The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In my first lecture, which I gave here in Amsterdam on the 19th of this month, I tried to explain how spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy fits into present-day civilization. This anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which today already has an artistically executed outer place of care in the Free University for Spiritual Science, the Goetheanum in Dornach near Basel in Switzerland, wants to add supersensible knowledge through exact spiritual scientific methods to the tremendous, great results of natural scientific knowledge, which it fully recognizes. And in my last lecture here on February 19, I took the liberty of pointing out that in the present time, numerous souls long for knowledge that is just as securely based as the knowledge that is considered scientific today, but precisely knowledge that extends to the realms of the world with which the eternal in the human soul is connected.

I pointed out that these supersensible insights can only be attained by developing certain abilities that are present in the human soul. These abilities are, however, still unknown to broad sections of our educated society today. Yet it is precisely this ignorance of these abilities that is the cause of the catastrophic developments of our time, which are apparent to everyone.

If we want to approach what is meant here by spiritual science, we must first start from what I called 'intellectual modesty' in my lecture on February 19. This intellectual modesty will be regarded as a paradox in our own time, which is particularly proud of its intellectuality. But anyone who wants to penetrate into the supersensible worlds — to which the human soul with its essential being does, after all, belong — needs this starting point of intellectual modesty. And I would like to repeat the parable, which I already used the other day to point out this intellectual modesty, because I have to assume that, due to the change of venue, a large number of the audience gathered here today were not present at my first lecture.

If we have a five-year-old child in front of us and we give him a volume of Shakespeare, he will play with it, perhaps tear it up, but in any case not do what is appropriate for the volume of Shakespeare. But if the child has lived for another ten or fifteen years, then those abilities that were previously latent in the child's soul will have been developed through education and instruction; he will now read the volume of Shakespeare. The child has ascended to a higher level of human existence, has become a different being after fifteen to twenty years.

If you really want to penetrate into the supersensible world, you have to be able to say to yourself: Perhaps as an adult you are in the same position as the five-year-old child in relation to the volume of Shakespeare, with regard to nature with its secrets and its deeper laws, and perhaps there are forces within the soul that first have to be brought out. If we seriously approach these slumbering powers and abilities in our soul with this intellectual modesty as adults, we will develop higher insights than the ordinary ones of everyday life and ordinary science.

First of all, the faculty in the human soul must be developed, which in ordinary life we know as the ability to remember. Through this ability to remember, we bring coherence into our lives. Through this ability to remember, our soul conjures up images of what we have experienced up to a very early age in childhood. This ability to remember makes permanent what would otherwise flash by as a mere idea. If we could only surrender ourselves to the outside world, if we would only surrender ourselves to ideas of the events and experiences that flash by, our whole soul life would be different. If one now further develops what is present in memory as lasting images, then one attains a quite different capacity for knowledge. And one can develop this through methods that I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, in my “Occult Science” and in other of my writings. One can develop this through certain processes of meditation and concentration, through a devoted resting on certain easily comprehensible ideas, which must not be reminiscences, must not be based on any kind of auto-suggestion; therefore they must be easily comprehensible.

One must rest with the whole structure of one's soul on such ideas. And these studies, which the true spiritual researcher must make regarding the knowledge of the supersensible worlds, are no easier than the studies one does in the clinic, in the physics or chemistry laboratory, or in the observatory, and they by no means take less time. This meditation, this concentrating with the whole power of the soul on certain ideas, which one does continually and on which one rests, must be continued for years. The powers of knowledge that lie dormant deep within the soul, of which the human being has no other idea, must be brought up. When they are brought up, one is able to perceive, through these higher powers of knowledge, that which surrounds us just as the physical-sensory world surrounds us. At first one perceives one's own experiences, but not as the vague stream of consciousness that goes back to just before birth, where the memory fragments emerge. Rather, one perceives the whole panorama of what one has gone through in this life since birth, like a unified, all-at-once present life panorama. And when one gets to know this, one experiences what it means to live in one's soul outside of the body. Materialism usually claims – and at first glance it seems justified – that all ordinary thinking, all ordinary remembering, all ordinary feeling and willing is bound to the physical body. But in ordinary life, this feeling, this willing, this thinking is interrupted. Every day, through sleep, that which is the ordinary soul life bound to the body is interrupted. People do not feel deeply enough the significance of the riddle associated with falling asleep, sleeping and waking up again. After all, the human being must be present in sleep, otherwise he would have to arise anew each time he woke up. But one only learns to recognize the form in which the human being is present in sleep by doing the exercises, some of which I have mentioned here.

When you are actually able to imagine mentally in such a way that you do not use your external eyes, do not use other senses, and do not use the ordinary mind that is connected to the brain, but only the purely spiritual-soul - and you achieve this when you develop the ability to remember in the way I have described it - then one comes to know that from the moment of falling asleep until the moment of waking up, the human being does indeed exist as a spiritual-soul entity outside of his body and that only the desire to return to his body then asserts itself. And this desire, which obscures consciousness.

Anyone who develops their powers of recollection as I have described will be able to behave exactly like the sleeping person – that is, not to perceive with the senses, not to combine the sensory perceptions with the mind – only to be fully conscious. He knows the spiritual soul independently of the body. This also enables him to recognize this spiritual soul before birth or conception and after death in its true essence and in connection with the rest of the supersensible world.

And if, in addition, he further develops a second soul power that is also present in ordinary life, namely the power of love, if he makes the power of love a power of knowledge, then the human being gets to know the images, which he otherwise experiences as a supersensible panorama, in their direct reality as well.

Today I would like to draw attention to something that is, in the most eminent sense, a link in a life practice that must interest all people. I would like to draw attention to the way in which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as I am referring to here, can enrich the art of education and teaching.

What do you actually gain from such a spiritual science, the methods of which I have now very briefly outlined? Above all, one acquires a real knowledge of the human being. Without being able to see into the supersensible, it is indeed impossible to have knowledge of the human being. After all, the human being is not only the outer physical organization, about which the outer scientific world view gives us such great, powerful, and insufficiently appreciated insights. Man is also soul and spirit. Man harbors within himself the eternal core of his being, which passes through births and deaths, which has a consciousness after death, because then he has no desire for the body, which lies in bed during sleep and after which he has desire during sleep, which his consciousness in ordinary sleep extinguishes.

When this physical body is discarded at death, the human being attains an all the more clear consciousness because it is not extinguished by any desire for a body. Through all this and much more, which I do not wish to describe now but which you can read about in my writings, the human being attains true knowledge of the human being. And only out of real knowledge of the human being can true teaching and true educational art arise.

We have tried to address this area of practical life in the Waldorf School founded by Emil Molt in Stuttgart, which I run and whose pedagogy and didactics flow entirely from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Firstly, the attitude of the teaching staff is such that something is brought into the classroom with every lesson, with every new morning, which turns teaching and educating into a kind of spiritual service. Does it not mean something special when we know through anthroposophical spiritual science that this human being, who reveals himself to us so wonderfully in the growing child, has descended from the spiritual worlds through conception or birth? If this is a true realization, if it is conveyed through anthroposophical spiritual science, then we face the developing human being, the child, in such a way that we have a task entrusted to us from the spiritual worlds. Then we see how the eternal, which has descended from spiritual worlds, works its way out of the initially indeterminate physiognomic features and the indeterminate movements of the child from day to day, from week to week, from year to year, with ever greater certainty. We see the spiritual soul at work on the physical development of the human being.

This is not the place for a careless criticism of what pedagogical geniuses have produced over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries. Certainly, some beautiful principles have been expressed with regard to pedagogy. For example, it is rightly emphasized that pedagogy has such principles as “one should not graft anything from the outside into children; one should draw everything one wants to introduce to children from their own abilities and capacities”. Quite right, an excellent principle – but abstract and theoretical. And so, by far the greatest part of our life practice confronts us in abstractions, in theoretical programs. For what is needed to carry out something like this, to extract from individuality what the child should develop within itself, requires real knowledge of the human being. Knowledge of the human being that goes into all the depths of the human being. But the science that has existed in modern civilization so far, despite its great triumphs, cannot have such knowledge of the human being.

I would now like to show you very specific things that will help you to see how this spiritual science, as it is meant here, can achieve real knowledge of the human being. There is a cheap saying that is thoughtlessly repeated over and over again: “Nature does not make leaps!” In fact, nature is constantly making leaps, and this expression is only thoughtless, as I said. Think of a plant: it develops green leaves, then it makes the leap to the calyx, then the leap to the colored petals, the stamens, and so on. And so it is with all life. It is just a phrase to say that nature does not make leaps. And so it is especially in human life. We have in human life, when we can observe it uninhibitedly through the impulses that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science provides, clearly distinct life epochs. The first life epoch goes from birth to the change of teeth, around the age of seven. It ends, then, with the year in which we start sending children to primary school. If one has the necessary insight and impartiality of observation, if one gets into the habit of observing life only at a higher level in the same way that one would otherwise observe at the lowest level in the natural sciences, one can sharply characterize the major differences between the first and second phases of human life. The first phase of life ends with the change of teeth, the second with sexual maturity. Both phases of life are quite distinct from one another. The first phase shows us the child as an imitative being. Even in play, the child is an imitative being. Of course, some believe that a certain imaginative being is formed during play. This is also the case, but if you study play in its deepest essence, you will perceive the moments of imitation everywhere, especially in children's play. And in connection with this play, I would like to remark right away how tremendously important knowledge of the human being, knowledge of the human being in relation to his totality, is for an education and pedagogical art that is full of life and truly engages with the world.

You see, every child plays differently. Anyone with an unbiased sense of observation can tell exactly how one child plays and how another child plays. Even if the difference is not a big one – you have to be a psychologist to be able to observe something like this if you want to become an educator at all. But if you can do that, then you have to relate the different ways of playing to a completely different epoch of a person's life. In terms of observing human beings, the natural sciences are such that they only rank what is nearest to what is nearest. But you won't get very far with that. What can be observed in children's play does not remain in the next phase of life. The child is turned to other things, that is, in the period from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. Even if it continues to play, the actual play age is no longer as characteristic as it used to be. What the play passions are withdraws into the depths of the soul and only comes to light again at a much later age: in the second half of the twenties, when the human being is supposed to enter into practical life. Some adapt themselves with great skill to the tasks of fate, while others become dreamers far removed from the world. The way in which a person can adapt to practical life in these years can be fully explained if one knows how the person played at the age of four, five, six, or seven.

Therefore, it is of the utmost importance for the pedagogue and educator to guide the child's play; to observe what the child wants to express and to guide what should not be expressed, because it would make the child awkward in later life. For when we guide play in the right way at the earliest age, we give the child something for life practice, as it develops in the twenties. The whole life of a human being is interrelated, and what we plant in the child's soul in youth only comes to light much later in life in the most diverse metamorphoses. Only a total knowledge of the human being, as provided by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, can truly see through the connections that lie as far apart as the twenties and childhood, as well as the finding of one's way into practical life and the play instincts; only such spiritual science can see so deeply into life. This will give you an idea of the scope of human knowledge that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to work with in order to develop a pedagogical art.

I said that the child is an imitative being until about the age of seven. And I do not say the number seven out of some mystical inclination, but because the change of teeth is actually an important event in the child's overall development. The child learns the particular nature of his movements, and also his speech, through imitation; he even develops the form of his thoughts in this way. Because the connection between the child's environment and the child itself depends not only on external factors but also on imponderables, parents or educators who live in the child's environment must be clear about how the child adapts to what the adults around him do, not only externally – not only what they speak – but also what they feel, what they sense, what they think. It is usually not believed in our materialistic age that there is also a difference in terms of the child's education, whether we indulge in noble or ignoble thoughts in the presence of the child, because we see the connections in life only in terms of external material entities, and not in terms of how things are connected internally by imponderables. This can be seen if one really observes life according to its internal structures.

I would like to give an example of what is actually important in such matters: a father once came to me and complained bitterly – and I could give many similar examples – that his five-year-old boy had stolen something. He was very unhappy about it. I said: Let's see if the five-year-old boy really has stolen. – I had the case described to me. What had actually happened? The boy had taken some money out of the drawer where his mother kept her pennies, which she always needed for her daily needs. He had not even done it out of selfishness, but had distributed the money among other children. I said to the father: The child did not steal, but what the mother always does, the child also considers right to do, because at the age of five she is still very much an imitative being. We must be aware of this: we do not influence children through admonitions, through commandments, but only through what we do in their environment.

And we can only arrive at a sound judgment of the child's entire soul configuration if we know that this soul configuration of the child will change significantly with the change of teeth. The mere imitation is replaced by the mental behavior towards the environment as a self-evident authority. And we are dealing with this desire of the child for the self-evident authority of the teacher, the educator or whoever else is around the child throughout the entire school period. One only has to know what it means for the whole of life if, in this childhood from the seventh to the fifteenth year, one has looked up with a real, great inner awe to those who, as adults, were around with educational authority were around, that what we thought was true and false emerged from the way these educators saw true and false; from what was the standard of true and false for the educators. We enter into the human, not into some abstraction, when we want to distinguish true and false, good and evil in this childhood age.

You will not believe that I advocate this necessity – that all teaching and education between the ages of seven and fifteen should also be based on unquestioning authority – out of some kind of preference for conservative or reactionary ideas when I tell you that as early as 1892 I wrote a small pamphlet in which I firmly presented the individual freedom of the human being as a basic social requirement. But no one can become a truly free human being, no one can find the right social relationship with their fellow human beings in freedom if they have not recognized an authority beside them between the ages of seven and fifteen, and from this authority learned to shape the standard for right and wrong, good and evil, in order to only later arrive at their own standard of intellectual or other purely internal, autonomous judgment.

And then the soul of the child at this age is still so constituted that it is still completely merged with its surroundings. Only when we come to the end of this phase of life, which falls in the twelfth or thirteenth year, do we see that the child is clearly different from its surroundings, that it knows that the I is within and nature is without. Of course, self-awareness is present in the very earliest childhood, but it is more of a feeling. If you want to educate properly, you need to know that an extraordinarily important point in a child's development lies between the ages of nine and ten and a half. It is the point where the child becomes so absorbed inwardly that it learns to distinguish itself from nature and the rest of the external world. Before this point, which is a strong turning point in human life, the child basically sees his surroundings in images, because they are still connected to his own inner life, in images that are often symbolic. He thinks about his surroundings in a symbolic way. Later, a different era begins. The child differentiates between nature and the external environment. It is of immense importance that the educator is able to assess this point in life, which occurs a little later for one child and a little earlier for another, in the right way. For how the teacher and educator behaves in the right way between the ninth and tenth year – fatherly, friendly, lovingly guiding the child over this Rubicon – that means an incursion into human life that is lasting for the whole of the following existence until physical death. Whether a person has a zest for life in the decisive moments or carries inner soul barrenness through life depends in many respects - though not in every respect - on how the teacher and educator has behaved towards the child between the ages of nine and ten and a half. Sometimes it is a matter of simply finding the right word at the right moment when a boy or girl meets you in the corridor and asks a question, or of making the right expression when you answer. The art of education is not something that can be learned or taught in the abstract – any more than painting or sculpting or any other art can. Rather, it is something that is based on an infinite number of details that arise from the rhythm of the soul. This sense of rhythm is derived from anthroposophical spiritual science.

It is also important to distinguish between what we need to teach children before and after this important point in their lives between nine and a half and ten and a half years of age. Above all, we must bear in mind that in our present, advanced civilization, we have something that has become external, abstract and symbolic. Go back to ancient civilizations, take any pictographic writing, and what was grasped by the senses was fixed. This was made into an image with which the human being was connected, with which the human being lived through feeling and emotion. Today, however, all this has become a symbol. We must not introduce reading and writing to the child as something alien, because it wants to grow together with its environment before the age of nine; we must not teach it from that abstract level, as is the case today. In Waldorf schools, we begin teaching in an artistic way by letting the child draw, even paint, the forms that arise out of the fullness of humanity. We let the child do this at first, and then, when we guide the child further in this drawing-painting way, we develop the letter forms, the writing, from this drawing. We proceed from the artistic, and from the artistic we first bring out writing and then reading. In this way we really correspond to what lies within the child.

It is not a matter of saying in some abstract way in education that one should only bring out what is in the child. One must know how to do it practically, how to really meet human nature. Anthroposophical spiritual science is never theory, but always real practice. That is what enables it to develop such an art of education.

What I have said about authority can also make us aware of something else that may perhaps seem paradoxical to you. In today's materialistic age, an enormous amount of emphasis is placed on so-called illustrative instruction. To anyone who understands the true nature of the child, it is a terrible thing to see the abstract calculating machines and all the things that children are often subjected to today. Today, children are expected to understand everything immediately. The aim is to organize teaching in such a way that nothing goes beyond the usual eight- or nine-year-old understanding. It seems extraordinarily scientific. But believe me, ladies and gentlemen, even a person with thorough anthroposophical knowledge can grasp the obviousness of such a principle just as well as those who defend such principles today as something that should be taken for granted. But what is self-evident is that, above all, between the ages of seven and fourteen, the child must have its memory and sense of authority developed in a healthy way, as I have just described.

Those who only want vividness and vividness that is adapted to the child's understanding do not know the following: they do not know what it means for the whole of life if, let us say in the eighth or ninth year or in the tenth to fifteenth year, one has taken something on the authority of the teacher; because the revered authoritative personality tells one, one considers it to be true. It is still beyond the horizon, but it is absorbed into the soul. Perhaps it is only in the thirty-fifth or fortieth year that it is taken out again. What one has already had in one's memory is now understood through the power that has matured. This awareness of having matured, this awareness of being able to bring something up, refreshes and invigorates the soul's strength in a way that is not appreciated in ordinary life, whereas it deserts the soul if one wants to tailor everything to the understanding of the child in the eighth, ninth, twelfth year. This is something that must be said today, because people, out of their materialistic cleverness, are no longer able to see what is natural, right and essential in such matters.

And from the foundations of human nature, from what seeks to develop from week to week, from year to year, the curriculum of such a school is derived, as it is the Waldorf School. This curriculum arises entirely from the knowledge of the essence of man. It is not an abstract curriculum, but something that underlies the pedagogy of this school, just as painting can do for the painter, sculpting for the sculptor.

Here, I have described to you how anthroposophically oriented spiritual science enters into practical life from the fields of education and teaching. But just think about what kind of spiritual life would be needed if such educational and teaching practices were to really take hold! We are accustomed to seeing this spiritual life only as an appendix to the state, perhaps as an appendix to economic life. We are accustomed today to having the most important part of intellectual life, namely the teaching and education system, prescribed by the state. What anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must now assert for modern civilization, based on a truly penetrating knowledge of teaching and educational methods that are based on true human knowledge, is that intellectual life, teaching and education must be placed in its own free administration. I would like to be quite specific: teachers and educators should not only teach and educate, but they should also have the entire administration of teaching and education in their hands, freely and independently of the state and economic life. From the lowest elementary school up to the highest teaching institutions, every teacher and educator should be so busy teaching that there is still enough time left for them to also be administrators of the teaching and education system. And only those who are still actively involved in teaching and education, the real teachers and educators in any field, not those who have become civil servants and are no longer involved in education, should also be the administrators of the education system. Nothing should be spoken into the teaching and education system except what also speaks into knowledge and art and religious world view. People do not want to recognize that what was necessary for one period of historical development, and perhaps extraordinarily good, does not apply to every period of history. When the modern era dawned, with its centralized state, it was a good and self-evident thing that the old confessional administrations should be relieved of the schools. At that time, it was a blessing for the development of humanity. But now we have arrived at a point in human development where this cannot continue; where what the state could do for the school system has been exhausted and where the free spiritual life, the spiritual life that draws from real spiritual sources, wants the independent administration of the school system.

Here the school question, the question of education, touches directly on the great social question, on everything that is the very essence of the social question. You see, regarding the social question, many people think that the essence of it lies in external institutions, that one only has to look at these external institutions to recognize the social question, that one has to work on these external institutions to do something for the social question. Those who have really come to know life cannot think this way. I have come to know proletarian thinking. I had the opportunity to do so not only in my own youth, but also because I worked for many years as a teacher of various subjects at a workers' education school and saw what actually lives in the broadest strata of the proletariat, which basically only emerged as a class, as a social stratum, through modern technology.

There it is not the external institutions, not even the bread-and-butter questions, from which the actual social question arises; there it is the state of mind, which is connected with the fact that the kind of intellectual life that has developed among the leading classes over the last three to four centuries has passed over to the broad masses of the proletariat like a kind of religion. I have seen this world view arise from materialistic principles in serious people, in deeply-rooted souls who were part of the bourgeoisie, who belonged to the leading classes, and I have learned the following: They said to themselves: Take the external scientific world view seriously; look at how it shows how the Earth developed from some kind of nebulous state through purely natural necessities to its present stage and how the various living beings have gradually developed along with it up to the point of humans. And a time will come again when either glaciation or heat death will occur to the earth – one may imagine it either way – but then the great churchyard will be there. What will have become of that which man must surely see as the noblest in human nature, which arises within him as moral ideals, as religious impulses, as art, as science? I have known people who seriously asked themselves this question, while the majority of modern people thoughtlessly juxtapose these two worlds, the world of external natural necessity and the world of what is actually humanly valuable, of moral ideals, of religious convictions, of knowledge, of artistic creation. Then serious souls say to themselves: Yes, man becomes aware of that which wells up from the soul; but that is an illusion, it is like smoke rising from the material basis. But one day the great churchyard will be there, and what we call the great ideals will have disappeared and faded away. - I have come to know the tragedy and pessimism that deeply inclined people have come to. But I also witnessed how this world view then penetrated into the proletarian soul and how a word was encountered that has a tremendous impact but denotes many things. If one understands how it lives in the proletarian soul, then one knows a lot about the foundations of contemporary civilization and its social issues. The word “ideology” lives in the souls of proletarians. What these proletarian souls know as intellectual life, as custom, law, science, art and religion, they call a superstructure above the production processes, which are historically the only real thing for them. This is the legacy of the world view that I have just described as tragic and that the proletarian souls, the millions of souls, have desolate.

One may appear an idealist today if one seeks the actual proletarian question in what the terrible word ideology expresses. But these idealists will be right. And those who believe that they have a monopoly on human wisdom and the routine of life will see history marching over them. This 'ideology' means that the souls of these masses remain desolate, have no connection with the living spirit – just as the leading classes do not either, who prevent this science from reaching the proletarians.

And here I may say something that should make clear to you the essential task and mission of Dornach, of the Goetheanum in Dornach, in the present age of civilization. Many people today realize that enlightenment and science must be brought to the broad masses. People's libraries and people's colleges are being founded, and all kinds of other things, in order to bring the science that is in our universities and our secondary schools to the people. Dornach cannot go along with this. Dornach wants to do what was the purpose of that autumn course that we held in the fall of 1920 and which we will repeat at Easter on a smaller scale, in keeping with our modest circumstances. The aim was to fertilize the individual sciences from the perspective of spiritual science. Thirty lecturers from all branches of science, including industrialists, merchants and artists, presented at this autumn course to show how all branches of science, art and life can be fertilized by this spiritual science. The aim is to renew science. The aim is to bring the spiritual into the sciences, to bring in a spirit that does not arise from a culture of the head but from the fullness of the human being.

That, then, is the purpose of the Goetheanum in Dornach: that a new spirit be brought into the colleges, only then will it be able to become popular. - One wants to bring the spirit of our college into the people - can one not see in modern civilization what use this spirit has been to those who have it? This spirit must be renewed. It is not that the schools must spread education among the people, but that a spiritual education must first be brought into the schools. That is the point in which Dornach differs from all other efforts along these lines today. For in this field people are thoroughly convinced that they are very free-thinking, but that they have a terrible belief in authority when it comes to conventional science. I say this not out of disdain for modern scientific thinking, but out of decades of engagement with all branches of this thinking. We need to work towards the liberation of spiritual life and thus the liberation of the school and education system, just as the state was once forced to take on teaching and education and wrest them from the old denominations.

I know what objections can be raised to developing a free spiritual life as the first link in the tripartite social organism. But when people express their fear that people would then not send their children to these free schools, it means looking at the matter wrongly. The question is not whether people voluntarily send their children to school or not, but rather that a free system of teaching and education is a necessity for humanity today and that one must then ensure that children go to school despite this. This should not be seen as an objection to a free spiritual life, but should merely lead to a consideration of how to get the children of negligent or unscrupulous parents into school despite a free spiritual life. This is the first link in the impulse of the threefold social organism, as formulated by the anthroposophical world view, to move towards possible solutions to social issues: a free spiritual life, administered by spiritual workers alone.

