The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The best way to make ourselves familiar with ideas which can lead us, as men, into the spiritual world,is to try to obtain information through comparison of different facts which face us in the world.

What I would like to speak about today will be best explained if I start with such a comparison, i.e.—if I compare the consciousness which our present humanity should in accordance with the mission of our epoch, attain with earlier stages of consciousness attained by evolving humanity.

Just think yourselves back to the consciousness of the Greeks, to the ordinary consciousness which the Greeks had of Space. (Naturally I mean the consciousness of Space in a wide sense). You will realise without difficulty that in the consciousness of Space which the Greeks possessed only a portion of Europe was comprised—namely his own land and what bordered on it, a part of Asia and a portion of Africa, and that beyond this definitely limited region, the world was a kind of vague, indefinite quantity It might be said that what formed the horizon of the Greek's consciousness was the boundary of a something which was a vague infinity, at least to his consciousness. And this consciousness of the ancient Greek can be called (although the expression is naturally rather rough and ready, as such expressions always are because the consciousness of language is not adapted to express such things)—this consciousness which the Greek possessed may be called a land, or territorial consciousness. Now you know that the essential feature about the consciousness of humanity in the forward evolution of modern times has been that this territorial consciousness as it were, has developed into an Earth consciousness, that the surface of the Earth as it were, has shut itself off within definite boundaries. As a result of the disclosures of modern history man has imagined the surface of the Earth to be of a spherical shape. Speaking for the moment from the point of view of universal history, it may be said that simultaneously with the emergence of this Earth consciousness as a development out of a territorial consciousness, a panorama of what was outside and beyond the Earth came to be built up, a mathematical-geometrical panorama. The Copernican world-conception arose, and men have conceived of that which is outside and beyond the Earth in Space, in terms of mathematics, of geometry and of mechanics. The Copernican-Newtonian world-conception is, in its essential feature is a mathematical-mechanical picture of the world. Now, for every really thinking man, the question must naturally arise as to whether this mathematical-mechanical picture includes all that there is to be said about that which is beyond the Earth and can be perceived b by men in Space? It obviously does not include it all,,any more than the case when the old Greek confined himself as it were within the land or territory bounded by the horizon of his consciousness, and constructed what was beyond this, in phantasies. Of course the modern man does not clothe that which is beyond the Earth in such poetic phantasy as was the case with the ancient Greek with reference to what lay outside the territorial region comprised with in his consciousness, but the modern man encloses it in mathematical phantasy. Phantasy it is, none the leer for being mathematical. The essential feature in the attitude adapted by humanity in general of the present day is this; to conceive of the Earth as s great sphere in universal space, and to embrace what is beyond the Earth by mathematical and mechanical concepts, which for men who think very accurately, are merely mathematical and nothing else. The concepts which have been invented about all kinds of gravitational forces have been to-day abandoned by more thoughtful men and the world picture of what is beyond the Earth, is really only conceived of in terms of mathematics.

If we take all that we have been considering, during the course of many years, from the standpoint of spiritual science, the question must arise as to whether the time is ripe for this super-terrestrial concept of space, this mathematical and mechanical concept of space, to be ensouled by something else, by something empirical, something that can be experienced. For this mathematical-mechanical concept of Space is not empirical in any sense; the space-concept of Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, is something that has been invented, devised, built up from a comparatively small number of observations. And you will realise since there is no possibility of investigating what is beyond the Earth with physical means that such an investigation can only come to pass by means of spiritual science And that it can do to-day. The mathematical-mechanical conception yields no really human factor in this picture; it simply says something to us in abstractions, which do not touch the substantial reality which we postulate. Everything that physics an astrophysics have to tell us today about the super-terrestrial universe, is cold, barren and without any real content. As a matter of fact we are just at that point of time when it is impossible for human evolution to advance any further if we do not progress beyond a concept of the world that is merely mathematical and mechanical. Just as the old Greek had a territorial, or a land consciousness, and man since the beginning of what is called the modern historical epoch, has developed an Earth consciousness, so from now onwards, there must be an expansion to a universal or cosmic consciousness. And today I would like to devote the hour during which we can consider these things, to certain brief, aphoristical suggestions, as to the nature of this world or cosmic consciousness, which must take the place of a consciousness which merely embraces the Earth. Of course a very great deal will have to be done in the future if we are to collect in more exact detail proofs and verifications of that which I am going to put before you today in a kind of aphoristical outline.

You know that the investigations of Spiritual Science are based up-an perceptions of the soul,and in my book An Outline of Occult Science a considerable amount of knowledge gained in that way,is given out. In that Look I gave as mush as is necessary for the general consciousness of humanity at the present time, but it must be extended; what is to be found in that book must be deepened and widened.

Now with reference to the coming cosmic or universal consciousness, we are, if I may make a comparison, in the position of someone who is travelling in a railway train. He looks out through the window of the carriage and gets accustomed to the idea that he sitting still an his seat. He forgets that the train is itself moving forward. The forward movement which he himself makes with the train, is something that he forgets. He only takes into consideration the movements which he makes, when he gets up, for instance, and in relation to other men who are likewise sitting in the train, changes his position. Now, what such a traveller experiences is something that is very limited in scope, and restricted, and it can be extended by the fact of a break in the journey at some town or other. What he has experienced in the train is not, of course, changed, but the content of his consciousness is increased every time he gets out of the train at some town and experiences what is possible in just that particular place. This is all summed up, as it were, into the content of his journey, and something concrete emerges out of the abstract idea of the journey. The travellers' inner knowledge of the experiences he has had in the different towns is a guarantee that he has gone some distance and has entered into a different set of circumstances. Through the experiences which he has had, he knows that he was not standing still and that he was only able to maintain the illusion of being at rest so long as he remained in the train itself.

Now this is something entirely different from what is often said in discussions on the Copernican world-conception. Of course on such occasions mention is made of all kinds of illusions under which man labours, for example, the illusion that he believes to be standing still on the earth, whereas as a matter of fact, he moves together with it, since it is itself moving. But what I mean here is not that. I want to point out something else, namely that man can acquire certain inner knowledge in the course of his life, and especially in the course of experiences which follow one upon each other which are comparable to the experiences which a man has in towns when he gets out of a train and into it again, and so in a certain sense pulls himself up in the inner experiences of his soul, and enters the full content of inner experience at that point. Therein can be found a guarantee, a proof, that while a man is in the world, he travels through space and experiences something which says to him; You, as man, are not at rest, you are in process of taking a real world journey! I want you to be clear in your minds that something like that which is suggested by this parallelism, is the case. The proof of it can of course only be found in the actual experience. Make it clear to yourselves that there can be in the life of the soul, different experiences, in consecutive periods of time which are a guarantee of the fact that one passes on to different points in universal, in cosmic space. We shall afterwards see that this is all said by way of comparison. We shall see too that the difference between the consecutive experiences indicate an element of space which is of much more qualitative a nature than the merely quantitative element which is usually in the mind when Space is spoken of. Anyone who has real inner experience, and not merely the abstract experiences which are frequently brought forward in so external a sense when mystical matters are being talked about, knows quite well that there is something in what I have just mentioned. Whoever has inner experiences is able to notice in the course of his earth life, differences in the content of his soul life at the ages of, say, 30, 40, or 50 years. If he thinks about these inner souls experiences, he knows that he has moved on the world, that he has sought out other places and that his inner, mystical (if I like to use that term) experiences have changed their character. I am here speaking of experiences which are only taken into account by those who do not look upon mysticism in an external, abstract way, but who look upon it as something concrete in inner experiences. The abstract mystic may talk from the age of 25 years, right up to the end of his life, of the “God within him”. But a man who knows how to understand inner experiences as a concrete reality, knows that these inner experiences change their nature and content, as if on a world journey, which is not the same as a tour around the earth. If I may again express myself mystically, we traverse universal space consciously through our inner experiences. But we only do it as it ought to be done, when we reflect upon our relation to the surrounding world in a much more definite fashion than is usually the case.

It is quite possible to look upon our relation to the surrounding world in such a way that on the one side we have only our sense perceptions in mind, and on the other our desires, our willing, our deeds, our acts. The fact of holding our sense perceptions in the mind, sets us in definite relationship with the outer world; we perceive through eyes and ears, certain facts of the external world—we are in living intercourse with the outer world. What happens—happens as it were, at the margin of our corporeality. To-day I will not go into certain physiological objections, or those of theories of cognition which could seemingly be brought against what I am saying, because what I want to do is to outline the nature of the consciousness which must be attained in contradistinction to the earth and the territorial consciousness already described.

Our sense perceptions then, place us in a certain relationship to external events. And again, when we act, we stand but from the standpoint of another pole of our being in a certain relationship to external events and occurrences. We are involved in them, involved in a real sense, for we have ourselves partly brought them about. Between these two extremes of our life as human beings, is to be found everything which goes on in the field of our consciousness; on the one side there is the relationship to the outer world given us by the senses, and on the other side, by our desires and acts.

In that we develop feelings and conceptions of what our senses perceive, we live an inner life. And willing is fashioned from feeling and perceptions which have either deepened or condensed, as it were, into faculties. So that between perception and willing lies that which we psychically experience. But now, what is present in sense perception, is only seemingly a unity. In sense perception we look at the world and it appears to us as something uniform, a unity perceived through the senses. But as a matter of fact within this apparent unity, a duality is contained. For anyone who is capable of real perception, a duality is contained within what seemingly is a unity; there is a continual dying and uprising again. The world without us is in a state of perpetual dying and again coming to birth. In every moment in the world, we live in something that faces death, and out of that death, life continually comes forth again. If you look at a cloud, or anything else in the outer world it appears to you as a unity; but that it is not, The fact is that something is dying in the cloud, and out of this death something is again being born. Out of what comes from the past, there develops something which goes forward into the future. In all that we perceive there is ever contained fuel that is burning away and dying out; and fire that is arising, newly created, passing over as living form into the future. Then through such a training as is given in The Way of Initiation and Initiation and its Result, we learn how to separate these two poles of sense perception from each other, and to perceive actually the phenomena of death and coming to birth, then for the first time the world takes on a real aspect for us. When a man who is trained in the right way observes another man through the senses, he sees in that other man something that is continually dying and something that is continually arising again. Dying—coming to birth; dying—coming to birth, that is what we see when we have trained our powers of observation to some degree.

When this continual dying and coming to birth becomes objective to us, when we really see it and do not merely imagine it in an abstract way—when we see continually in a man, a corpse and a child coming into being (and it can be actually seen in this picture)—in that moment we have within our range of vision, the three hierarchies of of the Angels, Archangels and Archai. The world is full of real substance. It is no longer a unity such as we used to see when we look at nature. We cannot observe this dying and coming to birth, this Prana and Shiva of nature, without finding the whole of nature transformed and resolved as it were, into the activities of the spiritual beings of the three Hierarchies immediately above man. And so it is at the other pole of our being. In our deeds and acts there is again a continual dying and arising. But at this pole it is much more difficult to perceive it. A long and arduous training is necessary, but it can be done. And we then are within range of wisdom of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Through meditation then, we perceive what is between the two poles: we are able to contemplate that Being Whom, as I have told you, is to be found midway between these two poles. Everything becomes more vital, more living in our epoch as we gradually acquire this way of thinking.

But by rising to this height of contemplation, our soul life changes considerably. 'hen we really have got to the point where we see in our surroundings the activities of spiritual beings, then, at the same time we get to a point where we are able concretely to observe the differences in the soul life of the different epochs of which I have already spoken. And then when we have learnt (it is difficult to learn, but it is possible)—to take account of these inner changes in concrete inner experiences—then we see ourselves to be travelling through universal, or cosmic space. And then we know, not by means of external mathematical considerations, not by the sequence of inner experiences, that we together with the earth have changed our position in cosmic space. And then cosmic space becomes a very different thing to the mathematical-mechanical space conceived of by Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton. It becomes something that is inwardly vital and living, We learn to distinguish movement which we make as men in universal space. We learn too, to distinguish a movement which is made from left to right—that is an actual movement which we make with the Earth from another movement which is an ascending one as it were; we realise that in turning, we also ascend in space. Yet a third movement—a “forward” movement I might call it—an onward movement. This is not the same thing as moving an the Earth but is something which is done together with the Earth which can be proved by inner experience. We can prove to ourselves that when we turn from left to right, we ascend and at the same time go forward. So, by inner experience, we observe a threefold movement made, not in relation to some other heavenly body but a movement in an absolute sense in space.

Now of course you will say that the present consciousness of humanity is very far away from the conception that man in this sense is a world traveller and that he can quite well prove to himself the reality of this world journey. Yet there is a means whereby such consciousness can be acquired, however far away from these things human consciousness nowadays may be. What I have described is a reality, even if men to-day know nothing about it. Their ignorance can be compared to the belief which may be held by a man in a railway train who imagines that he is sitting still, whereas he is moving forward with the whole train. Now why is this belief general? In the first place the purely mathematical and mechanical Copernican world conception has for the last three or four hundred years had a more lulling to sleep than an enlightening influence an men. I have often said that this purely mathematical-mechanical world conception is really based upon a mistake which is quite fairly obvious. It presents a convenient picture of space but really no more that that. In the well known work of Copernicus about the revolutions of the heavenly bodies in space, three tenets are to be found, but modern science bases itself only an the first two, and takes no account of the third. Copernicus knew something more than what is admitted by modern astronomical science. And this “more” he concealed in his third tenet -but no account is ever taken of that third tenet. The observations made do not agree with the Copernican system, but modern science disregards this. Today when under certain conditions a man investigates empirically where some star or other ought, according to the correct reckoning set forth in the Copernican system to be found at a particular point of time it is not there. But then there is the so-called Beseel correction, and it is applied in order to obtain the right result. The application of this “correction” is only necessary because the third tenet of Copernicus has not been taken into account. Because of this, a kind of convenient mathematical-mechanical world conception or world picture has come into existence during the last three to four hundred years. It is not in accord with many things, but of course today anyone who mentions this fact is put down as a fool! It is scientific to believe that the various facts are quite in accord with each other. Humanity has been lulled to sleep by the Copernican conception of the world with reference to certain facts—facts which are nevertheless substantiated by inner experience. Human consciousness is dulled and in the future men will have to see to it that this state of things does not continue.

I have often remarked that men do not wish to understand spiritual science with their own “healthy” sense. This is really only a result of certain educational prejudices which hold sway at the present time. It is very frequently the case nowadays that when the occultist gives out his experiences people say: Oh well, it may be so, but the only people who can know that are those who have gone through a certain “mystical” training as they describe it. Now that is right to a certain degree, but not entirely right. I have repeatedly said that up to a certain point, everyone today can recognise as fact, through his own consciousness what is, for example given in my Outline of Occult Science. There is no need to take it merely an authority. Everyone can understand it by means of an ordinary healthy human intelligence But How? It could be understood by anyone who had been sent to the Waldorf School from his seventh to his fifteenth year. In that school the forces of his soul would have been healthily developed through methods which correspond to reality, and then, if he had gone to a more advanced school, the elasticity of' his soul forces would have enabled him to absorb what people ordinarily begin to learn after the age of fifteen. That would be one way of getting men who would realise that reality is only given by what is substantiated by spiritual science—and that everything else is nonsense. The fact that men will not admit this, does not originate from any impossibility to understand spiritual science without training, but arises because our school education between the seventh and fifteenth years is of such a kind as to kill out and stultify certain forces instead of waking them into activity. It follows that men resist the acceptance of facts given by spiritual science, although they would readily accept many of them if their psychic powers were developed in a healthy way. Powers of the soul which have been developed in a healthy way are not dead and benumbed as appears to be the case in the majority of men of our modern times; they are mobile, fluidic, elastic, and anyone in whom they had been rightly developed between the ages of seven and fifteen would be irritated at the modern way of learning things. Today people are satisfied with many things because certain incorrect theories have made the illusions far greater than they really need be.

I have often quoted a characteristic example. Children in their 12th, 13th, and 14th years are told that lightning comes from friction in the clouds and it is admitted at the same time that the clouds are wet. Of course they are; but then when it is a matter of producing the electric spark which is the earthly replica of the lightning, it is found necessary to keep the electrical apparatus and everything belonging to it perfectly dry in order that no water of any kind is present; so that it comes to this—the only thing that is present when the lightning originates, is removed and yet the lightning is the same phenomena as the electric spark! Children and grown up people are quite satisfied to be lulled to sleep with all kinds of hypotheses of this kind. There are innumerable examples of the same kind where people will accept obvious nonsense simply on authority and yet in our days there is much talk of the laying aside of all authority—people say that they are no longer credulous of' authority. Yet as a matter of fact if they had been so credulous it would have been quite impossible for the Marxian-Socialistic world conception to arise in our epoch, for it is far more credulous of authority even than ancient Catholicism!

It is today one of the most essential cultural tasks,to overcome that which in so retardative a way interferes with men's powers of understanding—and to substitute for the present system a healthy educational organisation. It is one of the most important social talks to work for the removal of impediments to human understanding. And then men will not be so obstinate and perverse about accepting what spiritual science has to say; they will rather be irritated by much that orthodox science has to say today, that is if their development has been a healthy one. They will very soon learn to see through all the contradictions. There is instinctive opposition nowadays to the establishment of healthy educational conditions, for it is felt that if they were to be established the authority of modern science would be undermined in a drastic way. It is essential that fluidic soul forces should again be produced in humanity and they will emerge quite naturally as a result of the knowledge which Spiritual Science is able to impart. As a result of these elastic soul forces humanity would be able to understand what is meant when it is said that man is within a movement which is absolute; men would furthermore understand how a world consciousness can grow out of an earth consciousness.

To speak in pictures for a moment, but the picture is really a good one—it is as if a man learns to feel himself as a traveller through universal space—a traveller whose movement consists of a rotation combined with a forward movement and a movement from below upwards, If we sketch the result of these movements—moving upwards in rotation, moving forward in this upward spiral movement—the curve will represent the path of the earth through cosmic space, not mathematically and dynamically as it is built up through the Copernican- Newtonian world conception—but as a result of inner observation. This is the way in which it ought to be arrived at for then we get something that is not abstract like the Copernican-Newtonian world conception, but very concrete—something that is actually super-sensible experienced empirically, if one may be allowed to use this tautology. The importance of this kind of cosmic consciousness does not lie in the fact that through it a man begins to feel things more in accordance with the truth than is now the case when he believes the Copernican world conception and the path of the earth as conceived of by it, to be correct, but very much else is dependent upon it. I makes on inwardly a different man. A man learns to feel himself not merely a citizen of the Earth but of the Universe, of the Cosmos. The world expands,as it were, for anyone who comes near the forces which are actually operative in these movements. In the rotary movement from left to right are to be perceived the activities of the Angels; in the ascent from below upwards the activities of the Archangels; and by the advance in universal space forward are to be seen to movement of the Archai, the forces of the Time Spirits. By taking up into his consciousness this absolute movement through the cosmos man turns his gaze into a spiritual space and becomes aware of the fact that physical space is only an abstract image of this concrete, spiritual space, in which the activities of the higher Hierarchies are to be found.

It follows from what I have just said that such a consciousness is connected with something else. Anyone who has an idea that there is something of this kind bound up with the real being of man must necessarily realise what terrible harm is performed by modern education in that it allows certain forces to be paralysed in our children up to their fifteenth year and they then as students develop into something that is a natural result of these paralysed forces. It follows that young people between the ages of 15 and 21 absorb things that are not at all what the present time demands. And in their souls there exists things that are very different from what they ought to be. I assure you that by giving unctuous exhortations to children up to fifteen years old and then again later at an age when people used to have ideals as young men and girls of 20 years of age—you will attain absolutely nothing at all; or at least only that the young people at our Universities and High Schools become what they are today—which there is no need for me to describe any further! The only way to obtain real results is by giving free play to forces which should be active during student days, which nowadays are simply paralysed. Education today is a problem touching the whole of humanity. It is a problem not for arbitrary ideals, but for the whole of humanity, a problem which must be understood in the light of the very deepest demands of the present time. At most today men have a presentiment that muck ought to be different—let us say, for example, in medicine, possibly also in the realm of law and judicial matters, but that feeling when it arises is promptly squashed by the lawyers! Men have a kind of feeling that many things are not what they ought to be, but that they cannot be changed. The aim of mankind must be directed at the right period of life to the awakening and not to the paralysing of forces within them. The life period between the seventh and fifteenth years is not there for nothing. During this period, perfectly definite forces out of human nature which must be reckoned with when it is a question of education or giving instruction at this time of life. When anyone has this in view in education it is a very different thing to working arbitrarily: without any such aim. Certain things will be observed which today pass by entirely unnoticed.

