The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Address by Rudolf Steiner regarding point 4 of the agenda [Election of the Supervisory Board]:

I myself will have something to say regarding this point, ladies and gentlemen. It concerns the fact that the affairs of the Anthroposophical Movement have recently taken on such a form that In the future, it will be impossible for me to take on other activities of this kind, such as the position of chairman of the supervisory board of “Kommenden Tages”, in addition to my work for the Anthroposophical Movement in the narrower sense. The esteemed attendees – and they are, of course, the more numerous – who are members of the Anthroposophical Society, know that the circumstances of the Anthroposophical Movement have changed a great deal, especially in recent years. On the one hand, it is absolutely clear that a spiritual movement such as anthroposophy – and I do not want to say specifically anthroposophical, but a spiritual movement such as anthroposophy – lies at the lies at the very bottom of the innermost needs of an ever-greater number of people, and that therefore the Anthroposophical Movement, which has existed for more than 20 years now as a partial movement, so to speak, in this great stream, that the Anthroposophical Movement makes, one might say, more demands on those who have already been destined by fate to care for it and it has been clear for some time that, in addition to everything that is incumbent upon me for the anthroposophical movement, it is no longer possible to engage fruitfully in other activities without the tasks that I already have for the anthroposophical movement being disturbed or compromised. The latter must not happen under any circumstances, on the one hand because of the increasing demands on the Anthroposophical Movement and because of the ever-widening interest, which demands an expansion of my work precisely in this regard, in this direction. On the other hand, this Anthroposophical Movement, through countless things that can only be described as misleading, has to reckon with an opposition today that, well, I would say, if it is to be countered in the right way, will cause work and, above all, worry and the like.

So, taking all these things into account, I had no choice, esteemed attendees, but to recently decide to resign from my position as chairman of the supervisory board of “The Coming Day” and from the supervisory board in general, which I hereby do in a very official manner. The situation is such that, in practical terms, I have recently had to limit my work for the “Coming Day” to that which - precisely because of the other demands - will have to remain so in the coming period. If I am to do the work for the “Day to Come” that is to flow into its various institutions, and if I am to do the work for the Waldorf School, in which the “Day to Come” is also extremely interested in a certain respect, if I am to do this work , which will have to be provided in a positive and substantial way in the form of my advice to 'Der Kommende Tag', then I will have to admit to myself that I will withdraw all the more from the activity, which will be able to take place in the future without me and perhaps better without me than with me.

The supervisory board and the board of directors of “Tomorrow” are, after all, an absolutely sure guarantee for all those who, as shareholders and otherwise, have an interest in “Tomorrow” , that this Coming Day will continue to work in this direction even after my resignation, in the fruitful way it has set itself, and in the way it is in the interest of the shareholders and the world in general. I must say that the situation of the “Kommende Tag” is such that today I can only ask those shareholders whose trust in the “Kommende Tag” is perhaps somewhat connected with the fact that I took over the position of chairman of the supervisory board years ago, I can only urgently ask those whose trust is connected with this fact not to lose an ounce of that trust, but on the contrary to continue to place it in a greatly increased measure in the excellent management of “The Coming Day”. I would like to say that it was clear to me from the very beginning, when I took over the position of Chairman of the Supervisory Board three years ago, that this could only be for a relatively short time.

For the situation that now exists was entirely foreseeable, and although it was of course clear to me at the time that a large part of my work for the Anthroposophical Movement would be affected, ... I did it anyway.

Isn't it true that “Der Kommende Tag” came about because a number of personalities who had emerged from the Anthroposophical Movement wanted to support an undertaking that was designed to be socially sustainable in the future. The “Kommende Tag” was to be founded as a kind of model example of what should be done by combining enterprises, in particular combining personalities who are interested in social issues in economic life. Through this union, the “Kommende Tag” was to be established as a kind of model example. The personalities who founded it turned to me for advice at the time. We hammered out the preliminary details, the intentions and the principles together, and in the early days we tried to steer the “Coming Day” in the direction in which it should be steered.

The actual initiative did not come from me. From the very beginning, I was, so to speak, in the role of an advisor. At the time, I found it quite natural that friends approached me and wanted me to take over the position of Chairman of the Supervisory Board, and for me to be on the Supervisory Board at all. But what made it desirable for the first period of time, even if it was entirely decisive for the decisions at the time, cannot be decisive for continued membership of the Supervisory Board. And all this together with the fact that I am quite certain of the excellent management - I can tell you that I would not resign if “Der Kommende Tag” did not stand on absolutely secure feet and was in a future-proof situation - since that is the case is the case, because you can have full confidence in the “Day to Come”, even if I withdraw, perhaps even more so, as I have already mentioned, then, my dear attendees, you will not withdraw your confidence in the “Day to Come”. So you will understand that the reasons for my resignation are decisive, and I ask you to accept this resignation in the sense in which it has just been characterized.

Above all, it is my duty at this moment to express my heartfelt thanks to the other members of the supervisory board for their dedicated work, for the extraordinarily difficult work that had to be done in the early years, for the work that, I would say, suffered from ever-increasing opposition and caused serious concern.

I would also like to thank these members of the supervisory board in a special way for the warm way in which this collaboration has taken place; both those members of the supervisory board who are the originators of the original ideas of “The Day to Come” and those who, as members of the works council, have joined the supervisory board in accordance with the law. Those who have worked on the organization and further implementation of the ideas and affairs of “The Day to Come” over the last three years know just how much dedicated work is needed to accomplish things in an appropriate and proper manner. But I believe that more and more people will feel how grateful we are to the members of the supervisory board for their dedication, and it will therefore be understandable that I express my heartfelt thanks to the supervisory board and wish that its work in the near and distant future will be rewarded with the most beautiful fruits.

Secondly, I would like to express my warmest thanks to the board of directors, above all to the prudent, dedicated and extremely objective director of the board, Mr. Emil Leinhas, and to the other members of the board as a whole for their dedicated work. It has not exactly become easier for social and economic enterprises to carry out their management activities in recent times. It requires not only an extremely exhausting amount of work, but above all, constant thoughtfulness and constant prudence, which it is neither necessary nor even possible to describe in detail here. But if you have seen all this, if you have had to go through all this, so to speak, if you have had to see from day to day how things have actually been worked on, especially by the management of our board in recent times and since the beginning, it will also be understood that, out of a very special inner satisfaction and heartfelt feeling, I would also like to express my warmest thanks to the members of the board, above all to the director, Mr. Emil Leinhas, when I leave. In doing so, I would also like to express my heartfelt thanks to all those who, from the inner circle of the Anthroposophical Movement and from further afield, have turned their interest and attention to the endeavors of “Der Kommende Tag” and have simply given “Der Kommende Tag” the opportunity to survive through their sympathy and participation within the circle of shareholders. I would like to express my most sincere thanks to all of you on my resignation! I now ask you to take note of my resignation from the position of Chairman of the Supervisory Board and from the Supervisory Board in general. This brings us to the fourth item on the agenda. Since I have now resigned and no longer bear responsibility, I ask the Deputy Chairman of the Supervisory Board, Dr. Unger, to take over the chairmanship of this Annual General Meeting.

Today we offer you a performance of eurythmy. Through this art we want to place something into the spiritual development of humanity. We can view eurythmy from three perspectives: from the purely artistic, the educational, and the hygienic.

As an art, eurythmy represents a kind of voiceless, visible speech. Although it takes the form of gestures and movements, either in groups or individually, you should not confuse it with mime or pantomime or with some form of artistic dance. Eurythmy uses the entire human being as its language; this visible unvoiced speech is developed through a study of the laws of voiced speech.

Voiced speech is a way of expressing what lies within the human being. Schiller was right when he said, “When the soul speaks, then, sadly, the soul no longer speaks.” Language carries the human soul to the external world—or at least it should. It is also the means of communication between one person and another, and is therefore subject to convention. In a certain sense language is a social artifact. The more language must serve as a means of communication and of expressing thoughts, the less it can serve as a means of artistic expression, since art must arise out of the whole person.

Language has two sides. The first is the social side. The person must bow to the social world when speaking. Only in that way does language retain something that is intimately connected with the entirety of the human being. Young children do not learn language from their dreams. They learn it during that time when they need to adjust their entire being to their surroundings. This natural adjustment protects language from being just a means of communication.

When a poet—that is, an artist with words—wants to express something, he or she needs everything that hovers behind language. A poet needs pictures and, above all, musicality. True poetry, that is, the artistic aspect of a poem, is not at all found in the direct content of the words; rather it is in the way the content is formed. In poetry we need most of all to take into account what Goethe said in Faust: “Consider the what, but even more so, the how.” The way the poet shapes the poem is what is most important in poetry.

You can see this much more clearly if, when you express yourself artistically, you do not use a means of expression that is too strongly permeated by thoughts but instead use your entire being. For this reason we have used both sensory and supersensory observation to study the way the human larynx, tongue, and other organs of speech move when people express themselves through voiced speech. We studied the movements that are transformed into sounds, into vibrations in the air through normal speaking. We transferred those movements to other human organs, particularly those that are most comparable to primitive organs of speech: the arms and hands.

When people first see eurythmy, they are often surprised that the performers use their hands and arms more than their other limbs. You can see this as an obvious outcome if you consider that even in normal speech, when someone wants to express more than simple conventions, if someone wants to express his or her own individuality or perception or feelings through speech, that person finds it necessary to move into these more agile, more spiritual organs.Of course eurythmy takes the entire human being into account, not just the arms and hands. Eurythmy uses the expressiveness of movements in space, whether of groups or of individuals.

The most important thing to remember is that those movements, whether they are done by individuals or groups, are not at all arbitrary. They are the same movements that are the underlying foundation of what we express through voiced speech, transferred to the entire human being.

I need to emphasize once again that what we see on stage is essentially the entire larynx, represented through the whole person. What we present is the function, rhythm, and tempo of the larynx. It represents the musical and the pictorial aspects, as well as what is poetic when poetry is genuine art. The entire group reveals it all.

What is presented in eurythmy as voiceless and visible speech is also accompanied by music or recitation. Since music and speech are just other forms of expression for what lives in the human soul, we need to use that good old-fashioned form of recitation that Goethe had in mind when he was working with actors. He kept a conductor’s baton in his hand so that they would not only understand the content of the words but would also learn their rhythms. In our case, we need to avoid precisely the things that our inartistic age sees as important in recitation, namely, the emphasis upon the literal content of the words. We need to go back to what was artistic in more primitive recitations. This is rarely seen today, particularly if you live in a city. However, much of it is still alive in people my age, who can remember the traveling speakers of their childhood who recited their street ballads. They drew pictures on a blackboard and then spoke the text. They never spoke without keeping time with their foot, and at an exciting point in the story, they marched up and down or did other things to indicate that the tempo of the verse and its inner form were as important as the inner content. They wanted the listener to be aware of that. You will see that we attempt at every turn to emphasize this deeper aspect of art. Even on those occasions where we attempt to present poetry in humorous or fantastic ways through eurythmy, we do not present the literal content through such things as facial gestures or pantomime. We do not present the content of the poem through musical or poetic forms expressed solely in space but not in time. Instead we present what the poet or artist has shaped from the content.

These are a few things I wanted to mention about the artistic aspect of eurythmy. Since the human being is the instrument, not a violin or piano, not colors and shapes, eurythmy is particularly able to portray what exists within the microcosm of the human being of the ebb and flow of cosmic forces.

The second aspect of eurythmy is that of education. I am convinced that ordinary gymnastics, which developed during a materialistic period, focuses too much on anatomical and physiological aspects. In addition to physical development, there is also a development of the life of the soul and the will. We very much need these things, but mere gymnastics does not develop them in the growing human being. In the future, when people can look at such things more objectively, they will recognize that such gymnastics can strengthen human beings in a certain way, but that this strengthening does not at the same time strengthen the soul and will.

From a pedagogical perspective, we can see eurythmy as ensouled gymnastics, ensouled movement. In the small example we will present to you today with the children, you will see how those movements are carried by their souls.

We also need to say that although we are presenting some children’s exercises here, the children can study eurythmy only during those few hours available during school time. However, that is not really right. The education lying at the basis of our efforts in Dornach—which the Waldorf School in Stuttgart has realized to a certain extent—has the goal of not requiring children to attend any lessons outside of regular school time.

For that reason, it is especially important that we clearly understand the educational significance of eurythmy and completely integrate it into the school curriculum. Then the children will have everything that can serve them for normal spiritual, soul, and physical development, particularly the content of eurythmy.

Third is the hygienic element. The human being is a little world, a microcosm. All ill health essentially stems from the fact that human beings tear themselves away from the great laws of the cosmos. We could represent ill health by saying that if I removed my finger from my organism as a whole, it would no longer be a finger; it would wither away. My finger retains its inner function only in connection with my organism as a whole. In the same way, the human being realizes its inner nature only in connection with the universe as a whole. What happens in human beings really is connected with the entirety of the universe. People are not merely enclosed within the boundaries of their skin. Just a moment ago the air you now have within you was outside of you. After you have inhaled it, it becomes part of your organism, and what you now have within you will be exhaled. As soon as you have exhaled it, it will be outside you. Even if we only lived within our skin, we could not prove we are only that which is enclosed by our skin. We are not just a part of the air but of the entire cosmos.

We can therefore see that everything unhealthy results from things that people do that are not appropriate, that are not befitting of the entirety of human nature or the age in which we live, and that do not support the harmony and fulfillment that must exist between human beings and all creation. However, since every movement in eurythmy naturally comes forth out of the entire human organism, just as the movements of the larynx and its associated organs do for normal speech, everything done in eurythmy can bring the human being into harmony with the entire universe. We can certainly say that what a person, even as a child, can gain from the movements of eurythmy has a healing element. Of course, it must be performed properly and not clumsily. This is something we can certainly consider as an aspect of soul, spirit, and physical hygiene.

These are, then, the three perspectives from which we should see eurythmy and from which we have placed it in our spiritual movement.

Even though many visitors may have been here often and may have seen our recent attempts to move forward in our forms and utilization of space in the groups, we still need to appeal to your understanding for today’s presentation. Eurythmy is at its very beginnings. This is an attempt at a beginning, but it is an attempt that we are convinced will improve and become more perfect. Perhaps others will need to join in and take up what we can accomplish with our weak forces and develop it further. Nevertheless it is certainly possible to see our intent from what will be shown today. Eurythmy opens the artistic wellsprings at their source, because it uses the entire human being as its means of expression, because it pedagogically develops the soul, spiritual, and physical aspects of the child, and also because it places human beings into movements that have a health-giving effect. Therefore it is an art that can be justifiably placed alongside the other, older arts, especially when our contemporaries turn their interest toward it.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

Allow me today, as I have always done before these eurythmy attempts, to send a few introductory words in advance. This is not done here to explain anything of what is presented, because of course the artistic must work through its immediate revelation itself, and it would be inartistic to base such an attempt on any theoretical or ideological explanation. But I may say that this eurythmic art is an attempt to descend to certain sources of art within the human being and to seek certain forms of artistic expression that are particularly well suited to revealing the demands of all art: to bring the artistic into the sensual-supersensible.

The expression 'sensuous-supersensuous vision' was coined by Goethe, drawing on the depths of his world view and artistic ethos. For example, this sensuous-supersensuous vision underlies the entire development of our eurythmic art.

On stage, you will see all kinds of movements performed by individuals and groups of people. And at first one might have the impression that the attempt is being made to express something poetic or musical, which must of course be accompanied by the eurythmic presentation, for which the eurythmic presentation is only another expression. One might have the impression that arbitrary gestures, invented gestures, facial expressions are added to the poetic, to the musical. This is not the case at all. Rather, it has been discerned – precisely through a careful sensual-supersensory study – in human speech the movement tendencies that underlie the speech organs themselves.

In ordinary speech, the movements, the sliding movements, the movement tendencies of the palate and so on, are transferred directly to the air, where they become fine tremors that underlie hearing. Of course, it is not these tremulous movements that are at issue, but rather that which, as it were, underlies an entire system of such tremulous movements as the resultant. This has been studied and transferred from the speech organs to the whole human being, in accordance with Goethe's principle of metamorphosis, according to which, for example, the whole plant is only a more intricately designed leaf.

So one could say: what you see on the stage are movements that are not at all arbitrary, but are movements that are strictly lawful, as lawful as the movements of the speech organs themselves when speaking – through tones, through sounds or when singing and the like. This makes this moving sculpture something that is indeed imbued with an inner necessity, just as the succession of tones in musical creation. And what is presented here is actually a visible language, a completely lawful visible language, which is presented as eurythmy.

However, the present age will first have to find its way into this visible language. For the present age really has so much that is inartistic in it. What was still common practice in the Romantic period, for example, of listening with great devotion to poems that one did not understand literally, but listening only to the rhythm, to the beat, to the inner structure of the spoken word, has declined considerably today.

Even in recitation, which, as is the case with music, and mainly so, has to be accompanied by eurythmy performances, we will emphasize this artistic eurythmy element in recitation because it could not be done any other way, since the actual artistic element is already in the poetry itself. For it is not the literal content of the prose that is the essence of the poetry, but rather the formal structure that the artist himself brings forth.

So you will see that wherever we try to a great extent to create forms, spatial forms through groups, something is expressed that is not a mimic expression of the content of the poem, but rather that which follows from the character of the treatment of the poem that the poet has given to the literal content. Even when it is grotesque and comical – as we will try to show in the second part today, after the intermission, towards the end – you will see that we are really not concerned with a naturalistic representation, not about imitating any content, but about creating the context, the harmonious context, so that the individual does not want to have an effect through its content, but that the whole wants to have an effect through the coherent form.

On the whole, it can be said that eurythmy is going back to the sources of the artistic because this artistic must be based on the fact that it is not thoughts that affect us. If we cultivate science in today's materialistic sense, then only thoughts affect us. But this means that we can only penetrate the sensory content of the world. Here, however, the artistic aspect of eurythmy is effective in that the whole person or groups of people are the tool for what is to be expressed, for example, as a sensual-supernatural character. So you can say: The human being, the inspired human being, the spiritualized human being, puts soul and spirit into every movement, such soul and spirit as we can still hear from the true sounding poetry.

All this shows us how the sensual - as we see the human being in his limbs - how the sensual at the same time carries the spiritual on its wings. It is therefore truly sensual and supersensory. And it is so beautifully expressed, what Goethe basically demands of all art, when he says: “When nature begins to reveal her secret to anyone, he feels a deep longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.

For Goethe, art is in a sense an emotional experience of nature. And what better way to correspond to this nature than to reveal the possibilities of movement that lie within the human being, to let the whole person move out of their will in such a way that a visible language is expressed through them. The intellectual, which art otherwise rejects, is excluded by precisely this: only the will is expressed in the movements. And because the human personality - but in an impersonal way - is incorporated into these movements, an eminently artistic, a sensual and supersensual quality is expressed in the performances in this very way.

Then our eurythmy also has a significant pedagogical-didactic effect, in that it is in fact an animated form of gymnastics. And if we think about these things more objectively, we will realize that what has been valued about gymnastics for a long time – and we certainly don't want to do without it – is given a special boost when we add something to it, as we do in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, when we add this soulful gymnastics for children to it. You will be able to see some of this eurythmy today in the second part of our program.

However, ordinary gymnastics also strengthens the body, so we don't want to do without it for that purpose. But what is special about eurythmy, which is not just for the body but for body, soul and spirit, is that it has a particularly educational effect on the will, on willpower. And will energy is something that future generations will truly need in their lives, which will become ever more difficult.

Then our eurythmy has an important hygienic side. The movements of the human being, as they are brought out of his or her range of movement, are at the same time those through which the human being best integrates into the whole rhythm, into the whole harmony of the world. All unhealthiness is fundamentally based on the fact that the human being breaks out of this rhythm. If we take our time, where we have so many reasons to do so – nothing reactionary is being done here, so I ask you not to take what I say as if I wanted to rebel against necessary cultural phenomena, because we have many things in our time that are of course necessary, that we need, and we certainly cannot eliminate it if we consider doing so. We have to say that there is much cause for people today to disengage from the necessary rhythm, from the necessary harmony of the world, basically every time we take the train or even sit in the car, not to mention other things that happen in our time, take us out of the rhythm of the world and gradually creep into people's health, undermining it in a way that goes unnoticed. Only someone who is familiar with the more intimate connection between the human being and the world can see this when considering all of this and recognize how the world is currently striving to give the human being something healing again.

Where do we often look for what is healthy? Yes, esteemed attendees, I know that I am contradicting a great deal with this. But these are things that people will think about more objectively. For example, people tried – and this did happen even before this terrible world catastrophe befell us – to stage 'Olympic Games' here and there. This is a terrible thought that is completely beyond the understanding of children. The Olympic Games belonged to the Greek body. In such matters, people do not consider that each age has its own particular requirements.

But that is what we are trying to do in our eurythmic art: not to take something old from abstract theory and present it to humanity or demand it for humanity, but to find out what the present age demands from human nature in order to find something for humanity that is suitable for the present organization of humanity. Of course, such things cannot be proven anatomically or physiologically, because today one cannot dissect ancient Greeks. But anyone who has spiritual scientific means to look into the development of time knows that today's human being, in terms of his physical and especially his soul-spiritual organization, demands something different. The beginnings of such demands, which the age itself makes, are to be found with eurythmy; they are to be met with eurythmy.

You, esteemed attendees, know what we can offer: that this is only the beginning, that it is an attempt, perhaps only the beginning of an attempt. We are also convinced of this because we are honestly striving to work from the demands of the age, that if perhaps no longer we, but others, develop what today must be presented as an attempt, that a more perfect art direction will emerge that will be able to present itself worthily alongside the older sister arts.

For today, however, we must ask for forbearance, because, as already mentioned, it is a beginning, perhaps only an attempt at a beginning; but this beginning should also be developed. — With this in mind, I ask you to view our presentation with forbearance.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

Allow me to say a few words today, as I always do before the eurythmy performances. Of course, there is no need to explain artistic matters; it would be something inartistic to give an explanation of artistic matters. But here it is a matter of a certain art form expressing itself from artistic sources that have hardly been has been drawn upon, in a certain artistic language, and from sources that have not been drawn upon before, in a formal language that has not been used before. And so it will be necessary to say a few words about this source and about this formal language.

At first glance, when we see people or groups of people moving on the stage, as in a dramatic performance, for example, it might seem as if random gestures were being that are somehow connected with what is performed as an accompaniment, with the musical element or with the recitation that accompanies what is presented in eurythmy, somehow connected with random gestures. But this is not the case. What is important is that, through a kind of sensory-supersensory seeing – if I may use this expression of Goethe's – the human organism has actually overheard what movement tendencies the larynx and the other speech organs perform when the sound language is heard. This sound language is formed between people by the execution of air vibrations. These air vibrations actually arise from the fact that certain movement tendencies in the speech organs, as it were, collide with the air and transform into these oscillating movements. If we go back to what is going on inside the larynx and its neighboring organs during speech, we are dealing with tendencies of movement that do not come to full expression because they are transformed into vibrations, but which can be observed through sensory-supersensible observation.

