagogical conference, many people reached the point of saying, in effect, “All that needs to be done? How are we going to manage that? We get such a wealth of demands dumped on us in the course of just a few days;”—excuse me for expressing it like this, but this is a feeling I have often heard—“we come here with the best of intentions and leave feeling like a poodle that has been drenched with ideals instead of water. Our first impulse is to shake off what has been dumped on us.”

As I said, this was actually expressed frequently at the last conference in Dornach. My response was, “Yes, certainly I can see that, but you need to keep in mind that people have had a long time to get used to the educational practices that are prevalent everywhere in schools today. They grew up with them and are comfortable with them. Because people always have only a few days available to devote to progressive impulses, everything we have to say to them has to be said in a few days. Under these circumstances, it is totally understandable that people feel dumped on. However, if it is possible for the suggestions that will continue to be made to arouse interest in these issues among ever broader circles, then we will also eventually be in a position to present what we have to say at a slower place. Then people would not need to feel overwhelmed.”

This is proof that very intensive work is needed so that it will eventually be possible for us to actually set the pace that most people need, it seems, in order to grasp our ideas, rather than burdening people with them in the twinkling of an eye, as it were. I must point out that if this insight is taken as a starting point, then people would give us the opportunity to express ourselves more exactly and more slowly. So everything depends on a real interest in this issue of ours developing in ever broader circles. As things stand at the moment, the situation is very strange.

You know, we must keep in mind the inner process the Waldorf School movement has gone through in the four years of its existence. Naturally, the facts need to be weighed up in the right way. We now have around seven hundred students in the Waldorf School and nearly forty teachers. Years ago we started with fewer teachers and not even two hundred fifty students. The meaning of these two numbers—two hundred or two hundred fifty students then, and seven hundred now—is something extremely characteristic of the Waldorf School movement. They indicate not only a pedagogical and methodological, but also a complete cultural and social transformation of the Waldorf School movement, a real transformation. Depending on your taste, you can say either that it has found its feet or that it has been stood on its head; it does not matter to me. What I mean is the following: When the Waldorf School was founded, the thought among our friends was a social one. The intention was to found a comprehensive school of some sort, in accordance with the social impulses that prevailed at that time and that were surfacing in people’s social thinking and feeling in 1919. The idea of the Waldorf School was conceived on the basis of social circumstances. And now neither you nor Herr Molt will take it badly if I put forth a risky hypothesis—which is of course to be taken with the famous grain of salt—of how this transformation has taken place. I will try to express it clearly.

Assume for a moment that Herr Molt had not been an anthroposophist, but simply one of the many philanthropic factory owners of that time. This was not the case, but we may suppose that it was. On the basis of the social circumstances of the times, he would still have conceived the idea to found a school, but the Waldorf School as it is today would surely not have come about. The Waldorf School as it is today came about simply because it was born out of anthroposophy—that is, out of the circumstance that someone who was not only a philanthropic factory owner, but also Herr Molt the anthroposophist, conceived the idea and turned to anthroposophy for help with the school’s instructional methodology.

These are the cultural, historical and social factors. An idea characteristic of the times was realized with the help of anthroposophy, which was to provide the instructional methodology.

Now you see, over the course of time a transformation has taken place, and now a large percentage of the students we have today are here because of the pedagogy and methods that are cultivated in the Waldorf School. That the idea of the Waldorf School has expanded within the school itself is due to this pedagogy and these methods, so the original idea has been turned inside out. The original idea attracted the pedagogy and methodology that is used here. However, the Waldorf School is what it is today—and rightly so—because of this pedagogy and methodology. They were the main reason why parents who brought their children to us later on sought out the Waldorf School. Thus, in the course of these four years, an important development has taken place: Within the Waldorf School, a pedagogy and methodology born out of anthroposophy have come into their own.

And this pedagogy and methodology were what interested the people in England, what called forth the course in Dornach and so on. There is a specific pedagogical idea that is being realized in the Waldorf School, and that is what I have recently had to emphasize ever more strongly. The seven hundred students and the general expansion of the Waldorf School are due to the pedagogy and methodology that are practiced in the school. This is also demonstrated by frequent attempts to found schools on the example of the Waldorf School.

For me, naturally, what has become a reality here was the important thing from the very beginning. From the very beginning I conceived of the task of the Waldorf School as a purely pedagogical and methodological one, and in fact it has become apparent over time that wherever people were interested in the idea of the Waldorf School, this was because of its pedagogy and methodology.

Now there was a decisive interest in these various courses on the part of teachers and educators, but I must say that it has also been demonstrated in the longings of the parents. You know, the day before yesterday a number of parents from Berlin approached me again and told me that they had started small school groups in which they had offered instruction and tried to apply Waldorf School principles, but that now the government had come and would no longer allow it, so they had to send their children to the public schools. They asked whether it would not perhaps be possible to create a means of informing people by setting up a branch of the Waldorf School in Berlin. They thought that since it is still possible here, where things are administered more liberally, to not have the government intervening in the Waldorf School, it might also be possible in Berlin if a branch Waldorf School were opened.

I told them that it would not work, and that we needed to realize from this example that carrying out the idea of the Waldorf School is not possible without outreach into the broadest possible circles on behalf of the idea, which recognizes what thousands and thousands of people, or even more than that, are unconsciously wanting. These people basically want the same thing that is wanted here and simply are afraid to admit that they want it. And I still maintain that I did the right thing in issuing the challenge to found the World School Association once the model was there. I also still maintain that our task is not to get involved in all kinds of other experiments that pop up all over the place like quackery in the field of medicine, if I might put it like that—not real quackery, of course, but what is branded as quackery—but that it is more important to spread a real understanding of Waldorf education ever further and further. It must be spread ever further, and then the other thing will happen too.

You see, the Waldorf School is actually a challenge inherent in the evolution of education and in the relationship of educational evolution to the great ideas of culture and society. Perhaps it will be of interest to you if I draw your attention to how a turn-about in human feeling has occurred over a longer period of time, and how our thoughts have not caught up with it.

In March, 1792, there was an imperial chancellor in Central Europe for whom the task of educating the populace was merely a matter to be summarized as follows: “It is incumbent upon governments as a matter of course to disseminate the riches of the spirit, and in this just as in the enjoyment of man’s other social affairs it is up to governments to form a national policing agency of a sort.” This was spoken out of the feeling of concern for educational matters that was current at the end of the eighteenth century, when it was thought that the people had to receive directives from above with regard to the enjoyment of all social and human concerns, and especially with regard to administering pedagogical and methodological affairs.

And in the nineteenth century there was a person named Fröbel³ who said already as a young man of twenty-three, “All experiments in the field of pedagogy, including those of Pestalozzi, seem to me to be something crude and merely empirical. It would be necessary to arrive at exact principles of instruction, just as natural science has exact principles.” That was what Frobel said.

These two things, the pronouncement of the imperial chancellor Rottenhahn in 1792 and the passage from the letter by young Fröbel to his friend Krause, permit us an approximate characterization of what was alive at that time. The opinion prevalent at that time, which is still prevalent and must now be overcome, was that there was no need for further ideas on issues such as education and its methods; it was a matter of course to leave such things to the state. And the other idea was the sovereignty of the natural sciences: Whoever studied them and took them as their point of departure would necessarily discover the appropriate pedagogy.

Within both the current of subordination to the state and the current of science, it has become evident that we have reached a dead end in the field of education. Of course people had the best intentions in saying that it was necessary to establish a form of state policing in the field of pedagogy. Of course they had the best in mind, but that did not prevent the development of all the things that people now feel must change.

Educators are sighing to see things change; they say that they do not know how they ought to be dealing with human beings, that they believed that the art of dealing with human beings could derive from a—I cannot call it a mishmash, since that is not how the adherents of exact science would talk, so let us call it a synthesis simply to use a different word—a synthesis of anthropology, psychology, and ethnology. More recently, psychiatry is also being included. Time has shown that what Frobel wanted is not acceptable to a deeper feeling for education. In all the people attending the courses, in the wish for a branch Waldorf School in Berlin, it was evident that people are certain that something has to happen, but when Waldorf school people talk to them about things, they are like poodles drenched with the water of ideals. It cannot work its way into their heads in a few days; nevertheless, they know that something has to happen.

We must keep clearly in mind that our efforts correspond to the desires of thousands and thousands of people, and that we must do everything we can to make the idea of the Waldorf School and all its impulses become ever more popular, so that people begin to see it as a challenge of our times. All this needs is to awaken in many people the courage to recognize and act on what they have long experienced in their heart of hearts in an indefinite way. It has still been my hope recently that this would flow into the hearts of the friends of the Waldorf School ideal who come to gatherings such as this one, because this is the most important thing we need—to have the interest spread, to have the efforts to popularize the Waldorf School spread. This is what we need.

And you know, something similar is necessary with regard to our method’s inner progress. When we founded the Waldorf School four years ago, we had eight grades. It was clearly apparent to us that we had to work out of a striving that had remained unconscious to Fröbel and his ilk, that we had to create our curricula and educational goals on the basis of a true understanding of the human being, which can only grow out of the fertile ground of anthroposophy. Then we would have a universally human school, not a school based on a particular philosophy or denomination, but a truly universally human school.

The ideal that had been hovering over people for centuries was clear to us then. Since we had to take other existing circumstances into account, we had to accept compromises, but only to a certain extent: The first three school years would have to be allowed to run their course in a way that derived its standards for instructional goals and curricula only from the teachings of human nature itself. Upon completion of grade six (at age twelve) and grade eight (at age fourteen) we would try to have the children at a point where they would be able to transfer to other schools. We wanted to create the possibility of making the Waldorf School ideal a reality for as long as possible, on the one hand, and yet still offer the children the possibility to transfer.

This is something that is actually easier to carry out with regard to the eight primary grades than it is for the expansion of the school into grades nine through twelve, which has also become necessary. To the primary school education we offer, we need to add college-preparatory and vocational high school education. People are now saying that we need to get these young ladies and gentlemen to the point where they can pass the Abiturand enter a college or university. (Although the good will is there among certain individuals to open an institution of higher learning ourselves, this is a huge illusion for the time being, and the things we cultivate must always rest on real and solid ground.)