I have called attention to these matters in the article which will appear in the next number of the Waldorf magazine treating them from several different points of view. I have intimated that we can no longer today be satisfied with pedagogics modelled as they often are in perfectly good faith and with the best will in the world. Certain methods and principles and standards are drawn up—in good will perhaps, but without any real insight—and it is believed that these standards of pedagogics can be learnt. Herbart and his followers have this belief to-day that just by “learning” pedagogy it is possible to become a good teacher. Now even in the case where a set of standard rules is the most perfect imaginable—the rules are almost as worthless for teaching as a well-written book on aesthetics is worthless to the artist. It is quite certain that well written books on aesthetics do not make a man into an artist—and a science never makes a true teacher. It is not necessary to learn physiology in order to be able to feed oneself; a man can feed himself by a science that is quite different from physiology. Physiology is there for another purpose and if it is brought into the question of correct feeding, it comes in as a makeshift. It was always a horror to me to meet men at table who had scales near them in order to measure out and weigh every morsel that they put into their mouths and eat at a meal. That is am example of where the science of physiology interferes in a most destructive way in the process of feeding. Ah yes, you may well laugh at that; but those who because of their scientific prejudices feel such a thing to be justifiable, would laugh for quite another reason considering what I have said to you today to be the most god-forsaken dilettantism. He may laugh at these things from diametrically opposite points of view.

Well now, a cut and dried system of Pedagogics can never produce real teachers. And why? It is drawn up in such a way that its fundamental rules have to be accepted and then education is of no benefit at all. What is desirable is to forget pedagogics altogether when one goes into a classroom; to forget everything that may be known about academic pedagogics! Every time it should grow naturally out of a wide knowledge of what man and humanity is. Nobody can be trained to be a teacher by the mere fact of learning pedagogy; pedagogy can only be stimulated in men when they have acquired a knowledge of the nature of man. We should disregard pedagogics as a science as it were, and at most regard it as artists regard aesthetics, being quite conscious of the fact that aesthetics and its laws can never teach how to paint. An artist in Munich once said to me when I was speaking to him about aesthetics and Carriere—who was a celebrated authority on the subject: “When we were in the Art School we used to call Carriere ‘an old grunter on aesthetic rhapsodies!’”(Wonnegrunzer). Now it has not occurred to students as yet to give the same kind of appellation to theoretical pedagogics, for the general idea is that in pedagogics it is possible to make use of things which cannot be used in art. But as a matter of fact, the two things are the same. Into pedagogic training there should be brought that element which is to be found in our spiritual teachings—knowledge of Man, insight into the nature of humanity and that is able to stimulate a living relationship with the human being which is developing out of the child. Pedagogy should be born afresh every moment in the teacher; the impulse to teach and instruct in a certain way arises as the immediate result of having any particular child in front of one. This will produce quite a different kind of atmosphere from what prevails in the school room today, just because it is created not by cut and dried rules of education, but because it flows of itself out of life—living life as it were! If education were to arise out of life in this way, then those forces which ought to be present at the age of fifteen will not be paralysed, and a man will enter upon his later life with forces that are fluidic in his soul-forces of a kind which are necessary in order that something similar to what happened at the transition of the Middle Ages to modern times—when territorial consciousness was transformed into an Earth consciousness, may come to pass in our epoch—in order that out of an Earth consciousness there may grow a world consciousness, a cosmic consciousness. Outer experiences will not produce this; it will only come through the development of susceptibility for inner consecutive experiences of the soul. Today man has not the faintest consciousness of the dissimilarity of there souls experiences.

Now what is the position to-day? Men are children; they act like children influenced by their environment. Then the child becomes an adult; the concepts become more abstract, the experiences richer; that is the case with everybody. But with the soul it is not the same as is the case with regard to the external bodily part of us. We get a more sharply defined countenance when we reach a certain age; we have no longer the round curves of childhood; we get white hair and wrinkles, and we very often get bald! In short, the external bodily part changes. We cannot, however, say that the inner soul nature changes in this way—at most it gets more and more crammed full—but it does not grow in such a way that it changes from the point of view of thee external world. Old age and childhood have a wrong relationship to each other. Man today has no consciousness of things of which I have often spoken to you; for instance that an old man can bless and that the blessing of an old man has a special significance—a significance which is not there in the case of a middle aged man. Men of today have no consciousness of such things—simply because it is not known in our days that if one is to be able to bless rightly in old age, one must have learnt in childhood how to fold the hands (in prayer or veneration) For the power to bless in old age arises out of the folding of the hands in prayer in childhood. The soul element has the same relationship to blessing and the folding of the hands in prayer as grey hair has to the the hair of childhood. This inner change enters the sphere of knowledge of modern humanity in a very limited sense; but it must do so again to a greater degree. Men must again come to a point where they can understand life in its different metamorphoses. Otherwise we shall never get out of the terrible state of things which, for instance, makes it possible for anyone who is 18 or 19 years old and has a little talent, to become at that age, a Feuilletonist. [A journalist responsible for the critical and literary articles which sometimes appear in a newspaper below the leading articles. The feuilletons are usually divided from the rest of the newspaper by a line.] People who read the feuilletons produced by these men have no idea that they have been written by someone only 18 years old—and take them quite authoritative utterances. But if a man writes feuilletons at the age of 18 he does not develop any further. It also comes about that men when they are only 20 or 21 years old are considered mature enough to go into Parliament, or to become a town councilor! They are supposed to be capable to do this kind of thing. It is in these cases considered to be unnecessary at the age of 40 years to try to be a more accomplished person than was the case at their age of 20, for everything that the world can offer and what can be offered to the world, has already been attained! At the age of 20 one chooses or is chosen and the thing is finished! But men will first understand the wor1d in a concrete sense when they again realise that life is something which undergoes concrete transformation. Then that abstract socialism of which we hear so much today, will disappear and something concrete will take its place.

So you see that the growth of a cosmic consciousness out of an earth consciousness will be of great significance, especially because of what is produced in men by their feelings; for the important thing in such matters is not what a man knows but how he feels. There are certain things associated with life which can be understood only when this cosmic or universal consciousness is reached.

There is a great deal of abstract talking today about the ages or generations as they follow each other in life. We think something in this way—I mean those of us who have reached a certain age, for I except young people from this; a man has capabilities of a certain kind; he lives in such and such a way; his childhood was spent in such and such a way. People are really very short-lived, for they get angry with children when they do the same things as they did at the same age; they do not understand that children of to-day do the same kind of things as they themselves used to do; they expect those who are now children to be as well behaved as they are as grown up people, and do not realise that good manners and behavious have first to be acquired. But apart from this, there is something else. Men generally imagine that children now must be just the same as they were when they were children—a generation ago; children, who are born now must be just the same as I was in the year 1860! Now that is nonsense. For we are in an absolute sense, further on in cosmic space and those who are babies now are born at a different point of space. Suppose you travel from Stuttgart to another town today—you will have had something to eat in Stuttgart today and tomorrow somewhere else. You cannot have a meal in Stuttgart when you travel. And the children who are born in our time, cannot have the same psychic constitution as those of us who have reached a respectable age had when we were children. We must realise that childhood itself changes. This is connected with our absolute movement in universal space—of which mathematical space is only a schematic image. There is a tendency today to take ever thing in an absolute sense and it is a matter for rejoicing when this is not so. I was recently very pleased in Berlin when a man came to see me who had read—well,what shall I say the “discussions” of the Threefold Commonwealth which appeared under the title of A False Prophet in the paper called Die Hilfe. I do not know whether any of you read that effusion. This man was an American and he said to himself that there was something interesting about it. And he came to see me with Herr Pfarrer Rittlelmayer and explained that in spite of the feeble style, he had realised that it was a matter of interest. Among the questions which he—all of which were quite understandable—was the following, which specially pleased me; “One can see that the Threefold State is necessary for modern times and that it must be put in the place of the old uniform State; is it your opinion that the Threefold Commonwealth is the final and conclusive solution of the social question?” I answered him: “Most assuredly not; but in the course of historical development it has come about that in past centuries the State as a unity has been more in evidence and now the times demand a threefold Commonwealth, a time will come when the Threefold Commonwealth will have to be replaced by something different. That will not however, be for about three or four hundred years and then it will be necessary again to consider what should take place of the Threefold Commonwealth”. Now that is the opposite of chiliastic thought, the opposite to the thought that imagines the kind of empire which has lasted for a thousand years to be right for all time. It is the opposite of thinking which imagines that once a blessed existence is obtained for humanity it must remain for all time. Life in the world is not so easy as that. What is essential is that what is right for a particular epoch should be brought about and then substituted at the right time by what the following epoch demands, That is the essential point, that is organic thinking in contradistinction to mechanical thinking—and mechanical thinking is what holds sway at the present time; men really imagine that there is one absolute right for all time. One thing is right for Stuttgart, another for New York, another for Australia, One thing is right for 1919, another for 2530. I assure you that the evolution of humanity is not so simple as to possess one absolute Right. Things are always right for particular places and for particular times; there must be concrete thinking which arises from the facts and relationships. And that will happed when humanity is conscious of its absolute movement in universal space. a consciousness which, however, can only be induced through inner experiences, through inner life.

I have again to-day called your attention to something which should indicate to you how things must be looked at with reference to the penetration by spiritual science of our modern culture. Anyone who understands such matters,will see that humanity's love of ease resists spiritual science, for everything else is far more convenient, far easier, Spiritual science is terribly inconvenient! Spiritual science does not permit of our thinking out a certain condition of things which can remain for ever; it forces us to think out what is good and right for the centuries immediately following, perhaps even for a still shorter period of time. But this cannot be thought out by abstract concepts of the intellect about humanity, but only when a real effort is made to understand the special characteristics of the particular epoch, and to realise thereby what it demands. That may be inconvenient, but that is the reality. Men today like the settle down comfortably into cultural evolution, especially those men whose aim it is to be leaders in it!

I will give you an example of the understanding which persons of authority at the present time have of' spiritual science. I won't relate the story in detail in case someone might get offended, but in a certain town a man had occasion to lecture about Anthroposophy in a private High School. He was lecturing about modern world conceptions and he wanted to include an address about Anthroposophy because he considered it historically necessary—you see people try nowadays to be really “all round”. Now how did this man set about it? The plan of the lectures, the programme,was drawn up at the beginning of the tem and a certain hour was allotted to “Anthroposophy” just as in certain hours the subject was Darwinism, a particular hour was set aside for “Steiner's Anthroposophy”. This was all drawn up at the beginning of the term. Now this man, when he put Anthroposophy into the programme, had not the very least idea of what was to be found in a book about Anthroposophy. When the evening for this particular lecture came round, this man went to someone who had my books, and in the morning selected the most important of them in order to get information, in order to be in a position to give his lecture an Anthroposophy in the evening. It is very convenient to familiarize oneself in such a way about a world-conception, and then to give it our authoritatively. Such a thing as this is by no means rare in our modern days, and it deserves to be mentioned. For very, very much of what is said and lectured about and written about in the present day has no greater “depth” than this and it is accepted credulously. Then out of this credulous acceptance it built up what people have in their heads and in their souls about the different world conceptions. We must not close our eyes to facts like this which show the most terrible superficiality, we must be quite clear that to-day it is essential first of all to consider who the person is who is speaking “authoritatively” an certain matters.

The stimulation of this consciousness in the present time is more important, my friends, than all the substance of what I am able to tell you; it is a consciousness which makes us realise how terribly necessary it is to consider what degree of depth there is behind that which is given us, and told us. If one speaks of these things of course many people are hurt. And particularly it is said about Anthroposophists and Theosophists that they ought to have more forbearance, to judge with greater kindliness and not to be so critical, because to be so critical hurts people. But one asks oneself whether it is real charity to ignore the fact that such men who acquaint themselves in the morning with what they have to lecture upon in the evening should be let loose in the sphere of education. In questions that arise out of actual life, the important thing is how they are put. It is important to put the questions in the right way, for then only can the right point of view result.

I have tried to bring home to you today that earth consciousness must change into a cosmic or universal consciousness just as a territorial consciousness changed into an earth consciousness; but I did this in order to indicate much that in the realm of feeling is essential for the bringing about of healthy relationships in our civilisation of today.

And Oh! this must come about. If one could only shake sleepy humanity of modern times into a realisation of this! But it isn't by any means easy nowadays. Much may be said in this direction but men avoid making themselves fundamentally familiar with such a point of view. It is not enough merely to bring forward anthroposophical theories. It is absolutely essential to make one's penetration sharp for what is necessary for our time and not shut oneself up in preconceived ideas, We must open ourselves out toward that which has to be wrestled with, in order that from the point of view of a true charity one may be able to strike actively at the present time. If something is done in this direction by stimulating the souls and hearts of men, more is attained than by the most comprehensive theories imaginable.

It makes one's heart bleed to realise the truth of what was said by Herr Molt recently, that there are people today who say: “We would rather be a province of the Allies before we will think of anything like the Threefold Social Organisation”. This attitude is unfortunately widely spread. And a great many other things are connected with this kind of attitude because as a matter of fact another attitude can only arise from a spiritual deepening. Our modern time can only grow to be healthy through such spiritual deepening.

My dear friends! Of the two areas that you yourselves also spoke about yesterday, it seems to me necessary that we deal first with the one that will have to provide the foundation for all our work. Of course, we must first prepare the real ground, and in our time that can be nothing other than community building. We will be able to deal with what is to develop on this real ground all the better in our discussions if we first talk about this community building.

On the one hand, it is undoubtedly the most difficult of your tasks, although it is easy to underestimate, but on the other hand, it is also the most urgent. You can see this from the form that the youth movement has taken. This youth movement, as it lives today in its most diverse forms, has a clear religious background, and this religious background is also always emphasized by the understanding members of the youth movement. And if you look at this youth movement with an open mind, what you notice about it is what is intimately connected with the building of community.

Consider the following phenomenon of this youth movement: it emerged some time ago, years ago. How did it emerge? Initially with the express aim of joining one group with another. It emerged explicitly under the motto of union, of group formation; and the significant thing is that in recent years this youth movement has undergone a metamorphosis into its opposite in many circles. Even those who may have taken it most seriously in those days now advocate isolation and a hermit-like existence. They emphasize the impossibility of joining forces with others. And why is that so?

Perhaps it is, when viewed symptomatically, something that is one of the most significant social phenomena of our time, particularly in central, southern and eastern Europe, that the striving to be a spiritual hermit has emerged so rapidly from the striving for community building in the youth movement, and that there is actually a certain fear of union. If you are familiar with the youth movement, you may find something different here and there, but if you look at it impartially, you will see that the decisive impulses of this youth movement will have to be characterized as I have done.

Now, what is the underlying reason for all this? The underlying reason for all this is that the religious communities have not been able to hold this youth within themselves. It is quite obvious that this youth movement does contain a clear religious impulse. Originally, if we may say so, it was a rebellion against the principle of authoritative life, of paternal life, of looking up to the experience of older people, that gave rise to this youth movement; it was a shaking of the human, paternal principle of authority. The times developed in such a way that people simply no longer believed in their fathers, that they simply no longer had any inner, subconscious trust in their fathers. But man needs man, especially when it comes to action and work. People sought unification, but they could only seek this unification with spiritual life, which is anchored in the hearts of people today when they live and are raised in our ordinary schools, under our religious impulses and so on. Of course, religious longing stirs in young people precisely when something is not right in the external religious life, but it stirs as an indefinite, abstract feeling; as something nebulous, it stirs. On the other hand, it is precisely in connection with this religious urge that the longing for community life arises. But from all that young people could receive, from all that is available, the possibility of real community building does not arise, but rather – if I may express myself somewhat radically – only the possibility of clique formation. That is, after all, the characteristic of our time: that wherever the desire for community arises, what actually arises everywhere is not a real inner sense of community, but the sense of forming cliques, that is, of joining together through the accidental community and feelings of community for what is nearest at hand. What leads one person to another by the accident of place, the accident of circumstances, and so on, leads to the formation of cliques. But these cliques, because they are not based on a solid spiritual foundation, all have the seed of dissolution within them. Cliques dissolve. Cliques are not lasting communities.

Lasting communities do not exist under any other condition than that they are based on a genuine shared commitment in communal life. And for anyone who is familiar with the history of social life, there was nothing surprising in the fact that what only contained the beginnings of cliquish behavior could not develop into community life, and that therefore these young souls became reclusive, received the urge within themselves not to join, and even developed a certain fear of joining. Everyone goes more or less their own way, I would say, who has fully participated in the youth movement. But since this youth movement emerged from a shock to the paternal authority principle, it must be said that this historical life of more recent times does not contain the seeds for real community building.

What you must seek first and foremost is the formation of a community. And if you want to arrive at a goal that is true and rooted in reality, you will have no other choice than to practice threefolding, to be truly aware of how to practice threefolding. In your profession, you absolutely do not need to agitate for threefolding in the abstract. In your profession, it is particularly possible to work very practically for threefolding. But there is no other way than to seek out the way to those to whom you want to speak. A real way must be found to found communities.

Now one need not believe that by doing something like this, one must become a revolutionary in a certain radical sense. There is no need for that at all. It may happen in one case that you get into some kind of regular ministry, into a preaching job, in the completely regular way. It may also happen that you succeed in directing the external material conditions here or there in such a way that you found a completely free community. But such free communities and those in which one strives to bring freedom into religious life must belong together; and that can only be the case if, in a certain way, what you strive for – please do not misunderstand me here to misunderstand me, it is not to preach the pure power principle, but the justified power principle —, if what you strive for becomes a power, that is, if you have a certain number of like-minded people. Nothing else will make an impression on the world. You must actually have the possibility of having people as preachers over a large territory who are from your very own circles. To do this, it will be necessary to make the circle you have now at least ten times larger. That will be your first task, so to speak: to seek out such a large circle of like-minded people, initially in the way that the smaller circle came about. Only when people in the most distant places – relatively distant places, of course – see the same aspiration emerging, when there is cohesion with you over a larger territory, will you be able to proceed to such a community formation, regardless of whether you have come to the ministry of preaching by a path recognized today or otherwise.

You will be able to work in such a way that you can truly bind your parishioners to you inwardly, emotionally. When I say “bind,” it does not mean to put on slave chains. To do that, however, the parishioners must gain the awareness through you that they live in a certain brotherhood. The communities must have concrete fraternal feelings within them and they must recognize their preacher-leader as a self-evident authority to whom they can also turn in specific questions. That means that you must first of all establish a self-evident authority in these communities, which you do not need to call fraternal communities or the like in an agitative way, especially with regard to economic life, however strange it may seem at first. It must be possible for advice to be sought from you in economic matters and in all matters related to economic affairs, based on the personal insight of the community members. It must be possible for people to feel that they are receiving a kind of directive from the spiritual world when they ask the preacher.

You see, when you can look at life, then what should actually be giving direction to it comes to you in seemingly small symptoms. I was once walking down a street in Berlin and met a preacher I had known for a long time. He was carrying a travel bag. I wanted to be polite and asked him some question. The next thing, of course, was that I asked him the question that arose from the situation: “Are you going on a trip?” — “No,” he answered me, “I'm just going on an official act.” — Now you may see something extraordinarily insignificant in it; but from the whole context, the matter seemed extraordinarily significant to me. The pastor in question was more of a theologian than a preacher, but he was a very earnest man. He had the things he needed for a baptism in his traveling bag and yet he spoke and felt in such a way that he could say to someone whom he could reasonably expect to understand a different turn of phrase: “I'm going to an official function.” — That is something like a policeman, when a thief is to be sought, he also goes to an official act.

It should disappear completely from the preacher's work that the connection with the external state or other life should somehow emerge in his consciousness. The whole emotional tenor of the words must express the fact that what is being done is being done by a personality who acts out of the consciousness of her God, out of the free impulse of her human personality. The consciousness must be present: I am not doing this as an official act, I am doing it naturally out of my innermost being, because the divine power leads me to do so.

You may consider this a minor matter. But it is precisely this tendency to regard such facts as unimportant that is perhaps the most important factor in the decline of religious activity today. When, on the other hand, such things are regarded as the main thing, when a person is imbued with the direct presence of the Divine in the physical, right down to the most minute sensation, and when the preacher feels such authority that he knows he am bringing divine life into it, I am not performing an official act in the modern sense, but am carrying out a commission from God – only then will he transmit to his parishioners that which must be transmitted as imponderables.

This seems to be quite far removed from economic life. And yet, as things stand today, we must not consider the things we are striving for here in Stuttgart in the field of threefolding to be decisive for other areas of life. We are working out threefolding from the totality of the social organism. But for your profession, it is a different matter. For your profession, it is a matter of permeating each of the three limbs — which, even if they are not properly organized, are in fact still there — with religious life; so that, although complete freedom of action prevails within the communities, within which, of course, economic life also takes place - it must, so to speak, be a self-evident prerequisite that in economic matters, where it is a matter of spiritual life flowing into the community, the decision is made by the preacher, by the pastor. There must be such harmony, and above all, the pastor must live in intimate connection with the entire charitable life of his community. To some extent, he must be aware of the balance of social inequalities. This must be striven for in the community. One must actually be the advisor of the men, and one must also be, to some extent, the helping advisor of the women; one must help the women's charity, and so on.

Both men and women must, when it comes to organizing their economic affairs, economic aid, and economic cooperation in a higher sense, unquestionably have the natural feeling that the preacher has something to say. Without an interest in economic life, a participatory interest, religious communities cannot be established, especially not in today's difficult economic times.

Is that not right? We can initially present such things as an ideal, but in one area or another we will have the opportunity to approach the ideal to a greater or lesser extent. Of course, you will face endless resistance if you strive for something like this. You will be rejected, but you must make your parishioners aware of this, and through their desire, the necessity to achieve this guiding influence of the preacher in economic life will become apparent.