Then, in a sense, by expanding Goethe's principle of metamorphosis, what has been heard in the speech organs can be transferred to the whole person or to groups of people, just as the whole plant is a transformation of what is already contained in the individual leaf in the Goethean sense. In this way, it is possible to reshape this principle artistically and extend it to the functional, to activity. What takes place in a certain way in the speech organs can be transferred to the whole human being or to groups of people in a different form, namely by shaping movements. This gives rise to a certain mute language, a language of movement. And just as we have in the lawful sequence of sounds, in the lawful sequence of words and so on, that which language reveals as the inner life of the soul, so too we can, in the lawful sequence of such movements, where one does not have the individual movements of facial expressions or pantomime or the gestural expression of the soul life, but where this soul life takes place in its own lawful order. But what is revealed through the eurythmic movements takes place in an equally lawful order.

It is important to have the impression that something is expressed in the sequence of movements, in the lawfulness of the movements, as in the lawful sequence or harmony of tones in music. In this way, we achieve what is meant here by eurythmy, and what a silent language, a speech movement, is, which is all the more perfect in eurythmy, the more every form of pantomime and mime is avoided. We have seen how difficult this is in the perfection of eurythmy. And certainly, in some details we will still not have achieved a complete overcoming of pantomime, but at the beginning of our striving there was still a great deal of pantomime, a great deal of random expression, a great deal of gesturing in our movements. What is achieved when, in accordance with movement and the laws of movement, the following or third or fifth personality in the movements emerges and then joins with the first, so that there is truly an inner harmonizing, an inner attunement of the movements takes place, which, I believe, we have already achieved to a certain extent through our work on eurythmy.

We can say that this moving language can be shaped more artistically than the spoken word in our modern age. The spoken word becomes more and more, the further civilization progresses, on the one hand a means of expression for thoughts that are becoming more and more abstract and, on the other hand, a means of convention. But this takes language out of the element in which it can actually be created artistically. For the more language lends itself to thought, the less it rings true to the whole essence of the human being, and the more it itself becomes abstract. And just as little is that which is merely a possibility of communication in language, that is also not something that can be artistically shaped.

In language, the thought element of the human being originally came together with the will element. The will element of the human being comes from much deeper levels of the human being than the thought element. This will element can be poured into the moving language of eurythmy much more than the thought element. The thought element is, as it were, thrown out of this moving language. And these successive movements, which intertwine within themselves, which work again and again through their repetitions, through their rhythm and so on, are basically an expression of that will impulse that goes through everything that is linguistic, especially through the artistic, poetic shaping of language. And so we have the opportunity, on the one hand, to invest the whole human being in what eurythmy gives, and on the other hand, we have the opportunity to achieve a different ideal of art.

Art must, in creating, produce something that makes a direct impression without us grasping it in thought or through abstract powers. We must, so to speak, look at the spiritual in art with our senses. And what better way to do this than to use the human being itself, the human being in motion, who is the very expression of soul and spirit, as the tool for artistic expression. In every movement there is something spiritual and soulful at the same time. So the sensually visible is in all its details at the same time supersensible, spiritual and soulful.

Therefore, one can say: both the musical element, which must permeate the poetry if the poetry is to be art, and the plastic, pictorial element, are absorbed into this eurythmic presentation. One sees this particularly when one accompanies these eurythmic presentations with recitation or declamation, as is the case today. What an inartistic age like our own makes of declamation – I also referred to this in the lectures – is not the art of recitation, for that is also essentially related to poetry itself. It must be recalled again and again how the true artist goes beyond the merely linguistic, beyond the literal content, beyond the prose-like nature of language. Schiller always had a kind of melody in his soul, regardless of whether he was creating this or that poem. He imbued this melody with the material content of the poem, so to speak, in order to make it rise or fall like a ladder, to transfer the poem into this melody. Goethe, for example, did not rehearse his “Iphigenia” with his actors in such a way that he sought the essential moment of the theatrical performance in the literal content, but rather with the baton in his hand like a conductor, so that the actors had to see their actual task in the inner form of the poem, in speaking the iambus in the poem correctly, in the rhythm and so on.

The recitation that accompanies the eurythmy must therefore also allow the eurythmic element in the actual poetry to emerge. It cannot do so in every prosaic element, which today's declamation particularly likes to choose, when this or that, which is more significant than the other in terms of the prose content, is also emphasized particularly emotionally or the like, whereby one only falls into an inartistic manner. The fact that the recitation itself has to be performed in a eurythmic way shows the justification for this emancipated eurythmic art, in that it expresses itself in its moving language.

This is one of the things that can be said about eurythmy as an art. This eurythmy has many other aspects, for example a hygienic-therapeutic aspect. This is not to be spoken of here, it does not belong here. Instead, I would just like to say a few words about how we use this eurythmy in the Waldorf school, as it should be, in a pedagogical-didactic way. It is an obligatory subject there. And even if I do not want to go as far as a very well-known representative of physiology said here in this hall after I had also spoken such words, who said: gymnastics as it is practiced today is not an educational tool at all, but a barbarism – I do not want to go that far, just to point out that gymnastics has emerged from a school of thought that looks only at the physical, the physiological, the corporeal, and is therefore only effective there.

But what happens in the child when, alongside this kind of gymnastics, I would say, a spiritual gymnastics in eurythmy is taught, is the creation of will initiative, which the person of the present and culture of the future will have to acquire more and more. The soul element in every movement strengthens the child when it is translated into movement in eurythmy. This in turn has the effect of strengthening and harmonizing the child's willpower. We will see how attempts have been made – this will be noticed especially by those who have already attended eurythmy performances months ago – to develop more and more the actual essence of the eurythmic, how we are increasingly coming not only to shape what relates to the what, but also to the how, which the poet himself brings out of the prose content.

However, we are still at the very beginning with our eurythmy, and therefore I have to ask for indulgence every time such a performance is presented to an audience. We know very well what this eurythmy is not yet. It is taking its first steps, but we are also convinced that if we continue in this way, we will see how this eurythmy, precisely by grasping artistic sources and reaching for an artistic formal language that has not yet been developed, but which is being grasped in certain depths of the human being, So that it can one day take its rightful place as an independent art alongside its older sister arts.

I

The remains of the Goetheanum now cover the Dornach hill. Its construction was the result of an initiative by members of the Anthroposophical Society. Anthroposophy is the name I used when, twenty years ago in Berlin, I gave a lecture cycle on the world view that I believe is a direct continuation of Goethe's way of thinking. I chose the name in memory of a book by the Herbartian Robert Zimmermann, “Umriß einer Anthroposophie” (Outline of an Anthroposophy), which appeared decades ago. The content of this book, however, has nothing to do with what I presented as “anthroposophy”. It was modified Herbartian philosophy in the most abstract form. I wanted to use the word to express a world view that, through the application of the spiritual organs of perception of the human being, brings about the same knowledge of the spiritual world as natural science brings about through the sensory organs of perception of the physical.

About a year and a half before the lecture cycle mentioned above, I had already given lectures on another area of this anthroposophical world view at the invitation of Countess and Count Brockdorff in the “Theosophical Library” in Berlin at the time. The content of these lectures is published in my book “Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life”. As a result of these lectures I was invited to join the Theosophical Society. I accepted this invitation with the intention of never advocating anything but the content of what had presented itself to me as the anthroposophical world view. It was always my view that I should lecture to all people who wanted to hear me, regardless of the name of the party under which they had joined together in any group, or whether they came to my lectures without any such preconception.

At the same time that I was invited to join the Theosophical Society, a number of members of that society founded a German section of it. I was invited to become its General Secretary. Despite serious misgivings, I accepted. I did not change my intention to present the Anthroposophical worldview to the world. What I myself call “Theosophy” is clearly evident from my book “Theosophy”, which I wrote shortly afterwards. This Theosophy emerges as a special field of Anthroposophy.

At the same time that the members of the Theosophical Society were inaugurating the German section in Berlin with speeches by Annie Besant, I was giving the series of lectures on anthroposophy that I have just mentioned.

I was now invited to give lectures to members of the Theosophical Society quite often. But basically, from the very beginning of this activity, I was opposed by those members of the Theosophical Society who were dogmatically attached to the teachings of some of the older leaders of that society. The circle of those personalities who found something in the Anthroposophical worldview increasingly formed itself as an independent one. In 1913, these leaders expelled them from the Theosophical Society when I called the consequences drawn from the teachings of these leaders and presented to the world absurd and declared that I did not want to have anything to do with such absurdities.

The Anthroposophical Society was founded in 1912 under the influence of these events. With the help of those personalities who later held leading positions in the Society, I was able to add the performance of “mysteries” to my lecturing activities even before that. As early as 1907, the anthroposophically oriented members in Munich performed Schuré's adaptation of the Eleusinian mystery at the Theosophical Congress. In 1909, he presented the play “Children of Lucifer” by the same author, which was followed by the presentation of “The Children of Lucifer” by the same author in Munich in 1909. As a result, in the following years, 1910-1913, my four own, very modern mystery dramas were performed for the members of the anthroposophical circle, also in Munich.

This expansion of anthroposophical activity into the field of art was a natural consequence of the nature of anthroposophy. The reasons for this have been frequently presented in this weekly publication.

Meanwhile, the circle that had become the Anthroposophical Society had grown so much that the leading figures within it were able to build Anthroposophy a home of its own. Munich was chosen as the location for this, because most of the supporters of the building intention were located there and had developed a particularly dedicated activity at that time.

I myself saw myself only as the representative of these supporters of the building intention. I believed that I had to concentrate my efforts on the inner spiritual work of Anthroposophy and gratefully accepted the initiative to create a place of work for it. But at the moment when the initiative was realized, the artistic design was for me a matter of inner spiritual work. I had to devote myself to this design. I asserted that if the building was to truly frame the anthroposophical world view, then the same principles from which the thoughts of anthroposophy arise must also give rise to the artistic forms of the building. The fact that this should not be done in the manner of a straw-and-stone allegory of building forms or of a symbolism tainted by thought is inherent in the nature of anthroposophy, which, in my opinion, leads to real art.

The idea of building the structure in Munich could not be carried out because influential artistic circles there objected to the forms. Whether these objections would have been overcome later is not worth discussing. The supporters of the building intention did not want the delay and therefore gratefully accepted the gift of Dr. Emil Grossheintz, who had already purchased a piece of land on the Dornach hill for the building.

So the foundation stone was laid in 1913 and work began immediately.

The supporters of the building project named the building the “Johannesbau” in reference to a character in my mystery dramas named Johannes Thomasius. During the years of construction, I often said that I started from the study of Goethean forms of thought in the construction of the anthroposophical worldview many years ago, and that for me their home is a “Goetheanum”. As a result, non-German members of the Anthroposophical Society in particular decided to continue to give the building the name “Goetheanum”.

Since anthroposophy, at the time when the building was started, had already found members with academic training and experience in the most diverse fields, and therefore stood in prospect of applying spiritual scientific methods in the individual sciences, I was allowed to suggest adding to the name of the building: “Freie Hochschule für Geisteswissenschaft” (Free University for Spiritual Science).

Friends of anthroposophy have been working on this building for almost ten years. Difficult material sacrifices came from many sides: artists, technicians and scientists worked together in the most dedicated way. Anyone in the anthroposophical circle who had the opportunity to work on the project did so. The most difficult tasks were willingly taken on. The spirit of the anthroposophical world view worked through enthusiastic hearts on the “Goetheanum”. To my great joy, the construction workers, who at first were at least indifferent to anthroposophy, have been of the opinion since 1922 that the misgivings about anthroposophy that were expressed in such wide circles are unfounded.

My colleagues and I had turned our thoughts to the continuation of our work. We had planned a science course for the end of December and the beginning of January. Friends of the anthroposophical cause from many countries were present again.

In addition to the artistic activities, eurythmy and declamation had been added years ago, under the direction of Mrs. Marie Steiner, who has made this one of her many fields of work. On New Year's Eve, we had a eurythmy performance from 5 to 7 p.m. My lecture began at 8 p.m. and ended half an hour after 9 p.m. I had spoken about the connection between human beings and the phenomena of the course of the year in an anthroposophical way. Shortly thereafter, the Goetheanum went up in flames; by New Year's morning 1923 it had burned down to the concrete substructure.

II

When I had the honor of inaugurating the first course of lectures held at the Goetheanum in September and October 1920, it seemed to me to be of primary importance to point out how spiritual-scientific knowledge, artistic form and religious inwardness are sought from a single source in anthroposophy. In the opening speech I briefly pointed this out, and in lectures on the building idea in Dornach I wanted to show how art in the Goetheanum was drawn from the same spirituality that seeks to reveal itself in ideas when anthroposophy appears in the form of knowledge.

In this respect, the attempt that was made with the Goetheanum has been misunderstood by many. It has been said that the work here is done in symbolism. Those who have spoken in this way always seemed to me to be people who had visited the Goetheanum but had not really looked at it. They thought: a particular world view is presented here. The people who produce it want to create symbols of what they teach in the building forms and in the rest of the artistic work that they add inside and out. With this dogma, one often visited the Goetheanum and found it confirmed, because one did not look at it and because one judged the matter as if anthroposophy were nothing more than a rational science. Such a science, however, if it wants to express itself artistically, will usually achieve nothing more than symbolism or allegory.

But at the Goetheanum, no abstract ideas were embodied. The shaping of ideas was completely forgotten when form was created from artistic perception, line from line and surface from surface. When colors were used on the wall to depict what was also seen directly in the color picture.

When I occasionally had the opportunity to personally show visitors around the Goetheanum, I said that I actually dislike “explaining” the forms and images, because the artistic should not be suggested by thoughts, but should be accepted in direct contemplation and perception.

Art that arises from the same soil as the ideas of true anthroposophy can become real art. For the soul forces that shape these ideas penetrate into the spiritual realm from which artistic creativity can also come. What one forms in thought out of anthroposophical knowledge stands for itself. There is no need to express it symbolically in a semi-artistic way. On the other hand, through the experience of the reality that anthroposophy reveals, one has the need to live artistically in forms and colors. And these colors and forms live for themselves again. They do not express any ideas. No more or no less than a lily or a lion expresses an idea.

Because this is related to the essence of anthroposophical life, anyone who used their eyes and not their dogmatizing minds when visiting Dornach will not have become aware of symbols and allegories, but of real artistic attempts.

But there was one thing I always had to mention when speaking of the architectural idea of the Goetheanum. When the time came to carry out this building, one could not turn to an artist who was supposed to create a home for Anthroposophy in the antique, Renaissance or Gothic style. If anthroposophy were mere science, mere content of ideas, then it could have been so. But anthroposophy is life, it is the grasping of the universal human and the world in and through man.

The initiative of the friends of this world view to build the Goetheanum could only be realized if this building, down to the last detail of its design, was created out of the same living spirit from which anthroposophy itself springs. I have often used an image: look at a nut and the nutshell. The shell is certainly not a symbol of the nut. But it is formed out of the same laws as the nut. Thus the structure can only be the shell, which artistically proclaims in its forms and images the spirit that lives in the word when Anthroposophy speaks through ideas.

In this way, every style of art is born out of a spirit that has also revealed itself ideationally in a world view.

And in a purely artistic sense, a style of building has been created for the Goetheanum that had to move from symmetry, repetition and so on to that which breathes in the forms of organic life. The auditorium, for example, had seven columns on either side. Only one on the left and right had capitals of the same shape. In contrast, each following capital was the metamorphic development of the previous one. All this resulted from artistic intuition; not from a rational element. It was not possible to repeat typical motifs in different places; rather, each structure was individually designed in its place, just as the smallest link in an organism is individual and yet designed in such a way that it necessarily appears in its formation in the place where it is. Some people have taken the number seven of the columns as an expression of something mystical. This too is a mistake. It is precisely a result of artistic perception. By allowing one capital form to arise artistically from the other, one arrived at the seventh with a form that could not be exceeded without falling back on the motif of the first.

It may be said, without indulging in illusions, that the building at the Goetheanum was not the only one to be confronted with the prejudices just mentioned. Gradually, quite a number of people came forward who wanted to look with unprejudiced eyes at what had arisen from unprejudiced perception.

Goethe speaks from his artistic feeling the words: “He to whom nature begins to reveal her secret, feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art,” and “Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws that would have remained hidden forever if it had not appeared.” According to the forms that the human concept of knowledge has taken in modern times, it is believed that the essence of natural things and natural processes can only be expressed by formulating laws (natural laws) in a conceptual way. But what if there were an artistic basis to nature's creative activity? Then the person who starts from the prejudice that it can only be expressed intellectually would not come close to the full essence of nature. And so it is. When one has penetrated to the secrets of nature through the realm of ideas, full of the life of the world, then one experiences: there is still something that does not yield to thought, that one can only reach when one tunes the soul into the realm of ideas through artistic contemplation. Goethe felt this when he wrote the sentences quoted. And the Goetheanum was shaped out of such a feeling. Anyone who sees a sect in people who practice anthroposophy will easily explain the symbolism of a sectarian view into the architectural forms of the Goetheanum. But anthroposophy is the opposite of all sectarianism. It strives for the purely human in full impartiality.

The small domed room of the Goetheanum was painted in such a way that it was not started from an ideational figurative, to which colors were glued, but rather a color experience was there first; and from this the figurative was born. In devotion to the essence of the color, the soul's creative power is strengthened to the figurative that the experienced colors demand. When painting, one feels as if there were nothing in the world but living, weaving colors, which are creative and generate essence out of themselves.

When one has to speak about the intentions behind the creation of the Goetheanum, one feels the pain of its loss, for which words are not there. For the whole essence of this building was geared towards contemplation. The memory hurts unspeakably. For one remembers soul experiences that urge towards contemplation. But the possibility of contemplation has been taken away since that New Year's Eve.

III

At the Goetheanum, an artistic sense could lead one to the insight that anthroposophy is not a sect or a religion. You can't build a church or a temple in this style. Two cylinder casings, with different sized bases, interlocked on the sides where they were cut out. They were closed at the top by a larger and a smaller dome. The domes were hemispherical and also interlocked, with sectors cut out where they touched.

The small domed room was to serve as a stage for mystery plays when it was completely finished. But it had not yet been set up for that purpose. Until now, only eurhythmy performances had taken place in this room. — The larger domed room enclosed the rows of spectators and listeners. There was nothing that would have given this two-part room the character of a temple or cult building.

The bases of the twelve columns around the small domed room had been converted into twelve chairs. One could recognize a meeting room for a limited number of participants; but not something church-like. Between the columns there was to be a sculptured group in the center of which was to be a figure in which one could recognize Christ. It was to be the emblem that genuine spiritual knowledge leads to Christ, thus uniting with the content of religion.

Those who entered through the main portal should be addressed by the whole in an artistic way: “Recognize the true human being.” The building was designed to be a home of knowledge, not a “temple.

The two rooms were separated by a curtain. In front of the curtain was a lectern that could be lowered when the stage area was used.

One need only look at the shape of this lectern to see how little was thought of it in terms of a church. All these forms were artistically drawn from the overall design of the building and from the meeting of the designs that led to the place where the speaker stood.

These forms were not an architectural and sculptural temple interior, but the framing of a place of spiritual knowledge. Anyone who wanted to see something else in them had to first interpret artistic untruth into them. But it was always satisfying for me when I was allowed to hear from those who were authorized to say: these forms speak in the true way of what they want to be. And that I was able to hear such words, that happened several times.

But it should not be denied that some things about the building must have been strange to those who approached it with familiar ideas about architecture. But that was in its essence; and it could not be otherwise.

When people become acquainted with anthroposophy, some of them also experience something of this kind of alienation. It initially appears as knowledge of the human being. But as it develops its knowledge of the human being, it expands into knowledge of the world. The human being recognizes his own nature; but this grasping is a merging with the content of the world.

When you entered the Goetheanum, you were surrounded by walls. But the treatment of the wall in its sculptural design had something that contradicted the character of the wall. We are accustomed to seeing the wall treated in such a way that it closes off a space from the outside. Such a wall is artistically opaque. The walls of the Goetheanum, with their protruding column forms and the designs that were supported by these columns, were intended to be artistically transparent. They were not meant to shut out the world, but to catch the eye with their artistic formations in such a way that the observer felt connected to the vastness of the universe. If one could not immediately focus one's attention on this peculiarity, these forms appeared as if one suddenly became aware of an incomprehensible window where one had expected an opaque blackboard.

The glass windows set into the outer wall were also adapted to this character of the wall. These were visible between two columns. They were made of monochrome glass, into which the artistic motifs were engraved. It was a kind of glass etching. The image was created by the different thicknesses that the monochrome glass acquired through the etching. It could only be seen as an image in strong sunlight. Thus, what had been artistically conceived in terms of form for the rest of the wall was also physically achieved in these windows. The image was only there when the wall interacted with the outside world. Two windows on the left and right were the same color. The windows from the entrance to the beginning of the stage were different colors, arranged in such a way that the colors in their sequence created a color harmony.

At first, what was seen in the windows might have been incomprehensible. But for those who had absorbed the anthroposophical world view, the strangeness would have been revealed purely through contemplation, not through intellectual or symbolic interpretation. And the whole was a home for those who sought anthroposophy. Anyone who claimed to understand these pictures without an anthroposophically oriented view resembled someone who wanted to enjoy a poem in a language artistically without first understanding the language.

The same applied to the pictorial motifs that covered the inner two dome surfaces. But it is wrong to say that one should first have a worldview in order to understand the images and forms. One did not need to read books or listen to lectures in order to have an anthroposophical orientation for these images, but one could also gain this orientation without the preceding word by simply looking into the images. But one had to come to it. If one did not want to, one stood before it, as – without, of course, even remotely suggesting an artistic comparison of values – before Raphael's Disputa, if one did not want to orient oneself to the mystery of the Trinity.

The auditorium was designed for nine hundred to one thousand people. At the western end of the auditorium, there was a raised space for the built-in organ and other musical instruments.

This entire wooden structure stood on a concrete substructure that was larger in plan, so that there was a raised terrace around the outside of the auditorium. In this substructure, under the auditorium, were the places for depositing clothes, and under the stage area were machines. It must have seemed amusing to those who had seen the contents of this concrete substructure when they heard that opponents of the anthroposophical worldview were talking about all sorts of mysterious things, even about underground meeting places in this concrete building. The Goetheanum had goals that truly did not require dark, mysterious meeting places or magic instruments. Such things would not have fitted into the architectural concept of the whole. They would have been artistically unmotivated.

The domes were covered with Nordic slate from the Voß slate quarries. The bluish-grey sheen in the sunlight combined with the color of the wood to create a whole that many a person who has made their way up the Dornach hill to the Goetheanum on a bright summer's day has welcomed with sympathy.

Now they encounter a pile of rubble with a low concrete ruin rising up out of it.