One can find logically slighted terms that teach all sorts of things in defense of this necessary freedom of spiritual life, as well as to attack it and condemn it. But that is not the issue. Anthroposophy proceeds everywhere from life practice and life observation. Those who know what a real spiritual science will mean to humanity also know how necessary the liberation of spiritual life is. People speak of ideology because spiritual life consists of abstractions, because they have no concept that an idea, that which lives in the soul, is something other than the image of something, because they no longer know that the old religions have given to man, that living spirit lives in every human being, that man with his eternal belongs to the living spirit and not only in his soul live abstract images. A living spiritual world that fills us inwardly and connects us with the eternal is not an ideology. It is the rise of ideology that has led to the catastrophes of our time. But a school and education system that aims to bring the living spirit into humanity must be a school system that is as free as the one I have described. This free school system appears to me as something that must be understood in the most eminent sense as a necessity of modern humanity - provided that it is sincere about human salvation and human progress.

Therefore, I consider it – I say this without wanting to agitate – as absolutely necessary to eliminate many of the forces of decline in our modern civilization by means of forces of ascent, that something be created on the broadest international basis, such as what I would call a world school association. This world school association would have to include all nations and the broadest circles of people. These people must be aware that a free spiritual life is to be created. It is of no use at all if people think that our Waldorf School in Stuttgart is something practical that one must see for a few hours or for a few weeks. To want to see something that arises out of a whole spiritual life is like cutting out a piece of the Sistine Madonna to get an idea of the whole picture. You cannot learn anything about the spirit of the Waldorf School by sitting in on lessons, but by getting to know anthroposophy, the anthroposophical spiritual science that lives in every teacher, in every lesson, in the children, and that also lives in the school reports. I would like to briefly describe how we at the Waldorf School gradually get to know each child, despite the fact that we also have large classes. We do not give them grades, certificates that say “almost satisfactory”, “hardly sufficient” - that is all nonsense. You cannot grade like that. Rather, we give the children a true description of their character, which holds up a mirror to them for the whole of the following year, and a saying that has been chosen from the depths of our souls. We have also seen the value that these reports have for Waldorf school children. So we have experienced what the anthroposophical spirit has brought to this Waldorf school.

But we do not want as many Winkel schools as possible to be established along the lines of the Waldorf School. Rather, we want the widest possible international recognition that the old idea of basing the school system only on the state must be fought. We must strive to force the state to allow the free spiritual life to create its own free schools. We do not want to establish isolated schools by the grace of the state; we will not lend a hand to this, but what is necessary is an understanding of the kind of alliance of peoples that would lie spiritually in a world school association. This would bring people together across the wide expanse of the earth in a great, a gigantic task.

This is what I want to say first about the first link of the threefold social organism. I can only touch on the other links, because they belong to life in other areas. Over the last four to five centuries, we have developed the unified state in today's civilized world. On the one hand, it has absorbed intellectual life with the school and education system; it has also absorbed economic life, at least to a large extent. And social democracy, of course, strives to use the entire state, the state framework, to basically set up a kind of barracked economy, whereby all economic freedom and individuality is destroyed, as we see in Trotskyism, in Leninism, precisely in what has become there, what is happening there in such a terrible way in Eastern Europe and as far as Asia, causing humanity to convulse. The point is that people learn how certain things are necessary for humanity today.

Economic life has its own conditions, just as intellectual life has its own. Anyone who, like me, has spent thirty years, half of his life, in Austria, which was precisely the experimental country for the work of the socially destructive forces – which is why Austria became the first victim of this world catastrophe – anyone who has lived in Austria with open eyes could see as early as the 1970s how it was rushing towards its end. I can refer to an example of how this country worked its way into decline on a large scale. In the 1970s, they also wanted to democratize parliament. How did they do that? They set up four constituencies: the constituency of the large landowners, the constituency of the chambers of commerce, the constituency of the cities, markets and industrial towns, and the constituency of the rural communities. All economic interests were drawn into parliament. The representatives of mere economic interests in four curiae were to make the decisions for everything concerning the state. They made them, of course, according to economic interests. As a result, neither the legitimate state interests nor the economic interests were given their due.

I could give you hundreds and hundreds of reasons that would show you that just as intellectual life must be separated from actual state life on the one hand, economic life must also be separated on the other. Just as intellectual life must be organized for the completely free human being and the administration of free human beings, economic life must be organized according to the associative principle.

What does that mean, an associative principle? Well, today we already have a striving for the formation of consumer associations. People who consume join together. And we have a movement in which people from the most diverse circles who produce join together. But ultimately we actually only have a surrogate, composed of consumers and producers. Only when production is organized according to need, not the barometer of profit, when the interrelations between consumers and producers are guided by those people who are experts in the various branches of the economy, when we we strive for totality in relation to spiritual life, but never in economic life, where we are in contact with people in other sectors, as soon as we take this seriously, the associative principle will be introduced into economic life. Association will not be organization. Although I have spent some of my life in Germany, the word 'organization' has a terrible connotation for me, and it was in Germany that I first experienced what it means to want to organize everything possible. You achieve terrible things when you always want to organize from a central point. Association is not organization. There the individualities remain in full effect, join together, so that through the union a collective judgment comes about. You can read more about this in my book “The Crux of the Social Question” and in the book “In Ausführung der Dreigliederung” (In the Execution of the Threefold Order), which summarizes a number of articles that I have published in the Stuttgart journal “Die Dreigliederung”, which is published by the Bund für Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus.

In it, I showed how these associations can be formed out of real practical economic life; how these associations will lead to fair pricing, to tolerable pricing. Whereas today we only have random pricing, it will be a matter of pricing that really arises from associative cooperation between consumers and producers. For in economic life, the price question is the central question of the whole economic existence. Those who do not realize that prices must be regulated above all by associations and not by statistics or the like, but by the living interaction in associations, do not know what is important. There is no need to be afraid of bureaucracy; it will certainly not be greater than it is today. But the fact that the same people who are involved in practical business life will also be the leaders will simplify the whole process. And everyone will receive enough when they produce something for themselves and their families, for the other things they have to provide for, until they have produced the same product again. Roughly speaking: if I make a pair of boots, I must receive enough for it to make another pair of boots. This is not to be laid down in some utopian way, but will be the final result when the associations are in existence as I have described them in my book, The Core of the Social Question. The essential thing about this impulse of the threefold social organism is that it contains nothing utopian, but is born entirely out of practical life and the demands of the time. Knowledge of the subject and expertise must guide spiritual life; knowledge of the subject and professional ability must guide economic life in associations that combine to form a large world economic association independent of national borders.

With regard to the spiritual and economic life, majority decisions are an absurdity; everything must develop out of expertise and professional competence. Majority decisions, real democracy, is only possible for those matters in which every person is competent. There is a wide range of political and legal matters that then remain between a free spiritual life and an economic life based on the principle of association. These are all those matters in which every mature person faces the other as an equal in parliamentary life, where all the questions are decided that then remain by themselves from economic life and spiritual life.

Strangely enough, the experts have objected that they understand that in the tripartite social organism there must be free spiritual life and associative economic life, but then there is nothing left for state life. — This is very characteristic. Modern state life has absorbed so much of the economic and intellectual life, even in terms of ideas, that it has not developed the most important things, so that experts have no idea what tasks state life can perform.

What I have presented to you today is only a sketch. It is further developed in the books mentioned. But it is basically linked to the most intense historical necessities.

We see the great human ideals of freedom, equality and fraternity radiating from the 18th century into our own. How could we not feel what lies in these three great human impulses! And yet, there were clever people in the course of the 19th century who showed irrefutably that freedom, equality and fraternity cannot coexist in a unified state. Thus, on the one hand, we have the strange phenomenon that our hearts beat faster when we hear about these three great human ideals, when we feel them inwardly, but on the other hand, the clever statesman - and I say this quite without irony - can prove that these three ideals are incompatible in the unified state. What is the reason for this? The reason is that in the eighteenth century people felt that liberty, equality and fraternity were incontrovertible ideals and impulses of humanity. But they were still under the illusion that everything had to be done by the unified state. Today we must mature to the threefold social organism. Only in it will liberty, equality and fraternity be truly realized. In a free spiritual life, which I hope can really be brought to light by a world school association, real freedom for people will prevail. In the state life, which stands between the free spiritual life and economic life, everything will be built on equality; in its administration there will only be those things in which every mature person is competent and can face another mature person as an equal. In economic life, consumer and producer interests will join together in associations, find a balance and ultimately culminate in a pricing structure that respects people.

We will have an opportunity to incorporate the three great ideals of human development if we free ourselves from the suggestion of the unitary state by striving for: freedom in the spiritual life, equality in the state life or political or legal life - the second link in the social organism - and fraternity in the associatively organized economic life, which results from the objectivity of production and consumption.

Freedom in spiritual life, equality in state life, fraternity in economic life: only this gives the three greatest social ideals of humanity – freedom, equality, fraternity – their proper meaning.

A teacher reports about the independent religious instruction in the beginning and intermediate classes. They discussed verses from the mystery plays and “Cherubinischen Wandersmann” (Cherubic wanderer).

Dr. Steiner: It is important that you don’t ignore the children’s level of feeling. Can you give a concrete example?

A teacher: In the upper class, I had the children recite, “Let me peacefully act in you.…”

Dr. Steiner: Do you think the children can work with that? Yes, then you can continue with it.

A teacher: Perhaps we could divide the courses.

Dr. Steiner: That is certainly true. I think that if we divided the beginning class in two and left the upper class as it is, things would go well in all three groups.

That is, grades 1-3, 4-6 and 7-9.

A teacher reports that he had used three hours for the preparatory instruction for the Youth Festival.

Dr. Steiner: Isn’t that too much for the students? How many are there?

A teacher: Twenty-six.

Dr. Steiner: It will be difficult to say anything until we have seen a real success. It is certainly good to try that. If it is not successful, then we will need to see how we can do it differently.

A teacher reports about the course in social understanding. There were two hours per week in the sixth through eighth grades, and also some for fifth grade.

Dr. Steiner: Of course, the age from eleven to fifteen is difficult, but this is a separate class.

A teacher: We are also visiting factories.

Dr. Steiner: If you do this really livingly, make it lively, and connect it with all the questions about life that arise at that age, then things will work. I would try to see if the children have too much to do, and then try to connect things to life concretely wherever possible.

I believe the children may be overworked now, and that will, of course, certainly come out in some odd place. It would be a good idea not to have eight hours on one day.

I don’t understand why it is necessary to spend three hours preparing for the Youth Festival. Why wasn’t one hour sufficient? In such questions, the amount of time is not so important as the time available for them. It would, perhaps, be better if we could limit those things we can definitely limit. We could do that for those children attending the Youth Festival by dropping the independent religious instruction as such and connecting it with the preparation for the Youth Festival.

A question is asked about who may attend the Sunday services.

Dr. Steiner: That is certainly a problem. We had never thought that anyone other than the parents would attend. Of course, having begun in one way, it is difficult to set a limit. How should we do that? Why did you admit people who are not parents at the school? If we allow K. in, there is no reason we should send other members away. Where does that begin and where does it end? It’s mostly people who think this is just one more tea party. We have also had other disturbances by people from outside the school being at the school. The thing that disturbed me most was that people who have absolutely nothing to do with the school became involved in discipline. I certainly have nothing against strictly limiting the admission to the services to the parents, no siblings and no tea parties. We did not create that service for that. Now there are no limits. We should admit only the parents or those whom the faculty recognizes as moral guardians.

A teacher asks again about an older member in connection with the Sunday services.

Dr. Steiner: She should stay away. You need to make that clear to her in an appropriate way. That is the problem. The moment we allow someone in who has no child, it becomes difficult to draw the line. Where we need to make exceptions is in the Anthroposophical Society, or we simply leave it as it is.

A teacher: That has been impossible to do.

Dr. Steiner: The exceptions should perhaps only be for once or twice, but they grow.

A teacher: It should not be strictly a school affair. It is separate from the school.

Dr. Steiner: We hold the Sunday services within the context of the school. They are a part of the school in just the same way as, for instance, a class for a particular craft would be. That would also be something special that would be within the school, but not a part of the school. We can do things only in that way, otherwise we will have all these problems. I was recently asked if we could arrange to have a Sunday service in H. for their anthroposophical youth. At the present, when we are under attack from every direction, that is total nonsense. There are already such areas of attack, such as when Mr. L. stands up and conducts a service for the anthroposophical children. He has already received permission to observe our service. I would certainly deny any association with a Sunday service outside the school. It only makes sense if there are a number of children receiving religious instruction from an anthroposophical basis and there is a Sunday service in our school for these children. Thus, we would never admit someone from outside the school.

A teacher: Then we should leave it that way.

Dr. Steiner: We could leave things that way, but there are exceptions. It is difficult to understand how we could turn someone away when we say that Mrs. G. said they could come. Then we would have to turn away Mr. Leinhas, but he is a member of the Waldorf School Association. Eventually this will become a kind of right and will include everything connected to the school in any way.

A teacher: Can we include the wives of faculty members?

Dr. Steiner: Of course, we cannot admit them. If they have no children, they also have no right to it.

A teacher reports about the deportment lessons. An attempt was made to teach the children a soul diet. The children brought all kinds of gossip into school.

Dr. Steiner: It is unavoidable that the anthroposophical children hear things at home. That is not dangerous as long as the parents are reasonable. The healthy attitude of the parents will keep the children from becoming too wild, even though those things may go in deeply. The things we have often had to struggle against, such as those you mentioned about O.R. may arise because the parents talk about silly things.

You will have noticed that the instruction is bearing fruit. I would mention that particularly in critical cases, you have had good success with stories that have a particular moral. If you are certain a child has a specific kind of misbehavior, then you can think of a story in which that type of misbehavior becomes absurd. Even with very young children, you can rid them of their greed for sweets and such if the mother tells a story that makes that behavior absurd. If you think of something along the lines of the dog who goes over the bridge with meat in his mouth, that strongly affects the child and has a lasting effect. That is particularly true if you allow some time to go by between the misbehavior and telling the story. Generally, you can achieve more when the child has slept, and you return to the subject the next day. To take up the behavior immediately after it occurred is the worst thing. That sounds very theosophical, but it is also quite true.

It would also be a good idea if we, as the entire faculty, could take up individual children, or groups of children, who are a source of concern and speak about them. That seems to me to be something very desirable. It requires only that we give some interest to it.

This morning I asked about P.I. He has disappeared. You remember that his father had told me certain complaints he had. It would be a good idea if we could compare what is happening with the boy to what the father is complaining about. The father appears to be a rather useless complainer, always blaming things. I will talk with the boy. It seems to me that the father always complains and picks up small things that bother the boy. Then he expands them into fantasies so that the boy does things the father suggests. The boy certainly does not know what he wants to do.

That is a major problem in every school because it is so difficult to keep everything under control. Precisely in such questions, we must have complete clarity within the faculty about the individual students.

Some things are very interesting when you look at the statistics in detail. I have looked at all the classes. It is striking to me that there are very few children lacking in talent and also few who are gifted, but there are a large number of average children. One sign of that is that they are all making good progress. I always want to differentiate between progress as such and the content of the progress. It is possible that some things have not gone forward, but the tempo is good.

In the fourth grade, there are actually only two slow children and three who are not really moving along. However, the others, at least according to their writing, are sufficiently talented children. It is possible that there may be a number of pranksters, but those whom we have called such are actually gifted pranksters. That certainly hits the nail on the head.

All that relates to something else. When we raise the general level of morality, then things will even out. A characteristic of the Waldorf School students is that they are terribly jealous about their teachers. They only like their own teacher, and that is the one who does things right. That is certainly the case. But, on the other hand, although that has its good side, it also has a darker side. The main thing is not to pay too much attention to it. You shouldn’t feel flattered when you hear such things. That is readily apparent during class when Mr. A. is no longer a human being. The children see him almost as a saint.

Why shouldn’t the children laugh? That is more in keeping with the school. If you know anything, you will know the most important people were pranksters. If you connect that with life, you will see it has another aspect.

It would be good if they were not so loud. The fourth grade is terribly loud. But, we should not take these things so seriously. Morally, it is very significant if you have changed a child’s obtrusive characteristic. For instance, if you can achieve that the fourth grade is not so loud, or if you can break B.Ch.’s habit of throwing his school bag ahead of him. If you can change such an obvious characteristic, regardless of whether you view that as good or bad behavior. It has great moral significance if you can break the boys in the fourth grade from all that terrible yelling. I would say it is a question of general didactic efficiency, how far the speaking in chorus goes. If you develop it too little, the social attitude suffers. That is formed through speaking in chorus. If you go too far, the capacity to comprehend will suffer because that has a strongly suggestive force. When they speak as a group, the children will be able to do things they otherwise have no idea of. It is the same as with a mob in the street. The younger they are, the more they can fool you. It is a good idea to randomly request them to do the same thing again individually, so that each has to pay attention to what the other says. When you are telling a story, you can give some sentences and then let the children continue. You should do things I have done, for instance, when I said, “You there, in the middle row at the left end, continue on,” “You there in the corner, continue,” so that they have to pay attention and that you can make the children move along with you. Speaking in chorus too much leads to laziness. The tendency to shout in music confirms that.

Particularly in the fourth grade, you should pay attention to the intangibles. I am speaking of the very real intangibles that exist in the tension within the entire class. For example, there is the ratio between the number of girls and boys. I don’t mean you have to change that. You need to take life as it is, but you should at least try to pay some attention to such things. If I am not mistaken, in the fourth grade there is the highest ratio of boys to girls. It occurs to me that the physiognomy of the class is related to the ratio of boys to girls. In Miss Lang’s case, the situation is different. You should pay attention to such things. In Miss Lang’s class, there are significantly fewer boys than girls. Today, there were certainly twice as many boys in the fourth grade, twenty-five boys and eleven girls. In the sixth grade, there are twelve boys and nineteen girls. That is something you should certainly pay attention to, don’t you agree? The fifth grade is interesting for its balance. Today there were twenty-five to twenty-five. (Speaking to Dr. von Heydebrand) Today was certainly a good opportunity, because you had brought some very interesting material to the class. That is the proper way to bring anthroposophy. Such things are what we should pay attention to.

A teacher: I believe I have perceived a relationship between the phlegmatic children and a deep voice, the sanguine children and a middle tone, and a higher voice with the cholerics. Is that correct?

Dr. Steiner: That is certainly true with the first two. The question regarding the higher voices is rather interesting. In general, it is true that phlegmatics have lower voices and the melancholic and sanguine children, middle tones. The sanguine children are among the highest voices. The choleric children spread out over all three. There must be some particular reason. Do you thing that tenors are mostly choleric? Certainly on the stage. The choleric element spreads out everywhere.

A teacher: How can we have such differing opinions about the temperament of a child?

Dr. Steiner: We cannot solve that question mathematically. We can certainly not speak in that way. In judging cases that lie near a boundary, it is possible that one person has one view and another, another view. We do not need to mathematically resolve them. The situation is such that when we see and understand a child in one way or another, we already intend to treat it in a particular way. In the end, the manner of treating something arises from an interaction. Don’t think you should discuss it.

There is a further question about temperaments.

Dr. Steiner: The choleric temperament becomes immediately annoyed by and angry about anything that interrupts its activity. When it is in a rhythmic experience, it becomes vexed and angry, but it will also become angry if it is involved in another experience and is disturbed. That is because rhythm inwardly connects with all of human nature. It is certainly the case that rhythm is more connected with human nature than anything else and that a strong rhythm lies at the base of cholerics, a rhythm that is usually somewhat defective. We can see that Napoleon was a choleric. In his case, the inner rhythm was compressed. With Napoleon you will find, on the one side, something that tended to grow larger than he grew. He remained a half-pint. His etheric body was larger than his physical body, and thus his organs were so compressed that all rhythmical things were shoved together and continuously disturbed one another. Since such a choleric temperament is based upon a continuous shortening of the rhythm, it lives within itself.

A teacher: Can we say that one sense predominates in such a temperament?

Dr. Steiner: In cholerics, you will probably generally find an abnormally developed sense of balance (Libra) and an external display of that in the ear canal through an autopsy. The experience of rhythm, the sense of balance and sense of movement, the interaction of these, rhythmic experience. In sanguines (Virgo), in connection with the sense of balance and sense of movement, the sense of movement predominates. In the same way, in melancholics (Leo) the sense of life predominates and in phlegmatics (Cancer) the sense of touch predominates physiologically because the touch bodies are embedded in small fat pads. That is physiologically demonstrable.

Now, it is not so that the touch bodies transmit sense impressions. What occurs is a reflex action, just like when you compress a rubber ball and allow it to spring back. The little warts are there to transmit it to the I, to transmit the impression in the etheric body to the I. That is the case with each of the senses.

A report is given about the eurythmy instruction.

Dr. Steiner: The enthusiasm for eurythmy is somewhat theoretical. We always have the desire for the Eurythmeum before us, but we do not have enough rooms. If we did more tone eurythmy, we would want to have someone who played the piano. That might be necessary. We have until now done relatively little tone eurythmy. Miss X. started a children’s tone eurythmy group in Dornach and has been very successful with it. One thing we should take note of is that except for those older children who are more talented, the younger children more easily learn eurythmy, that is, they more easily develop their grace through it so that in fact eurythmy has been quite fruitful. With the older children, it is more difficult because they don’t want to get used to properly springing up, but the younger children learn it quite gracefully. It would never occur to people that having the younger children spread their legs is something ugly. It is certainly not ugly, but I am convinced that would never occur to them.

A teacher reports about gymnastics. Some children are cutting the class.

Dr. Steiner: We certainly have to ask if those children are avoiding gymnastics, or if they only want to sneak away to fool around.

A teacher: M.T. is very graceful in eurythmy, but outside he is clumsy.

Dr. Steiner: Just in his case, I can imagine he is avoiding things in order to do something else.

A teacher: He is lazy.

Dr. Steiner: Since he is fooling around so much, he is certainly very active. He is a very good boy.

A teacher makes a remark.

Dr. Steiner: In my opinion, it is very good that O.N. copies the writing. You can see that in marriages where the husband often writes like the wife or vice versa.

There is a report about working in the garden and shop class. There are difficulties with some children who are unsocial and lagging and don’t want to help each other.

Dr. Steiner: Are there many? We can hardly do anything else than put all of them together, give them a certain area so they are ashamed when they don’t get anything done. They need something that would be obviously complete so that they will be ashamed of themselves when they finish only a quarter. But not a hint of ambition. What I said does not count upon ambition, but upon shame. We could also form a group that looks at what they have done in the presence of the children and brings some dissatisfaction to expression. I think that if Mrs. Molt and Mr. Hahn were called upon to look at what he did, then M.T. would certainly decide to work in order not to cause any words of displeasure. Another method would be that you take those children and keep them close to you during class, but that is difficult to do. We must make them feel ashamed when they do not finish. I would not arouse the feeling of ambition, but of shame.

A teacher asks if it might be possible to form a bookbinding shop.

Dr. Steiner: I am not certain if that is consistent with the school. Bookbinding is something normally contained in the curriculum for the continuing education school. We could, however, try binding. Is there someone here who could take up such a course for the continuing education school? One or two perhaps, since we can certainly develop bookbinding as an artistic craft. We had no transition from those beautiful old volumes, which are slowly disappearing, to these monstrous modern volumes. The things made now are mostly just trash. It is always intriguing to accomplish something through artistic craft. What are made today are really not books. We should make books again. That is something that falls within the realm of the crafts in the continuing education school.

As such, it is a simple job, but we certainly could accomplish something. Of course, we will need to master the technique. That would give the children something to improve upon. I mean, for instance, when it comes to gold leafing, there is certainly much that can be improved. What they need to learn is relatively simple, though. It is simply practice.

A teacher: I am not certain I could take that over.

Dr. Steiner: This is a question we must discuss in connection with the continuing education school.

A teacher: Should I give a few lessons in my class?

Dr. Steiner: Then we would come into the question of subject teachers. That is something we must avoid as long as we can. As long as someone is there who can do it properly, then that will do. A teacher: Two periods a week for handwork are not enough. Could we increase the number of hours?

Dr. Steiner: I notice that there is considerable ability in the handwork class. As soon as the Waldorf School Association provides us with many millions, we will be able to have many rooms and employ many teachers. Now we can hardly add more work time. We must accomplish everything else by dividing classes. Two hours per week should be sufficient. We must divide the classes and then that is only one hour.

A teacher: Should we take the boys and girls separately?

Dr. Steiner: I would not do that. I would prefer to begin by dividing the whole class into two halves. You let the boys do things other than knit in handwork, don’t you? The girls, of course, also. Nevertheless, I would not do it. I would not begin separating the boys and the girls. We need to find another solution.

A teacher: Should the preschool be like a kindergarten?

