The Rudolf Steiner Archive

When I attempted to bring before you the Greek ideal of education, it was with the object that this ideal should stimulate ideas which ought to prevail in our modern system of education. For at the present stage of human life it is, of course, impossible to adopt the same educational methods as the Greeks. In spite of this, however, an all-embracing truth in regard to education can be learned from the Greek ideal, and this we will now-consider.

Up to the seventh year of life, the Greek child was brought up at home. Public education was not concerned with children under the age of seven. They were brought up at home, where the women lived in seclusion, apart from the ordinary pursuits of social life, which were an affair of the men. This in itself is the reinforcement of a truth of education, without knowledge of which one cannot really educate or teach, for the seventh year of life marks an all-important stage of childhood.

The main phenomenon characteristic of the seventh year of human life is the change of teeth. This is an event to which far too little importance is attached nowadays. For think of it, the nature of the human organism is such that it brings the first teeth with it as an inheritance, or, rather, it brings with it the force to produce these first teeth which are discarded at the seventh year. It is incorrect to imagine that the force which pushes up the second teeth at about the seventh year unfolds for the first time at this age. It is developing slowly from birth onwards, and simply reaches its culmination at about the seventh year of life. Then it brings forth the second teeth from the totality of force in the human organization. This event is of the most extraordinary importance in the course of human life as a whole, because it does not occur again. The forces present between birth and the seventh year reach their culmination with the appearance of the second teeth, and they do not act again within the entire course of earthly life. Now this fact should be properly understood, but it can only be understood by an unprejudiced observation of other processes that are being enacted in the human being at about this seventh year of life Up to the seventh year the human being grows and develops according to Nature-principles, as it were. The Nature-forces of growth, the being of soul and the spiritual functions have not yet separated from one another in the child's organization; they form a unity up to the seventh year. While the human being is developing his organs, his nervous system and his blood circulation, this development betokens the evolution of his soul and spirit. The human being is provided with the strong inner impulsive force which brings forth the second teeth because everything in this period of life is still interwoven. With the coming of the second teeth, this impelling force weakens. It withdraws somewhat; it does not work so strongly from out of the inner being. Why is this? Now suppose new teeth were to appear every seven years. (I will take an extreme illustration for the sake of clarity.) If the same organic forces which we bear within us up to the seventh year, if this unity formed of body, soul and spirit were to continue through the whole of life, new teeth would appear approximately every seven years! The old teeth would fall out and be replaced by new ones, but throughout our whole life we should remain children as we are up to the seventh year. We should not unfold the life of soul and spirit that is separated off from the Nature-life. The fact that the physical force decreases in the seventh year and the bodily pressure and impulses to a certain extent grow less—for the body now produces more delicate forces from itself—makes it possible for the subtler forces of soul life to develop. The body grows weaker, the soul stronger, as it were.

A similar process also takes place at puberty, in the fourteenth or fifteenth year. The element of soul now weakens to a certain extent and the spiritual functions make their appearance. So that if we take the course of the first three life-periods: up till the seventh year man is pre-eminently a being of body-soul-spirit in one, from the seventh to the fourteenth years he is a being of body-soul with a separate nature of soul and spirit, and from puberty onwards he is a threefold being, a physical being, a being of soul and a being of spirit.

This truth opens up deep vistas into the whole evolution of the human being. Indeed, without knowledge of it we really ought not to venture upon the education of children. For unless we realise the far-reaching consequences of this truth, all education must necessarily be more or less a dilettante affair.

The Greek—and this is the amazing thing—knew of this truth. To the Greek, it was an irrevocable law that when a boy had reached his seventh year he must be taken away from his parents' house, from the mere Nature-principles, the elementary necessities of upbringing. This knowledge was so deeply rooted in the Greeks that we do well to remind ourselves of it to-day. Later on, in the Middle Ages, traces of this all-important principle of education still existed.

The modern age of rationalism and intellectualism has forgotten all these things, and, indeed, even takes pride in showing that it places no value on such truths, for the child is usually required to go to school at an earlier age, before the end of the seventh year. We may say, indeed, this departure from such eternal principles of human evolution is typical of the chaos obtaining in our modern system of education. We must rise out of this chaos. The Greek placed so high a value on this truth that he based all education upon it. For all that I described yesterday was carried out in order to ground education upon this same truth.

What did the Greek see in the little child from birth to the time of the change of teeth? A being sent down to earth from spiritual heights! He saw in man a being who had lived in a spiritual world before earthly life. And as he observed the child he tried to discover whether its body was rightly expressing the divine life or pre-earthly existence. It was of importance for the Greek that in the child up to the seventh year he should recognize that a physical body is here enclosing a spiritual being who has descended. There was a terribly barbaric custom in certain regions of Greece to expose and thus kill the child who was instinctively believed to be only a sheath, and not expressing a true spiritual being in its physical nature; this was the outcome of rigid regard to the thought that the physical human being in the first seven years of life is the vesture of a divine-spiritual being.

Now when the child passes its seventh year—and this, too, was known in Greece—it descends a second stage lower. During the first seven years the child is released from the heavens, still bearing its own inherited sheaths, which are laid aside at the seventh year, for not only the first teeth but the whole body is cast off every seven years—cast off for the first time, that is to say, in the seventh year. In the first seven years of life the bodily sheaths revealed to the Greek what the forces of pre-earthly life had made out of the child. The child was thought to bear its earthly sheaths proper, its first earthly sheaths, only from about the seventh to the fourteenth years onwards.

I am trying now to express these things as they were conceived of by the highest type of Greek. He thought to himself: I reverence the Divine in the little child, hence there is no need to concern myself with it in the first seven years of life. It can grow up in the family in which the Gods have placed it. Supersensible forces from pre-earthly life are still working in it. When the seventh year is reached it behoves man himself to become responsible for the development of these forces. What must man do, then, when he knows how to pay true reverence to the Divine in the human being? What must he do as regards education? He must develop to the highest extent the human faculties that have unfolded in the child up to the seventh year. The Divine power, the way in which the spiritual expresses itself in the body—this must be developed to the greatest possible extent. Thus the Gymnast had perforce to be convinced of the necessity to understand the Divine power in the human body and to develop it in the body. The same healing, life-sustaining forces which the child possesses from pre-earthly existence, and which have been fostered in an elementary way up to the change of teeth—these must be preserved from the seventh to the fourteenth year by human insight, by human art. Further education must then proceed wholly in accordance with Nature. And so all education was ‘gymnastic’ because the divine education of the human being was seen as a ‘gymnastic.’ Man must continue the ‘divine gymnastic’ by means of education.

This was more or less the attitude of the Greek to the child. He said to himself: If through my intuition I am able to preserve in freshness and health the forces of growth which have developed in the child up to the seventh year, then I am educating in the very best way; I am enabling the forces which are there by nature up to the seventh year to remain throughout the whole of earthly life, right up to death. To see that the “child” in the human being was not lost till death—this was the great and far-reaching maxim of Greek education. The Greek teacher thought: I must see to it that these forces between the seventh and fourteenth years—the forces of childhood—remain living throughout the whole of his earthly life, right up to death. A far-reaching and deeply significant principle of education! And all gymnastic exercises were based on the perception that the forces present up to the seventh year have in no way disappeared, but are merely slumbering within the human being and must be awakened from day to day. To waken the slumbering forces between the seventh and the fourteenth years, to draw forth from the human being in this second period of life what was there by nature in the first period—this constituted Greek gymnastic education. The very glory of his culture and civilization arose from the fact that the Greek, by a right education, was at pains to preserve the ‘child’ in the human being right up to death. And when we wonder at the ‘glory that was Greece,’ we must ask ourselves: Can we imitate this ideal? We cannot, for it rests upon three factors, without which it is unthinkable.

These three factors must be remembered by the modern educationalist when he looks back to Greece. The first thing to remember is the following:—These principles of education were only applied to a small portion of mankind, to a higher class, and they presuppose the existence of slavery. Without slavery it would not have been possible to educate a small class of mankind in this way. For in order to educate thus, part of man's work on the earth fell to the lot of those who were left to their elemental human destiny, without education in the true Greek sense. Greek civilization and Greek education are alike unthinkable without the existence of slavery. And so the delight of those who look back with inner satisfaction on what Greece accomplished in the evolutionary history of mankind is tempered with the tragic realization that it was achieved at the cost of slavery. That is one factor.

The second factor is that of the whole position of woman in Greek social life. The women lived a life withdrawn from the direct impulses at the root of Greek civilization, and it was this secluded life that alone made it possible for the child to be left, up to the seventh year, to the care of the home influences, which were thereby given full scope. Without any actual knowledge, but merely out of human instincts, the child was led on by the elemental forces of growth to the time of the change of teeth. One may say it was necessary that the child's life up to this point, should, despite its different nature, proceed just as unconsciously in the wider environment of the family, detached from the mother's body, as when the embryonic life had proceeded through the forces of Nature. This was the second factor.

The third is really a paradox to modern man, but he must, none the less, grow to understand it. The second point—the position of women in Greece—is easier to understand, for we know from a superficial observation of modern life that between the Greek age and our own time women have sought to take their share in social life. This is a result of what took place during the Middle Ages. And if we still wanted to be as Greek as the Greeks were, with the interest in conscious education confined exclusively to men, I wonder how small this audience would be if it were only made up of the men who were allowed to concern themselves with education!

The third factor lies deeper down, and its nature makes it difficult for modern civilization to acknowledge that we have to attain our spiritual life by human effort, by work. Anyone who observes the spiritual activities of civilized life will be obliged to admit that as regards the most important domain of civilized life, we must count upon what we shall achieve in the future by effort. Observing all the human effort which has to be spent on the attainment of a spiritual life in present-day civilization, we look with some astonishment at the spiritual life of the ancient Greeks and especially of the ancient Orientals. For this spiritual life actually existed. A truth such as that of the part played in human life by the seventh year, a truth which modern man simply does not realise, was deeply rooted in Greece. (Outer symptoms indicate its significance but modern culture is very far from understanding it.) It was one of the mighty truths that flowed through ancient spiritual life. And we stand in wonder before this spiritual life when we learn to know what wisdom, what spiritual knowledge was once possessed by man.

If, without being confused by modern naturalistic and materialistic prejudices, we go back to early civilization, we find, at the beginning of historical life a universal, penetrating wisdom according to which man directed his life. It was not an acquired wisdom, but it flowed to mankind through revelation, through a kind of inspiration. And it is this that modern civilization will not acknowledge. It will not recognize that a primal wisdom was bestowed spiritually upon man, and that he evolved it in such a way that, for instance, even in Greece, care was still taken to preserve the ‘child’ in man until the time of earthly death. Now this revelation of primeval wisdom is no more to be found—a fact deeply connected with the whole evolution of man. Part of man's progress consists in the fact that the primal wisdom no longer comes to him without activity on his part but that he must attain to wisdom through his own efforts. This is connected in an inner sense with the growth of the impulse of human freedom which is at present in its strongest phase. The progress of humanity does not ascend, as is readily imagined, in a straight line from one stage to another. What man has to attain from out of his own being in the present age, he has to attain at the cost of losing revelation from without, revelation which locked within itself the deepest of all wisdom.

The loss of primeval wisdom, the necessity to attain wisdom by man's own labours, this is related to the third factor in Greek education. Thus we may say: Greek education may fill us with admiration but it cannot be dissociated from these three factors •; ancient slavery, the ancient position of woman, and the ancient relationship of spiritual wisdom to spiritual life. None of the three exist to-day nor would they now be considered worthy of true human existence. We are living at a time when the following question arises: How ought we to educate, realizing as we do that these three a priori conditions have been swept away by human progress? We must therefore observe the signs of the times if we desire to discover the true impulse for our modern education from inner depths.

***

The whole of the so-called mediaeval development of man which followed the civilization of Greece and has indeed come right down to modern times, proved by its very nature that in regard to education and methods of teaching, different paths had to be struck from those of Greece, which were so well-fitted to that earlier age. The nature of man had, indeed, changed. The efficacy and reliability of Greek education were an outcome of the fact that it was based upon ‘habit’—upon that which can be built into the very structure of the human body.

Up to the change of teeth in the seventh year, the development of man's being is inwardly connected with the body. The development of the bodily functions, however, proceeds as though unconsciously. Indeed it is only when the faculties work unconsciously that they are right; they are reliable only when what I have to do is implanted into the dexterity of my hands and is accomplished of itself, without need for further reflection.

When practice has become habit, then I have achieved securely what I have to achieve through my body. The real aim of Greek life was to make the whole earthly existence of man a matter of ‘habit’ in this sense. From his education onwards until his death, all man's actions were to become habitual, so habitual that it should be impossible to leave them off. For when education is based on such a principle as this, the forces which are natural to the child up to the change of teeth, up to the seventh year, can be maintained; the child forces can be maintained until earthly life ends with death.

Now what happened when through historical circumstances new peoples pouring over from the East to the West founded a new civilization during the Middle Ages, and established themselves in Middle Europe and in the West, even in America? These peoples assimilated the qualities natural to the Southern regions but their coming brought quite different habits of life to mankind. What was the result of this? It set up the conditions for a totally different kind of development, a development of the individual. In this time, for example, men came to the conscious realization that slavery ought not to be; to the realization that women must be respected. At this time it also became apparent as regards the evolution of the individual, in the period between the seventh and fourteenth year, when development is no longer of a purely bodily nature but when the soul is to a certain degree emancipated from the body that the child in this period was not now susceptible of being treated as in earlier times. In effect, the conservation of the forces of early childhood in the boy between the ages of seven and fourteen that had been practised hitherto was no longer possible.

This is the most significant phenomenon of the Middle Ages and right up to modern times so far as this second period of life is concerned. And only now for the first time do we see the powerful forces of revolt which belong to the period when the fourteenth and fifteenth years have been passed, the period during which human nature rises up most strongly in revolt, when indeed it bears within itself the forces of revolt.

How did this revolt in human nature express itself? The old primeval wisdom which flowed down naturally to the Greeks came to be in Roman and Mediaeval tradition something that was only preserved through books, through writing. Indeed it was only believed on the authority of tradition. The concept of Faith as it developed during the Middle Ages did not exist in very ancient civilizations, nor even in the culture of the Greeks. It would have been nonsense in those times. The concept of Faith only arose when the primeval wisdom no longer flowed directly into man, but was merely preserved. This still applies fundamentally to the greater part of humanity to-day. Everything of a spiritual, super-sensible nature is tradition. It is ‘believed,’ it is no longer immediate and actual. Nature and the perception of Nature this is an actuality, but all that refers to the super-sensible, to super-sensible life, is tradition. Since the Middle Ages man has given himself up to this kind of tradition, thinking at times it is true that he does in fact experience these things. But the truth is that direct spiritual knowledge and revelation came to be preserved in written form, living from generation to generation as a heritage merely on the authority of tradition. This was the outer aspect. And what of the inner aspect? Let us now look back once again to Greece. In Greece, faculties of soul developed as of themselves because the whole human being acquired habits of life whereby the ‘child’ was preserved in man till death. Music proceeded from the breathing and blood circulation, intellect from gymnastic. Without being cultivated, a marvellous memory evolved in the Greeks as a result of the development of the habits of the body. We in our age have no longer any idea of the kind of memory that arose, even among the Greeks, without being cultivated in any way, and in the ancient East this was even more significant. The body was nurtured, habits formed, and then the memory arose from the body itself. A marvellous memory was the outcome of a right culture of the body.

A living proof of the fact that we have no conception of the kind of memory possessed by the Greeks, a memory which made it so easy for the spiritual treasures to be handed down and become a common good, is the fact that shorthand writers have to attend when lectures are given which people want to remember! This would have seemed absurd in Greek civilization, for why should one wish to keep that which one has manifestly thrown away? It was all preserved truly in the memory, by the proficiency of the body. The soul developed itself out of this bodily proficiency. And because of this self-development she stood in contrast to that which had arisen from revelation—the primeval wisdom. And this primal spiritual wisdom disappeared, grew to be mere tradition. It had to be carried from generation to generation by the priesthood who preserved the traditions. And inwardly man was forced to begin to cultivate a faculty which the Greek never thought of as a necessity. In education during the Middle Ages it became more and more, necessary to cultivate the memory. The memory absorbed what had been preserved by tradition.

Thus, historical tradition outwardly and remembrance and memory inwardly, had to be cultivated by education. Memory was the first soul quality to be cultivated when the emancipation of the soul had taken place. And those who know what importance was attached to the memory in schools only a short while ago can form an opinion of how rigidly this cultivation of the memory—which was the result of an historical necessity—has been preserved.

And so through the whole of the Middle Ages education tosses like a ship that cannot balance itself in a storm, for the soul of man is the most hard of access. To the body man can gain access; he can come to terms with the spirit, but the soul is so bound up with the individuality of man that it is the most inaccessible of all.

Whether a man found the inner path to the authorities who preserved the tradition for him, whether his piety was great enough to enable him to receive the words in which the mediaeval priest-teacher inculcated the tradition into humanity, all this was an affair of the individual soul. And to cultivate the memory, without doing violence to another man's individuality, this needs a fine tact. What was necessary for the soul-culture of the Middle Ages was as much heeded by tactful men as it was ignored by the tactless. And mediaeval education swung between that which nourished the human soul and that which harmed it in its deepest being. Although men do not perceive it, very much from this mediaeval education has been preserved on into the present age.

Education during the Middle Ages assumed this character because, in the first place, the soul no longer wished to preserve the ‘child;’ for the soul itself was to be educated. And on account of the conditions of the times the soul could only be educated through tradition and memory. Between the seventh and the fourteenth years the human being is, as it were, in a certain state of flux. But the soul does not work in the same condition of security as is afforded by the bodily constitution up to the seventh year and the direction imparted by the spirit has not yet come into being. Everything is of a very intimate character, calling for piety and delicacy.

All this brought it about that for a long period of human evolution education entered upon an uncertain and indefinite course in which, while tradition and memory had to be cultivated, there were extraordinary difficulties. To-day we are living at a time when, as a result of the natural course of development, man desires a firm foundation in place of the insecurity obtaining in the Middle Ages. And this search for other foundations expresses itself in the innumerable efforts towards educational reform in our time. It is out of recognition of this fact that Waldorf School education has arisen. Waldorf School education is based upon this question: How shall we educate in a time when the revolt in the soul between the seventh and fourteenth years of life against the conservation of ‘childhood’ is still going on? How shall we educate now that man, in addition to that, has in the modern age lost even the old mediaeval connection with tradition? Outwardly man has lost his faith in tradition. Inwardly he strives to be a free being, one who at every moment shall confront life unhampered. He does not wish to stand on a memory foundation all his life long. Such is modern man, who now desires to be inwardly free of tradition and of memory. And however much certain portions of our humanity to-day would like to preserve ancient customs, this is not possible. The very existence of the many efforts for educational reform indicates that a great question is facing us. It was impossible in the Middle Ages to educate in the Greek way, and in our times education can no longer be based on tradition and memory. We have to educate in accordance with the immediate moment of life in which man enters upon earthly existence, when he, as a free being, has to make his decision out of the given factors of the moment. How, then, must we educate free human beings? That is the question which now confronts us for the first time.

***

As the hour is getting late, I will bring these thoughts to a conclusion in a few words and postpone until tomorrow's lecture the consideration of the methods of education that are necessary at the present day.

In Greek education, the Gymnast must be recognized as one who preserved the forces of childhood on into the second period of life between the seventh and the fourteenth or fifteenth years. The ‘child’ must be preserved, so said the Greeks. The forces of childhood must remain in the human being up to the time of earthly death; these forces must be conserved. It was the task of the Greek educator, the Gymnast, to develop the fundamental nature, the inherited fundamental nature of the child in his charge, on into the period between the seventh and the fourteenth years of life. It was his task to understand these forces out of his spiritual wisdom and to conserve them. Evolution in the Middle Ages went beyond this, and, as a result, our present age developed. Only now does the position of a modern man within the social order become a matter of consciousness. This fact of conscious life can only come into being after the age of puberty has been reached, after the fourteenth or fifteenth year. Then there appears in the human being something which I shall have repeatedly to describe in the following lectures as the consciousness of inner freedom in the being of man. Then, indeed, man ‘comes to himself.’ And if, as it sometimes happens to-day, human beings believe themselves to have reached this consciousness before the fourteenth or fifteenth years, before the age of puberty, this is only an aping of later life. It is not a fundamental fact. It was this fundamental fact, which appears after the age of puberty, that the Greek purposely sought to avoid in the development of the individual man. The intensity with which he invoked Nature, the child, into human existence, darkened and obscured full experience of this glimpse of consciousness after puberty. The human being passed in dimmed consciousness through this imprisoned ‘Nature,’ this reality. The historical course of human evolution, however, is such that this is no longer possible. This conscious urge would burst forth with elemental, volcanic force after the age of puberty if attempts were made to hold it back.

During what we call the elementary school age, that is to say, between the seventh and fourteenth years, the Greek had to take into consideration the earliest Nature-life of the child. We in our day have to take account of what follows puberty, of that which will be experienced after puberty in full human consciousness by the boy or girl. We may no longer suppress this into a dreamlike obscurity as did the Greeks, even the highest type of Greek, even Plato and Aristotle, who, in consequence, accepted slavery as a self-evident necessity. Because education was of such a kind that it obscured this all-important phenomenon of human life after puberty, the Greek was able to preserve the forces of early childhood into the period of life between the seventh and fourteenth years.

We must be prophets of future humanity if we would educate in the right way. The Greek could rely upon instinct, for his task was to conserve the foundations laid by Nature. We, as educationalists, must be able to develop intuitions. We must anticipate all human qualities if we would become true educators, true teachers. For the essential thing in our education will be to give the child, between its seventh and fourteenth years something which, when the consciousness characteristic of the human being has set in, it can so remember that with inner satisfaction and assent it looks back upon that which we have implanted within its being. We educate in the wrong way to-day if, later on, when the child has gone out into life, it can no longer look back on us and say, “Yes!”

Thus there must arise teachers with intuition, teachers who enter once again upon the path along which the spiritual world and spiritual life can be attained by man, who can give the child between the seventh and fourteenth years all those things to which it can look back in later life with satisfaction. The Greek teacher was a preserver. He said: All that lived within the child in earlier life slumbers within him after the seventh year, and this I must awaken. Of what nature must our education be to enable us to implant in the age of childhood that which later on will awaken of itself in the free human being? We have to lead an education into the future. This makes it necessary that in our present epoch the whole situation of education must be different from what it was in the past. In Greece, education arose as the result of a surrender to the facts of Nature. It was a fact of Nature which, as it were, played into human life, but as a result of the whole of life up to our time, it has worked itself cut of its natural foundations.

As teachers in schools, this is what we must realize: We must offer to the child before us something to which it may be able to cry “Yes!” when in later life it awakens to independent consciousness. The child must not only love us during schooldays, but afterwards too, finding this love for us justified by mature judgment. Otherwise education is only a half-education—therefore weak and ineffective. When we are conscious of this we shall realize to what a great extent education and instruction from being a fact of Nature that plays into the human being must also become a moral fact.

This is the deep inner struggle waged by those who from their innermost being have some understanding of the form which education must assume. They feel this, and it is expressed in the question: How can we ourselves transform education for the free human being into a free act in the very highest sense, that is to say, into a moral act? How can education become out and out a moral concern of mankind? This is the great problem before us to-day, and it must be solved if the most praiseworthy efforts towards educational reform are to be rightly directed on into the future.

The previous lectures have indeed in no way attempted to formulate new educational theories, but rather to create a true feeling for education. My aim has been to speak to the human heart rather than to the intellect. This is most essential for the teacher because, as we have seen, the art of education must develop from a deeper knowledge of man's whole being.

For a long time now it has been usual to hear in educational circles that this or that method should be used in teaching. Very frequently the training of teachers consists in little besides the assimilation of certain rules and theories as to the treatment of the child. This, however, will never make the teacher fully aware of the greatness of a task which he cannot approach with true devotion unless he has a deep insight into the whole nature of man as body, soul and spirit. A living conception of the human being develops into pure will in the teacher when, from hour to hour, he has learned to give really practical answers to the eager questions of the child he has to instruct. The first essential is that he himself shall understand the child, and this he can only do in the truest sense if he has a real and concrete knowledge of man in body, soul and spirit.

It is for this reason difficult to describe the education given at the Waldorf School. It is not a thing that can be ‘learnt’ or discussed; it is purely and simply a matter of practice, and one can only give examples of a practical way of dealing with the needs of particular cases. Such practice must be the outcome of actual experience and it is always essential that the requisite knowledge of the human being should be available. But education is a social concern in the widest sense for it begins immediately after birth. It is the concern of the whole of mankind, of each individual family, of each community. This is most significantly brought home to us by a knowledge of the child's nature before the change of teeth at about the seventh year. A German writer, Jean Friedrich Richter, spoke words of great truth v/hen he said that in the first three years of life man learns more than in all his subsequent student years. In his time there were only three academic years.

The first three years, and from then onwards to the seventh year, are much the most important in the whole development of a man, for the child is not at all the same being as in later life. In his earliest years the child is one great sense-organ. The scope of this truth is not generally understood; indeed it is a question of using very emphatic words if the whole truth is to be expressed.

In later years, for instance, man tastes his food in his mouth, tongue and palate. The sense of taste is, as it were, localized in the head. But with the child, and especially so during these early years, this is not the case. Taste then works throughout the whole organism; the child tastes its mother's milk and first food right down into its very limbs. The processes that in later life are localized in the tongue, extend over the whole organism in the young child who lives, as it were, in this sense of taste. There is a strong element of animality here, but we must never compare this element in the child with the ordinary animal nature. The animality of the child exists on a higher level. The human being is never an animal, not even in the embryonic state—in fact, at that period least of all. A comparison may help to make this clearer.

Those who have a true insight into the processes of nature may have the following impression of these processes in the animal, if they look at a herd of cows grazing in a meadow. As each cow lies down to digest its food, it gives itself up in a most wonderful way to the Cosmos. It is as though cosmic forces were active in the digesting animal, inducing the most marvellous visions. The digesting process in the animal is a mighty act of wisdom. While the cow digests it is given up to the Cosmos in an imaginative, dreamlike existence. This may seem an extravagant statement, yet strange to say it is absolutely true.

If we now raise this process one stage higher, we can understand how the child experiences the functions of its bodily organism. All these physical functions are accompanied by a kind of tasting, and, moreover, the other processes that in later life are localized in eye and ear, also extend over the whole organism of the child. Think of the wonder of the eye, of how the eye takes in colour from outside and makes an inner picture. This process is localized, separated off from our conscious experience of life as a whole. The intellect takes hold of what the eye forms in so wonderful a way and makes of it a shadowy, mental image. Equally wonderful are those processes which, in the adult, are localized in the ear. But all that is localized in the several senses of the adult is spread out over the whole organism in the child. In the child there is no separation between spirit, soul and body. Everything from without is mirrored in his inner being. He imitates his whole environment. And now, bearing this in mind, we must observe how three faculties, conditioning the whole of life, are acquired by the child during his earliest years—the faculties of walking, speaking, and thinking.

‘To walk’ is but the limited expression for something far, far greater. We say that the child learns to walk because this is the most evident feature of the process. But this learning to walk is in reality the bringing of man into a right equilibrium in the world of space. The child strives for the upright posture, he strives to relate his legs to the law of gravity in a way that will give balance. He does the same with the arms and hands. The whole organism finds its orientation. Learning to walk means to set the whole organism in a right orientation with the directions of space.

Now it is important to perceive in the right way that the child is an imitative being, for during the first years of life everything must be learnt from imitation of the environment. Now it is evident that the forces of orientation must inhere in the organism itself; the organism is adapted from the very beginning to attain the vertical and not to remain in the horizontal position. The arms must also find their right relation to the laws of space. All this inheres in the very nature of the child and is brought about by the impulses of the organism itself.

If in education we coerce the impulses of human nature, if we do not know how to leave this nature free, and to act only as helpers, then we injure the organism of the child for the whole of its later earthly life. If we wrongly force the child to walk by external methods, if we do not merely help but urge him to walk or to stand, we do the child an injury which lasts till death and is especially harmful in advanced age. In true methods of education it can never be a question of considering the child as it is at a given moment, but the whole of its journey through life from birth to death must be taken into account, for the whole earthly life is already present from the first.

Now because the child is a most delicately balanced organ of sense, he is not only sensitive to the physical influences of his surroundings, but also to the moral influences, especially of those of thought. However far-fetched it may appear to the modern materialistic mind, the child does, nevertheless, sense all that those in his environment are thinking. As parents or teachers we must not only refrain from actions that are outwardly unseemly, but we must be inwardly true, inwardly moral in our thought and feeling, for the child senses our moods and absorbs them. He does not merely shape his nature according to our words and actions, but in accordance with our whole attitude of heart and mind. The environment, then, is the most important thing of all in the first period of the child's education, up to the seventh year.

And now the question will arise: ‘What kind of help are we to give in this process of orientation and learning to walk?’ Here it must be remembered that the connections of life can be observed by a science that is spiritual in character, but not by a science that is materialistic and dead.

Let us take a child who has been forced on to walk and to adjust himself in space by all kinds of coercive measures, and then look at him in his fiftieth year, or between the fifties and sixties. If nothing else has intervened, we shall find him suffering from all manner of metabolic diseases which he cannot throw off, from rheumatism, gout, and so on. Everything of the nature of soul and spirit that we do to the child—for we are exercising forces of the soul and spirit if we urge him to adopt the vertical position, or to walk—everything comes to the stage where the spiritual works right down into the physical. For the forces that have been called into play by the use of highly questionable methods remain for the whole of the earthly life, and reappear later in the form of bodily diseases.