IV

The art of eurythmy seemed to come into its own at the Goetheanum. It is visible speech or singing. The individual performs movements with his limbs, especially the most expressive movements of the arms and hands, or groups of people move or take up positions in relation to each other. These movements are like gestures. But they are not gestures in the usual sense. These relate to what is presented in eurythmy as the child's babbling to the developed language.

When a person reveals himself through language or song, then he is there with his whole being. He is, so to speak, in the system through his whole body in motion. But he does not express this system. He captures this movement in the making and concentrates it on the speech or sound organs. Now, through sensual-supersensible observation – to use this Goethean expression – one can recognize which movement of the whole physical human being underlies a tone, a speech sound, a harmony, a melody, or a formed speech structure. In this way, individuals or groups of people can be made to perform movements that express the musical or linguistic element in a visible way, just as the speech and singing organs express it aurally. The whole person, or groups of people, become the larynx; the movements speak or sing as the larynx sounds.

Just as in speech or song, nothing in eurythmy is arbitrary. But it makes just as little sense to say that momentary gestures are preferable in eurythmy as it does to say that an arbitrary tone or sound is better than those that lie within the lawful formation of speech or sound.

But eurythmy is not to be confused with dance either. Musical elements that sound simultaneously can be eurythmized. In this case, one is not dancing to music but visibly singing it.

Eurythmic movements are derived from the human organism as a whole in the same orderly way as speech or song.

When poetry is eurythmized, the visible language of eurythmy is revealed on stage and at the same time the poetry is heard through recitation or declamation. One cannot recite or declaim to the eurythmy as one often likes to do, by merely pointing out the prose content of the poetry. One must really treat the language artistically as language. Meter, rhythm, melodious motifs and so on, or even the imaginative aspect of sound formation, must be worked out. For every true poetry is based on a hidden (invisible) eurythmy. Mrs. Marie Steiner has tried to develop this kind of recitation and declamation, which goes hand in hand with the eurythmic presentation. It seems as if a kind of orchestral interaction of the spoken and visibly presented word has really been achieved.

It turns out to be inartistic for one person to recite and perform eurythmy at the same time. These tasks must be performed by different people. The image of a person who wanted to reveal both in themselves would fall apart for the immediate impression.

The development of the art of eurythmy is based on insight into the expressive possibilities of the human body, insight that draws on both the senses and the supersensory. As far as I know, there is only scant evidence of this insight from earlier times. These were times when the soul and spirit were still able to shine through the human body to a greater extent than they are today. This scant tradition, which incidentally points to quite different intentions than those present in eurythmy, was of course used. But it had to be independently developed and transformed, and above all, it had to be completely reshaped into an artistic form. I am not aware of any tradition in the formal movement of groups of people that we have gradually developed in eurythmy.

When this eurythmic art appeared on the stage of the Goetheanum, one should have the feeling that the static forms of the interior design and the sculpture related to the moving human beings in a completely natural way. The former should, so to speak, accept the latter pleasantly. The building and the eurythmic movement should merge into a single whole. This impression could be heightened by accompanying the sequence of eurythmic creations with lighting effects that flooded the stage in harmonious radiance and sequence. What is attempted here is light eurythmy.

And if the forms of the stage took up the eurythmic designs as something belonging to them, so did those of the auditorium take up the recitation or declamation that occurred in parallel with the eurythmy, which sounded from a seat on the side of the stage, where it meets the auditorium, through Marie Steiner. Perhaps it is not inappropriate to say that the listener should feel in the building itself a comrade in the understanding of the word or tone heard. If one does not want to claim more than that such a unity of building form and word or music was striven for, then what has been said will not sound too immodest. For no one can be more convinced that all this has been achieved only in a highly imperfect way than I myself. But I have tried to shape it in such a way that one could feel how the movement of the word naturally ran along the forms of the capitals and architraves.

I would only like to suggest what can be tried for such a building: that its forms do not merely enclose what is depicted in them on the outside, but contain it in a living unity in themselves in the most direct impression.

And if I were to express my opinion on this, I would hold back. But I have heard what has been said from others.

I also know that I have shaped the forms of the building sensitively, out of the state of mind from which the eurythmy images also come.

The fact that the forms of eurythmy were continuously shaped in the experience of what could be experienced in the creation of the building forms will not be perceived as a contradiction of what has been said. For the harmony between the two was not achieved by intellectual intention, but arose out of a homogeneous artistic impulse. Probably eurythmy could not have been found without the work on building. Before the building idea, it existed only in its first beginnings.

The instructions for the soul-based shaping of the moving speech forms were first given to the students in the hall built into the south wing of the Goetheanum. The interior architecture of this hall in particular was intended to be a resting eurythmy, just as the eurythmic movements within it were moving plastic forms, shaped by the same spirit as these resting forms themselves.

It was in this hall that the smoke was first detected on December 31, which came from the fire that destroyed the entire Goetheanum when it grew up. One feels, when one has been lovingly connected with the building, the merciless flames painfully penetrating through the sensations that poured into the resting forms and into the work attempted within them.

V

Of course, some objections can be raised against the stylistic forms of the Goetheanum. I have always described them as a first attempt to undertake something artistic in the direction characterized in the preceding remarks.

Those who refuse to accept any transition from the cognitive representation of the nature of the world and of world processes through ideas to pictorial artistic embodiment must reject these forms of expression. But what is it ultimately based on, this desire to visualize something of the world's content through knowledge in the soul? But only because in the experience of the ideas of knowledge one becomes aware of something in which one knows the outer world to be continuously active within oneself. Through knowledge the world speaks in the human soul. He who merely imagines that he has formed his own ideas about the world, he who does not feel the world pulsating within him when he lives in ideas, should not speak of knowledge. The soul is the arena in which the world reveals its secrets.

But anyone who thinks of knowledge in such a realistic way must ultimately come to the conclusion that his thinking must pass over into artistic creation if he wants to experience the content of the world in certain areas within himself. One can close one's mind to such a view. One can demand that science must stay away from artistic visualization and express itself only in the formation of ideas that are demanded by logical laws. But such a demand would be mere subjective arbitrariness if the creative process of nature were such that it could only be grasped artistically in certain areas. If nature proceeds as an artist, then man must resort to artistic forms in order to express it.

But it is also an experience of knowledge that in order to follow nature in its creative work, the transition of logically formed ideas into artistic images is necessary.

For example, up to a certain point it is possible to express the human physique through logical thinking. But from this point onwards, one must allow the process to enter into artistic forms if one does not want a mere ghostly image of the human being, but rather the human being in his or her living reality. And one will be able to feel that in the soul, by experiencing the form of the body in artistic and pictorial terms, the reality of the world is revealed in the same way as in the logically formed ideas.

I believed I was presenting Goethe's view of the world correctly when, at the end of the 1980s, I described his relationship to art and science as follows: “Our time believes it is doing the right thing when it keeps art and science as far apart as possible. They are said to be two completely opposite poles in the cultural development of humanity. Science should, so it is thought, sketch out for us a world view that is as objective as possible; it should show us reality in a mirror or, in other words, it should adhere purely to what is given, divesting itself of all subjective arbitrariness. The objective world is decisive for its laws; it must submit to it. It should take the standard of truth and falsity entirely from the objects of experience. The two creations of art are to be completely different. The self-creative power of the human mind gives them their laws. For science, any interference by human subjectivity would be a falsification of reality, a transgression of experience; art, on the other hand, grows on the field of ingenious subjectivity. Its creations are the product of human imagination, not reflections of the outside world. Outside of us, in objective being, lies the origin of scientific laws; in us, in our individuality, that of aesthetic ones. Therefore, the latter have not the slightest cognitive value; they create illusions without the slightest reality factor. Anyone who understands the matter in this way will never gain clarity about the relationship between Goethean poetry and Goethean science. But this means that both are misunderstood. The world-historical significance of Goethe lies precisely in the fact that his art flows from the source of being, that it contains nothing illusory, nothing subjective, but appears as the herald of the lawfulness that the poet has overheard in the depths of natural activity to the world spirit. At this level, art becomes the interpreter of the secrets of the world, as science is in another sense. This is how Goethe always understood art. For him, it was a revelation of the primal law of the world; science was the other. For him, art and science arose from the same source. While the scientist delves into the depths of reality to express the driving forces of reality in the form of thoughts, the artist seeks to incorporate these same driving forces into his material. Goethe himself puts it this way: “I think that science could be called knowledge of the general, abstract knowledge; art, on the other hand, would be science applied to action. Science would be reason and art its mechanism, which is why it could also be called practical science. And so, finally, science would be the theorem, art the problem.” And Goethe expresses something similar with the words: ”Style rests on the deepest foundations of knowledge, on the essence of things, insofar as we are allowed to recognize it in visible and tangible forms.” (See my introduction to Goethe's scientific writings, which will soon be published as an independent book by the Stuttgarter Kommenden Tag-Verlag.)

What I meant at the time: that Goethe is right when he thinks of the relationship between art and science in this way; that seems right to me today too. That is why what was expressed in his work in the form of knowledge could be presented in artistic form at the Goetheanum.

Anthroposophy has the supersensible content of the world for its representation, insofar as it is accessible to human contemplation. One feels that every expression of this content through logically formed ideas is only a kind of thought-gesture that points to this content. And the artistic form appears as the other gesture through which the spiritual world responds to the thought-gesture; or perhaps the other way around, the world reveals the idea in response when one asks it through the artistic image.

The stylistic forms of the Goetheanum could not, therefore, be a naturalistic imitation of any inanimate or animate object in the world around us. The experience of what is happening in the spiritual world had to guide the hand that formed the sculpture and applied the paint to the surface. The spiritual content of the world had to be allowed to flow into the lines and reveal itself in the color.

No matter how many objections are raised against these stylistic forms of the Goetheanum, the attempt that was made was to create an artistic home for a striving for knowledge in the sense of Goethe's intentions, a home that was from the same spiritual source as the knowledge cultivated in it. The attempt may have been imperfectly successful; it was there as such: and the Goetheanum was built in the spirit of Goethe's view of art.

Thus one came to feel that the Goetheanum was the home of Anthroposophy; but after the disaster of December 31, after the one side, one also feels, with Anthroposophy, homeless. Sympathetic visitors came to the scene of the fire on January 1st, saying: we want to keep alive in our hearts what we have experienced in this building.

VI

The Goetheanum has only experienced nine major events. In September and October 1920, lecture series took place over three weeks on a wide range of scientific topics. The impetus for this came from the circle of scientists working in the Anthroposophical Society. The entire organization of the lecture cycles was also in their hands. Teachers from the Free Waldorf School and other personalities with training in various fields of knowledge — including artists — were involved. The idea behind the event was to show how the individual scientific fields can be illuminated by the anthroposophical method of research.

It struck me at the time, as I witnessed these cycles, that not everything appeared as if it had been born out of the spirit of the Goetheanum. When individual insights into nature or history were illuminated out of the spirit of anthroposophical concepts as a whole, one felt harmony between the structure and the presentation of knowledge. When individual questions were discussed, this was not the case.

I had to think of how, during the construction, the anthroposophical work had grown beyond the stage it was at when construction began. In 1913, the idea of those personalities who had decided to build it was to create a place for the anthroposophical work in the narrower sense and for those artistic performances that had grown out of the anthroposophical perception. At that time, the individual scientific fields were only included in the anthroposophical work of knowledge to the extent that they naturally integrated into the broader presentations of spiritual scientific observation.

The building was conceived as an artistic vessel for this spiritual content. This relationship was the basis for the design of the building. It was allowed to be so. For it was important to express artistically how anthroposophy should be placed in the context of human life as a whole. If the treatment of individual scientific fields was considered later, this should be done in separate extensions.

A different approach is needed for the reconstruction of the Goetheanum. The construction of a central place for anthroposophy in the narrower sense was obvious because it was the will of the personalities who advocated its construction to build this place out of wood. Such a central place can be artistically imbued with this material. Another material would then have been considered for the extensions. A second wooden structure is out of the question. Before the Goetheanum was tackled, I told the leading personalities what artistic feelings for wood and for another material would be considered. They decided on wood because at that time they took the view that they should proceed as idealistically as possible. This idealism bore the beautiful fruit that understanding souls had before them, at least for a short time, a home for anthroposophy that could not have been built in another material with such verve in the lines and such expressiveness in the forms. Today, this fruit is a tragic memory. There are no words for the pain of loss. The idealism of those who commissioned me to build in wood must therefore be given all possible credit.

The building is closely connected with the fate of anthroposophical development in recent years, precisely because of the lack of the marked harmony at the first event. The first series of lectures as a whole reveals itself as something that did not grow quite organically out of the same idea as the building itself. It was as if something had been carried into the purely anthroposophical building. In the outer reality of human coexistence, things do not always follow the path demanded by the inner workings of a spiritual context. Anthroposophy is absolutely predisposed to extend its developmental tendencies to where they also lead into the most specialized fields of knowledge. But that is not how it happened in the Anthroposophical Society. A different path has been taken. Scientifically educated personalities have become members of the Society. Science was their way of life and their education. Anthroposophy has become a matter of the heart for them. They have allowed themselves to be inspired by it for their science. Thus we have received scientific explanations from anthroposophically minded personalities before the individual fields of knowledge were born out of anthroposophy itself. Much has been achieved by the fact that, when the need arose, lecture cycles were held in front of small groups from the most diverse fields of knowledge, inspired by the anthroposophical spirit. What came out of this is not to be presented here as something that was hasty or the like. But just as, for example, in the pedagogical field, educational methods have emerged directly from anthroposophy, as is the case in the artistic field with eurhythmics, so it has not been destined by fate for the Anthroposophical Society to do so in other fields. In certain areas, a faster pace was demanded of anthroposophy out of a well-seen contemporary necessity. This requires that individual scientific fields that are already being worked on and anthroposophical development must first grow into each other.

This was also expressed in the disharmony of the first event in 1920, as described. If a reconstruction comes about, it will be able to contain - in a different material - individual rooms - for example on the first floor - for scientific events and artistic work, and thus the space for the anthroposophical in the narrower sense. On the one hand, such a building will correspond to its material, and on the other hand to the development that anthroposophical endeavors have taken in recent years.

The disharmony was only an expression of the endeavor to create a home for anthroposophy in the narrower sense that was artistically appropriate to its stage of development up to 1918. Perhaps I may cite this as proof of how Anthroposophy as a spiritual content and its home as an artistic unity were felt during the elaboration of the latter.

But today, in a strange harmony with this architectural idea of the Goetheanum, I feel what was then in me, when the first event was set up in it, to open the Goetheanum itself in a festive manner. The program of that series of lectures could not be taken as the occasion for such a celebration. It should only take place when an event had become possible whose whole would be in complete harmony with the original building idea. It did not come to that. The Goetheanum died away before then. In the hearts of those who loved it, there was a lasting funeral service.

The next essay will deal with the further events that could still take place in the dear building.

VII

Even if it was not possible for us to reveal the opening ceremony, the building idea and the event of the Goetheanum in full harmony, we were still able to make attempts in various directions over the course of more than two years to bring the anthroposophical spirit to bear.

The first three-weekly lecture cycle was followed by a second one-weekly cycle in April 1921. The aim was to show how the individual fields of human knowledge can be significantly expanded if their paths of research are continued into the spiritual realm.

On this occasion, it gave me particular satisfaction to be able to point out such a possible expansion for a number of fields of knowledge through my own lectures.

During these events, I was also always given the task of showing visitors around the building and talking about the artistic aspects of the Goetheanum. On the one hand, I was reluctant to say anything theoretical about art. Art is meant to be looked at. But these tours had another side to them. One could avoid wanting to 'explain' art in an unartistic way. I did that too, as far as it seemed permissible to me from those who were looking at the building. But there were plenty of opportunities to talk about anthroposophical matters in a free, fragmentary, aphoristic way, linking it to the forms and images that could be seen. And the lectures could then be woven into a whole with what was said during the tour. Then one felt very intimately how good the anthroposophically oriented word was when spoken at a pillar or under a picture that came from the same spirit as the word itself.

These events always included eurythmy performances. They made it clear how the building demanded that the insights presented in it had to be shaped into a whole by artistic means. The inner space of the Goetheanum seemed to brook no lecture cycle that was not rounded off by artistic elements. I believe it was felt to be a necessity when Marie Steiner added her art of recitation and declamation to the lecture events from the organ room.

We also had the joy of hearing Mrs. Werbeck-Svärdström unfold her wonderful art from this organ room, sometimes together with her three sisters. What the participants were able to hear there will certainly be unforgettable.

Personally, it always gave me the greatest joy to hear Albert Steffen speak from the Goetheanum podium. What he says is always meant to be felt in plastic forms. He is like a sculptor of language; a sculptor who carves in wood. I perceived a harmony between the building forms and his language sculptures, which he placed in the building at once deliberately and confidently.

In August 1921, we were able to hold an event that was thanks to the English painter Baron von Rosenkrantz. This event felt particularly at home in the building. The band stepped before the soul's eye, connecting spiritual-scientific research and spirit-revealing art. It is understandable that attention was drawn to what the building was intended to be an experiment for, on this occasion in particular.

At the end of September and the beginning of October, a number of German theologians who carried the impulse for a Christian religious renewal gathered at the Goetheanum. What was worked out here came to a conclusion in September 1922. I myself must count among the festivals of my life what I experienced with these theologians in September 1922 in the small hall of the south wing where the fire was later discovered. Here, with a group of nobly enthusiastic people, it was possible to follow the path that leads spiritual knowledge into religious experience.

At the end of December and beginning of January 1922, a group of English teachers gathered at the Goetheanum. That this was possible was due to the dedicated efforts of Prof. M. Mackenzie. She and Prof. Mackenzie had taken part in the course organized by Baron von Rosenkrantz in August. On this occasion, the distinguished English educationalist decided to invite English teachers to visit the Goetheanum during the Christmas holidays. Together with a number of teachers from the Stuttgart Waldorf School, I was invited to speak again in the hall of the south wing about pedagogy, education and teaching practice. The English educators were joined by others from Scandinavia, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany and so on.

In September 1922, I was invited to give ten lectures on “Cosmology, Philosophy and Religion from the Point of View of Anthroposophy”. Once again, the cycle of my lectures was rounded off by teachers from the Waldorf School and other personalities from the Anthroposophical Movement, through their lectures and the discussions they held with the participants. I went to each of my lectures and came away from them with a deep sense of gratitude to those who initiated the building of the Goetheanum. For it was precisely in these lectures, in which I had to cover a wide range of knowledge from an anthroposophical point of view, that I had to feel the benefit of being able to express ideas that had been given artistic form in the building.

Events such as the “Dramatic Course”, given by Marie Steiner in July 1922, and a National Economic Course, which I myself held in July and August 1922, did not take place within the rooms that were lost to us on New Year's Eve. But they belong to the circle of what the Goetheanum has inspired.

Eurythmy performances have been taking place at the Goetheanum for many years. I have tried to describe their close connection with the nature of the building in an earlier article.

A cycle of lectures on natural science was planned for the end of December and beginning of January 1922 to 1923. Once again, personalities working in the field of anthroposophy were to give lectures and hold discussions with me. I added other lectures on purely anthroposophical subjects to the lectures on knowledge of nature. Only the first part of this event could still take place at the Goetheanum. After the eurythmy performance and my lecture on New Year's Eve, the flames took the building in which we would have liked to continue working.

The lectures had to be continued in an adjoining room, while outside the flames consumed the last remains of the Goetheanum, which we loved so much.

You will have gathered from the remarks I have made during the last two days that there is a fundamental change in the inner constitution of the human being at every single stage of his life. Today, certainly, modern psychologists and physiologists also take this into account. They too reckon with these changes which take place in the course of life, firstly up to the change of teeth, then up to puberty, and again from puberty into the twenties. But these differences are more profound than can be discovered by means of the methods of observation customary today, which do not reach far enough, however excellent they may be. We must take a further step and examine these differences from aspects demanded by spiritual science. You will hear many things that are already familiar to you, but you must now enter more deeply into them. Even when the child enters this world from the embryo condition, that is, to take an external characteristic, when he adapts himself to the outer process of breathing, even then, physiologically speaking, he is not yet received directly by the outer world, for he takes the natural nourishment of the mother's milk. He is not nourished as yet by what comes from the outer world, but by what comes from the same source as the child himself. Now today people study the substances they meet with in the world more or less according to their external, chemical, physical properties only and do not consider the finer attributes which they possess through their spiritual content. Nowadays everything is considered in this way. Such methods are not to be condemned; on the contrary they should be recognised as justified. Nevertheless because the time came when man was concerned only with the outer aspects of things, aspects which could not be so regarded in earlier civilisations, he has now reached a point of extreme externalisation. If I may make a comparison, things are observed today in some such way as this. We say: I look upon death, upon dying; plants die, animals die, human beings die. But surely the question arises as to whether dying, the passing away of the various forms of life with which we come in contact, is in all three kinds of living beings the same process, or whether this only appears outwardly to be so. We can make use of the following comparisons: If I have a knife there is a real difference whether I cut my food with it, or whether I use it for shaving. In each case it is a knife, but the properties of “knife” must be further differentiated. Such differentiation is in many cases not made today. No differentiation is made between the dying of a plant, an animal or a man.

We meet the same thing in other domains too. There are people who in a certain way want to be philosophers of nature, and because they aim at being idealistic, even spiritual, they assert that plants may well have a soul; and they try to discover in an external way those characteristics of plants which seem to indicate that they have certain soul qualities. They make a study of those plants which, when they are approached by insects, tend to open their petals. The insect is caught, for it is attracted by the scent of what is in the plant. Such a plant is the Venus Flytrap. It closes its petals with a snap and the insect is trapped. This is considered to be a sort of soul quality in the plant. Well, but I know something else which works in the same way. It is to be found in all sorts of places. The mouse, when it comes near, feels attracted by the smell of a dainty morsel; it begins to nibble, and—hey presto! snap goes the mousetrap. If one were to make use of the same thought process as in the case of a plant, one might say: the mousetrap has a soul.

This kind of thinking, however, although quite legitimate under certain conditions never leads to conclusions of any depth, but remains more or less on the surface. If we wish to gain a true knowledge of man we must penetrate into the very depths of human nature. It must be possible for us to look in a completely unprejudiced way at things which appear paradoxical vis-à-vis external methods of observation. Moreover it is very necessary to take into consideration everything which, taken together, makes up the entire human organisation.

In man we have, to begin with, the actual physical organism which he has in common with all earthly beings and particularly with the mineral kingdom. In man, however, we have clearly to distinguish between his physical organism and his etheric organism. The latter he has in common only with the plant world, not with the minerals. But a being endowed only with an etheric organism could never experience feeling, never attain to an inner consciousness. For this again man has his astral organism, which he has in common with the animal world. It might appear that this is an external organisation, but in the course of these lectures we shall see how inward it can be. In addition to this man still has his ego-organisation, which is not to be found in the animal world and which he alone possesses among earthly beings. What we are here considering is in no sense merely an external, intellectual pattern; moreover, in speaking, for instance, of an etheric or life-body, this has no connection whatever with what an outmoded natural science once called “life-force,” “vital-force” and so on. On the contrary, it is the result of observation. If, for instance, we study the child up to the age of the change of teeth, we see that his development is primarily dependent on his physical organism. The physical organism must gradually adapt itself to the outer world, but this cannot take place all at once, not even if considered in the crudest physical sense. This physical body, just because it contains what the human being has brought with him out of the spiritual world in which he lived in pre-earthly existence, cannot forthwith assimilate the substances of the outer world, but must receive them specially prepared in the mother's milk. The child must, so to say, remain closely connected with what is of like nature with himself. He must only gradually grow into the outer world. And the conclusion of this process of the physical organism growing into the outer world is indicated by the appearance of the second teeth at about the seventh year. At approximately this age the child's physical organism completes the process of growing into the world.