Dr. Steiner: The children have not started school yet. We cannot begin teaching them any subjects. You should occupy them with play. Certainly, they should play games. You can also tell stories in such a way that you are not teaching. But, definitely do not make any scholastic demands. Don’t expect them to be able to retell everything. I don’t think there is any need for an actual teaching goal there. We need to try to determine how we can best occupy the children. A teaching goal is not necessary. What you would do is play games, tell stories, and solve little riddles.

I would also not pedantically limit things. I would keep the children there until the parents pick them up. If possible, we could have them the whole day. If that is possible, why not? You could also try some eurythmy with them, but don’t spoil them. They shouldn’t be spoiled by anything else, either. As I said, the main thing is that you mother the children. Don’t be frivolous with them. You would not want to do anything academic with them. You can essentially do what you want.

In playing, the children show the same form as they will when they find their way into life. Children who play slowly will also be slow at the age of twenty and think slowly about all their experiences. Children who are superficial in play will also be superficial later. Children who say that they want to break open their toys to see what they look like inside will later become philosophers. That is the kind of thinking that overcomes the problems of life. In play, you can certainly do very much. You can urge a child who tends to play slowly, to play more quickly. You simply give that child games where some quickness is necessary.

There is a question about speaking in chorus.

Dr. Steiner: You can certainly do that. You can also tell fairy tales. There are many fairy tales you should not tell to six-year-olds. I don’t mean the sort of things that the Ethical Culture Association wants to eliminate, but the stories that are simply too complicated. I would not have the little children repeat the tales. However, if they want to tell something themselves, then listen to it. That is something you will have to wait on and see what happens.

A teacher asks about student reports.

Dr. Steiner: We spoke about that already. You will need to emphasize some things, but not pedantically. You should try to have a little bit of personal history at the beginning, and then go into each child individually. For instance, you could write something like, “E. reads well and speaks interestingly,” and such things, so that you create the text yourself. You create a sentence freely written in which you emphasize what is otherwise simply a subject. You may need to speak about all subjects, but perhaps not. I would print the report form so that it has only the heading, “Independent Waldorf School, Yearly Report for …” and then leave room for you to write.

Each of you will describe a student in your own way. If more than one teacher has had the child, then each should write something. It would, however, be preferable if the various statements were not too contradictory. For example, one of you says, “He reads quite well,” and another says something that supports that. The best is that the class teacher begins the description of the child and the others go from there. It certainly will not do if the class teacher writes, “He is an excellent boy,” and then someone else writes, “He is really a terror.” You will have to put things together.

A teacher asks about the reports from the religion teachers.

Dr. Steiner: Well, they will have to write their two cents worth, also. We must also include the religion teachers. Here, they will have to control themselves, or they won’t be able to write anything.

A teacher: Do we need to have the parents sign the reports?

Dr. Steiner: I would simply have an introduction that says that those parents who want to have their children return the following year should sign the report. If the children are not returning, then we don’t need to do anything, but if they are, the parents should sign it. We made it through without any midyear reports. Do the parents want a midyear report?

Yes, the children will simply report and bring their report cards. They will receive them again at the end of the year when the report is already a booklet. It can certainly be a booklet, but perforated. Suppose at the beginning a child is not very good, then you could write a criticism. Perhaps later the child is better and would want to have the previous report removed. The booklet can be perforated.

Then you can write something that is not praise. You cannot give these two children reports that say their writing was very good, but you could phrase it in a way that describes how well the child writes without criticism. With little M., I would write, “He has not accomplished more than copying simple words. He often adds unnecessary strokes to the letters.” Describe the children.

Another question is asked.

Dr. Steiner: We hold the child back. I would only differentiate between those moving on to the next class, and those we have determined will go into the remedial class if they return. I don’t want to keep children back. In the case of these two children, they came only after Christmas. Now that we have the remedial class, it is possible to place those children who will be unable to meet the goals of the class into the remedial class; for example, those who are slow learners. It is not a good idea to begin failing the others. We should have held them back when they began school. It would certainly be preferable not to fail children. I don’t see how we could do that. In your class, there are at most three others who might be held back, aside from those two who we could place in the remedial class. For now, you will have to bring them along by not excessively praising them, but also not criticizing. Simply state that they have not quite reached the goals of the class. It was our responsibility to place the children in the proper classes when they entered the school. It would not be wise to fail them. It is important that we discuss H. and how we will treat her. We had to put her in the third grade; after we promised that, we had to put her there. In general, we should not keep the children the entire year, especially those who come from other schools, and then let them fail. But, now they are in this situation. The children we need to carry along are really not so bad, but we should never put a child into a class that is too advanced.

A teacher: How should we place children from other schools? Should we go according to their age, or is there some other way?

Dr. Steiner: In the future, when the children come at the age of six and go through all the grades, then this will no longer happen. For now, we must attempt to put the children in the grade that is appropriate for them, both according to their age and to their ability.

A teacher asks if a child can be placed in the remedial class.

Dr. Steiner: I don’t think that is possible. Particularly in the first grade you should not go too far in separating children into the remedial class. I have seen the child, and you are right. But, on the other hand, not so very much is lost if a child still writes poorly in the first grade. If we can do it, it would be very good for all of the children like that if we could do the exercises I discussed previously with you.

If you have her do something like this (Dr. Steiner indicates an exercise): Reach your right hand over your head and grasp your left ear. Or perhaps you could have her draw things like a spiral going inward, a spiral going to the right, and another to the left. Then she will gain much. You need exercises that cause the children to enter more into thinking.

Then we have writing. There are some who write very poorly, and quite a number who are really first class. The children will not improve much when you want to make them learn to write better by improving their writing. You need to improve their dexterity; then they will learn to write better.

I don’t think you will be able to accomplish much with your efforts at improving bad handwriting simply by improving the writing. You should attempt to make the children better in form drawing. If they would learn to play the piano, their writing would improve. It is certainly a truism that this really poor handwriting first started when children’s toys became so extraordinarily materialistic. It is terrible that such a large number of toys are construction sets. They really are not toys at all because they are atomistic. If a child has a simple forge, then the child should learn to use it. I wish that children had toys that moved. This is all contained in Education of the Child. The toys today are terrible, and for that reason the children learn no dexterity and write poorly.

It would be enough, though we can’t do this at school, if we had those children who write poorly with their hands, draw simple forms with their feet. That has an effect upon the hand. They could draw small circles or semicircles or triangles with their feet. They should put a pencil between their toes and draw circles. That is something that is not easy to do, but very interesting. It is difficult to learn, but interesting to do. I think it would be interesting also to have them hold a stick with their toes and make figures in the sand outside. That has a strong effect upon the hands. You could have children pick up a handkerchief with their feet, rather than with their hands. That also has a strong effect. Now, I wouldn’t suggest that they should eat with their feet. You really shouldn’t do this with everything. You should try to work indirectly upon improving handwriting, developing dexterity in drawing and making forms. Try to have them draw complicated symmetrical forms. (Speaking to Mr. Baumann) Giving them a beat is good for developing reasoned and logical forms.

A teacher asks about writing with the left hand.

Dr. Steiner: In general, you will find that those children who have spiritual tendencies can write without difficulty as they will, left or right-handed. Children who are materialistically oriented will become addled by writing with both hands. There is a reason for right-handedness. In this materialistic age, children who are left-handed will become idiotic if they alternately use both hands. That is a very questionable thing to do in those circumstances that involve reasoning, but there is no problem in drawing. You can allow them to draw with either hand.

A teacher asks if they can tell fairy tales where bloody things occur.

Dr. Steiner: If the intent of the fairy tale is that the blood portrays blood, then that is inartistic. The significant point in a fairy tale is whether it is tasteful or not. No harm is done if there is blood in it. I once mentioned to a mother that if she absolutely avoided mentioning blood when she told her children fairy tales, they would become too tender. Later, they would faint when seeing a drop of blood. That is a deficiency in life. You shouldn’t make children incapable of facing life by setting up such a rule.

A teacher asks about L.G. in the third grade. She is nervous and stutters.

Dr. Steiner: It would help if you made up some exercises. I am uncertain whether we have any sentence exercises with k and p. You should have her do those and walk at the same time, and then she would also be able to say those sentences. It would also be a good idea for her to do k and p in eurythmy. However, don’t take such things too seriously because they usually disappear later in life.

A teacher asks about E.M. in the fifth grade, who also stutters.

Dr. Steiner: Yes, didn’t you present her to me before? I must have seen her. You will need to know what the problem is, whether it is organic or lying in the soul. It could be either. If it is a problem in the soul, then you could have her do specially formulated sentences. If it is an organic problem, then you would need to do something else. I will need to take a look at her tomorrow.

A teacher asks about A.W. in the fifth grade. He adds titles to his name and underlines “I.”

Dr. Steiner: That is a criminal type. He might become a forger. He has a clear tendency toward criminality. He can write much better. Clearly a criminal type. You will need to undertake a corrective action with his soul. You will have to force him to do three (not recorded), one after the other. I will take a look at him tomorrow. His father is infantile.

A teacher asks about a closing ceremony.

Dr. Steiner: I would make the closing ceremony such that, assuming I will be there, I would speak, then Mr. Molt, and then all of the teachers. We should make a kind of symphony of what we have to say to the children. There should be no student presentations. They can do that in the last monthly festival. We could review the past school year and then look toward a summer vacation that will awaken hope, then give a preview of the next school year. That is what I think.

A teacher mentions a woman who intends to make a film about the Waldorf School and three-folding.

Dr. Steiner: I don’t have any idea what to do here. If, for example, someone wants to photograph the buildings, that will certainly hurt nothing. There is nothing wrong with that. If she wants to make a film publicizing the Waldorf School, we would have nothing against showing that publicly, since it is not our responsibility. Our responsibility is that the Waldorf School be properly run. We are not responsible for what she photographs any more than you are responsible for what occurs if you are walking along the street and someone offers you a ride. We can tell her we will do what we can do, but there is nothing we can do. She may want to photograph the eurythmy lessons. I did that in Dornach, but it was not very good. That is a technical question. I don’t think much will come of it. She wants to film the three-folding? I was thinking, why shouldn’t the film contrast something good with something bad? We certainly can have no influence if she creates a scene in the film where two people speak about the Waldorf School, but we do not need to let her into the classrooms. She can certainly not demand that we allow her to photograph anything more than a public eurythmy performance by the children. Since she wants to publicize eurythmy, that would be her contribution to the members’ work. It is rather senseless if she wants to film the classes. She could film any school, there is nothing particular to see. She could, for example, record that terrible yelling in the fourth grade.

It would certainly not be proper to suppress offhandedly, due to false modesty, somebody who wants to publicize three-folding and the school. It would be better if we could hinder everything that is tasteless, but, due to false modesty, I would be hesitant to hinder anything. We have much interest in making the school as perfect as possible, but there is certainly nothing to be gained by preventing someone from photographing it. If she had set up and filmed my lecture, what could I have done against that?

A question is asked regarding the trip to Dornach for the First Class of the Anthroposophical University of Spiritual Science (Sept. 26–Oct. 16, 1920).

Dr. Steiner: Well, you see, those things are not so easy. We want to have a course this fall where various people present lectures. We have invited Stein and Stockmeyer, and it would, of course, have been nice if many could come. But, finding lodging in Dornach is just as difficult as in Stuttgart. It is not so easy to invite people, the exchange problems, and so forth. It is, however, possible, if the exchange problems are resolved by then, that we could find room for a number of people. My desire is that everyone coming from the Entente will pay for two others coming from Central Europe. However, that does not need to be too cozy. We could do it as we did for the physicians’ course, that would be possible. However, you need to remember that we don’t have rich people in Dornach and Basel.

A teacher remarks that there are also difficulties in obtaining a visa.

Dr. Steiner: Generally, when people travel to Switzerland for vacation, they can obtain a visa. You only need to be careful that you are not going for another reason. You cannot travel in Switzerland in order to earn money. We are treated terribly there. Now they allow people to move there so that they will pay taxes. Otherwise, you cannot. We are being hit very hard. That is one of the major problems we have with the Goetheanum. If there is not another attitude toward the Goetheanum, people outside Switzerland will soon be unable to visit it.

There was some discussion about reproductions of the paintings in the cupola of the Goetheanum.

Dr. Steiner: What was painted in color in the cupola needs to be understood from the colors. If you reproduced it photographically, you could achieve something only if you enlarged it to the same size as in the cupola. It is just not something we can reproduce simply. The less the pictures correspond to those in the cupola, the better it is. Black and white only hints at something. It cries for color. I would never agree with those inartistic reproductions. They are only surrogates. I do not want to have any color photographs of the cupola paintings. The reproductions should not stand by themselves. I want to handle that so that what is not important is what is given.

It is the same with the glass windows. If you attempted to achieve something through reproductions, I would be against it. You should not attempt to reproduce such things exactly. It is not desirable that you reproduce a piece of music through some deceptively imitative phonograph record. I do not want that. I do not want to have a modern, technical human being. The way these paintings appear in the reproductions never reproduces them. The reproductions contain only what is novel, not what is important. You then have a feeling that this or that color must be there. That reminds me of something you can find in The Education of the Child—namely that you should not give children beautifully made dolls, but only those made from a handkerchief.

Perhaps deepening some of the questions of yesterday can be our starting point today. Dr Rittelmeyer has already called our attention to some difficulties which exist in understanding the relationship of this Christian-religious Movement to Anthroposophy. These difficulties are such that you actually can't just through, one could call it a definition, try and deal with it, but that it should actually be dealt with through practical application, and then also through a certain study of soul relationships in present-day humanity. The soul relationships in present-day humanity have only really just emerged in the course of the last three to four centuries and far too little consideration has been given to exploring just how difficult these soul relationships really are. Thus you must already be clear about how, out of all the energy and best of will impulses a religious movement can be formed, which can also work powerfully and nonetheless in opposition to other movements of our time where the hearts of people have gradually become lost, if at the same time the needs of humanity were not satisfied by the older, or relatively not so very old, religious streams having become unavailable.

We may not give in to the illusion that in reality it would be possible to lead a religious movement separated from the rest of cultural life, namely to be apart from what is called scientific culture. You must be aware that an atheistic science armed with the highest authority exists today. Now you would probably say, sure, this atheistic science exists as a science, but alongside that some or other contemporary science and those involved there insist they are filled not with a contemporary but an inner piousness; so that there are possibly people who can live quite within this present day atheistic scientific community who say: ‘This is another field but when I'm not active in this field then I find myself in a religious life.’

You see, this separation between the scientific and the religious elements which has been going on for centuries, this inner separation can still not cope with such a strong and pure Movement as yours—because a religious movement must, just like a scientific movement, above all support the truth. It can now seem even trivial when, after having spoken so much about the content of a religious movement, we again return to the elementary idea: the Movement must be truthful. We may not undervalue how strong the present day untruthfulness, the inner unconscious falsehood of civilisation has become. What the first initiators of this Religious Movement felt at the time, when they made the suggestion for founding this Movement, was in reality precisely towards dealing with that inner, unconscious untruthfulness of our present day.

You see, out of the cultural historical discomfort the view has gradually been developed that one must leave science to science; the theologians need not bother with it. The theologians had to create their own principles of truth from which they developed ethical and religious content separated from anything scientific and gradually introduced eternity and religiosity while not bothering with what drove science. It is exactly this detachment of the religious life placing itself opposite cultural life which resulted in deep inner untruth. Those who practice science as it is carried out today can only be atheists if he or she is honest because the manner and way thoughts regarding the world, as it is carried out in physics and chemistry, give no possibility to rise up to any kind of ethic ideal. There exists only one truth for the science of today, namely: “The totality of the world is determined by causes. The world of causality is however neutral towards ethic and religious ideals, completely neutral. Right here we must search for the truth and conclude there is no other way than to remain with the verdict of astronomers: I have searched through the entire universe and haven't found God anywhere, I therefore don't need this hypothesis.” Something else is not possible for science, if one is really honest.

On the basis of such a scientific viewpoint depends how a question such as: “Should we abandon everything moral and ethical?” is answered in the following way: “If we do this then humanity will fall into chaos and therefore it is necessary to tame humanity from the outside with state laws or equivalents.” We then have tamed people where the principle of being tamed becomes nothing other than a higher form of submission just like one applies to animals. Religion, for people who thought like this, only had one entitlement and that was to use it as a means to activate people into mutual opposition. Religion was just a means to an end; only this was allowed by those with a scientific way of thinking regarding the present. A large part of those who undermined humanity like this is as a result of not having an honest disgust for a way of thinking which only takes the half, that is, the scientific method of thought and incidentally invents the theory of how humanity was tamed. When one speaks about religious and ethical impulses with only this attitude then one must be completely clear that all one can speak about are the taming rules. One always steers towards deeper untruthfulness if one doesn't confess these things. On the other hand, atheistic science can't be stopped. Just think how forcefully today intentions arise to establish human institutions solely and extensively based on mere materialistically thought-out inherited principles, for example laws set up for marriage where nothing about inner heartfelt relationships are the decisive factor, but rather, for example, that a doctor decides. These things are argued away but in reality these things do not have an end. For those who want to work from the basis of religious renewal it is necessary to be clear to unite the focus of knowledge simultaneously with the spirit into nature's wisdom, making the spirit prevalent within the wisdom of nature so that right into physics spirituality is alive. This need really be striven for by the fact that the religious movement is based on Anthroposophy. Still, this basis of Anthroposophy needs to be a totally inward, truthful aspect. For this reason it is necessary that the relationship between the Religious Renewal and Anthroposophy is also represented in the correct way.

Isn't it true that Anthroposophy wants and can't be anything other than a quest for knowledge? You must, also as far as your relationship involves its followers, be fully aware that you are working with a path of knowledge. The religious renewal is even a religious movement with a corresponding religious ritual. When both movements work out of their own impulses then only mutual fructification can result. Basically this can never cause trouble. One must, when one is clear about it, know that on the whole, trouble can't appear when the conditions of the time are considered. The Anthroposophical Movement can be seen to have a difficult position because many people thirst for a spiritualised world view and spiritualised knowledge but want to come to their knowledge with more comfort and ease than what Anthroposophy offers. People don't want such intensive inner work which is necessary in Anthroposophy and as a result really absurd points of view and thoughts pop up. It is like this—you only need to remind yourselves about yesterday's lecture—for those who really want to be involved with Anthroposophy, a basic rethink is necessary which creates a radical difference between Antroposophists and those who have no inkling of the existence of such rethinking and transformative sensitivity.

What actually makes a community? A communal thinking and feeling! One can hardly imagine that people who truthfully work with the Anthroposophical impulse would not get such a feeling of community, as it had never before been in the world. Such a fundamental change in thinking has never existed before, even in the Mysteries: then everything was quite similar to popular thought. There is a strong bond where everyone calls and shouts for community which often becomes evident among the youth, surfacing basically as an absurd tendency. However, don't forget we are not in a studio where we can make people out of plasticine, but that people exist out there in all their absurdities, which one need to refer back to, from which there is no escape if one wants to do real work. It comes down to taking these things profoundly and in all seriousness. One tends not to think about all the various fields. Perhaps you will understand me better if I give you a popular example.

In the Waldorf School we now have 12 Classes and students of up to the age of 18 or 19. They all want to be teachers. Now, the first and foremost requirement in teaching and education lies in the non-discussion of the teaching methods to the child, boy or girl; these methods need to remain a mystery. The way things are accomplished these days centre around the child in the Waldorf School; revealing the pedagogical foundation and so on to them as they are growing up until they sometimes know what Waldorf pedagogy is better than the teacher. Yes, when things are like this there can be no progress.

On the other hand it is not acceptable today to dissect things in an outer manner. Recently in a delegation meeting we spoke about the method of how money could be acquired for the reconstruction (of the Goetheanum). A hateful article appeared as a result in a Geneva newspaper in a wild attack, how the poor Swiss people were having a million Franks pulled out of their pockets. Open secrets also don't work. It must come down to the ability to inwardly depend on people, so that when basic rules of secrecy are not given, that a form of tact develops among the authoritative personalities, speaking about something in a specific way and not, for instance, reveal the ground rules of Waldorf pedagogy to a fifteen year old as one would to a thirty year old person. This must gradually come out of it. In fact all kinds of absurd added impulses come to the fore, when things are not considered in depth or with enough strength.

This is how the impulse for community building appears in the Anthroposophical Movement. The Anthroposophical Movement is a movement for knowledge. It is founded on the communality of will, feeling and thought. Thus one can actually consider that the Religious Movement would simply rise out of the foundation of the Anthroposophical Movement, taken up in the way which was once given to religious movements which had come out of archetypal impulses and then developed further.

Before any religious movement existed among the Anthroposophists, a substitute was looked for in all kinds of esoteric circles which were however based solely on knowledge and the aspect considered as ritualistic also was just there to serve knowledge. As a result nothing from these circles could be brought across into a movement for the renewal of religion.

Had things going on at that time, considered then as ritualistic, had these things not been permeated with the pulse of knowledge, they would have been conceived outwardly which is not where they had their origin.

In contrast it is namely so in religious movements, that the ritual itself contains immediate content in each act of worship so that those who for instance refuse to strive for knowledge within the ritual, still through their participation in the ritual shares in the ritual's life, because the ritual, in the way it should work in this Religious Movement, is the speech of the spiritual world, brought down into earthly form, making participation in the ritual something quite positive.

Let us contemplate the central focus of the ritual from this viewpoint. When we look at the Act of Consecration we notice the preparatory part being the Gospel reading. Now here is another difficulty because it is really necessary to get a better understanding of the Gospels than what currently exists. It is really a matter of understanding that the Words of the Gospels are to be taken up quite differently to any other words, which have flowed from civilisation's development through humanity. The Word of the Gospel, when it is taken as the truth, contains within itself something which can be described when one says: The person who reads the Words of the Gospel out loud, speaks as the conduit for something which comes down from the spiritual into the physical world in order for the prepared part of the Gospel text to somehow enable the entire congregation to establish a link to the spiritual world.

Following this, the actual offering takes place, in three parts: Revelation, Transubstantiation and Communion. A real conception of this trinity is not possible if one is not clear about the very moment when transubstantiation is fulfilled, even for those who actually take part, when natural law and ethical law flow together as one, so that quite a different world order is opened up every time for the congregation, each moment when a person is lifted up to the divine, and the spiritual sinks down into the congregation. When one takes this as reality then one must say, something is happening which is completely independent to what one can recognise as happening in it. Mere feeling is sufficient for what precedes it. For knowledge, mere feeling is insufficient. For the preparatory steps to transformation, it suffices to have feeling, therefore actually it is a task, an activity involving the congregation, when the priest celebrates the Act of Consecration for the congregation. This is something which must definitely be accepted and as a result you should never disturb this harmony by asking the question: ‘Could any ritual which is received today out of the spiritual world’—and all our rituals are received from the spiritual world are to some extent ordained by God—‘can it be changed or stopped?’—You see, by somehow evaluating these rituals and come to saying: ‘Yes, it should develop into another state where people can have an invisible ritual’—these questions are unreasonable.

The relationship must be thought of in this way: people are always going to look for a ceremony followed by a sermon; in the sermon the only enrichment flowing into it can come from Anthroposophy, out of spiritual science. It will happen in future that those who are knowledgeable in the topmost degree in spiritual matters, will never reject keeping community with those who attend the ritual. He or she has also no other way of relating to the ritual than, I could call it, a naive person. Therefore the question can't possibly be raised: ‘Do we carry the ritual for the present time and in future substitute it by another?’—Through our founding of the ritual it is established and will continue; it is subject to other rules than those that human beings validate when it is asked: ‘Will there one day be an invisible ritual?’ The Ritual is subjected to the immense cosmic world impulses which include everything in its evolution which comes about in the world. However, the changes of the future will be quite different to changes that have happened in the past.

