The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today we will characterise certain general principles of the art of education for the period between the change of teeth and puberty, passing on in the next lecture to more detailed treatment of single subjects and particular conditions which may arise.

When the child reaches his ninth or tenth year he begins to differentiate himself from his environment. For the first time there is a difference between subject and object; subject is what belongs to oneself, object is what belongs to the other person or other thing; and now we can begin to speak of external things as such, whereas before this time we must treat them as though these external objects formed one whole together with the child's own body. I showed yesterday how we speak of animals and plants, for instance, as though they were human beings who speak and act. The child thereby has the feeling that the outside world is simply a continuation of his own being.

But now when the child has passed his ninth or tenth year we must introduce him to certain elementary facts of the outside world, the facts of the plant and animal kingdoms. Other subjects I shall speak of later. But it is particularly in this realm that we must be guided by what the child's own nature needs and asks of us.

The first thing we have to do is to dispense with all the textbooks. For textbooks as they are written at the present time contain nothing about the plant and animal kingdoms which one can use in teaching. They are good for instructing grown up people about plants and animals, but we shall ruin the individuality of the child if we use them at school. And indeed there are no textbooks or handbooks today which show one how these things should be taught. Now the important point is really this.

If you put single plants in front of the child and demonstrate different things from them, you are doing something which has no reality. A plant by itself is not a reality. If you pull out a hair and examine it as though it were a thing by itself, that would not be a reality either. In ordinary life we say of everything of which we can sec the outlines with our eyes that it is real. But if you look at a stone and form some opinion about it, that is one thing; if you look at a hair or a rose, it is another. In ten years' time the stone will be exactly as it is now, but in two days the rose will have changed. The rose is only a reality together with the whole rosebush. The hair is nothing in itself, but is only a reality when considered with the whole head, as part of the whole human being. Now if you go out into the fields and pull up plants, it is as though you had torn out the hair of the earth. For the plants belong to the earth just in the same way as the hair belongs to the organism of the human being. And it is nonsense to examine a hair by itself as though it could suddenly grow anywhere of its own accord.

It is just as foolish to take a botanical tin and bring home plants to be examined by themselves. This has no relation to reality, and such a method cannot lead one to a right knowledge of nature or of the human being.

Here we have a plant (see drawing) but this alone is not the plant, for there also belongs to it the soil beneath it spread out on all sides, maybe a very long way. There are some plants which send out little roots a very long way. And when you realise that the small clod of earth containing the plant belongs to a much greater area of soil around it, then you will see how necessary it is to manure the earth in order to promote

healthy plant growth. Something else is living besides the actual plant; this part here (below the line in drawing) lives with it and belongs to the plant; the earth lives with the plant.

There are some plants which blossom in the spring, about May or June, and bear fruit in autumn. Then they wither and die and remain in the earth which belongs to them. But there are other plants which take the earth forces out of their environment. If this is the earth, then the root takes into itself the forces which are around it, and because it has done so these forces shoot upwards and a tree is formed.

For what is actually a tree? A tree is a colony of many plants. And it does not matter whether you are considering a hill which has less life in itself but which has many plants growing on it, or a tree trunk where the living earth itself has as it were withdrawn into the tree. Under no circumstances can you understand any plant properly if you examine it by itself.

If you go (preferably on foot) into a district in which there are definite geological formations, let us say red sand, and look at the plants there, you will find that most of them have reddish-yellow flowers. The flowers belong to the soil. Soil and plant make up a unity, just as your head and your hair also make a unity.

Therefore you must not teach Geography and Geology by themselves, and then Botany separately. That would be absurd. Geography must be taught together with a description of the country and observation of the plants, for the earth is an organism and the plants are like the hair of this organism. The child must be able to see that the earth and the plants belong together, and that each portion of soil bears those plants which belong to it.

Thus the only right way is to speak of the plants in connection with the earth, and to give the child a clear feeling that the earth is a living being that has hair growing on it. The plants are the hair of the earth. People speak of the earth as having the force of gravity. This is spoken of as belonging to the earth. But the plants with their force of growth belong to the earth just as much. The earth and the plants are no more separate entities than a man and his hair would be. They belong together just as the hair on the head belongs to the man.

If you show a child plants out of a botanical tin and tell him their names, you will be teaching something which is quite unreal. This will have consequences for his whole life, for this kind of plant knowledge will never give him an understanding, for example, of how the soil must be treated, and of how it must be manured, made living by the manure that is put into it. The child can only gain an understanding of how to cultivate the land if he knows how the soil is really part of the plant. The men of our time have less and less conception of reality, the so-called “practical” people least of all, for they are really all theoretical as I showed you in our first lecture, and it is just because men have no longer any idea of reality that they look at everything in a disintegrated, isolated way.

Thus it has come about that in many districts during the last fifty or sixty years all agricultural products have become decadent. Not long ago there was a Conference on Agriculture in Central Europe, on which occasion the agriculturists themselves admitted that crops are now becoming so poor that there is no hope of their being suitable for human consumption in fifty years' time.

Why is this so? It is because people do not understand how to make the soil living by means of manure. It is impossible that they should understand it if they have been given conceptions of plants as being something in themselves apart from the earth. The plant is no more an object in itself than a hair is. For if this were so, you might expect it to grow just as well in a piece of wax or tallow as in the skin of the head. But it is only in the head that it will grow.

In order to understand how the earth is really a part of plant life you must find out what kind of soil each plant belongs to; the art of manuring can only be arrived at by considering earth and plant world as a unity, and by looking upon the earth as an organism and the plant as something that grows with this organism.

Thus a child feels, from the very start, that he is standing on a living earth. This is of great significance for his whole life. For think what kind of conception people have today of the origin of geological strata. They think of it as one layer deposited upon another. But what you see as geological strata is only hardened plants, hardened living matter. It is not only coal that was formerly a plant (having its roots more in water than in the firm ground and belonging completely to the earth) but also granite, gneiss and so on were originally of plant and animal nature.

This too one can only understand by considering earth and plants as one whole. And in these things it is not only a question of giving children knowledge but of giving them also the right feelings about it. You only come to see that this is so when you consider such things from the point of view of Spiritual Science.

You may have the best will in the world. You may say to yourself that the child must learn about everything, including plants, by examining them. At an early age then I will encourage him to bring home a nice lot of plants in a beautiful tin box. I will examine them all with him for here is something real. I firmly believe that this is a reality, for it is an object lesson, but all the time you are looking at something which is not a reality at all. This kind of object-lesson teaching of the present day is utter nonsense.

This way of learning about plants is just as unreal as though it were a matter of indifference whether a hair grew in wax or in the human skin. It cannot grow in wax. Ideas of this kind are completely contradictory to what the child received in the spiritual worlds before he descended to the earth. For there the earth looked quite different. This intimate relationship between the mineral earth kingdom and the plant world was then something that the child's soul could receive as a living picture. Why is this so? It is because, in order that the human being may incarnate at all, he has to absorb something which is not yet mineral but which is only on the way to becoming mineral, namely the etheric element. He has to grow into the element of the plants, and this plant world appears to him as related to the earth.

This series of feelings which the child experiences when he descends from the pre-earthly world into the earthly world—this whole world of richness is made confused and chaotic for him if it is introduced to him by the kind of Botany teaching which is usually pursued, whereas the child rejoices inwardly if he hears about the plant world in connection with the earth.

In a similar manner we must consider how to introduce our children to the animal world. Even a superficial glance will show us that the animal does not belong to the earth. It runs over the earth and can be in this place or that, so the relationship of the animal to the earth is quite different from that of the plant. Something else strikes us about the animal.

When we come to examine the different animals which live on the earth, let us say according to their soul qualities first of all, we find cruel beasts of prey, gentle lambs or animals of courage. Some of the birds are brave fighters and we find courageous animals amongst the mammals too. We find majestic beasts. like the lion. In fact, there is the greatest variety of soul qualities, and we characterise each single species of animal by saying that it has this or that quality. We call the tiger cruel, for cruelty is his most important and significant quality. We call the sheep patient. Patience is his most outstanding characteristic. We call the donkey lazy, because although in reality he may not be so fearfully lazy yet his whole bearing and behaviour somehow reminds us of laziness. The donkey is especially lazy about changing his position in life. If he happens to be in a mood to go slowly, nothing will induce him to go quickly. And so every animal has its own particular characteristics.

But we cannot think of human beings in this way. We cannot think of one man as being only gentle and patient, another only cruel and a third only brave. We should find it a very one-sided arrangement if people were distributed over the earth in this way. You do sometimes find such qualities developed in a one-sided way, but not to the same extent as in animals. Rather what we find with a human being, especially when we are to educate him, is that there are certain things and facts of life which he must meet with patience or again with courage, and other things and situations even maybe with a certain cruelty, although this last should be administered in homeopathic doses. Or in face of certain situations a human being may show cruelty simply out of his own natural development, and so on.

Now what is really the truth about these soul qualities of man and the animals? With man we find that he can really possess all qualities, or at least the sum of all the qualities that the animals have between them (each possessing a different one). Man has a little of each one. He is not as majestic as the lion, but he has something of majesty within him. He is not as cruel as the tiger but he has a certain cruelty. He is not as patient as the sheep, but he has some patience. He is not as lazy as the donkey—at least everybody is not—but he has some of this laziness in him. Every human being has these things within him. When we think of this matter in the right way we can say that man has within him the lion-nature, sheep-nature, tiger-nature and donkey-nature. He bears all these within him, but harmonised. All the qualities tone each other down, as it were, and man is the harmonious flowing together, or, to put it more academically, the synthesis of all the different soul qualities that the animal possesses. Man reaches his goal if in his whole being he has the proper dose of lion-ness, sheep-ness, tiger-ness, the proper dose of donkey-ness and so on, if all this is present in his nature in the right proportions and has the right relationship to everything else.

There is a beautiful old Greek proverb which says: If courage be united with cleverness it will bring thee blessing, but if it goes alone ruin will follow. If man were only courageous with the courage of certain birds which are continually fighting, he would not bring much blessing into his life. But if his courage is so developed in his life that it unites with cleverness—the cleverness which in the animal is only one-sided—then it takes its right place in man's being.

With man, then, it is a question of a synthesis, a harmonising of everything that is spread out in the animal kingdom. We can express it like this: here is one kind of animal (I am representing it diagrammatically), here a second, a third, a fourth and so on, all the possible kinds of animals on the earth. How are they related to man?

The relationship is such that man has, let us say, some

thing of this first kind of animal (see drawing), but modified, not in its entirety. Then comes another kind, but again not the whole of it. This leads us to the next, and to yet another, so that man contains all the animals within him. The animal kingdom is a man spread out, and man is the animal kingdom drawn together; all the animals are united synthetically in man, and if you analyse a human being you get the whole animal kingdom.

This is also the case with the external human form. Imagine a human face and cut away part of it here (see drawing) and

pull another part forwards here, so that this latter part is not harmonised with the whole face, while the forehead recedes; then you get a dog's head. If you form the head in a somewhat different way, you get a lion's head, and so on.

And so with all his other organs you can find that man, even in his external figure, has what is distributed amongst the animals in a modified harmonised form.

Think for instance of a waddling duck; you have a relic of this waddling part between your fingers, only shrunken. Thus everything which is to be found in the animal kingdom even in external form is present also in the human kingdom. Indeed this is the way man can find his relationship to the animal kingdom, by coming to know that the animals, taken all together, make up man. Man exists on earth, eighteen hundred millions of him, of greater or less value, but he exists again as a giant human being. The whole animal kingdom is a giant human being, not brought together in a synthesis but analysed out into single examples.

It is as though your were made of elastic which could be pulled out in varying degrees in different directions; if you were thus stretched out in one direction more than in others, one kind of animal would be formed. Or again if the upper part of your face were to be pushed up and stretched out (if it were sufficiently elastic) then another animal would arise. Thus man bears the whole animal kingdom within him.

This is how the history of the animal kingdom used to be taught in olden times. This was a right and healthy knowledge, which has now been lost, though only comparatively recently. In the eighteenth century for instance people still knew quite well that if the olfactory nerve of the nose were sufficiently large and extended backwards then you would have a dog. But if the olfactory nerve is shrivelled up and only a small portion remains, the rest of it being metamorphosed, then there arises the nerve that we need for our intellectual life.

For observe how a dog smells; the olfactory nerve is extended backwards from the nose. A dog smells the special peculiarity of each thing. He does not make a mental picture of it, but everything comes to him through smell. He has not will and imagination but he has will and a sense of smell for everything. A wonderful sense of smell! A dog does not find the world less interesting than a man does. A man can make mental images of it all, a dog can smell it all. We experience various smells, do we not, both pleasant and unpleasant, but a dog has many kinds of smell; just think how a dog specialises in his sense of smell. Nowadays we have police dogs. They are led to the place where someone has pilfered something. The dog immediately takes up the scent of the man, follows it and finds him. All this is due to the fact that there is really an immense variety, a whole world of scents for a dog. The bearer of these scents is the olfactory nerve that passes backwards into the head, into the skull.

If we were to draw the olfactory nerve of a dog, which passes through his nose, we should have to draw it going backwards. In man only a little piece at the bottom of it has remained. The rest of it is present in a morphosed form and lies here below the forehead. It is a metamorphosed, transformed olfactory nerve, and with this organ we form our mental images. For this reason we cannot smell like a dog, but we can make mental pictures. We bear within us the dog with his sense of smell, only this latter has been transformed into something else. And so it is with all animals.