During this time, however, in which the organisation is chiefly concerned with the shaping and fashioning of the bony system, the child is only interested in certain things in the outer world, not in everything. He is only interested in what we might call gesture, everything that is related to movement. Now you must take into account that at first the child's consciousness is dream-like, shadowy; to begin with his perceptions are quite undefined, and only gradually do they light up and gain clarity. But fundamentally speaking the fact remains that during the time between birth and the change of teeth the child's perception adheres to everything in the nature of gesture and movement and does so to such an extent, that in the very moment when he perceives a movement he feels an inner urge to imitate it. There exists a quite definite law of development in the nature of the human being which I should like to characterise in the following way.

While the human being is growing into the physical, earthly world, his inner nature is developing in such a way that this development proceeds in the first place out of gesture, out of differentiation of movement. In the inner nature of the organism speech develops out of movement in all its aspects, and thought develops out of speech. This deeply significant law underlies all human development. Everything which makes its appearance in sound, in speech, is the result of gesture, mediated through the inner nature of the human organism.

If you turn your attention to the way in which a child not only learns to speak, but also learns to walk, to place one foot after the other, you can observe how one child treads more strongly on the back part of the foot, on the heel, and another walks more on the toes. You can observe children who in learning to walk tend to bring their legs well forward; with others you will see that they are more inclined to hold back, as it were, between two steps. It is extraordinarily interesting to watch a child learning to walk. You must learn to observe this. But it is more interesting still, although much less attention is paid to it, to see how a child learns to grasp something, how he learns to move his hands. There are children who, when they want something, move their hands in such a way that even the fingers are brought into movement. Others keep their fingers still, and stretch out their hands to take hold without moving the fingers. There are children who stretch out their hand and arm, while keeping the upper part of the body motionless; there are others who immediately let the upper part of the body follow the movement of arm and hand. I once knew a child who, when he was very small and his high-chair was placed at a little distance from the table on which stood some dish he wished to get at, proceeded to “row” himself towards it; his whole body was then in movement. He could make no movements at all without moving his whole body.

This is the first thing to look out for in a child; for how a child moves reveals the most inward urge of life, the primal life impulse. At the same time there appears in the child's movement the tendency to adapt himself to others, to carry out some movement in the same way as his father, mother or other member of the family. The principle of imitation comes to light in gesture, in movement. For gesture is what appears first of all in human evolution, and in the special constitution of the physical, soul and spiritual organism of man gesture is inwardly transformed; it is transformed into speech. Those who are able to observe this know without any doubt that a child who speaks as though the sentences were hacked out of him is one who sets his heels down first; while a child who speaks in such a way that the sentences run one into the other tends to trip on his toes. A child who takes hold of things more lightly with his fingers has the tendency to emphasise the vowel element, while a child who is inclined to stress the consonants will bring his whole arm to his aid when grasping something. We receive a very definite impression of a child's potentialities from his manner of speaking. And to understand the world, to understand the world through the medium of the senses, through the medium of thought, this too is developed out of speech. Thought does not produce speech, but speech thought. So it is in the cultural development of humanity as a whole; human beings have first spoken, then thought. So it is also with the child; first out of movement he learns to speak, to articulate only then does thinking come forth from speech. We must therefore look upon this sequence as being something of importance: gesture, speech, thought, or the process of thinking.

All this is especially characteristic in the first epoch of the child's life, up to the change of teeth. When little by little the child grows into the world during the first, second, third and fourth years of life, he does so through gesture; everything is dependent on gesture. Indeed, I would say that speaking and thinking take place for the most part unconsciously; both develop naturally out of gesture, even the first gesture. Therefore speaking approximately we can say: From the first to the seventh year gesture predominates in the life of the child, but gesture in the widest sense of the word, gesture which in the child lives in imitation. As educators we must keep this firmly in mind for actually up to the change of teeth the child only takes in what comes to him as gesture, he shuts himself off from everything else. If we say to the child: Do it like this, do it like that, he really does not hear, he does not take any notice. It is only when we stand in front of him and show him how to do it that he is able to copy us. For the child works according to the way I myself am moving my fingers, or he looks at something just as I am looking at it, not according to what I tell him. He imitates everything. This is the secret of the development of the child up to the change of teeth. He lives entirely in imitation, entirely in the imitation of what in the widest possible sense comes to meet him from outside as gesture. This accounts for the surprises we get when faced with the education of very young children. A father came to me once and said, “What shall I do? Something really dreadful has happened. My boy has been stealing.” I said, “Let us first find out whether he really steals. What has he done?” The father told me that the boy had taken money out of the cupboard, had bought sweets with it and shared them with the other boys. I said “Presumably that is the cupboard out of which the boy has often seen his mother taking money, before going shopping; he is quite naturally imitating her.” And this proved to be the case. So I said further, “But that is not stealing; that lies as a natural principle of development in the boy up to the change of teeth. He imitates what he sees; he must do so.” In the presence of a child therefore we should avoid doing anything which he should not imitate. This is how we educate him. If we say: You should not do this or that, it does not influence the child in the slightest degree up to the change of teeth. It could at most have some effect if one were to clothe the words in a gesture, by saying: Now look, you have just done something that I would never do!—for this is in a way a disguised gesture.

It comes to this: with our whole manhood we should fully understand how up to the change of teeth the child is an imitating being. During this time there is actually an inner connection between the child and his environment, between all that is going on around him. Later on this is lost. For however strange and paradoxical it may sound to people today, who are quite unable to think correctly about the spirit, but think always in abstractions, it is nevertheless true that the whole relationship of the child to gesture and movement in his surroundings has an innate religious character. Through his physical body the child is given over to everything in the nature of gesture; he cannot do otherwise than yield himself up to it. What we do later with our soul, and still later with our spirit, in that we yield ourselves up to the divine, even to the external world, as again spiritualised, this the child does with his physical body when he brings it into movement. He is completely immersed in religion, both with his good and his bad qualities. What remains with us as soul and spirit in later life, this the child has also in his physical organism. If therefore the child lives in close proximity with a surly, “bearish” father, liable to fall into rages, someone who is often irritable and angry, expressing uncontrolled emotions in the presence of the child, while the inner causes of such emotions are not as yet understood by the child, nevertheless what he sees, he experiences as something not moral. The child perceives simultaneously, albeit unconsciously, the moral aspects of these outbreaks, so that he has not only the outer picture of the gesture, but also absorbs its moral significance. If I make an angry gesture, this passes over into the blood organisation of the child, and if these gestures recur frequently they find expression in his blood circulation. The child's physical body is organised according to the way in which I behave in his presence, according to the kind of gestures I make. Moreover if I fail in loving understanding when the child is present, if, without considering him I do something which is only suitable at a later age, and am not constantly on the watch when he is near me, then it can happen that the child enters lovingly into something which is unfitted for his tender years, but belongs to another age, and his physical body will in that case be organised accordingly. Whoever studies the whole course of a man's life from birth to death, bearing in mind the requirements of which I have spoken, will see that a child who has been exposed to things suitable only to grown-up people and who imitates these things will in his later years, from the age of about 50, suffer from sclerosis. One must be able to examine such phenomena in all their ramifications. Illnesses that appear in later life are often only the result of educational errors made in the very earliest years of childhood.

This is why an education which is really based on a knowledge of man must study the human being as a whole from birth until death. To be able to look at man as a whole is the very essence of anthroposophical knowledge. Then too one discovers how very strong the connection is between the child and his environment. I would go as far as to say that the soul of the child goes right out into his surroundings, experiences these surroundings intimately, and indeed has a much stronger relationship to them than at a later period of life. In this respect the child is still very close to the animal, only he experiences things in a more spiritual way, in a way more permeated with soul. The animal's experiences are coarser and cruder, but the animal too is related to its environment. The reason why many phenomena of recent times remain unexplained is because people are not able to enter into all the details involved. There is, for instance, the case of the “calculating horses” which has made such a stir recently, where horses have carried out simple arithmetical operations through stamping with their hooves. I have not seen the famous Elberfelder horses, but I have seen the horse belonging to Herr von Osten. This horse did quite nice little sums. For instance Herr von Osten asked: How much is 5 + 7? And he began to count, beginning with 1, and when he got to 12 the horse stamped with its foot. It could add up, subtract and so on. Now there was a young professor who studied this problem and wrote a book about it which is extremely interesting. In this book he expounds the view that the horse sees certain little gestures made by Herr von Osten, who always stands close to the horse. His opinion is that when Herr von Osten counts 7 + 5 up to 12 and the horse stamps when the number 12 is reached, this is because Herr von Osten makes a very slight gesture when he comes to 12 and the horse, noticing this, duly stamps his foot. He believes that it can all be traced back to something visible. But now he puts a question to himself: “Why,” he says, “can you not see this gesture which Herr von Osten makes so skilfully that the horse sees it and stamps at the number 12?” The young professor goes on to say that these gestures are so slight that he as a human being cannot see them. From this the conclusion might be drawn that a horse sees more than a professor! But this did not convince me at all, for I saw this wonder of an intelligent horse, the clever Hans, standing by Herr von Osten in his long coat. And I saw too that in his right-hand pocket he had lumps of sugar, and while he was carrying out his experiments with the horse he always handed it one lump after another, so that feeling was aroused in the horse associating sweet things with Herr von Osten. In this way a sort of love was established between Herr von Osten and the horse. And only when this is present, only when the inner being of the horse is, as it were, merged into the inner being of Herr von Osten through the stream of sweetness that flows between them, only then can the horse “calculate,” for it really receives something—not through gesture, but through what Herr von Osten is thinking. He thinks: 5 + 7 = 12, and by means of suggestion the horse takes up this thought and even has a distinct impression of it. One can actually see this. The horse and his master are in a certain way merged in feeling one into the other: they impart something to one another reciprocally when they are united through the medium of sweetness. So the animal still has this finer relationship to its environment, and this can be stimulated from outside, as, in this case, by means of sugar.

In a delicate way a similar relationship to the outer world is still present in children also. It lives in the child and should be reckoned with. Education in the kindergarten should therefore never depend on anything other than the principle of imitation. The teacher must sit down with the children and just do what she wishes them to do, so that the child has only to copy. All education and instruction before the change of teeth must be based on this principle.

After the change of teeth all this becomes quite different. The soul life of the child is now completely changed. No longer does he perceive merely the single gestures, but now he sees the way in which these gestures accord with one another. For instance, whereas previously he only had a feeling for a definite line, now he has a feeling for co-ordination, for symmetry. The feeling is awakened for what is co-ordinated or uncoordinated, and in his soul the child acquires the possibility of perceiving what is formative. As soon as this perception is awakened there appears simultaneously an interest in speech. During the first seven years of life there is an interest in gesture, in everything connected with movement; in the years between seven and fourteen there is an interest in everything connected with the pictorial form, and speech is pre-eminently pictorial and formative. After the change of teeth the child's interest passes over from gesture to speech, and in the lower school years from seven to fourteen we can work most advantageously through everything that lies in speech, above all through the moral element underlying speech. For just as the child before this age has a religious attitude towards the gesture which meets him in the surrounding world, so now he relates himself in a moral sense—his religious feeling being gradually refined into a soul experience—to everything which approaches him through speech.

So now, in this period of his life, one must work upon the child through speech. But whatever is to work upon him in this way must do so by means of an unquestioned authority. When I want to convey to the child some picture expressed through speech, I must do so with the assurance of authority. I must be the unquestioned authority for the child when through speech I want to conjure up before him some picture. Just as we must actually show the little child what we want him to do, so we must be the human pattern for the child between the change of teeth and puberty. In other words, there is no point whatever in giving reasons to a child of this age, in trying to make him see why we should do something or not do it, just because there are well-founded reasons for or against it. This passes over the child's head. It is important to understand this. In exactly the same way as in the earliest years of life the child only observes the gesture, so between the change of teeth and puberty he only observes what I, as a human being, am in relation to himself. At this age the child must, for instance, learn about what is moral in such a way that he regards as good what the naturally accepted authority of the teacher, by means of speech, designates as good; he must regard as bad what this authority designates as bad. The child must learn: What my teacher, as my authority, does is good, what he does not do is bad. Relatively speaking then, the child feels: When my teacher says something is good, then it is good; and if he says something is bad, then it is bad. You will not attribute to me, seeing that 30 years ago I wrote my Philosophy of Freedom a point of view which upholds the principle of authority as the one and only means of salvation. But through the very fact of knowing the true nature of freedom one also knows that between the change of teeth and puberty the child needs to be faced with an unquestioned authority. This lies in the nature of man. Everything is doomed to failure in education which disregards this relationship of the child to the unquestioned authority of the personality of the teacher and educator. The child must be guided in everything which he should do or not do, think or not think, feel or not feel, by what flows to him, by way of speech, from his teacher and educator. At this age therefore there is no sense in wanting to approach him through the intellect. During this time everything must be directed towards the life of feeling, for feeling is receptive to anything in the nature of pictures and the child of this age is so constituted that he lives in the world of pictures, of images, and has the feeling of welding separate details into a harmonious whole. This is why, for instance, what is moral cannot be brought to the child by way of precept, by saying: You should do this, you should not do that. It simply doesn't work. What does work is when the child, through the way in which one speaks to him, can feel inwardly in his soul a liking for what is good, a dislike of what is bad. Between the change of teeth and puberty the child is an aesthete and we must therefore take care that he experiences pleasure in the good and displeasure in what is bad. This is the best way for him to develop a sense of morality.

We must also be sincere, inwardly sincere in the imagery we use in our work with the child. This entails being permeated to the depths of our being by everything we do. This is not the case if, when standing before the child we immediately experience a slight sense of superiority: I am so clever—the child is so stupid. Such an attitude ruins all education; it also destroys in the child the feeling for authority. Well then, how shall I transform into a pictorial image something that I want to impart to the child? In order to make this clear I have chosen the following example as an illustration.

We cannot speak to the child about the immortality of the soul in the same way as to a grown-up person; but we must nevertheless convey to him some understanding of it. We must however do so in a pictorial way. We must build up the following picture and to do this may well take the whole lesson.

We can explain to the child what a butterfly's chrysalis is, and then speak in some such words as these: “Well, later on the finished butterfly flies out of the chrysalis. It was inside all the time only it was not yet visible, it was not yet ready to fly away, but it was already there inside.” Now we can go further and tell him that in a similar way the human body contains the soul, only it is not visible. At death the soul flies out of the body; the only difference between man and butterfly is that the butterfly is visible and the human soul is invisible. In this way we can speak to the child about the immortality of the soul so that he receives a true picture of immortality and one suited to his age. But in the presence of the child we must on no account have the feeling: I am clever, I am a philosopher and by no means of thought can I convince myself of the truth of immortality; the child is naive, is stupid, and so for him I will build up the picture of the butterfly creeping out of the chrysalis. If one thinks in this way one establishes no contact with the child, and then he gets nothing whatever from what he is told. There is only one possibility. We must ourselves believe in the picture, we must not want to be cleverer than the child; we must stand in the presence of the child as full of belief as he is. How can this be done? An anthroposophist, a student of spiritual science knows that the emergence of the butterfly from the chrysalis is actually a picture of the immortality of the human soul placed into the world by the gods. He can never think otherwise than that the gods inscribed into the world this picture of the emerging butterfly as an image of the immortality of the human soul. In all the lower stages of the process he sees the higher processes which have become abstract. If I do not get the idea that the child is stupid and I am clever, but if I stand before the child conscious that this actually is so in the world and that I am leading him to believe in something which I too believe with all my heart, then there arises an imponderable relationship between us, and the child makes real progress in his education. Then moral imponderabilia continually enters into our educational relationship. And this is the crux of the matter.

When we are quite clear about this we shall, out of the whole nexus of our studies, come to see how we can find the right approach to an instruction which is truly educational, an education which really instructs. Let us take an example. How must the child learn to read and write? There is actually a great deal more misery connected with this than one usually imagines, though human intellectualism is far too crude to perceive it. One recognises that learning to read and write is a necessity, so it follows that the child must at all costs be drilled into learning reading and writing. But just consider what this means for a child! When they are grown-up, people have no inclination to put themselves in the child's place, to imagine what he undergoes when he learns to read and write. In our civilisation today we have letters, a, b, c and so on; they are there before us in certain definite forms. Now the child has the sound a (ah, as in father). When does he use it? This sound is for him the expression of an inner soul experience. He uses this sound when he is faced with something which calls up in him a feeling of wonder, of astonishment. This sound he understands. It is bound up with human nature. Or he has the sound e (eh, as in they). When does he use this? He uses it when he wants to show he has the feeling: “Something has come up against me; I have experienced something which encroaches on my own nature.” If somebody gives me a blow, I say e (eh).¹ It is the same with the consonants. Every sound corresponds to some expression of life; the consonants imitate an outer, external world, the vowels express what is experienced inwardly in the soul. The study of language, philology, is today only approaching the first elements of such things.

Learned scholars, who devote themselves to research into language, have given much thought to what, in the course of human evolution, may have been the origin of speech. There are two theories. The one represents the view that speech may have arisen out of soul experiences in much the same way as this takes place in the animal, albeit in its most primitive form—“moo-moo” being the expression of what the cow feels inwardly, and “bow-wow” what is experienced by the dog. And so, in a more complicated way, what in man becomes articulated speech arises out of this urge to give expression to inner feelings and experiences. In somewhat humorous vein this is called the “bow-wow theory.” The other point of view proceeds from the supposition that in the sounds of speech man imitates what takes place in the outer world. It is possible to imitate the sound of a bell, what is taking place inside the bell: “ding-dong—ding-dong.” Here there is the attempt to imitate what takes place in the outer world. This is the basis for the theory that in speech everything may be traced back to external sounds, external event. It is the “ding-dong theory.” So we have these two theories in opposition to one another. It is not in any way my intention to make fun of this, for as a matter of fact, both are correct: the “bow-wow” theory is right for the vowel element in speech, the “ding-dong” theory for the consonantal element. In transposing gestures into sounds we learn by means of the consonants to imitate inwardly outer processes; and in the vowels we give form to inner experiences of the soul. In speech the inner and the outer unite. Human nature, itself homogeneous, understands how to bring this about.

We receive the child into the primary school. Through his inner organisation he has become a being able to speak. Now, suddenly he is expected to experience—I say experience deliberately weighing my words, not recognise, experience—a connection between astonishment, wonder, (ah) and the demonic sign a. This is something completely foreign to him. He is supposed to learn something which he feels to be utterly remote, and to relate this to the sound “ah.” This is something outside the sphere of a young child's comprehension. He feels it as a veritable torture if at the very outset we confront him with the forms of the letters in use today.

We can, however, remember something else. The letters which we have today were not always there. Let us look back to those ancient peoples who had a picture writing. They used pictures to give tangible form to what was uttered, and these pictures certainly had something to do with what they were intended to express. They did not have letters such as we use, but pictures which were related to their meaning. Up to a certain point the same could be said of cuneiform writing. These were times when people still had a human relationship to things, even when these were fixed into a definite form. Today we no longer have this, but with the child we must go back to it again. We must of course not do so in such a way that we study the cultural history of ancient peoples and fall back on the forms which were once used in picture writing; but we must bring all our educational fantasy into play as teachers in order to create the kind of pictures we need. Fantasy, imagination [The German phantasie is often more equivalent to the English imagination than to fantasy. In this lecture the latter is probably more appropriate.] we must certainly have, for without it we cannot be teachers or educators. And so it is always necessary to refer to the importance of enthusiasm, of inspiration, when dealing with some characteristic feature of anthroposophy. It never gives me any pleasure, for instance, when I go into a class in our Waldorf School and notice that a teacher is tired and is teaching out of a certain mood of weariness. That is something one must never do. One simply cannot be tired, one can only be filled with enthusiasm. When teaching, one must be absolutely on the spot with one's whole being. It is quite wrong to be tired when teaching; tiredness must be kept for some other occasion. The essential thing for a teacher is that he learns to give full play to his fantasy. What does this mean? To begin with I call up in the child's mind something that he has seen at the market, or some other place, a fish for example. I next get him to draw a fish, and for this I even allow him to use colours, so that he paints as he draws and draws as he paints. This being achieved I then let him say the word “Fish,” not speaking the word quickly, but separating the sounds, “f-i-ssh.” Then I lead him on so that he says only the beginning of the word fish (f...) and gradually I transfer the shape of the fish into a sign that is somewhat fish like, while at the same time getting the child to say f ... And there we have it, the letter “f!”

Or I let the child say Wave (W-a-v-e) showing him at the same time what a wave is (see sketch). Once again I let him paint this and get him to say the beginning of the word—w—and then I change the picture of a wave into the letter w.

Continuing to work in the same way I allow the written characters gradually to emerge from the painting-drawing and drawing-painting, as indeed they actually arose in the first place. I do not bring the child into a stage of civilisation with which as yet he has nothing in common, but I guide him in such a way that he is never torn away from his relationship to the outer world. In order to do this there is no necessity to study the history of culture—albeit the writing in use today has arisen out of picture-writing—one must only give free play to one's fantasy, for then one brings the child to the point at which he is able to form writing out of this drawing and painting.

Now we must not think of this only as an ingenious and clever new method. We must value the fact that the child unites himself inwardly with something that is new to him when his soul activity is constantly stimulated. He does not “grow into it” when he is pushed, so that he is always coming into an unfamiliar relationship with his environment. The whole point is that we are working on the inner being of the child.

What is usually done today? It is perhaps already somewhat out-of-date, but not so long ago people gave little girls “beautiful” dolls, with real hair, dolls that could shut their eyes when one laid them down, dolls with pretty faces and so on. Civilisation calls them beautiful, but they are nevertheless hideous, because they are inartistic. What sort of dolls are these? They are the sort which cannot activate the child's fantasy. Now let us do something different. Tie a handkerchief so that you have a figure with arms and legs; then make eyes with blobs of ink and perhaps a mouth with red ink as well; now the child must develop his fantasy if he is to imagine this as having the human shape. Such a thing works with tremendous living force on the child, because it offers him the possibility of using his fantasy. Naturally one must do this first oneself. But the possibility must be provided for the child, and this must be done at the age when everything is play. It is for this reason that all those things which do not stimulate fantasy in the child are so damaging when given as toys. As I said, today these beautiful dolls are somewhat out-dated, for now we give children monkeys or bears. To be sure, neither do these toys give any opportunity for the unfolding of a fantasy having any relationship to the human being. Let us suppose that a child runs up to us and we give him a bear to cuddle. Things like this show clearly how far our civilisation is from being able to penetrate into the depths of human nature. But it is quite remarkable how children in a perfectly natural, artistic way are able to form imaginatively a picture of this inner side of human nature.