Naturally, there are inherent difficulties in our needing to prepare the young ladies and gentlemen who graduate from this school to take the Abiturso that they will be able to attend colleges that will grant them the degrees they need in what is now called “real life.” It immediately becomes apparent that in the upper grades, it is much more difficult to cope with both the challenge of the Waldorf School ideal of deriving educational goals and curricula from human nature itself, on the one hand, and the coincidental curricula that include nothing of what human nature demands, on the other.

When these young adults are fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen years old, we would really need to be introducing them to real practical life, which means that they should understand something of what happens in real practical life. But instead of that, along comes the teacher of Greek and Latin, reproaching us for trying to incorporate real demands based on understanding the human being, for including lessons in chemical and technological subjects, in weaving and spinning—in short, in things people should know about in real life. Along comes the Latin teacher, complaining of not having enough time to prepare people for the Abitur.

This is how these unsolvable conflicts arise. On the one hand, we are trying to make the idea of the Waldorf School a reality in the best and purest way possible, and on the other hand we have to break this up with all kinds of compromises that are imposed by the fact that we are not allowed to tear the young people away from so-called real life, if you will excuse the expression. If we help them find their place in life as they should, they are rejected by so-called real life and become bohemians. (I used that word recently in the course in Switzerland and immediately had to apologize because some of the participants were from Bohemia.) The fact is, however, that we must come to the fundamental realization that we are not striving for bohemianism as an ideal, but for a really practical life, for a way of teaching and raising children that gives people a firm footing in real life. But before we can do this, an understanding of what human nature really encompasses and demands must become as widespread as possible.

Thus, we will not popularize the idea of the Waldorf School without first deciding to make understandable what I have pointed out today. In broader circles we will not popularize the idea of the Waldorf School if we speak only of abstract things, of having the children learn comfortably and through play and so on. If we present the same trivial thoughts that others also present, if we do not go into the concrete things that really lie dormant in people’s hearts, we will not succeed in popularizing the idea of the Waldorf School.

Today we are faced with the difficult task of having to do something so that in future we are not always living from hand to mouth with regard to the Waldorf School’s finances. Given the existing state of the finances, we never know whether we will be able to sustain the school for three or four months into the future; we are forced to economize with no end in sight. Of course it is true that the idea of the Waldorf School gives us such a firm footing that we can also summon the enthusiasm to go on into the unknown. On the other hand, however, responsibilities do arise. Actually, hiring each new teacher is such a responsibility that it really needs to be said for once that financing the Waldorf School, which is the point of departure of the Waldorf School movement as the first pedagogical example of how to raise and educate children according to this method, would have to rest on foundations that guarantee a certain measure of stability.

That is what I wanted to add as the necessary consequence of what I said before, so to speak. This august body would need to apply every means available to come to decisions that will make it possible to stabilize the financing of the Waldorf School at least to the extent that we know we will be able to carry the responsibility for it, and that it will never get to the point where the whole thing falls apart in a few months. We see the factors involved in taking our cause to the world in a financial sense. If this would happen, the outer framework would be there too.

Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, I can assure you that the things we experience in courses such as the ones I gave at Oxford and in Switzerland, the things we experience as the longings of teachers and parents, show that the Waldorf School movement is a challenge that is deeply embedded in the evolution of our civilization. This is proved in practical terms today by what has gone before. On the other hand, our ways of working in the Waldorf School, the fact that there is actually something present in the college of teachers, gives evidence of something from which the entire Waldorf School impulse radiates. It demonstrates how a strong will is making itself felt in the world out of the purest possible enthusiasm, as may have become evident to you most clearly during the recent artistic and pedagogical conference. In these two aspects, I might say, the school stands on firm foundations. Please excuse me for asking you to consider ways in which these two pillars which I have particularly tried to characterize, the first pillar of the challenge of the times coming from parents and teachers and the second pillar of the sacred, expert and fully appropriate enthusiasm that lives in the Waldorf School, can be joined by the third pillar of stabilizing the school’s financial foundations.

It is sad to have to speak of this. However, the fact of the matter is that doing anything at the present time takes money, lots of money. We can be certain that if we find ways to awaken understanding for the impulse of the Waldorf School, we will also arrive at the necessary financial means. This is why we must find the way from the first part of what I presented to what I have so presumptuously—there is no other word for it in this case—added to it by way of conclusion.

Points of business followed.

• 1. In Stuttgart, April 25-29, 1923. See Rudolf Steiner’s Pädagogik und Kunst, Pädagogik und Moral [Pedagogy and Art; Pedagogy and Morality], lectures and speeches, Dornach, 1978.
• 2. April 15-22, 1923. See Die pädagogische Praxis vom Gesichtspunkte geisteswissenschaftlicher Menschenerkenntnis [Pedagogical Practice from the Perspective of Spiritual Scientific Knowledge of the Human Being], eight lectures given in Dornach in 1923, GA 306, Dornach 1975. The Child’s Changing Consciousness and Waldorf Education, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1996.
• 3. Friedrich Fröbel, 1782-1852.

[ 1 ] Yesterday we referred to the important turning point in human evolution at the beginning of the third mystery epoch, when man's participation in the cosmic things in transubstantiation and in the act of consecration of man began to occur in the astral body. This is that member of the human being which leaves the physical body as far as ordinary consciousness is concerned, and which is unreceptive for percepts from the environment during the time of the separation.

[ 2 ] Let's try to get a clear idea of how this astral body functions in present-day man. It is the member which transmits the thoughts which enable us to understand the world. For thoughts about one's environment disappear as soon as one's astral body leaves the physical and etheric bodies.

[ 3 ] We can round out this idea if we realize that the ego-organization—the actual ego in man as he is today—is the receiver of sense impressions. However, the latter are obliterated when the ego-organization leaves the physical and etheric bodies.

So that we can say: here are the physical and etheric bodies of the human being, and during sleep the astral body and ego-organization are outside. The ego-organization gives us our sense percepts and sensations when we are awake. There is no sense perception during sleep, because the ego-organization is not in the physical and etheric bodies and because the ego is not receptive for impressions from the environment during that time. Likewise, the astral body gives us thoughts when it is in the physical and etheric bodies, but when it is outside it is not sensitive to things in the world and it gives us no impressions.

[ 4 ] However, it was this astral body which became receptive for what I described to you, during the third mystery epoch when man was to connect himself with divine, spiritual beings through cultic words and through everything the priest did in the way of preparatory exercises. It became receptive for the elaboration of the transubstantiation in itself during communion, and after the transubstantiation was elaborated it became receptive for apocalyptic things.

[ 5 ] The same kind of thing has to happen in the ego-organizations of people from the present epoch on. Even though this ego-organization can only experience sense impressions in ordinary consciousness, it must be constituted in such a way that it experiences transubstantiations and in such a way that it can participate in apocalyptic things through the latter.

[ 6 ] People can really become receptive for these things today, that is, someone can really become a priest if he takes in ideas which are true spiritual copies of the supersensible world. Therewith we have described the esoteric or inner connection between the esotericism which rightfully exists today and what must live in a priest's soul. We have described what can make the Christian Community a bearer of an important part of the new mysteries. We must only consider how the Anthroposophy which is approaching human beings today is really constituted.

[ 7 ] I have often used an analogy. I said that people are inclined to accept things which are supported by outer perceptions and experiments today, but they don't want to accept things which are not supported in this way. However, anyone who has this attitude is like a person who says: every rock on earth must be supported so that it won't fall down and therefore the planets in the universe must also be supported so that they won't fall down. Of course, since it's taught in a traditional and authoritative way, people believe that the planets in the universe mutually carry each other without supports. However, many people doubt that Anthroposophical truths support and carry each other, and that they don't have to be supported by outer observations and experiments.

[ 8 ] As soon as one sees that Anthroposophical truths are valid because they all support each other, so that the truths mutually support each other, in that moment one will stop saying: I can't see anything in the spiritual world yet and therefore I can't understand the content of Anthroposophy. Instead one will begin to understand Anthroposophy through the fact that its truths mutually support each other, and one will then work one's way further into it.

[ 9 ] The main thing which can and must put this body of priests on its inner path today is the task of penetrating what is given about the spiritual world. If it does tread this path, we should make it clear to ourselves that the attitude of soul which someone gets into if he takes possession of Anthroposophy in an honest way enables him to approach the Apocalypse. It enables one to approach it in such a way that one can say: It's true that the Apocalypse exists, but if I let it work upon me, each one of its images or Imaginations becomes united with my own ego. And then comes the moment where this Apocalypse can be a creation of the human ego and not just a personal experience. However, we must try to approach the Apocalypse in an Anthroposophical way. There's no other context which leads to it today.

[ 10 ] We will now try to grasp a few of the main points in the Apocalypse in a spiritual way, if I may put it that way. [ 11 ] “I am Alpha and Omega.” Expressed in an ancient form: one only understands alpha or A if one knows that a sound or letter as a component of a word was not the abstract, separate and meaningless thing back then, that we experience today. A sound was something which deserved to have a name. Mankind has treated The sounds of language which really enclose a great mystery in a peculiar way.

[ 12 ] Mankind has treated the sounds of language in the way that a policeman treats a criminal. A long time ago it numbered the letters in the way that we give numbers to criminals when they are put into their cells, so that they lose their names and get numbers. Sounds have lost their identity through the numbering process. This is a pictorial way of putting it, but a true one nevertheless.

[ 13 ] For if we go back before the late Hebraic period when they first gave numbers to the sounds, we find that mankind was fully aware that it is quite right for a sound to have a name, and that one can say alpha to it because it is a divine, supersensible being. If we want to find out what this first letter alpha of the so-called alphabet really is, we will have to go through a kind of spiritual development or conceptual development.

[ 14 ] You know that Anthroposophy goes back in earth evolution through Moon, Sun to Saturn. It tries to dig up things in the world which are connected with the evolution of man. We find the first cosmic human germ on Saturn, which became the present human body after manifold transformations during Sun, Moon and earth. Man was present on Saturn in his first, germinal form.