We must get this clear in our minds. Now a German philosopher called Schopenhauer wrote a book called The World as Will and Idea. But this book is only intended for human beings. If a dog of genius had written it he would have called it The World as Will and Smell and I am convinced that this book would have been much more interesting than Schopenhauer's.

You must look at the various forms of the animals and describe them, not as though each animal existed in an isolated way, but so that you always arouse in the children the thought: This is a picture of man. If you think of a man altered in one direction or another, simplified or combined, then you have an animal. If you take a lower animal, for example, a tortoise, and put it on the top of a kangaroo, then you have something like a hardened head on the top, for that is the tortoise form, and the kangaroo below stands for the limbs of the human being.

And so everywhere in the wide world you can find some connection between man and the different animals.

You are laughing now about these things. That does not matter at all. It js quite good to laugh about them in the lessons also, for there is nothing better you can bring into the classroom than humour, and it is good for the children to laugh too, for if they always see the teacher come in with a terribly long face they will be tempted to make long faces themselves and to imagine that that is what one has to do when one sits at a desk in a classroom. But if humour is brought in and you can make the children laugh this is the very best method of teaching. Teachers who are always solemn will never achieve anything with the children.

So here you have the principle of the animal kingdom as I wished to put it before you. We can speak of the details later if we have time. But from. this you will see that you can teach about the animal kingdom by considering it as a human being spread out into all the animal forms.

This will give the child a very beautiful and delicate feeling. For as I have pointed out to you the child comes to know of the plant world as belonging to the earth, and the animals as belonging to himself. The child grows with all the kingdoms of the earth. He no longer merely stands on the dead ground of the earth, but he stands on the living ground, for he feels the earth as something living. He gradually comes to think of himself standing on the earth as though he were standing on some great living creature, like a whale. This is the right feeling. This alone can lead him to a really human feeling about the whole world.

So with regard to the animal the child comes to feel that all animals are related to man, but that man has something that reaches out beyond them all, for he unites all the animals in himself. And all this idle talk of the scientists about man descending from an animal will be laughed at by people who have been educated in this way. For they will know that man unites within himself the whole animal kingdom, he is a synthesis of all the single members of it.

As I have said, between the ninth and tenth year the human being comes to the point of discriminating between himself as subject and the outer world as object. He makes a distinction between himself and the world around him. Up to this time one could only tell fairy stories and legends in which the stones and plants speak and act like human beings, for the child did not yet differentiate between himself and his environment. But now when he does thus differentiate we must bring him into touch with his environment on a higher level. We must speak of the earth on which we stand in such a way that he cannot but feel how earth and plant belong together as a matter of course. Then, as I have shown you, the child will also get practical ideas for agriculture. He will know that the farmer manures the ground because he needs a certain life in it for one particular species of plant. The child will not then take a plant out of a botanical tin and examine it by itself, nor will he examine animals in an isolated way, but he will think of the whole animal kingdom as the great analysis of a human being spread out over the whole earth. Thus he, a human being, comes to know himself as he stands on the earth, and how the animals stand in relationship to him.

It is of very great importance that from the tenth year until towards the twelfth year we should awaken these thoughts of plant-earth and animal-man. Thereby the child takes his place in the world in a very definite way, with his whole life of soul, body and spirit.

All this must be brought to him through the feelings in an artistic way, for it is through learning to feel how plants belong to the earth and to the soil that the child really becomes clever and intelligent. His thinking will then be in accordance with nature. Through our efforts to show the child how he is related to the animal world, he will see how the force of will which is in all animals lives again in man, but differentiated, in individualised forms suited to man's nature. All animal qualities, all feeling of form which is stamped into the animal nature lives in the human being. Human will receives its impulses in this way and man himself thereby takes his place rightly in the world according to his own nature.

Why is it that people go about in the world today as though they had lost their roots? Anyone can see that people do not walk properly nowadays; they do not step properly but drag their legs after them. They learn differently in their sport, but there again there is something unnatural about it. But above all they have no idea how to think nor what to do with their lives. They know well enough what to do if you put them to the sewing machine or the telephone, or if an excursion or a world tour is being arranged. But they do not know what to do out of themselves because their education has not led them to find their right place in the world. You cannot put this right by coining phrases about educating people rightly; you can only do it if in the concrete details you can find the right way of speaking of the plants in their true relationship to the soil and of the animals in their rightful place by the side of man. Then the human being will stand on the earth as he should and will have the right attitude towards the world. This must be achieved in all your lessons. It is important—nay, it is essential.

Now it will always be a question of finding out what the development of the child demands at each age of life. For this we need real observation and knowledge of man. Think once again of the two things of which I have spoken, and you will see that the child up to its ninth or tenth year is really demanding that the whole world of external nature shall be made alive, because he does not yet see himself as separate from this external nature; therefore we shall tell the child fairy tales, myths and legends. We shall invent something ourselves for the things that are in our immediate environment, in order that in the form of stories, descriptions and pictorial representations of all kinds we may give the child in an artistic form what he himself finds in his own soul, in the hidden depths which he brings with him into the world. And then after the ninth or tenth year, let us say between the tenth and twelfth year, we introduce the child to the animal and plant world as we have described.

We must be perfectly clear that the conception of causality, of cause and effect, that is so popular today has no place at all in what the child needs to understand even at this age, at the tenth or eleventh year. We are accustomed nowadays to consider everything in its relation to cause and effect. The education based on Natural Science has brought this about. But to talk to children under eleven or twelve about cause and effect, as is the practice in the everyday life of today, is like talking about colours to someone who is colour blind. You will be speaking entirely beyond the child if you speak of cause and effect in the style that is customary today. First and foremost he needs living pictures where there is no question of cause and effect. Even after the tenth year these conceptions should only be brought to the child in the form of pictures.

It is only towards the twelfth year that the child is ready to hear causes and effects spoken of. So that those branches of knowledge which have principally to do with cause and effect in the sense of the words used today—the lifeless sciences such as Physics, etc.—should not really be introduced into the curriculum until between the eleventh and twelfth year. Before this time one should not speak to the children about minerals, Physics or Chemistry. None of these things is suitable for him before this age.

Now with regard to History, up to the twelfth year the child should be given pictures of single personalities and well-drawn graphic accounts of events that make History come alive for him, not a historical review where what follows is always shown to be the effect of what has gone before, the pragmatic method of regarding History, of which humanity has become so proud. This pragmatic method of seeking causes and effects in History is no more comprehensible to the child than colours to the colour-blind. And moreover one gets a completely wrong conception of life as it runs its course if one is taught everything according to the idea of cause and effect. I should like to make this clear to you in a picture.

Imagine a river flowing along like this (see drawing). It has

waves. But it would not always be a true picture if you make the wave (C) come out of the wave (B), and this again out of the wave (A), that is, if you say that C is the effect of B and B of A; there are in fact all kinds of forces at work below, which throw these waves up. So it is in History. What happens in 1910 is not always the effect of what happened in 1909, and so on. But quite early on the child ought to have a feeling for the things that work in evolution out of the depths of the course of time, a feeling of what throws the waves up, as it were. But he can only get that feeling if you postpone the teaching of cause and effect until later on, towards the twelfth year, and up to this time give him only pictures.

Here again this makes demands on the teacher's fantasy. But he must be equal to these demands, and he will be so if he has acquired a knowledge of man for himself. This is the one thing needful.

You must teach and educate out of the very nature of man himself, arid for this reason education for moral life must run parallel to the actual teaching which I have been describing to you. So now in conclusion I should like to add a few remarks on this subject, for here too we must read from the nature of the child how he should be treated. If you give a child of seven a conception of cause and effect you are working against the development of his human nature, and punishments also are often opposed to the real development of the child's nature.

In the Waldorf School we have had some very gratifying experiences of this. What is the usual method of punishment in schools? If a child has done something badly he has to “stay in” and do some Arithmetic for instance. Now in the Waldorf School we once had rather a strange experience: three or four children were told that they had done their work badly and must therefore stay in and do some sums. Whereupon the others said: “But we want to stay and do sums too!” For they had been brought up to think of Arithmetic as something nice to do, not as something which is used as a punishment. You should not arouse in the children the idea that staying in to do sums is something bad, but that it is a good thing to do. That is why the whole class wanted to stay and do sums. So that you must not choose punishments that cannot be regarded as such if the child is to be educated in a healthy way in his soul life.

To take another example: Dr. Stein, a teacher at the Waldorf School, often thought of very good educational methods on the spur of the moment. He once noticed that his pupils were passing notes under the desk. They were not attending to the lesson, but were writing notes and passing them under their desks to their neighbours who then wrote notes in reply. Now Dr. Stein did not scold them for writing notes and say: “I shall have to punish you,” or something of that sort, but quite suddenly he began to speak about the Postal System and give them a lecture on it. At first the children were quite mystified as to why they were suddenly being given a lesson on the Postal System, but then they realised why it was being done. This subtle method of changing the subject made the children feel ashamed. They began to feel ashamed of themselves and stopped writing notes simply on account of the thoughts about the postal system which the teacher had woven into the lesson.

Thus to take charge of a class it is necessary to have an inventive talent. Instead of simply following stereotyped traditional methods you must actually be able to enter into the whole being of the child, and you must know that in certain cases improvement, which is really what we are aiming at in punishment, is much more likely to ensue if the children are brought to a sense of shame in this way without drawing special attention to it or to any one child; this is far more effective than employing some crude kind of punishment. If the teacher follows such methods as these he will stand before the children active in spirit, and much will be balanced out in the class which would otherwise be in disorder.

The first essential for a teacher is self-knowledge. If for instance a child makes blots on his book or on his desk because he has got impatient or angry with something his neighbour has done, then the teacher must never shout at the child for making blots and say: “You mustn't get angry! Getting angry is a thing that a good man never does! A man should never get angry but should bear everything calmly. If I see you getting angry once more, why then—then I shall throw the inkpot at your head!”

If you educate like this (which is very often done) you will accomplish very little. The teacher must always keep himself in hand, and above all must never fall into the faults which he is blaming his children for. But here you must know how the unconscious part of the child's nature works. A man's conscious intelligence, feeling and will are all only one part of his soul life; in the depths of human nature, even in the child, there holds sway the astral body with its wonderful prudence and wisdom.¹

Now it always fills me with horror to see a teacher standing in his class with a book in his hand teaching out of the book, or a notebook in which he has noted down the questions he wants to ask the children and to which he keeps referring. The child does not appear to notice this with his upper consciousness, it is true; but if you are aware of these things then you will see that the children have subconscious wisdom and say to themselves: He does not himself know what I am supposed to be learning. Why should I learn what he does not know? This is always the judgment that is passed by the subconscious nature of children who are taught by their teacher out of a book.

Such are the imponderable and subtle things that are so extremely important in teaching. For as soon as the subconscious of the child, his astral nature, notices that the teacher himself does not know something he has to teach, but has to look it up in a book first, then the child considers it unnecessary that he should learn it either. And the astral body works with much more certainty than the upper consciousness of the child.

These are the thoughts I wished to include in today's lecture. In the next few days we will deal with special subjects and stages in the child's education.

• 1. For an elucidation of the “astral body” and other higher members of man's being, see Rudolf Steiner:The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy.

If, in the forthcoming lectures, we are to become acquainted with a few things in further detail, today we have to put the question: If music essentially is the flow of Melos, and if it is Melos in particular which should be expressed in the gestures of eurythmy, what then is the musical element as such, the music shown in eurythmy, meant to express?

Here we meet with two extremes. On the one hand it may be said that the melodic element is tending more and more towards what is thematic, towards the expression of something which is not in itself musical. I have often mentioned that, especially in recent times through a Wagnerian influence, as well as other influences, music on the one hand has become expression, expression of something that is not music. On the other hand, especially in the beginning of the age of Wagner, we also find pure, absolute music (the musical element as such, simply the weaving of musical sounds)—of which it was said (not without a certain justification) that it made music into a tonal arabesque, a progression of notes without content.

Naturally these are both extreme cases. To put forward the idea that music embodies nothing and is merely a tonal arabesque [37] is nonsense, utter nonsense. But such nonsense may very easily arise when there is no real understanding of where the essential musical element lies. It cannot lie in the notes themselves, as I have repeatedly emphasized. The person engaged in tone eurythmy has constantly to bear in mind the necessity for expressing in the movements, in the actual gestures themselves, that which lies between the notes, regarding the notes as merely giving him the occasion for the movement.

It may help you to carry out these gestures I have already indicated, with inner correctness, and the right inner feeling, if we make a certain basic provision. And the provision should consist that you, as eurythmists, regard the actual note, and in a certain sense the chord too, as that which pushes you into movement, causes you to move, and gives the impetus (Ruck: ‘jolt’) towards movement. You must continue the impetus between two notes and again regard the next note as the impetus which is given to you. In this way the movement will not express the note, and will not emphasize the note, but will express in the fullest possible way everything that lies between the notes and what comes to the fore, for instance, in the intervals. This is of great importance.