Take the Mass of the today's Roman Catholic Church. What is present there is the synthetic confluence of all the corresponding rituals of ancient times, deepened in a Christian sense. This is the wonderful element within the Catholic Church which has flowed together out of all the ancient mysteries. However, at specific times in the development of Christianity there came about—these times actually already began in the third and fourth century—times during which there was no understanding any more for what was woven into the sacrifice of the Mass and so it became an empty formula, propagating itself through tradition, one could say, out of respect. Then, seemingly soon, people came with the courage of non-understanding and started to improve all kinds of things. Today, as a result, we have in the Catholic Mass sacrifice, something which gradually, simply through the dying out of language, has become fundamentally incomprehensible. It is celebrated in the old language, without it possibly bringing about understanding. One can regard this sacrifice of the Catholic Mass as a corpse, which is something unthinkably huge and powerful, yet still as a corpse possessing unbelievable power. In totality the peculiar aspect of the Catholic Church is how the priesthood is exceptionally educated philosophically but theologically extraordinarily uneducated. The Catholic theology has no liveliness, so that actually right up to the greatest climaxes Catholic theology is something extraordinarily uneducated. Since the Middle Ages it hasn't undergone any further development. On the grounds of religious needs of humanity, the teaching or sermon all fail to be satisfying, yet by contrast this is not the case with the cult because the cult has an extraordinary power of building the community. This is what is given in which you can engender a feeling of eternity through this new ritual, so that no disharmony need to bear down on your souls. Some Anthroposophists claim that parts of the prescribed ritual can be left out. This question would actually not come about if one has the right attitude. I really don't know out of what grounds these ideas could have come. Because, take the case of the funeral today; surely a religious community will ask for a ritual? So you are called to the Consecration of Man for the whole of humanity and not only with the attitude that it is something temporary, it will be replaced by something else. This is something eternal as far as something can be called eternal on earth. This conflict which appears to be developing among many of you, that Anthroposophy sees the ritual to some extent as something less meaningful or that something else in the future must represent the present Movement, this conflict can only be based on a feeling of a misunderstanding. As soon as you are clear that naturally Anthroposophy lies more on the side of knowledge and that it must give itself over to that, as far as the ritual is considered, then on the other side, people who attend the ritual and also seek the knowledge aspect, because of the strength of the intellect, and approach the ritual from the basis of Anthroposophy—as soon as you are clear about this then you can say to yourself in some way this is only a kind of division of labour. If taken from this basis, conflict should not arise at all.

Now I would like to ask you, following on from these comments, to express whatever you want because I know that much still lies in the depths of your souls.

A question is posed (which is not written down by the stenographer) regarding the lecture given on the 31^st December 1922 in Dornach.

A Saying:

The world's working approaches
As a material reflection to me
In the Heavenly Beings of the stars
I see, through Willing, their loving motion.
Penetrating me with life's water
Forming me through matter's power
The heavenly deeds of the stars
Within feeling I see their wise revolving.

Es nahet mir im Erdenwirken
In Stoffes Abbild mir gegeben
Der Sterne Himmelswesen
Ich seh' im Wollen sie sich liebend wandeln.
Es dringen in mich im Wasserleben
In Stoffes Kraftgewalt mich bildend
Der Sterne Himmelstaten
Ich seh' im Fühlen sie sich weise wandeln.

Rudolf Steiner: What I spoke about then is a kind of cosmic communion. When this is performed meditatively, then under the circumstances as things are today, they could offer people a certain satisfaction. In this way a kind of communion can be received. However that doesn't exclude those who receive communion through their knowledge in this way, when they in their entire soul constitution strive for it today, to also receive communion in another way. The differences should not be stressed because the two things are not contradictory. Do you experience a stronger contradiction here than what you have against the old, still truly understood, Catholic Church? There they have the priest communion and naturally also the lay communion—I don't want to say that all Anthroposophists should be priests. You have those who can give and receive communion and you have those who can receive communion but not give it. When you grasp the difference you have to say to yourself: ‘Those who give communion can't possibly, without it adding some inner experience, take the communion anyhow like the layman. He must experience something more in it.’ Therefore the priest, when working with the communion, must also experience something more, an inner communion, and this he does have. Now, it comes down to strictly adhering to the difference between the priesthood and the laity. Only these two classes exist. Today one walks away from the developments in these olden times, this past time is no longer here.

Today much which was only available to the Priests in olden times is now to some extent also made available to the laity. Our entire modern theology, all its literature is now available. The same can be said to be valid in our case. You can study theology as a layman. If you choose a way of knowledge like Anthroposophy it is self-evident that the thoughts of participants become familiar with such things as would first and foremost been available for the celebrating Priests in past times. Today it is different. We can't put up boundaries. If we would have clung to old principles it would be as if a religious movement existed and within that movement would have been the priesthood who then would have Anthroposophy to themselves, who would have to do everything on the level of profane technicality, as demanded by the times ... (gap in stenographer's notes). If you take that into account you will understand that this communion which the priest celebrates has developed from something which belongs to the Anthroposophical Movement. However, there is no ground for saying: ‘On the one hand we have the priestly, on the other we have cosmic communion.’ Both come from the same foundation, only differentiating in form. They can both stand independently beside one another. So when you enter with profound feeling into these things you will have no difficulties.

A Participant: In the report about the meeting of delegates in February 1923 it is said that the ritualistic element is something which comes from prenatal life. In the course which we attended in Dornach, it is illustrated how our ritual raises up the dead in their life after death.

Rudolf Steiner: This is something which is applicable to all things created out of the spiritual world; the concepts need to be grasped very precisely. To grasp concepts scholarly dialectic needs to be entered into. However we haven't come that far yet, neither in the area of Anthroposophy, nor in the Religious Movement. You see, the way people work in the ritual, to really engage, so that the human soul is involved, is in order for this to lead to the Portal of Death and encounter Christ—this is the one side of the cult. The other side through which that takes place for the human being is like a cosmic memory of what had been experienced prenatally. Let's take an example in ordinary life to make this clear. What meeting makes a great impression on a person today? To have had an encounter, already during his youth, with a venerated person. Now something else is added to this. It is something different, when I depict it, which germinates in the mood of soul towards the future; as a result of this he might approach relationships in life in quite a different manner to the kind of person he had been in his youth. When one partakes in the ritual, one's next, future life is touched. This happens because its origin lies in prenatal life. This works very strongly on the human being.

A Participant: Does one accomplish more by meditating on the Mass or when one celebrates the Mass? One can then come as far as saying we don't need to read the Mass any more.

Rudolf Steiner: Logically that is not quite untrue, but in fact it is not so. When the Mass is read and is then experienced meditatively and thus has an effect on you, then this effect, while depending on a more intense inner activity, actually becomes stronger. However you are not always able to call upon this inner activity. When you haven't read the Mass for some days then its power becomes paralysed. It is true, if one can, then it is good, but when it has had no preparatory stages then these forces are paralysed. It is not true that the inner meditated Mass is as strong as the read Mass, and it must not somehow become an ideal for the Priest, to not read the Mass. Then he could well say: ‘I refrain from working with my congregants, I, alone, want to make progress.’ It is possible to imagine this ideal (not reading the Mass but meditating) but the power which the priest will need, when he wants to read the Mass, this he must not allow to weaken as a result, by him wanting to present such an ideal.

A participant: How does one bring people to the Consecration of Man? Are we to only take people who emotionally come from underdeveloped religious sentiments, to whom the way of knowledge is closed? How should we approach participants if we don't follow the route of thinking?

Rudolf Steiner: You don't just have the ritual, but also in the broadest sense the sermon, lectures, or preaching in the terminological sense. Nothing can be seen as a problem. Today's younger intellectuals who work out of nothing don't want an isolated intellectual aspect, but strive strongly towards ritual.

What can enter here, which must from external sources form a synthesis between the Religious Movement and Anthroposophy, I now want to characterise. On the one hand today's intellect is not enlivened without the ritual. The ritual firstly calls upon the intellect. Today people stop believing they can think if they don't have the ritual. Stopping thinking is a danger of the time. On the other hand I don't see where the limitation must lie when presenting a sermon and ritual. A limitation can only exist where you create it artificially. They don't want to learn about Anthroposophy, they say. That they can't handle because they must! Of course one should not throw Anthroposophy at them because then the problem arises with them saying: ‘We don't want to learn about Anthroposophy.’

A participant: So I won't talk about the ether body, for example?

Rudolf Steiner: That depends on the knowledge of the congregation. I can easily imagine a congregation who relate honestly to the ritual and still can have a need for knowledge. I don't see why you shouldn't speak about the ether body.

A participant: There are actually people with a desire for knowledge and who find their way to Anthroposophy through the ritual. Can we find a possibility to satisfy people who don't want Anthroposophy?

Rudolf Steiner: The question is actually: how will you characterise someone who should be led by you, who will actually be led by you in order for that person to be seen quite separated from Anthroposophy? How must that person be? It is like this: When one really grasps what a person is about, when one really enters into true humanity, then people want Anthroposophy, just as at all times the underlying soul is being sought for. To not want Anthroposophy is only the case with inhibited people. For forty years you could still find elementally healthy people in the countryside, they uttered the highest wisdom. (The following sentence was only partially captured.) Under their pillows they use to hide something—take Jacob Böhme for instance—this is no longer found today. People who have become inhibited in large cities don't come anywhere near such things. As a result I can imagine that another way can be used, other than anthroposophic. Your approach need not be from what is printed in books but what you have experienced through books. For example the concept of the etheric body is easy to bring across to naive individuals. In some regions people called the little substance left in the eyes upon waking, “night's sleep”; the etheric is in there because it comes from the etheric body's activity. Starting points are everywhere. You satisfy people more when you become free of words and come from experience itself.

A participant: Is it possible to find the difference between cosmic communion and the ritual in order to formulate it as sacramental?

Rudolf Steiner: That is something which is difficult to say, because experience of real cosmic communication is already sacramental. All of anthroposophic thought is something sacramental, as I have expressed it already in my Theory of Knowledge in the Goethian world view. Knowledge, when it is true knowledge, strives towards sacrament. It depends more upon us trying to bring things together than to find differences, because in reality you bring yourself together with it.

A question is posed with reference to specific words in a sentence from one of Rudolf Steiner's Dornach lectures of 1922 (indicated by a few connecting words by the stenographer).

Rudolf Steiner: ‘Anthroposophy needs no religious renewal’—so you have correctly formulated the sentence. What will it mean for Anthroposophy, whose foundation is in itself, to need religious renewal? The reverse: ‘Religious renewal needs Anthroposophy!’ What was said there in the lecture, that Anthroposophy needs ritual, was actually directed at Anthroposophists, not at the Movement for Religious Renewal. Such things need to be said because many people believe they need to orientate themselves out of principle, whether they should choose to take part in the Religious Movement. There were members of the Anthroposophic Movement who were much older than Dr Rittelmeyer; when they asked if they should take part in the ritual, one must say to them: ‘In the end you should know this yourself, you must be able to consult Dr Rittelmeyer.’—One may not say that the only way to come to anthroposophy is through the Religious Movement; that would be very wrong. My lecture at that time was directed at Anthroposophists. It is therefore self evident that the Anthroposophists, as they have become lately, could be consultants for the ritual. The opposite is deadly for Anthroposophy: when you say one couldn't come to an anthroposophic understanding (of Christ) if you do not come via the ritual. It is necessary to stress that the lecture was directed at Anthroposophists. The misunderstanding came about by both sides making mistakes of omission in their handling. There are many in the Religious Movement who doesn't know what they should be doing.

Marie Steiner: Some Anthroposophists created the saying: “Dr Steiner wants the Religious Movement to replace the Anthroposophical movement”; that was Dr Steiner's assessment. Similarly at the start of the Threefold Movement it was also suggested it should replace the Anthroposophical Movement. There have already been signs of people believing that Anthroposophy should be disassembled. Lecture cycles at the publishers were cancelled, and such like.

Rudolf Steiner: These things appear in outer practice and do not lead to inner difficulties.

A Participant pointed out that Rudolf Steiner had said during the lecture on 30 December 1922 that there were many people who are orientated towards knowledge but other people with dull religious inclination (text here only copied in key words by the stenographer).

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, that can't be denied, there are people with a thorough orientation towards knowledge and others with just a dull religious inclination. If I said that Anthroposophy can't do anything with people who have dull religious instincts, but only through something like the Religious Movement, then it is true. However it does not mean that the Religious Movement is applicable to only these kinds of people, but it means these people can't do anything with Anthroposophy. These people can only be reached through the ritual, not through Anthroposophy. People with a dull religious inclination are to be involved through the ritual and possibly will become very thoughtful people in their next lives.

A participant: People say: ‘The Anthroposophists have a university, you have a school for children.’ This is the kind of thing we have to deal with.

Rudolf Steiner: Recently I saw a big poster which came out of Austria with sheer nonsense on it, claiming how concerned individuals reach the spiritual world, but on the other side it said: ‘With my spiritual system I include all things which are only approached one-sidedly by Anthroposophy and Theosophy etc.’ With such things inner difficulties can't be judged. Such people one may not take as tragic. You can't be upset by this.

A participant: To prevent such things being proclaimed, the leader of the branch needs to take action.

Rudolf Steiner: These are outer things. The leader of branch is not involved with what members do outside the branch.

A participant: It is said directly that the two paths are contradictory. This frightens people and they stay away.

Rudolf Steiner: This is not inner difficulty, it is outer action of practical life. That these things happen cannot be stopped. One can't characterise something in a trivial way which is connected to the most serious profundity; for this is needed clear formulation, with serious words which can possibly appear as falsely expressed. What one or other branch leader has to say is quite insignificant. Otherwise we have to regard it as a task to only have branch leaders who are infallible. Your spiritual tools are there to educate people.

Emil Bock: In a certain sense there was no confusion in the beginning. We were looking for our field of work as somewhere different from the Anthroposophic field. We probably took the declarations of the opposition as our connecting point which made us too separate from the Anthroposophic work. Some of us also had no more time for it. As a result of these difficulties arising among the Anthroposophists we realised we could not speak from the side of Anthroposophists. As a result of the course of events we had separated ourselves somewhat out of the anthroposophical line. Now we ask you, please help us, to find the true way in the anthroposophic work again, because we have a strong desire not to fall away from the Anthroposophic work and see how as a result we have attracted the possibility to really contribute to the clarification of us not being seen as Anthroposophists but as standing for Religious Renewal. We do not want to be poor representatives of Anthroposophy.

Rudolf Steiner: The danger was actually there from the beginning. It all depends on the correct critical attitude being maintained. It is possible through many things that judgement is rectified. For several months already, Dr Rittelmeyer is very actively involved in the Management (Forstand) of the Anthroposophic Society. What he says is highly recommended. It is already so that the strength of each one of you becomes strongly recommended. I will never again, at an occasion where social relationships are to be healed by the ritual, participate without a representative of the Religious Movement working with me. At burials I will no longer speak alone, without a priest. The ritual needs to be celebrated by the priest. In this way correct judgement must be built up. In discussions misunderstandings arrive, but the facts speak for themselves.

It is important that the Religious Movement does not deny Anthroposophy. You are mistaken if you believe you can make progress without it. It is far better to be clear and stand firm on the foundation of Anthroposophy. Everything must be openly brought to light. You may not allow people to come to the opinion that it has nothing to do with Anthroposophy. The Waldorf School is completely related to Anthroposophy. Some lecturer has said that the Waldorf School is quite nice if only their basic views could be dropped.

It is this which I want to stress: If Anthroposophy is the foundation of the Waldorf School then we don't create an anthroposophic sect education, but by going through Anthroposophy we strive towards a general education of mankind.

We have the task not to clarify misunderstandings but simply to speak the truth.

This lecture is number six of eighteen lectures from the lecture series entitled, Man's Responsibility for World Evolution through His Spiritual Connection with the Planet Earth and with the Stars Above. It is also known as, Spiritual Science in the Light of Today.

My dear friends,

On the basis of those things which we discussed here in the last lecture, I should now like to bring forward various details which may perhaps be of use to you as members of the Anthroposophical Movement for purposes of defence, whenever from some corner or other, attacks are made against our Anthroposophical Movement, and what must now appear in its train. In recent times, one sees these attacks appearing everywhere. To-day I will confine myself simply to attacks of a certain kind, but at the present moment attacks are being specially directed against our practical undertaking, against which has to come forth as such from the Anthroposophical Movement. Far and wide one can hear it said:—“Well, these people are now founding a ‘Kommende Tag,’ a ‘Futurum’;—what do they mean to do with these things? They only want to establish such practical things for the use of those who confess themselves as belonging to the Anthroposophical view of the world. Economic undertakings are therefore set on foot, in order that those who confess to an Anthroposophical world view may acquire a certain power, and in the first place an economic power.”

If those who make this reproach were to enter more closely into what lies at the basis of such undertakings and see how they proceed out of the whole spirit of the Anthroposophical Movement, such a reproach could not be made; but, on the other hand, one cannot deny that, even amongst those human beings who stand within our Anthroposophical movement, often things are said which contribute richly to the arising of such misunderstandings. It is quite impossible, according to the whole ways and methods by means of which what is here called Anthroposophy seeks to relate itself to the world, it is absolutely impossible that such a judgment can be in any way justified, but that will only be clear to those who can grasp the spirit of our whole Anthroposophical Movement. This Anthroposophical Movement reckons with all the forces present in the evolution of humanity. How often has it been emphasised that the development of humanity has to undergo certain points of transition, and that these turning points should be observed. I should just like to point to one such turning point, in order to show how little justified is the opinion that we may have any definite dogma or theory which we seek to bring to humanity.

It may of course, occur, as a kind of anomaly, a kind of out-growth of fanaticism amongst a few members, that they should think they have to advocate a definite dogma; and indeed, this may be considered right by many, but it does not lie in the spirit of the Anthroposophical Movement. For if, in the spirit of this Movement, we look back into human evolution, then we find that in olden times, those ancient times in which an instinctive clairvoyance was prevalent, the whole disposition of Man's soul was different; man assumed a quite different place in the world. What was striven for in those places which we often designate as the Mysteries, in those ancient epochs of human evolution? Let us for the present leave all details aside, and just try to grasp the meaning of the Mysteries.

Those who wore considered ripe and were found suitable for being received into the Mysteries during their earth-life—that means in the time between birth and death—participated in a certain instruction given them by the Guides in those Mysteries, and that instruction came from what the Leaders of the Mysteries had to impart concerning the super-sensible worlds. No Mystery-Leader made any secret of the fact that, in his opinion, the teachings in the Mysteries did not proceed only from human beings, but that, through the special rites carried on in those Mysteries, super-sensible beings, Divine Spiritual Beings were present during the celebration of the Mysteries, and with the assistance of those Gods present therein everything connected with it was given out. The essential point was this:—all the arrangements made in the Mysteries were of such a nature that they attracted, so to speak Divine Spiritual Beings, who, through the mouths of those who were the Leaders of the Mysteries, gave instruction to those who were the pupils therein.

In those olden times, everything was so organised socially, that not only were the arrangements made accepted by the Guides and Pupils of the Mysteries, but even by those who stood outside the Mysteries and who were not able to share in the life of the Mysteries. The whole arrangements made as social arrangements for humanity, were thus accepted.

One need merely think of old Egypt, and of how those who were the Leaders in the State received their directions from the Mysteries. The Mysteries were regarded as the self-understood place of direction for everything which had to occur within the social life.

To-day, my dear friends, one can also impart instruction, esoteric instruction, which can run in forms similar to those old Mystery-arrangements; but all that has quite another meaning to-day. That is because between our epoch and that ancient epoch, in reference to such things, a significant turning-point has occurred in the development of mankind. In those ancient times man was, as it were, destined to receive the instruction given through the Mysteries and through which he approached those Divine Spiritual Beings, during his life here,—between birth and death. Now things are different. We are living after that turning-point in human evolution, between birth and death. When these things altered, that which man then had to learn through the Mysteries between birth and death;—that, my dear friends, he now learns to-day, before he descends through conception or through birth into a physical body. He learns it according to his Karma, and according to the preparations he had gone through in a former life on earth. What man undergoes now in the Spiritual world, between the great Midnight Hour of existence and his next birth, is something which also includes that Spiritual instruction.

You will find what had to be said in another connection concerning these things, in a cycle which I gave in Vienna in 1914, on the life between Death and a New Birth; but that was only indicated there, was only touched upon with a few strokes. I will now try to characterise it more closely.

Man to-day experiences something akin to the old Mystery instruction, before he descends from the pre-existence condition into his physical body. That is a factor with which anyone must reckon, who through Spiritual knowledge, stands in reality to-day. We must not think of a man born to-day as he was thought of in olden times. In olden times he was so considered that one could say: “He descends on to the Earth and is destined to be initiated through the Mysteries into the knowledge of what he really is as a human being.”

The case is not like that to-day. That arrangement was made for human beings who had gone through a smaller number of earthly lives than has the man of to-day, who has, of course, taken far more into his soul in his many incarnations which made it possible for him to receive certain instruction on the part of the Divine Spiritual Beings in his pre-existent condition.

My dear friends, we have to pre-suppose something of this nature to-day, when we see a child. When we meet a child to-day, we must realise that we no longer have the task of pouring into that child that which had to be poured in, in olden times. To-day it is our task to say: “This child has been taught, he has only laid a physical body around his already-instructed-soul; that which was his pre-birthly instruction from the Gods must make its way through the veils around that soul, it must be brought out.” That is how we should think to-day in the sense of pedagogy, if we are to think in the sense of true Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. It will then be clear to us that, fundamentally, all our instruction shall tend to remove those hindrances which lie around that which the child brings with him into this world from his pre-birthly existence. It is for that reason that, in our Waldorf Teaching, such significance is laid on the fact that the teacher should really regard the child before him as something like a riddle that he has to solve,—in whom he must seek that which the child is concealing in himself; he must not lay the chief importance on anything which he has undertaken to put into the child. He must never proceed in any dogmatic way, but all the time he has to consider the child itself as his teacher, and see how the child through its special behaviour, betrays the very way in which those veils are to be broken through; so that, from out of the child itself, that Divine instruction can come forth. So the Waldorf pedagogy and didactic consist in eliminating those veils which are around the child, so that the child can come to itself, and discover within itself its own Divine instruction. Therefore, we say we have no need to inoculate into the child anything we have conceived as a theory—no matter how beautifully it may be put in our books; we leave that to those who are still rooted in the ancient traditional religious Confessions. We leave that to those who want to make children Catholics or Evangelists or to those who want to make them Jews. That is not our way,—we do not even want to inoculate Anthroposophical pedagogy into the children. We simply want to use what we have learned as Anthroposophy, to make ourselves capable of evoking into being that living spirit which lives in the child from its pre-existence. We want through Anthroposophy to acquire a dexterity in teaching, and not a number of dogmas, which we teach the children. We want to become more dexterous ourselves; we want to evolve a didactic art, so as to make of the child what it has to become. We ourselves are quite clear that all the other knowledge which is to-day brought from the most diverse sides, may indeed instruct the head, but cannot make a person an artist in pedagogy; it does not affect the whole man, but simply the head. Anthroposophy grasps the whole human being and makes him a manipulator of that artistic dexterity, (as I might call it) which should be displayed to the pupils. Therefore, we use Anthroposophy in order to become more dexterous teachers, but not to bring it to the child. We are quite clear as to this:—the spirit does not consist of a number of ideas, of concepts; it is a living thing, and it appears in each individual child in a quite special and individual way, if only we ourselves are able to bring to its consciousness what each child brings to the Earth with its birth here. My dear friends, we would impoverish this Earth, if we only sought to bring to the children things which can be comprised in a sum of dogmas; while on the contrary we make the Earth richer if we cultivate and cherish that which the Gods have given to the child and which it brings with it to the Earth. That which is the living spirit then appears in ever so many human individualities;—not that which some wish to bring as Anthroposophy to these human children in order to make them uniform, but that which brings to life that living spirit which dwells in them. That is our object, and for that reason we have absolutely no interest in bringing Anthroposophical dogma to the children. That is one of the practical outcomes of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science.

This special didactic, this special pedagogic art, is quite different from anything which human beings have thought of till now, for they have only been able to think, for instance “I believe in a certain dogma; that therefore is the best which we can give to our children.” It does not interest us at all to bring any dogmas to the children, for we know that each child brings his own message when he appears on the Earth through the Gate of Birth, and we should destroy that message if we tried to meet it with dogma of any kind. The spirit does not need to be cultivated in an abstract way; when one is able to get it free and bring it to life, the living spirit itself is then there, instead of a series of dogmas.

All our “opinions” are only there as a means of awakening the living spirit in humanity and to keep it quite in a state of continual development; that is why it is quite a wrong idea spread abroad that in the Waldorf School or in anything else which we cultivate pedagogically, we wish to carry on Anthroposophy in a dogmatic way. We do not wish to do so in the Waldorf School, nor do we want to impress Anthroposophy dogmatically on any Science. On the contrary, in every single Science we want to bring out the individual nature of that Science. We are quite convinced that it is essential to create something in the world through Anthroposophy which will extinguish all dogma and bring out the individual nature of each particular sphere. From this point of view, it was needful that those attacks springing up from all corners should be repelled, whenever they turn on our bringing Anthroposophy as Dogma into any Science, or pedagogy.