[ 15 ] For anyone who honestly and seriously wants to see the true state of affairs in this area, it's no doubt quite important to ask what men really experienced on old Saturn. Man experienced successive conditions of warmth. Man absorbed various states of warmth and cold. He existed in states which really only told him something about warmth conditions in the cosmos, for although they also told him many spiritual things, they only disclosed a limited region of the spirit through differentiated warmth and cold.

[ 16 ] If we go on from Saturn to Sun, we find that man's organism has become differentiated. During Sun existence man lives in a physical body which is differentiated into warmth ether and air. Differentiation also occurs within as man becomes filled with a richer content. He not only perceives the differentiated warmth like on old Saturn, but something like an inner life emerges. Man perceives the warmth on the Sun with his old perception and he also perceives an inner breathing rhythm in himself which in turn is an expression and a reflection of cosmic secrets.

[ 17 ] Just look at how the human being becomes richer as he evolves from Saturn to Sun. He also gets richer as he evolves from Sun to Moon and from Moon to Earth. And he will continue to get richer as he develops on Jupiter and up to Vulcan.

[ 18 ] Let's ask ourselves what the relation of man to the world is on ancient Saturn. On old Saturn man's relation to the world is such that he perceives a very large number of different warmths, but qualitatively he perceives very little. Not much of the world is in man. Man is present as man and he is just a man, as it were; not much of the world is in him yet. As he moves forward through Sun, Moon, earth and on to Jupiter his inner life becomes filled with the world more and more, and therefore it is richer. We already have a large part of the world in us here on earth. And when the earth gets to the stage where it will pass away again, man will have elaborated a large part of the macrocosm and he will bear it in him as earthly copies.

[ 19 ] We bear it within us already, but people are not usually aware of this. When a human being moves upwards through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition to a knowledge of the spirit, his inner soul life becomes ever more magnificent. Look at how little man knows about the human eye in his ordinary consciousness. But this eye is a whole cosmos, and like the macrocosm all of its details are marvelous and great. Every single organ in man becomes unveiled in a wonderful way in his physical body already. So that when an initiate looks around him he sees a world with the elements down below and its sun, moon and stars up above. If he looks into himself he sees that the eye, ear, lung, liver and every other organ is a world in itself, and that man's physical body is a marvelous interaction of worlds. Some of these worlds are finished, others are just beginning, some are sensory, others are half supersensible or entirely supersensible. Man really bears ever more worlds in himself as he works his way through one evolution after another.

[ 20 ] Thus we can distinguish man at the start of old Saturn evolution, where he is just beginning, where he is man, although he doesn't bear the world in himself yet. The first thing which man acquired during old Saturn evolution was a perception of the circumference of the warmth body which he felt that he was. So that in a schematic way we can say that man feels that he is warmth on old Saturn, but after he has felt that he is a warmth mollusk he gradually feels something like an accumulation of warmth, like an outer skin, a warmth skin, a somewhat cooler sheath than the warmth which is in him. He feels manifold degrees or intensities of warmth within him, and the warmth skin is the coolest.

[ 21 ] We express this in our present language, but this language is abstract and it doesn't conjure up the greatness of such a mental image before our soul, if we look into the course of time and we want to go back to old Saturn. However, people who are moved by a perception of these things at all are also moved by the awe with which such things were looked upon in the ancient mysteries. In the ancient Greek chthonic mysteries, they still spoke of Saturn men who didn't have a warmth skin yet, and then of men who had taken the first part of the world into their warmth skins; for the latter had a certain structure and form which imitated the world. This was the first thing from the world.

[ 22 ] What do man's experiences which he had while he was still a warmth man look like from a subjective, psychic viewpoint? They are like absolute amazement about the world. If one wants to describe them, one has to call them complete amazement. For one cannot grasp warmth in any other way than as sheer amazement. Outwardly it is warmth and inwardly it is complete astonishment. It's only because people have become as blockheaded as old Kant was, that they speak of a thing in itself which can't be explained. The thing in itself of warmth is astonishment;' and Saturn man is astonishment just as much as he is warmth. He lived in amazement or astonishment about his own existence, for he was just entering into this existence. This is alpha; the Saturn warmth man who is living in amazement. And the first thing which man experiences as the housing of the world, namely his skin, is beta,—building, this building or house. Man was a man in his house, and the house or temple or skin was the first thing from the world: beta.

[ 23 ] If we go through the alphabet like this, we go through the whole world. When man gradually absorbs everything which the world was and unites it with his being, until by Vulcan he will become united with the whole wide world to which he belongs, he will be the one he was at the beginning of Saturn evolution plus the whole world. He will be alpha and everything else too. But everything else amounts to the whole world. This is omega—man and everything in him which is the world. The “I am alpha and omega” describes what man will be at the end of the Vulcan period. At the end of Vulcan evolution, man will be able to say: I am alpha and omega. [ 24 ] Let's look at the Mystery of Golgotha from the vantage point of what we have placed before ourselves as the beginning, middle and end of human evolution. At the Mystery of Golgotha or approximately the halfway point in world evolution, we have the being who dwelt in Jesus' body at the stage of development that man will be in at the end of Vulcan evolution. We have a being as god which man will be at the end of Vulcan evolution.

[ 25 ] What is the difference between God's existence and man's existence? The difference between a god's existence and a man's existence is that the god already is what the human being will be later on in time. Don't say that this brings the god down to the human level and makes him into a human being. It doesn't. Because for supersensible perception, time is a simultaneous reality, if you'll permit me to use this paradoxical expression. The difference between man and God is the one which existed at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. One shouldn't relate different times or beings from different times when one looks at these things.

[ 26 ] A great deal of what is in writings like the Apocalypse is expressed in the language which was used in the mysteries, and it can only be understood if it is deciphered. On the other hand, one shouldn't blame the author of the Apocalypse for speaking in mystery language, for it was customary for people to do this at that time. People still knew that sounds are supersensible beings and that alpha is the supersensible human being when he was first created, and that when one goes from alpha to beta one is turning away from man and towards the world, including the divine world, and that if one goes through all the sounds to omega one has the entire divine world in omega.

[ 27 ] It's rather shocking that we're surrounded by experiences today which we consider to be trivialities. For instance, all the sounds are basically trivialities for us. Someone who only knows the alphabet doesn't know very much. The ABCs are trivialities. However, these trivialities point to divine, spiritual beings at the starting point, and our trivial letters are the descendents of what were once divine, spiritual beings for mankind. The whole alphabet was a number of such divine spiritual beings. Sounds were gods who assailed men from all sides with their din. The sounds AB were man in his house, and so on. Man with the whole world was alpha to omega. When someone uttered a sound he felt that it permeated him with spirituality.

[ 28 ] A last remnant of this life of a divine, spiritual element in sounds still existed in the intonation of cultic language during the third mystery epoch. They still understood this completely in very ancient times. When someone successively intoned what has now become our abstract, traditional alphabet, he was intoning the cosmic word. He intoned everything which exists and he connected himself with all the gods: In the beginning was the word. And when Christ says “I am alpha and omega,” he could say “I am the word” and mean the same thing.

[ 29 ] You can see that the Apocalypse is written in a mystery language, and it uses terms which remind us of the long period during which man felt that the macrocosm was a speaking universe. We have obscured the sounds of our language and made them trivial, whereas men used to know that they were something very spiritual. We must be able to feel what happened there. What happened? The sounds exist, but the gods are no longer in them as far as men are concerned. The gods have left the sounds. Our sounds contain Ahrimanic beings in a demonic way. The popular idea that the fixed sounds of our language are connected with black magic is not entirely unfounded. This idea of the people is a healthy one. For our sounds are now Ahrimanic gods. The gods who were once in them left, and Ahrimanic beings moved in. People will permeate language with more and more Ahrimanic powers if they don't find their way back to the gods in this sphere.

[ 30 ] We must approach the Apocalypse with such feelings about, language. This is the only way that the real greatness and power of what is placed, before our souls in the Apocalypse can become manifest to us. For what does the author of the Apocalypse want to do? He wants to do the same thing that all those who speak out of a true knowledge of the Christ want to do. [ 31 ] He wants to place the Christ before mankind. He draws attention to the fact that he is there. He begins by saying that he exists. For if one takes the first words of the Apocalypse and translates them into our language in accordance with their real meaning, they read: Look at the manifestation of Christ Jesus: Look over there; I want to show you the vision of Jesus Christ which God has given.

[ 32 ] Thus the first thing which is pointed out is that the author of the Apocalypse wants to let Christ appear to humanity in an apocalyptic way. But he also points out that he doesn't just want to report about the appearance or the Imagination of Jesus Christ, which presupposes vision, but he also wants to indicate that the divine world power which placed this phenomenon into the world and made it visible also expressed it in words.

[ 33 ] God has sent these words by his angel unto his servant John, and they are like an interpretation of the vision of Jesus Christ. This is how we must read the beginning of the Apocalypse.

[ 34 ] Two things are really being said here. An Imaginative element in Christ is mentioned, and something is said about what Christ's tidings are. And what John affirms and testifies to in his second sentence is the vision of Christ and the interpretation of this vision. The Christ in a picture and the Christ in words. The author of the Apocalypse wants to place the Christ before human beings in a picture and in words.

[ 35 ] Therewith we are also made aware of something which was quite obvious to people at that time, although most people today have lost sight of it completely. Our impoverished psychologists speak of sense percepts and ideas. To make the thing as poor as possible, people let the sense percepts arise through the senses and they say that ideas are created within. Everything is subjective and there is nothing cosmic there at all; they make a Kantian world out of a rich one, and they completely forget that man is standing in the whole world.

[ 36 ] The intuitive element in our words has shriveled into impoverished ideas: the second thing or so-called supersensible percept which John affirms, testifies to and tells us about is what the Apocalypticer places there as the manifestation of Christ. So that we have to say [ 37 ] “Behold the manifestation of Jesus Christ which is given by God, for this is how God must be shown to you [ 38 ] (I will interpret this later). [ 39 ] He has put it into words and has sent it to his servant John via his angel. John has affirmed God's words and the manifestation of Jesus Christ in the way that he saw it. [ 40 ] He wants to give mankind what he has seen and a letter he received from God.”