In the Waldorf School we have made a transition from the ordinary methods of teaching to what may be termed a teaching through art, and this quite apart from the fact that in no circumstances do we begin by teaching the children to write, but we let them paint as they draw, and draw as they paint. Perhaps we might even say that we let them splash about, which involves the possibly tiresome job of cleaning up the classroom afterwards. I shall also speak tomorrow about how to lead over from writing to reading, but, quite apart from this painting and drawing, we guide the child as far as possible into the realm of the artistic by letting him practise modelling in his own little way, but without suggesting that he should make anything beyond what he himself wants to fashion out of his own inner being. The results are quite remarkable. I will mention one example which shows how something very wonderful takes place in the case of rather older children.

At a comparatively early age, that is to say, for children between ten and eleven years old, we take as a subject in our curriculum the “Study of Man.” At this age the children learn to know how the bones are formed and built up, how they support each other, and so on. They learn this in an artistic way, not intellectually. After a few such lessons the child has acquired some perception of the structure of the human bones, the dynamic of the bones and their interdependence. Then we go over to the craft-room, where the children model plastic forms and we observe what they are making. We see that they have learned something from these lessons about the bones. Not that the child imitates the forms of the bones, but from the way in which he now models his forms we perceive the outer expression of an inner mobility of soul. Before this he has already got so far as to be able to make little receptacles of various kinds; children discover how to make bowls and similar things quite by themselves, but what they make out of the spontaneity of childhood before they have received such lessons is quite different from what they model afterwards, provided they have really experienced what was intended. In order to achieve this result, however, these lessons on the “Knowledge of Man” must be given in such a way that their content enters right into the whole human being. Today this is difficult.

Anyone who has paid as many visits to studios as I have and seen how people paint and model and carve, knows very well that today hardly any sculptor works without a model; he must have a human form in front of him if he wishes to model it.

This would have had no sense for a Greek artist. He had of course learned to know the human form in the public games, but he really experienced it inwardly. He knew out of his own inner feeling—and this feeling he embodied without the aid of a model—he knew the difference between an arm when it is stretched out or when, in addition, the forefinger is also extended, and this feeling he embodied in his sculpture. Today, however, when physiology is taught in the usual way, models or drawings of the bones are placed side by side, the muscles are described one after another and no impression is given of their reciprocal relationship. With us, when the children see a vertebra belonging to the spinal column, they know how similar it is to the skull-bone, and they get a feeling for the metamorphosis of the bones. In this way they enter livingly right into the different human forms and so feel the urge to express it artistically. Such an experience enters right into life; it does not remain external.

My earnest wish, and also my duty as leader of the Waldorf School, is to make sure that wherever possible everything of a fixed nature in the way of science, everything set down in books in a rigid scientific form should be excluded from class teaching. Not that I do not value science; no one could value science more highly. Such studies can be indulged in outside the school, if so desired; but I should be really furious if I were to see a teacher standing in front of a class with a book in his or her hand. In teaching everything must come from within. This must be self-understood. How is botany taught today for instance? We have botany books; these are based on a scientific outlook, but they do not belong to the classroom where there are children between the change of teeth and puberty. The perception of what a teacher needs in the way of literature must be allowed to grow gradually out of the living educational principles I shall be speaking about here.

So we are really concerned with the teacher's attitude of mind, whether in soul, spirit and body he is able to relate himself to the world. If he has this living relationship he can do much with the children between the change of teeth and puberty, for he is then their natural and accepted authority. The main thing is that one should enter into and experience things in a living way and carry over into life all that one has thus experienced. This is the great and fundamental principle which must form the basis of education today. Then the connection with the class will be there of itself, together with the imponderable mood and feeling that must necessarily go with it.

Answers to a Question

Question: There are grown-up people who seem to have remained at the imitative stage of childhood. Why is this?

Dr. Steiner: It is possible at every stage of human development for someone to remain in a stationary condition. If we describe the different stages of development, adding to today's survey the embryonic stage, and continuing to the change of teeth, and on to puberty, we cover those epochs in which a fully developed human life can be formed. Now quite a short time ago the general trend of anthroposophical development brought it about that lectures could be held on curative education, with special reference to definite cases of children who had either remained backward or whose development was in some respect abnormal. We then took the further step of allowing certain cases to be seen which were being treated at Dr. Wegmann's Clinical-Therapeutic Institute. Among these cases there was one of a child of nearly a year old, about the normal size for a child of this age, but who in the formation of his physical body had remained approximately at the stage of seven or eight months embryo. If you were to draw the child in outline with only an indication of the limbs, which are somewhat more developed, but showing exactly the form of the head, as it actually is in the case of this little boy, then, looking cursorily at the drawing, you would not have the faintest idea that it is a boy of nearly a year old. You would think it an embryo, because this boy has in many respects kept after his birth the embryonic structure.

Every stage of life, including the embryonic, can be carried over into a later stage; for the different phases of development as they follow one after the other, are such that each new phase is a metamorphosis of the old, with something new added. If you will only take quite exactly what I have already said in regard to the natural religious devotion of the child to his surroundings up to the change of teeth, you will see that this changes later into the life of soul, and you have, as a second attribute the aesthetic, artistic stage. Now it happens with very many children that the first stage is carried into the second, and the latter then remains poorly developed. But this can go still further: the first stage of physical embodiment can be carried over into each of the others, so that what was present as the original stage appears in all the later stages. And, for a superficial observation of life, it need not be so very obvious that an earlier stage has remained on into a later one, unless such a condition shows itself particularly late in life. Certain it is however that earlier stages are carried over into later ones.

Let us take the same thing in a lower kingdom of nature. The fully grown, fully developed plant usually has root, stalk, with it cotyledon leaves, followed by the later green leaves. These are then concentrated in the calyx, the petals, the stamen, the pistil and so on. There are however plants which do not develop as far as the blossom, but remain behind at the stage of herbs and other plants where the green leaves remain stationary, and the fruit is merely rudimentary. How far, for instance, the fern has remained behind the buttercup! With the plant this does not lead to abnormality. Man however is a species for himself. He is a complete natural order. And it can happen that someone remains his whole life long an imitative being, or one who stands in need of authority. For in life we have not only to do with people who remain at the imitative stage, but also with those who in regard to their essential characteristics remain at the stage that is fully developed between the change of teeth and puberty. As a matter of fact there are very many such people, and with them this stage continues into later life. They cannot progress much farther, and what should be developed in later years can only do so to a limited extent. They remain always at the stage where they look for the support of authority. If there were no such people, neither would there be the tendency, so rife today, to form sects and such things, for sectarian associations are based on the fact that their adherents are not required to think; they leave the thinking to others and follow their leaders. In certain spheres of life, however, most people remain at the stage of authority. For instance, when it is a question of forming a judgment about something of a scientific nature people do not take the trouble to look into it themselves, but they ask: Where is the expert who must know about this, the specialist who is a lecturer at one of the universities? There you have the principle of authority. Again in the case of people who are ill the principle of authority is carried to extremes, even though here it may be justifiable. And in legal matters, for instance, nobody today will think of forming an independent judgment, but will seek the advice of a solicitor because he has the requisite knowledge. Here the standpoint is that of an eight or nine year old child. And it may well be that this solicitor himself is not much older. When a question is put to him he takes down a lawbook or portfolio and there again you have an authority. So it is actually the case that each stage of life can enter into a later one.

The Anthroposophical Society should really only consist of people who are outgrowing authority, who do not recognise any such principle but only true insight. This is so little understood by people outside the Society that they are continually saying: “Anthroposophy is based on authority.” In reality the precise opposite is the case; the principle of authority must be outgrown through the kind of understanding and discernment which is fostered in anthroposophy. The important thing is that one should grasp every scrap of insight one can lay hold of in order to pass through the different stages of life.

• 1. In English we tend to prefix an aspirate to the vowel, saying “Ha” when something astonishes us, or “Heh” when something impinges on us, e.g. “Heh, stop it!”

I have given you some idea of the forces which determined the first two periods of the anthroposophical movement. But in order to create a basis on which to deal with what happened in the third stage, I still wish to deal with a number of phenomena from the first two.

The first period, up until approximately 1907, can be described as being concerned with developing the fundamentals for a science of the spirit in lectures, lecture cycles and in subsequent work undertaken by others. This period concludes approximately with the publication of my Occult Science.¹

Occult Science actually appeared in print some one and a half years later, but the publicizing of its essential content undoubtedly falls into this first period. Some hope was definitely justified in this period, up to 1905 or 1906, that the content of anthroposophy might become the purpose of the Theosophical Society's existence.

During this time it would have been an illusion not to recognize that leading personalities in the Theosophical Society, and Annie Besant in particular, had a very primitive understanding of modern scientific method. Nevertheless, despite the amateurish stamp which this gave to all her books, there was a certain sum of wisdom, mostly unprocessed, in the people who belonged to the Society. This became more marked as the focus of the Theosophical Society gradually moved to London and slowly began to feed, in a manner of speaking, on oriental wisdom. It sometimes led to the most peculiar ideas. But if we ignore the fact that such ideas were sometimes stretched so far that they lost all similarity to their original and true meaning, such books as Annie Besant's Ancient Wisdom, The Progress of Mankind, and even Christianity transmit something which, although passed down by traditional means, originated in ancient sources of wisdom.

On the other hand one must always be aware that in the modern world beyond these circles there was no interest whatsoever in real spiritual research. The reality was simply that the possibility of kindling an interest in a truly modern science of the spirit existed only among those who found their way into this group of people.

Yet within this first period in particular there was a great deal to overcome. Many people were working towards something, but it was in part a very egoistic and shallow striving. But even such superficial societies frequently called themselves theosophical. One need only think, for instance, of the theosophical branches spread widely throughout central Europe—in Germany, Austria and also Switzerland—which possessed only an exceedingly anaemic version of Theosophical Society tenets, impregnated with all kinds of foolish occult views.

One person who was very active in such societies was Franz Hartmann.² But the kind of profound spirit and deep seriousness which existed in these shallow societies will become obvious to you if I describe the cynical character of this particular leader. The Theosophical Society was at one time engaged in a dispute in connection with an American called Judge³ about whether or not certain messages which had been distributed by Judge originated with persons who really had reached a higher stage of initiation, the so-called Masters. Judge had distributed these “Mahatma Letters” in America.

While they were both at the headquarters in India, Judge said he wanted some letters from the Masters in order to gain credibility in America, so that he could say he had been given a mission by initiates. Franz Harmann recounted how he had offered to write some Mahatma Letters for Judge, and the latter had replied that this would not permit him to claim their authenticity. They were supposed to fly towards you through the air; they originated in a magical way and then landed on your head, and that is what he had to be able to say. Judge was a very small fellow, Hartmann told us, and so he said to him “Stand on the floor and I will stand on a chair and then I will drop the letters on your head.” Then Judge could say with a clear conscience that he was distributing letters which had landed on his head clean out of the air!

That is an extreme example of things which are not at all rare in the world. I do not really want to waste your time with these shallow societies. I only want to point out that the close proximity of the anthroposophical to the theosophical movement made it necessary for the former to defend itself against modern scientific thinking during its first period.

I do not know whether those who joined the anthroposophical movement later as scientists, and observed anthroposophy during its more developed third stage, have gained sufficient insight into the fact that a critical assessment of modern scientific thinking took place in a very specific way during the first period of the anthroposophical movement. I only give instances, because this process occurred in a number of different areas. But these examples will show you how the theosophical movement was strongly influenced by the deference to so-called scientific authority which I described as particularly characteristic of modern education.

Annie Besant, for instance, tried to use in her books all kinds of quotes from contemporary science, such as Weismann's theory of heredity,⁴ which bore no relevance to the science of the spirit. She used them as if they provided some sort of evidence. If you recall, at the time when we were in a position to start a centre for the anthroposophical movement in Munich many homeless souls were already organized in the sense that they belonged to various societies. Of course centres for the movement had begun to develop gradually in Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart, Kassel, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Hamburg, Hanover and Leipzig, and in Vienna as well as in Prague. When we were establishing the branch in Munich it became necessary to assess critically the various larger and smaller groups which were then in existence.

One group called the Ketterl, consisting of extremely scholarly people, was very much concerned with providing proofs from natural science for the claims which were made on behalf of the science of the spirit. If anthroposophy spoke about the etheric body, they would say that science has recognized this or that structure for atoms and molecules. Their formulae and definitions and so on were applied not to processes of the spectrum or electro-magnetism but to processes in the etheric or astral field. There was nothing we could do about that. The whole thing dissolved more or less amicably. In the end we no longer had any links with these investigations.

Not so very different were the efforts of a Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden,⁵ who played an important role in the Theosophical Society. He was a close friend of Blavatsky, and was the editor of Sphinx for a long time. He, too, was obsessed with proving what he felt was theosophical subject matter by means of natural-scientific thinking. He took me to his home, a little way outside Hanover. It was perhaps half an hour by tram. He spent the entire half-hour describing the motion of atoms with his index fingers: Yes, it has to happen in this way and that way and then we have the answer. The atoms move in one incarnation and then the wave motion continues through the spiritual worlds; then it changes and that is the next incarnation. In the same way as modern physicists calculate light in terms of wave lengths, he calculated the passage of souls through various incarnations.

A special version of this way of thinking was evident in the debate about the permanent atom, which took place in the Theosophical Society over a long period. This permanent atom was something awful, but was taken incredibly seriously. For the people who felt the full weight of modern science postulated that while of course the physical body decomposes, a single atom remains, passes through the time between death and a new birth, and appears in the new incarnation. That is the permanent atom which passes through incarnations.

This may appear funny to you today, but you simply cannot understand the seriousness with which these things were pursued, specifically in the first period, and the difficulty which existed in responding to the challenge: What is the point of theosophy if it cannot be proved scientifically! During that conversation in the tram the point was forcefully made that things have to be presented in a manner which will allow a matriculated schoolboy to understand theosophy in the same way that he understands logic. That was the thrust of my companion's argument. Then we arrived at his home and he took me into the loft, and up there—I have to repeat that he was an exceedingly kind, pleasant and intelligent man; in other words, a sympathetic old gentleman—were very complicated wire constructions. One of the models would represent the atom of a physical entity; the next model, which was even more complex, would represent the atom of something etheric; the third model, still more complex, was an astral atom.

If you pick up certain books by Leadbeater,⁶ a leading figure in the Theosophical Society, you will find such models in grandiose form. Atomism flourished nowhere as greatly as among those who joined our ranks from the Theosophical Society. And when younger members such as Dr. Kolisko⁷ and others are engaged in the fight against the atom in our research institute in Stuttgart,⁸ we might well recall that certain people at that time would not have known how to get from one incarnation to the next without at least one permanent atom.

That is something of an image of the way in which the strong authority of so-called natural-scientific thinking exerted its influence in these circles. They were unable to conceive of any other valid way of thinking than the natural-scientific one. So there was no real understanding in this quarter either. Only as the anthroposophical movement entered its second stage did these atomistic endeavours gradually subside, and there was a gradual transition to the subject matter which continued to be cultivated in the anthroposophical movement. Every time I was in Munich, for instance, it was possible to give a lecture designed more for the group which gathered round a great friend of Blavatsky's. Things were easier there because a genuine inner striving existed.

Within our own ranks, too, there was a call at that time to justify the content of anthroposophy using the current natural-scientific approach. It was less radical, nevertheless, than the demands made by external critics today. A large number of you heard Dr. Blümel's⁹ lecture today. Imagine if someone had responded by saying that everything Dr. Blümel spoke about was of no personal concern; that he did not believe it, did not recognize it and did not want to test it. Someone else might say: See whether it is accurate, examine it with your reason and your soul faculties. The first person says: It is no business of mine be it right or wrong, I do not want to become involved with that. But I call on Dr. Blümel to go to a psychological laboratory and there, using my psychological methods, I will examine whether or not he is a mathematician.

That is, of course, piffle of the first order. But it is exactly the demand made today by outside critics.

Sadly, it is quite possible today to talk pure nonsense that goes undetected. Even those who are upset by it fail to notice that it is pure nonsense. They believe that it is only maliciousness or something similar, because they cannot imagine the possibility of someone who talks pure nonsense acquiring the role of a scientific spokesman simply as a result of their social standing. That is the extent to which our spiritual life has become confused. The kind of things which I am explaining here must be understood by anyone who wants to grasp the position of the anthroposophical movement.

Well, undeterred by all that, the most important human truths, the most important cosmic truths, had to be made public during the first stage. My Occult Science represents a sort of compendium of everything which had been put forward in the anthroposophical movement until that point. Our intention was always a concrete and never an abstract one, because we never attempted to do more than could be achieved in the given circumstances.

Let me quote the following as evidence. We established a journal, Luzifer-Gnosis,¹⁰ right at the outset of the anthroposophical movement. At first it was called Luzifer. Then a Viennese journal called Gnosis wanted to amalgamate with it. My sole intention in calling it Luzifer with Gnosis was to express the practical union of the two journals. Of course that was completely unacceptable to Hübbe-Schleiden, for instance, who thought that this would indicate an unnatural union. Well, I was not particularly bothered, so we called it Luzifer-Gnosis with a hyphen. People were very sharp-witted and they were keeping a close eye on us at that time!

Of course we started with a very small number of subscribers, but it began to grow at a very fast pace, relatively speaking, and we never really ran at a deficit because we only ever printed approximately as many copies as we were able to sell. Once an issue had been printed the copies were sent to my house in large parcels. Then my wife and I put the wrappers around them. I addressed them and then each of us took a washing basket and carried the whole lot to the post office. We found that this worked quite well. I wrote and held lectures while my wife organized the whole Anthroposophical Society,¹¹ but without a secretary. So we did that all on our own and never attempted more than could be managed on a practical level. We did not even, for example, take larger washing baskets than we could just manage. When the number of subscribers grew we simply made an extra journey.

When we had been engaged in this interesting activity for some time, Luzifer-Gnosis ceased publication—not because it had to, for it had many more subscribers than it needed, but because I no longer had the time to write. The demands of my lecturing activity and of the spiritual administration of the society in general began to take up a lot of time.

To cease publication was a natural consequence of never attempting more than could be managed on a practical level, one step at a time. This belongs to the conditions which govern the existence of a spiritual society. To build far-reaching ideals on phrases, setting up programmes, is the worst thing which can happen to a spiritual society. The work in this first period was such that between 1907 and 1909 the foundations of a science of the spirit appropriate to the modern age were put in place.

Then we come to the second phase, which essentially concluded our attempt to come to grips with natural science. The theologians had not yet made their presence felt. They were still seated so firmly in the saddle everywhere that they were simply not bothered.

When the issue of the natural sciences had been dealt with, we were able to approach our other task. This was the debate over the Gospels, over Genesis, the Christian tradition as a whole, Christianity as such.

The thread had already been laid out in Christianity As Mystical Fact, which appeared in 1902. But the elaboration, as it were, of an anthroposophical understanding of Christianity was essentially the task of the second stage up to approximately 1914. As a consequence I gave lecture cycles on the various parts of the Christian tradition in Hamburg, Kassel, Berlin, Basle, Berne, Munich and Stuttgart.

That was also when, for instance, The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity¹² was drawn up. It was, then, essentially the time in which the Christian side of anthroposophy was worked out, following on from the historical tradition of Christianity.

This period also included what I might call the first expansion of anthroposophy into the artistic field, with performances of the mystery dramas in Munich.¹³ That, too, took place against the background of never wanting to achieve more than circumstances allowed.

Also during this time those events occurred which led to the exclusion of anthroposophy from the Theosophical Society, a fact which was actually of no great significance to the former, given that it had followed its own path from the beginning. Those who wanted to come along were free to do so. From the outset anthroposophy did not concern itself with the spiritual content which came from the Theososphical Society. But practical co-existence became increasingly difficult as well.

At the beginning there was a definite hope that circumstances, some of which at least I have described, would allow the real theosophical movement which had come together in the Theosophical Society to become truly anthroposophical. The circumstances which made such a hope appear justified included the serious disappointment about the particular methods of investigation pursued by the Theosophical Society, specifically among those people who possessed a higher level of discrimination. And I have to say that when I arrived in London on both the first and second times, I experienced how its leaders were basically people who adopted a very sceptical attitude towards one another, who felt themselves to be on very insecure ground which, however, they did not want to leave because they did not know where to look for security.

There were many disappointed people who had great reservations, particularly among the leaders of the Theosophical Society. The peculiar change which took place in Annie Besant from, say, 1900 to 1907 is an important factor in the subsequent course of events in the Theosophical Society. She possessed a certain tolerance to begin with. I believe she never really understood the phenomenon of anthroposophy, but she accepted it and at the beginning even defended against the rigid dogmatists its right to exist. That is how we must describe it, for that is how it was.

But there is something I must say which I would also urge members of the Anthroposophical Society to consider very seriously. Certain personal aspirations, purely personal sympathies and antipathies, are absolutely irreconcilable with a spiritual society of this kind. Someone, for instance, begins to idolize someone else, for whatever underlying reasons within himself. He will not acknowledge whatever compulsion it is, and sometimes it can be an intellectual compulsion that drives him to do it. But he begins to weave an artificial astral aura around the individual whom he wants to idolize. The latter then becomes advanced. If he wants to make an especially telling remark he will say: “Oh, that individual is aware of three or four previous lives on earth and even spoke to me about my earlier earth lives. That person knows a lot!” And this is precisely what leads to a spiritual interpretation of something which is human, all too human, to use an expression of Nietzsche's.

It would be sufficient to say: “I will not deny that I like him.” Then everything would be fine, even in esoteric societies. Max Seiling,¹⁴ for instance, was very amusing in certain ways, particularly when he played the piano in that effervescent way of his, and he was amusing to have tea with and so on. All would have been well if people had admitted: We like that. That would have been more sensible than idolizing him in the way the Munich group did.

You see, all these things are in direct contradiction to the conditions under which such a society should exist. And the prime example of someone who fell prey to this kind of thing is Annie Besant. For example—and I prefer to speak about these things by quoting facts—a name cropped up on one occasion. I did not bother much with the literature produced by the Theosophical Society, and so I became acquainted with Bhagavan Das's¹⁵ name only when a thick typewritten manuscript arrived one day. The manuscript was arranged in two columns, with text on the left side and a blank on the right. A covering letter from Bhagavan Das said that he wanted to discuss with various people the subject matter which he intended to reveal to the world through the manuscript.