Now, why is there such a strong urge in our modern age to deviate from the purely musical realm? Something quite beautiful may sometimes result from this deviation from what is purely musical, but why is the urge to deviate from it so strong? It is because the contemporary person has gradually acquired an attitude of mind in which he is no longer able to dream, no longer able to meditate. He has nothing within to set him into movement, and wants to be set into movement from outside. But this being-set-into-movement from outside can never produce a musical mood. In order that modern civilization could furnish proof of its unmusical nature, it has laid hold of a drastic means to do so. It is really as though, in its concealed depths of soul, modern civilization wanted to provide the clearest proof that it is unmusical. And the proof is given in that it has produced the film. The film is the clearest proof that those who like it are unmusical. For the whole basis of films is that they only permit those things to be active in the soul which do not arise out of the inner life of the soul, but which are stimulated from outside [See Appendix 6].

It must be admitted that a lot of modern music-making [1924] tends to lay special stress upon that which is stimulated from outside. Attempts are made to imitate what is external—not by means of the pure melodic element, but rather by employing some subject matter as far remote from the melodic element as possible.

There is a very simple way, once more a kind of meditation (I recently spoke to you about the TAO meditation, which may be helpful to eurythmists in the way I have already explained), whereby you may gradually accustom yourself to seek for that which is musical even in what lies outside the musical sphere. It consists in comparing a sequence of vowels, such as: Lieb ist viel or Eden geht grell. There need be no meaning. Compare these for instance with: Gab man Manna or Ob Olaf warm war.

And now repeat such sentences one after the other:

Lieb ist viel ... Eden geht grell ... : does not resonate
Gab man Manna ... Ob Olaf warm war ... : musical

You will most certainly feel that the second examples are musical, whereas the first exist as if they would not resound. Just try to repeat these sentences one after the other: Lieb ist viel. Gab man Manna. Eden geht grell. Ob Olaf warm war. You will easily recognize that the vowels ah[1] and o lie within the musical sphere, whereas the vowels ee and a depart from it. This is an important matter for eurythmists to observe, for eurythmy must, of course, represent a wholeness. When in tone eurythmy you wish to express something very inward, the movements may be led over into ah or o, or likewise into oo. But the gestures of tone eurythmy may not readily be led over into e or a. Thus the sounds ah, o, oo may be employed in pieces of music for eurythmy in order to emphasize the mood, but a and ee should only be used when it is definitely intended to pass, at some point or other, out of the musical realm. This is important.

These things are of such a nature that we have to acquire a consciousness of them above all. It is interesting, for example, when we follow the German language through several centuries, to observe that it has gradually dropped many ah, o, and oo sounds, and has taken on many ee and a sounds. In other words, the German language has become progressively more unmusical in the course of centuries. (I am speaking now of the vowels, not of the intervals.)

It is really important to bear this in mind in tone eurythmy, and indeed in other eurythmy too. For the knowledge that the German language has a marked tendency towards a distorted phonetic imagination may be quite valuable. With the western Germanic languages this is even more the case. But all this rightly leads us to put the question: ‘What does music really express?’ This question cannot easily be answered by anyone who is unable to dream. For, you see, in very truth the poet, the artist, must basically be able to dream, to dream consciously—that is to say, to meditate. Either he must hold dream- pictures in recollection, or be able to find dream-pictures of the realities of the spiritual world.

But what does this mean? It means leaving behind everything that makes sense in the sensory world. Take a dream (I have often spoken of these matters). Take a dream: if we are to get at its nature, we must not look at it as an interpreter of dreams does. For the interpreter of dreams takes the dream's content. Anyone who really understands the nature of dreams does not take the dream's content, but considers whether the dream rises up in fear and calms down, whether the dream stirs up an inner uneasiness which is intensified to anxiety, ending perhaps in this anxiety, or whether there is a state of tension which is afterwards resolved. This is really the decisive thing in a dream. And in the description of spiritual processes this becomes even more necessary.

It is, of course, exceedingly difficult today to speak to humanity about the things which spiritual science has to impart. For instance, when I described the progression of world-evolution (Saturn, Sun, Moon and so on), people thought the very things important that were unimportant to me. It is certainly correct that the processes on Saturn were as I described them. But that is not the essential point. The essential point is the inner movement which is described. And I have always been most delighted when somebody said that he would like to compose in music what has been described in the evolution of Saturn, Sun and Moon. Of course, he would have to leave out some of it, leave out the colour element, as I described, the warmth phenomena, even the smells on Saturn (for apart from the ‘smelling-harmonium’ [38] we have no musical instrument functioning to smells, do we!). Even so, particularly Saturn evolution is such that its essence could be expressed quite well in music and could be composed. [39]

When anyone dreams, and (setting aside its content) takes the tension and relaxation, the culmination of the picture sequence, or the culmination of bliss when flying, and so on; if he takes all this movement and says: ‘I am quite indifferent to the meaning of the dream; for me it all depends on how its movements take place’—then the dream already is a piece of music, then you cannot write it down except in musical notation. Once you feel that the dream can only be written down in musical notation, then you are just beginning to understand the dream, I mean really to understand it by looking at it directly.

From this you will see that the musical element has content: not the thematic content, which is taken from the sensory world, but a content which appears everywhere when something is expressed in terms of the senses, but in such a manner that everything sensory can be left aside, revealing the essence of the matter. You have to treat the musical element precisely in this way. And the eurythmist has above all things to bear this strongly in mind. And he will bear it strongly in mind when he pays more attention than is usual in listening, when he pays attention to the sustained notes and the rests.

For the eurythmist, the sustained note (the pedal-point) and the rest are of special importance. And it is a serious question whether a pedal- point or anything that recalls in some way the sustained note (this really is of great importance) is being adequately treated. It will be adequately treated if, every time he or she comes to a held note, or to something which either is a pedal-point in germ, or might become such, the eurythmist carries out the eurythmy in the greatest possible calmness, emphasizing standing calmly, in other words not proceeding further in space as long as the sustained note is heard.

On the other hand, it is important for the eurythmist to penetrate inwardly into the musical significance of everything connected to the rest. And so it will be good to take an example. Here (see musical example) you have the opportunity of moving up after the descending mood, with a corresponding rest which even contains a bar line, something which may seem a contradiction, from the point of view of the eurythmist.

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I mention this because after what I just said it must appear contradictory to the eurythmist. I previously said that the bar line signifies a holding-on, doing the movement in yourself; that the transition from one motif to another signifies moving in space, if possible with a swinging movement—naturally suited to the notes in question. As a eurythmist you may say: ‘Now here I really do not know what to do. I am supposed to move forwards and yet at the same time remain standing.’ That is in fact just what you should do! You should move forwards two steps and remain standing between them. You should accomplish this when you want to express anything similar to this example, taken from Mozart's Piano Sonata in F major, where you can have a longer rest during which the bar line occurs—then you should move with a swing from one note to the other, but calmly stand still in yourself in the middle of this swinging movement, in the rest. Here you will see how you radically indicate, precisely through eurythmy, that the musical element lies between the notes, for in such a case it is the rest which you specially emphasize through eurythmy. It is this that is so very important.

And now consider I said on the one hand that when a note is sustained, you should try as far as possible to stand still, remaining within yourself. Now, the pedal-point, the sustained note, frequently lies in a second voice and of course it may be aesthetically expressed when the two parts are taken (as they always have to be) by two people, each moving a different form. In this way a very beautiful interplay (Variation) may result between the two people. When the one proceeds in the movement, the other remains standing with the sustained note. The movements are carried out so that the person remaining standing moves a shorter curve, during which time the person moving onwards in the form makes a fuller curve—and they re-encounter each other. In this way the whole thing is brought into a satisfactory movement, which on the one hand may be shown between the swinging over, between the interval (which may go as far as the rest), and on the other hand in the pedal-point or the sustained note in general.

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It is in this way that the actual quality of tone eurythmy has gradually to develop. Only when you feel things in this way will you be able to bring out the actual quality of tone eurythmy.

This shows you at the same time that music of several parts will essentially be expressed by a number of people moving a number of forms. The forms must be carried out in such a way that they really correspond to each other, just as the different voices correspond in the music itself.

When you further develop the feeling of which I have spoken (the realization that the musical element lies in the tension, relaxation, in the rising and falling of the movement), you will indeed have something which the music expresses. For music does not express that which creates the meaning of words, but it expresses the spiritual element itself living in the movement of musical sound. It is consequently specially important for eurythmists to pay great heed to what the movement expresses quite inwardly in the greatest sense, that is discord and concord. Now, you know, a composer will never make use of a discord unintentionally, and indeed music without discords is not really music, because it is without inner movement. Composers and musicians in general make use of discords. Concords are actually there in order to calm the discords, to bring the discord to some sort of completion.

In the experience of discords and concords something makes its appearance which approaches the mysteries of the world closer than we can put into words. Let us suppose that we hear a discordant phrase which resolves into a concord. Let us observe what the eurythmist does. He or she of course can bear in mind all that I have indicated, and shall possibly still indicate, with regard to forms. He or she will go on to a concord and may use as form the various intervals that I have indicated. But the transition from a discord to a concord, or vice versa, should be brought out in the presentation. It should be that the eurythmist, while moving on in a discord, at the moment of going over from a discord to a concord, must insert an abrupt movement (Ruck) into the movement itself.

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Something very significant is expressed in this way. By this means we express the fact that here, with the transition from discord to concord, or vice versa, something is brought about which the human being places outside of himself. What I have drawn above could also be drawn like this:

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Observe how I erase a small part. That is where you go back. You will feel that a small part has been erased. It is a passing over into the spiritual. When you erase a piece of your path you annul all musical sound [that is present] in the movement, and you indicate: ‘Something is present that is no longer possible to express in the sensory realm. Here I [the eurythmist] can only suggest the bounds to you [the onlooker]; your imagination must take you further.’

You see, it is only when we come so far in doing such things that we reach the point where the arts should be. Philistines may think, when they see something of this kind (see Fig. 15, drawing on the left), that it is a face. It is not a face; it is a line. A face is as follows: I must manage in such a way that no actual line is drawn, but a line, as it is, is allowed to arise out of the light and shade (see drawing on the right). Anyone who draws these lines, from the very moment he begins to draw, is no painter, indeed no artist at all. Only someone who allows the lines to arise either out of the colour, or out of the chiaroscuro [light and shade], is an artist.

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You can draw in a philistine fashion, like this:

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This represents the boundary between sea and sky. But in reality it does not exist! It is absolutely non-existent. The sky exists: blue. The sea exists: green. The boundary between them both comes about because they touch each other (see Fig. 17).

If you want to paint a house, surrounded as it is by air, leave room for your colours within the area which the air leaves free. The house will come about. That's what art has to work for! In this matter one can indeed sometimes reach a fine state of despair. [40]

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You see, such despair is very difficult for someone of today to understand. Now, many and various are the types of people who apply for teaching posts at the Waldorf School [Stuttgart], amongst them, teachers of drawing. They have certainly learned something (namely drawing) that is quite useless at the Waldorf School. They say: ‘I can draw.’ Indeed there is no such thing as drawing! It is damaging when children are taught to draw, for there really is no such thing as drawing.

When you reach the point of understanding this erasing of your line in eurythmy, you will also have reached the point when this understanding of the musical element in doing eurythmy really leads into the artistic realm. Thus whenever transitions occur, try (once again without being pedantic) to develop a movement which goes back over itself so that the onlooker is obliged to go back, so that he says to himself: ‘He or she was already further and is now going back.’ He will notice all this unconsciously, but he will at that moment be urged out of the sensory realm, to enter into the spiritual realm where everything to do with the senses is erased.

In this way you will discover the possibility of looking for the essential nature of eurythmic movement in the rest, (Pause: ‘rest’, ‘pause’), even bringing more and more into the rest. Let us once more consider our example (see Fig. 11). Here you have a transition which, in its note values, already presents a marked feeling of going-out-of-yourself, of going with your inner being out of your skin. With the interval of the fifth there is still the feeling of being just at the boundary of the skin.

The fifth is the human being. Going further, we actually pass over into what lies beyond the human realm, but in this case, because we are dealing with music, into the spiritual realm. If you achieve this emphasis of the rest by means of specially pronounced movement, and yet introduce into this movement a momentary calmness (as I have indicated), you will express the whole meaning of this ascending passage in a really satisfactory eurythmical way.

When you are practising, try to find examples of musical phrases containing long rests and very pronounced leaps in pitch, and then try to make the movement as characteristic as possible. This will result in a eurythmy perfectly adapted to the expression of instrumental music; I might say, a singing eurythmy. This will also affect your eurythmy as a whole. For by this means you will feel the very marked contrast which lies between the vowels and the consonants for eurythmic expression. Even if it is true that ee and a actually tend towards a distortion of phonetic imagination, they are nevertheless vowels, and remain within the sphere of music, whereas the consonants are merely noises and lead away from the musical realm.

I have also said that the consonants are really the apology for using the vowel sounds for something in the outer world. This will closely concern you, for in speech eurythmy it will cause you to introduce as much of the vowel element as possible into the consonants. This means, in other words, that you should try in eurythmy to make the consonants as short and the vowels as long as possible.