At this point, I must say that much must remain an ideal. Above all, what must be the part of the one who lives as a preacher in a community in terms of legal and state life must still remain an ideal in many cases today. I will give a specific example. The fact that religious life has increasingly lost its real foundation has led to things that seem extraordinarily enlightened to today's people, but that have thoroughly undermined religious life from within social life. One example is the view that is held today about marriage legislation. There is no doubt that marriage legislation — whether conceived in strict or less strict terms, depending on other circumstances — is necessary. But it is necessary, under all circumstances, that this marriage legislation be integrated into the threefold social organism. For this, however, it is of course necessary to have a clear sense of marriage as a distinct institution that represents the threefold social organism. It is, first of all, an economic community and must be integrated into the social organism in so far as it has an economic part. Thus, a connection must be sought between the economic community that marriage represents and the associations. Today, little more can be thought of this, but this awareness must arise from within the communities, that above all the economic side of marriage must be supported by the measures of the associations, by the measures of economic life.

The second thing is that the legal relationship is clearly perceived as a relationship in itself, and that the state has only to intervene in the legal relationship of marriage, so that marriage between a man and a woman is only of concern to the state insofar as it is a matter of law, which originates from the state.

On the other hand, you will have to claim the spiritual blessing of marriage as your very own within the religious community in a completely free way based on your decision. So you will have to strive for the ideal that the religious blessing of marriage is placed within the freedom of religious decision and that this decision is fully respected, so that it is seen as a basis for the other, so that the trust that exists in the community is actually sought first for the marriage decision of the pastor or the preacher. Of course I know that such a thing is perhaps even regarded by many Protestant people today as something quite out of date, but again I can only say: that such things are regarded as out of date shows the damage of civilization, which inevitably undermines religious life.

So you will have to make your parishioners aware that the actual inner spiritual core of marriage has to do with religious life and that threefolding must certainly be practised in this area, that is, all three parts of marriage must gradually find their expression in social life, that is, all three things must be included. One should not imagine threefolding in such a way that one draws up a utopian program and says that one should threefold things. One threefolds them in the best way when one grasps that threefolding is implicitly contained in every institution of life and how one can shape the individual things in such a way that threefolding underlies them. Perhaps in your profession, in particular, it is not necessary to place too much emphasis on representing the threefold social order in the abstract; but one must understand how life demands that this threefold order comes about, that is, that each of the individual limbs of the social organism is a truly concrete, existing reality.

Of course you will meet with great resistance to this today, but it is precisely in such matters that you can, if you start by educating your community, best develop the relationship between the free spiritual life – in which, above all, the religious element must be included – which is to be, not in, I might say, benevolent mutual addresses, that one tolerates each other, but by actually presenting what is demanded by the matter as one's ideal. Of course, you must be prepared for the greatest resistance.

And thirdly, you must have the opportunity to develop what the free spiritual life should mean in the threefold social organism. Today, in the general social organism, we no longer have a spiritual life at all; we have an intellectual life, but we have no spiritual life. I would say that we have no dealings between gods and humans. We do not have the awareness that in everything that happens externally in the physical world, the divine work should be there through ourselves, and that the real, true spirit should be carried into the world, that therefore both the actions that take place within economic life, as well as the legal determinations that take place within state life, and in particular that the education of youth and also the instruction of old age must be the free deed of the people participating in this spiritual life. — That is what must be understood.

Therefore, you will have no choice but to fight for your complete individual authority for the free will. Of course, this is something that our time demands: that the individual who preaches preaches under his own authority. You see, in this area, one simply has to look at the tremendous clash of contradictions that prevails in our time.

When I go to a Catholic church today and come to the sermon, I know that the preacher is wearing the stole. I know that when he is wearing the stole, the person standing in the pulpit and preaching is not at all relevant to me as a human being. This is also really in the consciousness [of the Catholic priest]. As a human being, he does not feel responsible for any of his words, because the moment he crosses his chest with the stole, the Church speaks. And since the declaration of infallibility, the Roman Pope speaks ex cathedra for all things to be proclaimed by the Catholic Church. So, in [the Catholic preacher], I have a person in front of me who, at the moment [of the sermon], completely empties himself and doesn't even think about somehow representing his opinion, who is absolutely of the opinion that he can have a personal opinion that he keeps to himself, that doesn't even have to agree with what he speaks from the pulpit, because a personal opinion is out of the question there. The moment he crosses his stole over his chest, he is the representative of the church.

You see, that is one extreme. But it is there, and it will play a major role in the cultural movement that is just around the corner. Because as corrupting as we have to regard this power, it is a power, an immense power; and you cannot approach it otherwise than by becoming fully aware of it. They will have no other way of fighting. You will encounter this power at every turn in your life. It is spreading in an immeasurable way today, while humanity sleeps and does not notice.

On the other hand, the task of the time is to trust in – if I may call it that – divine harmony. And that, my dear friends, has absolutely not been understood in my “Philosophy of Freedom”. But it is something that should be understood in the most urgent sense in the present. In my “Philosophy of Freedom”, the legal system is also based on the individual human being acting entirely out of himself. One of the first and most brilliant critics to write about my Philosophy of Freedom in the English Athenaeum simply said that this whole view leads to a theoretical anarchism. This is, of course, the belief of today's people. Why? Because modern man actually lacks any truly divine social trust, because people cannot grasp the following, which is most important for our time: When you really get people to speak from their innermost being, then harmony comes about among people, not through their will, but through the divine order of the world. Disharmony comes from the fact that people do not speak from their innermost being. Harmony cannot be created directly, but only indirectly, by truly reaching people at their core. Then each person will automatically do what is beneficial for the other, and also speak what is beneficial for the other. People only talk and act at cross purposes as long as they have not found themselves.

If you understand this as a mystery of life, then you say to yourself: I seek the source of my actions within myself and have the confidence that the path that leads me inwardly will also connect me to the divine world order outwardly and that I will thus work in harmony with others. This brings, firstly, trust in the human heart and, secondly, trust in external social harmony. There is no other way than this to bring people together. Therefore, what you must achieve if you really want to have a social effect through your profession, a divine social effect, a spiritual social effect, is the possibility to really work from within, that is, everyone for himself, because he has found himself, has the possibility to be an authority.

The Catholic preacher acts without individuality, crosses the stole and is no longer himself, he is the Church. The Catholic Church has the magical means to powerfully influence social life without trust [in individual strength], through external symbolic soul activity. This was necessary to establish social communities towards the end of the 2nd millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha and was most ideally developed in ancient Egypt. In a roundabout way, which can be traced exactly historically, this has become the inner essence of the Catholic Church. The essence of the Catholic Church is that it still stands today at the point of view of the Egyptian priests and their social life in about the second millennium BC. The Catholic is an influence of the old into our time.

In contrast to this, there is a need today to really stand on the standpoint of our time, not to feel that we are anything other than the bearers of divine life within ourselves, which has become intellect. You have to fight for the freedom of speech so that no one can tell you what to preach, and that there is no norm for the content of the sermon. That is what you have to fight for. Otherwise you will not be able to found communities unless you make it a principle to fight for the freedom of preaching.

With this, I have first outlined in some detail what must, so to speak, lead to the formation of a community from within. If you are able to realize these things, then you will also, in turn, encourage young people to form a real community, whereas young people have only been able to form cliques out of themselves. I am convinced and have full confidence that if such communities can be brought into existence, then the young people will gather in such communities and something useful can come out of it, whereas perhaps 15 to 20 years ago the young people sought union in the so-called youth movement, but were leaderless because they no longer believed in their fathers and thus strove towards community building without any real inner impulse. All that came of it was the formation of cliques. Today, people's souls are hermits. But if there were a possibility of coming together, they would join immediately, and where truly free communities arise, that is, communities with inner freedom, young people in particular would flock to them.

You see, in such matters we naturally have a difficult time with our anthroposophical movement. Because of its inner nature, this anthroposophical movement today can be nothing other than a completely universal movement. It must, so to speak, extend itself to all areas of life, and we are in an extraordinarily difficult situation with regard to the anthroposophical movement. We are in the difficult situation that on the one hand a certain anthroposophical good must be communicated to the world today - it must go out into the world, because the world lacks the opportunity to receive spiritual content - on the other hand, the desire to form communities, to form anthroposophical communities, is arising everywhere. Call them branches, call them what you will, the endeavour is there to found anthroposophical branches. And because the anthroposophical movement today still has to be something universal, these anthroposophical branches cannot really come to a real life, because they oscillate back and forth between the religious element and the spiritual element, which is more directed towards all branches of life. Naturally, they do not develop a true sense of brotherhood; they do not even grasp their social task, which consists in founding small communities as models of what is to spread throughout humanity. But either they degenerate into a mere transmission of the teachings, or they feel the human resistance to unification and split into opinions, quarrel and the like. But if we ask ourselves where the fault lies, we find it not in these communities but in the fact that today one cannot really find a true connection to religious life by penetrating the spiritual world with insight. Among all the denominations that exist today, anthroposophists cannot find a religious life. These communities must first come into existence. They cannot come into being in any other way than by people seriously considering all the things that can lead to the founding of such communities. I believe that the external possibilities, the possibilities for establishing institutions, will not be so difficult to find if the attitude that I have tried to characterize for you today really takes hold, provided there are enough of you. If you have ten times as many people who are preparing to fulfill the preaching profession throughout Germany, over a larger territory, then you will also have the opportunity to come to community building out of this attitude. But community building is the foundation. Only when we have become clear about this can we talk further about worship and preaching.

Now I would like to ask you to speak up and ask questions about your own specific thoughts, desires, and so on. Perhaps you have had concerns about some of the things I have mentioned, or you feel that one or the other question has not been fully addressed, that you need more practical information.

A participant: Even if the practical side comes about easily, it may be that this or that practical matter is of the greatest importance to us now, especially since some of us are already in certain practical situations. Therefore, I would ask you to perhaps tell us something about the possibilities for connecting. Initially, there are two possibilities for connecting, either perhaps from the church or from the existing anthroposophical communities. Is it at all possible to connect from church work afterwards? This fear that it cannot be found still holds back many of us, although they could already enter into church service. What should happen then? The question of practical matters is perhaps already included, but the fundamental question of the possibility of making contact is already contained in it, because there is simply no clarity in our own movement about where we can make a practical connection right now. Would we be wasting an opportunity if we entered the church service now in the hope of being able to make a connection later? Should we not rather do something else, because we have to make a connection somewhere.

Rudolf Steiner: The situation is such that the answer to this must be a manifold one. It cannot be given in the same way because, despite the difficulties that the church presents today, there are still possibilities to work from within the church that should perhaps not be left untapped. If you take into account the particular circumstances here or there, you will be able to say that, given the nature of the community as a whole, you can found your community yourself, if you seek out the existing forms of the ministry, but then gradually lead the community out of the current church circumstances, while you would not be able to get the community members together if you placed yourself outside the church and simply tried to gather them. On the other hand, in certain fields it will no longer be possible to work outside the Church at all. In such cases it is of course absolutely necessary to try to found free communities. But I would recommend under all circumstances not to approach the matter with the aim of forming a union with the anthroposophical branches and so on, and not to aim at working out of anthroposophy itself, because in that case you would be pulled down before you got anywhere. Anthroposophy as such will simply be attacked in the most outrageous way from all possible sides in the near future; and in order to arrive at the formation of a quiet community within this battle, you see, the strength that you have today, even if you were ten times as numerous, is not yet sufficient. We do not yet live in social conditions that would make it possible to develop religious communities from anthroposophy itself. They have to form religious communities for themselves and then seek union with the anthroposophical movement. The anthroposophical movement – I can say this quite openly – will never fail to support this union, of course; but it would not be good to form ecclesiastical communities out of the anthroposophical 'communities', so to speak.

You see, when we founded the Waldorf School - it is not an example, but there is at least a similarity - we did not set out to found a school of world view, a school of anthroposophy, but merely to bring into pedagogy and didactics what can be brought in through anthroposophy. I was quite insistent that Catholic children should be taught by Catholic priests and Protestant children by Protestant priests. Now, however, it has become clear that, because the first core of the Waldorf School was working-class children, a great many children would have had no religious instruction at all. And so it became necessary to provide an independent anthroposophical religious education. But I am very particular, especially in my own behavior in this matter, that this anthroposophical religious education does not fall into the constitution of this school, but that it comes from outside in the same way as Catholic and Protestant religious education, so that the school as such gives this religious instruction out of itself, but simply allows the Anthroposophical community to give this Anthroposophical religious instruction to those children for whom the parents want it, just as Protestant religious instruction is given to Protestant children and Catholic religious instruction to Catholic children. In this area, we must be serious about the fact that the spiritual works only through the spiritual. As soon as we would make a school constitution to incorporate religious education into the school curriculum, we would probably achieve more at first than we are achieving now, but slowly dismantling it. We must have faith in the spirit to work through itself. And that is why we in the anthroposophical movement face the great difficulty that as soon as we establish a branch, we do so in the physical world; and there, of course, people always strive to work through external means. But anthroposophy cannot work through external means today; it can only work through that which is in it as spiritual content that works on people. These two things are always in conflict with each other: external branching out – internal effectiveness. This fights terribly with each other. And that would even change into a healthy one at the moment when a community could really be formed out of the religious spirit. Now, of course, it is a matter of overcoming, I would say, higher inconveniences, so to speak.

You see, when I speak to Swiss teachers about the liberation of intellectual life, the liberation of the teaching profession, even the best of them usually reply: Yes, in Switzerland we are actually quite free, we can do what we want at school. — But no one does anything other than what the state wants. In terms of freedom, they are basically as unfree as possible; they just don't feel their unfreedom, they feel their unfreedom as freedom because they have grown so inwardly together with it. We, in turn, must first learn to feel the unfreedom. I was once able to feel it in a very strange way at a threefolding meeting I had held in Switzerland; I would say it was more in a humorous way. During the discussion, someone had become extremely heated in a certain fanatical way about the fact that in Germany, laws and police measures were used to command everyone to behave loyally, to worship the monarchy loyally, and so on, that all this was a commandment. He became so terribly heated about it. I said to him: It may well be that Republicans get worked up in such a way against the monarchy, but I remember that when the German Kaiser was in Switzerland a few years ago, the people behaved in an extremely devotional manner, so that at that time in Zurich the image of devotion far surpassed what people were used to in Germany. — To which he replied: Yes, that is precisely the difference between Germany and Switzerland: in Germany, it is all compulsory, the people have to do it, but we do it voluntarily. —- That is the difference between free people and those who are unfree.

Well, it is not true that we have to, and that all people have to – it is completely international in our time – we actually have to learn what it means to be a free person. And that is why I believe that it must actually be possible to tie in with where some freedom is still possible within the church, to found these free communities from within the church itself.

I am not unaware of the difficulties, but it is true that you only have to consider the real cultural conditions, especially in Central Europe. A certain kind of community was formed at the time – and we really must learn from history – when Old Catholicism emerged after the proclamation of the dogma of infallibility. Now, if you take Old Catholicism in terms of its content, it can be said to have the same in terms of doctrine and priestly behavior as the Protestant pastorate. It is already inherent in Old Catholicism, which has only preserved in a popular way a cultus that we will talk about later. One can say that Old Catholicism, precisely because it arose as a reaction, already contained within it that which, by itself, could have led to the free formation of congregations outside the Church. Now you will know, of course, that Old Catholicism in Germany was received with great enthusiasm. Parishes were formed here and there, but they could not live, could not die. Of course, at that time, because one could not form such parishes within the Catholic Church, they had to form themselves. There was no other way. In Switzerland, where much more of the Old Catholicism has been preserved – because there are many Old Catholic communities there – it has recently become quite blatantly clear that these communities are continuing a conservative life, but are no longer growing, but rather remaining small, even shrinking, so that they are already on the ground of a descending development. This is the difficulty of forming free communities today.

Therefore, it will be necessary to save as many people as you can – not from the church, but from those people who have not yet been able to decide to leave the church in order to found free communities with you – to really grasp them in the church and bring them out. If things develop in this way, you can be quite sure that the connection with the anthroposophical movement will be achieved. For the anthroposophical movement, although it will have to fight terrible battles, will nevertheless establish its validity, even if it is only possible with many sacrifices on the part of those working in it, with great sacrifices. It will establish its validity , but it will hardly be in a position today to found a branch of religious life out of itself — that is why I always spoke today of the special nature of your profession — it will hardly be in a position to shape communities in a particular religious sense. It will be necessary for what I always emphasize to become truth: The Anthroposophical Society as such cannot found new religious communities and so on, but one must somehow form the religious community out of oneself, or - as far as one can - form it with the human material that today, purely out of prejudice, still stands within the old church. But perhaps you can formulate the question further so that we can talk about it in more detail.

Dr. Rittelmeyer – he just got sick – would have had the opportunity, given the way he had behaved towards his parishioners, to found a completely free parish in the middle of Berlin. And once it has a certain power, a certain standing, is it large, then you don't dare approach the pastor in any way. Is it actually your opinion that one should not have this last remnant of consideration for the church?

A participant: I think it will be especially difficult to work in the church, and I don't yet see clearly to what extent we could do that even now. We will have to wait until we can go out together to do the actual work. Would it perhaps be possible to look for points of contact in the church now? But then we would already be scattered until we are ready to go out together.

Rudolf Steiner: As long as you do not have a preaching ministry, you cannot seek such connections now. You must seek what is the preparation for religious work, of course independently of the church, at least inwardly independently. As long as you are, so to speak, students, you cannot seek union with the church. You can only look around to see where it would be possible to pull such congregations out of the church. And if you should find that this is impossible in Central Europe, then you should still proceed to the free formation of congregations, and you should seek the means and ways to proceed to this free formation of congregations.

Now, of course, I would only have two objections to an absolutely free establishment of a congregation, that is, one of you goes to place X and the other to place Y and simply, by preaching first for five and then for ten or twenty people for my sake, gradually creates a free congregation. The only difficulty I can see is that this path is, first of all, a slow one – you will see that it is a slow one – it is the safest, but a slow one. And the second is the material question. Because, isn't it true that if things were to be done this way, it would be necessary for this matter to be financed in the broadest sense, to be properly financed, so that a community would simply be established by you yourselves, and that the financing of this community would be sought.

Now I must say that this would, of course, be the best way; even if it has to be fought for with external material means, it would naturally be the best way. But I must tell you quite frankly that all these paths require great courage on your part. It takes great courage for you to join in the struggle that naturally arises, to join in the difficulties, in the struggle, for the financial foundation as well. It would, of course, be best if we could raise sufficient funds to make you completely independent, so that you could simply choose whether to collect here or there, even if it is only from the smallest circle, my community. It will come about. It takes courage to believe that it will come about. It will come about, but of course you need the financial basis, and there are extraordinary difficulties standing in the way of this today. The community of all today's positive confessions will soon be there, which most strenuously opposes the fact that something like this is done. And you cannot do it in detail, you have to organize it as a large movement. You actually have to establish a community out of all of you who set themselves this goal in life and for whom a financial foundation is then sought.

Now, you can do the math. It would be enough, if, let us say, there were two hundred of you, because this way is, so to speak, a very safe one and does not depend on such speed. Now you can calculate for yourselves what is needed annually. As soon as you have the means to do it, you can do it. Then it is the safest way. But then it is also the most visible way, and that would actually be the more natural one. But in today's social and economic conditions, raising these funds in Central Europe – and that is what it could be about – is extremely difficult. Because you won't find any possibility to do something like this in another empire, in another country. So in both Eastern and Western Europe it is absolutely out of the question; in Central Europe it could be done for internal reasons, and a great thing would be done with it.

Werner Klein: I must say in this regard that I have so far only seen this path, the latter, and actually still consider it the only viable one. We have major difficulties with financing, of course, but we could work to eliminate them. I also believe that you can keep your head above water with your own resources if you create your own field of activity in a city, perhaps try to get money from lectures. You will be able to make friends who will help you. But you can also get into a profession – after all, we live in the age of reduced working hours – so you will be able to fill a less significant position at the town hall or somewhere where you can make a living if necessary, in order to gain the time to pursue what is on your mind. I believe that you will be able to survive. But alongside that, a generous organization would have to be set up and an attempt would have to be made to at least obtain funds. And according to what lives in all of us in Germany, this general yearning for something new and strong, I believe that many things will be found. That will depend on us. — But now, for the first time today, I see the second way in connection with the church and I believe that one can go hand in hand there. The path of the free community requires a completely different tactic, a joint approach to the goal, and a joint approach at a joint point in time, but still each for himself when one emerges as a larger movement; while the other tactic is that everyone starts working on their own and tries to create a new community from the church. The one will not interfere with the other. At the moment when we are perhaps so far along on this safe but also more difficult path that we can, to put it bluntly, get started, then those who have so far taken the other path will join us in our work and then, with can support us with fruits that have already shown themselves to be real and positive, while, if we succeed in one area or another in following up the successes in one or the other area, that would only be to be welcomed and regarded as a factor in itself. If we really want to achieve something socially in view of the social and religious hardship today, then only this first, sure way seems to be available. We must try it in any case. If we fail, we will still take the other path, and if it is taken simultaneously by those who already want to work in order to fill the interim period, it is to be welcomed. If we want great things, we must also strive for the great and try.