As a matter of fact, all education of the child is at the same time physical education. We cannot speak of a specifically physical training of the child, for soul and spirit are always at work upon his bodily nature. We observe how the child's organism adjusts itself to attain the upright position, and to walk, and we lovingly watch this wonderful mystery enacted by the human organism as it passes from the horizontal to the vertical position. Piety and reverence must pervade us as we observe how the divine powers of creation are adapting the child to the laws of space, and then we must lovingly help him to walk and to acquire balance. If with inner devotion we observe every expression of human nature in the child and hold out a helping hand, we generate health-bringing forces which can then re-appear as healthy metabolic activities between the ages of fifty and sixty, a time of life when we especially need control of the processes of the metabolism.

Herein lies truly the mystery of human evolution: All that is of the nature of soul and spirit at one stage of life becomes physical, manifests itself physically in later life. Years later it makes itself evident in the physical body.

So much then as regards learning to walk. A child who is lovingly guided to walk develops into a healthy man, and to apply this love in the process of learning to walk is to add much to the healthy education of the body.

Now from this process of orientation in space there develops speech. Modern physiology knows something of this, but not very much. It knows that the movements of the right hand correspond to a certain activity of the left side of the brain, which is related to speech. Physiology admits the connection between the movements of the right hand and the so-called convolutions of Broca at the left side of the brain. As the hand moves and makes gestures, forces pour into it; all this motive force passes into the brain, where it becomes the impulse of speech. Science knows only a fragment of the process, for the truth is this: Speech does not arise merely because a movement of the right hand coincides with a convolution in the left portion of the brain; speech arises from the entire motor-organism of the human being. How the child learns to walk, to orientate himself in space, to transform the first erratic and uncontrolled movements of the arms into gestures definitely related to the outer world, all this is carried over by the mysterious processes of the human organism to the head, and appears as speech.

Anyone who is able to understand these things realizes that children who shuffle their feet as they walk pronounce every sound, and especially the palatal sounds, quite differently from those whose gait is firm. Every nuance of speech is bound up with organic movement; life to begin with is ail gesture and gesture is inwardly transformed into speech.

Speaking, then, is an outcome of walking, that is to say, of the power to orientate the being in space. And the degree to which the child is able to control speech will depend very largely upon whether we give him really wise, loving help while he is learning to walk.

These are some of the finer connections revealed by a true knowledge of man. Not without reason have I described in detail the process of guiding the spirit to the human organism. With every step that is taken, the body follows the spirit, if the spirit is brought into the child in the right way.

Again, it is a fact that to begin with the whole organism is active when the child is learning to speak. First there are the outer movements, the movements of the legs corresponding to the strong contours of speech; die more delicate movements of the arms and hands correspond to the inflection and plastic form of the words. In short, outer movements are transformed into the inner movements of speech.

Just as the element of love should pervade the help we give to the child as he learns to walk, so while we help him to speak we must be inwardly true. The strongest tendencies to untruthfulness in after life are generated during the time when a child is learning to speak, for in those years the element of truth in speech is taken into the whole bodily organism. A child whose teachers are filled with inner truthfulness will, as he imitates his environment, so learn to speak that the subtle activity constantly generated in the organism by the processes of in-breathing and out-breathing will be strengthened. Naturally, these things must be understood in a delicate and not in a crude sense. The processes are highly rarefied but are nevertheless revealed in every manifestation of life. We breathe in oxygen and exhale carbonic acid. Oxygen has to be changed into carbonic acid in the body by the breathing process. We receive oxygen from the cosmos, and give back carbonic acid. Truth or untruth in those around us while we are learning to speak determines whether, in the more subtle functions of life, we are able to change the oxygen within us into carbonic acid in the right way. This process consists in a complete transformation of the spiritual into the physical.

One of the most common and untruthful influences brought to the child is the use of “baby-language.” Unconsciously the child does not like this; he wants to listen to true speech, the speech of grown men and women. We should speak in ordinary language to the child and avoid the use of this “baby-language.” At first the child will naturally only babble in imitation of words, but we ourselves must not copy this babbling. To use the babbling, imperfect speech of the child to him is to injure his digestive organs. Once more the spiritual becomes physical, and works directly into the bodily organs. And everything that we do spiritually for the child constitutes a physical training, for the child is not all individual. Many later defects in the digestive system are caused by a child's having learnt to speak in a wrong way.

And just as speech arises from walking and grasping, in short from movement, so thought develops from speech. Just as in helping the child as he learns to walk we must be pervaded by love, so in helping the child to gain the power of speech we must be absolutely truthful; and since the child is one great sense organ and his inner physical functions are also a copy of the spiritual, our own thinking must be clear if right thinking is to develop in the child from out the forces of speech.

No greater harm can be done to the child than by the giving of orders and then causing confusion by reversing them. Confusion set up in the child's surroundings as the result of inconsequent thinking is the actual root of the many so-called nervous diseases prevalent in our modern civilization.

Why have so many people ‘nerves’ to-day? Simply because in childhood there was no clarity and precision of thought around them during the time when they were learning to think after having learned to speak. The physical condition of the next generation, as evinced by its gravest defects, is a faithful copy of the preceding generation. When we observe the faults in our children which develop in later life, we should gain self-knowledge. All that happens in the child's environment expresses itself in the physical organism—though in a subtle and delicate way. Loving treatment while the child is learning to walk, truthfulness while he learns to speak, clarity and precision as he begins to be able to think, all these qualities become a part of the bodily constitution. The vascular system and organs develop after the models of love, truth and clarity in the environment. Diseases of the metabolic system are the result of coercive treatment while the child is learning to walk. Digestive disturbances may arise from untruthful actions during the time at which the child is beginning to speak. Nerve trouble is the outcome of confused thinking in the child's environment.

When we see the prevalence of nervous disease in this third decade of the twentieth century, we cannot but conclude that there must have been much confused thinking on the part of the teachers about the beginning of the century. Many diseases of the nerves to-day are really due to confused thinking, and again the nerve troubles from which people suffered at the beginning of the century were equally the result of the confused thought of the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

Now these matters can be handled in such a way that physiology, hygiene, and psychology no longer need to remain shut off from each other as specialized branches of knowledge, so that to-day the teacher must call in the doctor the moment any question of health arises. Physiological education, school hygiene and the like can be united in such a way that the teacher's work will come to include an understanding of the activity of the soul and spirit in the physical organism. But since everyone has in a certain sense to train children from birth up to the seventh year, a social task stands before us, inasmuch as a true knowledge of man is absolutely necessary if humanity is to follow an ascending, and not a descending, path.

***

Quite rightly has our “humane” age attempted to do away with a certain educational measure very frequently applied in earlier days, I mean the habit of caning. The last thing I wish to do is to speak in favour of such punishment, but this I must say, that the reason why our age has made some attempt to get rid of corporal punishment is because it very well knows the evil results of this; the moral consequences of injury to the physical body are very evident. But, my dear friends, one terrible form of punishment has crept into the educational methods of to-day, when all eyes are so concentrated on the physical and material and there is so little comprehension of the soul and spirit. I am here referring to a form of punishment that is never realized as such because men's minds are not directed to the spiritual.

Parents often think it desirable to give their little girl a beautiful doll as a plaything. This ‘beautiful’ doll is a fearful production because for one thing it is so utterly inartistic, in spite of its ‘real’ hair, painted cheeks and eyes which close when it is laid down or open when it is lifted up! We often give our children toys that are dreadfully inartistic copies of life. The doll is merely one example. All modern toys are of the same type and they constitute a form of cruel punishment to the child's inner nature. Children often behave well in the presence of others merely from a fear of conventional punishments; equally they do not always express aversion from toys like the ‘beautiful doll,’ although this dislike is deeply rooted in their souls. However strongly we may suggest to children that they ought to love such toys, the forces of their unconscious and subconscious life are stronger, and the children have an intense antipathy to anything resembling the beautiful doll. For, as I will now show you, such toys really amount to an inner punishment.

Suppose that in the making of our toys we were to take into consideration what the child has actually experienced in his infant thought up to the age of six or seven in the processes of learning to walk after learning to stand upright and then we were to make a doll out of a handkerchief, for instance, showing a head at the top with two ink-spots for eyes. The child can understand and, moreover, really love such a doll. Primitively this doll possesses all the qualities of the human form, in so far at any rate as the child is capable of observing them at this early age. A child knows no more about the human being than that he stands upright, that there is an ‘upper’ and a ‘lower’ part of his being, that he has a head and a pair of eyes. As for the mouth, you will often find it on the forehead in a child's drawings! There is as yet no clear consciousness of the exact position of the mouth. What a child actually experiences is all contained in a doll made from a handkerchief with ink-spots for eyes. An inner, plastic force is at work in the child. All that comes to him from his environment passes over into his being and becomes there an inner formative power, a power that also builds up the organs of the body.

If the child has a father who is constantly ill-tempered and irritable, and the child as a result of this lives in an environment of perpetual shocks and unreasonableness, all this turmoil expresses itself in his breathing and the circulation of the blood. The lungs, heart and the whole venal system are affected by such a condition. Throughout the whole of his life the child bears within him the inner effects upon the organs of his father's ill-temper.

This is merely an example to show you that the child possesses a wonderful plastic power and is perpetually at work as a kind of inner sculptor upon his own being. If we give the child the kind of doll made from a handkerchief, these plastic, creative forces that arise in the human organism from the rhythmic system of the breathing and blood circulation and build up the brain, flow gently upwards. They mould the brain like a sculptor who works upon his material with a fine and supple hand, a hand permeated with the forces of the soul and spirit. In the child's perception of the handkerchief-doll these plastically creative elements are called upon and healthy forces are generated which then flow upwards from the rhythmic system and work upon the structure of the brain.

If, on the contrary, we give the child one of the so-called ‘beautiful’ dolls, with moving eyes and painted cheeks, real hair and so on—a hideous, ghostly production from the artistic point of view—then the plastic, brain-building forces that are generated in the rhythmic system have the effect of the constant lashing of a whip. All that the child cannot as yet understand works upon the brain like the lashings of a whip. The whole brain is lashed to its very foundations in a terrible way.

Such is the secret of the ‘beautiful’ doll, and it can be applied to many of the playthings given to the child to-day.

If we would give loving help to the child at play we must realize how many inner, formative forces are active in his being. In this respect our whole civilization is on the wrong road. For instance, modern culture has evolved the concept of ‘Animism.’ A child bumps against the table and strikes it in anger. We say to-day that the child imagines the table to be a living thing, he endows it with imaginary life and strikes it. Now this is not true. The child does not imaginatively endow the table with life, or with anything at all, but feels as though the living were lifeless. When he hurts himself, a kind of reflex movement makes him strike the table. He does not think of the table as living, for everything is as yet lifeless for him; he treats the living and the lifeless exactly in the same way.

These false ideas show that our civilization does not know how to approach the child. The first great essential is to learn to deal with children wisely and lovingly and give them what their own being needs. We should not inflict inner punishment by giving the child toys of the type of the beautiful doll. Rather should we be able to throw ourselves into the child's inner life and give him such toys as he can himself inwardly understand.

Thus play also is something that calls for true insight into the nature of the child. If we prattle like a little child and think to bring our speech down to his level, if we model our words falsely, we bring an untruthful influence to bear upon him. On the other hand, however, we must be able to descend to the stage of the child's development in everything that has to do with the will-nature in play. We shall then realize that intellectuality, a quality so much admired in this age, simply does not exist in the child's organic nature, and should therefore have no place in his play.

The child at play will naturally imitate what is going on in his surroundings, but it will seldom happen that a child of four expresses a wish to be a philologist, let us say, although he may say he would like to be a chauffeur! Why? Because everything about a chauffeur makes an immediate sense-impression. It is different with a philologist, for what he does makes no impression on the senses; it simply passes unnoticed by the child. Everything intellectual leaves the child unaffected, he passes it by. What, then, must we do if we are to help the child to the right kind of play?

Now when we plough, or make hats, or sew clothes, and so on, all these things are done with a certain purpose and have a certain intellectual quality. But everything in life, no matter whether it be ploughing, building carriages, shoeing horses, or the like, besides having a definite purpose, contains another element in outward appearance. At the sight of a man guiding his plough over the field one can feel, apart from the object of ploughing, the plastic quality of the picture; it is a picture which arises. If we can feel this pictorial element quite apart from its purpose (and it is the æsthetic sense that enables us to do this) then we can begin to make toys that really appeal to the child. We shall not aim at intellectual beauty as in the modern doll, but at something expressed in the whole content, in the whole feeling of the human being. Then, instead of the beautiful doll, we shall produce for the older children a primitive, really enchanting doll something like this one. [Dr. Steiner here showed a doll made by pupils of the Waldorf School]

In true education therefore the essential thing is to be able to bring an artistic element into our work and to apply it in the making of toys, for then we begin to satisfy the needs of the child's own nature.

Our civilization has made us almost exclusively utilitarian, intellectualistic, and we offer even our children the result of what we have ‘thought out’ with our brains. But we ought not to give them what adult life has ‘thought out,’ but what our maturer life feels and perceives. This is the quality the toy ought to exhibit. If we give a child a toy plough, the essential thing is that it should express the aesthetic quality of form and movement in the plough, for this will help to unfold the natural forces in the child.

Certain Kindergarten systems, in other ways worthy of all respect, have made great mistakes in this direction. Froebel's system, as also others, have arisen from a true inner love for children, but they have failed to realize that although imitation is a part of the very nature of the child, he can only imitate that which is not yet permeated by an intellectual quality. We must therefore not introduce into the Kindergarten such various forms of handiwork as have been ingeniously ‘thought out.’ The stick-laying, plaiting, and so on, that often play so large a part in modern Kindergarten methods, have all been ingeniously thought out. Kindergarten work ought rather to be so arranged that it contains an actual picture of what older people do, and not mere inventions. A sense of tragedy will often arise in one possessed of a true knowledge of man when he goes into these modern Kindergartens, for they are so full of good intentions and the work has been so conscientiously thought out. They are based on infinite goodwill and a sincere love of children, yet on the other hand it has not been realized that all intellectualism ought to be eliminated. Kindergarten work should consist simply and solely of imitative pictures of what grown-up people do.

A child whose intellectual faculties are developed before the fourth or fifth year bears a dreadful heritage into later life. He is being educated for materialism. To the extent that an intellectual education is given to the child before the fourth or fifth year, will he become materialistic in later life. The brain can either develop in such a way that the spirit dwells within it and gives birth to intuition, or on the other hand the whole nature can tend towards materialism if at this early age the child's brain is intellectually forced.

If we would so train the child that as man he may comprehend the spirit, we must delay as long as possible the giving of mental concepts in a purely intellectual form. Although it is highly necessary, in view of the nature of our modern civilization, that a man should be fully awake in later life, the child must be allowed to remain as long as possible in the peaceful, dreamlike condition of pictorial imagination in which his early years are passed. For if we allow his organism to grow strong in this way, he will develop in later life the intellectuality needed in the world to-day.

If the child's brain has been punished in the way I have described, permanent injury is done to the soul. The use of ‘baby-language’ injuriously affects the digestion; unloving, mistaken coercion in the process of learning to walk has an unfavourable effect upon the metabolic system in later life. Soul and body alike suffer if the inner being of the child is injured in these ways, and it must be the first aim of education to do away with such inner punishments as are represented, for instance, by toys like the beautiful doll. These do not only lacerate the soul of the child, but also harm his bodily constitution, for in childhood body, soul and spirit are one. The essential thing, therefore, is to raise the games and play of children to their true level.

In these lectures I have tried to indicate how false forms of spirituality must be avoided when we are dealing with the child, so that a true spirituality, in short, the whole individuality, may come to full expression in later life.

You will have seen that in anthroposophical education great value is laid on what lies in the consciousness of the teacher; there must live in his consciousness a knowledge of man that is whole, that is complete in itself. Now, as various examples have already shown you, the conception of the world which is usual today is ill-adapted to penetrating deeply into the human being. The following explanation will make my meaning clear. In studying man, we have to distinguish between his constituent parts: firstly his physical body, his physical organisation, then the finer ether or life-body which contains the formative forces, the forces which live in growth and in the processes of nourishment, and which, in the early years of childhood, are transmuted into the forces of memory. Then we have to add everything that the plant does not yet possess, although it, too, has growth and nourishment, and even to some extent lives in memory, in so far as it always retains and repeats its form. The next member of his being man has in common with the animal; it is the sentient body, the astral body, the bearer of sensation. Added to this we have the ego-organisation. These four members we have to distinguish from one another, and in so far as we do this we shall gain a true insight into the being of man and into human evolution.

To begin with man receives his first physical body, if I may so express myself, out of the forces of heredity. This is prepared for him by his father and mother. In the course of the first 7 years of life this physical body is cast off, but during this time it serves as a model from which the etheric body can build up the second body. Today people make the things confronting them so frightfully simple. If a ten-year-old child has a nose like his father's they say it is inherited. But it is not so simple as this, for as a matter of fact the nose is only inherited up to the time of the change of teeth. For if the ether body is so strong that it rejects the model of the inherited nose, then in the course of the first seven years its shape will change. If on the other hand the ether body is weak, it will not be able to free itself from the model and at the age of 10 the shape of the nose will still be the same. Looked at from an external point of view it seems as though the concept of heredity might still have the same significance in the second 7 year period as it had in the first 7 years. In such cases people are wont to say: “Truth must be simple.” In reality things are very complicated. Concepts formed today are mostly the result of a love of ease rather than the urgent desire for truth. It is therefore of real importance that we learn to look with understanding at this body of formative forces, this etheric body, which gradually in the course of the first 7 years creates the second physical body, that in its turn also lasts for 7 years. The etheric body is therefore a creator of form, a sculptor. And just as a true sculptor requires no model, but works independently, while a bad sculptor makes everything according to the model, so in the first life period, and working towards the second period, the ether body, or body of formative forces, fashions the second physical body of the human being. Our present day intellectuality enables us to acquire knowledge of the physical body; it serves this purpose admirably, and anyone lacking intellect cannot acquire such knowledge. But our university studies can take us no further than this. For the ether body cannot be comprehended by means of the intellect, but rather by pictorial, intuitive perception. It would be immensely important if the teacher could learn to understand the ether body. You cannot say: We surely cannot expect all our teachers to develop clairvoyance and so be able to describe the ether body!—But let the teacher practise the art of sculpture instead of studying the things which are so often studied in University courses. Anyone who really works at sculpture and enters into its formative nature will learn to experience the inner structure of forms, and indeed of just those forms with which the human body of formative forces is also working. Anyone who has a healthy sense of form will experience the plastic, sculptural element only in the animal and human kingdoms, not in the plant kingdom. Just imagine a sculptor who wanted to portray plants by means of sculpture! Out of sheer anger one would feel like knocking him down! The plant consists of the physical body and the ether body; with these it is complete. The animal on the other hand envelops the ether body with the astral body and this is still more the case with man. This is why we can learn to comprehend the human etheric body when, as sculptors, we work our way into the inner structure of the forms of Nature. This, too, is why modelling should take a foremost place in the curriculum of a training college, for it provides the means whereby the teacher may learn to understand the body of formative forces. The following may well be taken as a fundamental principle: A teacher who has never studied modelling really understands nothing about the development of the child. An art of education based on the knowledge of man must inevitably induce a sense of apprehension because it draws attention to such things as these and makes corresponding demands. But it can also induce apprehension because it seems as though one must become frightfully critical, rejecting everything that is common practice.

Just as the ether body works at freeing itself in order to become independent at the time of the change of teeth, so does the astral body work in order to become independent at puberty. The ether body is a sculptor, the astral body a musician. Its structure is of the very essence of music. What proceeds from the astral body of man and is projected into form is purely musical in its nature. Anyone able to grasp this knows that in order to understand the human being a further stage of training must develop receptivity towards an inner musical conception of the world. Those who are unmusical understand nothing whatever about the formation of the astral body in man, for it is fashioned out of music. If therefore we study old epochs of culture which were still built up out of inner musical intuition, if we enter into such oriental epochs of culture in which even language was imbued with music, then we shall find a musical conception of the world entering even into the forms of architecture. Later on, in Greece, it became otherwise, and now, especially in the West, it has become very different, for we have entered an age when emphasis is laid on the mechanical and mathematical. In the Goetheanum at Dornach an attempt was made to go back again in this respect. Musicians have sensed the music underlying the forms of the Goetheanum. But generally speaking there is little understanding for such things today.

It is therefore necessary that we should gain in this way a concrete understanding of the human being and reach the point at which we are able to grasp the fact that man's physiological and anatomical form is a musical creation in so far as it stems from the astral body. Think how intimately a musical element is connected with the processes of breathing and the circulation of the blood. Man is a musical instrument in respect of his breathing and blood circulation. And if you take the relationship between the breathing and the circulation of the blood: 18 breaths in a minute, 72 pulse beats in a minute, you get a ratio of 4:1. Of course this varies individually in many ways, but by and large you find that man has an inner musical structure. The ratio 4:1 is the expression of something which, in itself an inner rhythmical relationship, nevertheless impinges on and affects the whole organisation in which man lives and experiences his own being, In olden times the scansion of verses was so regulated that the line was regulated by the breath and the metrical foot by the circulation.

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Dactyl, Dactyl, Caesura, Dactyl, Dactyl. Four in one, the line expressive of the man.

But what man expresses in language is expressed still earlier in his form. Whoever understands the human being from a musical aspect knows that sound, actual tones, are working within him. At man's back, just where the shoulder blades meet and from there are carried further into the whole human being, forming and shaping him, are those human forms which are constituted out of the prime or key-note. Then there is a correspondence in the form of the upper arm with the second, and in the lower arm with the third. And because there is a major and minor third—not a major and minor second—we have one bone in the upper arm, but two in the lower arm, the radius and the ulna; and these correspond to the major and minor third. We are formed according to the notes of the scale, the musical intervals He hidden within us. And those who only study man in an external way do not know that the human form is constituted out of musical tones. Coming to the hand, we have the fourth and fifth, and then, in the experience of free movement, we go right out of ourselves; then, as it were, we take hold of outer Nature. This is the reason for the particular feeling we have with the sixth and seventh, a feeling enhanced by experiencing the movements of eurythmy. You must bear in mind that the use of the third made its appearance comparatively late in the development of music. The experience of the third is an inward one; with the third man comes into an inner relationship with himself, whereas at the time when man lived in the seventh he experienced most fully the going outwards into the world beyond himself. The experience of giving oneself up to the outer world lives especially strongly in the seventh.

And just as man experiences the inherent nature of music, so the forms of his body are shaped out of music itself. Therefore if the teacher wishes to be a good music teacher he will make a point of taking singing with the children from the very beginning of their school life. This must be done; he must understand as an actual fact that singing induces emancipation; for the astral body has previously sung and has brought forth the forms of the human body. Between the change of teeth and puberty, the astral body frees itself, becomes emancipated. And out of the very essence of music emerges that which forms man and makes him an independent being. No wonder then that the music teacher who understands these things, who knows that man is permeated through and through with music, will quite naturally allow this knowledge to enrich the singing lesson and his teaching of instrumental music. This is why we try not only to introduce singing as early as possible into the education of the child, but also to let those children with sufficient aptitude learn to play a musical instrument, so that they have the possibility of actually learning to grasp and enter into the musical element which lives in their human form, as it emancipates and frees itself.

But all these things will be approached in the right way if only the teacher has the right feeling and attitude towards them. It is important to understand clearly that every training college should in fact be so constituted that its curriculum should run parallel with medical studies at a university. The first approach should lead to the intellectual understanding which can be gained from a study of the corpse; this should lead further to an artistic understanding of form, and it can only be acquired when, side by side with the study of physical anatomy, the student practises modelling. This again should lead to a musical understanding. For a true knowledge of man is not attained unless there is added to the earlier medical studies a comprehension of the part music plays in the world. During his college training the student teacher should acquire an understanding of music, not in a purely external way, but inwardly, so that he is able by means of this inner perception to see music everywhere. Music is truly everywhere in the world; one only has to find it. If however we wish to obtain an understanding of the ego-organisation it is essential to master and make one's own the inner nature and structure of some language.

So you see, we understand the physical body with the intellect, the etheric body through an understanding of form, the astral body through an understanding of music; while the ego, on the other hand, can only be grasped by means of a deep and penetrating understanding of language. It is just here, however, that we are particularly badly off today, for there is a great deal we do not know. Let us take an example from the German language. In German something is described that rests quietly on our body, is round and has eyes and nose in front. It is called in German Kopf, in Italian testa. We take a dictionary and find that the translation of Kopf is testa. But that is purely external and superficial. It is not even true. The following is true. Out of a feeling for the vowels and consonants contained in the word Kopf, for instance, I experience the o quite definitely as a form which I could draw: it is, as eurythmists know, the rounded form which in front is developed into nose and mouth. We find in this combination of sounds, if we will only let ourselves experience it, everything that is given in the form of the head. So, if we wish to express this form, we make use of larynx and lungs and pronounce the sounds approximating to K-o-pf. But now we can say: In the head there is something which enables one person to speak to another. There is a means of communication. We can impart to another person the content of something which we wish to make known—a will or testament for instance.—If you want to describe the head, not in relation to its round form, but as that which imparts information, which defines clearly what one wishes to communicate, then language out of its own nature gives you the means of doing so. Then you say testa. You give a name to that which imparts something when you say testa; you give a name to the rounded form when you say Kopf. If the Italian wanted to describe roundness, he too would say Kopf; and likewise, if the German wanted to express communication, he would say testa. But both the Italian and the German have become accustomed to expressing in language something different, for it is not possible to express totally different things in a single word. Therefore we do not say exactly the same thing when we speak the word testa or Kopf. The languages are different because their words express different things.

Now let us try to enter into the way in which a member of a particular nation lives with the language of his folk-soul. The German way of living in his language is a way of plastic formation. German language is really the language of sculptural contemplation. That has come about in German because in the whole evolution of speech German is a further continuation of the Greek element up into Central Europe. If you study Italian and the Romance languages in general you find the whole configuration is such that they are developed out of the motor function of the soul. They are not contemplative. Italian has formed itself out of an internal dancing, an internal singing, out of the soul's participation in the whole organism of the body. From this we see how the ego stands within the substance of the Folk-Soul; through making a study of the inner connections, the inner make-up of language, we learn to know how the ego works.

This is why it is necessary for the teacher to acquire not only a feeling for music, but an inner feeling for language—taking as a starting point the fact that in the more modern languages we have only retained soul experiences, experiences of feeling, in the interjections. For instance, when in German we say “etsch!”—it is as though someone had slipped and fallen and we want to express this, together with the amusement it has caused. In the interjections we still have something in language which is felt. In other respects language has become abstract, it hovers above things, no longer lives in them. It must, however, again become living and real. We must learn to wrestle with language, we must feel our ego going right through the sounds. Then we shall feel that it is something different whether we say Kopf and thereby have the feeling that we should like to draw the form of the head straight away, or whether we say testa and immediately have the feeling that we want to dance. It is just this feeling one's way into the activities of life which must be developed quite specially in the teacher.

If therefore the teacher can accustom himself to regarding the physical and the soul-spiritual together—for they are indeed one, as I have repeatedly impressed upon you—and if he succeeds in doing this ever more and more, he will not be tempted to enter into abstractions and intellectualities, but he will have the will to keep his teaching and educational practice between the change of teeth and puberty within the sphere of the pictorial. There is nothing more distasteful, when one is accustomed to think pictorially about real things, than to have someone coming and talking intellectually in a roundabout way. This is a frightfully unpleasant experience. For example, one is accustomed to seeing something in life as it actually takes place, one only has the wish to describe it as it is, one is living completely in the picture of it; then somebody comes along with whom one would like to come to an understanding, but he forms his judgment purely on the basis of intellect and immediately begins with: It was beautiful, or ugly, or magnificent or wonderful—all these things are one or the other—and one feels in one's soul as if one's hair were being torn out by the roots. It is especially bad when one would really like to know what the other man has experienced and he simply does not describe it. For instance, I may have made the acquaintance of someone who raises his knee very high when he walks—but this man starts immediately with: “He walks well” or “he has a good carriage.” But in saying this he tells us nothing about the other man, only about his own ego. But we do not want to know this; we want an objective description. Today people find this very difficult. Hence they do not describe the things, but the effect the things make upon them, as “beautiful” or “ugly.” This gradually enters even into the formation of language. Instead of describing the physiognomy of a face, one says: “He looked awful”—or something of the kind.

These are things which should enter into the deepest part of a teachers' training, to get rid of oneself and to come to grips with reality. If one succeeds in doing this, one will also be able to establish a relationship with the child. The child feels just as I described, that his hair is being pulled out by the roots if the teacher does not get to the point, but speaks about his own feelings; whereas, if he will only keep to what is concrete and real and describe this, the child will enter into it all immediately. It is therefore of great importance for the teacher that he does not overdo—his thinking. I always feel it to be a great difficulty with the teachers of the Waldorf School if they think too much, whereas it gives me real satisfaction when they develop the faculty of observing even the smallest things, and so discovering their special characteristics. If someone were to say to me: “This morning I saw a lady who was wearing a violet dress; it was cut in such and such a fashion and her shoes had high heels” and so on—I should like it better than if someone were to come and say: Man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego,—for the one proves that he stands firmly in life, that he has developed his etheric body, the other that he knows with his intellect that there is an etheric body etc. But this does not amount to much.