Now this is not what I wanted to impress on you (for this will arise from your feelings) that there must be a certain parallel between declamation and recitation, and eurythmy. What I do want you especially to take to heart is that for speech eurythmy, too, it is most important to bear in mind that it is also the task of the speaker not only to say something when he speaks, but at times to say something even more essential when he doesn't speak. I do not mean by this those dashes of which recent poets are so enamoured, presumably because they have so much spiritual matter to communicate that they are compelled to express it in continual dashes! I expect you are acquainted with an ironical poem by Morgenstern, consisting only of dashes. [41] It does not contain a single sound, not a single word—simply dashes. I do not mean these dashes, then, but rather the fact that, in order to bring out certain effects in a poem, it is absolutely necessary, just as necessary in declamation as in eurythmy, to understand how to make proper pauses.

Think of the hexameter, with its caesura, where a pause has to be made, and you will realize that something is actually said by means of the pause. Sometimes the pauses need only be short, but it is important that they should also be given their place in declamation and recitation. Imagine the phrase: Was hör ich draussen vor dem Tor was auf der Brücke schallen? recited without any pause—appalling!

Was hör' ich draussen vor dem Tor—
Was auf der Brücke schallen?

is correct. Now as eurythmists, when you are concerned with the expression of a rest, and in speech eurythmy too, the effect will be eminently correct and aesthetically good as well as intrinsically justified, if you cultivate the goingback-into-yourself (going back in the form) which you have been able to learn from tone eurythmy. So that at times even in the short pauses of speech eurythmy, this retracing, this erasing the form, should by all means be seen.

In conclusion I only want to add something which will serve to complete what was left out in the preceding lectures. It is this: You know that the keynote is best expressed by the position, or also by means of the step: position, step (as I explained in connection with the triad). Now imagine that you have to form the interval of the second. The second in music is something which actually does not quite express the musical element, but in which the musical element makes a beginning. It stands at the gateway of the musical realm. The second is a musical question. Thus it is necessary (and you will feel the necessity) when forming a second, which follows any keynote, that you as second (whilst the second follows from another note) strive to turn the palms of the hands upwards. Any sort of movement you like can be produced while trying to arrive with the palms of the hands turned upwards, when ascending from one note to the next, or just a movement upwards, straightening the palm of the hand. Of course you must see to it that the hand does not appear in this position beforehand. The important thing is always to acquire a view of the whole. Through this, it [the second] manifests itself

Now, on the basis of what I have said, we have still to arrange the next two sessions.

Notes:

1. Phonetic spelling, see p. xiv. (Translator's note.)

We have placed the Apocalypticer's concluding perspective before our souls. If we understand it correctly we see that this last perspective is described in a way which is in complete agreement with everything one can say about evolution from the viewpoint of the most exact spiritual science. We saw that the building of cultural phenomena and of the human body changed from a below upwards mode to an above downwards mode, and that this is reflected in the Apocalypse. At the end of the last lecture I pointed out that if one honestly tries to understand the Apocalypse one must become acquainted with the things which can be said about world evolution from the viewpoint of spiritual research.

However, we see that a meaning is incorporated in certain places in the Apocalypse which one will find one can only grasp if one goes into the knowledge of the human being which is found in Anthroposophy. This is definitely the case when one has to do with a revelation which is based on experiences of the spiritual world. Of course one has to be able to see that the images which are presented in the Apocalypse are revelations from the spiritual world. Here one will disregard the question as to whether the Apocalypticer would really have been able to present all of the details which we rediscover in his work in an intellectualistic way, that is, whether he understood them to that extent. For that is not important at all. The only important thing is whether he is a real seer. He looks into the things in the spiritual world, but it's not he who makes them true, they are true through their own content, and they have this content and reveal it through themselves and not through him. So that even outer, rationalistic experts could come and could prove: The one who gave us the Apocalypse had this or that amount of education, and one cannot really expect him to have had these wide perspectives of things through his own soul. I don't want to discuss whether the writer of the Apocalypse had them here; I: just want to point out that this is not important. We must place the Apocalypticer's pictures which are revelations of the spiritual world before; our soul and we must let their content work upon us.

Now we have the magnificent concluding picture of the new Jerusalem before us, which has the experiential backgrounds of which I spoke. We will do well to go backwards from this picture a little bit. Here we have the important passage where another magnificent picture appears before our soul, namely, that magnificent picture where the Apocalypticer sees what he calls heaven open, and where a power approaches him on a white horse of whom he speaks in such a way that we become aware: he doesn't just have the trichotomy or the threefoldedness of the Godhead in his intellectuality—he has it in his whole I human being. He speaks in such a way that he is really still aware with his whole soul that one has the three forms of the one God before one, and that if one places oneself outside of the physical world one can alternately speak of the one or the other of them, because they intermingle.

Of course, when they're put into the physical World one gets a picture of three persons, so that one has to distinguish between the Father God who underlies all facts of nature, including the ones which work into human nature, the Son God who has to do with everything which leads to freedom in the soul's experience and the Spirit God who lives in a spiritual, cosmic order which is far away from nature and foreign to nature. This is how sharply contoured the three persons of the Godhead appear here upon the physical plane.

Now when man crosses the threshold to the spiritual world, he gets into the condition which I described in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? where he splits up into three beings, so that thinking, feeling and willing become somewhat independent. However, if we go to higher worlds from the physical plane we see the triune Godhead approaching us ever more as a unity. And so of course, the Apocalypse must be read in this light. One shouldn't distinguish between the Father God, the Son God and the Spirit God as directly as one would do this in the physical world.

Thus the one who approaches us on a white horse in that magnificent Imagination is none other than the unified God. And in the form in which he is' the Son of God, we have to see Him more in the free soul development of human beings on earth. But now something very strange occurs, which is what makes the picture that comes before the concluding one seem very magnificent. It is quite natural and a matter of course that John sees heaven open—I will call the one who wrote the Apocalypse John—for the new thing which is descending from the spiritual world. The whole culture must be arranged in such a way that it comes down from the spiritual world to the physical world. Now if we place this before our soul correctly, then of course the condition which must precede this is that John looks into the spiritual world. But this means: heaven is opened for him. However, he wants to indicate a future situation which will exist for human beings. He's actually saying nothing less than the following.

Before that state of affairs will arise on earth where the spiritual ingredients for the building up of the new Jerusalem will sink down from the spiritual world and will be received by men—just as men previously raised material ingredients from the earth upwards—before this state will come, before men become aware that they must build from above downwards—as I said recently, he considers this state to be a real one—before this will come, the state of affairs where man is mainly engaged with his will will be replaced by another one where he is only concerned with knowledge and where he has to look into the spiritual world: heaven is opened. The one who underlies the beings of the world in a radiating and creative and sanctifying way appears. And now the significant reason which makes the picture so magnificent: He has a name written on him which is known to no one besides himself. That is very significant. When one comes to the place in the Apocalypse where this is written, one sees another clear sign that one is dealing with one of the greatest spiritual revelations. The name which is given to the ego varies considerably in various languages, but I have pointed to the spiritually trivial fact that the name for the ego can never be spoken by someone in such a way that it can be given to someone else. I cannot say I to someone else; this distinguishes the name of the self from all other names. They are given to objects, to either inner or outer objects. But when I say “I” in any language I can only say it to myself; I can only say it to another person if I have slipped into him—which must be a real spiritual process; but there is no need to speak about that now.

Now let's imagine the things which describe the self in various languages the self was not given a name in the older languages; it was in the verb. The ego was not a direct designation. One described oneself through what one did in a kind of demonstrative way, but no name for the self-existed. This name for the self of one's human being only began to be used later; it's a significant symbolic fact that the German word for I—“ich”—contains the initials of Jesus Christ. But now let's think of an enhancement of this fact that we have a name in our languages which every one can only say in connection with himself. The enhancement consists in what is now said in the Apocalypse—that He who comes down from the supersensible world has a name written on Himself where He not only is the only one who can use it to refer to Himself, but where He is the only one who understands it; no one else understands it.

Now just think that this Revealer approaches John showing him in a prophetic picture what will later occur for humanity. There He comes down in future times the one who has the name which He alone understands. What can all of this really mean? If one honestly wants to understand it, the whole thing seems to be meaningless at first. Why does He come, the one who is to bring the salvation of the world, the justice of the world all of this is written in the Apocalypse—, “who shall make faith and knowledge true;” not what the (King James version has: “was called Faithful and True”) but “who shall make faith and knowledge true.” This is really like hide-and-seek, for if He has an inscribed name which only He understands, what is that supposed to mean? It makes us ask a question which goes deeper. What is this really all about?

Imagine it quite vividly: He has a name which only He understands. How can we relate to this name? It should really acquire a significance for us; this name should really be able to live in us. How can this occur? It can occur if the being who understands this name becomes united with us and enters our own self, then this being in us will understand the name and we will understand it also. We will have Him in us and we will continually have the awareness of Christ in us. He is the only one who understands the things, which are connected with His being; but He understands them in us, and the Christ-insight of the Christ being in us gives the light which is rayed out in us, because He becomes this light in us, in our own being. It will be an insight which dwells in men.

You see, something has occurred thereby. The first thing which has occurred is an intended, necessary consequence of the Mystery of Golgotha. This being who went through the Mystery of Golgotha, this being who must enter us, so that we comprehend the world with his understanding and not with our understanding, this being wears a garment which is sprinkled with blood, the blood of Golgotha. And we take in this picture. However, John the Apocalypticer tells us that this garment which is sprinkled with the blood of Golgotha has a name. This is not the same name he was talking about before; this is the name of the garment which is sprinkled with blood. And the name of this vesture dipped in blood is the logos of God, the Logos, God, the word of God. Thus the one who should live in us and should give the light in us through his own understanding fills us with the word of God.

The pagans read the word of God in natural phenomena. They had to receive it through outer manifestations. Christians must receive the word of God or the Creative word by taking the Christ into themselves. The time will come when all human beings who take Christianity into their souls in an honest way will know through the course of the events that the word of God is with Christ, and that this word of God has its seed in the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha and of the garment which is sprinkled with blood. Thus we have the Christ, enclosed in the Mystery of Golgotha in the language of the Apocalypticer.

However, a third thing appears. Christ in three forms: firstly, through himself, secondly through his garment, and thirdly through the deeds which he does for men on earth. Here again a condition is described which must set in, and which will of course not begin in such a way that one can point to a particular year but Christian development must move in that direction.

The third thing that our attention is drawn to is the sword with which he works, which is the sword of his will, the sword of his deeds, the sword of what he has done among human beings upon earth by living in them. But what he's doing now, what he does in his comings and goings, as it were, bears the third name: King of all Kings, Lord of all Lords. That is the third form. What is the nature of a king or the nature of a lord? If we go into the real inner meaning of the Latin word dominus, we arrive at what linguistic usage indicates in this case, quite independently of spiritual investigation: A lord is someone who is designated to give guidance to some other being on earth or in the whole world. 3ut how long will external lords be necessary upon earth? How long will one need the commands of outer lords upon earth and even the commands of external spiritual lords above the earth? Until that point in time when Christ lives in men with the name which only he understands. Then everyone will be able to follow Christ in his own being and in his own soul. Then everyone will try to realize in himself what man's will wants to realize out of inner love. Then the Lord of lords and King of kings will live in each individual.

Seen from an inner spiritual viewpoint, this is really the time in which we're living now. The fact that we're living in it is concealed by the fact that men are continuing to live in their old ruts, and they're really denying this indwelling of the Christ as much as possible, denying it as much as possible, they're denying it as much as possible in all fields. One can certainly say that a great deal exists in a large number of people today which is preparing in the right way for the etheric appearance of the Christ, who is a being that came down from the divine world. But men must prepare themselves by finding the source of their actions and deeds in themselves.

Therewith we really touch upon a difficulty with the present-day activities of priests out of the spirit of the Apocalypse. A priest should guide and direct in a certain sense. A priest has the faithful before him, and his priestly dignity presupposes that he, the leader, is a king over the ones he is to lead' in a certain way. He is the giver of the sacraments; he is the minister. On the other hand, we live in a time where men have the potential to take in the Christ to such an extent that they can become their own leaders ever more.

You see, this is the situation which the one who wants to become a priest gets into today. And yet the ordination of priests is fully justified today, completely justified. It's fully justified because although men really do bear something in them as an essence, it must be brought out of them, it must really be brought out of them. And one really needs everything which lies behind priestly dignity in order to bring out what is in human beings today. For we live in a time which really requires something quite definite. The outer world cannot really completely confront what is required here. For the outer world must deal with men insofar as they are bearers of a physical body. But it would be a terrible prospect if men—the way they are through our civilization, which hasn't arrived at the standpoint on which man is standing—would live over into the next earth life in this form.

We know that one tries to avoid this in the Anthroposophical sphere. Human souls are offered something whereby they are supposed to live over into the next incarnation with the things men are supposed to take in today. But this must become universally human. Men must develop an ego or an individuality with which they can live over into the next incarnation. This is only possible if what is given through the grace of sacrifice, through the grace of a sacrament is added to men's experiences. This doesn't separate men from their karma but it does separate them from what is clinging to them in a very intensive way today. Human beings are walking around with masks on. They're going around masked. And it can lead to tragic conflicts if the need arises at some point to really see human beings and their individualities.

Such a tragic conflict arises with Hölderlin, who once said: when he looks around in the world he sees Germans, Frenchmen, Turks and Englishmen, but no human beings, young, mature and old people but no human beings. And he enumerates more types. Men bear an extra-human stamp, as it were.