Rudolf Steiner: It is indeed the case that here in Stuttgart we have had some experiences with the difficulties that confront something like the surest way that has been characterized here. Of course, I am entirely of the opinion that this path can be taken if sufficient effort is put into it. But please also be aware of the difficulties that are encountered in all areas today. There is an extraordinary amount of goodwill in saying that one can also take on some position and work alongside it in the way that is desirable. But it is an open secret that students at German universities will face terrible financial difficulties in the coming years. People have thought of all kinds of impractical things; even a professor came to me and said that we should think about setting up printing presses because students will no longer be able to afford to print their dissertations, and they should print them themselves there. Of course, I do not have the slightest sympathy for such material inbreeding; because I do not know how the students should earn anything by printing their own dissertations. I thought it would be more rational to abolish the forced printing of dissertations altogether – for the time of need. – So, one thinks of all kinds of impractical things, but the matter is a very serious one. For example, it would be an extremely appealing idea to me if the “Kommende Tag” were able to provide a certain material basis for at least a number of students, that is, it would have to, let's say, take on a group of students in its enterprises for three months on a rotating basis, while employing others for the next three months. Then the latter could go back to university and study. So that would be a nice idea to implement, if it were possible. But in our own company, the moment we tried to implement something like that, i.e. hire a number of students, we would immediately have a revolution by the trade union workers, who would tell us: that's not on. They would throw us out. And, wouldn't you agree, something similar would happen, even if it wasn't exactly in the form of being thrown out, but probably in the form of not being let in. Besides, I don't see any real possibility of being able to pursue such a profession alongside a job, even with today's shorter working hours, where you can give yourself completely, because it requires complete devotion to really fulfill such a profession, which you want to pursue. I don't see any real possibility.

You see, we are simply faced with the fact that today, due to the difficult living conditions, people are actually not as strong as they should be. So I fear that such a path, where the person in question would have to rely on himself in financial terms, would at least lead to a slight neurasthenia. It also seems rather unlikely to me that under present-day conditions it is possible to earn a living by lecturing and working independently in this way. You see, intellectual services are paid for in the old currency, and one has to eat in the new currency. If you take the payment for intellectual performance, then in the old currency you get 30 marks, and in the new currency you would have to spend 300 marks. So this matter would of course be difficult. On the other hand, it would be really worth working for a financing in the broadest sense.

I also think that working together with the church, which seems to be more appealing to Mr. Klein than to some of you, is not a lost cause. Because combining this work with the church would, I believe, have advantages.

You can do both. I still think that experience today suggests that if you first succeed in creating free congregations from within the church, you will find followers simply by your approach. You will find followers. Because it is no exaggeration to say that there are many pastors and priests in the Protestant religious communities today who would like to get out of their jobs and just need a nudge. If you succeed in drawing these people out of their communities, then you will find that some of the pastors currently in office will follow you. That would be a good addition. It would enable the movement to grow rapidly. You would find support from those who, on their own, simply cannot muster the initiative. If the impetus were provided from outside, you would find support.

That would, of course, be extremely desirable if we could somehow at least tackle the question of financing. I deliberately say “tackle it somehow”, because if this financing question is properly tackled, then it is likely to succeed. Tackling it is much more difficult than succeeding once it has been properly tackled. For what is lacking today in the broadest sense is the active cooperation of people in the great tasks of life. People everywhere have become so accustomed to routines that one does not really gain sufficiently active collaborators for the most important tasks.

I believe that we should perhaps make use of our time, and because we have now come directly to the practical issues, which should be discussed preliminarily, I would ask you to come at half past six this evening for the continuation.

Emil Bock: To show what is desired, it is perhaps better if the questions received in writing are asked personally.

Rudolf Steiner: There remains the question from yesterday about women. Perhaps I will first speak a little about this question, which was asked yesterday in relation to the participation of women in the movement we are dealing with here.

Now, I believe that the time has indeed come when women should participate in all branches of public life on an equal footing. So there should be no doubt that the entry of women into this movement is justified and that women should be treated the same as men. I would just like to say that it would be necessary to make this clear. That has been the great disappointment so far, that the entry of women into the movements in which they have succeeded in entering has not actually been noticed, at most it has been noticed in relation to some externalities, to subordinate things, but not actually in relation to the cultural nuances. You will all have experienced the deep disappointment when a woman even entered the German Reichstag and absolutely no kind of change resulted from a woman's participation.

I already pointed out yesterday that years ago I said to a woman's rights activist, Gabriele Reuter, who was moderate in one sense but very active in another direction, that women must bring their own character into the movements and not find their way into what is already given by the culture of the past, which is above all a male culture. As you know, Bebel once explained that there is a reason why women do not actually intervene in such a way that their intervention is noticed as a shade [in cultural life], which is justified in theory within Darwinism, but is strange in view of reality. He said that it is self-evident that every being, when it enters the world, must first adapt to the circumstances, and since women have not had the opportunity to adapt to the circumstances so far, one must first wait until a certain time has passed. If women then had the opportunity to discard their old inherited traits, then the adaptation would have been better executed. At present, women are still too much influenced by their inherited traits. Well, my dear friends, in the future, inheritance in women will not be any different than it is today, namely that they also descend from a father and a mother, just like their brothers, so that in this respect, there is obviously no inheritance through generations and no [necessary] adaptation. That is self-evident. So in the main it is just a matter of mere words.

On the other hand, it is of course very important to consider that precisely for such an area as religious life, an extraordinary enrichment can occur if women bring their particular nature to it. Although women have not [so far] thrown their share into the movements they have joined, this nature has nevertheless been noticed within the modern emancipation efforts of women. The point is that women have a different way of thinking. It is therefore entirely possible for women to achieve a certain more congenial understanding of things that cannot be expressed in sharply defined concepts because then they would not correspond to reality. So women's ability to grasp things is readily given. It is extremely difficult for a man to grasp things without sharply contoured concepts; this makes it difficult for him to find his way into such areas where female concepts are needed. So it is that women will have to play a major role in the spiritualization of our culture. She will only have to try to assert sharply that which is her own, with less sharply defined concepts, and not simply imitate the conceptual contours of men, for example in their studies. We would have gained something if, for example, in medicine or in other branches, in philology and so on, where women have begun to work, we could have seen that women, with their greater mobility, with their greater adaptability, would really have made a difference. As a rule, female physicians are such that in their thoughts they are really a copy of what they have learned, even more so than men. So it is necessary that these qualities [of women] be brought into the field sharply, but on the other hand, precisely because of these qualities, women need an extraordinary self-criticism. Women are more subjective or at least more inclined to subjectivity than men. A man, for example, has more sense of the fact that one must be convinced of the truth of a matter that one asserts. It will be much easier for a woman to judge according to subjective feeling. This will be important here because a woman, when she participates in this movement, will probably be able to discern the emotional coloring of what is to be given with extraordinary subtlety. But she will have difficulties when it comes to really asserting a will rooted in the objective, and it is precisely this will factor that comes into play strongly. In the case of man, the fact is that he can generally be characterized in such a way that the greater part of his intellect is used to enter into the organism in an organizing way; hence, I might say, he retains for his psychic life an intellect that is indeed sharp but not mobile. His will enters less into his organism, hence he has a strong will. In women, it is the case that the will enters into the organism more, and the intellect less. The female body is less intellectual, less constructed with the intellect in mind than the male body; therefore, in general, despite the greater mobility of the intellect, or perhaps because of it, women are endowed with a greater measure of concepts, with broader concepts, and even with a greater number of concepts than men. It will be found that within this movement woman will present things in such a way that one has more of a feeling of the spiritual, and that man, in this movement, will present things in such a way that one has more of a feeling of firmness; but when the two really work together, then something extraordinarily harmonious can come out, especially in community life.

Of course, when discussing such things, one speaks in generalities. There is no other way to do it, because the things one discusses must be more directive than something that is already based on observation. On the whole, however, it can be said that it is possible for a woman to develop a strong sense of responsibility through a strong self-education when she enters this movement, because the lack of a sense of responsibility is something that could certainly be observed where women have entered more spiritual movements in recent times. It is, for example, the case that a man is much more likely to be persuaded to keep something secret than a woman, who, if she has a female friend, is extremely quick to consider that friend as being completely trustworthy and then to divulge the matter to just one person, even though there are also numerous old women among men. This is simply a phenomenon that one has to experience and which carries a great, great deal of weight. So the sense of responsibility is something that will have to be particularly developed. It could be observed, for example, in medicine, how particularly the finer operations, eye operations and the like, can be performed much more precisely, better and more skillfully by women than by men. This will also be the case in the spiritual realm, and it will become apparent in the cult that women will truly be able to carry out the cult in a very special way, that they will also be able to empathize much more easily when performing the cult. On the other hand, something else has become apparent. I need only remind you that at the head of the Theosophical Society there stood for many years a woman, Annie Besant, who has a very skilled hand for many things, especially in the treatment of external matters, but who, on the other hand, is inclined to a very particular vanity. This is something that must then be developed: a keen sense of self-discipline to overcome vanity and ambition. In all this, women are much more easily tempted, both externally and internally, than men.

All these things ultimately lead to the fact that woman is in a certain way less constant, that she very easily swings between these two you have seen, Ahriman on the one hand, Lucifer on the other. Man naturally swings in rhythm from one to the other, but woman swings with extraordinary agility and very frequently in such a way that the equilibrium becomes very unstable. This must be taken into account, and I could go on in this matter, but it is not really necessary. The question must practically be answered in such a way that today there can be no doubt that women must be able to participate in such movements, but that they must practice the necessary self-education for such movements. It must be said that women must participate out of the general course of human development. You see, until the 15th century, the development of man was such that he had then reached the so-called intellectual or emotional soul. In relation to the intellectual or emotional soul, man and woman are very different. Therefore, it could not be otherwise than that within this period of time, woman was excluded from certain things, and where these old customs have been retained, for example in Freemasonry, women are still excluded today. This is based on traditions, and this can be seen in the cult of Freemasonry itself. That women as such have absolutely equal rights is not recognized by legitimate Freemasonry. It is the case that the cult of Freemasonry is such that it could not be practised in common [with women].

But since the middle of the 15th century, we have been developing more and more towards the unfolding of the consciousness soul, and in relation to the consciousness soul, such a differentiation no longer exists; the qualities of both sides [of man and woman] flow entirely into a unified configuration. It is, of course, not correct when, within certain movements that also take the position of reincarnation, one repeatedly finds that women – with rare exceptions – when they list their past incarnations – which of course is mostly fantasy – then list only women, while men list only men. These are, of course, things that are based on fantasy. It is of course the case that the successive earthly lives are experienced in different genders.

So that is what I have to say first about such a matter, which is always problematic and must always be unsatisfactory, with regard to the position of women. Do you (to Gertrud Spörri) have anything else in particular in this direction that you would like to discuss?

Gertrud Spörri: I would like to ask whether a woman today has the opportunity to found independent communities herself.

Rudolf Steiner: Whether a woman today has the opportunity to establish independent communities? Yes, you know, I believe that women will not only have the opportunity to found independent communities, but that it will sometimes even be relatively easy for women to found independent communities. They just have to be sustainable, that is, women will have to prove themselves. She will be able to found communities relatively easily, but she will have to reflect on what is a little sensational, a little novel, and so on. But we must not exclude these latter things just because we are afraid of them; we must rise above them. I am rather afraid that at first it could go for the world as it has gone for the anthroposophical movement, where, in newspaper reports, when there is an anthroposophical lecture somewhere, it is usually calculated that there are so many women in it and only very few men. In general, this has also been the case in reality, in that women are much more easily able to found groups, circles and so on. So that does make itself felt. I have always said that when it was emphasized that there were often more women than men, it was not the women's fault. They were quite right to do so, but if the men find it necessary to play cards and therefore stay away, then it is the men's fault. It does not testify to a strongly developed spirit in men, but to a backwardness in men. You have to be clear about that. Now, this sometimes occurs in an extremely disturbing way in the anthroposophical movement, in that women quickly find their way into it, but sometimes the depth of their finding their way in is lacking because the active, the will element, is missing. Therefore, when forming a community, a wise self-education of this element of knowledge and, in the beginning, a certain reserved element will be called for, I think. Perhaps it will be a matter of tact and then has to develop in cooperation with the central leadership, so that in the beginning women do not found ninety percent of the communities and only ten percent the men. Yes, you could experience that under certain circumstances, and it would not be wise if it happened that way. But that we have to fear that women will be less successful than men in founding communities is not something I think will happen. It will certainly not be the case that the women's churches would be attended only by women, that is, more than is now the case with the men's churches, because some churches are indeed attended by a majority of women; so nothing special needs to change there. We must be quite aware that in Central Europe, where it is a matter of attributing to women alone the ability to bring a certain kind of divine revelation from the supersensible world into the sensory world, only a light veil lies over the old conditions with regard to the things at issue here. The WALA principle is something that is absolutely true here and that, when it is resurrected in a dignified way, is not something that needs to be looked at with a jaundiced eye.

But there are a whole bunch of questions here.

Gernot Weißhardt: How can the priest achieve a life together with the dead?

Hubert Sondermann: I would like to ask about meditation or intercession for the benefit of the deceased.

Rudolf Steiner: In what way would you like to know about this question?

Hubert Sondermann: How this intercession can be justified and how it can be practiced. Then about the funeral ritual...

Rudolf Steiner: We will discuss the funeral ritual tomorrow.

Well, for spiritual scientific-anthroposophical research, it turns out that the human being is still connected to the physical-earthly conditions after death and that one can imagine this connection in a very specific way because one can observe it. However, it must be clear that life here on earth in relation to life after death is often something like a cause in relation to an effect. Let us assume that a family man has died, he was a materialist, but he led a life otherwise that he, for example, was very much absorbed in his love for his children. In the beginning there is a certain difficulty for those who are left behind to approach the soul of the dead person with prayers or meditations, because the dead person initially only perceives what he experienced up to his death, so that he perceives, let's say, his wife and children insofar as their life developed up to the moment he died. A wall opens up to the present experiences, to the present being of the bereaved, so that it is extremely difficult for the deceased to experience the connection with his relatives in the immediate present. It seems as if he can only get to this particular point in time, and then it stops; it is like a memory that has been torn away. But this shows, of course, that it has a meaning how the soul's attitude towards the spiritual world [in life] has been. You cannot be materialistic or spiritual without consequences for life after death. In people who are spiritually minded, it is immediately apparent [after death] that they can have an immediate connection with those who have remained behind. Now today, the human being's ability to experience anything supernatural is extremely coarse. People can hardly develop any kind of feeling for the numerous influences from the spiritual world, so that the real connection with the dead, which many seek and which is quite possible – not in the sense of an ordinary trivial interpretation, of course – is made more difficult. One can help oneself to strengthen and increase the sensitivity for these things through meditation, for example in the following direction: Imagine that you have decided to go out on a certain day, let's say at 11 o'clock; now someone comes and delays you by half an hour. Afterwards you discover that if you had left half an hour earlier, you would have found a ride, for example, and then you hear that everyone was killed in the accident – so you would have been killed too. I believe it is absolutely certain that a great many people did not die in the Paris disaster these days because they were prevented from doing so. Don't you read the newspapers? A large number of people have been killed in the Paris subway. When you think about such things, you will see how extraordinarily little man, in judging his life, takes into account the things from which he is protected. We live for the moment and only pay attention to what happens to us. We never perceive what we are protected from. Of course, it is difficult to prove something positively when you live in the spiritual world. I have already pointed out the following: Suppose I advise someone who is ill – let's say he is 40 years old – not to drink wine and not to eat meat. He dies at 48; now people say: He died young, even though he didn't eat meat or drink wine for the last eight years. But who can say whether he wouldn't have died at 44 if he had eaten meat and drunk wine? What people so carelessly call 'proving' is extraordinarily difficult when it comes to things in the supersensible world, but precisely reflecting on such things increases our sensitivity to the intrusion of the supersensible world into the sensual world. I only mention this because there can still be very little understanding of this relationship with the dead today, especially in the West. Of course, this does not prevent us from cultivating this relationship with the dead in such a way, and it is particularly effective if we cultivate this relationship with the dead in such a way that we try to live in such thoughts in which the dead can also easily live, and these are never abstract thoughts. The more abstract a thought is, the less the dead person can have such a thought in common with us.

These things are all very difficult to express when I am trying to make myself understood. For example, there are no nouns for the dead; the dead do not know non-nouns, which are the most abstract words. They still know verbs, but mainly those that are spoken from the heart. That is tangible for them. Then he can experience what is specifically vivid. So if you immerse yourself in something that you experienced with the dead person in all concreteness here on earth, let's say you remember that you were on a walk with him, he picked up an ear of corn, he spoke something —, and you remember it down to the smallest nuance, then the dead person can have the thought [with you]. All these are preparations for developing a relationship with the dead. We can then also read out loud to the dead person everything that relates to the spiritual world, as I always call it. If we simply imagine in a concrete way that the dead person is present and we read something, but as I said, it must relate to the spiritual world, then he can develop a connection with us. I would feel untrue if I did not first communicate these things, which are concrete observations of spiritual science, to you, because then you will know that the assertions of spiritual science with regard to the dead refer to concrete things. One also has the possibility of bringing about the turning to the dead especially by supporting what the dead person takes with him in a spiritual relationship.

I can tell you that it is extremely important to relate to the dead person in the following way: Immediately after death, right away, the person experiences a streaming memory of their life here, which does not proceed like an ordinary memory because, as I said, it is much more fluid, but it contains everything specific in this memory picture. If we then inwardly say something to the dead person that is in this memory picture, then that is an element, a force, which can now also contribute to his particular well-being, which will particularly satisfy him. All this shows you that we as people on earth can do something to come into a special relationship with the dead. From this you can see that anthroposophical spiritual science must definitely speak of the fact that everything we feel inwardly for the dead is something real. A funeral ritual, for example, is something absolutely real. In a similar way to how we initiate something for life here between birth and death through a baptismal ritual. We give something to the dead when we direct our thoughts to them, thoughts that are multiplied a hundredfold in the community, not just added up, but multiplied many times over. What is directed to the dead in this way is something that falls into the dead person's field of vision and enriches the dead inwardly. Just don't say that we are interfering with their karma. If you gave someone 500 marks – I don't know how much that is worth today – so that he could make an Italian journey and visit the art galleries in Italy, that was not at all an unlawful interference with his karma; it was something perfectly permissible, although it has something to do with his karma. And so it is also not an unlawful interference with karma when we do something for the dead. It is indeed an embellishment, an elevation, an enrichment for the life of the 'dead, when thoughts or actions or the like, clothed in ritual, flow from us to the dead, but it must remain the intercourse with the dead in the inner life of the soul.

A great deal of nonsense has been done with spiritualism, also in other respects. In recent times, in particular, communication with the dead through spiritualism has been brought into a terrible situation. You know that spiritist séances are mainly used to communicate with the dead. Now, of course, most of what comes to light in spiritist séances is false, but despite all the falsity, there remains a certain residue that should not be cultivated, because it is something that always brings a person down, not up. If a person does not develop in a higher world, but allows the ordinary world to enter deeper into himself, a kind of pathological relationship with the spiritual world can arise. This is, as a rule, also the case with mediums, who very often succeed in approaching the dead through suggestion. You will understand that all kinds of illusions must arise. It is, of course, absolute nonsense to believe that the dead are able to use speech and writing in the way that is manifested in spoken or even written communications. That is, of course, complete nonsense. What comes to light is only transformed by the medium. Imagine that we were all sitting here together in peace, when the floor opened up and a menagerie of lions came up into this room. Imagine that vividly! Just as it would look here if a menagerie of lions came up through a floor opening, so it is for the dead when we enter their realm in a spiritualistic way with all that we are as human beings here. It is an entirely accurate image. The dead suffer as a result if the contact is real. It is irresponsible what can be achieved through spiritualism.

Communication with the dead must remain entirely within the soul realm. In this context, it is only ever appropriate to address prayers to the dead when there is a tendency to find a bridge to the dead, and that meditation, ritual acts and so on are also directed towards the dead, so that one can relate to the dead on a spiritual level. In this way, both the world in which the dead find themselves and the world in which the living find themselves are served; that is, those who are living on earth; for much of what people, without having a real idea of its origin, summarize in the word “genius” is in reality an inspiration from the dead, who find their way into the thoughts of men. So what we develop in relation to the dead in cult, in prayer, in meditation, these are absolutely justified things.

A participant: This raises the question of whether the grave is a particularly favorable place to get in touch with the dead. Or is it not the case that shortly after the dead person is buried, there is no longer a special place here to get in touch with the dead person?