[ 41 ] We must approach Christian writings in this concrete way again. If you really want to become priests out of the deepest and most honest impulses in your heart you will have to see to it that these writings become concrete. For the fact is that people are basically dishonest when they say they understand the gospels the way they are translated today. The Apocalypse begins in the way that I said. One translation of the beginning of the Apocalypse reads, “This is the revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him to show his servants, and he has interpreted it and sent it to his servant John by his angel;” this is how it reads. And then the whole world is told that this is what the Apocalypse says. But no one can really make any sense out of these words. The same goes for most of the gospels, because one wants to explain things to people with wording which doesn't tell one what's really there anymore. This is why the idea gradually arose that one shouldn't penetrate very deeply into the gospels. For how can one really do that? No matter what modern language one reads the gospels in, one can't really read them if one is honest about it. For the modern versions tell one nothing.

[ 42 ] One has to go back to what is really there, just as we did this for the first two sentences and as we will continue to do it. Or some people might say that one has to go back to the Greek for certain parts of the gospels. Now, with all due respect to our contemporaries, who take great pains to understand Greek, the fact is that no one understands Greek any more today, because we don't have the same things in us which the Greeks had when they spoke or listened.

We're basically like sacks of flour when we listen to someone or when we speak ourselves. We remain just as quiet inwardly as flour in a sack should, if it is packed properly. This was not the case with the Greeks. The consciousness of a Greek vibrated when he listened to someone. He became alive inwardly and he spoke out of this vitality. The words which he heard and spoke were alive; they were still living bodies. Not to speak of oriental people. The latter are decadent today but unlike European people they can still perceive and understand things inwardly in a vital way when they speak or hear.

Just listen to an ordinary oriental like Rabindranath Tagore and watch how he presents the inner weaving and life which can exist in language.

[ 43 ] Today one has language in such a way that one even thinks one has it if one takes a dictionary and a German word stands on one side and the English word on the other. People very calmly place the English words where the German words are. They are blissfully unaware that one steps over an abyss here and that one comes into an entirely different world, and that one really has to treat what lives in language as something which is divine.

[ 44 ] People have to become aware of this again. Then they will decide to go back to what vibrates out of writings like the Apocalypse, which conjures up a vision of Jesus Christ before our soul. If we can see this mighty vision it's as if the clouds, which could give us wonderful things, suddenly became concentrated and took on human and angelic forms, and the past, present and future welled out of the clouds' substances as they go past and revealed the world's content of spiritual substances, which includes human beings. This is how the manifestation of Jesus Christ is presented.

[ 45 ] The vision is there and we fall silent before it, so that we become united with the world and are no longer conscious of ourselves, and so that we confront the vision until nothing but the vision remains, while we become insignificant.

Then when we perceive the Father God who has given the vision we find that he holds back the inspiring words behind the vision. The words are the interpretation of the vision and they are his secret; but the time is at hand and God gives the secret to an angel, and he brings it down to men as an epistolary message from God on the path on which Inspirations from God generally come down.

[ 46 ] As soon as a man becomes quiet and disappears and becomes immersed in the vision and begins to be not in himself, and he takes in God's letter, which he first has to open, which is sealed with seven seals, which he takes in as a letter with seven seals which has been sent to him by the godhead—as soon as he does this he becomes the letter, because he gets to the point where he looks upon the contents of the letter as his own ego-being. Then he stands before the vision with God's ideas and concepts and with spiritual mental images.

[ 47 ] If you imagine John the priest in this way, with the vision of Jesus Christ before him, disappearing selflessly, if you see him receiving the letter of God that is sealed with seven seals from the angels there, and if you see the resolve arising in him to unseal God's letter and to communicate its contents to mankind—you have the picture or Imagination which stands at the beginning of the Apocalypse. For we must interpret the words which stand there in what we receive in such a way that it is like the Imagination I described. This is what the author of the Apocalypse wants to say. That is why he says, “Blessed is he that reads and hears the words in the macrocosm and who takes in and preserves what is written in the book, when he understands it. For the time for this has come.”

[ 48 ] It has come. It is not just chance that we're discussing the Apocalypse in this context; it lies in the karma of the community for Christian renewal.

In these lectures, which were given in Christiania (Oslo) in June 1910, I ventured to give a sketch of the psychology of the development of peoples. The lectures are based upon the teachings of Anthroposophy which can be found in my books Theosophy, Occult Science—an Outline, Riddles of Man, Riddles of the Soul,¹ etc. I was able to build upon this foundation because my hearers were familiar with the scientific views which are presented in my publications. That is the external reason for the choice of my point of view; there is however a further reason, an inner reason. The orthodox study of anthropology, ethnology, or even history cannot provide an adequate framework for a true psychology of the various folk characters. Neither the information provided by orthodox science, nor the study of anatomy and physiology suffice for an understanding of the psychic life of man. If we wish to understand the inner life of an individual we must study the soul as well as the body, and if we desire to gain real insight into national characteristics we must explore the psychic and spiritual element underlying them. This psychic and spiritual element, however, reflects not merely the activity of individual human souls working in concert, but has its origin in a higher order. The higher spiritual element is a province in which modern science is a total stranger. Before the bar of science it is paradoxical to speak of Folk Souls as real entities in the sense that we speak of the reality of thinking, feeling and willing in individual human beings; and it is equally paradoxical to relate the evolution of peoples on Earth to the forces of the heavenly bodies in space. But the matter ceases to be paradoxical if we recall that one does not look for the forces which determine the north-south direction of a magnetic needle in the needle itself. One attributes the deflection of the needle to the effect of the Earth's magnetic field but looks to the Cosmos for the causes of this deflection. Shall we not therefore have to seek the reasons for the development of folk characters, folk migrations, etc. in the Cosmos outside the peoples themselves? Apart from the anthroposophical view which considers higher spiritual Beings to be a reality, a totally new element is introduced into these lectures which sees a higher spiritual reality behind the evolution of peoples and seeks the forces which direct this evolution in this spiritual reality. We then investigate the facts which are manifested in the life of the peoples and we find that these facts become intelligible on this basis. The conditions in the life of the various peoples, as well as their mutual relationships, can thus be clearly understood, whereas without this basis there can be no true understanding of this approach. Either one must seek a basis for the psychology of peoples in a spiritual reality or one must abandon such a psychology in toto.

I have not hesitated to use the traditional names of the early centuries of Christianity to describe the higher spiritual Beings. An Oriental would choose other names. Nevertheless, although the use of this terminology may be regarded as rather unscientific today, there seems to be no reason to fight shy of it. In the first place, we thereby acknowledge the essentially Christian character of our Western civilization, and secondly, if entirely new names were chosen, or if an oriental terminology were adopted whose real meaning could only be fully comprehended by one who is spiritually at home in that civilization, we should be in danger of misapprehension. It seems to me that whoever wishes to investigate these spiritual relationships, assuming he does not reject our whole approach, will not object to names such as Angels, Archangels, Thrones, etc. any more than physical science objects to terms such as positive and negative electricity, magnetism, polarized light, etc.

Whoever relates the content of my earlier lectures to the painful trials of mankind at the present time will find that what I then said throws a flood of light upon what is taking place now. (February 1918.) Were I to give these lectures now you could well imagine that in the light of the present world-situation these earlier investigations were a necessity. Thus for example on page 23 of the first lecture you will find the following passage: “ ... we have every reason, especially at the present time, to speak quite impartially about the mission of the individual Folk Souls. Just as it was justifiable to maintain complete silence about their mission hitherto, so it is in order today to begin to speak of this mission. This is particularly important because the destiny of mankind in the near future will bring men together in far greater measure than has hitherto been the case in order to fulfil a mission common to all mankind. But the members of the individual peoples will only be able to offer their proper, free and positive contributions if they have, above all, an understanding of their ethnic origin, an understanding for what we might call ‘the self-knowledge of the folk’. ” No doubt the time has now come when the fate of humanity itself demonstrates the truth of this view.

Perhaps it is precisely the theme of the “Folk Souls” which shows how spiritual investigation which penetrates into the super-sensible reality of existence provides at the same time a practical view of life which also throws light upon the most diverse problems of life.

This is not possible for a view of life which only uses such concepts as are valid in the sphere of natural science in order to describe the nature and development of peoples. This mechanistic-physical science has been highly successful in exploiting the mechanical, physical and chemical resources for the benefit of civilization; but in order to promote the spiritual life of mankind we need a science which is spiritually orientated. Such a science is the first demand of our age.

• 1. Riddles of Man was not yet (1970) published in English. A translation of a section of Riddles of the Soul is published with the main title of The Case for Anthroposophy, with an Introduction by Owen Barfield.

Towards⁵⁶ the end of the meeting, Dr Steiner spoke the following words:

In addition to what I took the liberty of saying at the close of the last course which I was able to hold for the Swiss teachers, I have perhaps only a few more remarks to make in connection with the difficulties of the Swiss school movement. It seems to me that things do in part indeed depend on how the educational movement connected with Anthroposophy is run here in Switzerland.

The Waldorf School in Germany has remained essentially in a position of isolation. Though there have been one or two further foundations, in Hamburg, Cologne and so on, the Waldorf School in Germany, in other words in a relatively extensive area, has remained a solitary example. It will remain to be seen, therefore, whether what is to be started in England as a kind of Waldorf school, and also the school with three classes that already exists in Holland, will also to begin with remain as solitary examples.

Apart from everything else it has to be said that the reason why these schools are still only isolated examples, and also why it can be expected that they will remain so for a long time, is simply that the present social circumstances really do make it impossible for an attitude to come about that could lead to the financing of a larger number of such schools. Experience over the years has shown this quite clearly. And this challenges us to think carefully about the whole direction we should take with our educational movement.

This is especially necessary with regard to Switzerland. For Switzerland is pervaded by a very strong sense for everything represented by the state. And now that the Swiss school association for independent education has been founded, I do believe that the chief difficulties will arise from this Swiss sense of statehood. Even less than anywhere else will it be possible here in Switzerland to find an opening for the belief that a truly independent school could be an example for a model method of education, or that schools such as this could be founded on a larger scale. We should not allow ourselves to be under any illusion in this respect. Aversion to a system of education that is independent of the state is very great here.