We need a priestly activity today which speaks to human beings as human beings and which cultivates humanity. Of course none of the present-day confessions can really do this. Just consider how dependent the confessions are. The community for Christian renewal must get beyond the dependency of these confessions. It must do this through its own destiny. No one who grows out of Anthroposophy is in the same position that priests are. That is a quite special position. And it is perhaps quite right to point to what is present here out of the spirit of the Apocalypse. Just consider that in every other activity which grows out of Anthroposophy today, people become dependent upon the outer world in some way through the powers that be.

If someone becomes a teacher out of Anthroposophy, one can see the tremendous obstacles which are put in their way. People deceive themselves about this. But we won't get a second Waldorf school, because they will set up the condition everywhere that all the teachers one hires must be approved by the state in some way. The Waldorf School could only come into existence because we started at a time when no such school law existed in Württemberg yet.

Take doctors: we cannot make doctors out of people in the Anthroposophical movement from scratch without further ado. To be sure, we could make doctors. But they wouldn't be recognized, they would not be accredited. To some extent we even have this difficulty in artistic things. It won't be very long before things will tend in the direction of what is happening in Russia, and people will demand a stamp from the state. A priest who grows out of the Anthroposophical Society is the only one who can strip everything off, as it were. It's all right if he learned something, but he throws off everything in his work. He's really laying the first foundation stone of the new Jerusalem in the theology which he supports; for he represents a theology which doesn't have to be recognized by anyone besides himself. That is the important thing.

You are the only ones who are in this position. You should also feel that you are in this position, and you will feel the specific quality of your priestly dignity. If one is dealing with a country like Russia they can drive out certain kinds of priests, but people in such a country will never do anything which would make it necessary for priests to get an official stamp of approval. For one will either leave priests the way they are, or one will not want them, which has already been realized in Russia as far as the tendency goes. Thus priests are the first ones who will be able to feel the approach of the new Jerusalem, the approach of the indwelling Christ, the Christ who becomes the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords.

Hence it is very good for a priest to dwell on this passage \in the Apocalypse, to dwell on it with an ardent heart and to develop the entire enthusiasm of his priestly soul which he should develop at this place in the Apocalypse. For the Apocalypse should not be a teaching; the Apocalypse should be life which works in each of our souls. We should feel that we are united with the Apocalypse. We should be able to place what we're working and living with into the stream of prophetic things in the Apocalypse. Here we see ourselves gathered around John the Apocalypticer, who has the vision Heaven has been opened, the one who only understands his name himself comes, the one whose garment bears the name the “word of God,” the one who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords—he comes. The priesthood which gathers around the John who sees this, the priesthood that unites itself with the cultic rite which has been drawn from the spiritual world, that raises up the transubstantiation in the sense of the Holy Spirit again, that has the new act of, consecration of man, the transformed old one which has taken the valid things from the old one, but which has taken on the form which flows out of the spiritual world today—this priesthood may gather around John the Apocalypticer, who looks up into the opened heaven.

For we are permitted to look at the inauguration which took placed in the room which the fire then took hold of—, we should look at it in the light which rays out here when heaven opens—the white horse comes out with the one who sits upon it and who only knows his name himself, who must be incorporated into us if this name is to mean something to us, and who has the other characteristics which are mentioned. This is how one should understand the Apocalypse, for the Apocalypse must be understood in a living way and not just with the top of one's head.

However, I would like to say that very deep wisdom is connected with the magnificent Imagination that appears here. Just consider what appears in close proximity to this significant vision, as it were. The reader is told how active the beast that I described is—the beast which induces human beings to go down from the spiritual to the physical, which the Apocalypticer divided into three stages; the beast whose one form is a materialistic way of living and not just a materialistic view of life. However, the Apocalypticer refers to two points in time. He tells us how the beast is overcome, and on the other hand he tells us that the adversary of mankind, the stronger adversary of mankind, is bound for a thousand years and is then released again for a short time. Thus we really have to do with two adversaries of the good principle, with the beast and with what is traditionally referred to as Satan.

Now the beast is overcome with respect to the outer physical world, in the sense that a spiritual world view can always be opposed to materialism. And Satan is chained at the present time in a certain way. But he will be released again. Satan is fettered, and anyone who sees through the important things in evolution knows that he is fettered. For if Satan was not chained at the present time and if everything which could really pour out the vials of wrath would appear—if Satan was not bound,—the connection between the materialistic way of living and the materialistic view of life which is present on earth today would show up in the outer world in a ghastly way. Then the people who proclaim materialism as a truth with the deepest inner cynicism today would arouse such a desire in the unbound Satan that one would see this extraction of the materialistic view and a materialistic way of living and their acquisition by Ahrimanic powers, one would see this as the most horrible and most terrible diseases.

If Satan was not bound one would not only have to speak of materialism as a view and a way of living, one would have to speak of materialism as the worst kind of a disease. Instead of this people go through the world with the cynicism and frivolity of materialism and even with religious materialism, and nothing happens to them. But the only reason nothing happens to them is because Satan is bound and the Godhead still makes it possible for one to come to spiritual things without succumbing to Satan. If Satan was here, many a teacher who is standing in some confession and is infected by materialism would be a terrible, gruesome sight for mankind. The idea which arises when one points to the possible disease of materialism, to the leprosy of materialism which would really be there if Satan were not bound, if one points to this, it certainly gives rise to a terrible mental image.

However, anyone who is aware of his spiritual responsibility towards knowledge today will not make use of such an idea within any other context than the context of the Apocalypse. I myself would not speak of the leprosy of materialism in any other context than in the one I'm speaking of it here, where I have to connect things with the Apocalypse and where the one who becomes familiar with the ideas of the Apocalypse has these gruesome pictures before him, which however definitely correspond to the real state of the spiritual affairs.

The Apocalypse should not only permeate, our life, it should also permeate our words. If we take in the Apocalypse it is not only an enlivening element in priests' work, it is something that, permits us to point to things which we otherwise point to in exoteric life. The Apocalypse should not only live with our ego, if we want to understand it, the Apocalypse also wants to speak in our words: and if you are real priests there will be some things which you will say to each other when you are in a room with other priests so that they will live in you and remain amongst yourselves. Then you will gain the strength to say the right words when you are standing before your faithful followers.

Priests are priests today because they are the first ones who may speak about the Apocalypse freely amongst themselves. This Apocalypse is a priestly thing, that is, it is a priests' book which is appended to the Gospels. You will become priests all the more, the more you find your way into the inner spirit of the Apocalypse. We will speak about this some more tomorrow.

In view of what has already been said here, I will only have a few supplementary comments. Above all, I would like to point out that anyone who is familiar with the essence of our anthroposophical movement is also deeply convinced that we must work on the basis of social progress in the present day. But despite this conviction, which, as I believe, should have become sufficiently widespread in the course of our almost twenty years of anthroposophical work, despite this conviction, work such as that characterized to you today and already - at least for the time being - set in motion would hardly have become necessary, or perhaps we should say, hardly have been considered, if from any other side the possibility would have offered itself to take into account what is necessary for humanity today in the field of work, concerning the connection between economic, legal and spiritual life, if it had been shown that the necessity of the time would really have been taken into account from another side. For subjective reasons to somehow fight over what is now intended, subjective reasons to impose on the necessary work in the spiritual movement the additional burden of work associated with these enterprises, subjective reasons do not exist. Reasons of any personal character cannot truly arise from what is at stake here. Not even such reasons could have had the slightest say in the step forward into the world, into the world of ideas, with the consequences of which the present undertakings are associated, with the step forward into the world of ideas with those social ideas that are expressed in my book 'The Key Points of the Social Question'. If one could somehow have limited the previous activity to the purely spiritual field, one would not have needed to add the social field; it would truly have been much more accommodating for what one could have desired for subjective reasons. Because, you see, following necessity, which has been the case here, does not allow us to have good experiences. And our friends know that I much prefer to speak from experience, from symptoms, rather than from any dogma.

From the many experiences that one has been able to have in recent times, I would like to emphasize something more remote. You see, the “Key Points of the Social Question” have already been translated into Nordic languages; they have recently also appeared in Italian; and they have attracted the attention of a—as I am assured—important sociologist in the Italian language as soon as they appeared. They are also about to be published in English in England itself. Something strange then occurred, which is quite symptomatic of what is still going on in our general world situation today and what is so extremely closely connected with the causes of the horrific events of the last four to five years. The English translation of the book “The Key Points of the Social Question” was completely corrected in the whole sentence. The task was to find a publisher in America for the printing of the book, given the special relationship that exists between England and America. And it turned out that the English publisher of the book, who was found at the time, also had a business in America that was even run by a man of the same name. The contract with the English company had already been signed. But it was not at all possible to think that the American company would also print the “key points of the social question” in America, just as it was intended to spread them in England. And yet, as soon as the complete sentence was available, when the paper was purchased for the English edition, when it was no longer a matter of anything but publishing the book, because it was only a matter of a branch company, came the strange news from the American company that they were in the process of publishing my anthroposophical works; in particular, my mystery dramas were to appear in English in America in the next few days. And one wonders now, if the same company comes up with a work of mine of a completely different kind, whether people will not say: Well, that can't be any good, because someone who writes mystery dramas and then a book on social issues, the mystery dramas must be of no use, so we won't buy them either.

With this motivation, I do not want to say for these reasons alone, but with this motivation, the American branch thwarted the plan, which was already on paper, which means a great deal today. The English company immediately backed down and was willing not to publish the book. Nevertheless, the book will be published in England in the next few days. There is no need to sleep in all areas. And even if an American company was initially hesitant, the book must still be published as quickly as possible.

I am only mentioning this because it is intended to show you something specific. Please do not think that I consider people of today with their sleepy souls so clever that I did not know that When a social book appears alongside the Mystery Dramas, such judgments are made. I know that such judgments are timely and self-evident today. So with such foresight, do not think that there is anything tempting about adding to the mere idealistic representation of these social ideas, which is at issue here, all that has been discussed this evening. That alone cannot be considered. Only what is necessary is at issue. And from all the various trends that have emerged from everything we have done since April 1919, here in Stuttgart in particular, the necessity for these ventures, which have been reported to you today, arises with an inner consistency of facts, and they are thoroughly practical in nature.

One could cite many examples to support the conclusion that such endeavors are necessary today. Not only those that have been reported on, but such endeavors would be necessary in all areas. Because, my dear friends, among all the things that could be said for the necessity of these endeavors, there is also one thing. It is not immediately appreciated in the right way, but it is something that one should turn one's gaze to when one has been involved in all that took place in the series of events that then came together and led to the terrible Central European collapse. Perhaps not the most noticeable for everyone, but no less significant, is the machinations of those routiniers, of whom I have spoken in public lectures, who still consider themselves to be seasoned practitioners, even though they could have learned. Because, my dear friends, if you want to find out what caused the collapse of Central Europe, you have to look not least at the business, namely industrial, routine people who spoke big, brash words, who knew how to say that this or that should be done to secure things or not. What they knew, based on their prejudices, was something monstrous, something that unfortunately very few people had the judgment or the ear to hear. The tone from which the business world of Central Europe spoke during these war events must not be continued, otherwise we will not only experience something like the collapse again, but we will experience much worse things. But that can of course also be said today: the very clever will know just as cleverly all that needs to be done for the future, just as the very clever knew during the heyday what needed to be done, where they said: we will win because we must win. I have often referred to these words, which could be heard passed on countless times.

All these things are also involved in the difficult decision that is at issue here. And many a prejudice must be overcome. It has already been pointed out today that it may shock the world that the whole series of undertakings is called “The Coming Day”. When the publisher Scherl once decided to call his newspapers “Der Tag”, he would have done so regardless. But I don't see why what Scherl might do out of inner embarrassment should not also be done out of truth. If Scherl had done it, it would certainly have been successful in certain circles. What matters is that work be done in the truth for once. In that case, one cannot take into consideration whether it shocks the world or not. The main thing is to do what must be done.

I hardly need to tell you, since I have been speaking to you for almost twenty years, about the great goals. I do not need to fear that there are many people among you who do not know that it takes a long time to gain an insight into the subject of spiritual science as it is meant here. I do not need to fear that there are many of you who will form an opinion after just one lecture. I am also not in a position to speak openly in a few words about the goals that apply to practical life. Those who have followed the matter with some devotion know what it is actually about in an ideal and spiritual sense. One could speak very, very spiritually to explain these goals. But that is not necessary at the moment. On the other hand, it is not necessary for me to explain at great length that everything that is opposed to amateurism and boastfulness in every field must be placed on the other side of the scales, for this is a matter of two scales: conscious professionalism and objectivity. It is not programs that are needed, but work – the work that arises precisely from the dedicated efforts of the people who are involved in such things.

You see, when Mr. Molt, at a time when it was already possible to see that our movement must also lead to such things, spoke in Dornach for the first time about centralizing the financing of our movement, I said in response to his words, which were so warmly and beautifully spoken at the time: “I must confess that I am less concerned about the procurement of funds, because these will, after all, be given more or less by the sensible people, because they will come to the conclusion that today, after all, we must work in a rational way, even in the economic field, that countless national treasures have been squandered in the last decades, so I am not even so much concerned about finding those personalities who can now utilize and exploit these funds in the right way.