Well, the anthroposophical movement was already so widespread at that time that I did not manage to read the manuscript immediately. That Bhagavan Das was a very esoteric man, a person who drew his inspiration from profound spiritual sources—that was approximately the view which people associated with Annie Besant—spread about him. His name was on everyone's lips. So I decided to have a look at the thing. I was presented with a horrendously amateurish confusion of Fichtean philosophy, Hegelian philosophy, and Schopenhauer's philosophy; everything mixed up together without the slightest understanding. And the whole thing was held together by “self” and “not self”, like an endlessly repeated tune. The idolization of Bhagavan Das was based purely on personal considerations. Such things demonstrate how the personal element is introduced into impulses which should be objective. The first step on the slippery slope was taken with the appearance of this phenomenon, which became increasingly strong from about 1905 onwards. Everything else was basically a consequence of that.

Spiritual societies must avoid such courses of action, particularly by their leaders—otherwise they will, of necessity, slide down the slippery slope. That is, indeed, what happened. Then there was the absurd tale connected with Olcott's death,¹⁶ referred to as the Masters' nomination, which really represented the beginning of the end for the Theosophical Society. That could still be smoothed over, at least, by saying that such foolishness was introduced into the Society by particular people, even if they were acting on the basis of certain principles. It was, however, followed by the Leadbeater affair,¹⁷ the details of which I do not want to discuss just now. And then came the discovery of the boy who was to be brought up as Christ, or to become Christ, and so on. And when people who did not want to be involved in these absurd matters refused to accept them, they were simply expelled.

Well, the anthroposophical movement followed its set course throughout the whole of this business and our inner development was not affected by these events in any way. That has to be made absolutely clear. It was really a matter of supreme indifference—just as I was not especially surprised to hear recently that Leadbeater has become an Old Catholic bishop in his old age. There was no sense of direction and everything was going topsy turvy.

Indeed, there is no particular need to change one's personal relationship with these people. Two years ago a gentleman who had delivered a lecture at the Munich congress in 1907¹⁸ approached me with the old cordial spirit. He still looked the same, but in the meantime he had become an Old Catholic archbishop. He was not wearing the garments, but that is what he was!

It must not be forgotten that the stream which we have been describing also contained precisely those souls who were searching most intensively for a link between the human soul and the spiritual world. We are not being honest about the course of modern culture if these contrasts are not made absolutely clear. That is why I had to make these additional points today before going on to the actual conditions which underlie the existence of the Anthroposophical Society.

• 1. The appearance of Occult Science: An Outline (Translated by G. and M. Adams. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1969) had been announced in 1905 as a continuation of Theosophy which was published in 1904. For technical reasons, however, it did not appear until 1910 (the preface is signed: written in December 1909). “Only the absolute necessity of uninterrupted lecturing activity by the author has delayed the publication of this book for so long. Now it is to be made available to the public whatever the cost.” (Rudolf Steiner in the journal Luzifer-Gnosis, No. 33 from 1907.)
• 2. See Lecture Two, Note 8
• 3. William Quan Judge, 1851–1896. One of the co-founders of the Theosophical Society. In 1895 he split away from the Adyar-based society and became the leader of a secessionist movement in America.
• 4. August Weismann, 1834–1914. Medical doctor, zoologist. Disputed the heredity of acquired changes.
• 5. Dr. Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden, 1846–1916. From 1886–1896 edited the occultist monthly journal Sphinx. See Rudolf Steiner, The Course of My Life, Chapter XXXII, and Briefe II.
• 6. Charles Webster Leadbeater, 1847–1934. Prominent member of the Theosophical Society in England. See in this context the book Occult Chemistry by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, a series of clairvoyant observations about the chemical elements and atomic theory.
• 7. Dr. Eugen Kolisko, 1893–1939. Medical doctor and teacher at the Stuttgart Waldorf School.
• 8. The scientific research institute was one of the sections of Kommende Tag, a company set up for the promotion of economic and spiritual values, Stuttgart 1920–1925. The biology department (L. Kolisko) was transferred to the Goetheanum by Rudolf Steiner in 1924.
• 9. Dr. Ernst Blümel, 1884–1952. Mathematician and teacher, first in further education at the Goetheanum and subsequently (1927–1938) at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart.
• 10. The journal appeared from June 1903 to 1908. cf. The Course of My Life, Chapter XXXII. Rudolf Steiner's essays in Luzifer-Gnosis have been reprinted in the volume of the same name in GA 34.
• 11. See Aus dem Leben van Marie Steiner-von Sievers, pp.40ff.
• 12. Rudolf Steiner. The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity (1911). Translated by H. B. Monges. Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, New York, 1992.
• 13. Rudolf Steiner, The Four Mystery Plays. Translated by A. Bittleston. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1982.
• 14. Max Seiling: member of the Anthroposophical Society for a time. He turned against it when a book which he wanted to have published by Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag had to be turned down. See Rudolf Steiner's lecture of 11 May 1917 in GA 174b (not translated).
• 15. Bhagavan Das: prominent member of the Theosophical Society. Resigned his office as General Secretary of the Indian Section in 1912 because he disapproved of the goings-on within the Order of the Star of the East in connection with the Krishnamurti-Alcyone cult, and of the behaviour of the President of the Theosophical Society who approved of and encouraged these events unworthy of the society.
• 16. Henry Steel Olcott, 1832–1907. Founder President of the Theosophical Society. See Rudolf Steiner, “Henry Steel Olcott (Obituary)”, in the journal Luzifer-Gnosis, No. 33 (March/April 1907). Olcott had proposed Annie Besant as his successor. Some of the circumstances surrounding this nomination had become public, which is why Rudolf Steiner wrote in this issue:
  
  “… The deceased President did not merely state that he nominated Mrs Besant as his successor, but he informed the General Secretaries through a variety of circulars—which then found their way into the theosophical press and, unfortunately, beyond—that the elevated individuals who are described as the Masters, and those in particular who are especially connected with theosophical affairs, had appeared at his death bed and had instructed him to nominate Mrs Besant as his successor.
  … Now this addition to Mrs Besant's nomination could simply have been ignored. For whether or not one believes that the Masters genuinely appeared in this case, the source of Olcott's advice has no relevance to the members casting their vote in accordance with the Statutes. Whether he was advised by the Masters or by some ordinary mortals is his business alone. The voters have to adhere to the Statutes and solely ask themselves whether or not they consider Mrs Besant to be the right choice. An immediate difficulty arose, however, through the fact that Mrs Besant announced that she had been called upon by her Master to accept her nomination and that for this reason she would assume the burden; indeed, that she considered the order from the Masters as decisive in determining the outcome of the election. Objectively that is a disaster … There would have been no reason to write these lines if the affair were not being discussed so much outside Germany. But under the circumstances the readers of this journal can rightly demand that it should not keep silent about a matter which is the subject of so much debate elsewhere.”
• 17. C. W. Leadbeater (see Lecture 6, Note 6) left the Theosophical Society in 1906 after the emergence of serious differences between him and the Society. But in 1909 he was re-admitted by Annie Besant, despite her earlier condemnation of his methods.
• 18. The person concerned is James Ingall Wedgwood. See Emily Lutyens, Candles in the Sun. London 1957.

My dear venerated guests! As an introduction I have been obliged to refer to a notice in the newspaper which has just been handed to me; a notice in “Christian World,” a publication I don't know and obviously have not thought about. In this notice it says: “From 5 to 12 March an Anthroposophic University Course will take place in Berlin. The day for theologians is Friday the 10th. This event on Friday is now an unequivocal challenge of Steiner and his followers to the theologians ...” and so on.

Now, my dear friends, this event may be anything; what it certainly isn't, even if it was believed to be, it would be misunderstood in the most profound sense, if it is regarded as a challenge to the theologians. I myself would not be involved in any other way than having been asked to cooperate through lectures and introductory observations in this university course which didn't come out of my initiative. I'm least involved in today's event (which is an insertion into this program item of the course) by thinking that what we were dealing with today could be understood as an “unequivocal challenge of today's theologians.”

Thus, you will also allow, my dear friends, that not all sorts of misunderstandings will again be linked to what I have to say in a few introductory words today. I want to limit myself to a theme: The relationship of Anthroposophy to Theology. I want no new misunderstandings to arise; I will renounce some of them in my presentation because otherwise I would have to once again find my intention misjudged.

Dear friends, it has never been my purpose—forgive me if I'm forced by this challenge given to me by shortly mentioning some personal details—it has never actually been my intention to challenge theology and from their starting point Anthroposophy had, insofar as it presents a work sphere in which I participate as well, never attempted to set them apart within the work, with today's theology. This has happened so far, and really from me it has happened as little as possible, but unfortunately it has resulted that many attacks against anthroposophy from the side of theology have taken place, and sometimes people—not me particularly but others—defends themselves. Anthroposophy wants to remain thoroughly neutral in its working sphere, I'd like to say, it wants to work out of present day spiritual science.

Towards the end of the previous century one had a certain scientific direction, certain scientific methods, an attitude and method, out of the foundation of which we have already spoken and which can't be spoken about more extensively, established a method and attitude which people apply to the entire development of recent times and particularly apply to scientific research. Through this natural scientific research the greatest possible triumphs—I don't mean in a trivial but in a deeper sense—have come to human progress and human well-being. During this time natural scientific research stands in a somewhat puzzled manner towards philosophy. Philosophy had to separate itself from those methods which are applied to natural science; the difference of a factual sphere made scientific methods inapplicable in philosophy.

People were not always, one could call it, theoretically and epistemologically clear in what sense the scientific methods or philosophic methods had to apply. Practice lapsed into experimental philosophy in certain areas where it was more or less apparent or more or less really worked, but the uncertainty is basically there as well. By contrast Anthroposophy worked out of the most varied foundations towards its own working methods. On the one hand it wants to take into account what can be achieved in modern thinking and research methods of science, and on the other hand the human needs for the spiritual world and its knowledge. The human being is confronted on the one hand with the fact of fully recognising scientific methods, and in relation to the treatment of the scientific field—I have already mentioned this—I am today as much a student of Haeckel as I was in the 1890's; not in the sense of scientific methodology not to be developed further and not as if, from the side of science Heackel's writings should not be applied, but it comes down to quite a different area being discussed. In the treatment of the purely natural world I'm as much in agreement with Haeckel as at that time. It deals more with the experience of natural scientific observations through which one is educated in scientific precision, in a natural scientific sense which can result in the creation of ideas and concepts, which are needed for working scientifically. This then holds true for all observations in the world—due to our limited time now, I can't give you proof of this. This remains a truth: for all outer sensory observations this sentence is valid: “there is nothing in the mind which wasn't previously in the senses”—certainly on the other hand, Leibniz's statement applies: “Except in the mind itself.”

In the experience of the mind, that means in the weaving of the soul through the mind's categories where ideas are experienced in objects of nature, the examination of facts of nature which need a formulation of natural laws, in which experience of the world of ideas live, there is something which goes beyond the mere sensory experiences, so that when a natural scientific researcher confronts natural science, he must say to himself, if he is sufficiently unprejudiced: everything in the mind must be created out of the senses, only the mind itself can't be created out of the senses.

Once you have understood this in a lively manner then there is no obstacle to now observe what inwardly to some extent can be looked at in the pursuit of the expansion of the mind's categories through an inner soul-spiritual process, through such a process which is inwardly quite similar to the outer growth processes seen in the plant and animal. One remains always true to one's conviction of natural development when one admits that out of the seedling, if you have an inner image of it, you gain a truth which is that the mind itself can't be created out of the sense world. One remains true to that which is learnt from natural existence when you make an attempt to observe the human mind as a seedling which can grow within. When you make this attempt in earnest then the rest is a direct result of what I've suggested here and in other places, of the growth of human intellect in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. This is simply a fact for further progress in inner human development. Through this the result is a true observation of the spiritual world. This observation of the spiritual world Anthroposophy tries to clothe, as well as possible, in words of today's language use. Naturally one is often forced that what one is observing—I admit this without further ado—is clothed inadequately in words from the simple basis that speech, as in all modern languages, in the course of the last centuries adapted to the outer material world outlook and today we have the experience, which we have with words, of already being more or less orientated to this world outlook.

As a result, we always struggle with words if we need to dress in words what we have observed through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition in such a way that it can really be proven again through the ordinary, healthy human mind, because this must also be a goal for Anthroposophical research.

So Anthroposophy was simply a field of work and as such a field of work it has become, in the strictest sense of the word, conceived by me. Those individuals—and they make a very small circle—who have the need to hear about such research methods in the supersensible world, will be told and shown what can be discovered in this way. Nobody in this Movement will be forced in any way to participate in something other than through their own free will. What is said about this, that some or other suggestive means is applied, with one person it is a conscious and with another it is an unconscious defamation of what is really striven for in the Anthroposophic Movement. It is true that whoever thinks it over with a healthy mind, what is researched in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, in his higher senses becomes a more free person than any other people living in the present. His contemporaries for instance follow currents in parties and are influenced by all kinds of suggestions. From this inner soul dependency Anthroposophy must free people, because it claims that everyone, who wants to live into it, will not merely become immobilised in simple passive thinking, but that this thinking will make them inwardly mobile and powerful, and this empowered thinking makes a person more free.

For reasons, into which I don't want to enter today, it happened that from the scientifically orientated people on which Anthroposophy actually depend, in the beginning only very few drew closer to Anthroposophy. Today we have really made a start. Those people who first entered into the Anthroposophical Movement—with more or less naive minds with strong soul needs—they were never told anything other than what could be found in a conscientious way within anthroposophic research. I'm always delighted when things are said to me, for example by one of those present here today, a very honourable personality: ‘It is actually remarkable that you even get a large audience, because you avoid actually talking in the way which is considered popular, which we call understandable. You speak in such a way that people actually always have to do work to listen and this people don't want these days, so one must actually wonder how you still manage to find such a large audience.’—These are what the words sound like, which I've heard for years and now a seated person here has also said them, after they had heard a course of my lectures at that time. For popularity I have never striven because I have the validity of Anthroposophy which I want to bring to the world.

Now it is extraordinary that people from all kinds of circles of life and circles of commitment have come. Because Anthroposophy came their way simply through their work in a certain relationship to religious streams of the present, it actually never came into conflict with religious needs of people who came to it: to people, like I said, from all walks of life. For instance, I have often been asked by Catholics who find themselves in our midst whether in connection with religious practice it would be possible to remain Catholics when they also take part in the Anthroposophical Movement.

With Catholics I must say: Obviously it is possible for a good Catholic to take part in what Anthroposophy has to offer because Anthroposophy is there, not to limit the knowledge which speaks about the supersensible world, but it forms a foundation on which supersensible research can be done. This is my preference, that what comes out of the supersensible world is spoken about without entering into any kind of polemic. Someone who honestly says what he sees, knows how polemic comes about and how unfruitful that really is. My original striving was simply to honestly say what is found through Anthroposophy and to exclude any polemic considerations. Things don't always happen this way in life. Still, within the Anthroposophical Movement people of all faiths are found together, and so I would like to say that Catholics may obviously take part in the Anthroposophic Movement, but it will only come into one single point of conflict in the practical religious exercises and that is the audible confession. Not on the basis of it being an audible confession because that could be considered as a matter of conscience. I have found enough protestant clergymen who have gloated over a kind of confession in order to develop an intimate relationship with the congregation. One can have various opinions regarding this. However, here the point is that the Catholic Church denies the altar sacrament to anyone who has not made an audible confession before it. Due to this impediment, taking part practically in the most important Catholic church sacrament is difficult because those beliefs which are gained from the supersensible world need to be combined with this behaviour which is not freely done but which have nevertheless to be adhered to in the Roman Catholic Church constitution. The audible confession, as it is handled, tears the Catholic away from freely following the supersensible world, not because of Anthroposophy but because of the Roman Catholic Church constitution.

This could be avoided if confession could be avoided. One can't avoid it because otherwise one can't participate in the communion service. Still you can find many Catholics who search within the Anthroposophical Movement to satisfy their soul needs.

My dear friends, it is of course natural that people of all beliefs come to Anthroposophy, it is natural that simply in our time a strong need has developed to express what Christianity is about within the Anthroposophical Society. Now I would like to say the following. Just as with all other phenomena of research, in as far as the phenomena of the supersensible and sensible world flow together, just so Anthroposophy regards the content of Christology; it likewise tries to help with research into the supersensible regarding the content of Christology, help which can be acquired through anthroposophical methods. Now it is difficult to say in only a few words what characterises the position of Anthroposophy regarding Christology, but I would like to say the following.

We observe people in earthly life between birth and death where they have their soul and spirit life in their physical being, that they are bound to their physical body in relation to what they observe and process whatever is presented to them in their environment, also in relation to work itself, in relation to their life of will and finally in the way in which they place themselves in the sensory physical world. When a person looks back at when he wakes up, naturally in his surroundings, he firstly finds perceptions possible through the senses of his body, through his mind, and all of these experiences and observations of his environment he experiences as combined.

However, because his mind, intellect and ancient spirituality are carried within his own spirit, so he can—if he only thinks enough about himself, if he only looks away from the environment and looks at himself—not deny that through his own activity he comes to the conclusion culminating in a concept which only has spiritual content and that this spiritual content—if I may express it this way—is the Father-godly imagination. Here anthroposophical research must be of help with its methods. I can only briefly characterise this. It makes the entire human cognitive work process clear—this will also emerge out of the lectures in this course. It also wants to point to what happens through people when they try to turn their gaze away from the outer world, in order to gradually observe their own past actions and ask themselves: What have you actually done? What justifies you at all to make an imagination of the outer world?—By researching this experience far enough a person—when I may use this expression again—comes to a Father-godly experience. Whoever examines this divine godly-Father experience through Anthroposophy, arrives at quite a definite judgement. I ask that this judgement, which is a fact, which I speak about radically, should not be misunderstood.

A person arrives at this verdict, a person who is totally healthy—totally in full health in his physical body—comes to this godly Father experience, this means that whoever doesn't arrive at this godly-Father experience carries some or another degenerative symptom, even if hidden. In other words, through Anthroposophical research you can say: To not come to a Father-godly experience indicates some human illness. That is of course radical to say because illness is ordinarily seen through physical means because—if I might say so—it dwells in the subtleties of the human organisation. In fact, it is clear to those who research through Anthroposophy: Atheism is illness.

What I've said yesterday about the development of opinions, right or wrong, this is particularly important here. If a person follows only this route then he will come to a Father-godly experience. When he then goes further in this way, if he becomes aware what shortcomings live in his soul, if he only comes to this Father-god experience, he becomes aware that basically in the limitation of modern humanity leaning towards intellectualism there also lies a kind of limitation of this godly-Father experience, then he will realise he must go further with this godly-Father experience. Here outer observations can support this easily.

It is an extraordinary fact that in western countries where natural science has grown to its maximum intensity and where this scientific attitude doesn't want to enter into discussing the supersensible but that religion must remain preserved, that just in these religious movements of western countries the spirit of the Old Testament has particularly and successfully intervened even in our modern time. We see how in the west, when Christianity is outwardly accepted and preached that it is done totally in the spirit of the Old Testament; in a certain sense Christianity reshapes the Father-god and doesn't discern a difference between the Father-god and Christ.

In the (European) east by contrast, where people's minds don't see the division between religion and science as sharply as in the west; in the east where this bridge for the human soul more or less exists as an elementary inner soul experience—we find that for example in the presentations of the great philosopher Vladimir Soloviev—how the Christ experience, as an independent experience, exists beside the Father experience.

In this way one can say to oneself: indeed, a completely healthy person can't be an atheist if he combines everything around him in the outer world into the culmination of a God-imagination, which he must give a spiritual content; yet he remains with only a Father-imagination. With this Father-imagination one doesn't arrive at a summary of outer natural phenomena, it fails immediately when applied to one's own human development; one is then, as it were, abandoned. By deepening this inner development from this point at which one has arrived, having taken up the outer world into one's soul—then by following this inner development one will, if by open-mindedly pursuing it, come to a Christ experience, which is initially present as an indefinite inner experience. This experience continues to be recognised by Anthroposophy. A person, simply through honest observation of the human evolution on earth, comes to seeing before his own eyes, the Mystery of Golgotha, the historic Mystery of Golgotha. He arrives here through the inner development of spiritual organs which direct him to Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. If one with the help of these research means pursues the way human development went from antiquity to the Mystery of Golgotha, then one finds that everywhere in religious imagination—not only in the Old Testament religious imagination—lived a gravitation to the coming of the Christ-Spirit.

Then one can simply through observation, learn to recognise how the Christ-Spirit was not united with the earth in the time before the Mystery of Golgotha. By pursuing all of this which was sought for in the mysteries, was popular in pre-Christian religions, then we see how the images they made of their gods, finally all melt together into what the Christ-Imagination is. We see how the minds of people all over the world are lifted to the supernatural when they turn to their gods in their souls. We see how the point of origin for earthly mankind's development was simply more given through the human organisation than what was perceived through the senses or the mind in what could be observed in his surroundings. It entered into the human soul—most strongly in ancient times, and then less and less—what I would call instinctive perception—not earthly—of the world, to which the human being felt he belonged. In the moment when a person, through the mysteries or through popular religion, is brought to where he can lift his soul into seeing extra-terrestrially, and with which he knows he is united in his deepest being, at this moment a person experiences a rebirth within himself.

Now my dear friends, when we follow human evolution from an Anthroposophic point of view up to the Mystery of Golgotha, it shows that these abilities, which dwelt within human beings, actually diminished gradually and were no longer there the moment the Mystery of Golgotha took place on the earth. Certainly there can be remnants, for evolution doesn't take place in leaps. Individuals preserved, though perhaps inaccurately but still instinctively, an awareness of what had once been seen; this can be pursued in art. Then the Mystery of Golgotha took place on earth. In the Mystery of Golgotha Anthroposophy sees the streaming in of that spirit which previously could only be searched for in the extra-terrestrial: the in streaming of the Christ into the human body of Jesus. How this can individually be imagined, can only be discussed with those who have engaged positively in these fields of research. Here Anthroposophy shows how from that time onwards, from the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, another time has begun on earth, a time about which all the old religious knowledge confessed about. The Christ who went through the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ who Paul saw on the way to Damascus, the Christ then remained within in the earth with humanity. This is what these words want to say: “I am with you every day until the end of the world.” He lives among us, He can be found again. The Paul experience can, with certain preparation, be renewed time and time again. Then, if Christ is searched for in this way, a person—by looking at his own inner development—just as since the Mystery of Golgotha happened on earth—can see Christ walking; he discovers Christ in his inner life in the same way as when in the outer world—if he is not ill with atheism—he found the Father-god.

Thus, I can only fleetingly, in a sketch, indicate how Anthroposophy through real research of the Christ event, can arrive at an inner objective fact. With all possible detail Anthroposophy tries to present the Christ event as the most important fact of the earthly life of humanity, as something which happened objectively. For this reason, the entire spirit through which the Christ event is presented in Anthroposophy is done in such a way that this event can be absorbed simply as fact. We have within the anthroposophic movement experienced that for example Jewish confessors found themselves in the most genuine, truest and honest sense in recognising the Mystery of Golgotha. With this, my dear friends, the Anthroposophical Movement has already anticipated what after all must enter into human evolution: through directly pointing to what can be seen in the Mystery of Golgotha, how the way to Christianity can be found again.