Rudolf Steiner: In general, I can say that when thinking of the dead, when praying for the dead, the place plays an extraordinarily small role. It can indeed happen that the dead person has a strong longing for earthly life, then he would develop a certain longing for the place and also have a point of reference for being met there, if I may say so, where he was last thought of in community. It could be that way roundabout, but apart from that, one cannot say that the place, or even the place where someone is buried, has a great influence on what we can do for the dead. It is indeed the case, is it not, that in the festivals of the dead, especially in the All Souls' festivals, in a certain way the dead are almost brought to their graves, but that is actually something more for the living than for the dead. Here I must again take up the thought I expressed earlier. The dead man does indeed reach out to the living in his effectiveness, and we can certainly say: the dead man takes part in the world, as we take part in the most eminent sense in the spiritual world, and it can have a certain significance for the living when they develop their memories and their thoughts at the grave, in connection with the grave. This was naturally the case with the martyrs, the so-called saints. In the early centuries of Christianity, worship was performed at the graves primarily not for the sake of the dead, but for the sake of those who had been left behind. The altar still has the form of a grave, and this is a relic of the time when the service of the supersensible was already a kind of cult of the ancestors; and this is how it must be judged in the early times of Christianity. It is more for the living than for the dead.

A participant: Does time play a role here? And what about the requiem?

Rudolf Steiner: The funeral service is essentially one of the things that can be done ritually for the dead. Now it is the case that the funeral service should of course be read soon after the “death, and that is also good because the etheric body and the astral body still interact then. The etheric body is discarded very soon after death, so that the requiem, if it falls into the time when the person still has his etheric body or at least has not discarded it for long, still has a very strong subjective meaning for him.

Regarding the other question, I would like to ask you to take into consideration that a person, on the one hand, has to consider the objective facts and, on the other hand, his or her ability to perceive. Certainly, if someone died thirty years ago, he or she is no longer as intimately connected to the earth as if he or she died three days ago, that is certain. But there is a connection, and it is only a question of the fact that after thirty years it is difficult for a person here to establish the connection. I cannot find that it does not coincide a little with earthly development, because I have met a great many people in whom the first intense pain, which may have been stormy in expression, after they lost someone, was very subdued after thirty years, but I have never met anyone in whom the pain would have increased. Circumstances arise in the lives of those who have been left behind that are quite contrary to the fact that in later years the connecting bridge can still be as lively as in previous years. But if someone asks me whether the dead person comes out of the earthly sphere completely after thirty years or after an even longer time, then I must always say no; there can be no question of that. The world is such that everything is together in it; it is quite the case that we could just as easily perform rituals or ceremonies for the dead after thirty or fifty years as we could earlier. This is to be firmly held.

A participant: In this context, I would like to ask for an explanation of the passage in 1 Corinthians, chapter 15, verse 29.

Rudolf Steiner: “What do those who are baptized for the dead do? If the dead do not rise, why are they baptized for the dead?” — What kind of question is that?

A participant: Whether baptism is thought to influence the state of the dead.

Rudolf Steiner: What kind of influence do you mean?

A participant: Whether there is any influence at all and if so, what kind. This passage is completely unclear to me.

Rudolf Steiner: What do those who get baptized for the dead do if the dead do not rise at all? – Is it not the question of resurrection for you? Well, it is not, because here it is a matter of the idea of resurrection being the underlying assumption, and then of our taking it very seriously that the dead person has a relationship with the living, with those living here on earth. If the dead person has an ongoing life, then this life is modified in the most diverse ways, and if his life was such in Christ, then the connection that remains with the dead person is indeed a strengthening element for us. We can therefore say the following: Let us assume that we have known someone who was particularly significant in some way. I do not want to talk about spiritual or psychological qualities, but only about a significant person who has died and with whom we ourselves have a living connection in the way we can, emotionally, in thought.

I will start from something else first. You will gain extraordinary strength if you develop a living pedagogy, namely strength that can be used to make children receptive to certain admonitions when you educate, as it were, in the name of a dead person. If you just have the strength to do that, for example, to walk around the classroom and bring this connection with the dead person to life within you, it will give you the strength to make the children receptive to admonitions. In this way, you will also gain a special strength for the rite for that which is to be attained through baptism – baptism is emphasized here because it aims to lead the person into the Christian community – if you gain strength through the dead. It is natural that this is cited by the founder of Christianity, for the reason that all of Christianity, including dead Christianity, should work in the continuation of Christianity, so that all those who have gone out of the world through death should be co-helpers in properly guiding those who are born into the Christian community. That is what I would like to summarize.

A participant: [On what do the relations between the living and the dead depend?]

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, according to the experiences one can have, it is the case that the most real relationships emerge when they are built on real relationships in life before death. In general, if I may express it this way, dying is as follows: when the individual dies, he steps out of his physical shell, and what he has experienced in the physical shell is often the cause of what he then experiences [as an effect after death]. That is just the way it is: after death, he is dependent on what he has experienced in the physical shell. What he can experience through the physical shell falls away, he acquires other perceptual abilities, but he slips out of the shell, so to speak. It is the same with the relationships that a person has entered into with other people in life; these relationships have developed, they are mediated through our physical existence here, but when we slip out of the shell, the relationships continue. If one can have experiences in this area, one really has to say: the more concrete the relationships were in life, the more concrete the relationships are with the dead person.

But there is something else to consider. Above all, it must be considered that relationships are formed between the dead person and a new birth itself. So the person then develops new perceptions, but he forms emotional relationships, so that when the person comes down from the pre-existent life with human relationships – and in fact our real human relationships are much greater than we actually believe – one cannot say that the general relationship that is developed through such things as you have in mind would be completely fruitless. It is true that, for example, the members of a church community also establish relationships for their afterlife, but the other things are by no means fruitless, that much can be said. Such things can really only be determined from experience, but the concrete aspect plays a much greater role.

Johannes Perthel: Can we expect in the present or in the immediate future that a religious movement, including ritual, as mentioned, is possible in the proletariat?

A participant: What about the difference between city and country?

Rudolf Steiner: In this respect, we have indeed had a certain experience. Was it not necessary for me to follow a call to Stuttgart in April 1919 and to advocate there in Germany for the threefold social order movement, just as the view of the threefold structure of the social organism arose for me from the foundations of experience to be cultivated through spiritual science? I had to regard it absolutely as something that was a task for precisely this point in time. Before I left Switzerland, a man came to me who wanted to sign the appeal I had written and said that I must tell him more than was in the appeal. The Kernpunkte had not yet appeared at that time. He thought that something must arise that could be counted on, something like the second German revolution. I asked him: Do you therefore count on the second German revolution? — He counted the one of November 1918 as the first. And just as one revolution followed another in Russia, so he counted on a second revolution and thought that I held the view that threefolding should fall into it. I told him at the time: Yes, a large number of people believe that threefolding will indeed have a rapid effect after all the events of the times. It simply has to be tried. Because if I were to say that it cannot have a rapid effect, it would not be done, and then it will not be possible to prove to anyone that if it had been done, it would have had a very good effect for the benefit of all humanity. I told him: Just as one can overlook something in an ordinary context, so can some things also escape one in a spiritual field. There may be factors that make a second German revolution promising, but I do not believe at all in an acute second revolution, but in a continuity that would make it impossible to count on a second revolution as a serious factor. I do not believe that there is any real basis for such things.

Well, the development of the years has also proved this view right, and the result was that, at first, the threefold order progressed relatively quickly. Then it faltered, and obstacles arose from various sides, which I do not want to discuss with you now. On the other hand, a certain connection with the proletariat has been created precisely through the threefolding movement, and this connection has brought anthroposophy into the proletariat in a way that would not otherwise have been possible. I would like to say that anthroposophy has remained, and that threefolding has passed by the proletariat. It has been shown that there is a very strong interest among the urban proletariat in getting to know these things.

I have already mentioned another thing to you. If we had not been able to give anthroposophical religious education in the Waldorf school, always in harmony with the parents' views, never against them, the vast majority [of children] would have been left without religious education. With anthroposophical religious education, it is the case that the teachers say: We can't keep up, we are not able to have a sufficient number of teachers [for religious education]. It might even look a bit malicious if I were to say that the other RE teachers sometimes express their displeasure: Yes, if they keep it up like this, all the children will run away from us. But we can't help it, the blame must lie with someone, I won't say who, but I think it lies with someone else. So you see again that there is actually a strong pull in the direction that can come into the world through anthroposophy.

So I am not at all worried about the urban population. I believe that the communities you will be able to found will indeed attract a large influx of people from the proletariat in particular. Experience shows this quite clearly, and the whole constitution of the proletarian soul today shows it, as one has experienced in the last time. It is really the case that the proletariat today is something different than it was in 1914. If you grasp it in the right way, it is very accessible to a religious deepening, it is really longing for it.

The situation is more difficult, however, with the rural population, but with the rural population it is more difficult in all areas. The rural population is very stubborn, very conservative and will in fact hardly be won over to a reasonable further development in any other way than by the fact that those who are their leaders gradually become reasonable, which of course causes terrible difficulties with certain sides. Today, one must actually say that it would be relatively easy to make progress with the led — I mean, as a general phenomenon — if only the leaders would bite, but they are so terribly comfortable. With regard to the rural population, the leaders would just have to bite, we would have to overcome the leaders' complacency. Then the question of the rural population would also be solved, because it will quickly be solved if the question is resolved there as a pastor. In the cities, pastors will be forced to be progressive because the churches will gradually remain empty. In the countryside, it is a matter of winning over the leaders.

Now, my dear friends, I cannot interfere in this matter given our situation here, because it is a question of how quickly it will be possible for those who are actually, I do not want to say for a hasty, but for an energetic approach, in the real sense, that is, future pastors, to be able to shape the leadership in their own way. That is what one has to say about it. Is your question going in a different direction?

A participant: I would like to ask whether it is to be expected that these new cult forms will find immediate appeal among the proletariat?

Rudolf Steiner: That is quite certain. It is only important to know how to treat the proletariat. Of course — as can also be seen from the first chapter of my 'Key Points' — the qualities that have developed in the souls of the proletariat today are essentially the heirlooms of bourgeois qualities from the last centuries. The proletarian today shows no other characteristics than those he has inherited from the bourgeois. If the bourgeois has become pedantic, the proletarian has become even more pedantic; if the bourgeois has become philistine, the proletarian has become even more philistine; if the bourgeois has become materialistic, the proletarian has become even more materialistic, and so on. The dislike of ritual and ceremony that you find among the proletariat today is nothing more than the continuation of that dislike that has gradually developed in the bourgeoisie. It is also a matter of our really being able to appeal from the external to the internal, and here it must be said: anyone who looks a little deeper into the course of human development knows that, as the social question stands today, it cannot be overcome by anything other than a serious religious renewal, and that can only be found through the ceremonial. You do not even get around to developing what you need to get into the proletarian soul without the ceremonial. But the ceremonial must be honest. Here imponderables play a great role. If the ceremonial is not honest, it is impossible to bring it to bear. If it is honest, it takes the lead. I would like to say that it is not necessary to be blunt, but the ceremonial must be honest.

You see, in this respect one must say: the ceremonial acts have gradually become so externalized that of course the proletarian today has only a smile for everything ceremonial. But let something come along that is honest, that is what it should be, then you will get through to people, even to the proletarian soul, perhaps even to this first of all.

Hubert Sondermann: May I ask from which side we could approach the soul of the countryman with what we want and where, so to speak, the key can be found, where we can unlock it.

Rudolf Steiner: This cannot be done theoretically, but must be taken as I have said it. We must be clear about the fact that the countryman, the farmer, is conservative, and that what is rigid in him is extremely difficult to get out of him, and this is much more common today than it used to be. I think that can be seen in a relatively short time. In the 1980s, it was still relatively easy to bring people over from the Roman Catholic Church to the Old Catholic Church. Today, it is almost unthinkable.

Constantin Neuhaus: The good elements no longer come at all.

Rudolf Steiner: The general effect is that receptivity has actually been lost in a relatively short time, especially in the countryside to an eminent degree. In the countryside, things can only improve if we work indirectly through the priesthood. If we are able to found a community in the countryside, even if it is still small, and if this community is there and the priest really works in a priestly way, then he can gradually have this community, but of course he must be prepared for the fact that the real issue is to overcome the leaders. Of course, they cannot do anything with the people of Arlesheim as long as Pastor Kully is there. It is clear that we are talking here about the leaders. The path that can be taken at all will be to first found communities in larger towns and then to simply try to have a convincing effect on people, so that a kind of further development takes place through the pastor himself. The moment you succeed in conquering any district as a leader, it will happen. You always have to see that it does not depend on individual souls, especially not in the compact rural communities. But attempts must be made everywhere, and it will be a matter of overcoming the leaders there.

A participant: I think we will have difficulties because in the countryside religious life is lived much less consciously. I don't think that many people in the countryside are really searching, but religiosity is more traditional, it is a movement that happens by itself. We can expect much more of a person who is searching hard than of people who are only in the religious life because of tradition. Is there any hope of success here, of raising religious life in the countryside out of the sphere of tradition and into the sphere of consciousness, or is that expecting too much?

Rudolf Steiner: Please bear in mind that what you describe is only a contemporary phenomenon. Just think of the time of the peasant revolts, which were entirely religious in character. The phenomenon you describe is actually much more connected with other things in the present than merely with religious things. If you want to present anthroposophy in Regensburg and there are farmers in the audience, they will naturally come and stamp on the ground: You have nothing to say to us here, our pastor has to say that to us, and you have to shut up! —- But this is connected with the fact that today, as a result of liberalism, of man's development towards freedom, there is an enormous belief in authority, not only in the religious field, but everywhere. We have acquired this belief in authority particularly by becoming more and more liberal people. It is because liberalism has spread that we have forfeited our freedom. This is a somewhat radical statement, but it is already proving true in the most diverse areas. This has much more to do with the things that are otherwise present in life than with religious matters. Just try to imagine what would happen if a truly free spiritual life were to take hold. A free spiritual life, where, for example, the school is completely autonomous and self-sufficient, where what is done in the school is, I might say, direct revelation from the spirit, then, of course, you come to the point where, through the free spiritual life, you overcome the leading personalities with their authorities. This is something that comes to the fore most strongly in things that develop in other areas than in the religious sphere, especially in the countryside, because in the countryside the principle of authority cannot be overcome as easily in all areas as it can in cities. But I do not wish to say that religious life is unconscious in the countryside for that very reason. It is simply that everything is more rigid and submerged in what the modern age has brought forth.

A participant: [Isn't the rural population particularly receptive to cults?]

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, certainly for the introduction of cults. The moment you appear with the cult, you will win the heart of the countryman much more easily than with a teaching; that is quite certain. The Catholic Church spread Christianity initially not so much through teaching as through cult, even if the teaching has flowed into external forms.

A participant: Wherever the remains of cults still exist, the position of the priest is different – a position of authority – and this makes it easier for the priest to gain access to the lives of the rural population. My only fear is whether the priest has the necessary expert knowledge to intervene and take the lead in all these areas.

Rudolf Steiner: Which priest?

A participant: The pastor in the countryside. If all the threads come together there, can he really do it?

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, why do you think it can't be done?

A participant: Because we have become too unworldly as a result of our education.

Rudolf Steiner: This is indeed essentially overcome by a free spiritual life, as I think it is in the sense of the threefold social organism - that is, in the educational sphere according to the model of the Waldorf School through education in the free spiritual life. Don't we see the worst consequences actually coming from the lack of freedom in the spiritual life, that is, I mean now from the lack of social freedom. Just think, it was not so very long ago that there was a real and serious debate about whether or not to tolerate the Jesuits in the German Reich. Now, it is outrageous to even discuss the spiritual life from a political point of view. You will not expect me to have even a single hair left to praise the Jesuits, of course, but politically speaking, no kind of spiritual movement should be oppressed in any way if we want to advance in the general spiritual life. What have they achieved by politically fighting Jesuitism in Germany? To the same extent that they fought Jesuitism politically, to that same extent did its capacities increase from another side. Jesuitism is very astute; it has extraordinarily significant people working within it. If you want to fight it, you also have to develop sharp mental abilities. I must say that any kind of oppression of the free intellectual life leads to an oppression of the intellectual life in general. We should never think of using political measures to bind or restrict our opponents in the field of intellectual life, or anything of the sort; only in this way is it possible to really move forward. I think that when intellectual life sheds all the dark sides that still remain, for example specialization – which can be completely shed in anthroposophical education – then the pastor will actually be able to be the leader that he must be. There is simply no other way in the rural communities out there. There is no other possibility for the pastor than to really be involved in all matters concerning the community – I also want to talk about community building – he simply must be. One cannot say “he will be”, but one can say: he must be. We must say with Fichte: Man kann, was er soll, and when he says: ich kann nicht, so will er nicht. That should be our motto.

Christian Geyer: I would like to make a small suggestion. Unfortunately, some of us have to leave. It was originally planned that the course would last until tomorrow, and some will not be able to attend the continuation. I don't know if it is immodest of me to ask if you could at least give a rough outline of how the creed will be formulated.

Rudolf Steiner: Tomorrow. It is no longer possible for us to continue. Tomorrow, yes.

Dear attendees! From a sensitive, unprejudiced assessment of present events, I believe it will be quite natural today to talk about the coming day.

If I may refer to what I took the liberty of saying here the day before yesterday, it may perhaps be said that such descriptions, as given here, of the spiritual state of present-day civilized humanity express very much an evening mood. The results of the development of humanity over the last three to four centuries up to the present had to be described, and it had to be described how, despite the enormous progress and triumphs in the most diverse areas of life – which, as has been emphasized, are also present – the horrific events of the last four to five years have befallen humanity. It is not only possible that these terrible events have befallen humanity, but it has also become possible that today we are in a certain way faced with perplexity, with the question: What should happen? Yes, in many respects we have to admit: If we continue to build only on the results of the emerging developmental forces for our knowledge and our will, then we would have to reckon with hopelessness. There is something of a twilight mood. And this twilight mood suggests that we also speak, so to speak, from the other side of the matter: from the dawn, to speak of the coming day.

But when one speaks today of the coming day, it seems that one thing is not allowed: simply to look at the events as they have unfolded, as they have developed up to the present moment, in order to derive from them reasons for any things that one need only hope for. From the perplexity of the present, few reasons for such hopes can be found. Therefore, anyone who wants to speak of the coming day must start from something other than a description of the possible effects of past events, from a description of what could arise from the general cultural and civilizational conditions and which man can only observe.

No, my dear audience, anyone who wants to speak today of the coming day must speak of what man must do to hasten the coming of that day. Merely pointing to some fate lying outside of humanity will not awaken any hopes today. Attention must be called to man himself, to his possibilities of action, to that which can ignite the deed in him, so that he may be the one who, however the world may be aflame, can bring about the coming day. But the cause for this is not only an observation of the perplexity and hopelessness of the fate of the outer world; it is also caused by a somewhat deeper consideration of the historical development of humanity itself – the historical development of humanity, which one must then, however, consider from the point of view of the spiritual science meant here. Most people today are accustomed, when the historical development of man is mentioned, to follow it only, I might say, by the thread of cause and effect, as if everything that occurs in the subsequent period could be explained by the preceding events, which one then calls causes.

This is no more the case in the historical development of humanity than it is in the case of the individual human being. We cannot possibly be satisfied with a pursuit of human individual development in such a way that we say: Now, we look at the person when he is thirty years old, and we explain what he presents to us as a thirty-year-old as a consequence of what he was as a twenty-nine-year-old, as a twenty-eight-year-old, as a twenty-seven-year-old. Such an explanation would be superficial and abstract, and would not be able to do justice to the real essence of the human being. For if we want to grasp the real essence of the individual human being, then we must look at the individual epochs of his development. We must be clear about how the human being, when he is a child, is subject to certain laws of development, which initially apply until the period when the teeth change. Then we must realize how, after this change of teeth, something lawful takes place in the whole human organism, something that arises from the inner being and cannot be explained by simply tracing the outer facts of human development in about the ninth year back to the outer facts of human development in the fifth or sixth year. Again, we must look at the time when human sexual maturity occurs, at the fourteenth or fifteenth year. Then something arises again from the depths of the human being that must be called upon for help if one is to arrive at an understanding of the human being as a whole. And so it is in the following epochs of the development of the individual human being, even if the changes in human nature are less distinct for these following epochs, but still quite clearly evident to the discerning person.

And just as it is with the development of the individual human being, so it is with the historical development, the historical evolution of all mankind. For its understanding it is not enough to explain the subsequent from the previous, as has become customary. It must be realized that great upheavals also occur in the historical development of humanity, that epochs occur in which laws of development emerge from the depths of humanity, so that the essential way in which this humanity expresses itself changes from that in the previous age.

If we now look at what, I would say, has been working its way up for three to four centuries from below the surface of what was described the day before yesterday – for it initially only wants to work its way up from the depths of the human being – then we have to say that everything, absolutely everything, tends towards and aims at the individual members of humanity developing to full consciousness, to full consciousness in all areas of life. For the student of historical development who does not merely consider external history, as it is taught today, which is basically only a fable convenante, but who delves into the inner workings of human development — as one must delve into the inner being of the individual must enter into the inner life of the individual if we want to understand him. For such a person, the first germ of this new way of being human begins to show up in the 15th century, to grasp in full consciousness what surrounds us in the world. However, there is a fact in the development of humanity that masks, covers up what I have just characterized. From the old epochs, developmental forces always remained behind, which, as a conservative element, intervene in the entire development of humanity – forces that continue to have an effect and that actually not only push into the background what wants to develop from a part of the human being as the actual task of the epoch, but also, so to speak, fight it. And so from the preceding epoch, extending beyond the 15th century into our own age, there remains what I would call unconsciousness in all fields, first and foremost in the field of intellectual life itself.