Indeed, with these words I was able to tie in with something I said many years ago. You see, when we started doing dramatic performances back then, we had to keep a firm hand on the material in our purse. Because if you put your hand firmly on your wallet and don't let go, then you can, because it costs nothing, spout the most beautiful idealistic and mystical phrases, but the matter is in the purse and remains in the purse. And then people can say that the idealist is too mean to talk about money, and even meaner to give something of his money, this terrible mammon, which is better kept in his pocket, for his ideals, because “ideals are much too high to be defiled with this dirty mammon.” At first it worked. One could discuss whether one should pay the 50 pfennigs as an entrance fee for anthroposophical lectures in the early years. Because everywhere we heard from dear friends: anthroposophical lectures are much too high for us not to be delivered to us for free. - I am only telling facts! Then, however, came the years when dramas were to be performed. Then came the years in which dramas were to be performed. It was no longer possible to turn a blind eye to this “high idealism” that does not want to soil its ideals with the filthy lucre. Sometimes it was necessary to appeal to the sacrificial spirit of our friends. But at the time I said: Unfortunately, we are now condemned to touch on that corner of practical life that has been left to us, the corner of imitation or artistic [representation] of life - the image of life. Much rather – the sentence must be found in my lectures again – much rather, I said at the time, I would found a bank than a theater, not out of a preference for money, truly not, but because I realized that it would have to come to this, that the very outermost practice of life would have to be tackled for the necessities of our time. Now this necessary point in time has definitely arrived, and now the situation is such that there is no getting around the justification of practical things – for the reason that the practical people have suffered shipwreck everywhere.

Of course, saying this makes you look very important, because the practical people would prefer to mask the fact – even from themselves – that they are the ones who have brought us to our present situation; but they would prefer to muddle through.

Now, I said at the time in Dornach: Above all, we need people who can make use of the money. And then there comes a point – when you think about it – where you feel a great sense of responsibility. Because under the terrible mechanization of life, the initiative and alertness of the human soul life has indeed suffered so much in recent decades that it is extremely difficult to find the right people. We consider ourselves truly fortunate that we have now finally reached the point of finding people for individual branches of those activities that are necessary for us. People who are dedicated and truly immersed in our cause, who live for our cause as such and are inspired by the great ideals of humanity, and who of humanity, who have indeed introduced themselves to you, who can really connect with the idealistic spirit that we embrace, and who have the necessary dedication for a sober, practical grasp of the technical issues in every field. Because what matters is that we don't just put mysticism on one side of the scales and count on it to tip the scales in our favor; no, it's about balance. We must put expertise and objectivity on the other side of the scales. We must be truly sober practitioners. This must be seen.

You see, our task will be to calculate the future from the past with a fine instinct. Because in life, things cannot be done with programs. You can make the most beautiful programs in the spiritual, economic, and political fields. But making programs is always nonsense. What is important is to create realities in life that embrace such people, so that something living comes out of the joint activity of these people. It is very possible that if a number of people here form a circle, something quite different from what people could have dreamt of will have come into being in five years.

But for anything at all to come about in this way, it is necessary that the people united in this circle can and want to do real practical work. It depends on the individual personality. That is why it is not a cliché in the brochure that one of the tasks of these enterprises is to put people in such positions that their special individual abilities can come to light. This is what has been trampled underfoot, especially in the economic life of the last decades: human talents. What tipped the scales? The completely impersonal, which has been collected here and there into overall judgments about people from school reports, recommendations - all sorts of things that came out of grandstanding, of program words.

The point at issue is to create the possibility for a group of people to recognize the fruitful talents, so that they may draw from living life, not from program words, from faith, from dogmatics. The aim is to bring together people who create out of an ever-deepening insight into life; in short, people in whom one can have complete trust because one can have trust in their will, in their work, because one does not need to prescribe anything to them, but because one knows them, so that one knows that they will contribute what they have to contribute in complete freedom.

This is essentially what is connected with what is to happen here. And while in recent years the outer life has been built less and less on the human being, here it is precisely on the human being that this outer life is to be built - on the human being and on freedom. And it should be seen that the freedom - which, although not desired by some of our friends, was a reality here in this society, where there was no authority and no authority was claimed - that this system, this principle, is also carried into it is intended - into these economic enterprises, so that what happens, really happens through the combined strength of those who work together, and wherever productive life is, it is the living that should happen and not the execution of a dead program.

A few days ago I pointed out to you here something that is alive, but that, as something alive, must develop out of itself. I was a little surprised that friends here were so concerned about how to get this or that article speaking in our favor into this or that daily newspaper. The friends finally agreed that one cannot compromise with the parties, but it was not yet clear to them that one should not compromise with contemporary journalism either. They still wanted to sneak in here or there. Some of them did go down that road, and were thoroughly punished for it, but at least they learned something. They learned that the socialist tendency that remained produced all kinds of offshoots that were no less corrupt than what had fallen into the abyss.

And finally, the outward symptoms, well, you know! You see, an economic party is supposed to be the socialist one. Everything should arise from economic life. This socialist party has now even managed to get all kinds of members into the ruling circles. One of the most important economic areas has not been taken over by a solid or weakened or somehow kind of Marxist or socialist, but they have got used to letting the now most important branch of life, which underlies all the others , on which everything else depends, to be managed by Erzberger, who is certainly no Marxist and whose ability to reshape the Central European world even Helfferich had to educate this Central European world about. Today, it may not matter to anyone whether the language is 'Erzbergerian' or 'Helfferichian', but what is happening here is just one more example of how little the world is willing to learn. I believe that it will not learn much about the qualities of what has been said in “Erzbergerian” language, even if spoken in “Helfferichian”; for the world seems completely unwilling to understand that both belong to what has led us into misfortune. The things that are at issue today cannot be grasped in a “small-minded” way, but can only be grasped by drawing a little from the depths. And what has been said here today is connected with all these things.

I hope, my dear friends, that what I have added here as a few words in addition to what has been communicated to you from various sides will not be misunderstood. For certain reasons, I am prevented from saying many other words that I would have liked to have said in connection with these things. I hope that some of the things that are still causing me concern in the upsurge – I don't want to ignore mentioning this – will also be overcome very soon. But I believe that if as many of you as possible prove capable of standing on truly practical ground right now, something good will come out of this.

I would just like to add, because there may be talk from many sides that the matter has not been understood, I would just like to add what I did not actually want to talk about myself: that it is indeed necessary for the truly future-proof seeds that have been planted in the Waldorf school to be developed in a corresponding way in the various directions. Now, my dear friends, we will quite necessarily have to turn our attention to the economic side, because the economic side should support our spiritual side. But you cannot carry if you have nothing to carry. The main thing for us will always be that the spiritual be carried. We will try to find the harmony between the economic and the spiritual, and we will try especially to do so in the propagation through our publishing house, where we build the future from the past to the greatest extent. We have learned many lessons from the way in which anthroposophical literature has had to be disseminated in recent years, and we know very well that this book, 'The Key Points of the Social Question', has been distributed in 40,000 copies since the beginning of May last year, so for less than a year. People keep saying that the book is heavy and so on. And yet the fact remains that the book has received the favor of almost no journal or newspaper, and yet 40,000 copies of it have been sold. We know what not to count on with this book. So far, in terms of its distribution, we have not counted on what not to count on with this book. In the near future, ways and means will have to be sought to achieve what should be taken for granted. If a thousand copies of a book have been sold, there is no way of knowing whether fifty more will be sold in the next few years. But if 40,000 copies of a book have been sold, it is quite certain that 100,000 copies can be sold in a much shorter time if only the right ways and means are found. And in a similar way, we will have to truly divine from the past what is possible for the future in the most diverse fields. But everything depends on our cultivating the spiritual as such. For example, we must ensure that the spiritual can truly present itself to the world in its inner unity. It is truly no coincidence that we have recently endeavored to advance eurythmy – I would say from four to four weeks – and also to bring it before the public here and in Switzerland where possible. But it should be done in a much more comprehensive way. Something like this is also part of what happens in the Waldorf school in another area; we need a eurythmy as the center of artistic activity, we also need it in its representation through an independent area. And one thing is certain: even if we do not subtract what we want to give for the eurythmy school, for the cultivation of eurythmy, from what we otherwise want to put on the certificates, it will not be out of place to remember now that one must support the other. Things will certainly become clearer in the near future. It will become clear that what can be achieved, for example, by such an arts organization, in association with the publishing house, is also supported by what is to be achieved financially and economically. Such a building costs ten times as much today as it did relatively recently. In the face of such things, it is very important to do what is necessary before it is too late; to really bear in mind that under certain circumstances it may be impossible to build such a building for eurythmy in six months' time and to create binding art forms around it. But it would be necessary, especially here in southern Germany, here in Stuttgart as a central point for many things that would arise if one were to do something for this eurythmic art, which, precisely because of the nature of the means it chooses, the various artistic currents that actually all fail in the present because they still choose unsuitable means today, do not start from the right place, could fertilize. It cannot become a universal art, but it can show, as in a model, how to work, strive and live in other fields of artistic creation if you want to move forward.

I wanted to make these few remarks to explain and supplement what our friends here have said before you.

The crisis in human development that has occurred since the middle of the 15th century can be observed in spiritual science, even if not anatomically, in the physical body. The transition from the mind or feeling soul to the consciousness soul is a very significant one. In the present period: consciousness soul, and so on.

The Greeks felt the etheric body, but modern man does not. The Greeks felt the etheric body within the physical body, the form of the arm, the hand and so on. This was gradually lost, around the eighth or ninth century, and was completely lost by the fifteenth century. Not only did people no longer feel their etheric body, but the physical body began to decrease in size. It dried up more and more, became less and less, and hardened more and more. In the past, human bodies were softer – roughly speaking.

The sixth or seventh millennium BC marks the beginning of the ancient Indian period. Life was very different back then. Children, and even people of thirty, looked up to the elderly with great reverence and trust. Now, at seven years of age, the teeth change; at fourteen years of age, sexual maturity sets in; at 21 years of age, ideals are established. This last change is hardly noticed anymore. In the primeval Indian period, this development continued. The spiritual and soul-like is increasingly being replaced. With each seven-year cycle, something new came into life that man had not experienced before. The youthful human being was then happy to become older and older. However, this developmental opportunity decreased more and more.

From the middle of the fifteenth century onwards, this development stopped at the age of 28, and now it is the case that we actually only receive something through the body up to the age of 27, and that is becoming less and less, so that people no longer receive anything through the body, so that they have to see to receive something through the spirit. Such observations have to be made in order to understand the meaning of historical development.

Lloyd George and Erzberger are examples of such self-made men who have only received what the world around us can give, and have received nothing more from the spiritual, from their own efforts and so on.

We would face terrible times if social conditions did not return to the patriarchal conditions of the primeval Indian times. In our sixties, we have certain qualities, depending on our childhood education experiences. If a child has learned at the appropriate age to fold his hands in prayer, then this person gains the ability to bless with his hand in his old age. These are the connections. From this you will see the importance of a living education. It depends on bringing what corresponds to the forces at work each year to the child. When teaching children of seven, one must not appeal to the intellect. But reading and writing do appeal to the intellect. In the Waldorf school, we want to start with painting, drawing, and music. Art engages the human will. Drawing and form drawing affects the whole person. From these forms and lines, writing should gradually develop and from writing, reading. Because this is even more intellectual than writing.

In fables and legends – from the age of nine – where the self is already becoming stronger, plants and animals will gradually be introduced into the curriculum. Each year must be approached in this way. Then what is taught remains for life. What the teacher transfers to the pupils with fire and zeal is based purely on authority. At a later age, this comes up again through the revival of what rests in the soul. As a result, one then knows and understands what one has previously absorbed. More and more, education must be such that one can look back on one's childhood as on a paradise. This is necessary if only because the bodies no longer give us anything.

We now have to bring a lot with us through the gateway of death that we have not processed, that we have not been able to live out. Therefore, we have the following: that the dead develop the urge to have an effect on the physical world. This should be investigated in the normal way, not mediumistically. The forces that can work from the dead into the physical world can do so in such a way that we do not ignore the forces. When we wake up, we slip into our physical and etheric bodies so quickly that we don't bring anything with us. We can change this by vividly imagining a dead person in the evening. Vividly: this is how the dead person was, this is how he lived, this is how I was with him; now ask the dead person a question and then fall asleep with it. Then you have, as it were, directed your nightly life to this dead person. Now the dead person can approach this question. If he is able to answer this question, then he will answer. But not immediately, but over time, and then the answer will come during the course of the day. And then the dead who want to have an effect on the physical world can carry this into the physical world.

I would not say this if I did not know it for a fact. I could not have written anything about Goethe if I had not first tried to see what Goethe would have said or would say now or in the 1860s. If I had not had the opportunity to do such serious research into the influence of the dead, I would not say this with such certainty. In brief: we are able to let the dead be our fellow citizens.

Then life becomes richer, but we also need this. Bridges must be built to the spiritual world. Especially young people bring a lot of undeveloped things into the spiritual world.

Christianity came from east to west – horizontally. Now spiritual entities are coming down – vertically. The fresh brains of the proletariat are coming to meet them – from bottom to top. There is only one salvation for the bourgeoisie today: to turn to spiritual thinking. It is a fact of world history that the spiritual must enter into people, into spiritual life. But many people today do not want to understand this. This realization makes us ripe to understand many things, for example, the egoism of religious denominations. Life after death is what the denominations must spread. But they should also teach life before birth or before conception. The present life is a continuation of the life before birth.