And now, in what concerns our practical undertakings we find people saying, with remarkable unanimity during the last few weeks in Germany, as also in Switzerland and many other places,—because of the recent publications of the “Kommenden Tag” and the “Futurum,”—“Well, these undertakings are all conducted by Anthroposophists combining together so that they can have their own economic undertakings, and so on. Other people perhaps nay be admitted to these undertakings and concerns, but they will certainly have no voice in the administration,” and so on and so on. Now if we wanted to do things of this kind, it would contradict the very principle on which we stand, i.e. we have to keep the development of humanity in all its details clearly before our minds, and not ask for something absolutely complete and correct, but just ask ourselves: “What ought to take place to-day?” Then we must pay attention to the second turning-point in the evolution of humanity. To-day various affairs, but especially economic affairs are developed amongst humanity from a certain principle of inertia. Formerly these arrangements were born in a tiny circle, usually in a tiny territory. To-day, because they are as a rule State economic concerns, we find, in the place of the individual undertakings of the past, that we have imperial concerns, which have consequently become gigantic, although we find them now springing up from inertia. To-day one speaks of National Economy, thereby welding two things together, the peculiar Group-Spirit which holds a race together, a Group-Spirit is externally, I might say, embodied in the blood. Now the world-relationships have for a long time been of such a nature that, with every kind of Group-Community which expresses itself in the blood, modern economics can have nothing whatever to do,—that is, if they are to be based on sound relationships. So to-day, something is strongly expressed in an economic relationship when the Rhine boundaries are discussed, because it is desired to have on one side of the Rhine a different economic arrangement to what exists on the other side, because of the different racial and national considerations. These national considerations have all arisen from different forces, and to-day have nothing whatever to do with that which constitutes world-economy (Weltwirtschaft). These things have reached a certain crisis in the course of the last third of the 19th Century. Then only did these turning-points in evolution, in the evolution of humanity, become so obvious.

As we have just tried to explain, in olden times man entered physical existence uninstructed by the Gods, and he had to be taught through the Mysteries. To-day he enters already taught, and that which is in his soul has only to be brought to his consciousness. In ancient times, as regards the social and economic life of mankind, things were so arranged that a man was born into a definite social connection, into a certain group, according to just those forces which worked in him before his birth. It was not only the principle of physical heredity which lay at the basis of the oldest forms of inequality, which we find, for instance, in the oldest caste divisions;—in the old caste division the Leaders of the social orderings operated things according to the way in which man, before his birth or conception was destined for a certain Group of his fellow-human beings. In those times when fewer earthly incarnations lay behind the earthly soul, then, because of his fewer earthly incarnations on Earth, a man was born into a quite definite Group, and in that one definite Group alone could he develop socially. A man who, for instance, belonged to a certain caste in Old India, belonged to it because of what his soul had gone through in the Spiritual world; and, because of the small number of his incarnations, if he had been transferred to another caste he would have degenerated in his soul. It was not only the blood-inheritance which lay at the basis of the Caste system, but something which I must call Spiritual pre-determination. Man has long grown out of that. Between our Age and that old epoch there is in this respect another turning-point. People to-day still bear within them marks of a Group-nature, but that if simply a phantom-image. People are born into certain nations, and also into a certain class of society, but in the great number of people growing up in a certain epoch one can already see, even in childhood, that such a predetermination from a pre-earthly existence no longer prevails to-day. To-day human beings are instructed by the Gods in their pre-natal existence, and the stamp of a definite Group is no longer impressed upon them. The last relic of this still lingers in physical heredity. In a sense, one might say that to belong with one's consciousness to a Nationality is a piece of inherited sin and is something which should no longer play a, part in the soul of man.

On the other hand, there is the fact, which does play a definite role in our modern epoch, that man, as he grows up, grows away from all the Group-forms; yet within the economic life he cannot remain without a Group-education, because, with reference to the economic life, the individual can never be dominant. That which constitutes the Spiritual life, springs from the deepest part of man's inner being, within which he can acquire, not only a certain harmony of his capacities, but should perfect and maintain them through a certain schooling. But that which constitutes a judgement in the sphere of economics can never proceed from a single human being. I have given you instances of this, and I have shown you how an economic judgment suet always fall into error when it proceeds from one single man. I will give another example, taken from the second half of the 19th Century.

I have told you that at a definite time, in the middle and second half of the 19th Century, in Parliaments and other corporate bodies the discussions everywhere centered round the Gold Standard. Those speakers who at that time spoke in favour of a Gold Standard—you could have heard them everywhere,—were really clever people. I do a not say that ironically, because the people who at that time appeared as practical and Theoretical speakers in Parliaments and other assemblies really were very clever, and what they said really belongs to the best utterances of Parliament concerning the Gold Standard in the various Countries. But almost everywhere they pointed to one thing with great sagacity,—to the fact that the Gold Standard will set Free-Trade on its feet again, and do away with all Customs Duties. If one reads to-day what was then said about the beneficial effects of the Gold standard on Free-Trade, one has real joy in seeing how clever those people were; but, my dear friends, the very opposite appeared of what all the cleverest people said. As a consequence of the Gold Standard, prohibitive tariffs appeared everywhere. You see that the cleverness in the economic life which proceeded out of single personalities, was not able to help man. That could be proved in the most diverse spheres; because the fact is, that although what a man knows about nature or about another man makes him competent to judge as a single individual, no man is competent to judge as a single individual when it comes to the sphere of economics. A man cannot have a judgment on economic things in the concrete, as a single individual. An economic judgment can only arise when human beings unite together, associate together, and support each other mutually, when there is co-operation in their associations. It is not possible for a single man to have a sound judgment which can pass into economic activity.

Just the contrary happens when a man has a scientific judgment. In a scientific judgment, if it proceeds out of the whole man, he can give a comprehensive judgment; but in concrete economics and in economic trade the point is that one man knows one part, the second knows another part, the third knows something else. The producer in one department knows something, the consumer in the same department knows something else; what they each know must flow together, and then can arise a Group-judgment in the sphere of Economics. In other words, the old Forms are done away with, and a Group-judgment, a collective judgment must arise. Human beings must form themselves into Groups of their own accord, and these must comprise associations of the economic life. From the understanding of a necessary evolving force in evolution it comes about, that this associative life of economics must be taken up by humanity, and take the place of the old group-connections which are still propagated to-day in humanity as an inherited sin. When we consider this; we must indeed say:—As regards knowledge, in ancient times humanity came untaught to Earth, but in the Mysteries, they then received their wisdom. Now human beings descend to Earth instructed, and we have so to arrange our didactics that we can draw out of them that which the Gods have taught them.

In reference to the economic arrangements, formerly human beings were pre-determined, as it were; a stamp from the Gods was imprinted on them, and so they were born into a certain Caste, or into one Group or another. That is also past. To-day human beings are born without that stamp; they are in a sense put as single isolated individuals into humanity, and now they must bring ahout their own Group- forms by means of their Spirituality. It is really not a case of bringing such human beings as profess Anthroposophy; that simply depends upon what the Gods have taught them before their birth, and whether in their former incarnations they have been found ripe for that Divine instruction so that now we can draw forth Anthroposophy from them,—Anthroposophy is in far more people to-day than one thinks, but so many are too lazy to draw forth from themselves that which is in them, or perhaps their school instruction was so organised that the veils cannot be dissolved, and so they cannot attain their consciousness.

In the practical sphere, and especially in the economic sphere, it would be absurd to bring human beings together simply because they are Anthroposophists. We study Anthroposophy in order to obtain insight into the way in which human beings are seeking, from out of their group consciousness, the group-formation which they must seek as a result of their former incarnations. They must be given the opportunity of forming Groups and of carrying out what lies in germ in the development of humanity. So you see it can never be a question of grouping together human beings because they live in a definite dogma, but those human beings who, through their previous life on earth are called upon to find themselves in groups, to those should be given the possibility of associating themselves in these groups. In these things, as soon as we pass from the abstract into the concrete, we find an extraordinary number of riddles,—I might almost say mysterious things; because, whether a man belongs to one group or another, is by no means a simple matter. The longing people now have for simplicity, shows itself in extraordinary ways. I have been informed of something concerning a lecture which the worthy Frohmeyer has just held, “Theosophy and Anthroposophy” in which he says at the end,—“his own personal relationship to Christianity reminds him of the well-known fact that it unfortunately always annoys these people that what is so great can yet he so simple.”

He means apparently that the Anthroposophists are annoyed that the great is so simple. That is, as simple as the laziness of the Rev. Frohmeyer would like to have it, for he will not endeavour to realise the greatness in all its differentiation. One always has to translate these things into their proper language. That is something which is our especial task; we must translate things into their true-speech.

Of course, there can be no question of throwing at anyone's head this doctrine of the instruction of man before his birth, of his being born into Groups in ancient times and no longer being born into Groups now-a-days; but we can permeate ourselves with these truths, and we shall then find a possibility of showing our methods as time goes on, of showing how far removed we are from introducing any dogma into our schools, or of bringing people into economic associations because they admit amongst themselves the truth of certain dogmas.

How strongly that is made a point of in our Waldorf school at Stuttgart, you can see from the simple fact that we have no interest in bringing Anthroposophy to the children. We want to have a method of instruction which can only be gained through Anthroposophy; but that is a purely objective affair. Those children, or rather their parents, who wish them to have instruction from a Catholic Priest in the Catholic religion—for them a Catholic priest can come to the Waldorf school;—and for those who want to he taught the Evangelical religious instruction, the Evangelical minister can come to the school. We place no hindrance whatever in the way of these men. But it became necessary in recent times, when so many parents, especially those from the proletariat, do not want their children instructed either in the Catholic or Evangelical views, to ask whether they perhaps would like their children to have a free religious instruction born of an Anthroposophical education. It then at once became evident that those who would otherwise have been educated without any religion whatever, and would not have entered any religious confession, were very numerous; but these came to a so-called Anthroposophical religious class which did not teach Anthroposophy, but was simply born of Anthroposophy. These children proved to be more industrious in their religious instruction than was the case with the others taught by the Catholic or Evangelistical clergy; but that we could not help, that was the business of the Catholic or Evangelical Priests. Gradually a number of children passed over from the one religious instruction to the other. I believe it was the Evangelical teacher who finally said:—“In the near future I shall have no one left in my class, they are all running away from me!” But that again was most certainly not our fault; there was never any question of teaching dogma of any kind to those children. We have no interest in doing that. We knew that if our method succeeded in removing the veils around the children, they would then have the best instruction,—that which was given to them in the Spiritual world before their descent on to the Earth. Of course, certain confessions are strongly interested in darkening this instruction, not to let it appear. Whoever e.g. can compare the extraordinary relation between what stands in the Papal Encyclical and what transpires in the Spiritual world knows that the Divine religious instruction which children enjoy before their descent is absolutely not what many religious confessions would like them to have to-day. This is especially to be noticed in the Catholic Church; because the Catholic Church, as compared with the Evangelical, has always preserved a more super-sensible influence through its ritual and Ceremonies. But super-sensible influence can appear in various ways, and one can say: it may be an error when it deviates from the truth, it may also be an error when it is the direct opposite of the truth.

Regarding now what concerns the practical undertakings,—naturally I cannot betray here what is discussed in our business meetings, which often last till 3:30. but I can give you the assurance, that in the meetings of the Futurum and Kommenden Tag, Anthroposophy is not discussed, but things of quite another nature. There are things which must be treated only in the most practical manner; how one should manage things in this or that sphere, etc. Here theoretic Anthroposophy plays no role, except that what is discussed should grasp the economic life in as clever a manner as one does when one makes ones thoughts mobile so that they can contact the reality, as happens through a living grasp of the Spirit of Anthroposophy.

One need therefore merely point out, that neither in the Statutes of the “Kommenden Tag” nor of the “Futurum,” are there any Anthroposophical dogmas,—merely economic things; the only question is how to make these undertakings better than similar undertakings to-day. That is one of the points which must be defended, because it is one of the attacks which now crop up from every corner, and will do, do so more and more, unless we put our affairs clearly and energetically before the world. What I have to say recently in Stuttgart is true; it has not yet been learnt in the Anthroposophical Movement how to be attentive to realities. Our opponents are different. They organise and will prove their organisation. We must unconditionally fail unless we are conscious of this, and can make as strong efforts for the good as are now being made for the bad.

Thus to-day I wanted to bring up one of the points in reference to which you will hear definite attacks against our practical undertakings. If you open your ears, and this is necessary (figuratively I mean), you will hear: and many things will have to be defended in this direction. I wanted to-day to say what could enthuse the soul when it becomes necessary to defend in this direction. This enthusing-of-the-soul can come, when we know what it meant in olden times that man came to Earth uninstructed by the Gods; he now comes instructed before birth and his whole life must be ordered thereto. Also what it means that man was formerly determined by the will of the Gods into Castes, Classes, Peoples, Tribes, etc. That disappeared after the turning-point which lies behind us. Man is now destined from Economic necessities to form Groups in Earth-life. That happens in Economic Associations. A right knowledge of the Earth-development of the Spiritual evolution of man and their connections, shows how what we call the “Three-fold Commonwealth” is not merely a political programme, but the result of what flows from a real knowledge of human evolution as a Necessity for the Present and the immediate Future.

Of these things, more tomorrow.

My first words shall be to ask your forgiveness that I cannot speak to you in the language of this country. But as I lack practise I must needs formulate things in the language I can use. Any disadvantage this involves will be made good, I trust, in the translation to follow.

In the second place, allow me to say that I feel extra-ordinarily grateful to the distinguished committee which enables me to hold these lectures at this gathering in Oxford. I feel it an especial honour to be able to give these lectures here, in this venerable town. It was here, in this town, that I myself experienced the grandeur of ancient tradition, twenty years ago.

And now that I am about to speak of a method of education which in a sense may be called new, I should like to say: In our day novelty is sought by many simply qua novelty, but whoever strives for a new thing in any sphere of human culture must first win the right to do so by knowing how to respect what is old.

Here in Oxford I feel how the power of what lives in these old traditions inspires everything. And one who can feel this has perhaps the right also to speak of what is new. For a new thing, in order to maintain itself, must be rooted in the venerable past. Perhaps it is the tragedy and the great failing of our age that there is a constant demand for this new thing and that new thing, while so few people are inclined worthily to create the new from out of the old.

Therefore, I feel such deep thankfulness to Mrs. Mackenzie, the organiser of this conference, in particular, and to the whole committee who undertook to arrange the lectures here. I feel deep gratitude because this makes it possible to give expression to what, in a sense, is indeed a new thing in the environment of that revered antiquity which alone can sponsor it.

I am equally grateful for the very kind words of introduction which Principal Jacks spoke in this place yesterday.

And now I have already indicated, perhaps, the stand-point from which these lectures will be given: what will be said here concerning education and teaching is based on that spiritual-scientific knowledge which I have made it my life's work to develop.

This spiritual science was cultivated to begin with for its own sake; in recent years friends have come forward to carry it also into particular domains of practical life. Thus it was Emil Molt, of Stuttgart, who having acquaintance with the work in spiritual science going forward at the Goetheanum—(in Dornach, Switzerland)—wished to see it applied in the education of children at school. And this led to the founding of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart.

The pedagogy and didactic of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart was founded in that spiritual life which, I hold, must lead to a renewal of education in conformity with the spirit of our age: a renewal of education along the lines demanded by the spirit of the age, by the tasks and the stage of human development which belong to this epoch.

The education and curriculum in question is based entirely upon knowledge of man. A knowledge of man which spans man's whole being from his birth to his death. But a knowledge which aims at comprising all the super-sensible part of man's being between birth and death, all that bears lasting witness that man belongs to a super-sensible world.

In our age we have spiritual life of many kinds, but above all a spiritual life coming down to us from ancient times, a spiritual life handed down by tradition. Alongside of this spiritual life and in ever diminishing contact with it, we have the life that flows to us from the magnificent discoveries of modern natural science. In an age which includes the life-time of the great natural scientists, the leading spirits in natural science, we cannot, when speaking of spiritual life neglect the potent contribution to knowledge of man made by natural science itself.

Now this natural science can give us insight into the bodily nature of man, can give us insight into bodily, physio-logical functions during man's physical life. But this same natural science conducted as it is by experiment with external tools, by observation with external senses has not succeeded, for all its great progress, in reaching the essentially spiritual life of man. I do not say this in disparagement. It was the great task of natural science as systematised, for example, by such a personality as Huxley—it was the great service it rendered that for once it looked at nature with complete disregard of everything spiritual in the world.

Neither, therefore, can the knowledge of man we have in psychology and anthropology help us to a practical grasp of what is spiritual. We have, in our modern civilisation a life of the spirit, and the various religious denominations maintain and spread this life of the spirit. But this spiritual culture is not capable of giving answers to man's questions as to the nature of that eternity and immortality, the super-sensible life, to which he belongs. It cannot give us conviction. Conviction, when the isolation of our worldly life and worldly outlook makes us ask: “What is the eternal, super-sensible reality underlying the world of sense-perception?”

We may have beliefs as to what we were before birth in the womb of divine, super-sensible worlds. We may form beliefs as to what our souls will have to go through after passing the portal of death. And we may formulate such beliefs into a cult. This can warm our hearts and cheer our spirits. We can say to ourselves: “Man is a greater being in the whole universe than in this physical life between birth and death.” But what we achieve in this way remains a belief, it remains a thing we think and feel. It is becoming increasingly difficult to put in practice the great findings and tenets of natural science while still holding such spiritual beliefs. We know of the spirit, we no longer understand how to use the spirit, how to do anything with it, how to permeate our work and daily life with spirit.

What domain of life most calls for a dealing with the spirit? The domain of teaching and education. In education we must comprehend man as a whole; and man in his totality is body, soul and spirit. We must be able to deal with spirit if we would educate. In all ages it has been incumbent on man to take account of the spirit and work by its power: now above all, because we have made such advances in external science, this summons to work with the spirit is the most urgent. Hence the social question to-day is first and foremost a question of education. For to-day we may justly ask: What must we do to give rise to social organisation and social institutions less tragic than those of the present day, less full of menace? We can give ourselves no answer but this: First we must place into practical life, into the social community, men who are educated from out of the spirit, by means of a creative activity of the spirit.

The kind of knowledge we are describing pre-supposes a continuous doing in life, a dealing with life; hence it must seek out the spirituality within life and make this the basis of education throughout the differing life-epochs. For in a child the spirit is closer to the body than it is in the adult. We can see in a child how physical nature is formed plastically by the spirit. What precisely is the brain of a child when it is first born, according to our modern natural science? It is something like the clay which a sculptor takes up when he prepares a model. And now let us look at the brain of a seven year old child when we begin his primary education; it has become a wonderful work of art, but a work of art which must be worked upon further, worked upon right up to the end of school life. Hidden spiritual powers are working at the moulding of the human body. And we as educators are called upon to contribute to that work. Are called upon not only to observe the bodily nature, but—while we must never neglect the bodily nature—to observe in this bodily nature how the spirit is at work upon it. We are called upon to work with the unconscious spirit—to link ourselves not only with the natural, but with the divine ordering of the world.

When we confront education earnestly it is demanded of us not only to acknowledge God for the peace of our soul, but to will God's will, to act the intentions of God. To do this however, we need a spiritual basis for education. Of this spiritual basis for education I will speak to you in the following days.

We must feel when we observe child life how necessary it is to have a spiritual insight, a spiritual vision if we are adequately to follow what takes place in the child day by day, what takes place in his soul, in his spirit. We should consider how child life in its very earliest days and weeks differs totally from later childhood, let alone adulthood. We should call to mind what a large proportion of sleep a child needs in the early days of its life. And we must ask ourselves what takes place in that interchange between spirit and body when a child in early childhood needs nearly 22 hours sleep? The current attitude to such things, both in philosophy and practical life, is: Well it is not possible to see into the soul of a child, any more than one can see into the soul of an animal or of a plant; here we encounter limits of human knowledge.

The spiritual view which we are here representing does not say: Here are limits of human knowledge, of human cognition. It says: We must bring forth from the depths of human nature powers of cognition equal to observing man's complete nature, body, soul and spirit; just as we can observe the arrangement of the human eye or the human ear in physiology.

If in ordinary life we have not so far got this knowledge owing to our natural scientific education, we must set about building it up. Hence I shall have to speak to you of the development of a knowledge which can guarantee a genuine insight into the inner texture of child life. And devoted and unprejudiced observation of life itself goes far to bring about such an insight.

We look at a child. If our view is merely external we cannot actually find any definite points of development from birth on to about the twentieth year. We look upon everything as a continuous development.

It is not so for one who comes to the observation of child life equipped with the knowledge of which I shall have to speak in the next few days. Then the child is fundamentally a different being up to his seventh year or eighth year,—when the change of teeth sets in—from what he is later in life, from the change of teeth to about the fourteenth year, to puberty. And infinitely significant problems confront us when we endeavour to sink deep into the child's life and to ask. How does the soul and spirit work upon the child up to the change of teeth? How does the soul and spirit work upon the child when we have to educate and teach him in the elementary or primary school? How must we ourselves co-operate here with the soul and spirit?

We see for example how speech is developed instinctively during the first period of a child's life up to the change of teeth,—instinctively as far as the child is concerned, and instinctively as regards his surroundings. Nowadays we devote a good deal of thought to the question of how a child learns to speak (I will not go into the historical aspect of the origin of speech to-day.) But how does a child actually learn to speak? Has he some kind of instinct whereby he makes his own the sounds he hears about him? Or does he derive the impulse for speech from some other kind of connection with his surroundings? If, however, one looks more closely into the life of a child one can observe that all speech and all learning to speak rests upon the imitation of what the child observes in his surroundings by means of his senses—observes unconsciously. The whole life of the child up to his seventh year is a continuous imitation of what takes place in his environment. And the moment a child perceives something, whether it be a movement, or whether it be a sound, there arises in him the impulse of an inward gesture, to re-live what has been perceived with the whole intensity of his inner nature.

We only understand a child when we contemplate him as we should contemplate the eye or the ear of an older person. For the child is entirely sense-organ (i.e. a child up to the seventh year). His blood is driven through his body in a far livelier way than in later life. We can perceive by means of a fine physiology what the development of our sense-organs, for example the eye, depends on Blood preponderates in the process of development of the eye, in the very early years. Then, later, the nerve life in the senses preponderates more and more. For the development of the organism of the senses in man is a development from blood circulation to nerve activity. It is possible to acquire a delicate faculty for perceiving how the life of the blood gradually goes over into the life of the nerves.

And as it is with a single sense (e.g. the eye), so it is with the whole human being. The child needs so much sleep because it is entirely sense-organ. Because it could not otherwise endure the dazzle and noise of the outer world. Just as the eye must shut itself against the dazzling sunlight, so must this sense-organ: child—for the child is entirely sense-organ—shut itself off against the world, so must it sleep a great deal. For whenever it is confronted with the world, it has to observe, to hold inward converse. Every sound of speech arises from an inward gesture.

What I am now saying from out of a spiritual knowledge is—let me say—open to-day to scientific demonstration. There is a scientific discovery—and, forgive the personal allusion, but this discovery has dogged me all through my life and is just as old as I am myself, it was made in the year in which I was born. Now the discovery is to the effect that human speech depends on the left parietal con-volution of the brain. This is developed plastically in the brain. But the whole of this development takes place during childhood by means of these plastic forces of which I have spoken. And if we contemplate the whole connection which exists between the gestures of the right arm, and the right hand (which preponderate in normal children), we shall see how speech forms itself from out of gesture by imitation of the environment through an inner, secret connection between blood, nerves and the convolution of the brain: (of left-handed children and their relation to the generality of children I shall have something to say later; they form an exception, but they prove very well how what builds up the power of speech is bound up with every single gesture of the right arm and hand, even down to minutest details).

If we had a more delicate physiology than our physiology of to-day, we should be able to discover for each time of life, not only the passive but the active principle. Now the active principle is particularly lively in this great organ of sense, the child. Thus a child lives in its environment in the manner in which, in later years our eye dwells in its environment. Our eye is especially formed from out the general organisation of the head. It lies, that is, in a cavity apart, so that it can participate in the life of the outer world. In the same way the child participates in the life of the outer world, lives entirely within the external world—does not yet feel itself—but lives entirely in the outer world.

We develop nowadays a form of knowledge, called intellectual knowledge, which is entirely within us. It is the form of knowledge appropriate to our civilisation. We believe that we can comprehend the outer world, but the thoughts and the logic to which alone we grant cognitive value dwell within ourselves. And a child lives entirely outside of himself. Have we the right to believe that with our intellectual mode of knowledge we can ever participate in that experience of the outer world which the child has?—the child who is all sense-organ? This we cannot do. This we can only hope to achieve by a cognition which can go right out of itself, which can enter into the nature of all that lives and moves. Intuitional cognition is the only cognition which can do this. Not intellectual knowledge which leaves us within ourselves; which makes us ask of every idea: is it logical? No, but a knowledge by means of which the spirit penetrates into the depths of life itself—intuitional knowledge. We must consciously acquire an intuitional knowledge, then only shall we be practical enough to do with spirit what has to be accomplished with the child in his earliest years.