I must express myself drastically in this way so that we learn to recognise what is of the greatest importance in the teacher's training; not that he learns to spin out his thoughts about many things, but that he learns to observe life. That he is then able to make use of such observation in life is something that goes without saying. Everything is ruined, however, if he racks his brains over how he should make use of it. This is why anyone who wishes to describe something arising out of Spiritual Science should make very strong efforts to avoid using ordinary abstract concepts, for by so doing he gets right away from what he really wants to say. And especially it is the case that the impression made on anyone who tries to grasp things in a characteristic way will be such that he learns to describe things in the round, not with sharp edges. Here is a drastic example. To me it is unpleasant to say in certain circumstances: “There stands a pale man.” That hurts. On the other hand the sentence begins to breathe and have reality if I say: There stands a man who is pale,—in other words, if I do not give a description in stiff, ordinary concepts, but characterise with ideas that enclose it. And one will find that children have much more inner understanding for things when they are expressed in relative form, than they have for bare nouns qualified by adjectives. Children prefer a gentle way of handling things. When I say to them: “There stands a pale man”—it is just as if I was hitting at something with a hammer; but if I say: “There stands a man who is pale”—it is like a stroking movement of my hand. Children find it much more possible to adapt themselves to the world if things are presented in this second form rather than by hitting at them. A certain fineness of feeling must be developed in order to make oneself a sculptor in the use of language in order to put it to the service of the art of education. It also lies in the sphere of education as an art if one strives to gain a sufficient mastery of language to enable one to articulate clearly in the classroom and to know when teaching how to emphasise what is important and to pass lightly over the unimportant.

We lay great value on just these kind of things, and again and again in the teachers' conferences attention is drawn to the imponderable in teaching. For if one really studies a class, one notices all sorts of things which can be of immense help. For instance, suppose one has a class of 28 boys and girls and one wants to give these children something which they can make their own, something which will enrich their inner life. It may perhaps be a little poem, or even a great poem. You try to teach this poem to the class. Now you will observe the following: If you let them all recite in chorus, or even a third or half of the class, each child will speak and be able to say it; but if you then test one or other of the pupils in order to see if he can say it alone you will find that he cannot. It is not that you have overlooked him and failed to see that he was silent, for he can speak it perfectly well in chorus with the others. The fact is that a group spirit pervades and activates the class and one can make use of this. So if one really works with the whole class, regarding the children as a chorus, it seems at first that this calls up in them a quicker power of comprehension. One day, however, I had to point out the shadow side of this procedure and so I will now entrust you with a secret. It is this. There are also shadow sides in the Waldorf School! Gradually one finds one's way and discovers that handling the class as a chorus and allowing the children to speak together goes quite well; but if this is overdone, if one works only with the class, without taking the individual child into account, the result will be that in the end no child by himself will know anything.

We must consider the shadow side of all those things and be clear as to how far we can go, for instance, in handling the class as a chorus and to what extent it is necessary to take the individual child separately. Here theories do not help. To say that it is good to treat the class as a chorus, or to maintain that things should be done in this or the other way is never any use, because in the complexities of life what can be done in one way can also, given other conditions, be done in another way. The worst that can happen in educational science—which indeed is art rather than science—the worst that can happen is that directions are given which have an abstract character and are based on definitions. Educational instructions should consist solely in this, that the teacher is so guided that he enters with understanding into the development of this or that human being, and by means of the most convincing examples is led to a knowledge of man.

Method follows of itself when we proceed in this way. As an example let us consider method in the teaching of history. To want to teach history to a child before the 9th or 10th year is a quite futile endeavour, for the course of history is a closed book to the child before this age. It is only with the 9th or 10th year—you can observe this for yourselves—that he begins to be interested in individual human beings. If you portray Caesar, or Achilles, Hector, Agamemnon or Alcibiades simply as personalities, allowing what belongs to history to appear only as a background, if you paint the whole picture in this way the child will show the greatest interest in it. It will be evident that he is eager to know more about this sort of thing. He will feel the urge to enter further into the lives of these historical personalities if you describe them in this way. Comprehensive pictures of personalities complete in themselves; or comprehensive pictures of how a meal-time looked in a particular century, and in some other century; describe plastically, pictorially, how people used to eat before forks were invented, how they were accustomed to eat in Ancient Rome; describe plastically, pictorially, how a Greek walked, conscious of each step, aware of the form of his leg, feeling this form; then describe how the people of the Old Testament, the Hebrew people walked, having no feeling for form, but slouching along, letting their arms loose; call up feelings for these quite separate and distinct things which can be expressed in pictures; this will give you the right approach to the teaching of history between the 10th and 12th years.

At this latter age we can take a further step and proceed to historical relationships, for it is only now that the child becomes able to understand such concepts as cause and effect. Only now can history be presented as something that is connected, that has cohesion. Everything that lives in history must, however, be worked out in such a way as to show its gradual development. We come to the concept of growth, of becoming. Call up before you the following picture. We are now living in the year 1924 [The date of the lectures.]. Charles the Great lived from 760 until 814, so if the year 800 be taken as the approximate date, we find he lived 1120 years before us. If we imagine ourselves now living in the world as a child and growing up, we can reckon that in the course of a century we can have: son or daughter, father or mother, grandfather and perhaps even a great-grandfather, that is to say 3 or 4 generations following one after the other in the course of a hundred years. We can show these 3 or 4 generations by getting someone to stand up and represent the son or daughter. The father or mother will stand behind, resting their hands on the shoulders of the one in front; the grandfather will place his hands on the shoulders of the father, and the great-grandfather his hands on the shoulders of the grandfather. If you imagine placing son, father and grandfather one behind the other in this way, as people belonging to the present age, and behind them the course of the generations in a further ten centuries, you will get all told 11 times 3 or 4 generations, let us say 44 generations. If therefore you were to place 44 people one behind the other, each with his hands on the shoulders of the one in front the first can be a man of the present day and the last can be Charles the Great. In this way you can change the time relationships in history, which are so difficult to realise, into relationships which are purely spatial. You can picture it also in this way: Here you have one man who is speaking to another; the latter turns round and speaks to the one behind, who in turn does the same thing, and so it goes on until you come right back to the time when Peter spoke to Christ. In doing this you get the whole development of the Christian Church in the conversation between the people standing one behind the other. The whole apostolic succession is placed visually before you.

It really amounts to this. One should seize every opportunity of making use of what is pictorial and tangible. This is all the more necessary because in this way one learns to enter into reality, thereby learning also to form everything in accordance with what is real. It is actually quite arbitrary if I place 3 beans before the child, then add another 3 beans and yet another 3 or maybe 4, and then proceed to teach addition: 3 plus 3 plus 4 equals 10. This is somewhat arbitrary. But it is quite another thing if I have a small pile of beans and do not know to begin with how many there are. This accords with the reality of things in the world. Now I divide the pile. This the child understands immediately. I give one part to one child, another part to a second child and a third part to a third child. So you see, I divide the pile, first showing the child how many beans there are altogether. I begin with the sum and proceed to the parts. I can let the child count the beans because that is just a repetitive process, 1, 2, 3 and so on, up to 12. But now I divide them into 4, into 4 more and still another 4. If I begin with the sum and proceed to the addenda the child will take it in quite easily. It is in accordance with reality. The other way is abstract, one just puts things together, one is intellectualistic. It is also more real if I get the child to the point when he must answer the following question: If I have 12 apples and somebody takes them, goes away and only brings 7 back, how many has he lost? Here one starts with the minuend and goes from the remainder to the subtrahend; one does not subtract, but goes from the remainder, that is to say, from what remains as the result of a living process, to what has been taken away.

Thus one's efforts are not everywhere directed towards abstractions, but find their outlet in reality; they are linked with life, they strive after life. This reacts on the child and makes him bright and lively, whereas for the most part the teaching of arithmetic has a very deadening effect. The children remain somewhat dead and apathetic, and the inevitable result of this is the calculating machine. The very fact that we have the calculating machine is a proof of how difficult it is to make the teaching of arithmetic perceptually evident. We must however not only do this, but we must learn to read from life itself.

If we wish to understand the task of the anthroposophical science of the spirit in the present and immediate future we must consider the character of mankind's evolution since the middle of the fifteenth century. Everything that happens now depends on the fact that since that time there lives in mankind the impulse for each single individuality to attain the pinnacle of personality, to become a whole personality. This was not possible, nor was it the task of mankind in earlier epochs of our post-Atlantean evolution. If we want to understand this great change in the middle of which we find ourselves, we must focus our attention still more precisely upon such matters as I characterized yesterday.

I said that in our spiritual life we still have a Greek constitution of soul. The way we form our thoughts, the manner in which we are accustomed to think about the world, is an echo of the Greek soul. And the way we are accustomed to look at civic rights and everything connected with them is an echo of the soul-constitution of the Roman. In the State we still see the structure as it existed in the Roman Empire. Only if people will realize that the impulse of the threefold social order must enter our chaotic present will there be clarity in thinking and willing.

The soul-nature of the Greek was chiefly determined by the fact that in Greece there existed in the highest degree what were the leading characteristics of historical development right up to the middle of the fifteenth century. Across the Greek territory there were spread a subject population and their conquerors. These latter claimed the land for themselves; but also, through their blood inheritance, they determined the spirituality of ancient Greece. We cannot grasp the soul-nature of the ancient Greeks unless we keep in mind that it was considered justified to think about human relationships in the way that resulted from the blood characteristics of the Aryan conqueror population. Naturally, modern man has outgrown what thus lay at the basis of Greek culture. With the Greeks it was self-evident that there were two kinds of people: those who had to worship Mercury, and those who had to worship Zeus. These two classes were strictly separated. But, people thought about the world and the Gods in the way the conqueror population had to think because of its blood characteristics. Everything resulted from the clash of a conquered and conquering people. One who looks more closely into what lives socially among men of our time will recognize that in our feelings and our subconscious soul-life we no longer have this aristocratic attitude in viewing our world. Yet it still lives in our ideas and concepts, especially if we are educated in the schools of higher learning. These schools, especially the classical schools, shape their instruction in a way that represents a renaissance, and echo of Hellenism. And this is even more the case with our universities, with the exception of the technical and agricultural colleges which have sprung from modern life. Even they imitate in their outer form the structure of universities derived from Hellenism. Through the very fact that we have a high esteem for Hellenism in its time, and for its time, we must also be quite clear about the necessity for our age of a renewal of spiritual life. It will become more and more unbearable for humanity to be led by souls who have acquired the form of their concepts in our classical schools. And today, in almost all leading positions, you find people who did receive the forming of their ideas in the classical schools. It has become necessary today to realize that the time of “settling accounts,” not minor but major accounts, is at hand, and that we must think about such matters factually and stop clinging to old habits of thought.

You know that what was formed out of the blood in Hellenism became abstract in Romanism. I have mentioned this here before. The Greek social organism, which cannot be called a State organism, shaped itself out of forces descending through the blood. But this did not pass over to Romanism. What did pass over was the urge to organize as the Greeks had organized, but the cause of this organizing was no longer felt to be in the blood. While it would never have occurred to an ancient Greek to doubt that there are people of a “lower sort,” those in a conquered people, and others being of a “higher sort,” the Aryans, this was not the case with the Romans. Within the Roman Empire there was the strong consciousness that the order of the social organism had been arrived at through power, through might. You need only remind yourselves that the Romans trace their origin to that assembly of robbers in the neighborhood of Rome that had been called together in order, as a robber band, to found Rome; and that the founder of Rome was not suckled with delicate mother's milk but, as you know, was suckled in the forest by an animal, a wolf.

These are the influences that were taken up into the Roman nature and led to the formation of the social order in Rome largely out of abstract concepts. What has remained as our heritage in regard to the concepts of rights and the State has thus come from the Roman constitution of soul.

In this connection I am always reminded of an old friend of mine. I met him when he was already quite advanced in years. In his youth, at the age of eighteen, he had fallen in love with a girl and they had secretly become engaged. But they were too poor to marry, so they waited and remained faithful to each other. When he finally could consider marriage, he was sixty-four years old, for only then had he acquired enough means to risk taking such a step. So, he went to his home town near Salzburg ready to marry his chosen one of so long ago. But alas, the church and the rectory had burned down, and he could not get his baptismal certificate. There was no record of his baptism anywhere, so there was no proof that he had been born. I remember vividly the day his letter arrived. It stated, “Well, I believe it is quite evident that I was born, for after all I exist. But these people do not believe I was born because there is no baptismal certificate to prove it.”

I once had a conversation with a lawyer who said, “In a lawsuit it is not so important whether or not a man is present; all we need is his birth certificate.”

Continually one meets such grotesque incidents. The mood living in them shows that our entire public life has been built to a greater or lesser degree on Romanism. We are citizens of the world not through the fact we have become and exist as human beings but because we are recorded and recognized in a certain office. These things all lead back to Romanism. The descent by blood has passed over into registration.

Today the situation is such that many men no longer consider their value determined by what they are as human beings but by the rank they have reached in the hierarchy of officialdom. One prefers to be something impersonal, out of Roman rights-concepts, rather than a personality. Since the fifteenth century, however, there exists in mankind the subconscious striving to base everything on the pinnacle of personality. This shows us that in regard to spiritual life and the life of rights the times have changed, and we need a renewal of both, a real renewal. This is connected with many deeper impulses of mankind's evolution.

Just consider the fact that since the middle of the fifteenth century the evolution of modern man has been filled with the natural-scientific mode of thought which is based on abstract laws of nature, upon sense perception and the thoughts developed around it. Only what is derived from sense perception is considered valid. Yesterday I drew your attention to the fact that today there are quite a number of people who are convinced, justifiably so, that a view of nature acquired in this way can only lead to a ghost-like image of nature. A picture of the world formed by a student of nature is a specter of the world, not the real world. So, we have to say that humanity finds itself in the position of developing a specter-image of the world in regard to one half of it. For the science of initiation something profound is concealed behind this, and what this is we must now consider.

Sense perception as such cannot be altered; whether we consider it to be maya or something else is of no concern to a deeper world view. A red flower is a red flower whether or not we think it maya or reality. It is what it is. Likewise, all sense perception is what it is. Discussion starts only when we begin to form thoughts about it, when we consider it to be this or that, when we interpret it. Only then the difficulty begins. It begins because the concepts we as men have to form since the fifteenth century are different from those of earlier mankind. No attention is paid to this in modern history, which is a fable convenue, as I have often stated. Whoever is able to understand the concepts of mankind prior to the middle of the fifteenth century knows that they were full of imagery, that they actually were imaginations. The present abstraction of concepts exists only since that time.

Now why has our human nature so developed that we have these abstract concepts we are so proud of today and that we constantly employ? They have the peculiar character that, although we make use of them in the sense world they are not suited to this sense world. They are worthless there. In my book, Riddles of Philosophy, I have expressed this by saying that the way man forms his concepts regarding the external world constitutes a side-stream of his soul development. Think of a seed in the earth; it is destined by nature to become a plant. But we take many seeds and grind them into flour and eat them as bread. This, however, is not what the seed is meant for; it is a lateral development. If we ask, doesn't the seed contain those chemical elements we need for building up our body? we must say that it does not lie in the nature of the grain of wheat or rye to nourish us but to bring forth new grain. Likewise, it does not lie in our nature to grasp the outer world through the concepts we have acquired since the fifteenth century. We shall reap something different from those concepts if we enter into their nature properly. These modern concepts are the shadow images of what we have experienced in the spiritual world before birth—more exactly, before conception. Our concepts, the forces in them, are the echoes of what we have experienced before birth. We misuse our system of concepts in applying it to the outer sense world.

This is the basis of Goethe's concept of nature. He does not want to express the laws of nature by means of concepts; he strives for the primal phenomena. That is to say, he strives for the assembled outer perceptions, because he feels that our conceptual ability cannot be applied to external nature. We have to develop our conceptual ability as pure thinking. If we do so, it points us toward our spiritual existence prior to birth. Our modern thinking has been bestowed upon us so that we may reach with this pure thinking our spiritual nature as it existed before we were clothed with a physical body. If mankind does not comprehend the fact that it possesses thinking in order to apprehend itself as spirit, it does not take hold of the task of the fifth post-Atlantean period. Our natural science was inserted, so to say, into mankind's destiny so that we might remain with pure nature and not speculate about it. We were to employ our concepts to perceive it in the right way, and then develop our concepts in order to behold ourselves as we existed in spirit before we descended into the physical body. Men still believe today that they should only employ their conceptual ability for classifying external sense perceptions, and so on. However, they will only act correctly if they employ the thoughts they have had since the middle of the fifteenth century for perceiving the spiritual world in which they existed before they acquired a physical body.

In this way man of the fifth post-Atlantean era is forced toward the spiritual, toward the existence before birth. And still another factor places him in a peculiar situation which he must develop. Parallel to the specter-concepts of natural science runs industrialism, as I mentioned yesterday. Its chief characteristic is the fact that the machine, the bearer of industrialism, is spiritually transparent. Nothing of it remains incomprehensible. As a consequence, the human will directed toward the machine is, in truth, not directed toward a reality. In terms of comprehensive world-reality the machine is a chimera. Industrialism introduces something into our lives which in a higher sense makes man's will meaningless. There will be a significant impact on social life when modern men become convinced that the machine and everything resulting from it, such as industrialism, makes the human will meaningless. We have already reached the pinnacle of machine activity. Today a quarter of all production on earth is not being produced by human will but by machine power.¹ This signifies something extraordinary. Human will is no longer meaningful on earth.

If you read, for instance, the speeches of Rabindranath Tagore, you ought to sense something in them that remains incomprehensible to the European who employs his ordinary intellect. There is a different tone in what an educated Asiatic has to say today, because in him this adaptation of the European spirit to the machine is completely incomprehensible. To the Oriental the activity of working by means of machines, by means of industrialism, has no meaning. The European may believe it or not, but European politics born in the machine age is also just as senseless to the Oriental. In the educated Oriental's statements there is clearly expressed that this one-fourth of human labor in the present age is felt by him as senseless work—this quarter which is not carried out by the educated Orientals but only by Occidentals and their imitators, the Japanese. The Oriental feels so because, as he still possesses much clairvoyant vision, he knows that labor performed by machines has a definite peculiarity. When a man plows his field with his horse—man and beast straining themselves in labor—this work in which natural forces are involved has a meaning beyond the immediate present; it has cosmic meaning. When a man kindles fire by using a flint, making the sparks ignite the tinder, he is connected with nature. When the wasp builds its house this natural activity too has cosmic meaning. Through modern industrialism we have abandoned cosmic value. In our kindling of electric flames there no longer lives any cosmic significance. It has been driven out. A completely mechanized factory is a hole in the cosmos, it has no meaning for cosmic evolution. If you go into the woods and collect firewood this has cosmic meaning beyond earth evolution; but a modern factory and everything it contains has no significance beyond earth development. The human will is inserted in it without its having any cosmic value. Just consider what this means. It means that since the middle of the fifteenth century we have developed a knowledge that is specter-like and does not touch reality. More and more we employ machines and carry out an industrial activity, and the will inserted into this activity is senseless for world evolution.

The great question now confronts us: Is there nevertheless a meaning for mankind's evolution as a whole in the fact that our knowledge is ghost-like, and our will to a great extent senseless? Indeed, there is meaning in it, significant meaning. Mankind thereby is to be urged to penetrate beyond ghost-like thinking to a knowledge of reality that does not stop with the perception of nature but enters into the spiritual behind nature. So long as men received the spirit simultaneously with their concepts they did not need to make efforts to gain the spirit. Since in the modern age men have only retained concepts devoid of spirit, but that also contain the possibility of working one's way up to the spirit as I have stated, there is present in man the impulse to proceed from abstract knowledge and to penetrate into genuine spiritual knowledge. Therefore, since we have industrialism with its senselessness we must seek another meaning for human will. This we can only do if we arouse ourselves to a world view that brings sense into what is senseless—let us call it industrialism—by deriving meaning from the spiritual, saying: We seek tasks that stem from the spirit. Formerly, when willing could derive its impulses from the spirit instinctively, we did not need to arouse ourselves especially in order to will from out the spirit. Today it is necessary that we make a special effort to do this. The senseless industrial willing has to be confronted with a meaningful willing-out-of-the-spirit.

Yesterday I gave you an example of the way we ought to educate. We should recognize that up to the seventh year man is an imitator since he develops chiefly his physical body during this period. Imitation, therefore, ought to become the basis for that period of education. We should know that from the seventh to the fourteenth year we have to develop man by the principle of authority. This spiritual knowledge, which we gain by knowing how the etheric body develops during that time, must be made the impulse of education then. We should know also how the astral body develops from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year, and that this knowledge must lie behind education for that, period. Then, only then, do we will out of the spirit.

Up to the middle of the fifteenth century man willed instinctively out of the spirit. In external life we tend to immerse ourselves in machines, in mechanism; this is so even in politics, which gradually has turned governments into machines. We must strive for a spirit-ensouled willing. To that end we must accept the idea of a science of the spirit. We must, for instance, base education on what we know out of spiritual facts, out of what we learn from anthroposophical spiritual science. Through the stronger, more conscious emphasizing of willing out of the spirit we establish a counter-image to the senseless willing of industrialism.

Thus, industrialism with all its devastation of the human soul, is given us in order that in this devastation we may rouse ourselves to will out of the spirit. Our thinking has to be changed in many ways in our modern age. This requires a careful, intimately developed feeling for truth. We must become conscious that the feeling for truth has to be gradually applied in places where we are not yet accustomed to apply it. I believe many a person will be astonished today if he is told: You are right if you venerate Raphael highly because of his pictures, but if you demand that people paint the way Raphael painted then, you are mistaken. Only he has a right to admire Raphael who knows that whoever paints today the way he painted is a bad painter, because he does not paint as the impulses of our time demand. One does not feel with the times if one does not deeply sense the tasks of a given age. It is necessary that we acquire in our time an intimate feeling for truth in this regard. But here also modern humanity is caught up in what is the very opposite. One gets the impression that the feeling for truth has everywhere sprung a leak and does not function. People are shying away from calling right what is right, and wrong what is wrong; they recoil from designating a lie a lie. We experience today the most abominable things, and people are indifferent to them. The point is that we should have such a feeling for truth that we know, for example, that Raphael's painting no longer fits our present age; that it must be considered as something of the past and admired as such. It is particularly necessary now to pay attention to such things when out of the depths of the soul the impulse for truth comes over us. I am often reminded of a beautiful passage in Herman Grimm's biography of Michelangelo in which he speaks of his Last Judgment. He says that many such Last Judgment pictures were painted at that time and that the people experienced in full reality the truth of what was painted on the walls. They lived in the truth of those pictures. Today we should not look at such a picture as Michelangelo's Last Judgment without being aware that we do not feel as those people did for whom the artist painted it; that we have lost their feeling and at best can say: This is the picture of something we no longer believe in as an immediate reality.

Just consider how differently man confronts such a picture with his modern consciousness. He no longer thinks that angels really descend, or that the devils carry on as they do in Michelangelo's picture. If, however, one is aware that what modern man feels when looking at this picture is something gray and abstract, then one is called upon inwardly to experience the whole living movement in these pictures on the wall of the Sistine Chapel. One is stirred to asking how it was possible for the people of Michelangelo's time (although he painted after the decline of the fourth post-Atlantean period his paintings originated in the spirit of that period since he stood at the boundary of the fourth and fifth periods)—how was it possible for people like him and his contemporaries to experience such tremendous imaginations, such mighty pictures? This question confronts us in all its magnitude if one is conscious of how drab and lifeless is what man feels today in front of such a picture by Michelangelo. We must ask: What caused human souls of that time to conceive of the earth's end in such a way? Whence came the structure of these pictures?

The reason lies in the following: Since the time when the Mystery of Golgotha entered earth evolution and had given it its meaning, certain things that existed in the ancient manner had to recede into the background and were destined to be regained by mankind later on. One of these was the idea of repeated earth lives. The totality of human life takes its course through earth life, then life in the spiritual world, then earth life again, and so on. This course of the total life of man was the content of the atavistic, instinctive world-view in ancient times. Christianity had to arouse in man concepts different from those of ancient wisdom. By what means, above all, has Christianity accomplished this? It directed human consciousness only to a certain point in time, namely, to the beginning of one's life on earth. It did not consider man as an individuality prior to birth or conception but merely as a thought of the Godhead. Before earth-life man proceeds out of the spiritual world as a thought of the Godhead, only at birth did he begin to be a real human being. Then, after his life on earth, the life after death. In the first period of the development of Christianity the experience of repeated earth lives was, so to say, misplaced. Human experience was limited to looking into the origin of man and the life after death. This, however, supplied the equilibrium out of which the pictures of the Last Judgment were created. Through the fact that Christianity first eradicated from human feeling the teaching of pre-existence, the pictures of the Last Judgment could arise. Today there wells up again out of the deep recesses of the human soul the longing for a recognition of repeated earth lives. Therefore, those pictures fade away which only focus their attention upon the one earth life and a vague spiritual world before and after it. Now there exists the most intense longing to enlarge the Christian world-view of the early ages. The Mystery of Golgotha is not merely effective for those who believe only in one earth life, it is also valid for those who know of repeated earth lives. The present age is in need of this enlargement. Therefore, we should see clearly that we live in a period when we must use the ghost-like nature of ordinary conceptual knowledge, and the senselessness of willing released by industrialism, in order to rise to spiritual knowledge and spirit-permeated willing, as I have described it; and also, in order to enlarge religious consciousness so as to include repeated earth lives.

The great and full importance of this enlargement of human consciousness in the present time should be deeply inscribed in the soul of modern men, for upon this depends whether they really understand how to live in the present, and how to prepare the future in the right sense. Everyone, in the situation in which life has placed him, can make use of this enlarged consciousness. Even the external knowledge people gain will cause him to demand something that today plays a large role in the subconscious depths of soul life but that has difficulty in rising and sounding out into full consciousness. Truly, the most striking fact of modern life is that there are so many torn human souls; souls full of problems who do not know what to do with life, who ask again and again, “What precisely is my task? What does life mean to do specifically with me?” They start this or that and yet are never satisfied. The number of these problematic natures increases steadily. What is the reason for it? It comes from a lack in our educational system. Today we educate our children in a way which does not awaken in them the forces that make man strong for life. Man becomes strong through being an imitator up to his seventh year; through following a worthy authority up to the fourteenth year; and through the fact that his capacity for love is developed in the right way up to the twenty-first year. Later on this strength cannot be developed. What a person lacks because the forces were not awakened which should have been awakened in definite periods of his youth—this is what makes him a problem-filled nature. This fact must be made known!

For this reason, I had to say yesterday that if we will to bring about a true form of society in future it must be prepared through people's education. To this end we must not proceed in a small way but on a large scale; for our educational system has gradually taken on a character that leads directly to what I described yesterday as mechanization of the spirit, vegetizing of the soul, and animalization of the body.

We must not follow this direction. We must strongly develop the forces that can be developed in a child's soul, so that later on he can harvest the fruits of his childhood learning. Today he looks back and feels what his childhood was and cannot gather anything from it because nothing was developed there. Our educational principles must be fundamentally changed if we want to do the right thing for children. Above everything we must listen very carefully to much that at present is highly praised and considered especially wholesome.

So, it is necessary that, without undue strain and exertion but through an economy of educational effort, children acquire concentration. This can be achieved, in the way modern man needs it, only by abolishing what is so greatly favored today, namely, the cursed curriculum of the schools; this instrument of murder for the real development of human forces. Just consider what it means: From 7 to 8 A.M. arithmetic, from 8 to 9 grammar, from 9 to 10 geography, from 10 to 11 history. Everything that has moved through the soul from 7 to 8 is extinguished from 8 to 9, and so on. Now here it is necessary to get down to the bottom of things. We must no longer think that subjects exist in order to be taught as subjects. On the contrary, we must have clearly in mind that in children from the seventh to fourteenth year, thinking, feeling, and willing have to be developed in the right way. Geography, arithmetic, everything must be employed so that these faculties can be properly developed.

Much is said in modern pedagogy about the need of developing individualities, of paying attention to a child's nature in order to know which faculties should be developed. This is empty talk. These questions take on meaning only when they are discussed from the point of view of spiritual science, otherwise they are mere phrases. In the future it will be necessary to say that for a certain age group we must impart a certain amount of arithmetic. Two or three months are to be devoted to teaching arithmetic in the forenoon. Not a plan of study that contains everything jumbled up but arithmetic for an extended time, then on to another subject. Arrange things as they are indicated by human nature itself for definite points in time.

You see the tasks that arise for a pedagogy which works toward the future. Here lie the positive problems for those who seriously think about the social future. As yet there is little understanding for these problems. In Stuttgart, connected with our previous activities, a school is to be built up as far as possible within the present school system. Mr. Molt has decided to found such a school for the children of his employees in the Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette Factory.² Other children will be able to come, but at first of course only in limited numbers. Naturally, we will have to take into account the educational goals of the State. The children will have to achieve this and that by the end of a year, and we will have to make certain compromises. But we will be able to intermix something with what the State requires, because, according to socialistic ideas, the State is the especially clever idol. So, we shall have to intermix with what it demands that which is required by the real nature of man. This has to be recognized. But who today thinks of the fact that the prevailing plan of study is the murderer of truly human education? There are people whose thoughts in this direction are such that one is inclined to say: The world stands on its head, one has to turn it back on its legs. For many would shorten the lessons and change the subjects every half hour. This today is considered ideal. Just imagine: Religion, arithmetic, geography, drawing, singing, one after the other. In our heads they tumble through each other like the stones of a kaleidoscope. Only the outer world says, “Now that's something like it!”—because there is not the slightest interrelating between these subjects.