Of course what Herr Gnädiger has just said is right, namely that there will be interest in how things are done in a model school.

Least of all here in Switzerland can you expect the president of the Schweizerischer Schulverein, of whom you have spoken, to have any interest in the school other than that pertaining to its status as a model. Perhaps his interest will turn out to be such that he would like to influence Swiss state schools to take up certain methodological aspects from this model school. But this seems to me to be the only aspect that can be counted on to attract interest here in Switzerland. That is why it seems to me to be important to take up these two things wherever educational associations of the kind you have mentioned are founded; and also that many such associations should be founded, more and more of them!

Another aspect is that the crux of anthroposophical education is its method. The schools apply a certain method. It is not a question of any particular political direction but purely and simply of method. It is also not a question of any particular religious creed, or of seeing Anthroposophy somehow as a religious creed. It is simply a question of method.

In the discussion that followed my lecture cycle⁵⁷ my answer to questions on this was simply that the educational method represented here can be applied anywhere, wherever there is the good will to introduce it.

If this is done on the one hand, and if on the other hand—in order to create an understanding in wider circles—it is clearly emphasized that this is the proper method and that it is being applied in a school that can serve as a model, if these two points are given the main emphasis in the programme, if it is stressed that every school could use these methods and that a model school could demonstrate how fruitful they are, and if things are worked out neatly, then I believe that something could be achieved even in Switzerland. And then on the basis of these two points educational associations ought to be founded everywhere. But it would have to be made clear to everyone that the aim was not to found as many private schools as possible to compete with the state schools. In Switzerland such a thing would be regarded as something very peculiar and it would never be understood. But there would be an understanding for a model school which could be a source of inspiration for a method of education. Progress cannot be made in any other way. It is important to present these things to people in principle again and again and wherever the opportunity arises.

I believe it would be a good thing if you could always give the greatest prominence to these two aspects. They are perfectly true, and much damage has been done to us by the constant repetition of the view that Waldorf education can only be carried out in schools apart from the main stream, whereas I have constantly repeated that the methods can be applied in any school.

This is what I wanted to say, for everything else is linked to this. I also believe that a financial basis will only be won when there can be an understanding of these things. There will be very little understanding in Switzerland for independent schools if they are not linked to what I have just been saying. But if this is done, I believe that our efforts could lead to a greater degree of success than has been the case hitherto. So far the existing financial situation is not sufficient basis for the founding of a school in Basel.

• 56. ‘Schulverein für freies Erziehungs- und Unterrichtswesen in der Schweiz’, later ‘Goetheanum-Schulverein’, Dornach. Founded 1922. From 1924, after the Christmas Foundation Conference, under the directorship of Rudolf Steiner.
• 57. See Rudolf Steiner Swiss Teachers' Course, Report by Albert Steffen. English text available in typescript only. GA 306.

Newsletter from the Youth Section of the School of Spiritual Science.

In the letter which the committee of the General Anthroposophical Society sent to the members of the Society in response to my announcement of a youth section, there is a reference to the fact that I consider “being young to be so important that it can become the subject of a spiritual scientific discipline in its own right”. |

I really do consider this matter to be so important. Anyone who reads the description of my life in the weekly journal “Goetheanum” will understand why I think so. When I myself was as young as those who speak in this letter, I felt lonely with the state of soul that I now find alive in broad circles of young people. My contemporaries felt differently than I did. The life of civilization, of which this letter says that it no longer allows young people “to arrive at a worldview through any profession” and that young people “can no longer be led to any profession” through their “striving for a worldview,” was on the rise at that time. It was felt by young people as the latest stage in the development of humanity. They felt “liberated” from the extravagances of the ideological striving and secure in the prospect of professions that rose above the “safe” foundations of “science”.

I too saw the “bloom” of this civilization. But I could not help sensing that no genuine fruit of humanity would be able to arise from this bloom. My contemporaries did not feel this. They were carried away in the experience of “blooming”. They did not yet lack the fruit because they wasted their enthusiasm at the sight of the barren bloom.

Now everything has changed. The flower has withered. Instead of the fruit, an alien structure has appeared that freezes humanity in man. Youth feels the cold of civilization without a worldview.

In my contemporaries, there was an upper class of consciousness. They could rejoice in the fruitless blossom because its fruitlessness had not yet been revealed. And the blossom was radiant “as a blossom”. The joy of radiance covered the deeper layers of consciousness; the layers in which the yearning for true humanity lives inexorably in man. The youth of today can no longer find joy in the withered blossom. The upper layers of consciousness have become barren, and the deeper layers have been laid bare; the longing for a worldview is evident in the hearts, and it threatens to wound the soul life.

I would like to say to today's youth: do not scold the “old people” who were young with me forty years ago too much. Of course, there are superficial people among them who even today vainly flaunt their emptiness as superiority. But there are also those among them who, in resignation, bear the fate that has denied them the living experience of their true humanity.

This fate placed them in the last phase of the “dark” age, through which the grave of the spirit was dug in the experience of matter.

But youth is placed at the grave. And the grave is empty. The spirit does not die and cannot be buried.

Being young has become a mystery for those who experience it today. Because in being young, the longing for the spirit is laid bare. But the “light” age has dawned. It is just not felt yet because most people still carry the after-effects of the old darkness in their souls. But anyone who has a sense of the spiritual can know that it has become “light”.

And the light will only become perceptible when the riddles of existence are reborn in a new form.

Being young is one of the first of these riddles. How do you experience being young in a world that has become frozen in growing old? This is the question of feeling that lives in young people today.

Because being young has become such a human riddle, it can only find a living solution in “a spiritual scientific discipline of its own”.

In such a discipline, being young will not be spoken of in empty phrases, but the light that must fall on being young will be sought in it, so that one can perceive oneself in one's humanity.

Today, being young means wanting a world view that can fill one's life's work with warmth. It fears the professions that a civilization without a world view has created. It wants to see the profession grow out of humanity, not humanity crushed by the profession. To find one's way in the world without losing one's humanity in the search, requires a living relationship of the soul to the world. But this only awakens in the experience of the world view. The announcement of the Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society was made in such an attitude. In such an attitude, the Council would like to unite young anthroposophists in a youth section to work towards a life of true humanity. But there is something else I would like to say to our younger members. If we succeed in giving the Youth Section the right content, those who have understood in their anthroposophical lives how to grow old in the right way will want to join forces with the youth. Let us hope that the young people will not then say: we will not sit at the same table with the “old”. For Anthroposophy should have no age; it lives in the eternal that brings all people together. Let the young find in the Anthroposophical Society a field in which they can be young. But the “old”, if they take up Anthroposophy in their whole being, will feel the pull of the young. They will find that what they have conquered through old age is best communicated to young people. After all, young people will struggle in vain for true humanity if they flee the humanity into which they must one day enter. In the course of the world, the old must rejuvenate itself again and again if it does not want to fall prey to the formless. And young people will find what they need with the genuine “old” anthroposophists, if they do not want to arrive one day at an age of their own, from which they would like to flee, but cannot.

In the letter that the Committee of the Free Anthroposophical Society sent to the members of that society in response to my announcement of a youth section, there is a reference to the fact that I consider “being young to be so important that it can become the subject of a spiritual scientific discipline in its own right”.

I do think this matter is so important. Anyone who reads the account of my life in the weekly journal 'Goetheanum' will understand why I think so. When I myself was as young as those who speak in this letter, I felt lonely with the state of soul that I now find alive in broad circles of young people. My contemporaries felt differently than I did. The life of civilization, of which this letter says that it no longer allows young people to develop a worldview through any profession, and that young people can no longer be led to any profession by their “striving for a worldview,” was on the rise at that time. Young people saw it as the flowering of the latest stage in human development. They felt 'liberated' from the extravagances of the quest for a world view and secure in the prospect of professions that rose from the 'safe' foundations of 'science'.

I too saw the “blooming” of this civilization. But I could not help feeling that no genuine fruit of humanity would be able to emerge from this bloom. My contemporaries did not feel this. They were carried away by the experience of “blooming”. They did not yet lack the fruit because they wasted their enthusiasm at the sight of the barren bloom.

Now everything has changed. The flower has withered. Instead of the fruit, an alien structure has appeared that freezes humanity in man. Youth feels the cold of civilization without a worldview.

In my youth comrades, there lived an upper class of consciousness. It could rejoice in its fruitless blossoming because its fruitlessness had not yet revealed itself. And the blossoming was radiant “as a blossom”. The joy of radiance covered the deeper layers of consciousness; the layers in which the yearning for true humanity lives inexorably in man. The youth of the present can no longer find joy in the withered blossom. The upper layers of consciousness have become barren, and the deeper layers have been laid bare; the longing for a worldview is evident in the hearts, and it threatens to wound the soul life.

I would like to say to young people today: do not scold the “old people” who were young with me forty years ago too much. Of course, there are superficial people among them who even today vainly flaunt their emptiness as superiority. But there are also those among them who, in resignation, bear the fate that has denied them the living experience of their true humanity.

This fate placed them in the last phase of the “dark” age, through which the grave of the spirit was dug in the experience of matter.

But youth is placed at the grave. And the grave is empty. The spirit does not die and cannot be buried.

Being young has become a mystery for those who experience it today. Because in being young, the longing for the spirit is laid bare. But the “light” age has dawned. It is just not felt yet, because most people still carry the after-effects of the old darkness in their souls. But anyone with a sense for spiritual beings can know that it has become “light”.

And the light will only become perceptible when the riddles of existence are reborn in a new form.

Being young is one of the first of these riddles. How do you experience being young in a world that has become frozen in old age? That is the question of feeling that lives in the young people of the present.

Because being young has become such a human riddle, it can only find its living solution in “a spiritual scientific discipline of its own”.

In such a discipline, being young will not be spoken of in empty phrases, but the light that must fall on being young will be sought in it, so that one can perceive oneself in one's humanity.