Now, as the child gradually accomplishes the changing of teeth, when in place of the inherited teeth there appear those which have been formed during the first period of life (1-7)—there comes about a change in the child's whole life. Now no longer is he entirely sense-organ, but he is given up to a more psychical element than that of the sense impressions. The child of primary school age now no longer absorbs what he observes in his surroundings, but rather that which lives in what he observes. The child enters upon the stage which must be based mainly on the principle of authority, the authority a child meets with in his educators or teachers. Do not let us deceive ourselves into thinking that a child between seven and fourteen, whom we are educating, does not adopt from us the judgments we give expression to. If we compel a child to listen to a judgment expressed in a certain phrase, we are giving him something which rightly belongs only to a later age. What the true nature of the child demands of us is to be able to believe in us, to have the instinctive feeling: ‘Here stands one beside me who tells me something. He can tell things because he is so connected with the whole world that he can tell. For me he is the mediator between myself and the whole universe. This is how the child confronts his teacher and educator—not of course outspokenly but instinctively. For the child the adult is the mediator between the divine world and himself in his helplessness. And only when the educator is conscious that he must be such an authority as a matter of course, that he must be such as the child can look up to in a perfectly natural way, can he be a true educator.

Hence we have found in the course of our Waldorf School teaching and our Waldorf School education that the question of education is principally a question of teachers. What must the teacher: be like in order to be a natural authority, the mediator between the divine order of the world and the child? Well, what has the child become? Between the 7^th and 14^th or 15^th year from being sense-organ the child has become all soul. Not spirit as yet—not such that he sets the highest value on logical connections, on intellect; this would cause inner ossification in his soul. It is far more significant for a child between seven and fourteen years to tell him about a thing in a kindly, loving way, than to demonstrate by proof. Kindly humour and geniality in a lesson have far more value than logic. For the child does not yet need logic. For the child does not yet need logic. The child needs us, needs our humanity.

Hence in the Waldorf School we set the greatest importance on the teachers of children from seven to fourteen years being able to give them what is appropriate to their age with artistic love and loving art. For it is fundamental to the education of which we are speaking that one should know the human being, that one should know what each age demands of us in respect of education and instruction. What is demanded by the first year? What is demanded up to the seventh year? What is required of the primary school period? The way of educating children up to the tenth year must be quite different, and different again must be the way we introduce them to human knowledge between 10 and 14. To have in our souls a lively image of the child's nature in every single year, nay, in every single week,—this constitutes the spiritual basis of education.

Thus we can say: As the child is an imitator, a ‘copy-cat’ in his early years, so, in his later years he becomes a follower, one who develops in his soul according to what he is able in his psychic environment to experience in soul. The sense organs have now become independent. The soul of the child has actually only just come into its own. We must now treat this soul with infinite tenderness. As teacher and educator we must come into continually more intimate contact with what is happening day by day in the child's soul.

In this introductory talk to-day I will indicate only one thing. There is, namely, for every child a critical point during the age of school attendance; roughly between the 9th and 11th year there is a critical moment, a moment which must not be over-looked by the teacher. In this age between the 9th and 11th year there comes for every child—if he is not abnormal—the moment when he says to himself: ‘How can I find my place within the world?’ One must not suppose that the question is put just as I have said it. The question arises in indefinite feelings, in unsatisfied feelings. The question shows itself in the child's having a longing for dependence on a grown-up person. Perhaps it will take the form of a great love and attachment felt for some grown-up person. But we must understand how rightly to observe what is happening in the child at this critical time. The child suddenly finds himself isolated. He seeks something to hold on to. Up till now he has accepted authority as a matter of course. Now he begins to ask: What is this authority? Our finding or not finding the right word to say at this moment will make an enormous difference to the whole of the child's later life.

It is enormously important that the physician observing a childish illness should say to himself: What is going on in the organism are processes of development which are not significant only for the child—if they do not go rightly in the child the man will suffer the effects when he is old. Similarly must we realise that the ideas, sensations or will impulses we give the child must not be formulated in stiff concepts which the child has only to heed and learn: the ideas, the impulses and sensations which we give the child must be alive as our limbs are alive. The child's hand is small. It must grow of its own accord, we may not constrain it. The ideas, the psychic development of the child are small and delicate, we must not confine them within hard limits as if we assumed that the child must retain them in thirty years' time when grown-up—in the same form as in childhood. We must so form the ideas we bring the child that they can grow. The Waldorf School does not aim at being a school, but a preparatory school; for every school should be a preparatory school to the great school of manhood, which is life itself. We must not learn at school for the sake of performance, but we must learn at school in order to be able to learn further from life. Such must be the basis of what may be called a spiritual physiological pedagogy and didactics. One must have a sense and feeling for bringing to the child living things that can continue with him into later life. For that which is fostered in a child often dwells in the depths of the child's soul imperceptibly. In later life it comes out. One can make use of an image—it is only by way of image, but it rests upon a truth: There are people who at a certain time of their lives have a beneficent influence upon their fellow men. They can—if I may use the expression—bestow blessing. There are such people,—they do not need to speak, they only need to be there with their personality which blesses. The whole course of a man's life is usually not observed, otherwise notice would be taken of the upbringing of such people—of people like this who later have the power of blessing; it may have been the conscious deed of some one person, or it may have been unconscious on the part of teacher and educator:—Such people have been brought up as children to learn reverence, to learn, in the most comprehensive meaning of the word, to pray—to look up to something;—and hence they could will down to something. If one has learned at first to look up, to honour, to be entirely surrounded by authority, then one has the possibility to bless, to work down, oneself to become an authority, an unquestioned authority.

These are the things which must not merely live as precepts in the teacher, but must pass into him, become part of his being—going from his head continuously into his arms. So that a man can do deeds with his spirit, not merely think thoughts. These things must come to life in the teacher. In the next few days I will show how this can come about in detail throughout each single year of school life between seven, and fourteen. But before all things I wanted to explain to-day how a certain manner of inner life, not merely an outlook on life but an inner attitude must form the basis of education.

Then, when the child has outgrown the stage of authority, when he has attained puberty and through this has physio-logically quite a different connection with the outer world than before, he also attains in soul and body (in his bodily life in its most comprehensive sense) a quite different relation-ship to the world than he had earlier. This is the time of the awakening of Spirit in Man. This now is the time when the human being seeks out the rational and logical aspect in all verbal expression. Only now can we hope to appeal with any success to the intellect in our education and instruction. It is immensely important that we do not consciously or unconsciously call upon the intellect prematurely, as people are so prone to do to-day.

And now let us ask ourselves: What is happening when we observe how the child takes on authority, everything that is to guide and lead his soul. For a child does not listen to us in order to check and prove what we say. Unconsciously the child takes up as an inspiration what works upon his soul, what, through his soul, builds and influences his body. And we can only rightly educate when we understand the wonderful, unconscious inspiration, which holds sway in the whole life of a child between seven and fourteen, when we can work into the continuous process of inspiration. To do this we' must acquire still another power of spiritual cognition, we must add to Intuition, Inspiration itself. And when we have led the child on its way as far as the 14th year we make a peculiar discovery. If we attempt to give the child things that we have conceived logically—we become wearisome to him. To begin with he will listen, when we thus formulate every-thing in a logical way; but if the young man or maiden must re-think our logic after us, he will gradually become weary. Also in this period we, as teachers need something besides pure logic. This can be seen from a general example.

Take a scientist such as Ernst Haeckel who lived entirely in external nature. He was himself tremendously interested in all his microscopic studies, in all he built up. If this is taught to pupils, they learn it but they cannot develop the same interest for it. We as teachers must develop something different from what the child has in himself. If the child is coming into the domain of logic at the age of puberty, we (in our turn) must develop imagery, imagination. If we ourselves can pour into picture form the subjects we have to give the children, if we can give them pictures, so that they receive images of the world and the work and meaning of the world, pictures which we create for them, as in a high form of art—then they will be held by what we have to tell them.

So that in this third period of life we are directed to Imagination, as in the other two to Intuition and Inspiration. And we now have to seek for the spiritual basis which can make it possible for us as teachers to work from out of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition—which can make it possible not merely to think of spirit, but to act with spirit.

This is what I wished to say to you by way of introduction.

You will not only have to be teachers and educators at the Waldorf School, but if things go well you will also have to be protagonists of the whole Waldorf School system. For, of course, you will know far more exactly what the Waldorf School really means than can be conveyed to the neighbouring or more distant outside world. But to be the true protagonists of the aims of the Waldorf School and of its aims for civilization in general you will have to be in a position to conduct your defence against prevailing opinion wherever this shows itself antagonistic or even merely demurring. Consequently, I must introduce into these pedagogical-didactic reflections a chapter which will quite naturally connect with what we have already so far analysed in our discussions on method.

You know that in the sphere of educational theory, as well as other spheres, much is expected at the present time from the so-called experimental psychology. Experiments are carried out on people to determine an individual's gift for forming ideas, for memorizing, even for willing, although this can naturally only be ascertained by a detour. The will fulfils itself in sleep, and the electrical apparatus in the psychological laboratory can only indirectly discover an individual's experiences during sleep, just as these cannot be observed directly by way of experiment. Such experiments, indeed, are carried out. Do not imagine that I object to such experiments as a whole. They can be valuable as tendrils of science, as offshoots of science. All kinds of interesting things can be learnt from such experiments and I have decidedly no desire to condemn them, lock, stock, and barrel. I should like everyone who is attracted to work of this kind to have the means of acquiring such psychological laboratories and of carrying out their experiments there. But we must consider for a moment the rise of this experimental psychology in the form in which it is especially recommended by the educationist, Meumann,¹ who is really one of the Herbartian school.

Why is experimental psychology practised to-day? Because people have lost the gift of studying man directly. They can no longer rely on the forces which inwardly bind one man to another—or, to the child. So they try to discover by external devices, by external experiments, what should be done with the growing child. Clearly our principles and methods of teaching take a much more inward course. This is, moreover, urgent and vital for the present day and the immediate future of mankind. Granted, then, on the one hand, the urge to experimental psychology, on the other hand, as a result of this experimental psychology, we get the misconstruction of certain simple facts of life. Let me illustrate this by an example.

These experimental psychologists and educationists have lately been particularly interested in what they call the process of comprehension; for instance, the process of comprehension in reading, in the reading of a given passage. In order to ascertain this process of comprehension they have tried to work with “subjects,” as they are called. If we summarize the steps taken in great detail, this is the procedure. A “subject,” a child or an adult, is given a reading passage, and the investigation is now directed as to which is the most effective method for the child, for instance, to adopt, in order to arrive at the most rapid comprehension. It is discovered that the most effective method is first to “dispose” the reader to the reading passage, that is, first to introduce the person concerned to the meaning of such a reading passage. Then, after numerous tests, the “subject” carries out what is called “passive comprehension.” After having dealt with the meaning, by making “scheme” or plan, it is supposed to be passively comprehended. For through this passive assimilation of a reading passage there should occur what is called “learning to anticipate”: repeating once more in free spiritual activity what has just been worked out in scheme or plan and then passively assimilated. And then follows, as fourth act to this drama, the filling in of all that until now has remained uncertain, that is, of all that has not penetrated completely into the life of the human spirit and soul. If you let the subject carry out, in correct succession, first the process of familiarizing himself with the meaning of a reading passage, then of passive assimilation, then of learning to anticipate, then of returning to the as yet incompletely assimilated parts, you then see that a given reading passage is most effectively grasped, read, and remembered. Do not misunderstand me: I mention this procedure because it must be mentioned in view of the fact that people talk to-day so much at cross-purposes, for they may want to imply the same thing with diametrically opposed words. Accordingly, the experimental psychologists will say: “A scrupulously faithful method like this reveals exactly what should be done in education.” But those who have a profounder understanding of the life of the whole being know that this is not the way to true education—any more than you can put together again a living beetle from its separate parts after it has been dissected. It cannot be done. Nor can it be done by trying anatomy on the human soul-activity. It is interesting, of course, and in another connection it can be extremely valuable for science, to practise anatomy on the activity of the human soul—but it does not make educators. For this reason there can proceed from this experimental psychology no new true building up of education; this can only proceed from an inner understanding of man.

I had to say this for fear lest you should misunderstand me when I make a statement which will naturally cause annoyance to a supporter of modern opinion. The statement is one-sided in its way, and its one-sidedness must, of course, be counterbalanced. What do the experimental psychologists get, when they have split up into atoms like this the soul of their subject and have made a martyr of him—this process is not pleasant if it is inflicted on you—what good do they get out of it? According to them they have obtained an extraordinarily valuable result, which is constantly being impressed by italics in educational textbooks as a conclusion arrived at. This statement, translated into decent German, runs roughly like this: You can remember a reading passage better when you have understood the meaning than when you have not understood the meaning. It has been “determined by research”—to use scientific jargon—that it is useful firstly to understand the meaning of a reading passage if you want to learn it easily. And here I must make the heretical declaration that, in as far as this theory is correct, I could have known it before, for I should like to know what person with a normal human intelligence does not know for himself that a reading passage can be remembered better when its meaning has been understood than when this has not been understood. Every single one of the conclusions of experimental psychology is an appalling platitude. The platitudes printed in the textbooks of experimental psychology are sometimes of such a kind that only those people can have anything to do with them who have already trained themselves in the pursuit of science to submit to intense boredom for an occasional striking point. You are easily trained to do this by the drill of the school-system—for even the elementary school has this defect, although it is less conspicuous here than at the universities.

This heretical statement is meant particularly for the educationist: It is to some extent self-evident that one must first understand the meaning of a thing which is to be remembered. But there is this to consider: that what has been assimilated by understanding the meaning, only affects the observation, only affects thought-perception, and that this elevation of the human being to the level of sense-comprehension educates him one-sidedly to a mere observation of the world, to a thought-perception. And if we teach simply and solely in accordance with this theory we shall get nothing but weak-willed people. The statement, then, is in a sense correct—and yet not conclusively correct. It ought, as a matter of fact, to be further expressed in these terms: If you want to do the best possible thing for the thinking perception of the individual you can do it by analysing the meaning of everything that he absorbs. And, in fact, if we were to analyse merely the meaning of things, we could go very far in educating human observation of the world. But we should never educate a man's will—volitional man—for the will cannot be forced by simply throwing the light on the meaning of a thing. The will likes to sleep, and it does not wish to be fully awakened by what I should like to call the perpetual unchaste laying bare of the meaning. And the point is, that the very inevitability of life breaks in upon this simple truth of the value of revealing meanings, so that with the child, too, we must study subjects which do not lay bare the meaning. Then we shall educate his will.

The mischievous effects of the one-sided application of the principles of explaining the meanings have been particularly active in movements like the Theosophical Movement. You know how much I have protested for years against a certain mischievous influence in Theosophical circles. I have even had to see Hamlet, for instance, a pure work of art, explained in terms of theosophical cant like this: “This is Manas, this is the Ego—that is the astral body. This character represents one thing—that one another.” Such explanations were particularly in favour. I protested against them because it is a sin against human life to interpret symbolically what is meant to be taken directly, in its elements, as art. It leads to a mischievous reading of a meaning into things, and this is dragged to the level of mere observation to which it should not be dragged. This all arises from the fact that the actual Theosophical Movement is a decadent movement. It is the furthest-flung offshoot of a declining culture; in its entire attitude it has nothing to do with Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy aims at being the opposite: at being an ascending movement, the beginning of an ascent. That is a radical difference. That is why so much is written in the field of Theosophy which is really an extreme symptom of decadence. But that there exist people at all who contrive to interpret Hamlet symbolically, character by character, is the result of the appalling way in which we have been educated only to look for meanings.

Human life makes it indispensable that we should not only be educated in terms of the meaning, but from what the will experiences in the sleeping life: by rhythm, measure, melody, harmony of colours, repetition, in fact all spontaneous activity which does not seek to comprehend. When you let the child repeat sentences which he is far from understanding because of his tender age, when you encourage the child to take in these sentences just by memory itself, you certainly do not influence his comprehension—because you are unable to enter into their meaning, for that must only dawn later—but you influence his will, and that is what you should do; that is what you must do. You must try first of all to acquaint the child with things which are first and foremost artistic: music, drawing, plastic art, etc.; but on the other hand you must also give the child things which can have some abstract form of meaning in such a way that he does not, it is true, understand this at once, but only later in life. Then he will understand it because he has assimilated it by repetition, and can remember, and later understand, with his greater maturity, what he could not understand before. There you have worked upon his will. And quite especially you have worked upon his feeling—and you should not forget this. Just as feeling—this can be observed of the soul as well as of the spirit—lies between willing and thinking, so does the education of feeling lie midway between the methods of educating the thinking and those of willing. For the thinking knowledge or thinking perception we must definitely practise subjects concerned with revealing meanings: reading, writing, etc.; for action inspired by will we must cultivate everything which does not aim at a mere interpretation of meanings but at a direct impression through the whole being, for instance, of artistic subjects. What lies midway between the two (i.e. thought and will) will chiefly influence the development of feeling, the formation of its disposition. You can produce a strong effect on the education of the feeling nature when the child is made to assimilate something first of all only by rote, uncomprehended, without tampering with its meaning. For only after some time, when he has matured through other processes, and remembers it, can he understand what he absorbed earlier. This is a subtlety of education which must absolutely be respected, if we are to educate people with inner feelings. For feeling plays a peculiar role in life. In this sphere, too, people should make observations. But they do not observe rightly. I will indicate an observation which you can easily, with a little industry, make for yourselves.

Suppose you are trying to get a clear idea of the state of Goethe's soul in 1790. You can do this by studying a selection of the works composed by Goethe in the year 1790. You find, of course, at the end of every edition of Goethe a chronological index of his poems, in their order of composition; so you take out the poems written in 1790 and the plays written in 1790 and study them. You remember that in precisely this year he finished the beautiful essay, Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen (“The Metamorphosis of Plants”); you recall that just at that time he conceived the first idea of the Farbenlehre (“Theory of Colour”); you imagine from all this the state of his soul in 1790 and ask yourselves: “What were the influences active on Goethe's psychic life in 1790?” You will only be able to answer this question if you cast a critical glance on all Goethe's previous experiences from 1749 to 1790 and on what followed after this year—of which Goethe at the time was still unaware, but which you now know—during the period from 1790 to 1832, that is, to his death. Then there emerges the remarkable realization that the actual state of his soul in the year 1790 was a combination of what was to come later, the conquests remaining for the individual to make, and those he had already experienced. This is an extraordinarily significant discovery. People only avoid it because it leads into provinces which they quite naturally do not like to enter for observations of this kind. Try to extend your observations in this way to the soul-life of an individual who died recently and whom you have known for some time. If you train yourself to a more careful study of the soul you will then find this: A man, a friend of yours, died, let us say, in 1918. You have known him for some time, so that you can ask yourselves: “What was the state of his soul in 1912?” If you consider everything that you know of him you will find that the state of his soul in 1912 was such that the preparation for his approaching death was unconsciously reflected in his psychic disposition at that time; it was unconsciously reflected in his feelings. Taken as a whole I call the life of the feelings the psychic disposition, “Mood of Soul” (Seelenstimmung). A man who is soon to die has a quite different inner disposition from one who has still long to live.

You will now understand that people do not like to study these things, for it would create a very unpleasant impression—to put it mildly—if we were to observe the signs of approaching death in people's psychic disposition. These, however, can be observed. But in everyday life it is not wise for people to notice these things. That is why they are usually hidden from this life just as the will is withdrawn, as a sleeping power, even when we are awake, from the waking consciousness. But the educator must, after all, take up a position outside ordinary life to some extent. He must not be afraid to take up his stand detached from his usual life and to absorb truths for his teaching which are rather disturbing, rather tragic, for everyday life. In this connection there is lost ground to cover in the educational system of Central Europe. You know that especially the teachers in the universities in the early decades of this Central European system of education and teaching were people on whom the actual man of the world rather turned up his nose in scorn. Unworldly, pedantic fellows, who could not adapt themselves properly to the world, who always wore long, black frock-coats and never evening dress; these were the former educators of youth, especially the teachers of more mature youth. In these days things have changed. The university professors have begun to wear correct evening dress and to adapt themselves to worldly custom, and it is considered a great mark of progress that their former state is at last a thing of the past. It is a good thing. But it must be a thing of the past in other senses, too; it must in future be a thing of the past to the extent that the detachment from life does not merely consist, as it did formerly, in the teacher's wearing the invariable long pedantic frock-coat when other people did not. The detachment from life can remain to some extent, but it must be bound up with a profounder conception of life than that of people who wear evening dress for dinner. I am only speaking figuratively, of course, for I have nothing against “evening dress.”

An educator must be able to study life more profoundly, otherwise he will never give appropriate and fruitful attention to the growing child. Consequently, he will have to accept, among others, such truths as I have just mentioned. Life itself, to a certain extent, demands the presence of mysteries. We need no diplomatic secrets in the near future. But for education we need the knowledge of certain mysteries of life. The old Mystery teachers withheld such secrets of life esoterically because these could not be revealed directly to life. But in a certain degree every teacher must know truths which he cannot impart directly to the world, because the world would be confused in normal progress, if it had access to such truths all the time. But you do not fully understand how to treat the growing child if you cannot estimate the influence on him of something imparted in such a way that he does not fully understand it at the time. He will understand when it is returned to later, and when he is told, not only what he then realizes, but what he had assimilated earlier. This makes a profound impression on the feelings and disposition.

For this reason the custom should be followed in every school as faithfully as possible—wherever possible—of the teacher retaining his same pupils; of taking them over for the first form, of keeping them the next year in the second form, of going up with them again in the third year, etc., as far as this is possible in conjunction with outside regulations. The teacher, after finishing with the eighth class, should then begin anew with the first class. For one must sometimes be able to come back years later in a positive way to what was instilled into the children's souls years before. In any case, the formation of the disposition or feeling life suffers greatly when the children are passed every year to a fresh teacher who cannot himself develop what he instilled into children in earlier years. It is part of the teaching method itself that the teacher should go up with his own pupils through the different school-stages. Only in this way can we enter into the rhythm of life. And in the most comprehensive sense life has a rhythm. This manifests itself even in everyday decisions, in the rhythm of day to day itself. If you have accustomed yourself, for instance, only for a week, to eat a buttered roll every day at half-past ten in the morning, you will probably feel hungry for the buttered roll at the same time in the second week. The human organism conforms as closely as this to a rhythm. But not only the external organism, but the whole being, is rhythmically organized. For this reason, too, it is a good thing throughout life as a whole—and that is what we are concerned with when we educate and teach children—to be able to attend to rhythmical repetition. For this reason we do well to think that even every year is not too often to return to quite definite educational themes. Therefore select subjects for the children, make a note of them, and come back to something similar every year. Even in more abstract things this method can be followed. You teach, let us say, in a way suited to the child's disposition, addition in the first school year; you come back to addition in the second, and teach more about it, and in the third year you return to it in the same way, so that the same act takes place repeatedly, but in progressive repetition.

To enter like this into the rhythm of life is of quite particular importance for all education and teaching—far more important than continuously repeating: Do build up your lessons according to the principle of meaning—thus inartistically pulling to bits whatever you deal with. You can only divine what is demanded here by gradually developing a feeling for life itself. But you will then part company very markedly, precisely as educationists, from the external experimental aims so frequent to-day even in education. Again, not to condemn, but to correct, certain tendencies which have proved detrimental to our spiritual culture, do I emphasize these things. You can embark on modern textbooks of education where the results are worked out which have been obtained through experiments on memory. The “subjects”—people experimented upon—are treated in a strange way. Tests are made on them to show how they can remember something of which they have understood the meaning; then they are given words written one after the other with no connecting sense, and they have to learn these, etc. These experiments for ascertaining the laws of the memory are practised very extensively to-day. Again a result has been obtained which is committed to formulae in scientific form. Just as, for instance, in physics, the Law of Gay-Lussac, among others, is formulated, people are anxious to formulate such laws in experimental education or psychology. You find, for example, very learnedly expounded, the gist of conclusions about a certain scientific yearning which is quite justified, namely, to prove the existence of types of memory. Firstly, the quickly or slowly assimilating memory; secondly, the quickly or slowly reproducing memory. So a “subject” is tormented to furnish evidence for the fact that there are people who memorize easily and people who memorize with difficulty; then other “subjects” are tormented to prove that there are people who can call back to mind easily, and people who can call back to mind only with difficulty, what they have once learnt. Now it has been determined by research that there are such types of memory; those showing a rapid or a slow assimilation, and those showing an easy or painful recollection or reproduction of what was assimilated. Thirdly, there are also types of memory which can be called “true and exact;” fourthly, there is a comprehensive memory; fifthly, a retentive and reliable memory, in opposition to the type which easily forgets. This answers very satisfactorily to the craving of modern science to systematize. The scientific result has now been obtained. We can ask: “What has been discovered scientifically in exact psychology about the types of memory?” And we learn: firstly, there is a type of memory which assimilates easily or laboriously; secondly, a type which reproduces easily or laboriously; thirdly, there is a true or exact memory; fourthly, a comprehensive memory, that is, there are people who can remember great passages of prose in contrast to those who can only remember short ones; fifthly, a retentive memory, which has perhaps remembered things from years ago, in contrast to the kind which forgets quickly.