So strong has this unconsciousness remained in the field of intellectual life that today we have broad intellectual currents that see in the unconscious that which is the deeper, more essential part of the human being. In America, for example, we see the rise of the spiritual movement associated with the name William James, which, in various forms, has many followers precisely among Europe's intellectuals. This spiritual movement says: only part of what man holds in his soul comes fully to his consciousness. From the subconscious, all that is the content of artistic creation rises up; from the unconscious, even ideas rise up, which are then only subjected to the judgment of science. From the subconscious, all that inspires man religiously also rises.

That which spreads as an educated spiritual current, sometimes taking on grotesque forms, as for example in psychoanalysis, has its counter-image in something else. How often do we not still hear today that someone is well-meaning with regard to a supersensible, spiritual world, which he presupposes, but his good opinion comes to an end the moment spiritual science appears, which, with full awareness, wants to penetrate the spiritual world by looking at the signs of the time. A well-meaning person like this often says: There must be something beyond what can be consciously absorbed into the soul from nature and from people. But then he is glad when he can say: That which exists in this way is an unknown, is something that cannot be investigated; it is something that does not enter into full human consciousness. Artists are almost frightened, even afraid, of raising the impulses of their artistry into consciousness. They fear that in so doing they would lose their most elementary powers, their naivete, which they consider necessary for artistic creation. And there are some who do not want to make that which can be brought to full consciousness the driving force of social life, because they would like to point to something unconscious and unknown that should assert itself in the interaction between people. Man should draw the impulses for his social behavior from the unconscious, and that would be destroyed in a certain way if it were raised to full consciousness, as if the dew that refreshes it were taken away.

So in a certain way one offers the unconscious, the unknown, in the most diverse forms, as one does today in enlightened circles. And it is only to be expected that the spiritual science referred to here should be repeatedly criticized for presuming to make definite statements about the spiritual world and its contents, instead of merely pointing to an unknown supersensible realm that lies beyond the bounds of humanity. Instead, it is content to point to spiritual life out of a certain general feeling, out of the most primitive human nature. This belief, which today refuses to listen to the signs of the times, which rejects the specific content of spiritual life that spiritual science strives for, this belief is only the remaining residue of what used to prevail in human development as the unconscious. But what is this unconscious? It was different in earlier epochs of human development than it can be today. This unconscious was an elementary, living force in earlier epochs of human development. The further back we go in this development of humanity, the more we find, as it rises in man - though not by the path of consciousness, which must be ours today, but by the path of unconscious vision - not only the contents of his spiritual life, but also that by which he makes sense of the nature around him.

Just look, dear audience, at the last outposts of this ancient looking of humanity out of the unconscious, and you will find the magnificent myths, the magnificent mythologies, through which the earlier man enlightened himself about himself and the surrounding nature out of his unconscious. We find the source of artistic creation rising from this unconsciousness. And if we really want to educate ourselves and not just educate ourselves according to conventional prejudices, we also find evidence that early man sought the impulses for his social will and social behavior in the circle of his fellow human beings, emerging from the unconscious. Even if not everything, a good part of what connects people socially from the unconscious does lie in human language – in this human language through which we become sister and brother to the other person in whose vicinity we live. We acquire this human language in earliest childhood, at the time when we are still dreaming ourselves into life, when there can be no question of full consciousness. What does that which is born out of the child's life-dream carry into later life?

We are influenced by the genius of language. This language gives us a great deal. It connects us socially with our fellow human beings, but what permeates this language, acting as a social driving force, is hidden in earliest childhood; it is born not out of consciousness but out of the unconscious. And so we can say: the old social life has arisen in many cases out of the unconscious. The unconscious has given the human being something quite different from what it gives him today, up to the time that has occurred for the whole development of humanity around the 15th century. But just as the developmental forces of the individual human being that lie before his or her sexual maturity cannot be present in the same way in man after sexual maturity, and just as completely different abilities and forces must come to the fore, so in human development, in this present age, consciousness must take the place of the earlier unconsciousness. But the element that I had to draw attention to the day before yesterday, which permeates our present civilization, the phrase, is what intensively prevents full consciousness from developing out of the depths of the human being. What used to permeate the human being in all its liveliness from the unconscious is no longer alive today; it has been killed to the point of being a mere phrase.

And I had to point out the day before yesterday that the glorious scientific world view has not found the possibility to educate man about anything other than the non-human, about what is present in inanimate nature. I had to point this out, because anyone who comprehended all the knowledge that science gives him would be at a loss when faced with the question: What is man actually? The science that is still in use today does not provide any information on this question. Why is that? That is because this science has not yet been born out of full consciousness, but that this science, despite its glorious successes, is the continuation of what came to people from very different sources than today's in the age of unconsciousness. Therefore, we see this science in a strange position.

Recently, I came across a brochure about general social concepts and ideas that was by no means worthless. I would like to make it clear that it contains many valuable ideas. But at the end there is something that is extremely characteristic of such a consideration as the one today. It says that the author has considered social conditions purely scientifically, that is, as the scientific customs of the present demand. But because he wants to be scientific, he cannot draw any conclusions from his scientific ideas for moral, artistic, political or cultural life, because science does not have the task of drawing any conclusions for these different branches of life. Whether what he describes in purely scientific terms - so the author believes - whether it heals ulcers or destroys suns, is of no concern to science - that is not what matters to science.

Do we not see, when we consider the expression of such an attitude – which, however, is not an isolated one, but is actually typical of what is often called “science” or “scientific knowledge” today – do we not see how we are confronted with the continuation of a certain asceticism of life that only fails to recognize itself as a continuation. Do we not see there again that asceticism of life which in earlier centuries was connected with a certain disdain for the outer life, which has withdrawn into the human soul, which is unconcerned with what is going on in the outer world of ethical, moral, or social facts, but looks only at the affairs of the soul's interior? This ascetic striving has taken on other forms, but it reappears in this scientific attitude – in this scientific attitude, which, in its kind, is admirably strict and conscientious in its methodology, but which sees its greatness precisely in the fact that it admits: I have nothing to offer from my own resources as an impulse or stimulus for the moral, artistic, political or cultural life. Against this mood, which, however, does not only occur in scientific life but, because scientific life dominates education today, is spreading to all of our public life, against this mood, what wants to present itself here as spiritual science is the most profound protest. At the moment when the great questions for the future arose out of the sad circumstances of our present civilization, it was only natural that an inner vision of social life, of the progress of social life, should arise out of what spiritual science, what real spiritual science, as it is meant here, kindles within the human being. It is not by the whim or arbitrariness of individual personalities that the impulse of the threefold social organism has been added to what has been advocated here for decades as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science – it has arisen as a matter of course. It has turned out that one had to feel that it was inwardly untrue and dishonest of the one who, with his soul, purports to strive for this spiritual science and has no heart for the social question that is shaking and convulsing all of humanity, or at least should be shaking and convulsing it.

I might also mention the other areas of life, but I will mention only this one more thing: in our building in Dornach we have created something that does not rely on any old architectural style, but that deals with the forms of building and the artistic down to the last detail, arising out of the forces that arise out of our spiritual knowledge, out of our spiritual vision. This spiritual science, as it is meant here, protests against the idea that what is effective as art should be left in the unconscious and not raised into the consciousness. Just as spiritual science itself wants to enter the spiritual worlds with full consciousness, so it also wants to bring out of the spiritual worlds that which can lead to new architectural styles, to new artistic creation, here and now. Since spiritual science wants to behold the spirit itself, to which the human being is related in his innermost being, it encounters this innermost human being in such a way that it comes to the core of humanity - where moral will sprouts, where moral will arises. Spiritual science cannot say that it does not concern itself with what takes place in the moral will, but it can claim that by permeating itself with knowledge of the breadth and depth of the human soul, it simultaneously gives birth to the moral impulses from which the human being shapes his will and his actions. This spiritual science cannot say that it is not important to it to do something to heal ulcers or to prevent the suns from going out. It must say that it is important to it that, out of its knowledge, people draw strength to act in a healing way wherever the course of world events has harmful effects. It is important to it to present something that can be a sun for people and that can contribute to the beneficial forces in the development of humanity. Participation and co-action, co-will and co-intention in the whole course of human historical, social development, that is what this spiritual science strives for, not as an abstract goal, but what arises for it through its own nature and essence. It cannot appear otherwise than by continuing in full consciousness that which arose out of unconsciousness in a certain way in an earlier humanity.

From this unconsciousness, in earlier times, one had a very definite perception of the progress of human development. That was that the evolution of humanity, of all humanity, if left to itself, would continually degenerate, would continually be seized by harmfulness, would continually incline towards a kind of dying, would continually fall ill. But there was also an awareness that if man intervenes in this development of humanity, he will become the healer of illnesses and damage by relying on precisely that which, out of the nature of the unconscious, enlightens him. In the times of the unconscious development of humanity, all knowledge, all insight, was felt to be a healing force of human culture, because one did not stop at wanting something in just one corner and not participating in the outer cultural process – on the contrary, one wanted to participate in this cultural process precisely as a healer.

And the word that comes to us from Greek knowledge, characterizing one of the deepest artistic creations, the tragedy, the word “catharsis”, that comes to us from Greek culture and wants to say what the effect of the tragedy is actually based on. This is the basis of this effect: to create images of passions in people, so that these passions can be healed emotionally in the face of the tragic action of the tragedy. The fact that this expression “catharsis” resounds from Greek culture as the dominant element in tragedy suggests to us how the artistic in the Greek way of life, which is so close to life, was also regarded as a healing process of life. For “catharsis” is a word - we can only translate it with the abstract word “cleansing” - which is also used for that phenomenon that leads to a crisis in a person during an illness; and when this crisis leads to the elimination of the harmful, then healing occurs. From the individual human healing process, the Greeks derived the task for tragedy. They did not imagine art to be separate from the rest of culture; they conceived of it as being fully within it.

This is how the humanities, which have been discussed here for a long time and which, in the face of the perplexity that has arisen from the glorious science of modern times in other fields, must now stand as the most serious spiritual challenge of the coming day, want to be in life, in the living will and action. However, in order for it to be recognized as such, many a harsh prejudice still has to be dispelled. As long as people believe that serious science is only that which describes what can be seen through the microscope and telescope, what is stated in the physics cabinet, what happens in clinics, as long as this prejudice will be brought to this spiritual science. But when it is recognized that nothing can be learned about the innermost nature of man himself through all that can be investigated in this external way, however valuable it may be for mankind in other respects, then man will be driven by an inner urge to this spiritual knowledge because he cannot help it if he wants to gain enlightenment about himself. Just as we pay attention to what is stated in the physics cabinet and in the clinics today, we will pay attention to what the spiritual researcher does in his soul by strengthening his thinking to such an extent that this strengthened thinking is no longer dependent on the body, as is ordinary thinking, but makes itself independent of the body.

What most people still sneer at today, what they regard as fantasy, will in the future be seen as a strictly exact method that takes place entirely within the soul itself. It will be recognized that through the so-called meditative life - but now not through the old, mystical meditative life, which only alienates man from the world, but through the inwardly active meditative life - thinking can be strengthened in this way, especially when the strict willpower described in my book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” is added. Then one is indeed dealing with thinking of which one knows: You are thinking, but you no longer use your brain to help you in your thinking, which has now become a purely spiritual-soul process. - Then one ascends to supersensible knowledge through this inner strengthening of thinking. And just as, from a certain point in time, what was seen through the magnification of the microscope was recognized, so too will it be recognized through the strengthening of thinking and the acknowledgment of the results of research from the supersensible that nature, in which we live, cannot be fully understood through our intellectual soul content, through intellectualism.

This is something that still sounds paradoxical to people today, but which, when the serious demands of the coming day are recognized, will no longer sound paradoxical. For it will be recognized that nature is inwardly infinitely richer in its effectiveness than that which can be grasped by natural laws, which only the human mind can derive from experiment. From our own human inclination, we might say that only that which the human mind can grasp with an intellectual judgment can be seen as something experienced inwardly. But if we want to stop at that, if we want to accept only that as natural law — and everything we are taught today as natural laws is only obtained in this intellectualistic way through experimentation — then we must renounce the real knowledge of nature. For what use is it to keep declaiming: “Clear is only that which comes from the judgment of the intellect, from the intellectualistic judgment” – if all that is the essence of nature cannot be grasped through these natural laws. Nature is such that it does not surrender to natural laws, but only to the images that we recognize in the imaginative when we strengthen our thinking so that it becomes independent of the body and we make it the content of our soul.

However, what is presented in this way as the actual driving force and core of spiritual scientific research, it is not enough to recognize it theoretically. It is not enough to be interested in the results, in the ideas and thoughts of this kind of world view, for the sake of one's own inner soul egoism, but it is necessary that the inner attitude and human soul disposition that can follow from such a view can follow from such a vision, must penetrate our entire public and social life just as the horrors of the last four to five years have gradually - but in preparation - penetrated the merely scientific, intellectualistic way of thinking.

We must begin with the schooling of the human being. This schooling of the human being must finally break with what is still regarded as one of the main purposes of all schooling: that this schooling is dependent on, and supervised by, the state. The state authorities, having the task of organizing the state, will always want to shape the goals of the school system in such a way that the human being becomes an instrument within the state organization. In the future, it will not be a matter of preparing the human being for this or that, but rather of developing in oneself the sense of observing through looking at the spiritual and soul life of the human being, what wants to develop as a spiritual being through the human being's corporeality from the earliest childhood on. It will be essential that the school be founded solely and exclusively on the requirements of spiritual life itself, from the lowest to the highest level.

Today, our public circumstances are such that one can only attempt to implement such an education system in isolated cases, as has been done here under the aegis of Mr. Molt with the Waldorf School. In the Waldorf School, the principle is assumed from the outset that something hidden within the human being is working its way out from childhood on, but that this can be observed through spiritual insight as it develops from week to week, from year to year. The teaching method is designed to help the human being become a whole human being, to develop in the human being from the earliest childhood those powers that will then endure throughout life, that make it possible for the human being at the latest age to bring out of himself what has been developed in him. In many ways, this must be approached differently from the way in which the aims of education have been viewed, due to scientific and materialistic prejudice, especially in recent times. Above all, it must be based on the awareness that If I bring forth from a person everything that is latent in him, he will later integrate himself into social life in such a way that he will make the institutions, not, as is the case today, be made by the institutions, so that he will become only a machine in his occupation, an imprint of the being that his occupation imprints on him. The human being of the future, who is to be

this school is to be aimed at, must stamp his seal on all outer life, but outer life must not stamp its seal on him. When this is stated, it may at first glance seem to be one of those phrases that are often used today to describe educational goals. But they remain empty phrases, like so much of modern life, if they are not linked to the real spiritual insight. This must first be driven out of the depths of the human soul through a strengthening of the thinking, through a self-discipline of the will, until the method of supersensible seeing is attained.

It is an earnest demand of the coming day that, alongside of what is investigated outwardly in laboratories and clinics, there should also be recognized that which can be found through strict inner soul-searching as the revelation of one's own true and real human nature, which at the same time is the supersensible, eternal nature of man. And it is a failure to recognize the signs of the times when religious prejudices dismiss such striving in such a way that what man wants to bring forth out of man's own power is belittled. It is a serious matter that especially from some religious quarters it is repeatedly said that it is a mistake or dangerous when man wants to develop inwardly so that he comes to the contemplation of the supersensible; this supersensible one should accept out of instinctive faith given to the simplest mind. - That sounds very nice to many because it accommodates man's inner egoistic comfort. And it sounds burdensome to many when spiritual science appears to speak about the individual facts of the supersensible world in the same way that external natural science speaks about the external-sensory facts of life. It is burdensome when the claim is made to describe the individual with which the human being is connected as a spiritual-soul being in the same way as one describes this external, sensual world. Out of a very vague feeling, people want to grasp everything possible as “the divine” in the twinkling of an eye; they do not want to embark on the laborious inner path of conquering this divine within themselves. But by not wanting to engage in the laborious process of conquering this divine within himself, by wanting to hold on to it in the abstract of a feeling, the human being will increasingly distance himself from real life. What he will express about nature will be powerless to intervene in social life, in political life, in cultus, even in the moral life. In the end, it will even be powerless to maintain religion itself, because in the present age man is accustomed to striving for the concrete, because man is accustomed to watching natural science cognitively and not merely believing. The education he acquires there will also apply its powers to this area. If man is not given this spiritual science, if he is not told of this spiritual vision, if it is opposed, then he will lose the old traditional religious beliefs that come from the age of unconsciousness. His soul will become desolate. Those religious beliefs that today stand in the way of a living grasp of the spiritual world are the ones that work against the true religiousness of humanity.

And this realization itself is an earnest spiritual demand of the coming day. It is quite out of date to say, as they do today, that religion must arise from the darkest depths of the human soul, that it must remain in the realm of the unconscious, and must not aspire to full consciousness. What I have described to you today as a characteristic of true spiritual striving in this field is intended to reveal how humanity must strive for a conscious experience of the spiritual world. This conscious experience of the spiritual world cannot be achieved for public life other than by making all spiritual striving independent and thus mainly by training all human spiritual forces that are independent of the state-legal forces, that are independent of all economic powers – one can read about this in my book 'The Key Points of the Social Question'. A spiritual life that is self-contained, that works purely from what the innermost soul says about the human spirit, that is independent of all authorities, such a spiritual life alone will awaken in humanity an awareness of the spirit. Man needs this consciousness in order to become aware of the connection between his own spirit within and the spirit that encompasses the whole world. Thus, in the field of knowledge, mankind has actually recognized the necessity of finding the transition from the old unconscious demands to the newer, ever more conscious and aware demands, which must arise ever stronger and stronger.

But in other areas of life, too, serious demands of the coming day arise. If we consider a second area of human life, public human life – that area that arises from the coexistence of person to person, as it develops in the mature adult, as it develops at the same time as a support for the growing up childhood and youth, which is to grow into the following age - when we consider this life and look at earlier epochs of human development, this too goes back to the unconscious; but this life also demands the transition into consciousness.

From what did all right develop? From what has all that developed that has, so to speak, crystallized in state legislation, in legal systems? I can only briefly hint at it here. It has developed from that which arose in older times, in the times of unconscious human development, from the habit that human being developed in relation to human being. Unconsciously, the human being developed a way of looking up to another human being; from this a behavior arose. Unconsciously, man has developed a feeling through the fact that the other person has behaved towards him in a certain way. From this, habits of right and wrong have arisen. Out of unconsciousness, custom and right have arisen. In this area, too, what only had its justification in the age of unconsciousness has survived into the age of consciousness. Into the age of consciousness, clinging to remnants of the old habits has been preserved. Until today, little has been shown of a transition to a different view of the legal and political system, of a transition to the view that, in full consciousness, grasps what the relationship between human beings is in the outer, social life. Just as in pure knowledge the transition from unconsciousness to consciousness must be achieved, so too in the sphere of legal or state life this transition from unconsciousness to consciousness must be found. This must be born out of what man experiences as he inwardly gets to know the spirit through spiritual insight. Out of this knowledge of the supersensible must come the way in which man stands in relation to man in the legal and political order of the social order. Out of man's consciousness of the supersensible must come the earthly consciousness — the consciousness that By standing as a human being and facing another human being, we are both not only what stands as a human body opposite the human body; we are both the bearers of a spiritual-soul. A spiritual-soul is exchanged with a spiritual-soul. This cannot be acquired as soul content through theoretical contemplation. It can only arise as soul content if it is enlivened from earliest childhood by a schooling that links everything natural to the spiritual, that also permeates everything natural from the spiritual. When a person is inwardly grounded in the truth of the spiritual with his innermost feeling, then he will also develop in his dealings with other people those feelings that place him as a spiritual being in relation to another spiritual being. Then, in the state-legal order, he will initially see a result of people's behavior, but he will recognize in it, as a deeper meaning, that which permeates all of humanity as a supersensible reality. Because the remnants of the unconscious from ancient times still extend into our time in this area, what used to be fully animated by the unconscious in people's sense of right and wrong, their sense of state, has been transformed into a mere convention. The convention must in turn absorb into itself that which is living, that which can work elementarily from person to person. But this can only happen if man finds a soil in which - independently of all other human life - only that which develops from human soul to human soul as right takes place. But because the old unconscious, which in a certain respect was justified for our past epoch, has been preserved into our epoch, it has lost its meaning. Right has been preserved according to the outward wording, the outward custom; the inner meaning has been lost. It could therefore not be exercised out of the inner life of the soul; it could only be exercised out of physical power.