Few believe it is necessary now to think on a large scale; not to think petty thoughts but to have great, comprehensive views. We experience again and again that people finally have become accustomed to saying, “Indeed, revolution is necessary!” Even a large part of the bourgeoisie believes today in revolution. I do not know if that is the case here, but there are large areas where a majority of the bourgeoisie believes revolution to be necessary. But if we offer them such things as are stated in my book, The Threefold Social Order, they say: “We do not understand this. It is too complicated.” Lichtenberg once said, “If a head and a book strike together and a hollow sound results it is not necessarily the fault of the book.” But people do not believe this, because—it is not self-knowledge that is chiefly produced in men's souls. One can experience that throughout extensive regions the philistines believe in revolution, yet they say, “O no, we cannot enter into such deep questions, such comprehensive thoughts; you must tell us how shoe production can be socialized, how the pharmacies are to be socialized,” and so on. “You must tell us how, in the revolutionized State, I can sell my spices.”

One gradually discovers then what these people really mean. They mean that they agree there must be a revolution, but everything should remain as it has been, nothing should be changed by it. Many a person asks, how can we make the world over?—but so that nothing is changed! The most remarkable ones in this respect are the so-called intellectuals. With them one can have the most extraordinary experiences. One heard it repeatedly stated, “Very well, three members—autonomous universities, a spiritual life that governs itself—but then, how shall we live? Who will pay our salaries if the State no longer pays us?”

Today we really have to confront these things. It is necessary that we stop turning away from these questions again and again. Precisely in the sphere of the spiritual life a change must be brought about.

• 1. By 1969 this amount, of course, has been greatly increased.—Tr.
• 2. In the course of the next ten years this “Waldorf School” became the largest private school in Germany, with a waiting list of applicants from several European countries and the United States.

My dear friends,

Speaking to you here for the first time in these rooms on an Anthroposophical subject, I feel I must express gratitude first of all-gratitude to those friends who, in my unavoidable absence, have devoted themselves to the arrangement of these rooms, which are to be used for our work and discussions. At the present time man's soul is of, necessity involved in great and far-reaching events of world and human development. So strong is their demand upon our will and energy if we would understand our place as man within world-history, that we cannot as in earlier, more peaceful times, attend with so great care to such outward things of beauty as the arrangement of a place devoted to ideal spiritual aims, so devoted that men can work towards them together, co-operating as in social life. Rightly seen, there is a certain connection between the recent great events throbbing through the world and such a dedication. The vital claims of the historical development of mankind demand that what men have hitherto sought in the form of beauty, artistic adornment for their personal life, should be transferred from that egoistic realm and centred more and more where separateness gives way to social co-operation. It would argue a very poor understanding of the future if we judged it by what appear today as aims. The social movements of the present do, of course, wear a “democratic” look, but we need only observe their transitory nature in the right light to make no mistake as to their character. Yet these social movements contain a hint of menace lest the beautiful, which runs through our earthly civilization as artistic quality, may not find in the future the same comprehension as in the past, when only the better-endowed classes could devote them­selves to its culture.

A time of transition may result in some dimming of the appreciation of beauty, but it is essential, if a really social kind of living is to come into being, that whatever occurs in space and time should tend to encourage appreciation of the beautiful: otherwise man­kind will sink into mere philistinism. So the simple beauty of these rooms, which our friends have tried to make appropriate to the serious things of life to be fostered here, may be taken as symbolical of the great events throbbing through our time. Out of such feelings I speak, as from you all, to thank our friends most heartily for the work which they have accomplished in this time of stress. It would, further, be wrong to assume that the future will so develop that personality and all that has its origin in the personal and individual will diminish in value by reason of what men call the “objective events.” That will not be the case. The three or four centuries ending with the nineteenth have made it seem justifiable, in the general evolution of mankind, to regard man as a “cog” in the world-machine. The task of the immediate future will be for man to work himself out of this world-mechanism.

We may say without hesitation that the great movement of the present day displays a thoroughly egoistic character. It is true, its aim is Socialism—but its basis is that of anti-social impulses and instincts. No mistake should be made. We see that the real reason in striving for Socialism is that men have become so anti-social in development and constitution of soul. If the social sense were more natural and obvious, fewer socialist “programmes” would be formed; they have been largely evoked by anti-social feeling and experience. In times like the present, filled with bewilderment, in which the basic cause, of social feeling is egoistic and anti-social, the moment comes when an immense impression is made by the sight of a noble, selfless devotion to an ideal, through genuine, unselfish human feeling. It was well if, in these serious times, we did not hold outward festival, but turned our thoughts to this—how valuable it is, amongst the vehement, egoistic strivings of our times, to find the opportunity to create, as has been done here, something for the furtherance of an ideal, spiritual task, even if it be on a small scale. So the highest festival we can hold is to consider subjects connected with the seriousness of the present time, drawing that seriousness into our souls, as well as fostering in our hearts thoughts deeply concerned with human evolution, thoughts of worth and value in the tasks to which these rooms are dedicated.

Looking at our own time critically, yet not captiously, we should be dishonest if we shut our eyes to the many forces of decline prevalent in all spheres of life. If with due earnestness we consider the present day, we cannot forget how frequently what is present in, consciousness and finds expression in the spoken word stands far apart from truth and reality. Indeed, any feeling for the gulf yawning between words and the truth is lost in many of our contemporaries and in place of the elementary flow of truth out of the human soul we have the catchword, the “slogan!” What is the characteristic of a “catchword?” The lack of connection of the word used with the inner fount of truth. We need only look at the expressions of universal untruth which have been prevalent in the world during the last four, five, or six years, to be convinced that the estrangement of the world from genuine reality has led to the “empty phrase” and, if uncountered, it will become more dominant. Nor is there anything, outside of this growth of “the phrase,” which has flourished so much in the present age, as indulgence in face of untruth, as a definite bias towards falsity. Nowadays we can find plenty of people forbearing enough to make excuses for the “catch-saying” with its absence of truth. These “tolerant” talkers always ask: “How did the person mean this? Had he not the best intentions? Did he not think he was actuated by the best of motives?” And how little there is of the conscientious regard for truth which lays the duty on a speaker to test the ground of his assertion before he makes it! The time must, come when it will not be enough to say of a man “he meant well” when he has given expression to an untruth. Rather when men will feel the deepest responsibility for testing truth, when even in good faith to have said something which does not correspond with facts will not excuse it, when a man will realize that subjective belief in the truth of what he says matters nothing to the objective knowledge of the world. It does matter whether his speech corresponds to facts or not, is true, or is not, in the objective sense. The very seriousness of our times demands that we should learn what phrases and catchwords really are.

Nowadays many people feel, although not altogether consciously, that we may hold any view if it is agreeable to us, a belief easily to be studied in the attitude they adopt towards current events. We have passed through a serious period, but men only judge of it as is agreeable to them, not according to its importance for the general development of humanity. We have seen some of our con­temporaries, in the centre of the stage during the happenings of the last four or five years, thrust forwards into the first place in dealing with them. These men—their destiny has overtaken them—but how little are we inclined to acquire an objective judgment of what has really happened, or to ask by what method of selection, in these critical times, our leading men have been raised to their dominant position to the detriment of mankind! Nothing is so essential today as to work our own way through all subjective opinions and reach some sort of objectivity with regard to these things. An idea is prevalent that it is easy to speak the truth. Far from it: truth has many enemies and to speak it brings swift retribution on a man, since it is taken amiss in all sorts of ways.

During the last few months I have often been told that what I have put forward on the subject of the social question is so hard to understand as to be incomprehensible, and I have had to assert over and over again that to grasp this social impulse requires a different frame of mind from that which has pre­dominated in mid-Europe for a long time, coming to a climax within the last four or five years. In these recent years people managed to grasp a good deal which I honestly could not grasp. All sorts of statements, elegantly set forth, have been made and people have taken them in. They could not have done that if they had possessed, a straightforward sense of truth—yet, they did it “to order,” everything “commanded by headquarters” was received. today the essential things are not to be so acquired, out of “obedience,” but through man's own freedom of soul. Men must first regain that quality: the last four or five years have made that plain. In face of the delusions men have grown accustomed to during these last years, it is no pleasant duty to speak the truth now, for truth is so serious a matter and people resent it so deeply.

In time to come our age will be envisaged in a quite peculiar way. Men's present duties differ from those of the immediate past. Therefore, we ought to get some idea how future ages will look at today's events.

Men must learn to turn their eyes, their spiritual gaze, to the great and revolutionary impulses occurring in the earthly path of development. One such change took place in the middle of the fifteenth century A.D. According to Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, it is the beginning of the fifth post­Atlantean epoch, which we know bears an entirely different character from the earlier Graeco-Latin one, which began in the eighth century B.C. The “fable convenue” usually called “history” gives no information regarding the vast difference in the qualities of the human soul in, for instance, the tenth century, and the centuries following the fifteenth. New soul-qualities and attitudes arose in humanity and we can really only understand what has entered its evolution if we turn our spiritual vision to the forces active within it and see, for instance, their effects in the revolution which occurred in the middle of the fifteenth century. Some time has passed since then, and we are now approaching the crisis due to what swept over civilized mankind at that point and has developed up to the present time—this critical moment, when man's full consciousness must be brought to bear upon it.

We have reached a time when man must awake to the consciousness that, as man, he has his position within the Earth's history, and that outside of him are the three natural kingdoms, the animal, plant and mineral. (We shall speak later of how this awakening is to be achieved.) To speak of this fact expresses only a half-truth from the standpoint of our modern consciousness, the consciousness, that is, of the fifth post Atlantean epoch. Before that epoch people could still speak of the three kingdoms as outside of themselves, because their view of the kingdoms of nature was essentially different. In earlier times people understood them as being spiritually controlled. Modern man has lost that; he must regain the consciousness in which he looks at the three kingdoms, knowing that, as he is related downwards to them, so he is related upwards to the three kingdoms of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. The half-truth becomes a whole truth when so completed, when we can look up to the realm of these three spiritual kingdoms. Our physical body has a relation to the three natural kingdoms, our soul-spiritual to what lives in the three Hierarchies; and while we change on the one side our relation to the three kingdoms of nature, so also, we alter our relation to the three kingdoms of Hierarchies which stand above us. I want to draw your attention today to this important fact in human evolution, for by holding fast to this thought we can best celebrate the inauguration of this Branch.

If we look back to earlier epochs, which culminated in the middle of the fifteenth century, we must say, if we still keep in view the higher Hierarchies: the Beings belonging to the Angels, Archangels and Archai have always occupied themselves with man in so far as he goes through his existence between death and a new birth, but have also been occupied and concerned with him in so far as he goes through his existence here upon earth. In our age, however, this preoccupation with mankind has in a certain sense come to a conclusion. Among the many activities belonging to the beings of these three Hierarchies is this: to work together upon the pattern, or picture, which underlies the physical organization of earthly man. We enter physical existence, at birth and grow therein: the pattern or image of humanity is stamped upon us.

In the primal times of human evolution this picture was quite different and it has passed through many changes. We need only call to mind what appears when we look back into the Atlantean period or even into the Egyptian: men were different even in their outer structure. The pattern of humanity has altered and it was the task of these three Hierarchies to work at it, giving it first the form it had in Lemurian times, then the form for the Atlantean, and lastly that of the post­ Atlantean age. The Beings of these higher Hierarchies gradually came to the point where, through transformation of older forms, they brought forth the model which today under­lies the form of man.

Then is to be observed the peculiar fact, shown by true spiritual observation that, with the actual working out of this human model, the Beings of these three Hierarchies have essentially finished their task in our age. This picture of mankind, in so far as it underlies the physical organization of man, is really completed. Let this significant fact work on you—the Beings of the Hierarchy of Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai have worked for thousands and thousands of years at the accomplishment of a picture as the basis on which man's physical organization has been achieved; and we live in the age in which these Beings of the higher Hierarchies say: we have laboured at the human picture, but we have finished; we have set man as physical man into this earthly world, and this part of our task is now completed.

If we survey this fact in spiritual vision, we shall feel with terrifying force that in these times the interest of the Beings of these three higher Hierarchies has not only waned—it has vanished as far as the production of the physical picture of man is concerned. Looking back into the Graeco-Latin age, we find that they had a lively interest in the bringing­forth of the picture of humanity on Earth. today they really have no further interest in it. They feel that they have finished their task and their interest from that point of view has disappeared. Men might see this as a very important fact, piercing deeply' into human nature, if they would only take time and trouble to observe even the outer facts of human evolution. In earlier times, as we can see from what has been handed down to us so that we are able to judge of it, certain thoughts rose up in people instinctively. Those in whom this happened we call “geniuses.” today at best we “believe” that such thoughts arise in some men. There is little “genius” on Earth now, for the forces of genius no longer arise from the bodily organization because the Beings of the three higher Hierarchies no longer work on it. They have lost their interest in the bodily formation of man.

It is because modern man is complete, with reference to the formation of his body, that he is in a certain respect so arrogant. There will be no further perfecting of the physical earthly form as man passes through the remainder of our Earth-evolution; the body itself can contribute nothing more to its own perfection. What had arisen in earlier times as instinctive originality and genius in man's soul had come from the body; at the same time, because it was the work of divine beings, it had an organizing power on the body. Homer's poems, for instance, possessed an organizing force which formed the Greek body. That which arose, with such concrete force, possessed at the same time a body-building power. What we moderns proudly exhibit as our “laws of nature” are in the main abstractions and have no formative force at all. We construct abstract thoughts, unable to govern social life, and abstract “laws of nature,” because the Beings of the higher Hierarchies no longer work upon us and we have no organizing thoughts arising within us. The being of our soul has become abstract, dwelling in us in such a way that, through the body itself, it is forsaken by the activity of the beings of the three higher Hierarchies.

The important thing now is to seek afresh, from ourselves outwards, the connection with the activity of these Beings. Hitherto they have approached us; they have worked on us. Now we must work for ourselves on the soul-spiritual that is in us. The result of that work, what we unveil out of the spiritual world through spiritual investigation, will become something in our human soul which will restore the interest of the Beings of the three higher Hierarchies. They will be in the thoughts and feelings belonging to us, which we acquire out of the spiritual world. In this way we shall once again link our own being to that of the higher Hierarchies.

So important is what is happening in our time that we must describe it as “a change in the attitude of the divine world to the human world.” Till now divine Beings have worked at the perfecting of the physical picture of humanity; man must now begin to work from his own soul-content, in order to find the way back to the higher Hierarchies. The difficulty of our time is that men are so proud of their external picture of a body, which has now reached its completion, and develop thoughts independently of the picture, thoughts having no connection with the spiritual world. Our real task, thus made so much the more difficult, is to seek this connection from out of ourselves, through devotion to spiritual know­ledge, sensitiveness to it, and a will obedient to it. We can only acquire a right attitude to our times if we have felt and experienced this great revolution, which, of course, lasts through centuries. Outer observations will not help, us to this attitude; today we must have the possibility of achieving it by an inner work on our own being. We have entered the period of the Consciousness Soul, and have passed out of that of the Intellectual Soul—which was the Graeco-Latin age. The Consciousness Soul must develop more and more in such a way that the Beings of the higher Hierarchies no longer work into man, for that would darken man's consciousness—but that he may consciously raise himself to them. Man's full clear day-consciousness is established when he works his way upward to the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. Spiritual Science is the beginning of such work, for it has not sprung from any arbitrary choice or caprice, but from the recognition of this revolution in our time.

But man must consciously develop many other things as well. He has always had to live according to karma, the great law of destiny; but he has not always possessed a knowledge of it. How amazing it was when, in Lessing's Education of the Human Race, the consciousness of repeated Earth-lives sprang forth from the new spiritual evolution! We are at the beginning of a time of change in man's relationship to his fellows—that is changed, even as is his relationship to the Beings of the three higher Hierarchies. The way in which human life was nurtured in the past does indeed extend into our own, time; but we would fail in our, duty to the present if we did not emphasize that new relations between human beings must now enter. It was of no moment in earlier times, when the duty was not yet laid upon man to develop consciousness embracing previous Earth-lives, that he should have, in contact with his fellows, no realization that they stood before him as souls which had lived in the spiritual world before birth, and before that in another Earth-life. Now it is of moment—the time is beginning when we may not leave this out of consideration. I will show this in a concrete case.

Among the things we have tried to set up as a part of the life of human society, is a school based on a real new spirit of humanity, the Waldorf School, in the first instance connected with the Waldorf Astoria Cigarette Factory. The opening ceremony took place last Sunday, 7th September 1919, preceded by a course for teachers which I ventured to hold. The important thing was to establish a pedagogy, an art of teaching and education which would take into account the fact that in a child a soul is growing, which has been through other earth-lives. Hitherto the teacher, however advanced in educational ideas, has felt no more than that he was dealing with the soul of a child, whose capacities it was his duty to develop, but he could only, more or less, take note of what could be perceived through the bodily nature. That will not be enough for the teacher of the future. He will need a fine feeling for what is developing in the growing child as a result of earlier earth-lives, and this comprehension will be the great achievement in the education of the future. A social attitude must be created, built up upon a spiritual relation to other men in the consciousness that when a fellow-man stands before us, we have to deal with a soul which has been through a previous incarnation. To hold the theory, of repeated earth-lives, based on intellectual philosophy, is not enough. The theory must become so practical that it forms the foundation of something like a real art of teaching and education. That is what first gives theory a living quality. It is natural that there is as yet very little willingness to receive such things and that the spiritual attitude of men who do realize the need of the times should be looked at askance. Further, it is necessary not merely to converse in terms of some sort of spiritual view of the world, but to establish institutions concretely and in the full light of knowledge, not only to profess some formula but to carry this knowledge right into the lives of men. Then that attitude will make itself evident as the foundation for a new pedagogy; the old times and the new meet in that phrase.

I have taken the trouble to find out a great deal about what is demanded in education on various sides. To give but one example: the question is often raised whether education should be more “formal” (classical) or “technical.” Should teaching be directed to fitting a pupil for this or that calling, so that he may be suited to serve the State or conduct other business; or should it aim at calling forth in him the common being of man and “developing what is universal in a humanistic sense?” All the arguments on the question are: simply words, words, because fundamentally what is said and what is the inwardly grasped truth have no correspondence at all. Is a man, then, anything but what he grows into? How is it, for instance, that men who follow certain callings in public life are fitted for them? It is due to the work of bygone generations; the public life of today is only the result of what they brought into being. How about the earlier teachers—did they educate “technically” not “formally?” Certainly not the latter. But it is all one and the same thing! Men dispute over things that are not really different. What is really important is this: that in the children of today we have the tendencies which will grow in the next generation and the one after that—which means that education is prophetic. “Technical” or “humanist” education are mere words. What matters is that we should educate prophetically, foreseeing the task of the next generation. That does concern the world, urgently.

“So difficult to understand,” people comment on all this! They must take the trouble to understand it, however, otherwise they will more and more fall out of the general evolution of the time—a momentous alternative, indeed! We must become conscious, in the most serious meaning of the word, of two necessities—first, the discovery of our connection with the activity of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies, and second, the establishment of a new relationship of man to man in the educational sphere. No longer must we contemplate mankind as simply the personalities standing before us, but as souls which have come over from earlier earth-conditions. We must keep that fact in our consciousness, but it is important to find a concrete relationship to the Spirit. Certainly what we know of karma, of repeated earth-lives and the constitution of man is a theoretic view of the world and mere theory will not carry us very far. Only when this theoretic view becomes “Life” is it what man needs for the immediate future—truths concerning the relation of man to the higher Hierarchies and about karma. A third thing may be added.

From my description in Knowledge of Higher Worlds you know that man, when he wishes to look into the spiritual world, must in some way pass through the experience, we call “the crossing of the Threshold.” It is described there by drawing attention to three forces of soul (or mind) in man, thinking, feeling and willing, and showing how the three, which in physical life work chaotically into each other, become ordered and self-dependent. This is the result of passing over the Threshold. In many ways the life-course of human evolution corresponds to that of the individual man, but not completely. This, the crossing of the Threshold, which a man must experience consciously if he wants to reach vision in the spiritual worlds, will be experienced unconsciously by the whole of humanity in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. They have no choice, they go through it unconsciously—humanity, not the individual, but humanity in, general, and the individual together with the totality of human beings. What does that imply?

What now acts in man unitedly in thinking, feeling and willing, in the future will take on a separable character, and will assert itself in various fields. Man is just at the stage of passing unconsciously through a very significant gateway, easily perceived by the forces of seership. When a man goes through, this “crossing of the Threshold,” the spheres of thinking, feeling and willing fall apart. This imposes on us the obligation to shape the forms of external existence so that this revolution in our inner life may be carried through the external life as well. Since thought, feeling, and will, are to be more independent in the life of man, we must provide a basis on which that independence can be built up healthily. What has hitherto interacted chaotically in public life must be divided into three separate fields, those of economic life, political or juridical life, and the cultural or spiritual life. This demand for the “Threefold Order” is connected with the secret of man's development in this age.

Do not imagine that what is to become effective as the Threefold Social Order is a capricious, invention. It is born from the most intimate knowledge of human evolution, of what must come to pass if the aim of this evolution is not to be belied. The difficulty of finding an aim of a spiritual kind, of even admitting such aims, is one of the reasons for our having been involved in the terrible world­catastrophe of the last few years. From this chaos we must work our way out; the course of human evolution itself dictates that. For this reason, I think that the necessity for the Threefold Order will only be thoroughly recognized by those who start from an anthroposophical attitude, from knowledge of what is actually happening in human evolution. As yet there is no disposition to recognize such facts. Men like to attend to the problem immediately before them, to avoid involving themselves in aims of the deeper questions of existence.

This, it is which weighs so heavily on the heart of a man who can see into these secrets—humanity is little disposed to heed what is most necessary for it. Yet it is impossible to wish to remain stationary in the forms of ideas already expressed. We may say that all pessimism is wrong; but it does not, there­fore, follow that all optimism must be right. But it is right to appeal to the will. It is not a question of whether a thing happens this way or that, but that we use our forces of will in that direction where lies the true course of human evolution. Over and over again we must impress upon ourselves that; the old era is done with and that to reach a proper relation to the present we must close our account with the past. The new era will not allow us to reckon with it otherwise than spiritually. We dare not deceive ourselves into thinking it possible to carry over into the new what has been dear to us in the old; we must begin by turning to active new thoughts in outer life. Two paths stretch before man­kind. One leads through the “mechanization” of the spirit; very mechanical has the spirit become, especially as abstract “Laws of Nature,” which man has also carried over as laws governing social life. Mechanization of the spirit and “vegetization” of the soul. The plant-world sleeps; the human soul, too, tends to sleep. The most important events of the last years have literally been “slept through.” And the same thing is true of the important occurrences of today.

In Central Europe men have accepted the falsehoods told them from day to day about leading personalities in the world, and the same thing is being carried on now without their noticing it. They study the rate of exchange and find that the mark has fallen to 2.15 centimes, but I have not yet met anyone who sees the connection of the fall in the mark with other obvious events. Three syllables—I can only hint at them—would give the reason for the fall in the mark; but men's souls prefer to sleep, to sleep so soundly that in mid-Europe great disappointment has come over what we looked forward to with joyful anticipation. We were to have “double intelligence” in particular elections, because women were to take part in them. Then we had the “National Assembly”; but the intelligence, as compared with the old Reich­stag, was not double. We have seen the old parties continuing in existence at a time when they should have vanished, root and branch—and men have no inkling of what has happened, for their souls are asleep. Mechanization of the spirit, and souls as much awake as a cabbage [Vegetarisierung der Seelen]!

Look eastward. There we, see the active beginning of the “animalization” of bodies. The world of spirit is becoming mechanized in the American mechanical atmosphere, bodies are becoming animalized in the Bolshevism of the East. Criticism out of the emotions, comments on this and that; but what true life is, men will not grasp.

So humanity has its choice today—to go along the path which leads to mechanization of the spirit, plant-like sleep of the soul, and animalization of the body. Or to seek, on the other hand, to discover the way to the re-awakening of the spirit through the impulses corresponding to the age of the consciousness soul; to find the re-awakening of the spirit in the connection between the human soul and the activity of the higher Hierarchies, in the recognition of the fact that the soul comes forth from earlier earth-conditions, in the threefold ordering of social life. These things are all intimately bound up with each other. Those who are united in the movement we know as Anthroposophical Spiritual Science should feel themselves as a centre from which may radiate the force for this new social edifice. Much that comes from other sides for the reorganization of social life may be useful, but it must be worked on, for only spiritual impulses can bring genuine social transformation. The best understanding of these conditions should be expected from circles belonging to this Movement.

I have put before you some of the important things which may give you an idea of the necessities of our present age. I speak in these new rooms with the wish that in our work here we may always retain the consciousness of these truths, so important for human evolution. The more we carry such a consciousness into our anthroposophic work, the deeper is its consecration. And these rooms will be best consecrated through our feelings and perceptions, drawn forth from such deep sources of reality and truth.

[ 1 ] Since we last met here, our anthroposophical movement has made some important progress. After I left here, we prepared a long series of lectures in Stuttgart, which were initially to be given within Germany. My work in mid-February was devoted to preparing these lectures. And then, from about mid-February, a larger number of our friends, led by the teachers of the Waldorf School and the Stuttgart staff, but also including a number of younger friends who had only recently joined the anthroposophical movement, began a somewhat more extensive series of lectures in the most important cities in Germany, which will not be completed until the Stuttgart university course begins on March 12.

[ 2 ] These lectures arose from the realization that something radical must be done for the anthroposophical movement and everything that is its result — or at least should be — and everything connected with it. It is, of course, extremely difficult to fill halls to capacity in cities where only small groups of our friends are working for our cause. But in these difficult times, everything that is possible must be done.

[ 3 ] The lectures were specifically intended to on the one hand, to show how anthroposophical spiritual science has to position itself in relation to the great cultural and civilizational questions of the present, and then to show what consequences for social life must follow from this anthroposophical basic view. The tenor of the lectures that have just been given and are still being given in a large number of German cities was precisely in this direction. Dr. Boos has contributed to this series of lectures from here and will continue to do so in various German cities, and we will see whether this strong initiative we have attempted to take meets with understanding in our present time, with the understanding that is so necessary for our present time.

[ 4 ] After the preparatory lectures for this lecture series were completed on February 17, I was able to travel to Holland to give a series of lectures for the anthroposophical spiritual movement. The lectures I gave there were essentially aimed at showing how anthroposophical spiritual science arises from all the demands of contemporary civilization, and how this anthroposophical spiritual science can be something essential and important for those souls of the present who are truly seeking today. I gave a series of lectures in a number of Dutch cities, initially on two topics: “Anthroposophical spiritual science in its essence and in its relationship to the great civilizational questions of the present day,” and then “Questions of education, teaching, and practical life from the perspective of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.”

[ 5 ] I spoke on these questions on February 19 in Amsterdam, on the 20th in Hilversum, on the 21st in Utrecht; on February 22, I was able to give a slide lecture in the afternoon about our building in Dornach. On the 23rd, I gave a lecture in The Hague, on the 24th again in Utrecht; on the 25th, I gave a lecture at the Technical University in Delft on economic organization under the influence of the threefold social order. The lecture for the 26th had been announced but was canceled because I had to rest my voice, as I had to give a lecture to our university friends in The Hague on the morning of the 27th and, in the evening of the same day, I had another public lecture in The Hague on educational and teaching issues from the perspective of spiritual science. On the afternoon of the 28th, I gave a slide lecture in The Hague about our building in Dornach, and on the same evening I gave the second public lecture in Amsterdam. On March 1, I gave a lecture in the university auditorium in Amsterdam on the topic “Anthroposophy and Philosophy.” On March 2, I gave a public lecture in Rotterdam. On March 3, I gave a public lecture in Hengelo in Holland. This is a place that is particularly interesting because it is, I would say, basically an artificially created place. In the 1960s and 1970s, industrialists first established special welfare facilities there, and Hengelo gradually developed out of what was actually industrial-social thinking. This becomes particularly clear when you visit the nursery school there. I only had a short time there, but I visited the classes, and it was particularly striking that these little children are different from, say, those you find today in the first grade of a Waldorf school. Those children are simply taken from the population, as is the result of today's civilization. It's different in Hengelo. In Hengelo, there were initially certain industrial welfare institutions, and the people who settled there worked there in the 1970s; their children now work in the industrial establishments that have sprung up there, and the children of these working people, the second generation, were now in kindergarten. You could see it very clearly; they are not children picked up off the street, but have been artificially nurtured, if I may say so, by several generations of a civilization that emerged, in a sense, from the thinking of that time, naturally to their advantage, but nevertheless artificially nurtured, and they bear the mark of an artificial civilization. It is, of course, difficult everywhere to counter the prejudice that is so prevalent in the world today, especially when one finds oneself, I would say, in such an environment. I have indicated to you in various lectures how, especially at the beginning of the last third of the 19th century, we had a wave of liberalism across Europe, a wave of free thinking which, if it had been able to find a continuation on the spiritual side, would probably have achieved something extremely significant. Instead, we were driven back into reaction because we had a materialistic scientific spirit that no longer corresponded to the liberal aspirations of the time. It is strange how karmic things work.