Today, being young means wanting a worldview that can fill one's life's work with warmth. It fears the professions that a civilization without a worldview has created. It wants to see the profession grow out of humanity, not humanity being killed by the profession. To find one's way in the world without losing one's humanity in the search, requires a living relationship between soul and world. But this can only come about through the experience of world-view. It is in this spirit that the announcement of the Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society was made. It is in this spirit that the Council would like to unite young anthroposophists in a youth section to work towards a life of true humanity.

But there is one more thing I would like to say to the younger members. If we succeed in giving the Youth Section the right content, those who have understood in anthroposophical life how to grow old in the right way will want to make common cause with the youth. Let us hope that the young will not then say: we will not sit at the same table with the old. For Anthroposophy should have no age; it lives in the eternal that brings all people together. Let the young find in the Anthroposophical Society a field in which they can be young. But the “old” will, if they take up anthroposophy in their whole being, feel the pull towards youth. They will find that what they have conquered through old age is best communicated to young people. After all, young people will struggle in vain for true humanity if they flee the humanity into which they must one day enter. In the course of the world, the old must rejuvenate itself again and again if it does not want to fall prey to the formless. And young people will be able to find what they need with the genuine “old” anthroposophists if they do not want to arrive one day at an age of their own, from which they would like to flee but cannot.

(continued in the next issue).

Today, before going into any further explanations concerning questions of method, I should like to add something more to what I said yesterday about the teachers' conferences. We attach the greatest importance to our relationship with the parents of our Waldorf School children and in order to ensure complete harmony and agreement we arrange Parents' Evenings fairly frequently, which are attended by parents of children living in the neighbourhood. At these meetings the intentions, methods and the various arrangements of the school are discussed—naturally in a more or less general way—and, in so far as this is possible in such gatherings, the parents have the opportunity of expressing their wishes and these are given a sympathetic hearing. In this way the opportunity is provided actually to work out what we should seek to achieve in our education and moreover to do this in the whole social milieu out of which such aims have in truth their origin. The teachers hear the ideas of the parents in regard to the education of their children; and the parents hear—it is our practice always to speak with the utmost sincerity and candour—about what is taking place in the school, what our thoughts are about the education and future of the children and why it is that we think it necessary to have schools which further a free approach to education. In short, by this means the mutual understanding between teachers and parents is not only of an abstract and intellectual nature, but a continuous human contact is brought about. We feel this contact to be very important, for we have nothing else to depend upon. In a state school, everything is strictly defined. There one knows with absolute certainty the aims which the teacher must bear in mind; he knows for instance, that at 9 years of age a child must have reached a certain standard, and so on. Everything is planned with exactitude.

With us everything depends on the free individuality of each single teacher. In so far as I may be considered the director of the school, nothing is given in the way of rules and regulations. Actually there is no school director in the usual sense, but each teacher reigns supreme. Instead of a school director or headmaster we have the teachers' conferences, in which there is a common study and a common striving towards further progress. There is therefore a spirit, a concrete spirit living among the college of teachers which works freely, which is not tyrannical, which does not issue statements, rules or programmes, but has the will continually to progress, continually to make better and better arrangements, in meeting the teaching requirements. Today our teachers cannot know at all what will be good in the Waldorf School in 5 years time for in these 5 years they will have learned a great deal and out of the knowledge they will have to judge anew what is good and what is not good. This is also the reason why what associations for educational reform decide to be valuable is a matter of complete indifference in the Waldorf School. Educational matters cannot be thought out intellectually, they can only arise out of teaching experience. And it is this working out of experience which is the concern of the college of teachers. But just because we are in this situation, just because we live in a state of flux in regard to what we ourselves actually want, we need a different kind of support than is given to an ordinary school by the educational authorities, who ordain what should be done. We need the support of that social element in which the children are growing up. We need the inner support of the parents in connection with all the questions which continually crop up when the child comes to school; for he comes to school from his parents' home.

Now if the aim is to achieve an individual and harmonious relationship, the teacher is concerned with the welfare of the child possibly even more than the parents themselves to whom he looks for support. If he does not merely let the parents come and then proceed to give them information which they can make nothing much of, but if, after a parents' evening, he shows a further interest by visiting the parents in their home, then in receiving a child of school age, about 7 years old, into his class, he has taken on very much more than he thinks. He has the father, the mother and other people from the child's environment; they are standing shadowlike in the background. He has almost as much to do with them as with the child himself, especially where physiological-pathological matters are concerned. The teacher must take all this into account and work it out for himself; he must look at the situation as a whole in order really to understand the child, and above all to become clear in his own mind what he should do in regard to the child's environment. By building this bridge between himself and the parents, as he sees them in their home, a kind of support will be brought about, a support which is social in its nature and is at the same time both free and living.

To visit the parents in their home is necessary in order to foster in the parents a concern that nothing should occur which might damage the natural feeling a child must have for the authority of the teacher. A lot of work must be done between the college of teachers and the parent-body by means of an understanding imbued with feeling, with qualities of soul. Moreover the parent too, by getting to know the teachers, getting to know them pretty thoroughly, must break themselves of the tendency to be jealous of them, for indeed most parents are jealous of their children's teachers. They feel as if the teachers want to take the child away from them; but as soon as this feeling is present there is an end to what can be achieved educationally with the child. Such things, can, however, be put right if the teacher understands how to win the true support of the parents. This is what I wished to add to my previous remarks on the purpose of the teachers' conferences.

Now there is something else to be considered. We must learn to understand those moments in a child's life which are significant moments of transition. I have already referred to one such moment when the teaching, which up to this time has been imaginative and pictorial must pass over, for instance, into teaching the child about the nature of the plants. This point of time lies between the 9th and 10th year. It shows itself in the child as an inner restlessness; he asks all kinds of questions. What he asks has usually no great importance in so far as the content is concerned; but the fact that the questions are asked, that the child feels impelled to ask questions, this is undoubtedly of great significance.

The kind of relationship we establish with the child just at this time has great importance for the whole of his life. For what is it that indwells the soul of the child? It is something that can be observed in every child who is not pathological. Up to this age a child who has not been ruined by external influences accepts the authority of the teacher quite naturally; a healthy child who has not been ruined by being talked into all kinds of nonsensical ideas also has a healthy respect for every grown-up person. He looks up to such a person, taking him as an authority quite simply and as a matter of course. Just think back to your own childhood; realise what it means, particularly for the quite young child, to be able to say to himself; You may do what he does or what she does for they are good and worthy people. The child really requires nothing else than to place himself under an authority

In a certain sense this feeling is somewhat shaken between the 9th and 10th year; it is shaken simply in the course of the development of human nature itself. It is important to be able to perceive this clearly. At this time human nature experiences something quite special, which does not however rise up into the child's consciousness, but lives in indefinite sensations and feelings. The child is unable to give it expression, but it is there. What does the child now say to himself unconsciously? Earlier he said out of his instinctive feelings: If my teacher says something is good, then it is good; if he says something is bad, it is bad; if he says something is right, it is right; if he says it is wrong, it is wrong. If something gives my teacher pleasure and he says it pleases him, then it is beautiful; if he says something is ugly and it does not please him, then it is ugly. It is quite a matter of course for the young child to look upon his teacher as his model. But now, between the 9th and 10th year this inner certainty is somewhat shaken. The child begins to ask himself in his life of feeling: Where does he or she get it all from? Who is the teacher's authority? Where is this authority? At this moment the child begins to feel an inner urge to break through the visible human being, who until now has been for him a god, to that which stands behind him as super-sensible or invisible God, or Divine Being. Now the teacher, facing the child, must contrive in some simple way to confirm this feeling in him. He must approach the child in such a way that he feels: Behind my teacher there is something super-sensible which gives him support. He does not speak in an arbitrary way; he is a messenger from the Divine.

One must make the child aware of this. But how? Least of all by preaching. One can only give a hint in words, one will achieve nothing whatever by a pedantic approach. But if one comes up to the child and perhaps says something to him which as far as content goes has no special importance, if one says a few words which perhaps are quite unimportant but which are spoken in such a tone of voice that he sees: He or she has a heart, this heart itself believes in what is standing behind,—then something can be achieved. We must make the child aware of this standing within the universe, but we must make him aware of it in the right way. Even if he cannot yet take in abstract, rationalistic ideas, he already has enough understanding to come and ask a question: Oh, I would so much like to know .... Children of this age often come with such questions. If we now say to him: Just think, what I am able to give you I receive from the sun; if the sun were not there I should not be able to give you anything at all in life; if the divine power of the moon were not there to preserve for us while we sleep what we receive from the sun I should not be able to give you anything either. In so far as its content is concerned we have not said anything of particular importance. If however we say it with such warmth that the child perceives that we love the sun and the moon, then we can lead him beyond the stage at which he asks these questions and in the majority of cases this holds good for the whole of life. One must know that these critical moments occur in the child's life. Then quite of itself the feeling will arise: Up to this time when telling stories about the fir tree and the oak, about the buttercup and dandelion, or about the sunflower and the violet, I have spoken in fairytale fashion about Nature and in this way I have led the child into a spiritual world; but now the time has come when I can begin to tell stories taken from the Gospels. If we begin to do this earlier, or try to teach him anything in the nature of a catechism we destroy something in the child, but if we begin now, when he is trying to break through towards the spiritual world, we do something which the child demands with his whole being.

Now where is that book to be found in which the teacher can read what teaching is? The children themselves are this book. We should not learn to teach out of any other book than the one lying open before us and consisting of the children themselves; but in order to read in this book we need the widest possible interest in each individual child and nothing must divert us from this. Here the teacher may well experience difficulties and these must be consciously overcome.

Let us assume that the teacher has children of his own. In this case he is faced with a more direct and more difficult task than if he had no children. He must therefore be all the more conscious just in this respect and above all he must not hold the opinion that all children should be like his own. He must not think this even subconsciously. He must ask himself whether it is not the case that people who have children are subconsciously of the opinion that all children should be like theirs.