This scientific method of observation scrupulously and very conscientiously maltreats innumerable victims, and sets to work most ingeniously to obtain results, in order that education, too, after having tested the children in experimental psychology, may know what various types of memory are to be differentiated. But with all due respect for such a science, I should like to make the following objection. Anyone endowed with a little sound common sense must know that there are people who commit things to memory easily or with difficulty; there are also those who easily or laboriously recall things once known, and again there are people who can recount things truly and accurately, in contrast to those who muddle everything they try to tell. There are people with an extensive memory, who can remember a long story, in contrast to those who can only remember a short one; and there are also people who can remember a thing for a long time, even years, and people who have forgotten everything in a week! It is part, in fact, of the fairly ancient wisdom of sound common sense, but it is discovered again in a science which inspires us with respect, because the methods which it applies are so ingenious.

There are two conclusions to be drawn from this: firstly, let us, above all, prefer to cultivate sound common sense in education and teaching, rather than expend it on such experimenting, which will, it is true, develop ingenuity very considerably, but which will not bring the teacher in touch with the quality of individuality in the child. But we can also draw a second conclusion: our age is actually in a sorry plight if we have to assume that the people who are going to become our teachers and educators have so little healthy human intelligence that they can only learn in this roundabout way that there are the different kinds of memory which we have just mentioned. Moreover, these things must undoubtedly be considered symptoms of the state of our present spiritual standard.

I had to draw your attention to these things. For people will say to you: “Well, you have let yourself be appointed at this Waldorf School. It is only a dilettante institution; the people there don't even want to know anything about the greatest conquest of our time: about the methods of experimental psychology. The study of this experimental psychological method is for experts, but the methods of the Waldorf School are quackery in comparison!” You will have to realize that you will sometimes have to acknowledge the connection of science—which must not be respected any the less for that—with what remains to be built up by us on an inner educational theory and method, but which, compared with the external relations which are set up by experiment, inspires an inner loving attentiveness towards the child. Certainly this quality has not completely disappeared; it prevails even more than is realized. But it definitely prevails in opposition to the ever-encroaching aims of scientific educational theory. To a certain extent it is true that the pursuit of science can destroy a good deal in modern life, but it has not the power to drive out all healthy human intelligence. This healthy human intelligence or sound common sense should be our starting-point, and when this is properly cultivated it will produce an inner connection with the ideals of teaching. We must realize, of course, that we live at the beginning of a new age, and we must completely master this fact. Down to the middle of the fifteenth century the surviving traditions of the Greek and Latin-Roman times were preserved. After the middle of the fifteenth century these are only the clattering after traditional repetition. But the people whose life is in this “clattering” still feel, in certain sub-regions of their consciousness, the craving to return to the Graeco-Latin age, which we can admire profoundly in its place, of course, but whose persistence into our age is no longer a living thing. Just think for a moment how self-satisfied the person is in these days, who has learnt something and can descant on it in the following terms: “A good teacher must not merely bring out the rhythm, and the rhyme in a poem; he must comment technically on the text; he must introduce the meaning, and only when he has unravelled the meaning will the pupils absorb it as an inner activity.” After such a person has long held forth on the importance of starting with the meaning, he concludes with: “As the old Latin said: rem tene, verba sequuntur, if you have understood the question, words will follow of themselves.” These are tactics which you will frequently find in people who imagine that they have learnt a great deal, that they have gone far beyond dilettantism in enunciating something first as a piece of sublime contemporary wisdom, and then following it up with, “as the old Latin said. ...” And, of course, he has only to say it in Greek for people to believe implicitly that it is something quite extraordinary. For the fourth post-Atlantean period of civilization, this attitude was desirable; it is unbecoming in our age. The Greek did not introduce his children, first of all, to old grammar schools where they could learn, let us say, ancient Egyptian; he made them learn Greek. But to-day we begin by introducing people to ancient tongues before their own. That is a fact which must be realized.

• 1. See Dr. C. v. Heydebrand, Gegen Experimentalpsychologie und Pädagogik.

My dear fellow students! It is clear from many statements of this kind that we are counting on you with all our hearts for what we are thinking of here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. We are counting on you with all our hearts because, if we are to work against the impending downfall of Western civilization, it can only come from science, given the state of affairs today. Consider that what has brought us into today's situation, after all, basically also comes from science. I will point out much less what is actually, so to speak, on the palm of your hand: that the destructive anti-cultural institutions of the latest time are basically scientific results. It is easy to imagine that, so we don't have to discuss it here. But we want to consider something else. You see, the proletariat, if I may use the grotesque expression, has a kind of Janus face today. It is quite true that the proletariat must be brought in if the situation is to be reorganized today. That, again, is something that is as self-evident as can be. And perhaps I may remind you that in Stuttgart, among the nearer and more distant surroundings, the cold was at its worst when I once used a certain word in a public lecture, but which, I believe, was spoken out of a real insight into present conditions. I said that the bourgeoisie suffers first of all from a decadent brain and that it is absolutely dependent on replacing brain work with the work of the ether brain, with something spiritualized. That is as obvious as anything can be. By contrast, the proletarian, in the context of the present vertical migration of peoples, does not yet have a decadent brain. He can still work with his physical brain if only he can be persuaded to do so. This, of course, has caused a great deal of resentment among the bourgeoisie in the immediate and more distant vicinity. But today it is not a matter of whether people are more or less resentful, but of bringing the truth to light.

Now, however, the proletariat is revealing this. On the one hand, the proletarians will always be inclined to say to themselves: Yes, we don't want to know anything about what you are bringing us. It's too difficult for us; it's not of interest to us for the time being. But on the other hand, these proletarians are completely fed up with the waste products of the science of the 19th and early 20th centuries. They only work with what has fallen away from it. We must make up our minds to look at it that way. We must say to ourselves: Of course it will be quite difficult to enter the proletariat with what we are working out of science in a very serious way. But if we do not let up, if we do not let ourselves be deterred, but rather base ourselves on this social action: we must win the proletariat from science! then we will also certainly get through to the proletariat with something sound, just as one has come to the proletariat with Marxism and Bolshevism. It is only a matter of not losing our breath too soon, that we actually carry out what we have once recognized as correct. That was always and always my principle in anthroposophical work. Therefore, I never compromised, but simply made enemies with full insight into the matter, because there was no other way than to simply reject everything that came up amateurishly. And if it were worth the effort, it would be very easy to prove that the majority of our current enemies are people who were once rejected because of over-amateurism. You would see, if you went into the details, that this is the case. All you need is a substitute for memory. After all, memory is no longer as strong! If you have access to spiritual training, you know that. Then you know how to assess the enemies. They often emerge from the shallows only after years.

Therefore, you must not shrink from a powerful adherence to what was once recognized as correct, then it will also go with the proletariat. For the proletariat suffers only from an exaggerated sense of authority. But as soon as you have it for yourself, you would win it. It is still difficult today to make people understand that their leaders are their greatest enemies from the bottom to the top; that they are pests. But this must be taught to people little by little; then it will work. Then one will probably give the proletariat an interest in this healthy scientific work that we are scientifically developing. Then one will have an extraordinarily good audience in the proletariat. And for a long time to come, the proletariat itself must, of course, be an 'audience' in its mass.

But now I would like to point out something else. You see, for many years I have been active in the anthroposophical movement and have always tried to work in a certain direction, which consisted of bringing together the anthroposophical and the specifically scientific. I could give you specific examples of the difficulties that have always arisen in this regard. For example, many years ago a scholar approached us who was an extraordinarily learned man in terms of Orientalism and Assyriology. On the other hand, he was enthusiastic about anthroposophy. It would have been natural for someone who really had Orientalism and so on in his fingers as a scholar and was enthusiastic about anthroposophy to work on these two things at the same time. But he could not be brought to do that; the man could not be brought to build a bridge from one area to another. He could make progress in both, but he could not build a bridge. Nevertheless, it must also be the case that this bridge must be tried absolutely. And you can find it; you can find the entrance to every single science through anthroposophy.

On the other hand, I found a well-known professor of botany who was also an enthusiastic 'theosophist'. The man in question wrote botanical works and he wrote about theosophy. He did not belong to the Anthroposophical Society, but to the Theosophical Society. He wrote about theosophy in the same way that Annie Besant wrote about it. He was completely a botanist when he closed the book on Theosophy and completely a 'Theosophist' when he taught or wrote books on Theosophy, without one being able to recognize that he was a botanist. He even found it abhorrent when I spoke to him about botany and wanted to prepare a kind of bridge.

You see, this is the result of the culture of the last few centuries, this double bookkeeping – that is what I must always call it. One wants that which relates to life in the specialist journal, and that which one then needs for the mind, for the “interior”, as one calls it, in the Sunday supplement of one's political newspaper. Politics is in between; according to the “tripartite structure” that has existed up to now, you want to get that from the political paper. These things are the ones that you actually have to see through above all. And then you will perhaps be the ones most qualified to help find this bridge everywhere. In a sense — it won't always appear so radically — things are like that.

You see, poor Hölderlin already expressed the beautiful word at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century when he said to himself, when he looks around his Germany, he finds officials, factory owners, carpenters and tailors everywhere, but — no people. He finds scholars, artists and teachers and so on, but — no people. He finds young and older and old, sedate people, but – no people.

One would like to say today: We actually have the least of all in our learned professions, that there are people there! We have sciences, and the scientists actually swim around as something factual. Basically, we actually live to a high degree quite apart from science, in that we feel like human beings. Just think, if we today – I mean, if we summarize all of our scholarly knowledge – if we do a piece of work today to habilitate, what do we do then? We cannot just sit down and write what flows from our soul into such a scholarly work. That doesn't work. Then we would very soon be reproached: Yes, he writes from the wrist. You mustn't do that. You mustn't write from the wrist, but you have to study the books for your doctoral dissertation, which you otherwise don't pay attention to, maybe don't even read, only open at the pages where something is written that you have to quote. In short, you have to have as external a relationship as possible to what you are working on, and you absolutely must not have an internal relationship to it! When people meet again, I can tell you about a strange meeting in Weimar that took place during my working hours at the local Goethe-Schiller Archive, where I was able to attend the meetings of the Goethe Society. As soon as someone said something that was related to Goethe, or as soon as someone touched on something scientific, they would say: There's another group talking shop, that's not on! The purpose of the gathering was something that had to be avoided at all costs, so as not to be seen in a bad light of talking shop. But all of this is essentially to blame for the fact that we have ended up in this situation. In Weimar, one could really see all the specialists – many of them offered a kind of combination of all subjects – in these seven years, and there was basically no strong differentiation by nationality. For example, when Mr. Thomas from a very Western university in America writes, there is no real difference between the work and thinking of any Schmidt or Scherer student, even in his work and thinking - he worked on Goethe's “Faust.” It was basically international, because Thomas only differed from the others in that he sat on the floor and crossed his legs when he sat on the floor in front of the bookcase. That was how he distinguished himself as an American. But otherwise he worked like the others. The only exception was a Russian councilor. The man didn't know what questions he was researching. But when he came to an inn in the evening, where people would gather, they would always say to the others: “Don't look around, because the councilor is walking around!” Because he kept starting to talk about what he knew of Goethe's Faust, people avoided sitting with him. These things are actually more important than one would usually think; for they could be amply multiplied and would still explain something about how the scientific life has developed bit by bit. And we want to get out of this! We certainly do not want to become pedants or new-fangled simplifiers, but we must realize that man stands higher than all science, that he need not let himself be tyrannized by it. And the emancipation of the spirit is actually working towards combating science as such in its abstraction, and putting man first. So that we not only have science as Bölsche writes about the “immortality” of science. Wilhelm Bölsche has also set up a kind of spiritual science, but he seeks it in libraries, which are, however, full of paper and blackened print of the actual spirits.

But this is what we must work towards: this humanization of scientific life, this: putting people in the foreground in so-called objective science. Objective science must actually have its existence in life in man. And having this does not make one dry and arid. On the contrary, by combating abstract thinking, one becomes a useful co-worker in that which we so urgently need: the combating of barbarism in the life of Western civilization.

This is what is most urgently needed by those who enter the learned professions, or professions supported by the sciences. Therefore, I believe that it will be extraordinarily beneficial if you get together at the individual universities and freely address such topics scientifically, develop such topics, as it is to be attempted from the bodies that we already have, especially from the Waldorf school. I am not thinking that a school-like operation should be set up, not at all, my dear fellow students, but I am thinking of something else. We will try, so to speak, to shape the threads in such a way that they are woven out of the necessities of the time, that they are basically found in view of what actually lies in the ethos of the overall context of our culture. And then certain individuals among our Waldorf school teachers, the body of teachers, which in turn should maintain a kind of unity with those who have presented here, should simply be given the task of identifying the topics that need to be resolved today. And it should only be said to the student body what tasks are necessary according to the insights that these circles can have. The rest is therefore not letting oneself be led by the tasks, but it is a fathoming of what is particularly necessary today. And there will be the opportunity to work really correctly from scientific foundations. I would like to emphasize that it must be avoided that small scientific circles, more or less really or supposedly working, isolate themselves and believe that they can do enough with that today. This could, of course, be very useful and will be very useful, and it must also be done, but we also need a broad student movement that is truly aware today: things cannot go on as they would among young people if these young people were only to follow in the footsteps of those who still hold office today out of old traditions and old times. If one says that the Social Democrats must get rid of their leaders, then it is above all necessary that the youth of today get rid of the old leaders in a certain way. That will be more difficult than it should be.

Because, you see, I cannot, of course, avoid the issue that is actually at stake. And I must ask you to be quite clear about the fact that I am talking about these things with complete honesty and sincerity. You can be quite sure: we would make easy progress in the anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement if we had the freedom to work only for the spirit and as a stimulus to the spirit. Assigning posts, awarding degrees, letting students fail their state exams – that is what the others do. And that is an important factor. We certainly do not underestimate it in our field. For we know full well what courage and boldness are needed today, especially for the prospective scholar and prospective scientific worker, to be and remain with us. Because, in fact, we can offer him very little today. If we can gradually build up our individual movements, then things will improve. When the Waldorf School was founded, I said: the founding is nice, but it has no meaning if at least ten more schools are not founded in the next quarter, because then it is only established. And I have definitely envisaged – as I always follow up practical ideas, not just ideas that can be handed down – that if we can found schools everywhere, then we will be able to appoint to our schools those who, under certain circumstances, do it the way Dr. Stein told us himself. But it is not a system. He enrolled, saw what a few lectures were like, but otherwise he read cycles and other things, read what was quoted there, and completed his academic studies. Of course, this cannot be generalized, because probably only three quarters of the professors would agree that if there were only students like Dr. Stein, they could actually only attend the first three lectures and then go for a walk. This cannot be easily realized for the general public today. So I do not want to propagate that. But I just want to draw your attention to the fact that at any rate the spirit that sits on the chairs in the lecture halls today, if it is transferred to the school benches, does not bring us any future. Out of this necessity you must already find the courage to at least in some way ally yourselves with what is wanted here. But on the other hand, I thought practically, as the Waldorf School was founded: if we are able to truly emancipate spiritual life, we will have more and more Waldorf Schools, and then we will also be able to offer our young friends from the student body a future. It is not at all unidealistic for me to say that. But then it will be easier. But we have to support each other from both sides. We will only be able to work on founding independent schools and universities if we see an understanding student body coming towards us. To do this, we need not only small groups, but a student movement that wants to work on a large scale and advocate on a large scale for what is being considered here.

I must point out that what I have said in these days as the reason for the World School Association is meant very seriously. I think of it as international, so that it is to be created, so to speak, out of the thinking and feeling of today. If we can first make the world understand that there are really only two movements today that have to struggle with each other, on the one hand Bolshevism, which is leading the world into the swamp, and on the other hand the threefold social organism, then people will also be faced with a choice as soon as they see that the old impulses will no longer work! Either it must happen, that those who want to advance civilization in a reasonable way must gradually live into the impulse of threefolding, or, if people are too lazy to do so, Bolshevism will flood Europe and barbarize European culture. If people understand this, they will be easier to win than they are today.

There are three things that must be taken into account. When one speaks to the international world today about a project such as the one in Dornach, and that money is needed for it, people take the view that it must all be idealism! You can't be so mean as to give money for it! Money is much too dirty to be used for such an idealistic cause. In short, people are not easily won over to something like this unless they are prepared for it for a long time. And since we cannot complete our building in Central European countries because of the foreign currency, we are dependent on other parts of today's civilized world. But they don't give us any money just like that. Basically, they are very tight-fisted. On the other hand, people are still relatively easy to win over if you tell them you want to set up sanatoriums. You can get as much money as you want. We can't do that now, set up sanatoriums, but we can get involved in the middle way. The middle way is what I mean by the world school association. The World School Association can finance all cultural institutions if it is understood in the right way. And there is still some understanding for the establishment of the school-based approach, but less for something that is directly the building. We have to work for what is in the middle, so to speak. Therefore, it is important that this foundation of the World School Association, which we will have as something universal, be prepared in a certain way, that the mood be set for this World School Association. And so I would like to suggest that it would be best if you were to include in your decisions, in your strongest initiative, that you approach everyone you can, and convince them that this World School Association must spread across all countries, that it is up to them to emancipate intellectual life. That it must finance as many free schools across the world as possible. The emancipation of spiritual life must be pursued on the grandest scale. We must come to emancipate ourselves from that which, in essence, enslaves us spiritually. But we can only do that if we create the right mood. The tyranny is greater than one might think. From a place in Europe, I will attempt to inaugurate this founding of the World School Association myself. But what must come first is to create the right mood for it. Because today you can't achieve anything by forming groups of twelve or fifteen people to work things out. Rather, it is important that we spread this idea as widely as possible: a world school association must come into being. Now, I can well imagine, and I am quite satisfied with the fact, that of course the students can't exactly open their wallets very wide. That is not necessary. The others belong to this. But what the student can open, that is – you know, I mean this cum grano salis – what the student can open, that is his mouth. That is what I mean: that you can make it possible for the World School Association to open its mouth wherever you go. So that when we establish this World School Association in the near future, we will not fall on deaf ears, but on prepared people. That is what must be.

As you can see, we have enough to do. What we need is nothing more than real courage and a clear view of the world. Why should we not be able to overcome with youthful strength the things that must be overcome because they still tower over our time with all the hallmarks of the old age and seek to oppress us? We must not let ourselves be oppressed. We must realize today that we are dancing on a knife's edge, or, as we might say, on a volcano. It is not the case, my dear fellow students, that things will continue as they are now. We are heading for very, very sad times. But we can remedy these sad times by growing into them with courage and energy. And I believe that spiritual science, anthroposophy, can be of help to you in this. It can be of help to everyone.

I ask you in conclusion only: do not pursue things particularistically, sectionally, but in the broadest style. Do not exclude anyone, but include everyone who wants to work with you. The only thing that should count is the will to work honestly with us in the direction we have set, the direction of growing into the scientific professions. It seems to me, my dear fellow students, that we must not sin in this direction any longer. We must be broad-minded. We must regard everyone who honestly wants to work with us as a very welcome co-worker. We must not allow any distinction to arise between people and people, but we must let everyone who simply has the will to work with us, work with us. This should also be the case, as it has always been in the anthroposophical movement. We have never demanded that anyone give up anything they otherwise represent in the world. No one has ever had to give up anything; they only had to accept what the Anthroposophical movement could give them. And perhaps I may recall something personal. You know how I am always reproached for having once been part of the Theosophical movement. It was not a matter of me going along with it! The Theosophical Society actually approached me; it joined me for a time, until it threw out what I stood for. But I said to the Theosophists at our first meeting in London that it was not a matter of us accepting anything from the center, but rather of us bringing to the common altar what we had to bring at that particular time.

In this sense, we can work together to the greatest extent possible. And if you work in the style of such work, especially in student circles, then we will make progress.

In the lecture yesterday which dealt with Spengler's Decline of the West, I tried to bring home to you the significance of anthroposophical Spiritual Science by emphasising the difference between merely abstract concepts and that which also arises in the soul in the form of ideas and concepts but is, nevertheless, reality. Let us realise once for all that with his materialistic frame of mind, and his tendency to reject spiritual conceptions and occupy himself only with ideas concerning the natural world, man is making himself more and more akin to the material, is descending so deeply into the material world that he is no longer speaking falsely when he declares that it is the material substance of his body which thinks, that his brain actually does the thinking. Man is becoming a kind of automaton in the universe, and as the result of his denial of the soul and Spirit he is losing the soul and Spirit. I said before that this thought is by no means popular; people will not accept it because they cherish the belief that the soul-and-spirit will be saved to man for all eternity without any action being necessary an his part. By no means is it so. A man may give himself up to material life to such an extent that he severs himself from the soul-and-spirit altogether, sinks into the realm of the Ahrimanic Powers and passes with them into a cosmic stream which does not belong to our world. But thereby he loses his own Ego, for the Ego does not belong to the world of Ahriman and can only find its true path of development when a human being pursues the normal course of progressive evolution; that is to say, when he unites with the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha and when he realises that in the pr sent age he must find a link with all that spiritual research can contribute to the civilised life of mankind. Since the middle of the fifteenth century man has been living through the phase of evolution in which, as he looks out into his environment, he sees nothing but the material world. And as he looks into his own being he intellectualizes the inner experiences of his life of soul; these become abstract and shadowy. This has been the tendency since the middle of the fifteenth century.

The thoughts and concepts with which we build up our picture of the world to-day, drawn as they are from the dicta of orthodox science, have no connection with existence as it actually is. Neither can they lead to the heart of reality. It is merely a convention to imagine that man's life of soul is fundamentally involved in the forming of abstract thought. These abstract thoughts are quite remote from reality; they are nothing but a series of pictures. We may say, therefore, that externally man perceives the material world and inwardly a world of pictures having no essential connection with existence. This has been the lot of mankind since the middle of the fifteenth century and we shall presently see what effect it has upon a conception of the universe to see, externally, nothing but the material world and, inwardly, to have experiences that have become a mere series of pictures. We may ask: Why is it that since the middle of the fifteenth century man's life of soul has gradually come to the point of having no more reality than a picture? The reason is that only in this way is it possible for man to attain his real freedom.

In order to understand this let us consider the world as it lies before us to-day and our own place in the world. To begin with we will think of the world, leaving aside the human being altogether. Looking at clouds, mountains, rivers, at the minerals, plants and animals, we ask: What is there, in reality, in the whole wide world, when we leave the human being out of the picture? In other words, we think of all that surrounds us in the mineral and plant kingdoms, and to a certain extent also, in the animal kingdom, but apart altogether from man. In reality, of course, this is quite impossible, but we will assume hypothetically a Nature divested of the human being. In this Nature that is divested of the human being, there are no Gods. That is what we must bring home to ourselves. In this Nature that is divested of the human being there are no Gods, any more than an oyster is there within an empty oyster-shell or a snail in an empty snail-shell. This whole world which we assume hypothetically, a world without the human being, is something which the Gods have separated off from themselves in the course of evolution, just as the oyster sheds its shell. But the Gods—the spiritual Beings—are no longer within it. The world that surrounds us, is a world of the Past. When we look at Nature we are looking at something which represents the spiritual Past, we are looking at a residue of the Spiritual. And that is why religious consciousness in the real sense can never arise from contemplation of the external world alone. Let us not imagine for a moment that any element of the life of the divine-spiritual Beings who work creatively in mankind, is contained in this external world. Elementary beings, spiritual beings of a lower order, are there, of course; but the creative spiritual Beings who should live in our religious consciousness belong to this external world only inasmuch as represents their shell, being a residue of spiritual evolution in the Past.

Certain outstanding personalities have felt the truth of these things. In the spiritual life of the nineteenth century the man who felt most deeply of all that the Nature surrounding man is a residue of divine-spiritual evolution was Philip Mainländer whose philosophy of self-destruction was born from the gravity of this knowledge and who finally put an end to his own life. It is often the destiny of human beings to steep themselves in one-sided truths of this kind and the inevitable consequence is that this destiny itself becomes one-sided and difficult to bear. Philip Mainländer, the unfortunate German Philosopher, is an outstanding example of this.