One more thing: the God of whom the religious denominations speak corresponds only to the angel within us.

In the West, people have tried to come together with the dead. They have directed mediums to them and given them special questions, for example: “How will the Balkan situation develop?” The people asked went into the mediumistic state with such questions. They then acted on the answers that came out, because in the West. They knew very well that they should turn to those people who knew how to give the right answers. For example, they turned to the Thugs in India because they knew very well that they could provide information about such things. These associations existed in India until they were dissolved by the police. In Germany, people didn't believe that because they are much too clever to believe what comes from the spiritual. It is different in the East. Tagore's speeches. The spiritual that still lives in him resonates through them. We tend more to the West than to the East. The bridge must be built from West to East.

The best translation of “Maya” today is “ideology.” Only in essence is the exact opposite regarded as Maya in the East and West.

In our spiritual life, we are steeped in Greek life; in our state life, we are attuned to the Romans; only in economic life have we had to tune ourselves to modern times. You cannot eat what the Greeks ate, but what is available now.

Then we come up to the archangeloi, the spirits of the people, and get to know them. Zeitgeister - Archai; Urgeister; Zeitempfindung.

In the West: mechanization of the spiritual. In the East: animalization of the bodies. In the middle: oversleeping, not understanding what is going on.

The animalization of the body in Russia as one path – the other: spiritual realization. This path must be chosen. Draw strength from spiritual impulses for one's social conscience. That is what I would like to have expressed from the deepest feeling, so that a sense of responsibility remains to take account of the times.

Autoreferat in der Goetheanum-Sondernummer der Waldorf-Nachrichten 3. Jg. Nr. 4/5 (März 1921)

In the following, I will share some of the thoughts that I expressed at the opening of the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum in Dornach.

It is with a heavy heart that I say the first words in this Goetheanum. For before me stands the serious goal that this as yet incomplete building should serve in the future. The spiritual outlook that should be striven for here appears as a challenge of the present and the near future to all those who have made material and spiritual sacrifices for its construction.

This willingness to make sacrifices should be remembered first. The construction of this Goetheanum has been started from their insightful penetration into what is currently needed by humanity. Through them, it has become possible that in the coming weeks, many areas of scientific, artistic and practical life will be discussed here. Through personalities with similar spiritual direction, this Goetheanum will be able to be completed in the future.

These people, willing to make sacrifices, have grasped the idea that has arisen from the realization that the development of humanity has reached a point at which an active orientation towards spiritual knowledge must be striven for.

It was with this thought in mind that the foundation stone of this building was laid seven years ago; and it is with this thought in mind that thirty leading figures will now discuss science, art and practical life here. They want to present their experiments to the public in order to show how the various areas of life can be enriched by the knowledge of the spirit that is being sought here.

In present-day civilization, what we call science exerts an enormous influence. And alongside science, art and religion stand to go their own ways. But today, more than in the recent past, the human soul feels more powerfully the urge for a unity of its experience. This feeling asserts itself more and more irresistibly. It expresses one of the most serious demands of present-day civilization.

Under the influence of this feeling, one must consider those times of human development when science, art and religion had not yet gone their separate ways. Today's recognized science does not want to know much about this form of human civilization. Spiritual science, which will be discussed here in the coming weeks, must present it as a fact based on its insights. There were times when science, art and religion formed a unity. In those times, research was not as conscious as it is today; a more instinctive knowledge was developed. But this knowledge was not expressed in the abstract form of thought that is currently ours. What was intuitively known was expressed in pictorial form. And these pictorial forms could also be presented to the outer senses. One could make knowledge visible to the senses. Before the senses, scientific knowledge arose as a vivid art. And the mind could worship what it had before it as artistically designed knowledge. In religious devotion, wisdom revealed itself as beauty.

Humanity could only progress in its development by separating knowledge, artistic creation, and religious experience. The soul life became richer through this separation. The currents of life had to be given separately to inquiring thinking, artistic feeling, and religious contemplation.

Humanity has arrived at a point in time when these three currents want to merge. Further separation would rob the soul of its health.

Science, which has flourished in modern times, has greatly enriched our external lives; it has provided us with an unlimited service in understanding the external world. It cannot, however, fulfill our striving for a unity of knowledge, art and religion.

Goethe already sensed what must be addressed as the deepest need of humanity in the present and even more so in the near future: that in art, at a higher level than in the instinctive time of the soul, knowledge is to be experienced again. He sensed the unity of science and art by saying that when nature begins to reveal its manifest secret, one feels the deepest longing for its most worthy interpreter, art.

Even if, out of outdated habits of thought, some theorists say that science must keep away from everything artistic, they are blurring the boundaries and confusing human striving. Those who speak in this way cannot be right if it turns out that nature itself creates in artistic forms, and that one remains far from nature's secrets if one only wants to express oneself in a conceptual form.

The anthroposophical spiritual science to be striven for at this Goetheanum wants to be as rigorous and scientific as any recognized science of the present day. But it leads to the realization that forces can be developed in a strictly methodical way from the depths of the human soul, which lead mere thinking to the beholding of a real spiritual world content. In this way a world reveals itself that is not accessible to the senses and ordinary reason. But it is a world through which the sensory realm becomes understandable in a higher sense. Through this insight, a realm of existence is opened up that can be experienced artistically again. What was granted to early humanity through instinct, the possibility of transforming what has been cognitively explored into artistic creation, can be achieved again in full consciousness. This does not mean unartistic symbolism and allegory, but the experiencing of the forces of existence through direct perception, which are sometimes expressed through the idea as spiritual science and sometimes revealed through elementary artistic creation. Those who visualize thoughts of logical or observational knowledge do not work artistically. Those who realize in art what they have experienced through spiritual vision do not create differently than the true artist. For they do not clothe what is seen spiritually in symbols, but as artists they shape that which can reveal itself through its own nature, on the one hand in accordance with ideas and on the other in accordance with images.

Just as Goethe was able to say that art must be turned to when nature begins to reveal its manifest secrets, so too may one who is striving in the Goethean sense say: When nature begins to reveal its manifest secrets through spiritual vision so that he must express them in ideas and shape them artistically, the innermost part of his soul urges him to worship what he has seen and captured in art with a sense of religion. For him, religion becomes the consequential experience of science and art.

Spiritual science, which is to be cultivated in this Goetheanum, permeates the whole human being, the knowing, artistically feeling, religiously attuned human being. Therefore, it can also hope to serve the urgent social needs of the present. These hardships arise from the fact that science, which merely satisfies the intellect, lacks the momentum that man needs if he is to consciously act as a social being. Today there are already so many people who no longer close their minds to the fact that neither state nor economic life can heal itself; rather, new impulses in the spiritual realm must have an effect on the state and the economy. Here at the Goetheanum, this idea is to be thought through to its logical conclusion. We stop halfway if we think that the spiritual impulses needed today can be provided by adult education centers, popular education efforts, etc., that what is cultivated in lecture halls can be carried into the broad masses of the people. Those who believe this do not realize that the small circle of educated people to whom this spiritual fruit has come has driven humanity into a terrible catastrophe. Should that which has led to such results in a few now also work through the widest circles?

The kind of thinking that should be cultivated here at the Goetheanum is based on the conviction that the old spirit of the lecture hall cannot be carried into the broad masses, but that a new stream of knowledge must first be directed into the lecture halls out of knowledge of the spirit. What flows from such knowledge will be a spiritual life that also provides true education for the people and the strength to shape society. It is with this in mind that this Goetheanum was begun seven years ago; it is with this in mind that I may now open our college courses; and may those who have made all this possible be joined by others of the same mind, so that this Goetheanum may soon be visited in its completion.

Dr. Steiner: I am meeting with the students who took the final examination tomorrow at noon. The teachers who taught the twelfth grade should also come.

A teacher: We have received complaints about two grade reports.

Dr. Steiner: I have the impression that the style used in the reports was rather sloppy. We should not do that. When we write such a report as we discussed, we should make an effort to express things so that someone else can make something of it. That was not the case with these two reports. To my horror, I noticed that the name of one student was incorrectly spelled. To do that, you would really have had to have been very superficial. The two reports really depressed me. Actually, you need to rewrite these reports. You simply cannot use such phrases as, “He is not exactly the best.” Yes, it is difficult to write such reports, but if we cannot find some way of doing it, we will have to stop writing them. I understand it is difficult. Regardless of how terrible normal grading is, it does have the advantage that people cannot criticize it in this way. I also understand that there are things playing in the background, but I do not understand their playing a role in writing a report, particularly in a case where the children will be moving to America. If you want to make the report more personal, you must take that into account. Americans wouldn’t know what to do with such a report. If the children go to an American school, they will be treated like pariahs from the very beginning because of this. Perhaps we need to look into the case in more detail. In any event, I think you should rewrite the reports. People cannot get a picture of the children through these reports, but providing such a picture is exactly what they were intended to do. You can see you need to write them in a different style. The facts do not need to be changed. That is not what I mean at all, but you need to choose a different style. You need to take more care in writing the reports, otherwise such personal reports will not have the value they should have.

A teacher: What can we do about student tardiness?

Dr. Steiner: When the students are tardy in the morning, it has a bad effect on your teaching. Sometimes when I came here early, I had the impression that the way class was begun in the morning left much to be desired of the teachers. I thought someone should be in the corridor, so the children wouldn’t play hide and seek there. You should not be surprised that when children are left to themselves, they become excited in their play. We all would have done that. It seems to me there is something behind all this, leading me to believe that it was not just by chance that the few times I came early, there was no teacher, far and wide.

A teacher: Before class, we say the weekly verse together.

Dr. Steiner: Couldn’t you arrange to read the verse so that the school does not suffer? Anthroposophists commonly use esoteric things as an excuse. Esoteric practices exist so that other people will not see them. However, people see them quite clearly when everything becomes chaotic because the teachers want to prepare themselves in the proper way. I was also here once when the verse was spoken, but I did not find that it offered much esoteric deepening. I also noticed that a number of people were not present. I have to admit that I think the problem is that the teachers get up too late. It’s like old Spielhagen said, “I never leave a dinner party without being last.” For teachers, the exact opposite would be proper, namely, that they are always first at school. I don’t think that is the case here. What do you think about this?

They divide the classes and subject areas among the various teachers.

Dr. Steiner: We need to consider one other thing. It is connected with all the possibilities of development within the Anthroposophical Society, and the effects they can have. I would like to have Dr. Röschl come to Dornach for a while and do some work that is quite necessary if the pedagogical work is to continue. She should begin teaching at our continuation school there to create a form of “youth anthroposophy.” I have often spoken of the need to rework anthroposophy for youth. Anthroposophy as it is now is intended for adults. For grown-up young people, anthroposophy is, of course, good. What I am speaking of here is an anthroposophy appropriate for the rough-and-tumble years. That needs to be developed through genuine instruction. For that reason, I and the Vorstand intend to call Dr. Röschl to Dornach. We could do that by giving her a sabbatical, since non-citizens cannot be hired in Switzerland. She would, therefore, receive her salary from here. So, we need to find a replacement for Latin and Greek, as well as a teacher for the fifth grade.

A teacher reports again about the situation with F.R. and reads a letter signed by eight parents.

Dr. Steiner: This is a difficult case to decide. For now, only eight people signed, but if a larger number want F.R. expelled, it will be difficult to get around it. It is difficult to throw a child out, particularly when we have had him for as long as we have had F.R. He has been here five years. If we did that, we would also be throwing ourselves out, because it would show we did not know how to work with him. I also need to mention that the physician’s bill was only fifteen Marks, which is objective proof that the situation cannot be so bad. We need to remain objective, and I can see no real reason that would force us to throw the boy out. There is no really accepted authority in that class.

We should not take such things so seriously. I once experienced a similar situation in a class on drawing theory. The teacher was leaning over the drawing board and had a rather short frock coat on. One of the students gave him quite a slap on the part of the body that is normally hit. The teacher turned around and said to the student, “You must have confused me with someone else.”

A teacher makes a comment.

Dr. Steiner: I don’t know whether we should bring cramming into this or not. That is something we could consider for the next school year, but in that case it would be important for the children in the twelfth grade to participate. The main question is whether we should retain the Waldorf School method to the end and then add a cramming year. We could do that only for next year, since those now going into the twelfth grade would first have to complete the twelfth grade.

The difficulty with adding a cramming year is that we would not have enough teachers. We cannot just create another grade with the teachers that we now have. We would need quite a few new teachers.

A teacher asks about the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach.

Dr. Steiner: You should not imagine the school in Dornach as a replacement for other universities. Rather, it is a place where the things other universities do not teach are offered. It is not as though we would train doctors in Dornach. Imagine what a task that would be for Dr. Wachsmuth, to be in so many places at once. It is not as though we will transform the Scientific Section into a scientific faculty. That is particularly true since the Science Section is the newest member of the Vorstand. How should Dr. Wachsmuth, who is not so very big, do all that? I think Dr. Mellinger should spend half her time in Dornach in order to work with the social-economic questions we have decided upon. The truth is that it is ridiculous to continually start such things and then let them lie. The socioeconomic course exists, and it would be a good idea if we could create a fund here that would pay Dr. Mellinger so she could lecture on socioeconomics here a quarter of a year and then work a quarter year in Dornach.

The university exists in Dornach and must begin to really work. It must begin to do something.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear friends!