[ 6 ] For example, in the last few days, I gave this lecture in Hengelo for the local industrialists and people associated with them, and I saw how what has actually been broken off, what is lacking only in its spiritual continuation, is still having an effect on the present. When I came back here, I happened to pick up a book from my bookshelf that is of some interest in connection with these things. This book, which is not particularly significant as a work—it is a book that deals with philosophical questions—was written by the former Bonn University philosopher Jürgen Bona Meyer; but it is the copy that belonged to the well-known materialist Arnold Dodel, who worked in Zurich. In this book, you can see how far he read it. Up to, I believe, page 114—it has, let's say, 460 pages—there are pencil marks and notes everywhere, and from these notes one can see how, at that time, materialism fought “bullishly” against what was still emerging from the old philosophy, albeit in the clumsy manner of the Bonn University philosopher Bona Meyer. ; how materialism fights, how materialism quarrels, but also how materialism appears with incredible arrogance. You see, my dear friends, that is what broke the momentum of a better will at that time and what shows that it is absolutely necessary to delve deeper into a spiritual life if we want to make progress in civilization, if we do not want to rush headlong into decline, which is so clearly perceptible everywhere, especially in the economic sphere, I would say, which is obvious to everyone, if we do not want to rush headlong into decline. For the fact that the sixties and seventies did not allow a spiritual life to arise is what has actually caused all the misfortune of recent times.

[ 7 ] In addition to these lectures, which I gave in various places, we had eurythmy performances on February 20 in Hilversum, February 22 in Amsterdam, February 26 in Rotterdam, and February 27 in The Hague. On February 27, there were three events in The Hague: a branch event in the morning, a eurythmy performance in the afternoon, and the public lecture in the evening. Then there was another eurythmy event on March 2 in Amsterdam, which I was unable to attend, but Mr. Stuten gave the introductory remarks because I had to give my public lecture in Rotterdam that day.

[ 8 ] What can be said here is that everywhere there is a clearly perceptible longing among people for spiritual nourishment, for that which can advance the soul. Eurythmic performances have been planned and some have already been held in Cologne and Essen, and will be held in Mannheim, Karlsruhe, Freiburg, and Stuttgart. The other things I would like to mention are those that have often had to be discussed here, which accompany our movement like a shadow; the more our movement proves its inner necessity, the more intense the opposition becomes. This opposition has the peculiar characteristic that as it spreads and grows, it simultaneously becomes increasingly mean and base. For example, on February 28 in Amsterdam, when I entered the concert hall, a man was standing there distributing leaflets containing, in a very sleazy manner, roughly the same things that are being spread here by Pastor Kully's newspaper and other similar publications.

[ 9 ] So you see, these things are not localized, but spread all over the world, and everything is being done to spread them. The opposition, I must mention again and again, is much better organized, much more active than the Anthroposophical Society is organized in this direction or develops organized activity. On the contrary, when an activity is undertaken here or there, numerous friends of ours who do not like it want us to let ourselves be beaten up and carry around the bruises without defending ourselves in any way.

[ 10 ] Cute things come to mind when one considers, for example, the, one might say, strangely appearing “School of Wisdom” in Darmstadt run by Count Hermann Keyserling. It has published a kind of brochure, but a rather thick booklet, “Der Weg zur Vollendung” (The Way to Perfection), which appeared with the well-known so-called “belly band” that advertised books carry, and there it is advertised that my attacks would be “dealt with”: “Dealing with Steiner's attacks.” — First of all, this writing is actually extremely comical. What someone who has read a little of this pamphlet told me a few days ago is almost true, namely that its actual content is that anyone who has not moved in the circles of the School of Wisdom in Darmstadt is actually a stupid fellow in this world! That is indeed more or less the content of this “Path to Perfection.” But the following is also quite cute, for example. You know that I deliberately called Count Hermann Keyserling a liar in my public lecture in Stuttgart because he really did lie, and he took offense at that; while he says that the other judgments I have made about his philosophy can be left alone — he leaves them alone! — he turns against this accusation with an extremely significant justification: He says: If I had simply said that what he claimed was not true, then he would understand; but he did not have time to do any special research on Steiner, so one must understand that he could also spread incorrect things. Now, you see, that is so characteristic of all these ignorant people of the present day, who, in addition to being ignorant, are also lazy, terribly lazy, and even derive a certain right from their laziness not to know certain things. So when you accuse them of lying, they say they don't have time to research Steiner, which means they don't have time to convince themselves of the things they claim. Of course, they don't need to research Steiner, but then they should keep their mouths shut about what they don't know — I want to be polite. If they keep their mouths shut, no one will reproach them; but if they trumpet incorrect things and then say they don't have time to learn the correct things, then that is indeed a symptom of the terrible moral and intellectual decay of our so-called intellectuals today, especially of such parlor intellectuals as Count Hermann Keyserling.

[ 11 ] What is remarkable about this is that it is already clear today that these people are incapable of doing anything scientific, simply because they are far too comfortable in their scientific or literary positions to seriously engage with the humanities. People like Professor Fuchs in Göttingen are particularly in this situation. Because these people have no scientific understanding of the humanities, they resort to other means, and these other means consist of destroying the movement in some questionable way. When I arrived back in Stuttgart from Holland, I was surprised to find that the article in the Frankfurter Zeitung, which had of course been published in the meantime, had gone further and was now entitled, because of our measures regarding the Upper Silesian question, “Traitors to Germanness,” and talked about treason and all sorts of other things. It is very characteristic that these things are being used to destroy this matter from behind.

[ 12 ] Well, these things are only proof of the low means to which our representatives of the present intellectual life resort, and you can see from these things that not a single word spoken here has been unjustified, that I was compelled to characterize our educational institutions, especially the universities, in this way. That we need a thorough metamorphosis here, that we need a thorough reorganization of our universities in particular, is something that must be recognized more and more. And from this point of view, it is certainly to be welcomed with joy that, despite the fierce opposition that arises from the other side, a small circle of university students is now coming together to work on introducing anthroposophically oriented spiritual science into the university system. This is evident in the preparation of such undertakings as the Stuttgart university course and the university course to be held here, which will begin on April 3.

[ 13 ] That, my dear friends, is what I wanted to share with you to give you a picture of the activities of the last few weeks.

[ 14 ] What I would like to discuss with you today is a kind of summary of truths that we already know from one source or another, but which must repeatedly come to the fore in our minds if we want to draw inspiration from the depths of spiritual scientific knowledge for what is necessary for human activity in the present.

[ 15 ] I have often spoken to you about how different currents interact to form the world in which we live, and we are familiar with the terminology: Luciferic, Ahrimanic, and that which is, in a sense, the equilibrium between the two currents and which is best expressed for us when we speak of the Christ current. You know that the central group of our building is intended to express precisely the mystery of this trinity of the Luciferic, Ahrimanic, and Christian.

[ 16 ] When we look at the human being, who is ultimately the confluence of the forces of the cosmos, we can see exactly how these three currents, one might say, work through him. We know that we must clearly distinguish in the human being what is essentially — you know how to understand this — the head or head organization, which is also essentially the carrier of the nerve-sense system. We know that we must then distinguish the rhythmic system, which as the most important part comprises the respiratory rhythm and the circulation of the blood, that is, everything that proceeds rhythmically, and that the third member of the outer human being is the metabolic system, which is closely connected with the development of the limb system. But we also know that we can understand this trinity of the human being in a spiritual sense. For the nervous-sensory organization, the head or brain organization, is essentially the carrier of everything that is imagination and thinking. The rhythmic organization is the carrier of everything that is feeling life, and the metabolic organization is the carrier of the life of the will.

[ 17 ] Now let us be clear about the following: We only have real daytime consciousness, daytime consciousness permeated by full light, through our nerve-sense system, through the life of imagination that develops in this nerve-sense system. The rhythmic system, or, we could also say, the chest system, is the carrier of the life of feeling. This is where feelings develop in the middle part of the soul. And that in which feelings have their physical basis is the rhythmic system. This life of feeling, as we have often said, is not permeated by clear, bright consciousness in the same way as the realm of ideas. If we approach human soul life with an open mind, we cannot help but say that emotional life has no greater clarity of consciousness than dream life. Dream life, which takes place in images, and emotional life are equally conscious and equally unconscious. They only appear different because emotional life is not experienced in images, but in something spiritual and essential that does not take shape as an image. Dreams are lived out in images. This is what distinguishes emotional life from dream life. But in terms of the intensity of consciousness, the two do not differ.

[ 18 ] Completely shrouded in unconsciousness, as the human being otherwise is when asleep, from falling asleep to waking up, is then the life of the will, whose physical basis is the system of metabolism and limbs. In relation to the life of the will, the human being, while awake, is entirely a sleeping being. By will, the human being actually sees only what comes about through his will, which he then imagines, just as he imagines something else. But what is actually active in the will, the inner soul experience in the act of willing, is actually overslept, just as the life of the feelings is dreamt away.

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[ 19 ] But now let us nevertheless consider this sleeping life of the will, or rather its physical counterpart, this sleeping life of metabolism and limbs. The human being does not stand with his whole being merely in the physical natural environment, but he stands in a spiritual world. He stands with his whole being, regardless of the degree of consciousness in which this being appears, in the spiritual cosmos. Now let us consider the will. We can say something like this: if this is the spiritual cosmos (see drawing, light color), which I do not wish to characterize further for the time being — you know, “spiritual cosmos” is a very universal term, one can only ever take out a part of it — then this (red) would be a certain part of the spiritual cosmos, namely that to which our will or our metabolism and limb life primarily belong. So that when you think of the will life as separate from the human being as spiritual, and the metabolic-limb life as physical, and then ask yourself: How is this integrated into a spiritual cosmos? — this whole relationship to a spiritual cosmos should first be represented by this drawing. And for us the question arises: What is the white here? We know that the red is the human life of the will, viewed spiritually, or the human life of metabolism and limbs, viewed physically; but what is that to which this life belongs, so to speak? I would like to express myself in other words. When you look at any part of the human organism, say the liver, you say to yourself: this liver belongs to the whole organism and has a meaning within the whole organism. In the same way, within a large organism, a world organism, which is represented here in white, we can regard the whole human metabolic-limb system, the will system, as a limb. And then the question arises: What is this large cosmic organism in which the human life of will and the life of metabolism and limbs are, as it were, embedded?

[ 20 ] You see, what man is embedded in with regard to his third limb is the cosmic life of those spiritual beings whom the Bible calls Elohim. In fact, just as we live in the outer nature that we see through our senses, so we live with this part of our being, which we actually sleep through in its activity, the life of the Elohim.

[ 21 ] Now, we want to discuss these things in more detail; I will first just characterize them for you. Let us consider this life of the Elohim throughout cosmic evolution. If you read my “Outline of Esoteric Science,” you will find that these are the spirits of form; they arose from earlier stages of development. If we go back, we come to the earlier stage of development of the cosmic lunar existence. There were these spirits of form, archai, primal forces, primal beginnings. If we go back to the solar existence, they were archangels; if we go back to the Saturn existence, they were angels. So since that time they have ascended and entered into the Elohim existence, into the existence of the spirits of form.

[ 22 ] When we consider our human development, we must say to ourselves: We are also developing; when will we reach the level where these spirits are now? — We will reach this level when we have passed through the Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan stages of existence, and are in what comes next. If you add up what I have described in my “Secret Science,” you have seven successive stages of development, seven successive, one might also say, spheres of development. And the spirits of form, the Elohim, have entered the eighth sphere of development.

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[ 23 ] That is what I would say characterizes the situation of the Elohim. When the Earth came into being, they were at the stage that we humans would characterize as volcanic existence. They ascended to the eighth sphere. Now the great question, the great cosmic question was: What is the situation with human beings during this earthly existence, or what was it? You see, human beings were in a position to remain a link in the development of the Elohim, just as they had been before. The Elohim developed through Saturn, Sun, and Moon existence to the stage I have now described to you. There they carried human beings in their womb, as you will find described in my “Secret Science.” But everything I have described there rested in the womb of the Elohim. It is described as if I were describing the development of the liver. When you describe it in its stages, it rests in the womb of the human being. Thus, the entire development of the human being that I have described rested in the womb of the Elohim.

[ 24 ] When the earth came into being, the question arose: Will human beings simply remain a dependent member of the great organism that ascended to its eighth sphere, the great cosmic organism of the Elohim, or will they develop toward freedom, will they become independent? — This question: Will human beings become independent? — was decided by a very specific cosmic fact. In relation to our soul system of will and our physical system of metabolism and limbs, we are indeed parts of the Elohim; there we are asleep. There we are not separated. We are separated in relation to our head system.

[ 25 ] And how did this separation come about? — This separation came about because certain spiritual beings, which in the course of evolution would have become Elohim if they had progressed properly, did not become Elohim but remained behind, remaining at the stage of Archai or Archangeloi. We can therefore say that these are beings who, if they had progressed properly, could have become Elohim. But they did not progress properly; they remained behind. If we look at them occultly today, they belong to the same sphere as the angels and archangels; but they are not of the same kind as the angeloi or archangeloi or archai, but are actually of the same kind as the Elohim, as the spirits of form, only they have fallen behind in their development and have therefore entered the ranks of the angels and archangels, They manifest themselves in the same sphere, and their activity has therefore had to be limited to not acting on the whole human being and on that which has been acquired primarily on earth by human beings: the metabolic-limb system. Instead, they act on the human head system. So we say: In relation to the head system of the human being — if I draw this here as the opposite pole of the will system, of the metabolic-limb system (see drawing on p. 257, pink) — it is not this great cosmic organism of the Elohim that is at work, but the backward Elohim, whom I will draw like this (yellow). Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai also work within this sphere. These beings, who are the Elohim who remained behind, are actually the opponents of the other Elohim. The other Elohim cut humanity off from themselves, but they could not give humanity freedom because they have influence over the whole human being. In contrast, the backward spirits of form limit themselves to the head, and in this way they gave humans reason and understanding. These are essentially the Luciferic spirits. As you can now see from the illustration, they are will-givers on a lower level. The Elohim give the will to the whole human being, but they give the head its will. Otherwise, the head would be filled with ideas devoid of will. Ideas become reasonable only when they are imbued with will and become the power of judgment. This comes from these spirits.

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[ 26 ] You may now see from this illustration, from a certain point of view, how one must not use philistine concepts when attempting to grasp cosmic opposites. One must not simply look down on the Luciferic spirits, if I may express myself thus, but one must be clear that these are spirits of a much higher order than man himself. They are not actually enemies of man; they are enemies of the Elohim because they have remained behind, and they limit themselves to the human head. That is what we must consider here.

[ 27 ] If you now imagine what these spirits would actually achieve if they had complete freedom over human evolution, you would come to the following conclusion. You will say to yourself: Well, when the Earth came into being, the Elohim rose to their dignity, while the others remained behind at earlier stages of development; they are therefore the bearers of what is imprinted on humans primarily from the past, from the Saturn, Sun, and Moon existences, the bearers of what is to be placed in humans from the sublime past, which we have undergone in the three previous metamorphoses of development.

[ 28 ] Because they remained behind, in a sense opposing what the Elohim intended for the people of Earth, we can also characterize them in relation to human beings by saying: These spirits, who are actually spirits of form, but who oppose us in the spiritual world among the hosts of angeloi, archangeloi, and archai, impress upon human beings everything that prevents them from descending to full earthly existence. They actually want to keep them above the mineral kingdom. They would prefer that human beings experience only what is in the sprouting plant world, what lives in the animal world, what is in the human world itself. But they do not want them to descend into the dead mineral world. And in particular, these spirits have no inclination whatsoever to allow human beings to learn anything connected with our technology. They are, so to speak, angry about this. They want to keep human beings in a spiritual sphere; they do not want them to descend to the earthly realm. That is why they are also enemies of the Elohim, because the Elohim, who have solidified man in the dust of the earth, as the Bible puts it, have pulled him down into the mineral kingdom. However, it is to this that he owes his freedom. But freedom, the freedom that man is supposed to experience in the earthly realm, is not really important to the spirits who want to keep man free from the earthly realm.

[ 29 ] Now, human beings have been placed, so to speak, by the Elohim into the mineral-earthly world. But this has in turn given other spirits access. Now pay attention to the difference between the spirits I have just spoken of and the spirits I am about to speak of. Those I have just spoken of are in the sphere where the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai are. We find them among the hosts of these spirits, and they are the ones who bring mobility, active reason, imagination, artistic activity, and so on into the human head. But because human beings have been pushed down into the mineral kingdom, because the Elohim have given them independence, but this independence is not complete independence, for they experience it while asleep in their will and in their metabolic-limb system, other spirits have gained access. These other spirits sneak into evolution, so to speak. The spirits I have spoken of were present during evolution, but they were left behind; they were unable to participate, but they are Elohim who have been left behind. They were present in the cosmos with the Elohim and do not want to let humans descend completely to Earth. But now humans have descended to Earth through the Elohim. Now other spirits are coming from outside. We find them when we turn our occult gaze to the hosts of cherubim, seraphim, and thrones. Some of these spirits, which actually belong to this species, have also been left behind. They did not enter these hosts; they have only become spirits of wisdom. These spiritual beings reveal themselves in such a way that one can say of them: they actually want to begin a completely new creation on earth; they want to preserve human beings on earth. Just as human beings are embodied in the mineral kingdom through the Elohim, they want to take this as a beginning and continue the development from this beginning. They want to wipe out all the past: Oh, what's the past, they say, that doesn't matter to us; human beings once came down into the mineral kingdom, so let's tear them away from the Elohim, who don't need them; let's tear them away from the Elohim and start a new evolution. Let them be the first link, so that they can live on and on!

[ 30 ] These are the Ahrimanic beings. These Ahrimanic beings want to wipe out all the past and leave human beings only with what they have achieved directly on earth.

[ 31 ] You see how the Elohim stand in the middle. The Elohim want to link the past with the future. The spirits I described earlier want to imbue human beings with their sublime past. The other spirits want to wipe out the entire past, take away from the Elohim what human beings are made of, the dust of the earth, and make a new beginning, starting the development from the earth. Away with this “balloon” of the cosmos, with Saturn, the sun, and the moon; none of this should have any meaning for humans. A new evolution should begin with the earth; it should be a new Saturn, then the sun should come, and so on. That is the ideal of these other beings. They storm into the unconscious of human beings, into the life of the will, into the life of the metabolism and limbs, they storm in there. They are the race among the spiritual beings who want to teach human beings a special interest in everything mineral and material, who want to teach human beings an interest in everything that is, for example, external, mechanical, and mechanical. They would like nothing better than to destroy everything that the earth has brought with it from the old moon, to see the animal world disappear, the physical human world disappear, the plant world disappear, so that only the physical laws remain from the mineral kingdom, but especially that human beings be taken away from the earth; and they would like to form a new Saturn out of machines, a new world made entirely of machines. That is how the world should continue. That is actually their ideal. In the external scientific realm, they have the ideal of turning everything into matter, of mechanizing everything. In the religious realm, we can clearly perceive these two opposites.

[ 32 ] In earlier times — you know this from other lectures I have given here — people were more exposed to spirits of the former kind, which act on the head. In Plato, for example, you still find that when people spoke of the eternity of the human soul, they spoke in particular of pre-birth existence, of what human beings actually remember from their previous existence. This ceases the further we go into the Middle Ages, until the Church completely forbids belief in pre-existence; and today, belief in the pre-existence of human beings is considered heresy by the Church. So on the one hand there is the inclination toward knowledge of pre-existence; on the other hand there is the dehumanized Church, which continues human life only beyond death and then allows it to be only a result of what man is here on earth.

[ 33 ] There you have it as a creed: what man experiences here in the physical body, he carries with him through death. His soul always looks back on it. — In fact, the whole of the following life is only the continuation of what was here between his birth and death. This is exactly what the Ahrimanic spirits want. These are precisely the important questions facing humanity today: Should the Ahrimanic belief continue to proliferate, as if there were only one life after death, or should the awareness of pre-existence awaken again and should pre-existence and post-existence then be connected through what is the middle equilibrium?

[ 34 ] This is what spiritual science must seek: this Christ principle, the equilibrium, the balance between the Luciferic-Ahrimanic — on the one hand, pre-existence, and on the other, post-existence. These are the important questions of the present, that after humanity has devoted itself for a time to the Ahrimanic belief in mere post-existence, we must again add the consciousness, the knowledge of pre-existence, in order thereby to arrive at an understanding of the whole of humanity.

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The truth of spiritual science and the practical life demands of the present. At the same time, a defense of anthroposophical spiritual science against its accusers.

Ladies and gentlemen, One might imagine that even the title of today's lecture would give rise to misgivings here and there. The title combines two aspects of spiritual science: the spiritual science that I have been privileged to represent here in Stuttgart for almost two decades and that is primarily concerned, as many believe, with the highest spiritual, with the supersensible aspects of the human being, and the directly practical life challenges of the present. And it will be my task today to overcome such prejudices, which the two fields cannot be reconciled with, and to show precisely how much depends on a correct understanding of the connection between spiritual knowledge and the most immediate practical demands of life, which we need today to get out of the great distress and misery of the time. I would therefore like to start with something directly practical.

Perhaps it might seem as if this has no connection with my lecture today: I would like to start with the temporary end of the English miners' strike, which was so frightening for the civilized world. The outcome, as you know, was quite uncertain for quite some time. The strike has been settled for the time being, settled through the negotiations of the parliamentarians with the working population. Anyone who has taken note of the way in which the parliamentary body and the working population have settled this strike through negotiations and who has an unbiased view of the course of events will have to say to himself: The way in which the measures have been agreed, it depends entirely on the development of the English economic situation in the next few years how quickly this strike will have to be repeated. For the question is: Will it be possible for the English economy to fulfill the conditions that have been agreed upon? In all likelihood it will not. It may be said that the clever Lloyd George sensed this. But this man has the ability to achieve results everywhere through forceful parliamentary speech. He has less opportunity to understand the conditions of reality and to bring about something through his measures that could have the necessary duration. He probably foresaw that too. That is why he advocated measures to the parties that would serve to bring into effect the forces of the state machinery the moment such a strike recurred. Now something very strange happened: the parties of the right, well into the center, were actually afraid of such measures. They did not really want these measures to become law. Everyone spoke out in favor of not letting these measures become law because they did not dare to point out what strict measures the state would take if the strike were to be repeated. Lloyd George gave a half-hour speech, and all doubts and fears were swept away. The speech had the effect that what he intended was seen as a necessity of state. This man, the very type of parliamentarian, had overwhelmed the people with his speech.

It is important to point this out if we want to consider the most important thing in the state of mind of the present, because it is actually in the processes of practical life that we see this state of mind of the present most clearly. The man had something to defend, something that pointed entirely to uncertainty, something whose outcome could not be known. He had no ideas that could have led to measures that seemed realistic, that would have been such that one could have said: these parties are throwing something into economic reality that promises to really help this economy. He had nothing like that. But he had the speech that dispelled people's fear, that motivated them to do something, which may not be realistic, but which first of all satisfies the way of thinking, the attitude, the state of mind.

This is characteristic of the present time. Above all, it is characteristic of what has emerged more and more in recent times, and is only now, in this time of great and terrible need, beginning to falter. It is characteristic of the particular conception of parliamentarism and its tasks. In parliamentarism, there are people who have general ideas about the course of necessary events, and there are people who take measures according to the interests they have, or even according to general, more or less even abstract ideas that they have of reality. And basically, for a long time within modern civilization, it was decided to intervene in reality based on ideas that could be talked about beautifully, but which did not have the power to intervene in reality based on an understanding of reality. And basically, this kind of thinking, this kind of outlook of present-day humanity is such that this outlook, this way of thinking, is alien to reality, that it is powerless to think out of reality and in turn to work through thoughts into reality.

Many examples could be cited of contemporary events that would prove the same as the settlement of the English miners' strike. One could point to many things that would show how people's way of thinking floats, as it were, above reality, but how, precisely at the points where decisions have to be made, the ideas that float above reality and should make the decisions cannot make them. Despite our materialism, despite our naturalism, despite our science that insists on experience, we have become a humanity that is out of touch with reality. This is basically the tragic fate of the present, that we have become a reality-alienated humanity. And do not the events of recent years stand before all of European humanity in their devastating, destructive effect? And do they not face the powerlessness of thoughts, the powerlessness of ideas, to conquer these events, to give them a form within which man can really live?

What does the truth of spiritual science have to do with all this? To answer this question, I must refer to a few things that I have repeatedly dealt with here in Stuttgart over many years, albeit before a smaller circle, I must first point out that this spiritual science is based on a special research method of soul development that conveys to man the view of his eternal core: of what man is before birth, before conception, and what he will become after death, but also what the soul and spiritual essence of man works on in the world of the senses between birth and death.

But in recent years, in addition to the spiritual-scientific knowledge that the human soul needs, in addition to the human yearning for knowledge, all kinds of practical institutions have been established. The Federation for the Threefold Social Organism has been added, which, from the particular type of spiritual-scientific way of thinking, wants to work in the social shaping of contemporary life in such a way that not ideas floating above reality in cloud cuckoo land are to prevail, but ideas that come from reality and can therefore also shape reality. Ideas that are practical in terms of reality are to be juxtaposed with social demands precisely from this spiritual science.

And it was out of this spiritual science here in Stuttgart that the Waldorf School was created, whose pedagogy and didactics, whose entire educational system does not seek to spread the world view of spiritual science, to instill it in children - that is not the case at all - but to apply the teaching and educational practice in the school that can arise from spiritual science. The Waldorf school wants to apply those practices through which the child, because it is educated by the spirit, can also become a truly practical human being through this spiritual education, to use Goethe's words, a human being who can stand in reality with his whole personality.

And even in recent times, the spiritual scientific way of thinking has given rise to the very practical institution of the “Coming Day”, which, from its circle, would like to have a healthy effect on economic life by replacing mere business routine with spiritual business and economic practice. And if these things are understood, my dear audience, then they will undoubtedly have many other things in their wake, because spiritual science is there for life, not for an unworldly brooding and pondering. In order to recognize it in this task, however, it must indeed be pointed out with some reference to its special nature.

This spiritual science, as it is meant here, grows directly out of the scientific spirit of the present, that scientific spirit that has emerged in the last three to four centuries within the development of civilized humanity, which has produced the special scientific attitude that today has such great authority. And I must point out, even if it may not seem popular at first, how, on the one hand, the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that is meant here grows out of today's recognized science, but how, on the other hand, it completely transforms this recognized science, making it something completely different. The Dornach School of Spiritual Science course last September/October was intended to show that these individual sciences can become something different through spiritual science than they were before. This is also what the School of Spiritual Science course announced today and organized by the School of Spiritual Science students is intended to show.

To look at what spiritual science actually is, let us first consider the nature of today's recognized science, rightly recognized in its fields. This science, which has indeed celebrated its great triumphs particularly in the field of natural knowledge, and which has provided humanity with such indispensable services, attaches particular importance not only to recognizing the laws of nature, but also the laws of the historical development of humanity and other things, including social life, which are completely detached from the subjectivity and personality of the human being. Today's science regards it as its ideal to have ideas and to register the results of observations in such a way that these ideas of natural and other laws, these results of observation, are completely independent of the person who records them, who makes them. Today's science regards it as its ideal that man, as it were, completely eliminates himself by recognizing. And the more he eliminates himself, the more he lives completely impersonally in the abstract ideas, the stronger - one thinks - he is scientifically. But what does this science produce? The one who lives in this science can feel what it produces. It produces something like images of external reality, which, precisely because they must be impersonal according to the ideal of science, actually leave the human being completely cold, so to speak, inwardly separate from the human being.

Dear attendees, I would like to use a comparison to characterize what man experiences in today's science. Man strives to get external nature, external reality in general, through this science into himself in such a way that it lives in him like the mirror images that arise in a mirror from that which stands in front of the mirror. The content of this science is indeed something abstract, something pictorial. And no matter how much of this science one has within oneself, when one has, so to speak, crammed one's head full with the results of this science and one looks into one's inner being, into everything that lives in man in the form of a yearning for knowledge in relation to what he himself is, what lives in him, in order to warm himself to the world, so to speak, in order to find his way in the world, it is as if someone, in order to get behind the images of the mirror, would reach out his hand and grasp behind the mirror. Because one has only images, one does not grasp anything behind the mirror. Science is proud of the fact that its concepts and ideas are such that when one reaches into the immediate, warm human life, there is nothing of these images in it. Through this science, only recognition takes place, recognition in images, but it is not experienced. Nothing flows into the human being through the images of this science that answers the great, directly felt questions of existence: about the eternal in his being, about that which goes beyond birth and death. Nothing flows from the objective images of this science into the human being that points to the power that directly affects life from his inner warmth.

The nature of this science has often been described. Basically, it can only be described by someone who approaches it with a sense of insight, with a sense of what is truly human, and who then perceives in direct experience what I have just described, perceives how reaching into the soul of man, into the spirit of man, in relation to the images of science, is like reaching behind the mirror, into nothingness, in order to get behind the origin of the mirror images. The more we realize that we are grasping at nothing, especially when this science seizes upon its highest ideal in its field, the more we will also find why that which comes from this science cannot flow into practical life.

Yes, in the factory, in the industrial enterprise, in the commercial context, there is a need for leaders who work out of warm love for their fellow human beings, but also out of warm love for production and human interaction, for all external processes, who work out of the warmth of the soul. But our universities, our educational institutions, with their objective science, with their science that wants to be as impersonal as possible, send out into practical life those people who, on the one hand, look up to science, which lives only in cold images, and who, on the other hand, in practical life – because it cannot be warmed through by a spiritual life which starts from such spiritual science -, in this practical life only become routiniers, only become experimenters: no bridge between what the mind wants to see as science, which has the greatest authority in the present, and what one must do daily in direct life, and which therefore lives without ideas, purely according to routine!