There is always a question whether there isn't yet a deep meaning in the book by Overbeck, a friend of Friedrich Nietzsche, that modern theology is no longer Christian. If this is legitimate then one could even, perhaps with a certain right, say: Anthroposophy is suitable for directing people in a lively way to the Christ experience. It states that during the time in which the Christ event took place there still existed an instinctive insight among some individuals, so that the spiritual foundation, or I might call it, the spiritual substantiality of the Mystery of Golgotha could be seen and acknowledged in the first Christian centuries. We then see how this diminished gradually; we see it completely fade in the figure of Scotus Erigena, we see medieval theology spreading where the attempt was being made to separate itself from what modern humanity had to develop in the intellect, that which, when it is left to the person who no longer develops inwardly, he becomes incapable of accessing the supersensible worlds. It split what wanted to enter into the human soul into what was recognisable by the intellect, and what people could not attain themselves, except through a revelation.

On this basis one can understand the entire medieval theology, especially Thomistic theology which was considered by Catholicism as the only authority. Today something can be said about this. What Anthroposophy was and is, is nothing other than simply to express what exists and is available through spiritual observation.

As Anthroposophy comes to the proposition that atheism is actually a hidden illness, it arrives at a second proposition: Not finding the Christ, not finding a relationship with the Christ is destiny for humanity, is the fate of misfortune. Atheism is an illness, not finding the Christ is the fate of misfortune because one can find Him in an inward experience. Then He positions Himself there as that Being who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha. One can only discover Christ through one's inner life; one doesn't need anthroposophical research to be a religious person in the Christian sense. Then again, when one has come to Christ, one becomes a member of the spiritual world and one can really speak about a resurrection of the human being in the spiritual world, because the person who fails to find Christ in regard to his world view, is restricted. Atheism is an illness! Not coming to Christ is a destiny, not reaching the spirit is soul obtuseness!

Now, my dear friends, Anthroposophy relates from such foundations basically only to religion (and not theology) and to religion only in as far as people who have religious needs and who are unable to fulfil them through current declarations, approach Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy will only do what is necessary within the needs of today, and that which others fail to do. What ethos is at this basis—I have to always characterise this again—you can find from the following.

Some years ago, I once held a lecture in a southern German town—at that time it was a German town but it no longer is—a lecture entitled “Bible and Wisdom”. Two Catholic priests were present at the lecture. After the lecture they both approached me and said: “We actually haven't found anything in your lecture which could be challenged from a Catholic point of view.”

I answered: “If only I could always be so lucky!”

To this they both replied: “Yes, but we noticed something, it is not what you say but it is the manner and way how you present it. We must add that you speak to people who are prepared in a certain way. You lecture to a kind of congregation who have a certain education; we, however, speak to all people.”

I said: “Reverend, it doesn't come down to how our subjective experiences decide, but it comes down to us living into our work in evolution, that we don't imagine we speak for all people but that we answer such a question according to what objectively lives in the evolution of humanity. So, I can imagine I speak for all people—and could be very mistaken—you can imagine that. It is very good for enthusiasm to have such an imagination. Still, ask yourselves for once: do all people who have the need to hear something about Christ all come to church?”

Both of them couldn't say yes because naturally they knew that a lot of people who search for a way to Christ, do not come to the church.

So I said: “You see, for those who don't come to you and still search for a way to Christ, it is for those I speak.”

This means finding your task in the evolution of time, and not to imagine you speak for everyone, but to ask: are there minds out there who want to accept this or that in a special way?

Anthroposophy never turns to any other mindset, like to some or other religious confession.

When we, in the Waldorf School, manage to apply teaching in a practical way out of Anthroposophy we still completely avoid making the Waldorf School a school which will splice Anthroposophy into the heads of the children. With regards to religious instruction, we leave the Catholic children to be instructed by a catholic priest and the evangelists by an evangelist priest. Only for the dissident children there is a freer kind of religious instruction, but in the thorough Christian sense. We don't introduce abstract Anthroposophy—also no concrete anthroposophy which is presented to grown-ups—but we try with all our good intensions to bring to the children what is suitable to the stage of their development; all of that must first be searched for and determined according to the content and method. Through those of us who have given free religious instruction, we have managed to bring those children who have no religious instruction as such, towards Christianity and they come in droves to take part in this kind of religious instruction. Never have we preached some or other kind of religious propaganda within the Anthroposophical Movement and even less would Anthroposophy embark on something against single theological systems. With this in mind, anthroposophy can only apply itself to finding differences in separate theological systems in order to understand them and not to oppose them. Thus, I've always regarded it to be my task when I speak to people who have come to Anthroposophy: to make it understandable why Catholicism has become Catholic, Protestants Protestant, Judaism Jewish and Buddhism Buddhistic and how all of them—I believe that is a Christian concept—have within them a Being who through their destiny will let them experience the true Christ.

So it is not possible, if attacks have not originated from the other side, to start a struggle between Anthroposophy and theology, and also today I want to utter these words, while it has been asked for from those who organised today's theologian's day. The only task of Anthroposophy is the pronouncement of anthroposophic research results about the supersensible worlds. This is why I have always been reticent in particular regarding attacks originating from the theological side.

Anthroposophy doesn't want to act as a fighter on the scene but to satisfy the legitimate demands of human soul needs of the time. Everyone who in this sense wants to work together with Anthroposophy and wants to bring to the surface the fulfilment of legitimate, soul foundations of human soul needs, everyone who wants to work with her in this sense, is welcome!

It behoves me today to link certain aspects of the knowledge gained from earlier studies—with which most of our friends are already acquainted—to what I said yesterday. But once again I want to draw your attention to the essential content of what was then said, namely, that the knowledge, the passive kind of knowledge cultivated today is in reality a comparatively recent production. This indifferent knowledge, shown for instance when medicine is set down as just one science among many, has been developed only in course of the last three or four centuries; whereas in olden times the aim of all knowledge was to heal. Knowledge and the finding of means to heal mankind were, in the sense intended yesterday, one and the same.

Now from various indications in my lectures you will know that in the last third of the nineteenth century an event of spiritual importance took place; that during the seventies of that century, behind the scenes of world-history, of outer, physical world-history, something of great significance happened. We have some name for it but another name might do just as well—we have called it the victory of the archangelic Being, Michael, over opposing spiritual forces. We will look upon this as an event taking place in the spiritual world and connected with mankind's history. It is in the spiritual world that such events are prepared. This particular one could be said to be in preparation already in 1842. It reached a certain climax in the spiritual world about 1879, and from 1914 on the necessity arose for men on earth to establish a harmonious relation with this spiritual event. What has been happening since 1914 is essentially a struggle on the part of narrow-minded humanity against what, in the opinion of the spiritual powers concerned with the guidance of mankind, should come about. Thus we may say: In the second half of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth, behind the scenes of human evolution, there was taking place something significant—a challenge to men to submit themselves to the will of those spiritual beings. This would entail a change of direction and the bringing about of a new kind of civilisation, a new conception of social life, of the life of art and all spiritual life on earth. In the course of human evolution there have repeatedly been such events, of which external history takes little account. For external history is indeed a fabrication. Things of this kind have nevertheless definitely happened—one of them taking place 300 years, another in the middle of the third millennium, before the birth of Christ.

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Regarding mankind, however, there was a great difference between the experiencing of these two events and that of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most of you have at least partly experienced the events of the second half of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, and will know that small notice was taken of how a change should actually come about in the spiritual life.

Hardship will compel mankind to realise the necessity for this. There will be no end to hardship until a sufficient number of human beings have realised this necessity—even in the organising of public affairs. We may indeed ask why no notice has been taken, and whether it was the same in the case of those other experiences, the third millennium and the third century.—But no, it was quite different then. Could people only interpret to history of the Greek soul rightly, even that of the more coarse-grained Romans, they would understand that actually both Greeks and Romans were fully aware that something calling for notice was taking place in the spiritual world. Indeed precisely in the case of the event 300 years before Christ's birth, we can quite well see its gradual preparation, how it then reached a climax and lived itself out. The men of the third, fourth century before Christ's birth were clearly conscious: In the world of spirit something is happening that has an echo in the world of men.—What they thus perceived can today be called the birth of human phantasy—man's faculty of imagination.

You see, human beings, as they are constituted today, consider the way they think: and the way they feel to be the same as thinking and feeling have always been. But that is not so. Indeed in the course of time our sense-perceptions have changed—as I showed yesterday. Naturally, three or four centuries before the birth of Christ creative art was already in existence; it did not arise, however, out of what today is called imagination but out of imagination that was clairvoyant. There who were artists could perceive how the spiritual revealed itself, and they simply copied what was thus revealed. The old atavistic clairvoyance, the old imagination, was inherent in the artist. The phantasy which then arose and was developed till, having come to the climax in the works of Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, it started to degenerate—this phantasy did not create as if the spiritual appeared in imaginations, but as if something were ordered from within a man, formed from within him. The gift of this phantasy was ascribed by people at that time to strife among the divine beings ruling over them, at whose orders they carried out their earthly deeds.

In the middle of that third millennium, about 2,500 years before Christ's birth, people perceived as something of still greater significance how their whole being was involved in the events which, out of the spiritual world it made an impact on physical events. About that time, still in the third millennium before our era, it would have been deemed very foolish to speak of man's earthly pilgrimage without referring to the spiritual beings around him. This would have seemed nonsense to everyone, for then the earth was thought to be peopled by beings both physical and spiritual.

The life of soul that became habitual in the course of the nineteenth century is certainly different from the life of those olden days. Men perceived the ordinary secular events on earth but not the underlying, significantly spiritual strife. How came it that this was not perceived?—It was the result of the special character of our present age, the age which began it the middle of the fifteenth century and is called by us the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In our present epoch the most outstanding, significant force of which a man can avail himself is intellect, and since the fifteenth century people have attained to great heights as intelligent beings. Today they still take pride in this. It should not be thought, however, that in earlier times there was no kind of intelligence—it was a different kind, it is true, but it arose at the same time as a certain perception. This intelligence was endowed, too, with a spiritual content. We, on the other hand, have an intelligence devoid of spiritual content, a formal intelligence; for in themselves our concepts and ideas are empty—they merely reflect something. Our whole understanding is just a mass of reflected images. It is indeed in the nature of this intelligence, which has been particularly developed since the middle of the fifteenth century, to be simply a reflecting apparatus. What is thus merely reflected does not act within man as a force; it is simply passive. And it is characteristic of this intellect—of which we are so proud—to be passive; we just let it work upon us, give ourselves up to it. Very little force of will is developed in it thus. The most outstanding trait in men now is their hatred of intellect that is active. In face of a situation where thinking is required of them—well, they find that very boring. When it is a question of real thinking there is a general dropping off to sleep—at any rate for the soul. On the other hand, with a film, a cinematograph, when there is no need to think and it is thinking that can go to sleep, when all one has to do is to gaze and passively to give oneself up to what is reeled off, so that thoughts run on of themselves, then there is general satisfaction. It is a passive understanding to which men have grown accustomed, an understanding devoid of force. And what in fact is that? We realise its nature when looking back at the distinction made in human knowledge in the old Mystery schools. There were three categories: first, the knowledge that came from men's physical life, arising out of their common physical experience of the world. Perhaps we could say: First, physical knowledge; secondly, intellectual knowledge, developed by man himself, chiefly in mathematics, knowledge, in effect, in which a man immerses himself—intellectual knowledge; and thirdly, spiritual knowledge, coming from the spiritual and not from the physical. Today, of these three it is intellectual knowledge which is especially cultivated and most in favour. It has become quite an ideal to approach the spiritual life with the passive, unconcerned attitude usually adopted towards mathematics. It is not admitted but all the same true that our present men of learning, for instance our university professors, on leaving the lecture-room like to turn as soon as they can to something quite unconnected with their particular subject. That betrays an abstract relation to knowledge which goes extremely deep.

When I was lecturing in Zurich a few days ago, a workman broke into the discussion. As the Waldorf School and the timetable we have put in place of the usual soul-destroying one had been mentioned, he said: “Your timetable gives too long a stretch for one subject; there should be more change. For when children have gone on with a subject from eight to nine, if they are not to be bored there ought to be something else from nine to ten.” Naturally I could but reply: “It is not the business of the Waldorf School to deal with boredom but to take care that the children's interest is kept alive—and that is the concern of the School pedagogics and didactics.” Thus the idea is very deeply-rooted in people that spiritual life is boring, and easily becomes tiresome as a subject. This is entirely because our intellectual life, consisting as it does merely of pictures, of reflected images, can provide no substance for our spiritual life. And a spiritual life devoid of substance is in a state of isolation—cut off not only from the spiritual world but also from the physical. Actually in the age we live in very little is known either of the physical world or that of the spirit. All that a man knows about is his own imaginings. As a result of intellectuality being just so many reflected images, the man of the nineteenth century was debarred from any knowledge of what was going on spiritually behind the scenes of world-history. He had no share in the experience of that great, momentous change which, behind external world history, came about in the spiritual world during the second half of the nineteenth century. It is through his own endeavours that he has to learn how the physical world should follow the lead of the spiritual world. This lesson is forced upon him, for, if not learnt, increasing hardship will prevail and all present civilisation will go down into barbarism. To avoid this it is necessary for people to be aware inwardly that they must experience something in the same way that, 300 years before Christ's birth, the birth of phantasy was experienced. In our day we have to experience the birth of active intelligence—at that time the active force of imagination arose. At that time it became possible to give imaginative shape to what was created in accordance with external form; now, people must turn to the inward, victorious creation of ideas, through which everyone makes for himself a picture of his own being—setting it before him as a goal. Human beings must acquire self-knowledge in its widest sense, not just by brooding over what they had for dinner, but ,a self-knowledge which sets their whole being in action. That is the kind of self-knowledge demanded for the evolution of those men whose present task is the bringing to birth of an active intelligence.

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Now, it will happen that human beings in ordinary recollection, in their ordinary memory, will discover something very peculiar. Because people today have become rather insensitive and do not notice what is already in their souls, on looking back over their life they still perceive only memories of their ordinary experiences. But that is not the whole picture; actually a certain change has taken place and more and more people are met with who are having a new experience. When these men look back ten or twenty years they come not only to what they have experienced, but out of that, like an independent entity, there rises something they have not experienced. Psycho-analysis, in its foolishness, examines what thus lies hidden in the soul examines it without realising the nature of our present age. What these foolish psycho-analysts are unable to find, spiritual science must propound, namely, that when we look back—say from our 45th year—and watch our experiences surging past like a stream (see diagram), within them there is not only our past experience; it was so once and even today is all that most of our rather thick-skinned generation perceive. But anyone sensitive to such things will realise that in a backward survey of his life he sees not only the ordinary events but something (red in diagram) he has not experienced, arising from the past experiences of his soul in an almost demoniacal way. And this will increase in intensity. If people do not learn to observe such things they will lose the power to understand them.

Therein lies the danger for future evolution, and deluding oneself is of no avail for it is indeed so. Among the experiences lived through by a man something new will appear, only to be grasped by active intelligence. This is extraordinarily important. Just as in the individual human being something new arises after the change of teeth, then again at puberty, and so on, after a certain period the same kind of metamorphosis occurs in mankind as a whole. This present metamorphosis can be described as follows: If we look back occasionally on our life (and this can also be done in the backward survey over our day) we do not only remember the most obvious experiences, but out of these surge up demonic forms. It almost causes us to say: I have had certain experiences out of which daydreams arise.—This will be quite normal but we have to be alive to it. It will call for much more inward activity on men's part and the overcoming of that passive attitude which promotes despair in face of the great demands of the age. That passivity must be overcome. People's sleepiness, their inability to rouse themselves and to take things with dignity and in earnest, is certainly terrifying. I have already spoken here of how in our day many people cannot even be angry. Anyone incapable of getting angry over what is bad is incapable of enthusiasm over what is good. When, however, active intelligence takes possession of human beings there will be a change. We may indeed say that they are still afraid of the discovery they will then make. For with the coming of active intelligence they will recognise their cherished intellectuality for what it is—recognise the real nature of these arising images. This can be understood only if we remember something I have often mentioned here—that we can feel, we can will, just being alive; but just being alive does not enable us to think. That we cannot do. We are able to think only by bearing permanently within us the principle of death.

This great secret about mankind lies in there being a never-ending stream, as it were, flowing from the senses—let us take the eye as representing them (see diagram). Through what we know as nerve, the senses carry into a man something destructive. It is as if—by way of the nerve-fibres—men were filled through their senses with a crumbling material. When you see, when you hear, even when you are conscious of warmth, there is taking place what is like the crumbling of some material on its way inward from the senses. This crumbling material has to be taken hold of by what streams out from within a man; it must be, as it were, burnt up. Our thinking necessitates a continual struggle against the forces of death in us. Indeed, because he is conscious of his thinking merely in its reflecting capacity, a man does not realise that, strictly speaking, he is alive only in what has nothing to do with his head, his head actually being an organ always in the throes of death. We should be in constant danger of death were merely that to happen which goes on in our head. This permanent dying is checked by the head being united to the rest of the organism, upon which it draws for its vitality. When the human being will have possessed himself of active intelligence as he did of active phantasy in the days of the Greeks and Romans—whereas the imagination of the old atavistic clairvoyance was a passive phantasy—with this active intelligence he will be able to perceive how part of his being is always dying. And this will be important. For just today we have to progress to a state of consciousness enabling us to perceive this permanent dying, so mankind in a past age, even up to the time of the Greeks, perceived what was living in the principle of vitality, in the will and its associated metabolism. What fights against the principle of death, what in a man is continuously disabling that principle of death, is living there. It might be said that in this respect the people of old were superior to those who followed them. They perceived the vitality with their instinctive clairvoyance, perceived the life with which the principle of healing is connected. Indeed, we do not die because our head has the will to die, but, owing to our head being the organ of thinking, we permanently carry within us the germs of sickness. Thus it is necessary for us to pay the price of our thinking by setting counter to the head, with its tendency to disease, the healing forces lying in the rest of our organism. Today it is still little noticed, but forms of disease are becoming to appear—as you know, they change—in which the constant process of death coming from the head will be more easily noticed than many of our present illnesses. Then it will be found that in reality the whole healing process in human beings is to counteract the harmful effects of our intellectual life. Whereas people of old could claim healing to be in their science, their knowledge, in future it will have to be admitted that what we are now making of our intellect, what is becoming of this intellect, of which today we are so proud, should it alone be held valid, will show us in future the gradual fall of mankind into complete decadence. To avert this, science will have to become able to carry within it the forces of healing.—I indicated this yesterday from another point of view; today I do so more from the standpoint of the way in which man is constituted. We must recognise that spiritual science is needed as bearer of a new healing process. For if there be a further development of the intellect of which modern man is so proud, intellect which lives merely in images, then by reason of its predominance all men will become disease-ridden. Measures must be taken to prevent such a thing. I can well imagine some people replying: “But if we discourage this intellectual cleverness, if we do away with intellect”,—and there are indeed those who would like to see the intellect left undeveloped—“then there would be no need to repair the damage it does.”—The true progress of mankind, however, has nothing in common with this Jesuitical principle; rather is it a question of human evolution being such that the healing element developing out of man's soul-forces can have effect on the intellect—otherwise the intellect will take a decadent trend and bring about the downfall of mankind. (See first diagram)

As counter-measure to this, what arises from knowledge of spiritual science, and can permanently hinder the forces of decline in the one-sided intellect, must become effectual.

We come here to a point where once again I have to draw your attention to a very special matter. You will certainly realise that during the nineteenth century, when all I am telling you about today—and have frequently pointed out in the past—was taking place, intellectual materialism was assuming great proportions. Men came to the fore—I need only remind you of Moleschott, Vogt, Gifford—upholding, for instance, the proposition: All thinking consists in a metabolism going on in the brain.—They spoke of phosphorescence pf the brain, and said without phosphorus in the brain there is no thinking. According to this thinking is just a byproduct of a certain digestive process in the brain. And the men saying this cannot be written off as being the stupid ones among their contemporaries. We may think how we like about the theory of these materialists but we can just as well do something else: that is, measure their capacity by that of their contemporaries and ask: Were such people as Moleschott and Gifford the cleverer or those who opposed them out of old religious prejudice and without spiritual science? Was Haeckel the cleverer or his opponents? This question may still be asked today. And when it is not answered in accordance with personal opinion, but with regard to spiritual capacity, naturally it cannot be said that Haeckel's opponents were cleverer than he nor that the opponents of Moleschott and Gifford were cleverer than they. The materialists were very clever people, and what they said was certainly not devoid of significance. How then did all this come about? What was behind it? We must indeed find the answer.

Certainly quite well-intentioned opponents of materialism arose at the time, for example Moriz Carriere whom I have often mentioned. Now he said: If everything man thinks and experiences is merely concocted by the brain, what is propounded by one party is just as much a concoction as what the opposite party says. As far as the truth is concerned there is no difference between a statement of Moleschott or Gifford and what is maintained by the Pope. There is no difference because in both cases they are concoctions of the human brain. There is no way of distinguishing the true from the false. Yet the materialists fight for what appears to them as the truth. They are not justified in doing so but they are astute—capable of a certain quickness of spirit. What then is in question here? You see, these materialists have had to arise in an age when thinking is made up merely of images, lives merely in images. But images are not there without something to act as reflector—which in this case is the brain. Indeed, where ordinary thinking is concerned—the thinking that grew to such heights in the nineteenth century—materialists have right on their side; that is a fact. They are no longer right, however, if they want to maintain that the thinking which transcends that of the intellect is also nothing but images dependent on the body, for that is not so. What transcends the intellect can be acquired only in course of a man's evolution: only by his becoming free of what has to do with the body. The thinking that has come to the fore in the nineteenth century must be explained materialistically. Though composed of images it is entirely dependent on the instrument of the brain, and the remarkable thing is that, for the most part, in face of the life of spirit in the nineteenth century, materialism is actually justified. That life of spirit is bound up with the bodily and material. It is precisely this life of spirit which must be transcended. The human being must rise above it and learn once more to pour spiritual substance into the images. This can be done not only by becoming clairvoyant—as I constantly emphasise there is no necessity for everyone to be so—for spiritual substance can be made to flow into a man's thinking when he reflects upon what another has already investigated spiritually,„ This must not be accepted blindfold; once there, it can be judged. Commonsense will suffice for the understanding of what has, been investigated through spiritual science. The denial of this means that commonsense is not given its due; and anyone who denies it is thinking: Commonsense—civilised people have been developing a great deal of that for a long time. Indeed these civilised people are developing a “very assured” judgment! And if this assured judgment is refuted by the facts they take no notice, refuse to take notice. At the suitable moment such matters—which speak volumes symptomatically—are forgotten.