We see therefore that what the teacher has perforce to admit touches on the most intimate threads of the life of soul. And unless he penetrates to these intimate subconscious threads he will not find complete access to the children, while at the same time winning their full confidence. Children suffer great, nay untold damage if they come to believe that other children are the teacher's favourites. This must be avoided at all costs. It is, not so easily avoided as people usually think, but it can be avoided if the teacher is imbued with all those principles which can result from an anthroposophical knowledge of man. Then such a matter finds its own solution.

There is something which calls for special attention in connection with the theme I have chosen for this course of lectures, something which is connected with the significance of education for the whole world and for humanity. It lies in the very nature of human existence that the teacher, who has so much to do with children and who as a rule has so little opportunity of living outside his sphere of activity, needs some support from the outer world, needs necessarily to look out into this world. Why is it that teachers so easily become dried up? It happens because they have continually to stoop to the level of the child. We certainly have no reason to make fun of the teacher if, limited to the usual conceptual approach to teaching, he becomes dried up. We should nevertheless perceive where the danger lies, and the anthroposophical teacher is in a position to be specially aware of this. For if the average teacher's comprehension of history gradually becomes that of a school textbook—and this may well happen in the course of a few years' teaching—where should he look for another kind of comprehension, for ideas in keeping with what is truly human? How can the situation be amended? The time remaining to the teacher after his school week is usually spent trying to recover from fatigue, and often only parish pump politics plays a part in forming his attitude towards questions of world importance. Thus the soul life of such a teacher does not turn outwards and enter into the kind of understanding which is necessary for a human being between say, the ages of 30 and 40. Furthermore he does not keep fit and well if he thinks that the best way to recuperate in leisure hours is to play cards or do something else which is in no way connected with the life of the spirit.

The situation of a teacher who is an anthroposophist, whose life is permeated with anthroposophy, is very different. His perspective of the world is continually widening; his sphere of vision extends ever further and further. It is very easy to show how these things affect each other—It is indicated by the fact that the most enthusiastic anthroposophist, if, for instance, he becomes a teacher of history, immediately tends to carry anthroposophy into his conception of history and so falls into the error of wanting to teach not history, but anthroposophy. This is also something one must try to avoid. It will be completely avoided if such a teacher, having on the one hand his children and on the other hand anthroposophy, feels the need of building a bridge between the school and the homes of the parents. Even though anthroposophy is knowledge as applied to man, understanding as applied to man, there are nevertheless necessities in life which must be observed. How do people often think today, influenced as they are by current ideas in regard to educational reform or even by revolutionary ideas in this field? I will not at this moment enter into what is said in socialist circles, but will confine myself to what is thought by those belonging to the prosperous middle classes. There the view is held that people should get out of the town and settle in the country in order that many children may be educated right away from the town. Only so, it is felt, can they develop naturally. And so on, and so on. But how does such a thought fit into a more comprehensive conception of the world? It really amounts to an admission of one's own helplessness. For the point is not to think out some way in which a number of children may be educated quite apart from the world, according to one's own intellectual, abstract ideas, but rather to discover how children may be helped to grow into true human beings within the social milieu which is their environment. One must muster one's strength and not take children away from the social milieu in which they are living. It is essential to have this courage. It is something which is connected with the world significance of education.

But then there must be a deep conviction that the world must find its way into the school. The world must continue to exist within the school, albeit in a childlike way. If therefore we would stand on the ground of a healthy education we should not think out all kinds of occupational activity intended only for children. For instance all kinds of things are devised for children to do. They must learn to plait; they must carry out all kinds of rather meaningless activities which have absolutely nothing to do with life, merely to keep them busy. Such methods can never serve any good purpose in the child's development. On the contrary, all play activity at school must be a direct imitation of life. Everything must proceed out of life, nothing should be thought out. Hence, in spite of the good intentions lying behind them, those things which have been introduced into the education of little children by Froebel or others are not directly related to the real development of the children. They are thought out, they belong to our rationalistic age. Nothing that is merely thought out should form part of a school's activity.

Above all there must be a secret feeling that life must hold sway everywhere in education. In this connection one can have quite remarkable experiences. I have told you already that the child who has reached the stage of changing his teeth should have the path of learning made smooth for him by means of painting or drawing. Writing—a form of drawing which has become abstract—should be developed out of a kind of painting-drawing or drawing-painting. But in doing this it should be borne in mind that the child is very sensitive to aesthetic impressions. A little artist is hidden somewhere inside him, and it is just here that quite interesting discoveries can be made. A really good teacher may be put in charge of a class, someone who is ready to carry out the things I have been explaining, someone who is full of enthusiasm and who says: One must simply do away with all the earlier methods of education and begin to educate in this new way! So now he starts off with this business of painting-drawing or drawing-painting. The pots of paint and the paint brushes are ready and the children take up their brushes. At this point one can have the following experience. The teacher simply has no idea of the difference between a colour that shines and one that does not shine. He has already become too old. In this respect one can have the strangest experiences. I once had the opportunity of telling an excellent chemist about our efforts to produce radiant, shining colours for the paintings in the Goetheanum and how we were experimenting with colours made out of plants. Thereupon he said: But today we are already able to do much better—today we actually have the means whereby we can produce colours which are iridescent and begin to shimmer when it is dark. This chemist understood not a word of what I had been saying; he immediately thought in terms of chemistry. Grown-up people often have no sense for a shining colour. Children still have this sense. Everything goes wonderfully with very few words if one is able to read out of the nature of childhood what the child still possesses. The teacher's guidance must however be understanding and artistic in its approach, then the child will find his way easily into everything his teacher wishes to bring to him.

All this can however only be brought about if we feel deeply that school is a place for young life; but at the same time we must realise what is suitable for adult life. Here we must cultivate a sensitivity as to what can and what cannot be done. Please let no one take offence at what I am about to say. Last year in the framework of a conference on anthroposophical education the following took place. There was the wish to show to a public audience what has such an important part to play in our education: Eurythmy. This was done, but it was done in the following manner. In this particular place children gave a demonstration of what they had learned at school in their eurythmy lessons and a performance showing eurythmy as an art was only given later. Things were not arranged so that first people were given the opportunity of gaining some understanding of eurythmy, so that they might perhaps say: Ah, so that is eurythmy, that is what has been introduced into the school. It was done the other way round; the children's eurythmy demonstration was given first place, with the result that the audience was quite unconvinced and had no idea what it was all about. Just imagine that up till now there had been no art of painting: then all of a sudden an exhibition was held showing how children begin to daub with colours! Just as little was it possible for those who were outside the anthroposophical movement to see in this children's demonstration what is really intended and what actually underlies anthroposophy and eurythmy. Such a demonstration only has meaning if eurythmy is first introduced as an art; for then people can see what part it has to play in life and its significance in the world of art. Then the importance of eurythmy in education will also be recognised. Otherwise people may well say: Today all kinds of whimsical ideas are rife in the world—and eurythmy will be looked upon as just such another whimsical idea.

These are things which must lead us, not only to prepare ourselves for our work in education in the old, narrow sense, but to work with a somewhat wider outlook so that the school is not sundered from life but is an inseparable part of it. This is just as important as to think out some extremely clever method in education. Again and again I have had to lay stress on the fact that it is the attitude of mind which counts, the attitude of mind and the gift of insight. It is obvious that not everything can be equally perfect; this goes without saying. I do beg you not to take amiss what I have just said; this applies also to anthroposophists. I appreciate everything that is done, as it is here, with such willing sacrifice. But if I were not to speak in this way the following might well happen. Because wherever there is light there are also strong shadows, so wherever efforts are made to do things in a more spiritual way, there too the darkest shadows arise. Here the danger is actually not less than in the usual conventional circles, but greater. And it is particularly necessary for us, if we are to be equal to the tasks with which we shall be faced in a life which is becoming more and more complicated, to be fully awake and aware of what life is demanding of human beings. Today we no longer have those sharply defined traditions which guided an earlier humanity. We can no longer content ourselves with what our forefathers deemed right; we must bring up our children so that they may be able to form their own judgments. It is therefore imperative to break through the narrow confines of our preconceived ideas and take our stand within the all-comprehensive life and work of the world. We must no longer, as in earlier times, continue to find simple concepts by means of which we would seek to explain far-reaching questions of life. For the most part, even if there is no desire to be pedantic, the attempt is made to characterise most things with superficial definitions, much in the same way as was done in a certain Greek school of philosophy. When the question was put: what is a man?—the explanation given was as follows: A man is a living being who stands on two legs and has no feathers.—Many definitions which are given today are based on the same pattern,—But the next day, after someone had done some hard thinking as to what might lie behind these portentous words, he brought with him a plucked goose, for this was a being able to stand on two legs and having no feathers and he now asserted that this was a man. This is only an extreme case of what you find for instance in Goethe's play, “Goetz von Berlechingen,” where the little boy begins to relate what he knows about geography. When he comes to his own district he describes it according to his lesson book and then goes on to describe a man whose development has taken place in this same neighbourhood. He has however not the faintest idea that the latter is his father. Out of sheer “erudition,” based on what he has learned out of the book, he does not know his own father. Nevertheless these things do not go so far as the experience I once had in Weimar, where there are, of course, newspapers. These are produced in the way that usually happens in small places. Bits and pieces of news regarded as suitable are cut out of newspapers belonging to larger towns and inserted into the paper in question. So on one occasion, on 22nd January, we in Weimar read the following item of news: Yesterday a violent thunderstorm broke over our town. This piece of news had, however, been taken out of the Leipziger Nachrichten.

Similar things happen in life and we are continually caught in the web of their confusion. People theorise in abstract concepts. They study the theory of relativity and in so doing get the notion that it is all the same whether someone travels by car to Oosterbeek or whether Oosterbeek comes to him. If however anyone should wish to draw a conclusion based on reality he would have to say: If the car is not used it does not suffer wear and tear and the chauffeur does not get tired. Should the opposite be the case the resulting effect will likewise be opposite. If one thinks in this way then, without drawing a comparison between every line and movement, he will know out of an inner commonsense that his own being is changed when from a state of rest it is brought into movement. Bearing in mind the kind of thinking prevalent today, it is no wonder that a theory of relativity develops out of it when attention is turned to things in isolation. If however one goes back to reality it will become apparent that there is no accord between reality and what is thought out on the basis of mere relationship. Today, whether or not we are learned or clever we live perpetually outside reality; we live in a world of ideas in much the same way as the little boy in Goetz von Berlechingen, who did not know his father, in spite of having read a description of him in his geography book. We do not live in such a way as to have direct contact with reality.