Spiritual science, as it is conceived here, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, seeks to develop such a soul life, to shape such knowledge that one can say of it - I will again use a Goethean sentence -: this spiritual science should give an account of its method, of its entire procedure, to the strictest mathematician. But even though what is worked out in this spiritual science is to be completely permeated by the conscientiousness of the science of the present, which has celebrated such triumphs, even though this spiritual science is to have learned the full discipline of this science, it must, precisely because it works from this science, but with this spirit of science, not stop at the door of this science and rave about the limits of science, precisely for this reason this spiritual science must differ from ordinary science.

Ordinary science recognizes, it recognizes in unrealistic images; spiritual science experiences its spiritual content. The difference between the recognition and the experiencing of the soul is the difference between the external, scientific method and the spiritual scientific method. The one who wants to come to spiritual science in a searching way must come to the conclusion that in the depths of the human soul lie forces that can remain as hidden for the whole of human life as certain forces remain hidden in the child's soul if the child is not educated. One could imagine: If a child were not educated, it would remain at a certain stage of savagery. In this way, a sum of powers lives in every human soul, of powers of direct insight, which our present-day science - which wants everything to be impersonal and therefore does not want to develop the human being - does not want to extract from the soul, because that would be something personal, which is disregarded by this ordinary science. Spiritual science, however, proceeds as I have described in detail in my book “The Occult Science in Outline” or in “How to Know Higher Worlds?”. Spiritual science teaches that when the human soul undergoes certain exercises - exercises of which you can read the nature and essence in these works - the forces hidden in the soul emerge into consciousness and the human being becomes aware that he has other powers of perception than the powers of knowledge of ordinary science.

In the last lecture, I already pointed out that under our ordinary way of knowing, we have something that is very abstract, but which, in a certain way, aims at what is also decisive in the spiritual scientific method: it is mathematics. What we come to know as mathematical truths, we know through the direct intuition of the mathematical content arising from our soul. We need not establish anything externally. We also need not find anything externally confirmed. We know what we know through what arises from our soul. We consider the Pythagorean theorem to be true when we have understood it, and even if someone were to contradict it, we know through direct experience that it is a mathematical truth, and we do not demand any external confirmation. That which is admitted by the present-day scientific spirit only for mathematics can be comprehensively developed in the human soul, so that not only lines and line connections, numbers and number connections arise from this human soul, but that solutions to mighty world riddles arise, that truths arise about the essence of man and the essence of the world.

Why is this so? The person who does not gain an unbiased insight into the deep, intimate connection between man and the world will at first be amazed when he is told that truths about the nature of man and the nature of the world can arise from within man in a mathematical way. But the one who looks at what intimately connects the human being to the world, who realizes how everything that is out there in space and time basically lives in the human being, because the human being is born from the whole world and develops out of this whole world every day, it will not be surprising that the human being, who was formed out of the whole world, can also gain an insight into the whole content of the world. Spiritual scientific experience shows that this can arise because the human being is connected in his inner being, firstly, through his physical body with everything mineral, vegetable and animal in his environment; he carries these realms of nature in a higher form in his physical body. Secondly, however, he also bears within his spiritual-soul all that is spiritual-soul in the world. Therefore, if he only applies the appropriate methods for soul development, he can allow truths about the secrets of humanity and the world to arise from within him, just as mathematical truths arise within him.

But what is present in ordinary knowledge, which only comes to images, is different in this spiritual science; after all, it has to be brought forth from the most personal. The whole human being must go within himself to extract from within himself the treasure of truth about the world and about himself. In this way, the human being is also connected with what arises in him like a mathematical truth, but now like a truth that is intimately connected with his and the world's being. Those who only want objective images of the world can talk. It may be their need to have such objective images – but they will not come to the intimate truths about the life of the world and human beings through such images. The personality must be fully thrown into the process of recognition. But then recognition becomes experience. Then, my dear audience, by methodically developing the soul beyond the ordinary life, just as one must unfold the soul of a child in the ordinary life, the human being is inwardly transported in his entire soul-condition into an experience that is thoroughly different from the ordinary life of science.

In our ordinary, external life, we take an interest in what concerns us directly. We feel warmth when a friend tells us his fate; we feel anger when injustice is done; we feel pain when there is hardship around us, and so on. We are with our whole being, with our whole experience, with what confronts us in the external environment, which we experience through our senses and through other things in people, perceive. This is not the case in the experience of abstract science, which is of course good for nature, but not the case. After all, nature is basically dead to us. No wonder that dead science, which leaves us cold, is best suited for nature. But when man experiences that which can arise from his soul like a spiritual mathematics, then he takes a warm, living part in everything that really arises as an intuition of the world and of human life.

I would like to use two examples to clarify what I actually mean by this interest in the science that has been experienced. Some time ago, I gave a lecture here in Stuttgart that took up the famous book by Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West. Those of you who were present and heard this lecture will not accuse me of underrating Spengler. I have said many words of praise; I have even called Oswald Spengler's expositions ingenious, and they are so. But at the time I also pointed out the fundamental error in Spengler's arguments. Today I would like to draw particular attention to another aspect of these arguments. I would like to point out the whole way in which the ingenious ideas of Spengler settle in the soul of someone who has come to experienced spiritual science. One can follow these ideas, which are ingeniously taken from all sciences that are currently in vogue, in detail; one can absorb them. If one is a spiritual scientist, one has knowledge that has been experienced in oneself, and if one then brings Spengler's ideas into one's soul, then one cannot simply experience one idea after another in one's soul, nor can one point out the contradictions of one's own ideas with the other ideas of today's science or with Spengler's entire world of ideas with cold cleverness. That would be abstract knowledge. That would be mere logic. A scholar in the humanities cannot stop at such mere logic, at such mere abstract knowledge. The scholar in the humanities takes up, for example, Spengler's ideas, which are born entirely out of the scientific spirit of the present. But as he lets one idea take effect in him and lets the other idea take effect in him, as these ideas live in him because he has absorbed experiential knowledge into himself, one idea disturbs the other. One idea, so to speak, skewers the other; one experiences within oneself the pain of being skewered. One experiences within oneself something like one experiences the external contradictions of life that are close to us. That is the difference between the science of experience and mere knowledge. What we otherwise only know from ordinary life – that we experience pain and joy, rapture, warmth and cold – is bestowed upon us through ideas when we have absorbed the science of experience, when we have absorbed what I have been calling anthroposophically oriented spiritual science for almost two decades now. What streams in from the whole human being into soul and spirit is that which is pain and suffering and joy and delight, that which is personality - and yet the human being remains objective in relation to the outside world. Just as one cannot say that a person is being subjective when they feel pain in the face of a painful external event, so too one cannot say that a person becomes subjective when they radiate their personal experience into what would otherwise be a cold world of ideas, because they radiate the power of their personality into their knowledge and into their experiential knowledge.

And I would like to give another example. It often happens in the present day that mere cognitive wisdom, that wisdom that lives in abstract ideas, develops into philosophical thinking. This wisdom, which to a certain extent only produces mirror images, impersonal, bloodless mirror images of external reality, can celebrate its great triumphs when it develops directly from external experience, because then this external experience acts on the senses, and the sensual impressions contain the vitality. But if we disregard these external sensory impressions, if we do not describe minerals, plants, animals, clouds, rivers, etc., but instead spin out into philosophy the ideas, mere mirror-image ideas, that we have gained from the external world, then something like Keyserling's philosophy results – this Keyserling philosophy, which is particularly evident today, consisting of the most anemic abstractions, which develop ideas that are mere mirror images of external experience and spin them out, thereby naturally squeezing out the content that is otherwise gained from external experience. In spinning out these mirror-image ideas, they arrive only at the most empty-content, most phrase-like ideas.

Those who have truly living knowledge, experiential knowledge within themselves, also feel something personally and directly about the anemic Kaiserling abstractions that are now being imposed on humanity in the “schools of wisdom”. He feels something like the way one feels physically when one lives in a room that is not airy enough, when one suffers from a lack of air, when one gasps for air that does not come. The one who has learned to grasp reality with these ideas, who has learned to submerge his cognitive faculty in reality, feels a painful sensation as if he were in a vacuum in which he cannot breathe when he has to digest the bloodless abstractions of Count Hermann Keyserling. But it is precisely such things that are characteristic of the present, for they express what the present develops out of the science of mirror images, which becomes unworldly, which believes that it is developing something particularly noble when it floats in this unworldliness, but which can never submerge itself in reality.

And, my dear assembled guests, if we now look at practical life in the world, we say of the old religious creeds: certainly, they are there - they should, as I explained in the last lecture, be collected and united by well-meaning people, so that a spiritual impulse may again pass through humanity. But they have become, so to speak, abstract; they are cultivated only to warm the abstract inner life of man. They no longer intervene in real, outer life. Just ask yourself how many of the real ideas of the denominations are still present in today's economic life, for example; they no longer have the strength to have an effect on it. And also, what people, out of a certain conservatism, retain of the spiritual life from ancient times: it is certainly venerable and also contains immeasurable truths, but it no longer has any life force today. What I would call the mirror-image scientific spirit seeks to have life force, but cannot have it due to its own inner essence.

This mirror-image scientific spirit has been absorbed by all those who are reflecting today on the possible shaping of social life. Lenin and Trotsky basically took up this mirror-image scientific spirit and wanted to implement it in the shaping of economic life; they wanted to create something new. The destructive spirit of a militarized economic state lives in Eastern Europe, and it is already conducting fairly insistent propaganda far into Asia. The spirit of mirror images wants to bring into reality of social life, and it will only be destructive. Because people believe in social theories and social paradises that are made out of this spirit of mirror images, the worst illusions arise, for they will plunder what practical life has brought forth in the past; what will be consumed and destroyed that which an economic system no longer appealing – perhaps more or less justifiably no longer appealing – has brought forth, but nothing new will emerge, because no reality can develop from mere images if it is to penetrate into practical life. But this spirit, which to a certain extent has emerged from mere thinking, schooled in the reality of the last centuries, especially the 19th century, this spirit has prevailed wherever those powers have emerged that then led to the terrible catastrophe disaster of 1914, because – I would like to say – you can see with your own hands how this spirit, which gradually gained more and more authority, but lost more and more and more of its sense of reality, how this spirit worked. I would just like to give a few examples.

I have already pointed out how a personality like Lloyd George, who is basically imbued with this spirit of unrealistic ideas, has a parliamentary effect but not an effect on reality. But one can cite something else: with the newer times, with the same times in which the spirit of science just described developed, humanity's call for freedom and democracy has also arisen. The states wanted to imbue themselves with freedom and democratic forces. It has been mentioned many times: in the Germany that has now been thrown to the ground by its enemies, what was the external state configuration in this Germany? It was expressed in the words “universal, secret, equal suffrage.” From the point of view of the right to vote, it was the freest constitution one could imagine. But where did this live? It lived on paper. The constitution was there; people were so little involved in reality with what was expressed there in an unrealistic idea that they could even bear that a person in the German Reich had the most free right to vote, but that the same person, who had the general, secret, equal right to vote for the Reich, voted in the most restricted right to vote in the individual state.

So one lived in a reality-alienated way, in a reality lie. And a personal regime, which basically had nothing to do with what was on paper, that was reality. There was no bridge between the beautiful ideas that were on paper and were therefore abstract, and what was external reality. And, ladies and gentlemen, after all, we also live now in some beautiful things that only exist on paper. Compare what people's aspirations are with what happens daily in intellectual, state and economic life, and you will see how, on the one hand, people have illusions, unworldly ideas, learned from unexperienced scientific and on the other hand, live in a reality that degenerates into routine because it is uninspired and devoid of ideas, and in which everything that is educated because it is unrealistic only gets as far as the word. There, I would like to say, one can point out the most painful things.

For example, in the country in which I myself spent three decades, half of my life, in Austria, there lived a man who particularly loved the German influence on Austrian civilization, who had grown entirely out of this German influence on Austrian civilization. The man understood what the word “fatherland” means. He had a living sense of the word “fatherland”. He was a man whose mind reached out beyond the mirror-image ideas of the present into a realistic view of the soul, even if he did not get very far with it, which was impossible in his age. He wanted to think in a realistic way, and he looked at his Austrian fatherland at least with a realistic feeling; his fellow countrymen, the Germans, lived there. He wanted to experience the feeling of home and country together with them. The political configuration of Austria, which was born out of the unreal spirit described today, learned from modern science, made him feel with pain that over there, beyond the Erzgebirge and the Bohemian Forest, his kindred Germans lived, with whom he felt he belonged to the same fatherland, but with whom he could only share the feeling of home. The person I am referring to is Robert Hamerling, the German-Austrian poet. I would like to say that out of a yearning for reality he coined a word that only those who have suffered greatly from the unreality of the present, through which the individual structures [of Austria] were gradually imbued with unreality as state structures, will feel in all its depth. Hamerling, with his sense of reality, could not bring himself to say what millions of Germans on the other side of the Ore Mountains and the Bohemian Forest have said in the phrase: “Austria is my fatherland”. For in saying that, they were saying something that was out of touch with reality, something born of cloud-cuckoo-land ideas, something that had no basis in reality. Hamerling said: “Germany is my fatherland, Austria is my motherland”. He needed a supplement to find reality. Spirits who want to be connected with reality had to resort to such expressions as Hamerling's “Austria is my fatherland, Germany is my motherland” if they wanted to assert their sense of reality against the sense of unreality that surrounds them, that surrounds us all in the surrounds us all in the present – that sense of unreality that grasps ideas only like mirror images, that, when it wants to reach behind these ideas into the human, into the reality of the human, finds emptiness, just as one finds nothing when one reaches behind the mirror. In past epochs, the best minds suffered from a longing for a reality that is completely practical, that directly engages life and yet is not spiritless, not without ideas, that can carry into reality that which is most valuable to man, that must be most meaningful to him, that can carry the ideas he has experienced.

Thus spiritual science is that which, on the one hand, through knowledge, strives towards the highest spiritual content that man can experience. But these are not experienced in mirror images; on the other hand, they are experienced in connection with the whole human being, and are drawn out of the whole human being. They therefore educate the human being to reality again. If spiritual science becomes a cultural element in the present and in the near future, as its representatives strive for, then it will not be what emanates from the existing educational institutions and what does not find the bridge to life, but rather something that connects idea, knowledge, and realization with warm human life at its very source, with that through which the human being is also involved in practical life. Anyone who strives for spiritual research on the one hand and on the other hand still has warm interests in everything human will have encountered many people in the recent past who have been placed in this or that place in life by the routine of life, the mindless mechanism of life. They felt the mechanistic aspect of their profession, which consisted in their standing in one place like a wheel in the state or economic machine. They felt, to a certain extent, that the way they stood was degrading to humans, because these professions sucked the essence out of people. After all, everything that existed as a configuration of economic and state life had emerged from unrealistic ideas. Oh, how alien to external reality were the ideas that people thought out of the science of mirror images, just as the ideas of the mechanic are alien to the machine. There we experienced science in all fields, whose ideas were as alien to external social life as the ideas of the mechanic are to the machine. There we experienced social politicians and statesmen, whose ideas were just as unrealistic in relation to practical life. No wonder that we are immersed in a practical life that absorbs people like a mechanism, like a machine. This feeling of being in a machine is the terrible, underlying cause of the burning social issues – unfortunately, they are not seen in their true form, everything else are just their offshoots.

If, instead of abstract science, instead of mirror-image natural science, the personality-warming spiritual science will radiate from the educational institutions, then this science will shape life in such a way that there can be no people who, at some point in their lives, feel as if they are in a wheel. For whatever is thought out from the deepest, most intimate humanity and really enters into social life as a social form will in turn have a human impact on everyone, even on those who, so to speak, occupy an outwardly low social position. What is recognized and seen as human at the top will resonate down into the human heart of the worker. What is already connected with the human being in theory, which is life, will be able to be life when it takes hold in practice at the bottom. Such a spiritual science can only flourish in freedom. Therefore, what has grown out of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science as a social impulse demands the free development of spiritual life, not state paternalism, not state supervision, and not the dependence of spiritual life on the economy, but its self-government. This is necessary so that the human being may find in the free spiritual life what he can only find in such a life: living knowledge, not mere mirror-image knowledge. This mirror-image knowledge is what the state and the economy in its abstractness squeeze out of itself. A living spiritual life that sets people free will be able to arise through the free self-administration of the individual members of the social organism.

And economic life will never be able to develop among people in such a way that one only talks, so to speak, about ideas that are unrealistic, that one only talks like routine parliamentarians, for example like Lloyd George, that one talks about ideas that have so little to do with economic life and so little prospect of being realized in the near future. In our parliaments, much is said about unrealistic ideas, learned from the wisdom of mirror images. What we need is a prosperous development of the economy, which is cracking at the seams. We can only achieve the recovery of our economy by handing over the economy to the people who manage it, that is, to all people, for free self-management, just as we hand over the spiritual life to free self-management.

Some people feel that economic life can only flourish if the economic operators themselves have it under free administration. But, again, they demand half-measures out of touch with reality. They demand, for example, that decisions be made in parliaments, where they are made by the majorities of the parties, who naturally do not judge from a technical and objective point of view. They demand that parliaments be advised by colleges of experts, formed from the professional associations and from the combination of consumers and producers and the like. But that, in turn, is an unrealistic half-measure, because imagine the sovereign parliament, advised by the economic body – and then the decisions are again made by the majorities.

No, that is not the issue. The only issue is that what happens in economic life should arise from the associations themselves that arise from the economy. The economic entities must conclude their contracts among themselves. They must disregard what people say who are not involved in any branch of the economy. Each branch of the economy must assert itself through direct negotiations from association to association. A free economic life based on objective and professional negotiations between economic entities must be established. Economic life, just like intellectual life, in free self-government – that is the only thing that can lead to a healthy future.

Then, between the self-governing spiritual life and the self-governing economic life, there will be the remaining area in which all people, as equals, can democratically deliberate in parliament. If we first eliminate the spiritual life, which must be based on abilities and grow out of abilities, and the economic life, which must be shaped out of the factual and the technical, if we first eliminate the right and the left, then what remains is the reality that depends on speeches, on the effects of words. Then there remains that into which constitutions can be fulfilled if they are not to remain merely on paper, as was the case with the former constitution of the German Reich.

This threefold order emerges directly from the true, inner character of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science as a way of satisfying practical demands in life. And many other practical things arise from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, for example the Waldorf school, which is set up in such a way that it already serves the free spiritual life in its configuration, which depends on nothing but only on the abilities that can arise from the human being, from teachers and students.

This, I believe, characterizes what makes spiritual science eminently practical. Spiritual science does not take hold of abstract knowledge, or mere conceptual knowledge, but of the essence of knowledge. It therefore educates the human being in such a way that he can also carry into the management of everyday life that which is first taught to him in science. The science of the spirit is practical in its origin, and therefore it will establish a practice that, in its ramifications, despite being full of ideas, can be life-affirming and liberating for people.

And now, dear assembled guests, allow me to characterize the following with a few words: Like everything that has ever presented itself to the world as such a radical view, this spiritual science is also fought by those who simply cannot imagine that man could get out of the accustomed tracks. Today, most people who have anything to do with science have become so immersed in the spirit of unexperienced, merely conceptualized science that they cannot imagine that there can be a living spiritual knowledge as I have described it here over the past decades, and which I have only sketched out in its basic features. And they are capable of saying that what this spiritual science sees could perhaps be based merely on suggestion, whether it be self-suggestion or suggestion from others.

One hears very strange things – I must, especially when I am characterizing the nature of spiritual science as I understand it, conclude with a few words about such externalities – one hears very strange things. For example, it is said that what I have presented could be based on suggestions that came to me from reading the books of such personalities as Blavatsky and Besant. And now it is even being pointed out with a certain scientific rigor that I immersed myself in the writings of Blavatsky and Besant from 1900 or 1901 and that what is found in these writings is recurring in my spiritual science. Well, there is much in these writings that is ancient tradition. Just as the person who presents geometry today must present the geometric truths of the centuries again, so naturally much of what is in earlier books is also found in my writings again. But anyone who then claims that everything in my books can already be found in earlier ones [by Blavatsky and Besant], that nothing has been added, is either blind or is blatantly lying, because it is not true — as can be seen by anyone who compares my books with these other books.

But the approach is even more seemingly scientific. For example, it is said: Yes, Steiner was an esoteric disciple of Besant from 1901 to 1913. Well, I will tell you a fact. In 1900/1901 my book “Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im 19. Jahrhundert” (World and Life Views in the 19th Century) was published, which those people who like to fish for contradictions in my work count among my “naturalistic” books. Almost at the same time, my essay “Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life and its Relationship to the Modern World View” was published. This writing was translated and published in an English magazine immediately after its publication. I was invited to give lectures within the Theosophical Society and was also invited to attend Theosophical meetings in London itself. There, my English translation of the writing 'Mysticism at the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life' had already been read. And one of the most important authorities among these English 'Theosophists' told me quite clearly at the time – I am just reporting: 'What is written in your “Mysticism” actually contains much of what we are striving for with our Theosophy.' – Well, the person to whom this was said truly had nothing to learn from Besant or Blavatsky. I am not saying this out of immodesty, but simply based on the facts.

But they went about it in an even more scientific way, thoroughly scientific. They even, as has been stated, went to Weimar, where I lived from 1889 to 1897, and made a fuss about it. And as a result of this trip, one could even claim that some lady, whose name one is willing to mention, said: “Steiner was an atheist during his time in Weimar.” Well, I have often had to explain that scientific conscientiousness sometimes goes as far as gossip. But I would like to tell you a small fact from my time in Weimar, so that you can get an idea of the alleged atheism of that period: it was roughly in the middle of my time in Weimar, at least after the publication of the first edition of my “Philosophy of Freedom”, when a Protestant clergyman who was extremely well respected in Weimar at the time gave a lecture in Weimar on “The Free Christian Personality”. You can read this lecture in the journal “Die Wahrheit” (The Truth), published by Christoph Schrempf; I don't know in which year, but not many were published, so it should be easy to find. There is a reference to the “Philosophy of Freedom” at one point. But at another point in this lecture there is a reference to me again, only the lecturer omitted to mention my name at this point. Of course, that doesn't matter; but it may be important, especially in view of the gossipmonger's claim about my Weimar atheism, to point out this passage in the lecture, which was also printed and given by a serious personality. This personality said roughly the following in the lecture:

Recently someone said to me that if one sees in the right way that God has infinite love within himself, one cannot speak of God's existence in the way one speaks of the existence of ordinary things, because love is devotion to another. And if God has the fullness of infinite love within himself, then he passes out of the fullness of this love into all beings through an outpouring of his being, and then one can no longer speak of God's self-existence in the ordinary sense.

This personality said at the time, from his purely evangelical point of view: Why should love be the Moloch that drives God out of Himself? —

Now, the deeper philosophical question that lies in this, I will of course not deal with today. But the one who spoke of divine love for this man in this way was I. And I ask you whether someone who speaks about the personality of God in such a way can be called an atheist? That is a truth, and this truth is to be documented. And as far as this truth is concerned, it makes no difference to me what can still be asked about my alleged atheism from this or that Weimar personality today.

And so I could cite fact after fact in refutation of the accusers of spiritual science, but the accusers are mostly not interested in really looking at the facts. They are only interested in shining their own light and therefore putting spiritual science in a correspondingly different light. I am never curious to hear what these people say, because it can usually be predicted what, for example, Count Hermann Keyserling, whom I have already mentioned today, said as a characteristic of my anthroposophy in his abstract book, which has the character that I have described today. This could be constructed from the outset out of Keyserling's empty wisdom. This is just as well known as what such a person has to say about spiritual science, who parrots Eduard von Hartmann's ideas like Drews. These people, even if they are Count Hermann Keyserling, always have one thing in common: since they basically lack the will to go into the matter, they always have one thing in common at one point, and I say this with all radicalism: they always have to lie. You find in one place in the book “Philosophy as Art” by Hermann Keyserling the assertion that I started out with what he considers my “materialistically shaped spiritual science” - which he only calls that because he has no idea about it, not even a blue one. You find there the assertion that I started from Haeckel's ideas, that the origin of my anthroposophy lies in Haeckel's ideas.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I wrote about Haeckel at the end of the 1890s, and I must mention a fact here: in 1893, I presented the one-sidedness of Haeckel's world view in a lecture on a spiritual monism at the Vienna “Scientific Club”. I then returned to Weimar, where I had written my essay about the Society for Ethical Culture in one of the first issues of “Zukunft”. Haeckel wrote to me about this essay, and I sent him a copy of my Viennese lecture against materialistic monism. And Haeckel established the connection that led to Haeckel being very friendly towards my endeavors at the time. And it also led to a confrontation with Haeckelism, which was necessary from the scientific and spiritual development of the time, because Haeckelism was a force to be reckoned with. From this one can see - I say this truly only forced by what is being said by the enemy side, I have not said it long enough, I am not saying it out of any immodesty -: It is not true that I sought any connection with Haeckel; Haeckel approached me on his own initiative, in the way of the aspirations that I cultivated. I did not pursue Haeckel, but Haeckel, despite being Haeckel, came to me, just as I did not pursue the Theosophical Society, but the Theosophical Society came to me and requested my lectures. Hermann Keyserling is lying when he says that I started with Haeckel, because it can be proved that he is lying if you read the relevant chapter of my arguments with Haeckel in my “Einleitungen zu Goethes naturwissenschaftlichen Schriften” (Introductions to Goethe's Scientific Writings) from the 1880s. Anyone who claims that I started from Haeckel, despite the fact that this dispute with Haeckel is available, can be said to be lying, even if he founds wisdom schools.

This is the peculiarity of opponents of spiritual science: because they have no will to go into the matter, they always have to lie at a certain point. Whether they lie like Count Hermann Keyserling, somewhat more refined, in patent leather boots, or whether they lie like Professor Traub, or whether they lie so crudely, so “ferkelig” as the neighboring Rohm in Lorch, it does not matter. For there is an inner reason why these people, in what they bring forward against spiritual science, pass over to lies. If there were anything that would scientifically speak against spiritual science, I would be the first to take it up and discuss it. As I said in my last lecture here: the one who really goes through the psychological development that I have characterized, which must be gone through to become a spiritual researcher, knows that it cannot be a matter of suggestion. Just as I know that when I lift a kilogram weight, I have to strengthen my inner strength to do so, that in a sense my ego has to strengthen itself through the resistance, so I know that my ego has to strengthen itself if I want to have spiritual insight, whereas it does not strengthen itself through suggestion.

But people also put forward other arguments. For example, the absurdity is being repeated today that one should not recognize and pass on the spiritual-scientific knowledge that lives in my anthroposophy through mere thinking, but that it should be verified in the same way [as it has been researched]. Now, my dear audience, what is the reason for this verification? Mathematical truths are the model for spiritual-scientific truths. For example, approval and recognition by others of the Pythagorean theorem is not necessary; one learns to understand it from one's inner experience, others agree with it out of their free judgment, not out of any external experience. Spiritual truths need no confirmation, any more than mathematical truths do. They arise out of the free spiritual experience of the human being, not in the way that some of the opponents of spiritual science today believe. And then I have often said: spiritual training is part of the process of exploring spiritual knowledge, but not of processing it; this can be done with ideas, with ordinary common sense. Mathematics is also a model for this. To make mathematical discoveries, special mathematical abilities are necessary. Once the discoveries have been made, anyone who has mathematical ideas and has developed them to a corresponding level can substantiate, prove and carry them further. And so it is in spiritual science. And those who want to pick on such points simply do not understand the inner structure of spiritual science.

Now, I could continue this litany – I myself feel it is a litany – which actually only serves to hold up the proceedings, for a long time. And if those who now act as accusers of spiritual science, and there are very, very many of them, would go down to the ground on which spiritual science stands – which, to use this Goethean saying again, would like to give account to the strictest mathematician with regard to their methods and their discipline. If these accusers would only enter the terrain of spiritual science, they would realize that spiritual science is not at all opposed to today's scientific method, but that it recognizes this scientific method in terms of its discipline and its strict methods. Spiritual science recognizes this scientific method in its strict methods, only it leads them beyond themselves, as it should be shown by the thirty lecturers at the Dornach University courses and is to be shown here at further university courses. Other things would be brought to spiritual science, and indeed those things that - but in their true form, not in their caricatured and distorted form - have often been mentioned and refuted by this spiritual science itself as possible objections.

Today, my dear attendees, if you are completely grounded in spiritual science, as it is meant here, you are basically dealing with more important matters than with such a confrontation with insubstantial opposition. Today you are dealing with the answer to the question: How does the human being move from his life-filled knowledge to a social practice of life that is permeated by love? Cold mirror-image science introduces into practice what is loveless and empty of love. The knowledge that must be inwardly experienced as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science appears to the human being in such a way that he brings his whole personality into his outer activities, including his immediate life. And no matter how complicated the community may be, anyone who has been educated in spiritual science can also carry into their outer social life what they experience in spiritual science with the most intense part of their personality, regardless of whether they are in a leading or a non-leading position. For what is experienced with the whole personality also becomes an experience when it is put into action. But the outer experience in which the personality must be completely involved is the experience in love. A knowledge that strives for the world of ideas in the spirit, that engages the whole human being in such a way that this human being places himself in love in the social life, that he lets love permeate social ideas. Just as in spiritual research the direct experience of the spirit lives inwardly, so through the threefold social organism spiritual science brings love into the social life, into the community. It places the ideas as such into reality, so that love can be the bearer of these ideas in reality. Love in the social life can only be connected with experienced, not merely with cognitive science. Therefore, when one is grounded in spiritual science, as it is meant here, one's gaze is first of all directed to the connection between these spiritual scientific insights, this spiritual scientific life, with social love, with socially loving practice, which is not merely routine, but which is carried in love, by radiant ideas. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we need if we do not want to descend into barbarism but want to arrive at a new civilization.