I will give you just one nice little example. In 1866, at the time of the Prussian victory over Austria, it was said that this was a proof of the superiority of Prussian schools. It gave rise to the saying: “It was the Prussian schoolmasters who won the 1866 victory.” ¹ This has been constantly repeated, and it would be interesting to count the times, between 1870 and 1914, that it was said by the qualified and unqualified—mostly the unqualified: “The Prussian victory was won by the schoolmasters.”—I imagine that people today will no longer be so ready to speak anywhere in such a fashion, any more than the truth of this other assertion will be insisted upon in the light of present events. But in this intellectual age, when people are so clever, they are not willing to notice the contradictions to be found in life. Facts play very little part in the intellectual life, but they must do so if the intellect is to be permeated with fresh spiritual content. Then, indeed, it will be manifest that a paralysing process, a decadent process, is appearing in men, which must be overcome by new spiritual knowledge. In the past: men must be said to have sensed, experienced, something of a healing nature in the knowledge surging up from the physical body. In future they will have to learn to see in the development of intellect the cause of disease, and to look to the spirit for healing. The source of healing must indeed be found again in science. This necessity, however, will arise from an opposite direction, when it can be seen how external life, even when proficient in knowledge, makes for sickness in men and must be counteracted by the healing principle.

Matters such as these afford us insight into the course of human evolution—in so far as this is a reality. Today history does not give us a real picture of human evolution but merely worthless abstractions. Man today is deficient in a sense of reality, having indeed very little of it. During the nineteenth century, people in mid-Europe became very proficient at giving out what of a spiritual nature was already there. One of the most arresting examples of this is the case of Herman Grimm who, as a writer about the works of Goethe—such as Tasso or Iphigenie ranks very high. He was, however, quite unable to portray Goethe the man. Although he wrote a biography of him, in it Goethe seems a mere shadow. Spiritual force was not there in the nineteenth century; people were living in images.; and images have no power to enforce the reality which is so necessary for the future. We must understand not only what human beings create, but above all the human being himself, and through him nature, in a more all-embracing sense than hitherto. I believe it to be possible for such things to work in all seriousness upon the human heart and soul. It is likely to be some time before a sufficient number of people allow themselves to be fired by the knowledge that, if not permeated by the spirit, mankind will be overcome by disease. At least those should accept this knowledge who have come nearer to an understanding of anthroposophy.

There is one thing which must be recognised—that many who have accepted anthroposophy have come to our Movement out of what I might call subtle egoistic tendencies, wishing to have something for the comfort of their souls. They want the satisfaction of gaining certain knowledge about the spiritual world. But that will not do. This is not a matter of basking in the personal satisfaction of participating in the spiritual. What people need is actively to intervene in the affairs of the material world from out of the spirit—through the spirit to gain mastery over the material world. There will be no end to all the misery that has come upon mankind till people understand this and, understanding, allow it to influence their will.

One would so gladly see—at least among anthroposophists—this kind of insight, this kind of will, taking effect. Certainly it may be asked: What can a mere handful of human beings do against the blindness of the whole world?—But that is not right. To speak in that way has absolutely no justification. For in saying this there is no thought that what concerns us here is first to strengthen the will-power—then we can await what will come. Let everyone from his own sphere in life do what lies in him; he may then await what is done by others. But at least let him do it—do it above all so that as many people as possible in the world may be moved by the urgent need for spiritual renewal.

Only if we are watchful, and take a firm stand where anthroposophy has placed us, can we ourselves make any progress or set our will to work on what is necessary to ensure the progress of all mankind.

• 1. First said in 1866 by Oskar Peschel—a professor at Leipzig University.

You have seen how spiritual science works toward using educational material as a means for raising children. The scientific forms of the instructional material are presented to the child in such a way that those forces within the child that prepare him or her for development are drawn out. If we are to work fruitfully with the instructional material we have, we need to pay attention to the course of activity of the child’s soul.

If we look at the activity of a human soul, we see two things. The first is a tendency toward analysis and the second is a tendency toward synthesis. Everyone knows from logic or psychology what the essential nature of analysis and synthesis is. But it is important to comprehend these things not simply in their abstract form, as they are normally understood, but in a living way.

We can recall what analysis is if we say to ourselves the following: if we have ten numbers or ten things, then we can imagine these ten things by imagining three, five, and two, and adding to it the idea that ten can be divided, or analyzed as three, five, and two.

When working with synthesis, our concern is just the opposite: we simply add three, five, and two. As I said, in an objective, abstract, and isolated sense, everyone knows what analysis and synthesis are. But when we want to comprehend the life of the human soul, we find that the soul is continuously impelled to form syntheses. For example, we look at an individual animal out of a group of animals and we form a general concept, that of the species. In that case, we summarize, that is, we synthesize. Analysis is something that lies much deeper, almost in the unconscious. This is a desire to make multiplicity out of unity. Since this has been little taken into account, people have understood little of what human freedom represents in the soul. If the activity of the human soul were solely synthetic—that is, if human beings were connected with the external world in such a way that they could onlysynthesize, they could only form concepts of species and so forth—we could hardly speak of human freedom. Everything would be determined by external nature.

In contrast, the soul aspect of all of our deeds is based upon analysis, which enables us to develop freedom in the life of pure thinking. If I am to find the sum of two and five and three, I have no freedom. There is a rule that dictates how much two and five and three are. On the other hand, if I have ten, then I can represent this number ten as nine plus one, or five plus five or three plus five plus two, and so forth. When analyzing, I carry out a completely free inner activity. When synthesizing, I am required by the external world to unfold the life in my soul in a particular way.

In practical life, we analyze when, for example, we take a particular position and say we want to consider one thing or another from this perspective. In this case, we dissect everything we know about the thing into two parts. We analyze and separate everything and then put ourselves in a certain position. For instance, I could consider getting up early purely from the standpoint of, say, a greater inclination to do my work in the early morning. I could also consider getting up early from other perspectives. I might even go so far in my analysis that I have two or three perspectives. In this analytical activity in my soul, I am in a certain way free. Since we develop this analytical soul activity continuously and more or less unconsciously, we are free human beings. No one can overcome the difficulties in the question of human freedom who does not understand this analytical tendency in human beings.

And yet it is just this analytical activity that is normally taken too little into account in teaching and education. We are more likely to take the view that the external world demands synthesis. Consequently synthesizing is what is primarily taken into account rather than analyzing. This is very significant. If, for example, you want to pursue the idea of beginning with dialect when teaching language, it is clear how necessary it is to analyze. The child already has a dialect language. When we have the child speak some sentences, we then need to analyze what already exists in those sentences in order to derive the rules of speech formation from them. We can also develop the analytical activity in instruction much further.

Now I go on to the analysis. I would try to draw the child’s attention to how the word begins with f. Thus, I analyze the f in the context of the word. I then do the same with the i and so forth. Thus we work with human nature as it is when, instead of beginning with letters and synthesizing them into words, we begin with whole words and analyze them into letters.

This is something we also need to take into account, particularly from the perspective of the development of the human soul in preparation for later life. As you all know, we suffer today under the materialistic view of the world. This perspective demands not only that we only accept material things as being valid. It also insists that we trace everything in the world back to the activities of atoms. It is unimportant whether we think of those atoms in the way people thought of them in the 1880s, that is, as small elastic particles made up of some unknown material, or whether we think of them as people do today—as electrical forces or electrical centers of force. What is important in materialism is material itself, and when the tools of materialism are transferred to our view of the spirit and soul, we think of them as being composed of tiny particles and depending upon the activities of those particles. Today we have come so far that we are no longer aware that we are working with hypotheses. Most people believe it is a proven scientific fact that atoms form the basis of phenomena in the external world.

Why have people in our age developed such an inclination for atomism? Because they have developed insufficient analytical activities in children. If we were to develop in children those analytical activities that begin with unified word pictures and then analyze them into letters, the child would be able to activate its capacity to analyze at the age when it first wants to do so; it would not have to do so later by inventing atomic structures and so forth. Materialism is encouraged by a failure to satisfy our desire for analysis. If we satisfied the impulse to analyze in the way that I have described here, we would certainly keep people from sympathizing with the materialistic worldview.

For this reason in the Waldorf School we always teach beginning not with letters, but with complete sentences. We analyze the sentence into words and the words into letters and then the letters into vowels. In this way we come to a proper inner understanding as the child grasps the meaning of what a sentence or word is. We awaken the child’s consciousness by analyzing sentences and words.

When you accept a child as he is and see how he speaks a dialect, then it is not at all necessary to begin with the opposite method. Children understand the unity of sentences much more than we think. Children whose tendency to analyze is accepted develop a greater awareness than is generally the case in today’s population. We have sinned a great deal in education in regard to the awareness in people’s souls. We could actually say that we sleep not only in the time between falling asleep and awakening, nor are we simply awake during the period from awakening until falling asleep. To some extent during daily life we alternate continually between being awake and being asleep. The activity of inhaling and exhaling is at the same time an illumination and a darkening, though we may not notice it. We do not notice it because it occurs quite quickly and because the darkening and illumination are very weak. The rapidity of the process and the subtlety of the changes make this imperceptible. Nevertheless it is true that with every inhalation we go to sleep in a certain sense, and when we exhale, in a certain sense we awaken. In this sense wakefulness and sleeping continually alternate within us.

This is also true of the mind. As a rule, with every analytical activity we awaken, and with every synthesizing activity we fall asleep. Of course this does not mean the ordinary states we are in during the night or day. Even so there is a relationship between analyzing and awakening and synthesizing and falling asleep. We therefore develop a tendency in the child to confront the world with a wakeful soul when we use the child’s desire to analyze, when we develop the individual details from unified things.

This is something we must particularly take into account in teaching arithmetic. We often do not sufficiently consider the relationship of arithmetic to the child’s soul life. First of all we must differentiate between arithmetic and simple counting. Many people think counting represents a kind of addition, but that is not so. Counting is simply naming differing quantities. Of course, counting needs to precede arithmetic, at least counting up to a certain number. We certainly need to teach children how to count. But we must also use arithmetic to properly value those analytical forces that want to be developed in the child’s soul. In the beginning, we need to attempt, for instance, to begin with the number ten and then divide it in various ways. We need to show the children how ten can be separated into five and five, or into three and three and three and one. We can achieve an enormous amount in supporting what human nature actually strives for out of its inner forces when we do not teach addition by saying that the addends are on the left and the sum is on the right, but by saying that we have the sum on the left and the addends on the right. We should begin with analyzing the sum and then work backwards toward addition.

If you wish, you can take this presentation as a daring statement. Nevertheless those who have achieved an unprejudiced view of the forces within human nature will recognize that when we place the sum on the left and the addends on the right, and then teach the child how to separate the sum in any number of ways, we support the child’s desire to analyze. Only afterward do we work with those desires that actually do not play a role within the soul, but instead are important with interactions of people within the external world. What a child analyzes out of a unity exists essentially only for herself. What is synthesized exists always for external human nature.

Now you might say that what I had said previously regarding the concept of species, for example, is the result ofsyntheses. And that is true. However, we cannot understand the process of synthesizing as simply the creation of abstract concepts. Certainly people believe that when we form general concepts such as wolfor lamb, these are general concepts that develop only in our reasoning.This, however, is not the case. The things that exist outside of all substance, and which we comprehend in the idea of a wolf or lamb, are also real. If they were not real, if only material substance were real, then if we were to cage a wolf and feed it only lamb, after a period of time it would have to become like a lamb. Clearly this is something that will not happen because a wolf is something more than simply the matter out of which it is made. The additional aspect of which a wolf consists becomes clear to us through the concept that we form through synthesis. It is certainly also something that corresponds to an external reality. On the other hand, what we in the end separate out of something into various parts corresponds to something subjective in many cases, but particularly in those cases where our concern is to find a point of view. It is certainly a subjective activity when I separate the sum on the left into the addends so that I have the addends on the right. In that case, I have what needs to be on the right. If I have the sum on the left and then separate it into parts, then I can do the separation from various points of view and thus the addends can take on numerous forms. It is very important to develop this freedom of will in children.

Similarly, in multiplication we should not attempt to begin with the factors and proceed to the product. Instead we should begin with the product and form the factors in many various ways. Only afterwards should we turn to the synthesizing activity. This way through arithmetic people may be able to develop the rhythmic activity within the life of the soul that consists of analyzing and synthesizing. In the way we teach arithmetic today, we often emphasize one side too strongly. For the soul, such overemphasis has the same effect as if we wereto heap breath upon breath upon the body and not allow it to exhale in the proper way. It is important to take the individuality of the human being into account in the proper way. This is what I mean when I speak of the fructification that education can experience through spiritual science.

e need to become aware of what actually wants to develop out of the child’s individuality. First we need to know what can be drawn out of the child. At the outset children have a desire to be satisfied analytically; then they want to bring that analysis together through synthesis. We must take these things into account by looking at human nature. Otherwise even the best pedagogical principles—although they may be satisfying to use and we believe they are fulfilling all that is required—will never be genuinely useful because we do not actually try to look at the results of education in life.

People are curiously short-sighted in their judgment. If you had lived during the 1870s, as I did, you would have heard in Prussia (and also from some people in Austria) that Prussia won the war with Austria in 1866 because the Austrian schools at an earlier time were worse than those in Prussia. It was actually the Prussian teachers who won. Since October 1918 I have not heard similar talk in Germany, although there would perhaps be reason to speak that way. But of course the talk in Germany would have to be the other way around.

We can learn from such things. They show how people have too strong a tendency to form judgments not according to the facts, but according to their sympathies and antipathies, according to what they feel. This is because there are many things in human nature that are not developed, but actually demand to be developed as human forces. We will, however, always find our way if we take the rhythmic needs within the whole human being into account. We do that when we do not simply teach addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. When teaching addition, we should not simply expect answers to the question of what is the sum of so and so much. Instead we should expect answers to the question of how a sum can be separated in various ways. In contrast, the question with regard to subtraction is, from what number do we need to remove five in order to have the result be eight? In general, we need to pose all these kinds of questions in the opposite way to which they are posed in synthetic thinking when interacting with external world.

Here we can place the teaching of arithmetic in parallel with teaching language, where we begin with the whole and then go on to the individual letters. In our Waldorf School it is very pleasing to see the efforts the children make when they take a complete word and try to find out how it sounds, how we pronounce it, what is in the middle, and so forth, and in that way go on to the individual letters. When we atomize or analyze in this way, children will certainly not have any inclination toward materialism or atomism such as everyone does today, because modern people have been taught only synthetic thinking in school and thus their need to be analytical, their need to separate, can only develop in their worldviews.

We must, however, take something else into account. Human nature, as I mentioned yesterday, basically begins with activity and only then goes on to rest. Just as a baby begins by kicking and waving its arms and then becomes quiet, the entirety of human nature begins with activity and must learn how to come to rest. This process actually needs to be developed quite systematically. Thus what is important is that we, in a sense, educate people based upon their own movement.

It is very easy to make an error in that regard today. I have already tried to show how important it is at the beginning of elementary school to work with the musical and singing elements. We need to work with the child’s musical needs as much as possible. Today, however, it would be very easy for an erroneous prejudice against these ideasto arise. If we look at the modern world—and most of you will have already noticed this—there are nearly as many methods of teaching singing as there are singing teachers. Of course each one always believes his or her own method is the best. If we simply apply these methods of teaching singing and music to adults, who are already beyond the age of development, we can allow them to pick and choose the method they want. Essentially all such methods begin with an erroneous position. They assume that we need to quiet the human organs in order to develop the activity that is desired. Thus, in a sense, the activity of the lungs, for example, must be quieted in order to develop that activity in the lungs which in this case, in singing, should predominate. However, just the opposite occurs within human nature. Nearly all methods of teaching singing that I have every seen actually begin with our modern materialism. They begin with the assumption that the human being is somehow mechanical and needs to be quieted in order to be able to develop the necessary activity. This assumption is something that can never be important when we genuinely see the nature of the human being.

The proper method of teaching singing or developing a musical ear assumes that children normally hear properly,and then a desire develops within the child to imitate so that the imitation adjusts to that hearing. Thus the best method is for the teacher to sing to the children with a certain kind of love and to adjust to what is missing in them musically. In that way, the natural need of the students to imitate and have their mistakes corrected is awakened though what they hear from the teacher. However, in singing, children need to learn what instinctively results from quieting the organs. In the same way, speaking serves to regulate the human breathing rhythm. In school we need to work so that the children learn how to bring their speech into a peaceful regularity. We need to require that the children speak syllable for syllable, that they speak slowly and that they properly form the syllables so that nothing of the word is left out. The children need to grow accustomed to proper speech and verse, to well-formed speech, and develop a feeling rather than a conscious understanding of the rise and fall of the tones in verses. We need to speak to the children in the proper way so that they learn to hear.

During childhood the larynx and neighboring organs adjust to the hearing. As I said, the methods common today may be appropriate for adults, as what results from those methods will be included or not included in one way or another by life itself. In school, however, we need to eliminate all such artificial methods. Here what is most needed is the natural relationship of the teacher to the student. The loving devotion of the child to the teacher should replace artificial methods. I would, in fact, say that intangible effects should be the basis of our work. Nothing would be more detrimental than if all the old aunts and uncles with their teaparty ideas of music and methods were to find their way into school. In school what should prevail is the spirit of the subject. But that can only occur when you, the teacher, are enveloped by the subject, not when you want to teach the subject to the children through external methods.

If in the school education becomes more of an art such as we have been discussing, then I believe people will be less inclined to learn things according to some specific method than they are today. If children at the age of six or seven are taught music and singing in a natural way, later on they will hardly take any interest in the outrageous methods that play such a large role in modern society.

In my opinion, modern education should also require the teacher to look objectively at everything in the artificiality of our age, and eliminate it through instruction during elementary school. There are many things—such as the methods I just mentioned—that are very difficult to overcome. The people who use such methods are fanatical and can see only how their methods may reform the world. In general, it is useless to try to discuss such things reasonably and objectively with these people. Such things can only be brought into their proper context by the next generation. Here is where we can make an impact. In regard to society it is always the next generation that accomplishes a great deal. The art of teaching and education consists not only of the methods used, but also of the perspective that results from the teacher’s interest in the general development of humanity. Teachers need to have a comprehensive interest in the development of humanity, and they need to have an interest in everything that occurs during the present time. The last thing a teacher should do is to limit his or her interests. The interests we develop for the cultural impulses of our age have an enlivening effect upon our entire attitude and bearing as teachers. You will excuse me when I say that much of what is properly felt to be pedantic in schools would certainly go away if the faculty were interested in the major events of life and if they would participate in public activities. Of course, people don’t like to see this, particularly in reactionary areas, but it is important for education not to simply have a superficial interest.

A question was asked of me today that is connected with what I have just said. I was asked what the direction of language is, what we should do so that all of the words that have lost their meaning no longer form a hindrance to the development of thinking, so that a new spiritual life can arise. An English mathematician who attempted to form a mathematical description of all the ways of thinking recently said, in a lecture he gave on education, that style is the intellectual ethical aspect. I think this could be a genuine literary ideal. In order to speak or write ethically each person would need a particular vocabulary for himself, just as each people does now. In language as it is now, the art of drama only develops the words, but seldom develops general human concepts. How can we transform language so that in the future the individual thought or feeling, as well as the generality of the individual concept, becomes audible or visible? Or should language simply disappear and be replaced by something else in the future?

Now that is certainly quite a collection of questions! Nevertheless I want to go into them a little today; tomorrow and the next day I will speak about them in more detail. It is necessary to look into how more external relationships to language exist in our civilized languages, since they are in a certain way more advanced than external relationships that exist in other languages. There is, for example, something very external in translation by taking some text in one language and looking up the words in a dictionary. When working this way you will in general not achieve what exists in the language beyond anything purely external. Language is not simply permeated by reason; it is directly experienced, directly felt. For that reason, people would become terribly externalized if everyone were to speak some general language like Esperanto. I am not prejudiced; I have heard wonderful-sounding poems in Esperanto. But much of what lives in a language in regard to the feelings, the life of the language, would be lost through such a universal language. This is also something that is always lost when we simply translate one language word for word into another using a dictionary. We therefore need to say that in one sense the man who spoke about that here was quite correct, although it is not good to make such things into formulas. It is not good to try to formulate thoughts mathematically or to do other things that are only of interest in the moment. What we can say, though, is that it is important for us to try to imbue our language with spirit. Our language, like all civilized languages, has moved strongly into clichés. For that reason, it is particularly good to work with dialect.

Dialects, where they are spoken, are more alive than so-called standard language. A dialect contains much more personal qualities: it contains secret, intimate qualities. People who speak in dialect speak more accurately than those who speak standard language. In dialect, it is more difficult to lie than it is in standard language. That assertion may appear paradoxical to you, but it is nevertheless true in a certain sense. Of course I am not saying there are no bald-faced liars who speak dialect. But it is true that such people must be much worse than they would need to be if they were to lie only in educated, standard language. There you do not need to be as bad in order to lie, because the language itself enables lying more than when you speak in dialect. You need to be a really bad person if you are to lie in dialect because people love the words in dialect more than they do those of standard language. People are ashamed to use words in dialect as clichés, whereas the words in standard language can easily be used as clichés. This is something that we need to teach people in general—that there are genuine experiences in the words. Then we need to bring life into the language as well.

Today hardly anyone is interested in trying to bring life into language. I have tried to do that in my books in homeopathic doses. In order to make certain things understandable, I have used in my books a concept that has the same relationship to force as water flowing in a stream does to the ice on top of the stream. I used the word kraften (to work actively, forcefully). Usually we only have the word Kraft, meaning “power” or “force.” We do not speak of kraften. We can also use similar words. If we are to bring life into language, then we also need a syntax that is alive, not dead. Today people correct you immediately if you put the subject somewhere in the sentence other than where people are accustomed to having it. Such things are still just possible in German, and you still have a certain amount of freedom. In the Western European languages—well, that is just terrible, everything is wrong there. You hear all the time that you can’t say that, that is not English, or that is not French. But, to say “that is not German” is not possible. In German you can put the subject anywhere in the sentence. You can also give an inner life to the sentence in some way. I do not want to speak in popular terms, but I do want to emphasize the process of dying in the language. A language begins to die when you are always hearing that you cannot say something in one way or another, that you are speaking incorrectly. It may not seem as strange but it is just the same as if a hundred people were to go to a door and I were to look at them and decide purely according to my own views who was a good person and who was a bad person. Life does not allow us to stereotype things. When we do that, it appears grotesque. Life requires that everything remain in movement. For that reason, syntax and grammar must arise out of the life of feeling, not out of dead reasoning. That perspective will enable us to continue with a living development of language.

Goethe introduced much dialect into language. It is always good to enliven written language with dialect because it enables words to be felt in a warmer, more lively way. We should also consider that a kind of ethical life is brought into language. (This, of course, does not mean that we should be humorless in our speech. Friedrich Theodore Vischer2 wrote a wonderful book about the difference between frivolity and cynicism. It also contains a number of remarks about language usage and about how to live into language.) When teaching language, we have a certain responsibility to use it also as a training for ethics in life. Nevertheless there needs to be some feeling; it should not be done simply according to convention. We move further and further away from what is alive in language if we say, as is done in the Western European languages, that one or another turn of phrase is incorrect and that only one particular way of saying things is allowed.