And so we see how today, still half unconscious at first, the appeal rises from humanity – but an appeal that today is raised too much from the phrase, that must be stripped of the phrase and clothed with reality – the appeal rises to replace what exists merely under the influence of external power commands with a real right, to transform it into a real right. What lives as power in our external institutions on the legal or state level has come about simply because what previously arose from the unconscious has held on without meaning, so that it cannot now be held on to from the human soul, but is held on to by external power. It must transform itself - on a path that can only be found in the transition from unconscious feeling from person to person to conscious feeling of the individual human being for the real spiritual-soul nature of the other human being.

And just as knowledge developed in the epoch of unconsciousness, just as what was custom and what was right developed out of the elementary, out of what could not be counted among the known and manageable, so too did the customs and rules of conduct for outer life develop. They have developed through man's adaptation to his dealings, through his dealings with external things, through trial and error, through scratching, scraping, grinding in external life; in other words, this is how the skills of economic life have developed. These skills of economic life have developed out of the unconscious. And in the age in which the old, unconscious residue has remained, which has not filled with new, inner soul experience what used to be filled with the soul-unconscious in the treatment of the external world by man, that has become empty, that has become mere routine. But the spirit must seize the human being. The supersensible must enter into consciousness, then the human being will in turn permeate the economic world with what fires him from within. Then he will give meaning to the outer world again. Then he will not do the job, he will do the job. Then it will also be necessary that the human being is not simply placed in some profession and has to adapt to it, but it will be necessary that he is educated out of the demands and forces of human nature. He will place himself in the structure of economic life, in which there will be manageable associations, associations between people of the same and similar professions or related professions, and between those who produce and those who consume. Such associations will attain only such a size that the whole circumstances in them can be overseen by human power, that these overseeable associations can stand in free intercourse of economic exchange with others. There that will develop, what is won in economic life from contemplation, from experience. There it will be impossible - because the

— people are united in manageable associations, it will be impossible for one to offer the other anything that the other does not know about its origin and provenance. In such a case it will be possible to build on what has been formed by the power of the organizations and associations. Then one will know with whom one is dealing, because one will see how the individual comes into being through the economic and social context in associations. Then the spirit will truly prevail in economic life instead of the unspiritual. Thus it may be said that through the associations, and as people get to know each other commercially and economically through these associations, consciousness also enters into economic life. In this way, simply by being part of these associations, conscious economic life will develop.

The transition from unconsciousness to consciousness: this is what people must take hold of in the individual, narrowly defined circles of public, external life, and what people must take hold of on a large scale. We see how the unconscious is working today in one area of the great life of the world. But one could also ask: How few see it there?

We have seen how, under the influence of the events of the last four to five years, a world coalition has risen up against Central Europe, and how the sad events of these years have highlighted the hegemony of the English-speaking population over the earth. And in this respect, humanity still has much to experience. For those who can look at these matters with an unprejudiced mind, a very bitter future lies ahead. If one is able to look straight at the great world events, one must also ask the question from this point of view: What is the character of the public political life of the power that today, as the English-speaking power, is striving for world domination? What is the fundamental character of Anglo-American policy in particular? It is hardly ever stated. This policy is followed almost everywhere in the world today, and it is hardly ever stated. We see how certain phenomena recur again and again in this policy, but we cannot characterize these phenomena correctly. One could have listened to how, in the last third of the 19th century, people in England who were familiar with what was actually being striven for there basically predicted, for example, the fate of today's European East, and predicted, for example, that a great world war would have to come. But this policy has been acted upon under the influence of these impulses.

This is what is so little understood. But it is what must be understood if one is at all to proceed to a practical shaping of life, if one is to gain a practical position in today's public life. But then one must also ask: does this English policy not proceed in such a way that it often seems to take steps forward, then withdraw them again, and so on? We can follow this in English policy towards Egypt and Russia to this day, when we see how Lloyd George behaved a few months ago, how he is behaving today, how he takes steps forward and then withdraws them again. But what is the meaning of all this? One specific goal is to do with the national egoism of the English-speaking population of the earth. This goal is contained in it, as in the earlier epochs of human development, man set himself goals out of the unconscious. Then, in the external, for example in economic life, he began to experiment, to adapt to his surroundings.

If we look at the English political ideal of world domination, which was born out of the unconscious, and observe these steps forward and back, observe what is tried and done in detail, then we find the only really correct description for politics: it has its great goals out of the unconscious, and in relation to the individual actions it is experimental politics. It is so strongly experimental politics, trial politics, politics determined from unconscious goals, that one should not be discouraged if one or the other does not succeed. One then tries another way. One has the unconscious goals, and in consciousness one experiments, one tries, and if one does not get far enough in one way, one tries to get far enough in the other way. In the realm of the great cosmic being and cosmic activity, we have the emergence of the unconscious, which merely tries and experiments. This, too, must be overcome by the demands of the coming day.

Here, my dear audience, you see through and recognize that what is happening today as the main thing in the world, I would like to say, thank God, is not the coming day, but is the dusk of the evening. But the real coming day will arise out of the demand that can only arise out of an inner development of the human soul itself. This development aims to raise to consciousness that which previously ruled in humanity as the unconscious, and rightly so. However, this development must go right to the most intimate, innermost powers of the human soul.

You have been told today that leaflets were distributed after my last lecture. These leaflets contain all sorts of things. Among other things, they reheat the old myth that this spiritual science is an outlook that mocks Christianity and, above all, mocks Christ Himself. Well, my dear audience, that which has come into the evolution of mankind on earth through Christ Jesus is a fact – a fact that is part of the whole evolution of mankind. Each successive age in which humanity progresses must grasp this fact anew in its own way. He is weak-minded who believes that he can only stand on Christian ground if he can accept only the old conceptions and rejects that which arises from a new stage of development of the life of the human soul as a perception of Christianity.

Such people, who condemn precisely what spiritual science has to say about the Christ and about the mystery of Golgotha, do not follow the beautiful Pauline saying: Not I, but the Christ in me. Spiritual science is clear about the fact that the Christ is drawn into this earthly development from transcendental heights and that He is so connected with this earthly development that the human being of today cannot live from passive hope into the coming day, but that he must develop in his own inner being the power as a human being that will bring about this coming day. But because the power of Christ has entered into human evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha, the one who unites with this power of Christ will not merely have the Christ as the “Saviour of sinful man”, passively counting on his Redeemer. They will be able to say in truth: Not I, but the Christ in me — but the Christ not only as the Redeemer of sins, but the Christ as the inspirer and awakener of all the powers that will be able to emerge in the period to come as the powers of human progress. And those who believe that they have to rebel against something like this out of their beliefs perhaps misunderstand the very serious demands of the coming day, because they understand nothing of the real meaning of this Pauline word. “The Christ in me” is not merely something passively believed, but an active force that moves me forward as a human being. Not I, but the Christ in me – so says spiritual science. But the others, who fight against this spiritual science, they do not say at all: Not I, but the Christ in me – but they say: Not I, but the old opinions that I want to have about the Christ in me. – They do not say: The Christ in me, but: my old accustomed opinions in me; my old accustomed ideas about the Christ in me. — The correct understanding of St. Paul's words, that is what will fulfill a most serious demand of Christian progress.

In this way I have tried to characterize for you today some of the demands of the coming day, and I believe that I may conclude these serious reflections by saying: If humanity is to draw strength from the spirit, then there must also come from the spiritual a new grasp of the true, the genuine Christian essence. And that is truly not the last, not the least serious demand of the coming day.

RUDOLF STEINER: In the speech exercises that we will take now, the principal purpose is to make the speech organs more flexible.

Curtsey Betsy jets cleric
lastly light sceptic

One should acquire the habit of letting the tongue say it on its own, so to speak.

Tu-whit twinkle ‘twas
twice twigged tweaker
to twenty twangy twirlings
the zinnia crisper
zither zooming shambles
this smartened smacking
smuggler sneezing
snoring snatching.

Both these exercises are really perfect only when they are said from memory.

From “We Found a Path” (by Christian Morgenstern):

Those who don’t know the goal
can’t find the way,
they will trot the same circle
all their lives long,
and return in the end
whence they began,
their piece of mind
more disturbed than before.

RUDOLF STEINER: Now we will proceed to the task that we have been gnawing at for so long.

Someone presented a list of the human soul moods and the soul moods of plants that could be said to correspond to them.

RUDOLF STEINER: All these things that have been presented are reminiscent of when phrenology was in vogue, when people classified human soul qualities according to their fantasies, and then searched the head for all kinds of bumps that were then associated with these qualities. But things are not like that, although the human head can certainly be said to express human soul nature. It is true that if a person has a very prominent forehead, it may indicate a philosopher. If a person has a very receding forehead and is at the same time talented, such a person may become an artist. You cannot say that the artist is located in a particular part of the head, but through your feelings you can differentiate between one or another form. You should consider the soul in this way. The more intellectual element drives into the forehead, and the more artistic element allows the forehead to recede. The same thing is also true in the study of plants. I mean your research should not be so external, but rather you should enter more deeply into the inner nature of plants and describe conditions as they actually are.

Some remarks were added.

RUDOLF STEINER: When you confine yourself too much to the senses, your viewpoint will not be quite correct. The senses come into consideration insofar as each sense contributes to the inner life of human beings, whatever can be perceived by a particular sense. For example, we owe several soul experiences to the sense of sight. We owe different soul experiences to other senses. Thus we can retrace our soul experiences to these various senses. In this way the senses are associated with our soul nature. But we should not assert unconditionally that plants express the senses of the Earth, because that is not true.

Someone cited samples from the writings of Emil Schlegel, a homeopathic doctor from Tübingen.

RUDOLF STEINER: Schlegel’s comparisons are also too external. He returns to what can be found in the mystics—Jacob Boehme and others—to the so-called “signatures.” Mystics in the Middle Ages were aware of certain relationships to the soul world that led them into deeper aspects of medicine. You find, for example, that a definite group of plants is associated with a quality of soul; mushrooms and fungi are associated with the quality that enables a person to reflect, to ponder something, the kind of inner life that lies so deeply in the soul that it does not demand much of the outer world for its experience, but “pumps,” as it were, everything out of itself. You will also find that this soul quality, most characteristic of mushrooms, is very intimately associated with illnesses of a headache nature; in this way you discover the connection between mushrooms and illnesses that cause headaches. Please note that you cannot make such comparisons when teaching about animals.

There are, as yet, no proper classifications of plants, but by means of these relationships between human soul qualities and groups of plants you must try to bring some kind of classification into the life of plants. We will now attempt to classify the plant kingdom.

You must first distinguish what are properly seen as the different parts of the plant—that is, root, stem (which may develop into a trunk), leaves, blossoms, and fruits. All the plants in the world can be divided into groups or families. In one family the root is more developed; the rest of the plant is stunted. In another the leaves are more developed, and in others the blossoms; indeed, these last are almost entirely blossom. Such things must be considered in relation to each other. Thus we can classify plants by seeing which system of organs predominates, root, trunk, leaves, and so on, since this is one way that plants vary. Now, when you recognize that everything with the nature of a blossom belongs to a certain soul quality, you must also assign other organic parts of the plant to other soul qualities. Thus, whether you associate single parts of the plant with qualities of soul or think of the whole plant kingdom together in this sense, it is the same thing. The whole plant kingdom is really a single plant.

Now what are the actual facts about the sleeping and waking of the Earth? At the present time [September] the Earth is asleep for us, but it is awake on the opposite side of the Earth. The Earth carries sleep from one side to the other. The plant world, of course, takes part in this change, and in this way you get another classification according to the spatial distribution of sleeping and waking on the earth—that is, according to summer and winter. Our vegetation is not the same as that on the opposite side of the Earth.

For plant life, everything is related with the leaves, for every part of a plant is a transformed leaf.

Someone compared groups of plants with temperaments.

RUDOLF STEINER: No, you are on the wrong track when you relate the plant world directly to the temperaments.

We might say to the children, “Look children, you were not always as big as you are now.¹ You have learned to do a great many things that you couldn’t do before. When your life began you were small and awkward, and you couldn’t take care of yourselves. When you were very small you couldn’t even talk. You could not walk either. There were many things you could not do that you can do now. Let’s all think back and remember the qualities you had when you were very young children. Can you remember what you were like then and what kinds of things you did? Can you remember this?” Continue to ask until they all see what you mean and say “No.” “So none of you know anything about what you did when you were toddlers?

“Yes, dear children, and isn’t there something else that happens in your lives that you can’t remember, and things that you do that you can’t remember afterward?” The children think it over. Perhaps someone among them will find the answer, otherwise you must help them with it. One of them might answer, “While I was asleep.” “Yes, the very same thing happens when you are very young that happens when you go to bed and sleep. You are ‘asleep’ when you are a tiny baby, and you are asleep when you are in bed.

“Now we will go out into nature and look for something there that is asleep just like you were when you were very young. Naturally you could not think of this yourselves, but there are those who know, and they can tell you that all the fungi and mushrooms that you find in the woods are fast asleep, just as you were when you were babies. Fungi and mushrooms are the sleeping souls of childhood.

“Then came the time when you learned to walk and to speak. You know from watching your little brothers and sisters that little children first have to learn to speak and walk, or you can say walk and then speak. That was something new for you, and you could not do that when you began your life; you learned something fresh, and you could do many more things after you learned to walk and speak.

“Now we will go out into nature again and search for something that can do more than mushrooms and fungi. These are the algae,” and I now show the children some examples of algae, “and the mosses,” and I show them some mosses. “There is something in algae and mosses that can do much more than what is in the fungi.”

Then I show the children a fern and say, “Look, the fern can do even more than the mosses. The fern can do so much that you have to say it looks as if it already had leaves. There is something of the nature of a leaf.

“Now you do not remember what you did when you learned to speak and walk. You were still half asleep then. But if you watch your brothers and sisters or other little children you know that, when they grow a little older, they do not sleep as long as when they were first born. Then came the time when your mind woke up, and you can return to that time as your earliest memory. Just think! That time in your mind compares with the ferns. But ever since then you can remember more and more of what happened in your mind. Now let’s get a clear picture of how you came to say ‘I.’ That was about the time to which your memory is able to return. But the I came gradually. At first you always said ‘Jack wants.. .’ when you meant yourself.”

Now have a child speak about a memory from childhood. Then you say to the child, “You see, when you were little it was really as though everything in your mind was asleep; it was really night then, but now your mind is awake. It is much more awake now, otherwise you would be no wiser than you used to be. But you are still partly asleep; not everything in you is awake yet; much is still sleeping. Only a part of you has awakened. What went on in your mind when you were four or five years old was something like the plants I am going to show you now.”

We should now show the children some plants from the family of the gymnospernms—that is, conifers, which are more perfectly formed than the ferns—and then you will say to the children, “A little later in your life, when you were six or seven years old, you were able to go to school, and all the joys that school brought blossomed in your heart.” When you show a plant from the family of the ferns, the gymnosperms, you go on to explain, “You see there are still no flowers. That was how your mind was before you came to school.

“Then, when you came to school, something entered your mind that could be compared to a flowering plant. But you had only learned a little when you were eight or nine years old. Now you are very smart; you are already eleven years old and have learned a great many things.

“Now look; here is a plant that has leaves with simple parallel veins

and here is another with more complicated leaves with a network of veins. When you look at the blossoms that belong to the simple leaves, they are not the same as those on the plants with the other kind of leaf, where the blossoms and everything else are more complicated than in those with the simpler leaves.”

Now you show the children, for example, an autumn crocus, a monocotyledon; in these plants everything is simple, and you can compare them to children between seven and nine. Then you can continue by showing the children plants with simple blossoms, ones that do not yet have real petals. You can then say, “You have plants here in which the green sepals and the colored petals are indistinguishable, in which the little leaves under the blossom cannot be distinguished from those above. This is you! This is what you are like now.

“But soon you will be even older, and when you are twelve, thirteen, or fourteen you will be able to compare yourselves with plants that have calyx and corolla; your mind will grow so much that you’ll be able to distinguish between the green leaves we call the calyx and the colored leaves called petals. But first you must reach that stage!” And so you can divide the plants into those with a simple perianth—compared to the elevenyear- old children—and plants with a double perianth—those of thirteen to fourteen years.² “So children, this is another stage you have to reach.”

Now you can show the children two or three examples of mosses, ferns, gymnosperms, monocotyledons, and dicotyledons, and it would be a fine thing at this point to awaken their memory of earlier years. Have one of them speak of something remembered about little four-year-old Billy, and then show your ferns; have another child recall a memory of seven-year-old Fred, and then show the corresponding plant for that age; and yet another one could tell a story about eleven-year-old Ernie, and here you must show the other kind of plant. You must awaken the faculty of recalling the various qualities of a growing child and then carry over to the plant world these thoughts about the whole development of the growing soul. Make use of what I said yesterday about a tree, and in this way you will get a parallel between soul qualities and the corresponding plants.

There is an underlying principle here. You will not find parallels accidentally according to whatever plants you happen to pick. There is principle and form in this method, which is necessary. You can cover the whole plant kingdom in this way, with the exception of what happens in the plant when the blossom produces fruit. You point out to the child that the higher plants produce fruits from their blossoms. “This, dear children, can only be compared to what happens in your own soul life after you leave school.” Everything in the growth of the plant, up to the blossom, can be compared only with what happens in the child until puberty. The process of fertilization must be omitted for children. You cannot include it.

Then I continue, “You see, dear children, when you were very small you really only had something like a sleeping soul within you.” In some way remind the children, “Now try to remember, what was your main pleasure when you were a little child? You have forgotten now because, in a way, you were really asleep at that time, but you can see it in little Anne or Mary, in your little baby sister. What is her greatest joy? Certainly her milk bottle! A tiny child’s greatest joy is the milk bottle. And then came the time when your brothers and sisters were a little older, and the bottle was no longer their only joy, but instead they loved to be allowed to play. Now remember, first I showed you fungi, algae, mosses; almost everything they have, they get from the soil. We must go into the woods if we want to get to know them. They grow where it is damp and shady, they do not venture out into the sunlight. That’s what you were like before you ‘ventured out’ to play; you were content with sucking milk from a bottle. In the rest of the plant world you find leaves and flowers that develop when the plants no longer have only what they get from the soil and from the shady woods, but instead come out into the sun, to the air and light. These are the qualities of soul that thrive in light and air.” In this way you show the child the difference between what lives under the Earth’s surface on the one hand (as mushrooms and roots do, which need the watery element, soil, and shade), and on the other hand, what needs air and light (as blossoms and leaves do). “That is why plants that bear flowers and leaves (because they love air and light) are the so-called higher plants, just as you, when you are five or six years old, have reached a higher stage than when you were a baby.”

By directing the children’s thoughts more and more—at one time toward qualities of mind and soul that develop in childhood, and then toward the plants—you will be able to classify them all, based on this comparison. You can put it this way:

Pleasures of infancy (babies): Mushrooms and Fungi
Pleasures of early childhood (the awakening life of feeling, both sorrows and joys): Algae, Mosses
Experiences at the awakening of consciousness of self: Ferns
Experiences of fifth and sixth year, up to school age: Gymnosperms, Conifers
First school experiences, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth and eleventh year: Parallel-veined plants, Monocotyledons; Plants with simple perianth
Experiences of the eleven-year-old: Simple dicotyledons
School experiences from twelfth to fifteenth year: Net-veined plants, Dicotyledons; Plants with green calyx and colored petals

“You are not smart enough yet for these last experiences (the plants with a green calyx and colored blossoms), and you won’t know anything about them until you are thirteen or fourteen years old.

“Just think; how lovely! One day you will have such rich thoughts and feelings, you will be like the rose with colored petals and green sepals. This will all come later, and you can look forward to it with great pleasure. It is lovely to be able to rejoice over what is coming in the future.” The important thing is that you arouse within children’s hearts a joyful anticipation of what the future will bring them.

Thus, all the successive soul qualities before puberty can be compared with the plant kingdom. After that the comparison goes no further because at this point the children develop the astral body, which plants do not possess. But when the plant forces itself into fertilization beyond its nature, it can be compared with soul qualities of the sixteenth to seventeenth year. There is no need to call attention to the process of fertilization, but you should speak of the process of growth, because that agrees with reality. The children would not understand the process of fertilization, but they would understand the process of growth, because it can be compared with the process of growth in the mind and soul. Just as a child’s soul is different at various ages, so also the plants are different because they progress from the mushroom to the buttercup, which is usually included among the most highly developed plants, the Ranunculuses. It is indeed true that, when the golden buttercups appear during spring in lush meadows, we are reminded of the soul life and soul mood of fourteen-and fifteen-year-old boys and girls.

If at some time a botanist should go to work along these lines in a thoroughly systematic way, a plant system would be found that corresponds to fact, but you can actually show the children the whole external plant world as a picture of a developing child’s soul. Much can be done in this way. You should not differentiate in the individualized way practised by the old phrenologists, but you should have one clear viewpoint that can be carried right through your teaching. Then you will find that it is not quite correct to merely take everything with a root nature and relate it to thought. Spirit in the head is still asleep in a child. Thus, thinking in general should not be related to what has root nature, but a child’s way of thinking, which is still asleep. In the mushroom, therefore, as well as in the child, you get a picture of childlike thinking, still asleep, that points us toward the root element in plants.