But this is what we must bring into the school; we must face this direct impact of reality. We are able to do so if above all we learn to understand the true nature of man and what is intimately connected with him. It is for this reason that again and again I have to point out how easy it is for people today to assert that the child should be taught pictorially, by means of object lessons, and that nothing should be brought to him that is beyond his immediate power of comprehension. But in so doing we are drawn into really frightful trivialities. I have already mentioned the calculating machine. Now just consider the following: At the age of 8 I take something in but I do not really understand it. All I know is that it is my teacher who says it. Now I love my teacher. He is quite naturally my authority. Because he has said it I accept it with my whole heart. At the age of 15 I still do not understand it. But when I am 35 I meet with an experience in life which calls up, as though from wonderful spiritual depths, what I did not understand when I was 8 years old, but which I accepted solely on the authority of the teacher whom I loved. Because he was my authority I felt sure it must be true. Now life brings me another experience and suddenly, in a flash, I understand the earlier one. All this time it had remained hidden within me, and now life grants me the possibility of understanding it. Such an experience gives rise to a tremendous sense of obligation. And one cannot do otherwise than say: Sad indeed it is for anyone who experiences no moments in life when out of his own inner being something rises up into consciousness which he accepted long ago on the basis of authority and which he is only now able to understand. No one should be deprived of such an experience, for in later years it is the source of enthusiastic and purposeful activity in life. [Walter de la Mare has described this experience and the joy of saying: “Ah, so that was the meaning of that.”]

But let us add something else. I said that between the change of teeth and puberty children should not be given moral precepts, but in the place of these care should be taken to ensure that what is good pleases them because it pleases their teacher, and what is bad displeases them because it displeases their teacher. During the second period of life everything should be built up on sympathy with the good, antipathy for the bad. Then moral feelings are implanted deeply in the soul and there is established a sense of moral well-being in experiencing what is good and a sense of moral discomfort in experiencing what is bad. Now comes the time of puberty. Just as walking is fully developed during the first 7 years, speech during the second 7 years, so during the third 7 years of life thinking comes fully into its own. It becomes independent. This only takes place with the oncoming of puberty; only then are we really capable of forming a judgment. If at this time, when we begin to form thoughts out of an inner urge, feelings have already been implanted in us in the way I have indicated, then a good foundation has been laid and we are able to form judgments. For instance: this pleases me and I am in duty bound to act in accordance with it; that displeases me and it is my duty to leave it alone. The significance of this is that duty itself grows out of pleasure and displeasure; it is not instilled into me, but grows out of pleasure and displeasure. This is the awakening of true freedom in the human soul. We experience freedom through the fact that the sense for what is moral is the deepest individual impulse of the individual human soul. If a child has been led to a sense of the moral by an authority which is self-understood, so that the moral lives for him in the world of feeling, then after puberty the conception of duty works out of his individual inner human being. This is a healthy procedure. In this way we lead the children rightly to the point at which they are able to experience what individual freedom is. Why do people not have this experience today? They do not have it because they cannot have it, because before puberty a knowledge of good and bad was instilled into them; what they should and should not do was inculcated. But moral instruction which pays no heed to a right approach by gradual stages dries up the human being, makes out of him, as it were, a skeleton of moral precepts on which the conduct of life is hung like clothes on a coat-hanger.

If everything in life is to form a harmonious whole, education must follow a quite different course from the one usually pursued. It must be understood that the child goes through one stage between birth and the change of teeth, another between the change of teeth and puberty and yet another between puberty and the age of 21. Why does the child do this or that in the years before he is 7? Because he wants to imitate. He wants to do what he sees being done in his immediate surroundings. But what he does must be connected with life, it must be led over into living activity. We can do very much to help bring this about if we accustom the child to feel gratitude for what he receives from his environment. Gratitude is the basic virtue in the child between birth and the change of teeth. If he sees that everyone who stands in some kind of relationship to him in the outer world shows gratitude for what he receives from this world; if, in confronting the outer world and wanting to imitate it, the child sees the kind of gestures that express gratitude, then a great deal is done towards establishing in him the right moral human attitude. Gratitude is what belongs to the first 7 years of life.

If gratitude has been developed in the child during this first period it will now be easy between the 7th and 14th years to develop what must be the activating impulse in everything he does. This is love. Love is the virtue belonging to the second period of life. And only after puberty does there develop out of what has been experienced with love between the change of teeth and puberty that most inward of human impulses, the impulse of duty. Then what Goethe once expressed so beautifully becomes the guiding line for life. Goethe asks: “What is duty? It is when one loves what one commands oneself.” This is the goal to which we must attain. We shall however only reach it when we are led to it by stages: Gratitude—Love—Duty.

A few days ago we saw how things arising out of an earlier epoch of life are carried over into later ones. I spoke about this in answer to a question. Now I must point out that this has its good side also; it is something that must be. Of course I do not mean that gratitude should cease with the 7th year or love with the 14th year. But here we have the very secret of life: what is developed in one epoch can be carried over into later epochs, but there will be metamorphosis, intensification, change. We should not be able to carry over the good belonging to one epoch were there not also the possibility of carrying over the bad. Education however must concern itself with this and see to it that the force inherent in the human being, enabling him to carry over something out of an earlier into a later epoch, is used to further what is good. In order to achieve this however we must make use of what I said yesterday. Let us take the case of a child in whom, owing to certain underlying pathological tendencies, there is the possibility of moral weakness in later life. We perceive that what is good does not really please him, neither does what is bad awaken his displeasure. In this respect he makes no progress. Then, because love is not able to develop in the right way between the 7th and the 14th year, we try to make use of what is inherent in human nature itself, we try to develop in the child a real sense of gratitude, to educate him so that he turns with real gratitude to the self-understood authority of the teacher. If we do this, things will improve in respect of love also. A knowledge of human nature will prevent us from setting about things in such a way that we say: This child is lacking in love for the good and antipathy for the bad; I must instil this into him! It cannot be done. But things will go of themselves if we foster gratitude in the child. It is therefore essential to know the part gratitude plays in relation to love in the course of moral development in life; we must know that gratitude is a natural development in human nature during the first years of life and that love is active in the whole human organisation as a quality of soul before it comes to physical expression at puberty. For what then makes itself felt outwardly is active between the years of 7 and 14 as the deepest principle of life and growth in man; it weaves and lives in his inmost being. Here, where it is possible to discuss these things on a fundamental basis, I may be allowed to say what is undoubtedly a fact. When a teacher has once understood the nature of an education that takes its stand on a real knowledge of man, when on the one side he is engaged on the actual practice of such an education, and when on the other side he is actively concerned in the study of the anthroposophical conception of the world, then each works reciprocally on the other. For the teacher must work in the school in such a way that he takes as a foregone conclusion the fact that love is inwardly active in the child and then comes to outer expression in sexuality.

The anthroposophical teacher also attends meetings where the world conception of anthroposophy is studied. There he hears from those who have already acquired the necessary knowledge derived from Initiation Wisdom about such things as the following: The human being consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. Between the 7th and 14th years the etheric body works mainly on the physical body; the astral body descends into the physical and etheric bodies at the time of puberty. But anyone able to penetrate deeply into these matters, anyone able to perceive more than just physical processes, whose perceptions always include spiritual processes and, when the two are separated, can perceive each separately, such a man or woman can discern how in an 11 or 12 year old boy the astral body is already sounding, chiming, as it were, with the deeper tone which will first make itself heard outwardly at puberty. And a similar process takes place in the astral body of an 11 or 12 year old girl.

These things are actual, and if they are regarded as realities they will throw light on life's problems. It is just concerning these very things that one can have quite remarkable experiences. I will not withhold such experiences. In the year 1906 I gave a number of lectures in Paris before a relatively small circle of people. I had prepared my lectures bearing these people specially in mind, taking account of the fact that in this circle there were men of letters, writers, artists and others who at this particular epoch were concerned with quite specific questions. Since then things have changed, but at that time a certain something lay behind the questions in which these people were interested. They were of the type which gets up in the morning filled with the notion: I belong to a Society which is interested in the history of literature, the history of the arts; when one belongs to such a Society one wears this sort of tie, and since the year so-and-so one no longer goes to parties in tails or dinner jacket. One is aware of this when invited to dine where these and similar topics are discussed. Then in the evening one goes to the theatre and sees plays which deal with current problems! The so-called poets then write such plays themselves. At first there is a man of deep and inward sensibility, out of whose heart these great problems arise in an upright and honourable way. First there is a Strindberg. Later on follow those who popularise Strindberg for a wider public. And so, at the time I held these Paris lectures, that particular problem was much discussed which shortly before had driven the tragic Weininger to suicide. The problem which Weininger portrays in so childlike yet noble a fashion in Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character) was the problem of the day. After I had dealt with those things which were essential to an understanding of the subject I proceeded to explain that every human being has one sex in the external physical body, but bears the other sex in the etheric body. So that the woman is man in etheric body, and the man is woman. Every human being in his totality is bi-sexual; he bears the other sex within him. I can actually observe when something of this kind is said, how people begin to look out of their astral bodies, how they suddenly feel that a problem is solved for them over which they have chewed for a long time, and how a certain restlessness, but a pleasant kind of restlessness is perceptible among the audience. Where there are big problems, not merely insignificant sensations in life, but where there is real enthusiasm, even if it is sometimes close to small talk, then again one becomes aware of how a sense of relief, of being freed from a burden, emanates from those present.

So the anthroposophical teacher always looks on big problems as being something which can work on him in such a way that he remains human at every age of life; so that he does not become dried up, but remains fresh and alert and able to bring this freshness with him into the school. It is a completely different thing whether a teacher only looks into text books and imparts their content to the children, or whether he steps out of all this and, as human being pure and simple, confronts the great perspectives of the world. In this case he carries what he himself has absorbed into the atmosphere of the classroom when he enters it and gives his lesson.