We need a spiritual life that does not live in cloud cuckoo land, but that descends into practice; a practical life that does not look down on the unworldly spirituality with contempt, but that allows itself to be permeated with love by real ideas. We need a spirit that does not float ethereally in clouds, but that lives in practice. We need a practice that does not become an uninspired routine, but a practice that is filled with the Spirit. We need a spirit that illuminates the practice; we need a practice that is warmed by the Spirit. Then we can embark on a fruitful path into the future.

Dear attendees! Today, anthroposophy is still seen by many people as a more or less fantastic attempt to penetrate into areas of the world through knowledge, which serious science should have nothing to do with. Now, however, there are also scientists who are to be taken very seriously indeed, who speak of the fact that going beyond the usual scientific methods to knowledge of worlds into which these scientific methods do not lead must be striven for, and one speaks then of all kinds of abilities that one or the other person may have in order to penetrate into such worlds. They then endeavor to fathom what comes to light through such abnormal abilities and register it in the usual scientific way. But even such serious scientists will not want to have anything to do with anthroposophy for the reason that they do not want to recognize the path by which anthroposophy attempts to penetrate into supersensible worlds as a scientific one, but at most want to regard it as a kind of fantasy, as a special kind of impossible mysticism or even as a special kind of superstition. Now, my dear audience, those people who strive for enthusiasm, for nebulous mysticism or even for superstition will sometimes come close to what anthroposophical knowledge wants to incorporate into our spiritual life, but in the long run they will hardly get their money's worth. People who run everywhere where there is talk of some “Sophie” or some “occult” will very soon see that Anthroposophy in particular endeavors to work entirely out of the spirit of modern scientific spirit, and even to take this spirit of modern science to its very last consequences, but above all that a thoroughly healthy and as far-reaching thinking as possible is necessary for anthroposophy. And that is not exactly what the devotees of enthusiasm and nebulous mysticism love. The fact that anthroposophy has such aspirations cannot, however, prevent those people who would like to reject it with a slight wave of the hand from repeatedly saying that only neurasthenics or hysterical people can approach anthroposophy.

Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, this evening I would like to take the liberty of addressing the essence of anthroposophy, as it is intended by those who who, in the spirit of this serious science and serious thinking, strive for an expansion of our knowledge because they recognize that, in our scientific culture and in that which opposes it, the modern person must remain unsatisfied in two directions. In the first instance, where it is a matter of research in natural science, anthroposophy places itself firmly on the ground of this natural science research, and it sees, with all those who proceed as cautiously as, for example, the famous du Bois-Reymond, it sees precisely the limits of this natural science research. It sees how human thinking, which has celebrated such great triumphs in modern times and is justifiably so proud of its methods, can nevertheless only work in the direction of natural scientific research by adhering to external, sensually given facts, by more or less summarizing these sensually given facts and arriving at natural laws. When we realize that our present thinking, which is so conscientiously applied in science, is trained entirely on external, sensory facts, that it can only have methods that correspond entirely to the course of these sensory facts, then we will have to speak of the limits of scientific recognize the limitations of scientific knowledge and admit that all philosophical speculation that seeks to go beyond these limitations by means of pure thinking, by thinking left to its own devices, will enter into uncertainty in those areas where the actual being of the human being is rooted in its immortal foundation. That is why there is so much controversy about the one or other philosophical system that wants to speak about the immortality of the soul, about the divine spiritual foundations of the world. One feels how thinking, tearing itself away from sensual facts and wanting to build on its own foundations, how this thinking absolutely enters into uncertainty, so that one can actually have the feeling: this thinking no longer deals with anything outside of the sensual facts. On the other hand, there are numerous people today who have a more or less clear feeling that they still want to penetrate to the deepest human longing, to penetrate to the world reasons with which man is connected in his innermost being and through whose knowledge he could gain insight into his immortal being. Then such people probably surrender to one or the other direction of mysticism, that is, they say goodbye to all knowledge. They delve into their own inner selves. They believe that if they delve into their own inner selves, if they dig deeper and deeper into the shafts of their own human soul, then the eternal essence of man must also be found.

In this area, I would say that anthroposophy takes exactly the same scientific approach to observation. And by engaging in taking what some mystics present as the actual essence of the human being, it sees how there is nothing in it but transformed perceptions of the external sense world, which to a certain extent withdraw into memory and the ability to remember. And who knows how, over the course of years and decades, that which this mysticism may have half-consciously taken up into its memory can be transformed and how it is brought forth by mystics as something quite different, how they believe that something is telling them about a certain divine spiritual being in man, while in fact they are only dealing with the transformed memories of external perceptions. Anyone who has insight into these things will see, precisely in these mystical endeavors, however well-intentioned they may be, a stumbling block to truly scientific penetration into a spiritual world to which the human being truly belongs.

And so, dear attendees, there are two pitfalls that anthroposophical research must avoid. The first is mere mental work, which wants to be left to its own devices, philosophical speculation about the supernatural and the beyond, which leads into uncertainty and even into nothingness. The other is mysticism, which, although it believes it is penetrating to the divine-spiritual through immersion in one's own inner self, nevertheless has nothing to do with anything other than what the human being has first led down into his soul through observation of nature, through observation of the external sense world, and what he then later brings up again.

These two pitfalls stand in stark clarity before anthroposophical research. Therefore, anthroposophical research tries to simply say: the paths of knowledge that one must take in the field of external knowledge of nature do not lead at all into the spiritual, supersensible realm. Other paths of research must be taken. And since the usual paths of research make use of the cognitive abilities that a person has in ordinary life, anthroposophical research must seek out other cognitive abilities. It can be said right from the outset: the anthroposophical research referred to here is not based on any kind of abnormal ability that individuals may want to have through grace or illness, but on the fact that there are abilities slumbering in every human soul – if one wants to express oneself scientifically – that are latent abilities that can be brought out by certain methods, so that only when man has come into full possession of the cognitive faculty, which is applied in ordinary life and in ordinary science, only then does he begin, I might say, to imitate the child once more. We see the child as it enters the world with only limited abilities to gain insight into its surroundings. We see how these abilities lead ever deeper and deeper into the outer and inner world and how these abilities develop. In our ordinary lives, we complete this development at a certain point. And having acquired a certain way of thinking, a certain way of feeling and a certain way of willing as adults, we stop at that point, using these to drive our everyday lives and our ordinary science. Those who want to do anthroposophical research must continue this development. At a certain point in their life, they have to say to themselves: the abilities in the soul are not fully developed in this way; more can be raised up from the depths of the soul. And this bringing up leads to those cognitive abilities that can guide us into the supersensible worlds. I have described in detail, Ladies and Gentlemen, what a person has to do to bring up dormant abilities in his soul. I have described it in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, in the second part of my “Occult Science” and in other writings. I would like to take the liberty of now quoting in principle what is described in detail there.

What a person has to do in order to develop their higher, their supersensible cognitive abilities is not an external process, but a process that takes place within the most intimate depths of the soul itself. There are certain soul exercises, soul exercises that lead in two directions. One direction is a certain treatment of thinking, of imagining, and the other direction is a certain treatment of the human will. The way in which imagining is in every human being can be transformed and furthered by certain soul exercises, and the same applies to the human will. What is to be achieved through thinking is a certain inner strengthening, a certain inner strengthening of the thought life itself in the first instance. This is not achieved by some arbitrary act, by an arbitrary inner contemplation or the like, but it is achieved in the sense of anthroposophical research by giving thinking itself a kind of inner schooling, and indeed a schooling that works, I might say, according to the principle by which we otherwise also make the human being stronger in life. If I may use a very trivial example, I can say: If a person repeatedly strains a particular muscle system in his work, this system becomes particularly strong. The same can now be achieved in relation to the act of visualizing itself. For example, you can do the following – and many such exercises are mentioned in the books I have mentioned – you can place any idea or a set of ideas at the center of your entire mental life. I call this meditation and concentration of thought. This is truly not some kind of magic, but a development of the very ordinary, normal human abilities. So you put some idea that you can easily grasp at the center of your mental life. It is often recommended — and rightly so — that you look up such an idea in a book or elsewhere so that it is new to you, or that you get it from an experienced anthroposophical researcher so that it is new. Why should it be new?

Because when we have an idea that we have had for a long time in our lives, or even for a short time, because such an idea, by bringing it into the center of our attention, evokes all kinds of memory remnants. Much remains in the subconscious and unconscious. We do not overlook what we put into the soul when we take such an idea or series of ideas from our treasure trove of knowledge. But if we take something that is completely new to us, or something that we have been given, then there can be no question of any reminiscences emerging. Instead, we then devote our entire soul life to a new, but now inner, impression, an impression that we can only grasp with thought. We give ourselves over to such an image with all our soul life as intensely as possible, and we try to bring it to the same kind of vibrancy in the act of visualizing such an image as we otherwise have vibrancy when we are confronted with an external sensory impression. This activity of the soul in response to an external sensory impression must in every respect be the model for every exercise that the anthroposophical researcher first undertakes in his soul.

This clearly shows — my dear audience — that it is not a matter of bringing something out of the depths of the human organism in a pathological way, so that what I am describing to you now can by no means lead to hallucinations, visions or the like, but on the contrary, leads precisely to the other pole of human soul life. The ideal is not what can be achieved by some kind of morbid brooding, isolated from external perception, but rather the ideal is, so to speak, that healthy human devotion of soul that one develops when one faces external sensory impressions with full consciousness and with the most absolute control of the will. And by applying this liveliness to that which one places at the center of one's soul life in the manner described, one actually comes to strengthen one's imaginative and thinking life, to make it more powerful, just as one strengthens a muscle when one uses it continually.

If you continue such exercises — they require a lot of patience and perseverance, because anthroposophical research is no easier than research in any field of external science — you will eventually notice how your thinking has become more intense, more vigorous, more powerful. And one arrives at developing within oneself what can be described as a kind of first step on the path to supersensible knowledge, and what I have called — names must be there, one must not be offended by them — imagination. One gradually learns to live completely, as otherwise in the world of the senses, in an inwardly intensified thinking.

But what is most urgently needed now, above all, is to be clear about one thing: when one's entire soul life is concentrated on such a complex of images, then — I would say — the soul life gradually submerges into a realm in which it , to imagine them vividly, to have such images in abundance, they would arise with an inner intensity that is otherwise only found in external sensory perceptions; but if one did not develop another faculty, one would ultimately come to be dominated by these images in a certain way. They would besiege you, they would be there, you would be devoted to them. It would come to pass that the ideas have the person and not the person the ideas. Therefore, it is necessary that these exercises — modified in the most diverse ways — are accompanied by others, exercises that consist of suppressing such ideas, of removing them from consciousness; so that on [ on the one hand, to develop the ability to make one's consciousness as intensive as possible through thinking, and on the other hand, to remove these thoughts at will and to pass over into a state that can be called empty consciousness. But one notices that after such exercises have been continued for some time, one's entire thinking has become free of that which the body has as its share of ordinary thinking life.

This, ladies and gentlemen, can only be realized, I would say, through the experience itself. In the practice of thinking, as I have described it to you, of thinking that has been thoroughly worked through, it becomes apparent how one moves freely in thought and then has the thoughts as something like an external table or some other object. And just as little as one would think of placing an external object in the interior of the soul or the human body, so little would one, when one has penetrated into such a modified imagination, place what then arises in consciousness only in the interior of the organism. It is an experience that one comes to a soul life that takes place outside the body. It is important, my dear audience, that this first stage, the stage of imaginative knowledge, be transcended before moving on to higher stages.

But now we must be clear about one thing: everything that arises in this way initially takes on a pictorial character. The usual abstract way in which we otherwise follow natural phenomena, carefully lining them up link by link, can certainly be evaluated by the spiritual researcher in the right way, and must remain so, because common sense must run entirely parallel to what I describe as supersensible research, this kind of linking-together abstract thinking ceases for the field of supersensible research itself and an inwardly intensive, pictorial imagining occurs. One lives in pictures and manages to remove these pictures from consciousness in order to remain with an empty consciousness.

Dear attendees, it actually seems quite easy to remain with an empty consciousness. But most people who have not undergone this training immediately fall into a kind of sleep when there is no content of consciousness, when the content of consciousness is suppressed. That is what must be achieved for anthroposophical research: that after one has first brought the life of thought to its fullest development of strength, one can then immediately suppress it again and, so to speak, face the emptiness on one's own initiative. One does not stand there facing the void, because we will see in a moment that if one makes the consciousness empty from within, after first having permeated it, that if one has become free of the body penetrates with his imagination into the supersensible world, that this is the way not to remain with a sleeping consciousness, but that this consciousness is filled with the content of a supersensible world. But man still has to imagine — I would like to say — undergo a transition. When one enters ever more strongly into this world of images through intensified visualization, one comes to the point where one can simply say, from the facts that one experiences inwardly: You do not have the same lightness of thought within you that you used to have and that you reserve for ordinary life; you do not have this lightness within you in imaginative thinking. You live in these images now in such a way that you are devoted to them. You know that you cannot simply structure one image within another as you used to, but that the images structure themselves. They demand, through their own essence, the form they are to take, and you feel yourself in a world that is a reality.

You enter this imaginative world and from a certain point onwards you experience how you are immersed in reality, I would even say, how you are immersed in the soul. And the first experience one has when one has penetrated to such imaginative vision is that one's life on earth since birth comes to life before the soul as in a great tableau. Otherwise, a person has the stream of memories from this life, from which this or that emerges, either voluntarily or involuntarily. This is not the case with what I am now describing, but what emerges from a certain point of imaginative knowledge is that the human being has before him, as in a broad overview, the workings of his inner being. He overlooks how certain forces have given rise to this or that disposition in him, how he has come to this or that heroic or unheroic decision. He does not so much gain insight into the individual facts of life as into the forces that lie behind them, that have shaped us ourselves, that have given our thoughts their direction and content, that have guided our feelings from within when they have been stimulated by the outside world, that have impulsed our will. All that has been incorporated since birth, one can see.

One comes to experience, not through fanciful arbitrariness but through the realization of the experience of anthroposophical research, what is called the formative forces, or, with an older term, the etheric body. One experiences that which the human being carries within, which has not only a spatial character but also a spatial-temporal character. What stands as a unity above the time space since birth is experienced as something that cannot be depicted in detail, unlike a flash of lightning. One can depict this formative body in a single moment; but it is in motion, it is that which works in us, which flows through and pulses our entire soul life. In that, one lives initially.

But – dear attendees – once you have acquired the ability to extinguish the images that arise in the imagination over and over again as I have described, so that you can penetrate to the empty consciousness, then you have gradually acquired the ability to powerfully concentrate and suppress this entire formative force body, so to speak, to remove it. Just as one otherwise only removes the individual images that one has brought to, so one removes this formative force body, thus emptying one's consciousness of this content, which now contains not abstract ideas and images, but the forces of inner growth. When you remove it, you have not only stepped out of your body, you not only perceive spiritually outside of your body, you have stepped out of your earthly existence. Then you perceive in that in which the essence of the soul lived before birth or - let us say - conception, and in which it will live after the human being has passed through the gate of death.

You see, dear attendees, for the anthroposophical spiritual science meant here, it is not a matter of philosophical speculation, but of something that is achieved through gradual, truly systematically applied inner methods as a human ability. One does not penetrate to human immortality with mere thoughts, but one penetrates to that which precedes birth and follows death — I would like to say — through an inner method of experimentation — please do not misunderstand this word — but one must continually make the attempt. When you have come so far that you can imagine without the body and can suppress the images that arise in the imagination, that you can step out of the life between birth and death and enter into the essence of the human being, which is the immortal part of the human being, when you have strengthened the soul to such an extent that it can become empty, then it is not an empty consciousness that enters. Rather, this consciousness is filled with facts that one could never perceive otherwise, with facts from a purely spiritual, supersensible world, from a world that is always around us, permeating all sensuality, in which the human being lives without his sensual body before birth or, let us say, conception as in a spiritual world. And in this way one actually enters into concrete spiritual ideas that cannot otherwise be obtained except through inner experience. One arrives at the experience of human immortality.

You see, dear audience, you may doubt the results of anthroposophical research at first – not only do you have the right to do so, but it is even understandable for the first attempt at human understanding – but if you look at what underlies the anthroposophical researcher, if he puts himself in a position to get these results, then you will have to admit: He has the right attitude for true science and scientific conscientiousness. He tries to change his soul, but not arbitrarily, but out of such inner conscientiousness as can be found in the laboratory or clinic.

The fact that a person, having created an empty consciousness, now perceives something, means that in the most eminent sense he no longer perceives with the body – which he otherwise always does for ordinary and scientific consciousness – but perceives with the soul, freed from the body. And when a person perceives, as I have now indicated, that which is not contained within the sense world, that which is the essence of the human being before he enters into embryonic life, then one can speak of the second stage of higher knowledge, of knowledge through inspiration. That which penetrates into the soul because the consciousness has learned to empty itself, is inspired into this consciousness. And from experience we know that through such inspiration alone man can form an opinion about immortality. But if it is presented as a result, then everyone can follow with common sense what anthroposophical research does. Anthroposophical research does not lead to visions or pathological states, but can be followed at every stage with common sense. Therefore, one can always verify whether the paths taken by the spiritual researcher are reasonable and whether reason can therefore also be found in the results he gives.

And when one now advances to such inspired insights, then the first step is indeed the recognition of the supersensible entity of the soul, as it was before birth or – let us say – conception, as it will be after death, the realization of the immortal essence of the soul But one can only penetrate to this immortal essence of the soul if the soul has come to a body-free realization, if it exercises pure mental, transparent cognitive activity, which it otherwise exercises with the help of the brain and nervous system. This is independent of brain and nerve activity. And just as, to the ordinary consciousness, man must be more or less a materialist, as materialism is right for the ordinary consciousness, that it is bound to the physical organization, that the physical organization must underlie its activity, so it is true on the other hand that, by developing such abilities as I have described here, man then comes to make free use of the soul as an organ of knowledge. In this way he not only penetrates into the supersensible world just characterized, but also into that which is continually around us, of which the ordinary sense world is only a manifestation. That is to say, now man can penetrate into a world that lies behind the sense phenomena, not merely through philosophical speculation, but by using purely soul organs that he has first — I would almost say, if it did not sound philistine — laboriously acquired. And then one does indeed enter into regions that are still very much resented by today's familiar modes of representation.

But before developing knowledge for these areas, other methods of imagination and concentration must be added to those described. These other methods go in the direction of the will. Just as thought, for ordinary consciousness, is dependent on the brain and nervous system — I cannot go into the details here, but for those who are truly familiar with modern scientific developments, this will be beyond question — so too is the human will, as it unfolds in all that leads a person to action, dependent first of all on the human physical organization. Just as one has to free the life of thought from the bodily organization for supersensible research, so one also has to free the life of will from the bodily organization. But even that strong effort of the will, which one must unfold in imaginative knowledge, leads one to gradually apply the will in a body-free way.

Dear attendees, perhaps I may make a seemingly personal comment here, but one that is entirely relevant. I published my “Philosophy of Freedom” at the beginning of the nineties and tried to show what human freedom is actually based on. The usual question is: Is man free or subject to an absolute necessity? Does everything that leads to a decision of the will, to an act, flow from the necessary conditions of his organism, or does the possibility lie within man to decide freely out of himself, without necessity? I tried at the time to show that, for the vast majority of human actions, one must indeed speak of necessity, that the instinctual, the drive life, the emotional life, that everything that is bound to the human organism, is the basis for the vast majority of our actions, but that man can also rise to have pure thoughts as his volitional motives, pure thoughts that live inwardly in moral ideals.

When man lays such pure thoughts as moral ideals at the foundation of his volitional impulses, then he gradually comes to be a truly free being as a personality. And I called this sum of moral ideals that can find a place in a person, and which then find their outward expression in the way a person morally lives, I called this sum of moral ideals moral intuition. And I have said that the truly free life of man is based on such an intuition, an intuition of which I said: What its content is does not come from the human organism, but is taken from a spiritual world, and it is from a spiritual world that the free man is determined. And if one now pursues the philosophy of freedom in this way, then this philosophy of freedom is thoroughly a preparation for insight into such cognitive abilities as I have described today.

When one sees the essence of these moral ideals that are to be realized here, then one comes to expand this essence more and more. And when one adds such inner exercises as I have described today in principle, then one realizes: what is granted to man as an earthly being in terms of free actions can take part in a spiritual world. This can fill his entire soul, it can bring him to imagination, through which he surveys his body of formative forces, and can bring him to inspiration, through which he surveys the soul that he was before he entered earthly existence through birth or, let us say, conception, and that he will be when he has crossed the threshold of death. But the capacity for such supersensible knowledge as this in man must be cultivated also in the sphere of the will.

Here one can indeed bring forth the best fruits by endeavoring to make one's will ever stronger and stronger in relation to the purely inner life. This can be done in many ways.

I will give the following one. We are accustomed to thinking in terms of how external facts unfold. We treat what is earlier as the cause and what comes later as the effect. And when we are immersed in ordinary life, we think along the lines of external facts. The one who only thinks in this way along the thread of external facts, who thus, so to speak, passively surrenders to the course of external events, cannot achieve the development of will that is necessary for the purpose of supersensible knowledge. But the one who, for example, does the exercise – and does it again and again – that he, instead of thinking along the thread of external events, imagines these external events backwards, the last ones first, then the penultimate ones and so on and so on – let us say, for example, the course of a drama from the last act to the penultimate, third-last and so on, in the smallest possible portions backwards – or if he considers his experiences of the day in this retrospective view in the evening, then, if it is to be done seriously, a different effort of will is required than that used when he lets his thoughts run along the thread of external facts.

This effort of will, which one then arrives at, ultimately brings about what otherwise – I would like to say, although this is perhaps not popular with those people who only ever speak of objective knowledge — this effort of will brings about a deeper sense of what, in ordinary life, is tied to the organization as the most beautiful and best expression of the human will: to develop love. I know, dear listeners, that love is not readily seen as a cognitive faculty. And in the way it is in ordinary life, anthroposophy does not seek to appropriate it. But when the will unfolds in the way I have described, then the human being comes to discover that the capacity for love is one of the most significant cognitive faculties.

Through this cognitive faculty, which he can still increase by, when he has, as it were, grasped this ability to love within, when he has become aware of it, by now pursuing the external facts in such a way that he really lovingly puts himself in the individual kingdoms of nature — I have described this in detail — as a person develops such cognitive abilities, as he lovingly follows the life of a plant from germination to fruit, so that he experiences how leaf by leaf unfolds. Likewise, one can — I would say — with such a developed capacity for love, delve into the animal organization and so on. If one also strengthens the life of the will in this way and begins to observe oneself more seriously than usual as an active human being, if one observes oneself in one's actions as objectively as one otherwise only observes external objects, if one gets into the habit of walking beside oneself like a second person and always watching oneself in his volitions, then the will comes to not only let inspiration unfold in man, but to let that which speaks into the human soul from a spiritual world also be experienced through the imagination. Then man comes to make his own soul a living organ of knowledge for the spiritual. In inspiration, the spiritual world does not yet reveal itself to the soul in a clear way. In the third stage, which I have called intuition — real intuition, not the vague one that one also speaks of in one's outer consciousness — in this intuition, man truly penetrates into the spiritual world.

This is what anyone who wants to penetrate the spiritual world, which always surrounds us and of which the external sense world is only the manifestation, only the outer expression, should have achieved.

Just so that I am not misunderstood, I would like to say in advance: when a person enters into abnormal, pathological states of visionary life, when he is taken in by a hypnotic state, when he is suggested something by others, then he is in this abnormal state of mind and the other state is, as it were, suppressed. The person is completely surrendered to the abnormal perception or experience. Those who are really pursuing the anthroposophy referred to here will see that there is not the slightest reason to confuse what is referred to here as the anthroposophical method of knowledge with anything hallucinatory, visionary, or pathological. The latter comes from a completely different direction. This can be recognized mainly by the fact that in all hypnotic, hallucinatory, visionary, pathological states, the person is given over to these states, and his ordinary soul life is extinguished, either temporarily or permanently. In the case of the supersensible form of knowledge described here, we do indeed penetrate into a completely different way of looking at things, into a perception of the world of the spirit that has nothing in common with the world of the senses. However, in every moment in which one surrenders oneself to this supersensible knowledge, ordinary knowledge and the ordinary state of consciousness, the completely normal, healthy human understanding, remain present at the same time. In the process of realizing spiritual life, this maintained healthy state controls the other unusual, but no less healthy, state in every moment.

I must say this before I describe how things appear under the influence of supersensible knowledge. Let us take something cosmic, the sun. We see it for ordinary observation in the way you know it: as a disk within space. We construct its true size and shape and so on with the physical methods we have. For the knowledge I have described here, the picture we have of the sun through ordinary science is completely transformed. The solar phenomenon that appears with firm contours and emits rays ceases to exist in this way before supersensible knowledge. For supersensible knowledge, the solar phenomenon, as it were, fills the whole space. The sun-like quality is everywhere and we become aware that this sun-like quality, which is everywhere, is only concentrated, so to speak, on the physical sun, that this physical sun is only the physical manifestation of something spiritual that fills all of space. Then one becomes aware of how this sun-like quality is a process, an event, and indeed an event that one is now [getting to know], since one has indeed got to know the formative body of the human being, which is the creative force in the human being, the creative force that gives us our abilities and forms our organs plastically.

By getting to know this formative body of the human being and how the forces of this body are connected to the forces of the sun, we recognize that everything that is constructive growth forces, that is the progressive forces of flourishing, of increasing, of becoming, is contained in the sun. In short, I would like to say that the cosmic space that has now been transformed into spirituality is filled with the power of becoming, of growth, which unfolds outside in nature and underlies nature. One sees this solar aspect as that which is becoming, growing, penetrating everywhere, one sees it penetrating into the own constitution of the body of formative forces. One learns to recognize how the human being, with his intimate spiritual-soul and bodily organization, is integrated into a cosmic principle of development. The world of facts is truly enriched by a sum of spiritual processes.

Just as one gets to know the solar, one gets to know the lunar. It becomes apparent as the process that asserts itself in everything as that which dies, decreases and withers, and which also extends into the human being, constantly bringing about the fact that not only ascending forces of growth are within us, accompanying us from youth, becoming less and less towards old age, but which nevertheless accompany us until death, that not only the forces of growth are in us, but also the others, those of destruction, of decline, of aging, that the lunar forces are this.

The human being learns to fit into the solar and lunar process. And in this way, I would say, the human being appears as a member of the whole cosmos. Just as our hand appears as a member of our organism, which, as we know, is no longer what it is as a member of our organism when we cut it away; it only makes sense through the whole organism. In the same way, when we look at it with the means of knowledge, we perceive how man, though closed off from the other things of the sensory world by his outer sensory form, is nevertheless backed by the forces that shape this sensory form, but which at the same time make it a member of the whole cosmos.

Here it is possible to show that to get to know the cosmos as a sum of spiritual beings is not based on fantasy, but on the fact that man first grasps within himself the means by which he can see through the processes and events of the cosmos in their spirituality. In this way one goes further and further, and comes to recognize the cosmos as a spiritual world. And when one has ascended to the point of really seeing the spiritual in the soul in this way, then one actually only ascends to that which is now exalted above the forces of growth and destruction, which, in the case of a person with an inner struggle, so to speak, carries the victory over what is solar and lunar in man. There one arrives at the most complete realization of the human ego, and one learns to recognize that this ego is not limited to this one earthly life.

Once one has recognized through inspiration what goes through birth and death, and what the soul is like outside the body, one has recognized how that which is outside the body connects through conception with that which is given to it through the powers of inheritance. Then one notices, when one can perceive this together, that something else is at work in the soul that is purely spiritual, but which works in our ego. Without this spiritual element, the ego in man would be a completely powerless thing. This spiritual element, which manifests itself when one reaches intuition, is a repetition of earlier earthly lives. Man has gone through earlier earthly lives and lives again and again between death and a new embodiment. And that which, in an earthly life, is active in the ordinary life and ordinary science with the help of the ordinary organism, and which finds its expression through this ordinary organism, passes through the gate of death and through the spiritual worlds. Having passed through the spiritual worlds, having absorbed everything that it had previously only worked and experienced through the body in the world, it enters a new earthly life.

What one experiences in this realm is one of the most intimate experiences of the soul, one of those experiences in which one becomes aware that behind even the spiritual-soul activity at work in the organism lies something else, something that has already gained earthly experience, that brings something into this life that is not contained in the two worlds that one has already become acquainted with. It is not contained in the sense world and not in the spiritual-soul world. One learns to recognize that which is now elevated above the sensual and the soul-spiritual in that it has already experienced a sense world. One learns, because one has first got to know those other two worlds, also to know that world where the repetitive in man reveals itself.

This can be said about the world outside of man in connection with man himself.

In this way, I have roughly indicated to you the essence of anthroposophy, how through it one can penetrate into the immortal part of the human being, how one can penetrate into the cosmos and into the connection of the human being with the cosmos. But when we get to know the human being in this way, and his or her relationship to the world, we gradually advance to the areas where anthroposophy is not just a form of knowledge, although that is what it seeks to be at first, and from which it but one advances to that which anthroposophy is already capable of in a certain sense today, namely to the applications of anthroposophy to the most diverse fields of science and practical life. I can only make brief references to these things here, but I would like to make them based on the principles that I have just discussed about the nature of anthroposophy.