The Anthroposophical Society has entered a new phase of its development. We need to grasp this fully consciously and shape our anthroposophical work accordingly. In the early years, it may have been enough to absorb the results of spiritual research with an open mind and receptive heart and to prepare places for it in smaller circles. In recent years, the anthroposophical movement has increasingly become a world movement. This fact poses new challenges for those who want to represent anthroposophy to the world. This is a consequence of both the inner progress of anthroposophy and the changing conditions of the times in general. The realization that anthroposophy can bear fruit in all areas of life has given a number of people the courage to found a series of enterprises in the spirit of the anthroposophical worldview and its practical implications for life since 1919. Dr. Steiner supported this intention in the confidence that those who undertook the enterprises would also work with unyielding will to carry them out. In view of the fact that the opinion has taken hold in wide circles of the Anthroposophical Society that Dr. Steiner himself is the founder of such enterprises, it is our duty to emphasize that this is not the case. Rather, full responsibility lies with those who founded them. The way in which anthroposophy can enrich life, where it can work out of its own inner impulses, is shown by creations such as the now destroyed Goetheanum and the art of eurythmy, which has developed in unexpected ways under the direction of Mrs. Marie Steiner in recent years. They have been recognized worldwide as creations of universal human significance. Similarly, the Waldorf School, with its pedagogy born of anthroposophical spiritual insight, has found the greatest respect in Germany and far beyond. In the practical economic sphere, it has been possible – despite fierce hostility arising from old ways of thinking – to develop the joint-stock company “Der Kommende Tag” (The Coming Day) in such a way that it can fulfill its important task within the limits imposed by the general economic situation.

Dr. Steiner has shown how scientific work can be enriched by supersensible knowledge. But this gives rise to enormous tasks for anthroposophical work. The scientist can only do justice to them if he incorporates anthroposophical methods into his research, as was done, for example, in the work on the function of the spleen by Mrs. L. Kolisko of the Scientific Research Institute. Whoever is aware of the difficulties with which research in this field has had to contend up to now must welcome such a discovery, as presented in this paper, as the epoch-making beginning of a new understanding of the nature of the human organism. Dr. Hermann von Baravalle's work “On the Pedagogy of Mathematics and Physics” is a similar achievement in its field. Dr. C. von Heydebrand's work on experimental pedagogy must be seen as an act in the field of pedagogy. It delivers a scathing critique of the grotesque excesses of experimental psychology and pedagogy, countering them for the first time with positive results of the spiritual-scientific art of education.

How are these achievements to be taken into account by external science if they are not appreciated to their full extent in our own ranks?

Beyond such positive results, there are many indications from Dr. Steiner that, in continuing legitimate scientific research, the researcher himself can see himself on the path to supersensible knowledge. The Anthroposophical Society, if it wants to be the true bearer of anthroposophical life, must take a lively interest in these important tasks. Cultivating the path of spiritual-scientific knowledge is the main task of the Anthroposophical Society. The present consciousness is undergoing a transformation in many people that threatens to drive some into a state of mental chaos if they are not offered the strength to shape it through anthroposophical work.

Young people carry within them the power of new creation. They are striving to escape from the dull atmosphere that sometimes still hangs over our college courses and go to where they can find anthroposophy as such. Anthroposophy must meet their desire for healthy internalization in such a way that it takes hold of knowledge, feeling, moral and religious striving. An older generation that has followed the path of inner soul development in the sense of anthroposophy cannot come into conflict with the young, since this development awakens youthful forces in all souls. On this basis of the anthroposophical striving for soul development, there is no antagonism between old age and youth. The smear campaign by our opponents demands a counter-campaign that is conducted with objective clarity and vigorously pursued. The opposition that arose from Dr. Steiner's establishment of anthroposophical spiritual science would not have been of significant importance. It was only since the various enterprises were founded after 1919 that dangerous opposition arose. This latter type of opposition took up foolish assertions of former members and used them as a means to their intention of eliminating anthroposophy from the world. Thus an unscrupulous opposition managed to shower the person of Dr. Steiner with a flood of slander.

It is the task of the Anthroposophical Society, and especially of those who want to represent Anthroposophy in all fields, to vigorously counter these slanders in order to finally protect Dr. Steiner from such attacks in an effective way. Above all, it is important to vigorously combat defamations, such as those contained in the “Psychischen Studien” (Psychical Studies), which have then been uncritically circulated by almost all opponents, by characterizing and pillorying their authors.

In Munich, for instance, there was a man who was particularly troublesome to Dr. Steiner because of his fanatical devotion to him. He tried, for example, to kiss Dr. Steiner's hand at every opportunity. Later, out of wounded vanity, he became an equally fanatical opponent. All the other opponents drew from this source of filth. An example from the most recent past also sheds light on the character of our opponents. A private lecturer at a famous university tried to obtain unpublished material from us under the guise of scientific interest. At about the same time, he proved his manly courage by asking some of our members not to treat him in the polemic debate, as they did Prof. Drews, and thus ruin his career. The methods of many of these new opponents must also be exposed. They have tried to foist a distorted image of anthroposophy on their contemporaries, often abusing their official positions or scientific authority, and maliciously compiling numerous quotations from Dr. Steiner's books and lectures out of context. We must counter this distorted image with an accurate representation of the true nature of the anthroposophical spiritual heritage.

We owe it to anthroposophy that its representatives express an attitude of soul created by independent spiritual experience, which enables them to present anthroposophy in its full dignity in such a way that all human souls can find their way to it. Even the opponents' assertions, such as that supersensible knowledge about past human conditions has no significance for real life, are refuted simply by the way Anthroposophists themselves live when these insights are cultivated in the branch work and in individual life in such a way that it becomes apparent what they can give to people in terms of strengthening their personality and enlightening their existence. The knowledge of prenatal and post-mortal life will not be presented to people in abstract dogma if it becomes directly tangible as an ethical force. The revival of Christianity through the results of anthroposophical research will not be presented to people as a disputable assertion or an uncertain promise when it comes to them from the whole attitude of the anthroposophists themselves.

In view of the strength of the opposition, it is also imperative that all the living spiritual forces present in the Anthroposophical Society neither weaken through isolation nor wear themselves down in antagonism, but fully develop in free cooperation, and that the leadership of the Society should support everyone working in a truly anthroposophical spirit, to achieve the fullest possible effectiveness in the service of the common cause. A human relationship must develop among the individual anthroposophists. New flexible forms must be sought, so that the Anthroposophical Society can emerge from its isolation and self-isolation and become a versatile mediator of its spiritual wealth. Every leadership of the Society will have to be supported and at the same time kept flexible by a living organization of trusted individuals who will feel jointly responsible for the work as a whole.

What we have only outlined in this appeal from our sense of the new tasks for the Anthroposophical Society, we would like to present to a representative assembly for discussion. In view of the extraordinary significance of the decisions we have to make, we request the working groups in Germany to send such personalities, who are deeply committed to a re-organization of the Anthroposophical Society, to a conference to be held in Stuttgart from February 25 to 28.

Until the representatives' meeting, we signatories will form the leading trust body for the affairs of the Anthroposophical Society. Stuttgart, February 13, 1923.

Jürgen v. Grone, Dr. Eugen Kolisko, Johanna Mücke, Emil Leinhas, Dr. Otto Palmer, Dr. Friedrich Rittelmeyer, Dr. Carl Unger, Wolfgang Wachsmuth.

Dr. Steiner: There are some things that are troubling me about the school, so I think I need to spend two days here next week. There are two things I think we need to discuss, but today we can do nothing but address more pressing problems.

Certainly, all of the points we discussed yesterday are important. The first thing troubling me, particularly after what I saw this morning in various classes, is the issue of punctuation. The second thing we need to resolve is a kind of running wild here at school, which we can certainly not take lightly.

Let’s take that as our starting point. Let’s start with the 9b class. The teachers have described some things to me, but this morning the 9b class was very well behaved. The only thing that troubled me was how they write. It cannot continue that way.

Regarding unruliness, I would ask those of you who have some concerns to present them objectively.

A number of teachers speak about the class and the particularly difficult students F.R., T.L., D.M., K.F., and J.L. Regardless of what the teachers attempted, they were unable to create a respectful attitude toward the great artists. F.R. incited the boys to a pogrom-like attitude. They also wrote some obscene things on the door to the teachers’ bathroom.

Dr. Steiner: First, I would like to say that F.R. suffers from a persecution complex and, aside from that, hates women. T.L. appears to be somewhat weak minded, as are D.M. and K.F. Here we have some psychological problems, and F.R.’s hatred of women affects the others. That is the situation. It would be interesting to know if a large part of his misbehavior is related to that question. The misbehavior I saw certainly comes from that direction.

This is not an easy case. F.R. came to us first in the fourth grade, after having been beaten at home. In addition, he felt he was treated extremely poorly by the fourth grade teacher, and many of the things he told me took on particular nuances in his fantasy. From what he told me, it seems he made an unsympathetic impression upon the teacher, and she took it out on him. Now he feels at least subjectively justified in thinking that the teacher had her favorites in the class, and that he was set back because he was one of the most disliked. At the time, all this created a small crisis, particularly because the teacher was not firm enough. She had to retract much later. In the fourth grade, the boy was not properly handled, so we were not able to move him into the fifth grade. That caused some trouble for me at the time. However, you had him for quite a time. How did it go?

A teacher: In the fifth grade, I had no problems with him. He was strongly impressed then.

Dr. Steiner: At that time, he was four years younger and the impression he got was that there is still some justice. Possibly that was weakened later, but that was the impression he had then. His feeling was that the world was unjust, but that there is still some kind of justice. Now he has some psychological problems. Certainly, since that time it seems to me that the boy—well, what should we do? We can only treat him if he trusts someone. The teachers’ viewpoint may be justifiable, but what he lost is trust. Somehow, he lost trust again.

T.L. is the boy who, when he reads or hears something, becomes possessed. He is possessed by good and by evil. When something dramatic occurs, he is possessed and speaks in that way. When he talked back to you, he did so out of that state. It is really a problem. K.F. is not exactly honest, either. It is not only that he misstates things, but he has a tendency toward absolute lying. He needs a strong hand. It is not easy, you see, because we are not in a position of following things with greater energy.

There is something else we need to take into account. If you think F.R. would write a good essay about Raphael and Grünewald in the ninth grade, you will never come to terms with him. That is completely impossible in his present incarnation. He cannot do it, nor can he understand it. It is something that lies outside his field of vision. When he realizes he cannot understand it, he dries up inwardly and the bad juices, the etherically bad juices, rise and push him on so that he becomes vengeful. The recurring theme of his thinking is that he is unjustly treated.

There is nothing more I can do other than speak with these five boys. It is something that could make the 9b class impossible. I will speak with them next week. We need to have some order here. There is little possibility of doing very much. All these things point to something below the surface. We need to recognize that many of these things are only symptoms. The obscene things you mentioned are only symptoms of something lying deeper within him. He probably did that as revenge against a teacher.

I once knew a class who had to write some letters. You should have seen what the boys thought up as names for the writer. They really thought up some names. They made up names by abbreviating first names in unthinkable ways, when you read the first and last name together, so that the result was a cynical provocation. Everyone in school knew about it.

We really cannot take such things seriously. The situation often depends only upon how you laugh. You need to get used to laughing at such things. If you get angry—well, fifteen-year-old boys are a particular kind of human being. We need to look into the situation further.

The transition years are difficult for these children, and we can see we need to do something. There is not enough energy, not enough punch in the German class in the eighth and ninth grades. That is something the children miss in their German class. We must teach them in an interesting way about the structure and style of sentences. You need to develop a feeling for style through essays. That should begin at the age of twelve. I mentioned these things in the course about adolescents. You should discuss forming pictures with them, metaphors, similes, and anecdotes. I have noticed that this is missing. We will never be able to introduce them to punctuation if they do not comprehend the value of a word in style.

The fact is that the way you are teaching German, they will never understand style and essays. In the ninth grade, they do not even know what a sentence is. They write in such a way that it is clear they have no idea what a sentence is. They have no feeling for style. That is something you must include in your teaching. German class is not quite what it should be, and that has tremendous significance for these developmental years. The boys and girls are changing the inner style of their sentences just as they are changing their speech. If you do not take that into account, they will have an inner deficit.

The important thing is that if you ask yourselves how many of the students in the entire Waldorf School are such that you would have such critical opinions of them, you will find it is nowhere near 5 percent.

I would also like to draw your attention to something else. All kinds of things occur in the Society. Recently, a man came to an official of the Society and said, “I know you have great ideas. The ideas are very good, but no one in the Society has the proper will. The reason for that is that you people in the Society do not take care of the egotists in the proper way. I am a prime example of a real egotist. I have no ideas, although I would like to have some. However, I do have will. A couple of people like myself,”—and you should take note of this—“three or four students like me could get all the students and faculty to do what we want, and in the end, the school inspector too.”

Three or four can dominate an entire class, even the whole school. The school cannot go under simply because of them.

There are some other things also. The 3b class is really horrible, but there is a way to improve it by taking two of the boys out and putting them into the remedial class. We need to make the remedial class not only for those who are intellectually weak, but also for those who are morally weak. That would be good for the 3b class. The two boys, K.E. and R.B., should go immediately into the remedial class. They are infecting the whole class. The class would not be so bad, but then we have these two boys. As long as they are there, you will be unable to do anything with the class.