Having realised what has been put forward hypothetically in connection with external Nature, you may ask: Where then, are the Gods; where are the creative spiritual Beings? If I were to make a drawing, I should have to draw the Gods within the human being. The truly creative Gods have their habitat in the realm that is bounded by the human skin, within the organs—if I may use this expression. The being of man is now the bearer of the Divine-Spiritual. The Divine-Spiritual, the truly creative principles is within the human being. Try to picture to ourselves external Nature as it is to-day, and then a future lying thousands of years ahead—in this future there will be no clouds, no minerals, no plants, even no animals. There will be nothing left of all that now lives in external Nature outside the bounds of the human skin. What will continue its evolution is the soul and Spirit permeating the inner organisation of man. This will constitute the future. The Nature by which man is now surrounded will pass away, and the Human-Divine principle now within his being will become his outer environment.

Insight into the truth that the Divine-Spiritual—the only truly creative principle in our time—lives inside the bounds of the human skin, must be taken in deepest seriousness, for it lays upon man a responsibility in regard to the whole universe. It enables him to understand the words of Christ: “Heaven and Earth”—the world of external Nature—“will pass away but my words will not pass away.” And when in the individual human being the saying of St. Paul, “Not I but Christ in me,” is fulfilled, then the words of Christ will live in the individual human being. “Heaven and Earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away” or My words in the individual human being, namely all that lies inside the human skin and is received into Christ, this will not pass away.

All this is an indication of the fact that since the middle of the fifteenth century, through his abstract, intellectual concepts, man has been making his inner being empty and void. And to what end has he been making himself empty? It is in order to receive the Christ Impulse, the Divine Spiritual, into his inner being. I said that as we look into the external world, we see only the material. It is the divine Past. (In this residue of a divine Past there are, of course, the Elemental Spirits who have remained at lower stages of evolution.) As we look into our inner being, we see, to begin with, nothing but abstract concepts which can only become concrete and real when we receive the impulse of the Spirit into our being through Spiritual Science and unite the impulse of the Spirit with our inner life. Man has the choice—a choice which has become a matter of greater and greater seriousness since the middle of the fifteenth century—either to remain at a standstill with his abstract intellectual concepts or to receive into himself the living substance of Spiritual Science. Abstract intellectuality enables him to evolve a brilliant science of Nature, for intellectual concepts are dead and by their means he can unfold an admirable understanding of dead Nature. But all this mummifies him, makes him akin to matter, and leads him ultimately into the clutches of the Ahrimanic world. To further the Progress of earthly existence and the whole evolution of the earth, he must receive the Spiritual into his being, and in our time the Spiritual does not draw near to man by way of atavistic instinct. It must be reached by his own efforts. The assimilation of Spiritual Science is not, therefore, the assimilation of a theory but the development of something absolutely real, an impulse that will fill the otherwise empty recesses of the soul with spiritual substance.

In the mass to-day, men prefer to have this emptiness inwardly and the Past outwardly manifest before them. They will only admit the validity of thought when it has been proved by experiment and they resist the quickening impulses of spiritual life. The danger confronting the world to-day is not so much the spread of false theories but the loss of the very Mission of the Earth.

Only those who have really thought through and perceived the task of the human race will realise how much depends upon the assimilation of Spiritual Science. These souls will never lose sight of the importance of knowledge of the being of man, but in modern natural science and in the ancient religious tradition this knowledge simply does not exist. What is the trend of ancient religious tradition? It directs the minds of men to unworldly abstractions and is silent an the subject of the Gods indwelling the being of man, indwelling his very organism. This thought would he condemned by religious tradition as out-and out heresy. If any attempt were made to bring home to the traditional religions in Europe and America to-day the truth of the ancient saying that “the Body of man is the Temple of the Gods,” they would indignantly refuse to countenance such heresy.

And an the other hand we have a materialistic natural science which precisely because it is materialistic has no real understanding of matter. What does science really know about the functioning of the human brain, of the human heart? I have often told you, and I have also said in public, that one of the views held by modern science is that the human heart is a kind of pump which drives the blood through the body. This dictum of academic science is universally accepted but it is simply a piece of nonsense—pure nonsense. We shall never understand the essential nature of the heart we imagine that it pumps the blood in every direction and then lets it flow back again. The circulating blood itself is the living force. The driving force in the human organisation is contained in the blood, in the circulating blood, and the heart is the outward expression of this; the movement reveals itself in the heart. To say in accordance with modern science that the heart drives the blood into the Body, is rather like saying: “At ten minutes to nine one hand of the clock pointed to nine, and the other a little past ten, and these hands, in conjunction with the mechanism of the clock, drove me to the speaker's desk and left a great many still outside (because in the Anthroposophical Society people have a habit of unpunctuality). In reality, it is not so at all. Obviously the clock is simply an expression of what is happening—it is the expression and nothing more. The heart is not the pumping machine by means of which the blood is driven through the body; the heart is inserted into and is the expression of this whole system of movement.

Natural Science, as it is to-day, never leads into the inner being of man. All that science does is to make the inner into the outer by the dissection of dead bodies. But dissection of the dead body merely takes the inner and transfers it to the outer world. I mention this in order to bring home to you that in the spiritual life of to-day there is no inclination whatever to penetrate into the inner being and inner nature of man, and it devolves upon Spiritual Science to bring that real knowledge of man's being which scares the great majority of our contemporaries. Why are they scared? It is because religious traditions through the centuries have utterly hood-winked mankind so far as striving for real knowledge is concerned. Just think of the way in which the traditional creeds mystify human beings with apocryphal utterances culminating in a warning that it is not meant for man to know the Supersensible, that he may only have faith in it and feel its existence darkly. This is all done with the object of playing upon man's pride and self-conceit and also upon his inherent laziness. He must be led to believe that it is not necessary for him to think about the Divine, that his conception of the Divine must be a matter of instinct and dim feeling. But ideas that arise from this region of man's being are merely emanations from the organs—emanations which become illusions, and these illusions are distorted into all kinds of nebulous ideas by theologians and others who know quite well how much they can count an man's inherent love of ease.

The instinct for knowledge which alone can promote the earthly evolution of man and also lead him to the path of spiritual development, has been stifled and suppressed for many long centuries. People to-day are frightened at the very thought of developing knowledgE of realities or of experiencing the spiritual world. But to the extent to which they are frightened—to that extent do they sever themselves from the Spirit and soul and make themselves akin to the material.

It is so indeed; people are scared when the gravity of these things dawns upon them, because everything to-day is regarded from the external point of view. And here, in parenthesis, let me repeat certain remarks made a short time ago. In Stuttgart we have the Waldorf School. The Waldorf School was founded out of the very spirit of anthroposophical Spiritual Science; that is to say, fundamental principles of education and of teaching were laid before those who were specially Chosen to work in the School. Everything is a question of the Spirit in this art of education. Yet we are finding to-day, a sensation, that people visit the school and actually think that in a couple of hours or so they can inform themselves about the essentials of education there given. But it is of course only through Spiritual Science that one can gain insight into the spirit of the Waldorf School; it cannot be done by short brief visits which only disturb the teaching.

To assimilate anthroposophical Spiritual Science, however, is much more difficult and much less sensational than visiting the School as an outsider. As I have often said, the education at the Waldorf School takes account of the existence of the spiritual world, and, above all, of the pre-earthly existence of the human being. What is there to be said about this pre-earthly existence? We may take the year of our birth and say that this is the time when we descended to physical life on the Earth. Children born later have been living in the spiritual world while we were already on the Earth. These children have just descended to the physical world, whereas we ourselves have been living through our earthly existence for a considerable length of time. And they bring with them something of what they were experiencing in the spiritual world while we were already living in the physical world.

One can realise this quite clearly among children who are taught according to the principles of Waldorf School education. To give this kind of education is to prepare for the application in everyday life of thoughts and ideas which are the natural outcome of Spiritual Science. But it is precisely here that people are kept back by traditional religions, for the last thing these religions want is the development of inner activity in human beings. Inner activity leads to a real knowledge of the being of man and brings home the truth that the dwelling place of the Gods is inside the bounds of the human skin.

Suppose we see a planet in the sky. There is nothing of the Divine-Spiritual in anything upon that planet except in Spiritual Beings whose nature in some way resembles the nature of man. From these Beings the Divine pours its radiance upon us. Why, then, should this radiance be any the less because it shines from the bodies of men? You will begin to feel at home with this thought if you dissociate it from earthly life and relate it to conditions as they are upon another planet. Living an the Earth as you do, you will find that there is something oppressive, something rather coercive in the thought that you and your fellow men are bearers of the Divine-Spiritual. But if you turn the gaze of your soul to one of the other planets it will be much easier for you to grasp the fact that the Beings who there constitute the highest kingdom of Nature are the point from which the Divine Spiritual shines down upon you.

In a certain respect the thought we have been considering to-day amplifies the thought which occupied our minds in the last lecture, namely that something is unfolding in the inner being of man upon which the future evolution of the Earth essentially depends, but also that it lies within the powers of the human will to hinder the Earth's evolution, to receive the stream of Ahrimanic forces only. And to-day we added the other thought, namely, that Nature around is transient and external, for it already represents nothing more than a residue of Divine Spiritual creation. The process of Divine-Spiritual creation which dominates the present and will dominate the future, lies inside the bounds of the human skin. Strange as it may seem, it is therefore quite true to say that everything our eyes can see and our ears hear will all pass away with the Earth. Only that which is contained in the regions enclosed by the human skin lives over to the Jupiter stage of evolution, bearing existence as it is an the Earth into future conditions of planetary evolution.

When it is once realised that a knowledge of the nature of man is a burning necessity, the urge to understand the connection of the human being with the universe will again make itself felt. You know that man really lives between two extremes, the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic as we are accustomed to call them. We can also understand the nature of these two extremes from a more elementary point of view. Philosophers have declared again and again that Being in itself eludes the grasp of thought. This is quite true, for whence comes the sense of being, the feeling of existence which there is in man? The human being exists before he enters earthly existence through conception and birth; he exists in super-sensible worlds. From super-sensible worlds he descends into his earthly, material existence. Here he experiences something quite new, something he did not experience in the super-sensible worlds. He is encompassed by it as soon as he has descended to earthly existence. It is the attractive force of the Earth, gravity, ‘to have weight,’ as we say, but only by way of illustration. As you know, the expression ‘to have weight’ is drawn from the most palpable phenomenon of all. The fatigue of which we become aware is similar to ‘having weight,’ and what we feel in our limbs when they move is also akin to this. But because the fact of ‘having weight’ is merely the representative phenomenon, we can say: The human being places himself within gravity. And in a hidden way man always enters, a little more into this element of gravity when he approaches a thing of Earth and calls it real.

It is exactly the reverse when the human being is passing through his life between death and rebirth. Just as here on the Earth he is allied with gravity, in the life between death and rebirth he is allied with light, for ‘light’ too is used in a representative sense. Because we receive most of our higher sense-perceptions through the eye, we speak of the light. But what lives as light in the sense-perception of the eye is the same element that sounds in the sense-perception of the ear and reveals itself in different tones, just as the light reveals itself in different colours. And it is the same with the other senses. fundamentally speaking, the element we speak of in a representative sense as the light, just as we speak of gravity in a representative sense, is the ‘tincture’ of all the senses. We are received into the extreme pole of gravity when we descend to the Earth. We are received into the extreme pole of light when we are living in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. are, in reality, always in the middle condition between light and gravity; and every sense-perception, as we experience it here on Earth, is half light and half gravity. When, as the result of some pathological condition, or in dream, we experience without the element of our own gravity, we are experiencing only the Spiritual, as for instance in a dream or in delirium. Psychologically, delirium is a state in which the human being has experience, but his own gravity is no factor in them. This state of balance between gravity and light into which we are placed, is something that is intimately connected with the riddle of the world, inasmuch as it is bound up with many of the experiences we have as beings of soul and Spirit in the world.

It will surely be obvious to you from what has been said that neither the traditional creeds nor the fantasies of natural science succeed in finding their way from merely abstract concepts into the light nor from sense perception down into gravity. People have become blind and deaf to these things. Man is bound to the Earth by gravity. He experiences gravity as the element which draws him to the Earth. Think of a crystal. A crystal gives itself its form. Within the crystal there is the same force which the human being feels drawing him downwards—the force which gives the whole Earth form. And now think of the oceans and seas. Here the Earth can give form, or rather the element of gravity gives the form. This very same force also gives the crystal its form but in this case it works from within. According to science, nobody knows what is behind matter or within matter. This is said to be a world-riddle. But inasmuch as we experience our own gravity, we experience what is behind the surface of matter; for in relation to the whole Earth we are placed within the same forces which are active in small bodies (as, for instance, the crystal) and by which the various parts are held together. We must reach the point of being able to recognise the small in the great, the great in the small and not to lose ourselves in speculation as to what presumably lies behind matter.

Knowledge of the Divine-Spiritual which transcends matter must be kindled by those forces in man's inner being which enable him to understand ideas such as that of the Temple represented in ancient tradition by the human being himself.

I have said many times that the sayings of ancient atavistic wisdom contain much that is worthy of deep veneration. In the present age it is our task once again to raise these truths from the depths of our being and to make them the guiding principles of life and action.

My dear friends!

What I have to say has been said here in recent years on these occasions, so there is little that I can add today to the proceedings. First of all, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to all the friends who have contributed artistically, scientifically and in other ways to the realization of the Goetheanum and its work over the past year. Once again this year, the dedicated nature of a large number of friends, especially among the staff, has been evident in an extraordinary way in the completion of this Goetheanum. These thanks arise from an awareness of the importance of this work for our entire present civilization. Those to whom these thanks are addressed know how they are meant and will accept them in the sense in which they arise from an awareness of urgent cultural necessities.

But what I mainly have to say is this: you have heard a financial statement; you have heard reports of other kinds. But if, like me, one has to see above all that what is wanted and what must be wanted with this Goetheanum is accomplished, then one has to deal with the balance sheet in a somewhat different way. Isn't it true that the balance sheet for December 31, 1920, which has now been delivered, is relatively favorable; but that can be of little interest today. We need the financial statement of June 27, 1921; and those who are primarily interested in the continuation of the project are interested in the current balance sheet. I cannot calculate this current balance sheet any differently than by telling you that the Goetheanum's coffers are currently short of around three hundred and eighty to three hundred and ninety thousand francs. If we do not receive these in the coming months, then we will not be able to continue the construction despite all the other good intentions expressed in words or empty feelings. We will be left with an unfinished project and will have to close down the work.

There should be no illusion about this fact, which I have already pointed out several times. I shall therefore repeat it very clearly: for the continuation of the building work – and this does not, of course, mean a hidden deficit – but for the continuation of this building work, that is, for the living work here, the Goetheanum's coffers are almost four hundred thousand francs short; and if these are not raised in the next few months, the completion of the building will have to be abandoned. The restoration of the building must simply be interrupted.

It was said earlier, when the accounts were presented, that the Dornach enterprise resembles an organism in which the blood is gradually becoming sluggish. And, isn't it true, many of the appeals that I have made to the membership and the world over the past year, especially in this direction, that it is necessary to stand up for a broader interest in the realization of the Goetheanum, have fallen on deaf ears. They were not received with interest; and that is what, looking around today at the Goetheanum, gives me the greatest concern. It gives me the greatest concern because there is another fact.

We were able to begin the spiritual work of the Goetheanum. Courses have been held in all fields of science. Attempts have also been made, for example, to broaden the artistic activity that is so beautifully evident at the Goetheanum itself by taking the art of eurythmy out into the world. It has become apparent that an ugly opposition is emerging from certain quarters – it was recently called “vulgar” in the newspaper on threefolding –. I do not want to say now from which side this uncivilized opposition comes. Anyone who wants to see the truth can easily see it. But of course there is no need to fear that the interest in one's own circles will consolidate to the extent that the interest in the opposition grows in the other circles.

But just take, I would say as symptomatic, the following: in other respects it is no different, but take the two courses from September and October of last year and those at Easter this year. We have made significant progress. Of course, this is my subjective judgment; but first of all, the four hundred thousand francs that are missing from the treasury are also my subjective concern. We have these two courses, and we have seen significant progress in the quality of the lectures and in the progress of the content of spiritual science. One can say that what has been done in the main building and here from the podium at Easter 1921 shows significant progress compared to what could be achieved in the fall of 1920. As I said, the same can be seen in artistic terms. We have the potential for external progress in this area. If we look further, it may be mentioned that the spiritual work in the Stuttgart Waldorf School has progressed significantly, that the overall spirit, the activity of the Waldorf School and the permeation of this activity with the spirit that should be inside have made significant progress.

By contrast, let us consider the evening discussions in the fall and at Easter. Well, in the fall they were already at a level that really could not be praised. But at Easter: I must confess, they were something terrible, these evening discussions. They showed quite clearly how the movement can advance as a spiritual one, how a small circle is involved in the advancement of the movement, how the scientific and the artistic grow, and how, by contrast, the general interest among the membership simply fades. This has become apparent from the decline in the level of our discussions from last autumn to this Easter.

If I have to speak from my subjective point of view in these matters, I have to remind you of a certain fact. Those who are sitting here today were probably present when these facts were unfolding. When we spoke here some time ago about all the possible external foundations connected with the anthroposophical movement, I said: the ideas for these foundations are good, are extraordinarily significant, and as far as the ideas and the inner possibilities are concerned, I am not at all worried. But when I look at the human material of the present day, which wants to be active in practical life, when I see how little the so-called practical man is up to the mark today, it worries me when I think of such foundations.

Now, please do not misunderstand me. This is not to say that the things that have been established are bad from their own point of view. They work quite well; and from an external point of view there is no need to worry about them. But from another point of view, these things are nothing more than an increase in my worries, and for the work needed to continue the Goetheanum they are nothing more than a drain on my own energy, strongly detracting me from other necessary tasks because I have too many worries about what has been added without any sign of thought for the further development of the actual center, which is crystallizing here at the Goetheanum.

All the external foundations, too, have ultimately arisen on the basis of the anthroposophical work that is crystallized in the Goetheanum. And what is forming on the periphery is only justified by its emergence from this root; and it would therefore be necessary for all these individual branches to develop a real sense of thinking, feeling and working together. If this lack of empathy and cooperation continues as it has so far, nothing else would be possible but for the actual central work to suffer in the most severe way.

As I said, the spiritual movement has gone. The teaching staff at the Waldorf School, for example, is becoming more and more a real incarnation of the spirit that is to work out of anthroposophy in an educational direction. The same applies to the artistic sphere. And we would also overcome our opponents if the inner consolidation of our own membership really progressed, if something were really done in this direction. Do you see why we had a better external balance sheet last year? It was because we were able to get a few individuals to take charge of improving it. Most of it came about through the personal efforts of a few individuals who traveled around. It would have been a matter of continuing this work for the cause. But that was not done. And that is why we are experiencing what I had to characterize. I would like to give an example of how little my intentions are being addressed. You see, it was at the end of April that someone in Holland is said to have said: Yes, World School Association, you can't make it popular as quickly as you think you can, it takes five to six months.

Now, do the math. I pointed out at the end of the last fall course, I might say, that that was the time to personally stand up for this World School Association. I said that, given the time situation, it would be too late if we did not do so. So take the starting point of the reference back then, let's say October. Then do the math: November, December, January, February, March, April - six months. Six months had passed since I emphasized the necessity. So if we had started in October of last year, we would have had the six months. Instead, after six months, they say we need six months. Yes, if we continue to think and work in this way, then in three to four months we will have fallen asleep in terms of the outer movement, and this just at the moment when we might have the greatest and best prospects in terms of the spiritual and the spiritual.

This is not said merely because one wants to lament these things, but because labor is taken up by them, which should be working in a different direction. Of course, one has to take care of these things when others do not take care of them. And since the manpower is required, it is self-evident that the ideal and spiritual work suffers as a result and cannot reach the level it should actually reach. It is, of course, a hypothesis when I say that we could perhaps reach a peak of our spiritual achievements in three to four months; because this peak depends on the members doing the right thing.

For the near future, not tomorrow, but today, there should be a desire for some kind of energetic action for the administration of our cause. Above all, those foundations that have been able to emerge on the periphery should feel a strong obligation to contribute to the central core, to the whole; they should, despite the fact that they may well stand on their own (no one should misunderstand this), feel the obligation to support and sustain the center of the matter and, above all, to relieve it of external material work.

And as unpleasant as it is for me to say it, it had to be said, and it had to be said again today. It has often been pointed out in recent years, but it has fallen on deaf ears. To the same extent that the mark accounts have understandably declined, to the same extent the prospects of our cause have gradually faded. Now there is a large loss of Swiss franc accounts, after there were no more German mark accounts at all. That is the actual result, which I can only summarize in the words: the Goetheanum treasury is currently short of four hundred thousand francs for the next few months. If there is to be any prospect of continuing the construction and administrative work, these funds must be found.

This is a great concern to me. I said it very clearly last year and regret that I have to say it again at this moment.

Berlin, March 1917—The First World War had run its fearful course for two years and seven months. There might, perhaps, have been a chance during the preceding months that the warring powers would have sought a negotiated settlement, but with the collapse of the Czarist regime in Russia in March and the entry of America into the struggle in April, the die was cast and it was now war to the death—to final victory for one side or the other. And with this the stage was set for the drama of the 20th century.

Rudolf Steiner was in Berlin, when he was not in Switzerland, in Dornach, carving and painting, guiding and inspiring the work on the great building which was, in 1917, nearing completion within sound of the French and German guns to the north. He knew that only a thinking which could go to the roots of the problems which had finally made the war inevitable, could provide the ground on which a socially constructive peace might hope to be built. And he saw that such thinking must reach beyond a one-sidedly spiritual world view or a one-sided materialism and must show how the two worlds—soul-spiritual and sense perceptible—interact and form a whole.

For thirty years Steiner had pursued his spiritual-scientific research into the ways in which the human soul—as thinking, feeling and willing being—penetrates the bodily organism. And, as he said, it was only during the terrible years of war that the results of this research had finally become clear and enabled him to give them conceptual form. It must, therefore, have been with a sense of urgent responsibility that he interrupted the public lecture series which had begun in February to hold the two lectures which appear here for the first time in English translation.

He begins the first lecture by drawing his hearers' attention to the failure of the researchers of soul—the psychologists—to build a bridge to the physical and of the natural scientists to find the bridge to the soul, and he then goes on to show that only a science which can extend the methods of natural science—with its awe-inspiring achievements—into an investigation of soul and spirit can hope to build the bridge which is so urgently needed. And it is only such a science which can show how the human soul, in its totality, penetrates and makes use of the entire human bodily organism as the instrument for will and feeling, as well as for thought.

In the second lecture, Rudolf Steiner links his anthroposophical spiritual-scientific research with the work of those pioneering forerunners among the idealistic German thinkers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries who came to realize that the life of the organism pre-supposes an invisible, persistent body of supersensible forces which unites with, organizes and sustains the physical organism and survives its dissolution. And he goes on to show how the etheric from without, enlivened by the etheric within, gives rise to mental images, to thought representations, and to memory, and when rightly intensified, can lead to genuine imagination, but can also spawn hallucinations when the etheric reaches too deeply into the physical organism. In contrast, he describes how in willed activity, when the soul unfolds an impulse of will, the etheric is partially withdrawn from the organism and the soul works directly through the etheric into the metabolism. When this activity is intensified, intuition becomes possible, but when the etheric is bound by the physical, compulsive actions arise. It is also within the context of these lectures that Rudolf Steiner makes the challenging assertion that spiritual-scientific research reveals no essential difference between the so-called motor and sensory nerves. In this view, all nerves are sensory, serving only to perceive the subtle changes in the breathing organism and the metabolism which are affected by the soul's intervention in feeling and will.

These few indications may suffice to show the fundamental significance of these two lectures in the evolution of a new, and radical anthroposophical anthropology. The insights which they embodied were given written form in the volume which Steiner published the following November, and we owe it to Owen Barfield, the distinguished English essayist and critic, that this later volume—Von Seelenrätseln (Riddles of the Soul)—was made available to English readers some twenty-five years ago.¹ Yet it is only when one takes the highly concentrated presentation contained in the Commentary Note appended to Von Seelenrätseln together with the two earlier lectures that the full magnitude of these research results becomes apparent. One then comes to realize that what one meets in its germinal, seed form in 1917 had already expanded and taken root in two years' time in the later lectures with which Rudolf Steiner laid the foundation for the establishment of the first Waldorf School in Stuttgart in August 1919. The two lectures presented here are therefore an integral part of the wellspring from which Waldorf education flows.

Henry Barnes

• 1. The Case for Anthroposophy. Rudolf Steiner Press, 1970. (Selections from Von Seelenrätseln. Translated, arranged and with an Introduction by Owen Barfield.)