First of all, we get to know the human being as a sensory being, as a being that exists as a natural being within natural facts, natural forces and natural substances. When we learn through physiology and biology how the substances of the external world penetrate into the human being, which paths they take, which forces then continue to work, then we become aware of how the human being stands – I would like to say – as a physical-sensual whole. But when we get to know the human being in the way I have just described, then we see not the physical-sensuous whole, but we become aware of the many different ways in which the human being is determined by the cosmos in relation to his various members. Thus, for the characterized supersensible knowledge, it shows that the solar element, which has an effect on man from the cosmos and continues to have an effect on man, has its effect on everything that I would like to call the main, the head organization of man, the one that is mainly the nerve-sense organization. This is therefore what has to do with the development and growth of the human being, and what is most active internally in the very young child.

In the course of life, the moon-like forces, the [dampening] forces that lead to physical death, become more and more effective. These are mainly active at the opposite pole of the human organization, in the system of limbs, the organs of movement and the internal organs of movement, the metabolic organs. In short, we now learn to understand the human being not just as a whole, but learn to integrate it into the outside world. This can then be further specialized. What seems to us to be closed off in the human being for the ordinary consciousness becomes an event, a process for supersensible knowledge. We learn to speak through supersensible knowledge not only of the brain and its parts, but of the brain process, the lung-like process, the heart process, in short, of the human being as a form that is mobile in itself, even in its physical organization, permeated by the formative forces of the body, moving it, and we get to know what the etheric body accomplishes with the physical body as a sum of processes. In this way, however, we penetrate deeper into the human being.

We get to know the human being's relationship to its surroundings, in the broadest sense to the cosmos. In this way we arrive at a real, genuine knowledge of the human being. And you have seen that we not only gain knowledge of the human being, but also of the outer world. We get to know the sun-like, moon-like, that which otherwise lives in the cosmos, in the plant, animal and rock world. We learn about the processes that take place in healthy and sick people. We recognize external processes that are, in a sense, the opposite processes of these processes. We get to know the plants and minerals that contain the opposite processes. We penetrate to a pathology and therapy, to a medical science that is not only based on trial and error, but that, like any rational science, learns from knowledge of man and the world how to observe health and disease and how any medicinal substance helps any process in the human body that deviates from what is beneficial for the human body. So you can see how it has come about that anthroposophical research has been made fruitful by setting up our Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Stuttgart, where we are looking for new remedies and new therapies. The experiments have already progressed so far that they can go out into the world and prove how it has been possible to make anthroposophy fruitful in this field of practical scientific life.

Likewise, my dear attendees, we were able to find a path that may be said to fulfill Goethe's path of art in a certain way, by which I mean a path that leads from what is there into what is formative, for example, through our building in Dornach, the Goetheanum, the School of Spiritual Science, which is not only, so to speak, an external framework for anthroposophical activity, but is artistically so imbued in its architectural style as anthroposophy with that with which it, as a world view, presents itself to humanity. If any other spiritual movement had needed its own building, it would have turned to this or that master builder, who would have created a setting for it out of the Romanesque or Gothic or some other architectural style.

Anthroposophy does not want to be abstract knowledge, it does not want to be mere theory. It cannot merely fertilize the individual sciences, but it penetrates from the formed world to the forming world. And let us take a saying by which Goethe has just characterized his own artistic perception. He says: Art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature that could never be revealed without art. By creating art, Goethe does not want to implant human arbitrariness into the material, but rather what is felt or, as we would say today, seen in the spiritual from the cosmos itself. A building could arise that says exactly the same thing in its forms for external observation as is said in words, by representing the anthroposophical view, the view of the spiritual world, from the idea. And so anthroposophy will also be able to have a fruitful effect on artistic life.

In Stuttgart, Emil Molt founded the Waldorf School in 1919, which I run. This Waldorf School is by no means a school of world view, and those who think that anthroposophy is taught there as a world view are quite wrong. That is not the case. It has gone so far that the religious worldviews are represented by the representatives of the individual religious denominations. Catholic worldview is taught by the priests of the Catholic Church, Protestant worldview by the priests of the Protestant Church. We have introduced special religious education only for those children who would otherwise have no religious education at all, but this does not aim to graft an anthroposophical worldview onto the children. The educational method of the Waldorf School, its didactics, should express what anthroposophy can give in this most important area of practical life.

And, dear ladies and gentlemen, anthroposophical knowledge gives us knowledge of the human being. With it, we can follow how the soul and spirit of the child express themselves from the first moment of life, how the soul and spirit have an ever-increasing plastic effect on the external physical form. Certain laws can be found that are different in the child up to the time he learns to speak, then different again up to the age of nine, and then again up to sexual maturity. We can get to know the child completely without having to become a revolutionary with regard to the basic laws of life. What we need is practical knowledge of human nature. Anthroposophy does not want to create revolutionary new principles at any price; it wants to get to know the child in such a way that anyone involved in teaching can, so to speak, deduce everything that is developed in the curriculum and teaching objectives from the spiritual, mental and physical knowledge that anthroposophy can provide, as I have described it.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is fair to say that if anything in any other field had been able to bear fruit in the same way as some things did at the Anthroposophical Congress in Stuttgart this past summer, the world would have looked at something like this differently. At this congress, for example, we saw how external experimental psychology and education were so excellently discussed, as in the lecture by Dr. von Heydebrand. If this had been given in other fields too, it would have been the talk of the day for a long time for all those involved in education and teaching. Anthroposophy, which has to fight for its field, to fight for it in the field of education and also in other fields, will then also be fruitful for other fields.

We have experienced in modern culture that thinking, the whole way of imagining, which simply emerges from the scientific way of thinking, has led us into a social world view and outlook on life that is now bearing its terribly destructive fruits in Eastern Europe in particular. We have seen the fruits of a purely scientific life that does not want to penetrate to the spirit in the social sphere. The Anthroposophy that is to be revealed does not merely comprehend man as a natural being and also think him into social life as a natural being, but comprehends him as a being of body, soul and spirit. And in this way Anthroposophy can fertilize social life. However, this can only be shown little by little, it must gradually be lived out in individual practical things, which have already been pursued. I do not want to talk about that, but about the fact that even economics, which arose from purely external views, has been subjected to an excellent critique by Emil Leinhas, so that here, in his lecture 'The Bankruptcy of Economics', which is now also available in print, a way has been shown to introduce spirituality into social life. But social life is not steered in the right direction merely by speaking to a stove: “Dear stove, your task is to warm the room, so warm it up.” That is of no use, as we know; instead, you have to put fuel on the stove, and then the warming will come of its own accord. Social life is not steered in the right direction by persuasion, by a categorical imperative. This can only be achieved by making use of the forces that can really be introduced into practical life.

And finally, where anthroposophy can have a fruitful effect – but this is perhaps the most important thing, although it does not belong to our topic – I mention the area of religious life. It is precisely here that anthroposophy is misunderstood, in that people believe that it wants to incorporate something sectarian into life, when in fact it shows how knowledge — which is as rigorous as ordinary science — penetrates to the spiritual and soul life in the world and, in the core of the human being, fulfills that which comes from it, the human soul, with religious intimacy. In a sense, the human being learns to recognize this through being a religious adult, illuminated by the light that can only come from beholding the spiritual worlds to which the human being truly belongs.

Nothing would like to be anthroposophy for religious life more than what, according to the demands and longings of modern man, can live through this life in such a way that it offers inner security, that it gives support for life, that it can also enter into life practice. Because ultimately that is what everything depends on: life practice. If we were to ascend to a spiritual world that we only half-dreamt of, glimpsing it out of cloud-cuckoo-land, and if our lives on earth were to continue without the influence of this spiritual world, then this spiritual world would be of highly questionable value to human beings. Anthroposophy does not present itself to people in such a way that they should follow the example of certain mystics for whom the material world is always too bad. It also wants to advance to the higher worlds, but it knows that the higher spiritual worlds are those that bring their lives to a revelation precisely by creating the physical-material.

And so anthroposophy seeks to become the basis for a true practice of life. We permeate ourselves with what can be seen in the spiritual life, but we try to carry it into all areas of life, into the practice of life. Because it is not the spiritual world in which one must flee that is the right one, but the one in which one can actively immerse oneself in life. And so anthroposophy does not want to become something that turns against the great advances in knowledge of nature and what comes from it, but something that further develops this knowledge of nature in the sense of a knowledge of the spirit, but also in the sense of a true spiritual practice worthy of human beings. No one more than the one who stands on the ground of this spiritual-scientific anthroposophy will recognize the great importance of modern science and reject any dilettantism in any field if it wants to set the tone for the spiritual life. But it must nevertheless arise from the deepest longings of the human heart and all human striving for knowledge, which ultimately wants to be anthroposophy.

Just as we only have the whole, the full human being before us when we not only consider the outer nature of the human being, the outer, bodily organization, but when we see him or her as ensouled and spiritualized , we only have real knowledge of the world and of the human being and a spiritual and humane way of life if we want to penetrate our natural practice and our natural knowledge with what comes from the spirit, from the soul. And so anthroposophy does not want to oppose scientific progress, but wants to have genuine scientific meaning itself, wants to be that which is soul for the whole human being, which is spirit in corporeality. It seeks to be this for external natural knowledge and for external natural practice. To a certain extent, it seeks to see a soul and a spirit in the magnificent and powerful contemplation and practice of nature in recent times, and it is this anthroposophy that is meant here that seeks to act as and be understood as the center, as the soulful and spiritual center for natural knowledge and natural practice.

Saying from the soul calendar (16) by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the soul calendar (17) by Rudolf Steiner
“Children's Song” by Max Schuurman (children's group)
Saying from the soul calendar (19) by Rudolf Steiner
“Wind and Violin“ by Christian Morgenstern, with music by Leopold van der Pals
“Blissful” by Christian Morgenstern
“Autumnal Feeling“ by Friedrich Hebbel
“The Legacy” by Robert Hamerling
Saying from the soul calendar (20.) by Rudolf Steiner
“The Demure“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“The Convert” by J. W. v. Goethe
“Andante grazioso” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Saying from the soul calendar (21st) by Rudolf Steiner
Three-part canon (children's group)
“I. Urtrieb“ by Fercher von Steinwand
“Prooemion” by J. W. v. Goethe
“II. Urtrieb” by Fercher von Steinwand ‘Tanzliedchen’ by Jan Stuten (children's group)
Humoresken by Christian Morgenstern with music by Jan Stuten: “Ein Seufzer”; “Muhme Kunkel”; “Der Papagei”; “Lore”; “Lorus”; “Wortkunst”
“Der Rattenfänger” by J. W. v. Goethe with music by Max Schuurman

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen!

Allow me today, as usual, to say a few words before these attempts at a eurythmic presentation. It is not done to explain the idea. Artistic attempts that would first need explanations would not be such. Art speaks entirely for itself, and it should also be understandable for the immediate impression. But now, with this eurythmic art, the attempt is being made to create something out of different artistic sources than those we are used to, and through a different formal language. And about these sources and about this formal language, allow me to say a few words, also because the whole attempt at the eurythmic art is still in its infancy and only with its further perfection will it be able to give what is actually intended.

On the stage, they will perform the movements that a person performs with their limbs – movements of the whole person, movements of groups of people. All of this is not achieved by some kind of pantomime or facial expressions, but is based on carefully observing what actually happens in a person when they reveal the depths of their soul through speech. We can say that, like everything that this Dornach structure wants to present to the world, the art of eurythmy is also derived from Goetheanism, from Goethe's view of art and his artistic attitude.

Goethe undertook – if I may preface this with something seemingly theoretical, which is, however, not meant theoretically – to recognize the essence of a living being from its form. Well, more than we realize today, human knowledge will come back to this Goethean attempt at a real penetration of the essence of the living, when many prejudices will be stripped from the world view, which is still very much asserted within this world view today. What counts is simply what Goethe published in 1790 in his so vividly and profoundly significant essay, 'Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants'. I would like to emphasize only that Goethe is concerned to explain the individual leaf in its often simple, often more complicated form for the whole plant and, in turn, to explain the whole plant in its inner ideal essence only as a more complicated leaf: The plant as a kind of community of individual, visible plants, which appear as leaves and undergo transformations and metamorphoses. The petals, calyx vessels, stamens and so on are also metamorphoses of the leaf. This living contemplation of the transformation of a single organism, this beholding of the whole living being as a more complicated structure, which is already foreshadowed in the individual organs, is what will one day solve the riddle of the living, when it is further developed.

What Goethe applied to the form of plants, and later extended to the form of animals, is here to be used – but elevated to the artistic – for the eurythmic art. From knowledge, Goethe also builds a bridge to skill, to artistic skill. And Goethe has a beautiful saying that should be taken up by every artistic disposition: “When nature begins to reveal her secrets, one longs for her most worthy interpreter, art.” This brings us to true knowledge, which does not live in abstractions but in direct observation, and to artistic creation.

Now we will attempt to extend what Goethe first observed for the purpose of design to human activity. We will carefully study the artistic movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs when speech is produced. It is not the fine vibrations that are transmitted from the human organ to the air and then travel to the hearing organ of the listener that are important, but rather the underlying movement tendencies, on which these vibrations are then, so to speak, threaded. I would like to say that when we look at a long plant stem, such as the false acacia, which forms a long stem to which individual leaflets are attached, we could follow basic tendencies that already make themselves felt in the larynx and its neighboring organs, basic tendencies for the vibrations of speech. These basic tendencies are recognized, if I may use Goethe's word, through sensory-supersensory observation. And just as Goethe imagines the entire plant to be nothing more than a single leaf in a more complicated form, we let the whole person carry out in movement what is otherwise carried out in the region of the larynx and its neighboring organs. So we actually transform phonetic speech, in which the inner movement tendencies are not subject to attention because they are only devoted to the sound, we transform phonetic speech into a visible language: the whole human being – or groups of people too – stand in front of you on the stage and perform the movements that are otherwise performed invisibly when phonetic speech is produced. That which underlies speech as a sub-sensation, I would say, is brought out and imprinted as movement on the human form or on groups of people.

This creates an opportunity to point out something that is currently being felt very vividly by creative artists – at least, one would like to point this out from one corner – namely, that a large proportion of artists today are yearning for new means of expression, new forms of expression. Impressionists, expressionists or whatever these artists call themselves, is how the various paths taken in their art are called. On the one hand, we see how the immediate impression is to be captured, how the impression is to be reproduced. Because people today have actually lost the power to delve into the inner essence of things, as the great artists of earlier epochs were able to do, have lost the ability to create entirely from within, so to speak, what remains is captured in the impression. Or, what is captured through wrong words and so on, which then seems difficult for more philosophical natures to understand, is captured in expressionism. But these are all paths that actually lead to answering the old question of art in a new way: how do you capture impressions artistically without thoughts playing a role in the process? Abstract thoughts are always the ones that kill actual art. Art must proceed without abstract thoughts. Now, here we have the opportunity. In ordinary speech, we do not have the same opportunity, because today the need to communicate has already descended too far into the conventional, into usefulness. And the artist, for example, must try to achieve through what lies beneath language - also a eurythmic element, by the way - that which can satisfy him.

Here in eurythmy, we have the opportunity - apart from the one element that is present in spoken language - to completely switch off the thought and to derive the movement directly from the whole human being, from the will, so that we have something very direct, because the means of expression is made by the human being himself, comes about in the human being himself. Incidentally, it expresses itself because the human being is the instrument of this eurythmic art and what is inherent speaks directly to the senses, as all art must speak to the senses, and everything that is soul-based passes directly into movement, so that here, under all circumstances, a union of the expressionistic with the impressionistic is created. The impression is given by everything speaking to the senses, to the eye, the expression is given by the fact that it is the inner life of the human being that is expressed in these movements. This avoids all pantomime and mere mime, and one arrives at a regularity in the movements that can be compared to the inner connection of the melodious and harmonious element in the music itself. In this way, what you will hear on the one hand as recitation and on the other as music is transposed into this visible language.

Those of you who are present and who have been here before will see that we have made efforts to make some progress recently, particularly in the construction of forms. However, these are things that are still very much in the making. We are our own harshest critics and we know very well how much is still missing in each case. On the whole, it will still be a matter of implementing the dramatic element into the eurythmic. I have been working on this for a long time, but so far no way has been found, while in the lyrical, and in the humorous, it has recently been very successful as a well-executed presentation. To express this in a new way, not only what was in the words, but the real form, that is, what the poet has made of the content, to express that also in the rhythm of the movements, that is our ideal: not to express the direct feeling, as it is also the case with music, not to express that which is a chance connection between gesture and inner soul experience, but something so lawful as it is present in the spoken language itself.

This is some of what I have to say to you about the formation of the art of eurythmy. You will see that in this art of eurythmy, the true artistic quality that has been so sorely lost in our time comes into its own. Our time often looks at the content of a poem, not at the how of the structure, the beat, the rhythm, which is what really matters. I would like to remind you again and again how Schiller, when writing his most significant poems, did not first have the literal content in his soul, but rather a kind of indeterminate melody - no matter which words it should belong to - an inwardly moving music in the soul, and only then did the words arise.

Those who cannot see through to this eurythmic element will not be able to understand the artistic element in poetry either. Recitation must also follow this aspiration, and cannot see its ideal here either, as the literal content is particularly emphasized, muffled and the like, which is currently regarded as the ideal of recitation , but rather that which lies in the how, in the formal elements, in the movement of thoughts and feelings, quite apart from the literal content, which is more of a guide to the artistic aspect and not the artistic aspect itself. This must also be expressed in the recitation. Otherwise it would not be possible to accompany this eurythmic art in reality in the recitation. The art of recitation as it is generally regarded today is something that can no longer be done alongside eurythmy. But precisely through this, the prospect will open up that our inartistic time will return to artistic feeling when one sees that something that can only be understood in the actual artistic sense, like this eurythmy, will also radiate something of the actual artistic element for the sister arts.

Then this eurythmy, this visible speech, has a hygienic element. I do not want to talk about that today because of the shortness of time. Another essential element, however, is the pedagogical-didactic one, which is why we have already introduced eurythmy as a compulsory subject in our Waldorf School in Stuttgart, where it already shows what it is supposed to for those who want to see it.

My dear attendees, of course there is a certain appreciation for gymnastics, which has emerged in more recent times in the development of humanity. But people who see a little deeper - like Spengler - have already expressed their reservations about gymnastics. And for those who are still aware of the prejudices that exist in today's world and who can see something ahead, know that gymnastics, because it is guided by the physiology of the human being, by the physical body, can to some extent also train this physical body, but that what the person of the present time does not have, but what he urgently needs – initiative in the will, initiative in the soul – can only be cultivated by introducing soul-filled gymnastics – eurythmy – alongside the previous gymnastics, which is more physical. Through this soul-filled gymnastics, which is incorporated into didactics and pedagogy, every movement that the child performs as eurythmy is such that it is worked towards engaging the whole person, not just the physical part. This is something that will be taken into account little by little, precisely because initiative of the will, soul initiative of the will, must be striven for alongside physical education, which can only come through gymnastics.

So today, in addition to the artistic side of eurythmy, you will also see something presented by children. This should be seen only as a sample of how eurythmy can work in a pedagogical-didactic way on the child. In all of this, however, I may ask for your forbearance again today, for the reason that it is meant very seriously that we ourselves are the strictest critics of these our beginnings, perhaps of the attempt of our beginnings in our eurythmic art and eurythmic didactics. They will need further training, perhaps even from others, because it takes a long time to develop, like other arts; but then this eurythmic art – anyone who seriously engages with it must have this prospect – will be able to stand in a dignified way alongside its older sister arts, which have had longer to influence people.

Saying from the soul calendar (22nd) by Rudolf Steiner
Saying from the soul calendar (23rd) by Rudolf Steiner
“Children's Song“ by Max Schuurman
“Blissful” by Christian Morgenstern
“Cheerfulness” by F. Hiller
“Zwei Segel“ by C. F. Meyer (two children)
“Die Spröde” by J. W. v. Goethe
“Die Bekehrte“ by J. W. v. Goethe
“Andante grazioso” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Saying from the soul calendar (24th) by Rudolf Steiner
“Primal Words, Orphic“ by J. W. v. Goethe with music by Leopold van der Pals
“IV. Primal Instinct” by Fercher von Steinwand
Children's performances: “Pious Hopes” by Graben-Hoffmann; “A Little Story” and “From the Sketchbook” by Christian Morgenstern; “Dance Song” by Jan Stuten
Humorous prelude with music by Jan Stuten
Humoresques by Christian Morgenstern: “Physiognomisches”; “Die Nähe”; “Palmström”; “Das böhmische Dorf”
Satirical prelude by Leopold van der Pals
“Bildhauerisches” by Christian Morgenstern

Dear attendees!

As always before these eurythmy performances, I would like to say a few words in advance. I do this not to explain the performance, which would be inartistic, but to say something about the source - the particular forms of expression that come into play in our eurythmic art. It is, after all, a new attempt. This eurythmy is an attempt to create art through a particular formal language, which is not invented but drawn from human nature, from the human being itself. Eurythmy, as conceived here, is a visible language, performed through movements that the human being produces through his organization, through his limbs, or that individual human beings produce through movements in space or groups of people through movements in space or through mutual relationships.

At first glance, all this could be seen as a collection of gestures, and eurythmy as a whole could be confused with something related to pantomime or facial expressions and the like. But eurythmy is the opposite of all that. If I may use this Goethean expression: in order to bring eurythmy about, it is through sensory-supersensory observation – Goethe often used this expression out of his artistic ethos, out of his artistic out of his artistic outlook, it is through sensuous-supersensuous observation that we try to recognize what inner movement tendencies the human larynx and the other speech organs have within them when the audible speech sound comes about.

What is meant here are not the movements that come about when the human speech organ first moves the air and then these vibrations propagate in space, penetrating the ear and thereby mediating the hearing of sounds, the hearing of the sound. What is meant are not these movements, but rather movements that are observed through sensory-supersensible seeing, or better said, inner movement tendencies. Because the larynx and the other speech organs are directly related to the external air, the movement tendencies are transferred to the external air and speech comes about. But that which lies in speech is, in a sense, the expression of the whole human being. And it is from this insight that eurythmy, as an artistic observation, proceeds. The same movement tendencies are brought forth from the whole human being that otherwise come only from the larynx and the speech organ. The whole human being is set in motion as otherwise only the larynx and its neighboring organs are. But only naturally, when the whole human being is taken into account and set in motion, the movements are not transmitted in the same way silently to the outer air, but they are first transmitted to the human movement organs themselves, to the muscle system. And so it comes about that not an audible but a silent, visible language is created, in which the whole human being can reveal himself in relation to his soul and spiritual life. Therefore, what is expressed in music and what one otherwise hears when a person speaks can be translated into the visible language of eurythmy. One could say that the whole human being becomes a speech organ, becomes a larynx.

What we see on the stage is what we otherwise hear when people speak. We see it when people or groups of people move. But all of this is in accordance with an inner law of the human organism. So we cannot ask: what is the momentary connection between a particular movement and what is recited in a poem that is being read in parallel? Rather, as in music, where one sees the actual artistic element in the continuous stream of the sound structure, one must see the artistic element in eurythmy in the way one movement arises out of another. It is not the content, the prosaic content of the poetry, that should be expressed in this movement, but precisely the artistic element.

Those of you who have seen some of this eurythmy before will have noticed that we have been trying to make progress in this eurythmic art, especially in recent months. You will have seen how we have been trying to get rid of all pantomime and mime – teething troubles in eurythmy, we are still in the early stages of this but these are the kind of problems that arise in eurythmy if it happens at all. All of this can be increasingly stripped away to reveal only what is expressed in the poetry in terms of inner rhythm, inner beat, the formation of thoughts and the like, rather than the prose content. In our so unartistic time, some artistic aspects can now be added again. For it has become fashionable today, for example, in reciting, to simply reproduce the prose content of a poem in a somehow “soulful” or similar way, as it is so beautifully called - in eurythmy recitation today an impossibility. That is what could not accompany the eurythmy. In recitation, the main emphasis must be placed on the actual artistic quality of the poetry. Today, it is the case that 99% of all poems that are written would be better left unwritten, because basically they are just prose set to verse. It is the inner form that the real poet gives to the content of the prose, either musically or plastically, that is what should actually come to the fore in eurythmy, and what must come to the fore above all in the visible language of eurythmy.

Schiller – I always have to remind people of this – had, like other great poets, in mind, in his soul, before he sought the prose content for a poem, an indeterminate melodious form; only then did he seek the prose content. If you go back to certain primeval times of human feeling, you will find everywhere, I would say, a primeval eurythmy. It is not recited as it is recited today, but is often recited in a kind of moving accompaniment. I can still see this primitive eurythmy when the reciter is moving around, although this has increasingly been abandoned in recent decades.

If what we think of as eurythmy really does fit in with the artistic aspirations of the time in the future, then it will help to create a certain upturn in the actual artistic feeling that arises from it. For the more language is cultivated, the more it becomes, on the one hand, the expression of the conventional that prevails in human intercourse, which of course completely excludes the artistic, or it becomes the expression of thoughts, of logically formed thoughts, which in turn excludes the artistic. All intellectualism is, of course, inartistic. In speech based on sounds, however, it is self-evident, and the more cultivated it is, the more the intellectual, the thinking element, and the will and feeling element merge. Thus speech based on sounds is, I would say, only half suited to truly expressing something artistic. Eurythmy leaves out what the thought element is. Everything that is translated into movement comes from the feeling, from the will element, and is translated into will form, into movement. That is why the whole person is expressed in this eurythmic form of movement. What is revealed is, as it were, pushed back into the human being, but in doing so it is also made more artistic in essence. Of course, I do not want to claim that eurythmy is now something that can be seen as a model in the face of the many artistic endeavors that already exist today. We see how the old artistic endeavor is worthy of destruction, and how a new artistic element is truly demanded by the times. But in a certain sense, this eurythmy will be able to have a particularly fruitful effect on this longing, which is present to such a high degree in artistic natures in the present day, especially in the direction that this eurythmy, so to speak, elevates the human being above that which, I would say, is culturally devastating in today's world. We live in a time in which the most important matters of the world are followed by the vast majority of people with a kind of sleeping soul; and in many respects, when we hear about mysticism, theosophy and the like today, we are actually hearing about something that increases the state of sleep that so many revere and that has caused so much catastrophe in recent times. We must consider how eurythmy actually works in this respect.

Let us take the opposite pole of eurythmy, human dreaming. What does it actually consist of? The time of day of the human being, I would say the state of the human organism during the day, is tuned down; the human being lives, while dreaming, only in thoughts. When he performs movements in thought, they are not movements in which his organism participates, but rather movements that are thought. Man can be motionless; he can be in a state separate from external reality, in the dream element. This dream element, which weakens the human will so much, which makes people so sleepy in terms of culture, is precisely what is completely overcome by eurythmy. We no longer have to struggle with anything when it comes to emerging eurythmists, who always want to fall back into all kinds of mystical dreams - even when it comes to the opposite - than with this falling back into any kind of dreamlike states. In eurythmy, it is about the opposite pole. Precisely [gap in the text] the thought life as an element is suppressed, [one] suppresses what predominates in dreams and what lies still in dreams, the moving human being, the human being completely permeated and fired by will, is made an object of art itself.

Precisely for this reason, this eurythmy essentially becomes, in addition to the actual artistic element of eurythmy, which I would like to mention in the second place, an important pedagogical-didactic element in our time. I would like to say: it becomes an element that really belongs in schools - as we have also introduced this eurythmy as a compulsory subject in the Stuttgart Waldorf School.

Times that will think more calmly and objectively about these things than we do will know that while gymnastics is very healthy in terms of the external physical body, the soul is neglected in gymnastics, as it is conceived as arising from the physiological nature of the body. What eurythmy can give to the child – and you will find the test of children's ideas presented in eurythmy today – is that every movement that is carried out is not carried out without soul, is not merely dictated by physiology, but is carried out with soul, that the whole body is in soul-filled movement. But this is something that has an effect on the will, that has an effect above all on that which is a main requirement for education in our present and the near future, without which we cannot make progress in education: the will element, the inner soul initiative, is fostered when this eurythmy is used as a teaching method.

To speak of a third element, the hygienic-therapeutic element, in this eurythmy would be going too far today.

What we can offer will of course have to be taken with a grain of salt in many respects, because we are still at the very beginning with this eurythmic art. It has to be said that we ourselves are our harshest critics. We know how much we still have to learn, but we have tried hard to develop the art, especially in the design of the spatial forms, which are integrated into the poetry. We are trying more and more to enter into the eurythmic element where the attempt to shape poetically, itself already proceeds in the eurythmic, as for example in my 'Wochensprüchen' (weekly verses), where thoughts are indeed at the basis, but not the thought element, as it usually is based on the thought element, but rather where the main thing is the flowing sequence of thoughts through the interweaving of thoughts, the occurrence of a thought at a certain point - where it is not irrelevant whether a thought is in the third or fourth line. This following of the poetic form, of the poetic element in eurythmy — that is where we are trying to go further and further.

But eurythmy is still in its infancy. It will need to be perfected. Whether this can be done by ourselves or — as is more likely — by others, But anyone who has grasped the essence of eurythmy in his or her innermost being will be convinced that one day, when what we can only present today as a first attempt has reached a higher degree of perfection , eurythmy, as a younger sister art, will be able to present itself alongside the older and therefore still more perfect sister arts as a complete art, as the older sister arts were.