Rudolf Steiner then gave the following assignments:

1. To comprehensively work out the natural history of plants as discussed up to this point;

2. The geographical treatment of the region of the lower Rhine, from the Lahn onward, “in the way I showed you today when speaking of lessons in geography”: mountains, rivers, towns, civilization, and economics.³

3. Do the same for the basin of the Mississippi.

4. What is the best way to teach the measurement of areas and perimeters?

• 1. According to the Waldorf curriculum, the children are around eleven years old when they are taught about the plant kingdom.
• 2. The perianth is the envelope of a flower, particularly one in which the calyx and corolla are combined so that they are indistinguishable from one another; these include such flowers as tulips, orchids, and so on. The perianth is single when it has one verticil, and double when it has both calyx and corolla.
• 3. See Practical Advice to Teachers, lecture 11.

The principles were developed for teaching music to the first and second grades.

RUDOLF STEINER: Children should be allowed to hear an instrument, to hear music objectively, apart from themselves. This is important. It should be a matter of principle that well before the ninth year the children should learn to play solo instruments, and the piano can be added later for those for whom it is considered advisable. What matters most is that we make a right beginning in this sphere.

Further remark on the concept of interest, proceeding to algebra:

If \(A =\) amount, \(P =\) principal, \(I =\) interest, \(R =\) rate of interest, \(T =\) time, then \(A = P + I\).

Since

$$I = \frac{PRT}{100}$$

then

$$A = P + \frac{PRT}{100}$$

RUDOLF STEINER: It would never be possible to describe capital in this way these days; this formula only has real value if \(T\) equals a year or less, because in reality two cases are given: Either you remove the interest each year, in which case the same initial capital always remains, or else you leave the interest with the capital, in which case you need to figure according to compound interest. If you omit \(T\)—that is, if you figure it for only one year, then it is an actual thing; it is essential to present realities to the children. Do not fail to observe that the transition to algebra as we have spoken of it, is really carried out—first from addition to multiplication, and then from subtraction to division. This must be adhered to strictly.

RUDOLF STEINER explained the transition from arithmetic to algebra with the following example: First you write down a number of figures in which all the addenda are different:

Some of the addenda could also be equal:

Or all the addenda could be the same:

If you proceed, as described in our previous discussion, to replace numbers with letters, then you could have the equation:

\(S_1 = a + a + a\); that is, three \(a\)’s, or three times \(a = 3a\).

then

then

\(S_3 = a + a + a + a + a + a + a\); or seven times \(a = 7a\)

and so on. I can keep doing this; I could do it \(9\) times, \(21\) times, \(25\) times, I can do it \(n\) times:

\(S_n = a + a + a ... n\) times \(= na\)

Thus, I get the factor by varying the number of the addenda, while the addendum itself is the other factor. In this way multiplication can easily be developed and understood from addition, and you thus make the transition from actual numbers to algebraic quantities:

\(a × a = a2\), \(a × a × a = a3\).

In the same way you can derive division from subtraction. If we take b away from a very large number a, we get the remainder \(r\):

\(r = a – b\)

If we take b away again, we get the remainder:

\(r_2 = a – b – b = a – 2b\)

If b is taken away a third time we obtain:

\(r_3 = a – b – b – b = a – 3b\) and so on.

We could continue until there is nothing left of number \(a\): suppose this happens after subtracting \(b\) \(n\) times:

\(r_n = a – b – b – b ... n\) times \(= – nb\) When there is nothing left—that is, when the last remainder is \(0\), then:

\(0 = a – nb\)

So a is now completely divided up, because nothing remains:

\(a = nb\)

I have taken b away n times, I have divided \(a\) into nothing but \(bs\), \(a/b = n\), so the \(a\) is completely used up. I have discovered that I can do this \(n\) times, and in so doing I have gone from subtraction to division.

Thus we can say: multiplication is a special case of addition, and division is a special case of subtraction, except that you add to it or take away from it, not just once, but repeatedly, as the case may be.

Negative and imaginary numbers were discussed.

RUDOLF STEINER: A negative number is a subtrahend [the number subtracted] for which there is no minuend [the number from which it is subtracted]; it is a demand that something be done: there being nothing to do it with, thus it cannot be done. Eugen Dühring rejected imaginary numbers as nonsense and spoke of Gauss’s definition of “the imaginary” as completely stupid, unrealistic, farfetched nonsense.¹

From addition, therefore, you develop multiplication, and from multiplication, rise to a higher power. And then from subtraction you develop division, and from division, find roots.

addition—subtraction
multiplication—division
raising to a higher power—finding roots

You should not proceed to raising to a higher power and finding roots until after you have begun algebra (between the eleventh and twelfth years), because, with roots, raising to a power of an algebraic equation of more than one term (polynomial) plays a role. In this connection you should also deal with figuring gross, net, taxes, and packing charges.

A question about the use of formulas.

RUDOLF STEINER: The question is whether you should avoid the habitual use of formulas, but go through the thought processes again and again (a good opportunity for practicing speech), or whether it might be even better to go ahead and use the formula itself. If you can succeed, tactfully, in making the formula fully understood, then it can be very useful to use it as a speech exercise—to a certain extent.

But from a certain age on, it is also good to make the formula into something felt by the children, make it into something that has inner life, so that, for example, when the \(T\) increases in the formula \(I = PRT/100\), it gives the children a feeling of the whole thing growing.

In effect, this is what I wanted to say at this point—that you should use the actual numbers for problems of this kind—for example, in interest and percentages—in order to make the transition to algebra, and in doing so, develop multiplication, division, raising powers, and roots. These are things that certainly must be done with the children.

Now I would like to ask a question: Do you consider it good to deal with raising to a higher power and finding roots before you have done algebra, or would you do it later?

Comment about raising to a higher power first and finding roots after.

RUDOLF STEINER: Your plan then would be (and should continue to be) to start with algebra as soon as possible after the eleventh or twelfth year, and only after that proceed to raising to a higher power and finding roots. After teaching the children algebra, you can show them in a very quick and simple way how to square, cube, raise to a higher power, and extract the root, whereas before they know algebra you would have to spend a terribly long time on it. You can teach easily and economically if you take algebra first.

A historical survey for the older children (eleven to fourteen years) was presented concerning the founding and development of towns, referring to the existence of a “Germany” at the time of the invasion of the Magyars.

RUDOLF STEINER: You must be very careful not to allow muddled concepts to arise unconsciously. At the time of Henry, the so-called “townbuilder,” there was of course no “Germany.” You would have to express what you mean by saying “towns on the Rhine” or “towns on the Danube” in the districts that later became “German.”²

Before the tenth century the Magyars are not involved at all, but there were invasions of Huns, Avars, and so on. But after the tenth century you can certainly speak of “Germany.” When the children reach the higher grades (the seventh and eighth grades) I would try to give them a concept of chronology; if you just say ninth or tenth century, you do not give a sufficiently real picture. How then would you manage to awaken in the children a concrete view of time?

You could explain it to them like this: “if you are now of such and such an age, how old are your mother and father? Then, how old are your grandfather and grandmother?” And so you evoke a picture of the whole succession of generations, and you can make it clear to the children that a series of three generations makes up about 100 years, so that in 100 years there would be three generations. A century ago the great grandparents were children. But if you go back nine centuries, there have not been three generations, but \(9\ x\ 3 = 27\) generations. You can say to the child: “Now imagine you are holding your father’s hand, and he’s holding your grandfather’s hand, and he is, in turn, holding your great-grandfather’s hand, and so on. If they were now all standing together side by side, which would be Henry I, which number in the row would have stood face to face with the Magyars around the year 926? It would be the twenty-seventh in the row.” I would demonstrate this very clearly in a pictorial way. After giving the children this concrete image of how long ago it was, I would present a graphic description of the migrations of the Magyars. I would tell them about the Magyars’ invasion of Europe at that time, how they broke in with such ferocity that everyone had to flee before them, even the little children in their cradles, who had to be carried up to the mountaintops, and how then the onrushing Magyars burned the villages and forests. Give them a vivid picture of this Magyar onset.

It was then described how Henry, knowing he had been able to resist the Magyars in fortified Goslar, resolved to build fortified towns, and in this way it come about that numerous towns were founded.

RUDOLF STEINER: Here again, could you not present this more in connection with the whole history of civilization? It is only a garbled historical legend to say that Henry founded these towns. All these tenth century towns were built on their original foundations—that is, the markets—before then. But what helped them to expand was the migration of the neighboring people into the towns in order to defend themselves more easily against the Magyars’ assaults, and for this reason they fortified these places. The main reasons for building these towns were more economic in nature. Henry had very little part in all this.

I ask you to be truly graphic in your descriptions, to make everything really alive, so that the children get vivid pictures in their minds, and the whole course of events stands out clearly before them. You must stimulate their imagination and use methods such as those I mentioned when I showed you how to make time more real. Nothing is actually gained by knowing the year that something occurred—for example, the battle of Zama; but by using the imagination, by knowing that, if they held hands with all the generations back to Charles the Great, the time of their thirtieth ancestor, the children would get a truly graphic, concrete idea of time. This point of time then grows much closer to you—it really does—when you know that Charles the Great is there with your thirtieth ancestor.

Question: Wouldn’t it also be good when presenting historical descriptions to dwell on the difference in thought and feeling of the people of those times?

RUDOLF STEINER: Yes. I have always pointed this out in my lectures and elsewhere. Most of all, when speaking of the great change that occurred around the fifteenth century, you should make it very clear that there was a great difference between the perception, feeling, and thought of people before and after this time. Lamprecht too (whom I do not however especially recommend) is careful to describe a completely different kind of thinking, perceiving, and feeling in people before this time.³ The documents concerning this point have not yet been consulted at all.

In studying the books written on cultural history you must, above all, develop a certain perceptive faculty; with this you can properly assess all the different things related by historians, whether commonplace or of greater importance, and so gain a truer picture of human history.

Rudolf Steiner recommended for the teachers’ library Buckle’s History of Civilization in England and Lecky’s History of Rationalism in Europe.

RUDOLF STEINER: From these books you can learn the proper methods of studying the history of human progress. With Lamprecht only his earlier work would be suitable, but even much of this is distorted and subjective. If you have not acquired this instinct for the real forces at work in history, you will be in danger of falling into the stupidity and amateurism of a “Wildenbruch” for example;⁴ he imagined that the stories of emperors and kings and the family brawls between Louis the Pious and his sons were important events in human history.

Gustav Freytag’s Stories from Ancient German History are very good;⁵ but you must beware of being influenced too much by this rather smug type of history book (written for the unsophisticated). The time has come now when we must get out of a kind of thinking and feeling that belonged to the middle of the nineteenth century.

Mention was made of Houston Stuart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century.⁶

RUDOLF STEINER: With regard to Chamberlain also you must try to develop the correct instinct. For one part of clever writing you get three parts of bad, unwholesome stuff. He has some very good things to say, but you must read it all yourselves and form your own judgements. The historical accounts of Buckle and Lecky are better.⁷ Chamberlain is more one of these “gentlemen in a dinner jacket.” He is rather a vain person and cannot be accepted as an authority, although many of his observations are correct. And the way he ended up was not particularly nice—I mean his lawsuit with the “Frankfurter Zeitung.”

Kautsky’s writings were mentioned.⁸

RUDOLF STEINER: Well yes, but as a rule you must assume that the opposite of what he says is true! From modern socialists you can get good material in the way of facts, as long as you do not allow yourselves to be deceived by the theories that color all their descriptions. Mehring too presents us with rather a peculiar picture;⁹ because at first, when he was himself a progressive Liberal, he inveighed against the Social Democrats in his book on Social Democracy; but later when he had gone over to the Social Democrats he said exactly the same things about the Liberals!

An introduction was presented on the fundamental ideas in mathematical geography for twelve-year-old children, with observations on the sunrise and the ecliptic.

RUDOLF STEINER: After taking the children out for observations, it would be very good to let them draw what they had observed; you would have to make sure there is a certain parallel between the drawing and what the children saw outside. It is advisable not to have them do too much line drawing. It is very important to teach these things, but if you include too much you will reach the point where the children can no longer understand what you are saying. You can relate it also to geography and geometry.

When you have developed the idea of the ecliptic and of the coordinates, that is about as far as you should go.

Someone else developed the same theme—that is, sunrise and sunset—for the younger children, and tried to explain the path of the Sun and planets in a diagrammatic drawing.

RUDOLF STEINER: This viewpoint will gradually lose more and more of its meaning, because what has been said until now about these movements is not quite correct. In reality it is a case of a movement like this (lemniscatory screw-movement):

Here, for example, [in position 1] we have the Sun; here are Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and here are Venus, Mercury, and Earth. Now they all move in the direction indicated [spiral line], moving ahead one behind the other, so that when the Sun has progressed to the second position we have Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars here, and we have Venus, Mercury, and Earth over there. Now the Sun continues to revolve and progresses to here [position 3]. This creates the illusion that Earth revolves round the Sun. The truth is that the Sun goes ahead, and the Earth creeps continually after it.

The ancient Egyptian civilization was described.

RUDOLF STEINER: It is most important to explain to the children that Egyptian art was based on a completely different method of representing nature. The ancient Egyptians lacked the power of seeing things in perspective. They painted the face from the side and the body from the front. You may certainly explain this to the children, especially the Egyptian concept of painting. Then you must point out how Egyptian drawing and painting was related to their view of natural history—how, for example, they portrayed men with animal heads and so on.

In ancient times the habit of comparing people with the animals was very common. You could then point out to the children what is present in seed form, as it were, within every human face, which children can still see to a certain extent.¹⁰ The Egyptians still perceived this affinity of the human physiognomy with animals; they were still at this childlike stage of perception.

Question: What should one really tell children about the building of the Egyptian pyramids?

RUDOLF STEINER: It is of course extraordinarily important for children too that you should gradually try to present them with what is true rather than what is false. In reality the pyramids were places of initiation, and this is where you reach the point of giving the children an idea of the higher Egyptian education, which was initiation at the same time. You must tell them something about what happened within the pyramids. Religious services were conducted there, just as today they are conducted in churches, except that their services led to knowledge of the universe. Ancient Egyptians learned through being shown, in solemn ritual, what comes about in the universe and in human evolution. Religious exercises and instruction were the same; it was really such that instruction and religious services were the very same thing.

Someone described the work of the Egyptians on the pyramids and obelisks, and said that several millions of people must have been needed to transport the gigantic blocks of stone, to shape them, and to set them in place. We must ask ourselves how it was possible at all, with the technical means available at that time, to move these great heavy blocks of limestone and granite and to set them in place.

RUDOLF STEINER: Yes, but you only give the children a true picture when you tell them: If people were to do this work with the physical strength of the present day, two and a half times as many people would be necessary. The fact is that the Egyptians had two and a half times the physical strength that people have today; this is true, at least, of those who worked on the pyramids and so on. There were also, of course, those who were not so strong.

Question: Would it be good to include Egyptian mythology?

RUDOLF STEINER: Unless you can present Egyptian mythology in its true form, it should be omitted. But in the Waldorf school, if you want to go into this subject at all, it would be a very good plan to introduce the children to the ideas of Egyptian mythology that are true, and are well known to you.¹¹

• 1. Karl Eugen Dühring (1833–1921), German positivist philosopher and economist. Wrote Kapital und Arbeit (Capital and Labor), and Logik und Wissenschaftstheorie (Logic and Epistemological Theory).
• 2. This could as well apply to speaking of “America” in regard to events and places prior to the time of Columbus and the European settlers.
• 3. Karl Gottfried Lamprecht (1856–1915), historian who developed the theory that history is social-psychological rather than political.
• 4. Ernst von Wildenbruch (1845–1909), German writer, author of Spartacus.
• 5. Gustav Freytag (1816–1895), German writer, promoter of German liberalism and the middle class. His books included a series of six historical novels.
• 6. Houston Stuart Chamberlain (1855–1927), British publicist, naturalized German citizen. Wrote on the superiority of the Western Aryan race.
• 7. Probably refers to Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–1862), English historian, who wrote the incomplete History of Civilization in England. William Edward Hartpole Lecky 1838–1903), Irish historian who wrote on modern European history.
• 8. Karl Johann Kautsky (1854–1938), German Marxist theorist, journalist, and secretary to Friedrich Engels in London, he opposed Bolshevism and the Russian revolution.
• 9. Franz Mehring (1846–1919), German Socialist historian and journalist.
• 10. See The Foundations of Human Experience, lecture 9.
• 11. See Rudolf Steiner, Egyptian Myths and Mysteries, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1990.

My dear friends, it would still be possible, of course, to present many more details from the field of general pedagogy. However, since we are always forced in such cases to conclude prematurely, we will use the remaining time this morning to take our general discussions of education over into an outline of instructional goals for the individual grades. In our general pedagogical studies, we have been trying to acquire the right point of view for dividing up the subject matter with regard to the development of the growing human being. We must always remember the necessity of consolidating our instruction in the way that I demonstrated. For example, we can proceed from mineralogy to geography or use ethnological characteristics to link history and geography when we deal with cultural history in a spiritual way. Bearing in mind this possibility of proceeding from one subject to another, let’s go through the subject matter we want to present to our young charges and divide it into individual categories.

The first thing we need to consider when we welcome children into the first grade is to find appropriate stories to tell them and for them to tell back to us. In the telling and retelling of fairy tales, legends, and accounts of outer realities, we are cultivating the children’s speech, forming a bridge between the local dialect and educated conversational speech. By making sure the children speak correctly, we are also laying a foundation for correct writing.

Parallel to such telling and retelling, we introduce the children to a certain visual language of forms. We have them draw simple round and angular shapes simply for the sake of the forms. As already mentioned, we do not do this for the sake of imitating some external object, but simply for the sake of the forms themselves. Also, we do not hesitate to link this drawing to simple painting, placing the colors next to each other so that the children get a feeling for what it means to place red next to green, next to yellow, and so on.

On the basis of what we achieve through this, we will be able to introduce the children to writing in the way that we have already considered from the perspective of educational theory. The natural way to go about it would be to make a gradual transition from form drawing to the Latin alphabet. Whenever we are in a position to introduce the Latin alphabet first, we should certainly do so, and then proceed from the Latin alphabet to German script. After the children have learned to read and write simple handwritten words, we make the transition to printed letters, taking the Latin alphabet first, of course, and following it up with the German.¹

If we proceed rationally, we will get far enough in the first grade so that the children will be able to write simple things that we say to them or that they compose themselves. If we stick to simple things, the children will also be able to read them. Of course we don’t need to aim at having the children achieve any degree of accomplishment in this first year. It would be completely wrong to expect that. The point is simply that, during the first grade, we should get the children to the point where they no longer confront the printed word as a total unknown, so to speak, and are able to take the initiative to write some simple things. This should be our goal with regard to language instruction, if I may put it like that.

We will be helped in this by what we are going to consider next—namely the elasticity and adaptability that the children’s speech organs can gain from instruction in singing. Without our making a special point of it, they will develop a greater sensitivity to long and short vowels, voiced or voiceless sounds, and so on. Even though this may not be our intention in teaching music, the children will be introduced nonetheless to an auditory understanding of what the instrument of the voice produces in music—in a simple way at first, so that they can get ... well, of course it’s impossible to get an overview of sounds, so I would actually have to invent a word and say: so that they can get an “overhearing” of it. By “overhearing” I mean that they really experience inwardly the single thing among the many, so that they are not overwhelmed by things as they perceive them.

In addition to this we must add something that can stimulate the children’s thinking when we tell them about things that are close at hand, things that will later appear in a more structured form in geography and science. We explain such things and introduce them to the children’s understanding by relating them to things that are already familiar—to familiar animals, plants, and soil formations, or to local mountains, creeks, or meadows. Schools call this “local history,” but the purpose is to bring about a certain awakening in the children with regard to their surroundings; a soul awakening, so that they learn to really connect with their surroundings.

At the beginning of the second grade, we will continue with the telling and retelling of stories and try to develop this further. Then the children can be brought gradually to the point of writing down the stories we tell them. After they have had some practice in writing down what they hear, we can also have them write short descriptions of what we’ve told them about the animals, plants, meadows, and woods in the surroundings.

During the first grade it would be important not to touch on issues of grammar, and so on, to any great extent. In the second grade, however, we should teach the children the concepts of what a noun is, what an adjective is, and what a verb is. We should then connect this simply and graphically to a discussion of how sentences are constructed. With regard to descriptions, to thoughtfully describing their surroundings, we continue with what the children began in the first grade.

The third grade is essentially a continuation of the second with regard to speaking, reading, writing, and many other things. We will continue to increase the children’s ability to write about what they see and read. Now we also try to summon up in them a conscious feeling for sounds that are short, long, drawn out, and so on. It is good to cultivate a feeling for articulating speech and for the general structure of language when the children are in third grade—that is, around the age of eight.² At this point, we attempt to convey an understanding of the different types of words and of the components and construction of a sentence—that is, of how punctuation marks such as commas and periods and so on are incorporated into a sentence.

Once again, with regard to telling and retelling, the fourth grade is a continuation of the third. When we take up short poems in the first and second grade, it’s good to make a point of allowing the children to experience the rhythm, rhyme, and meter instinctively, and to wait to make them aware of the poem’s inner structure--that is, everything that relates to its inner beauty—until the third and fourth grades.

At that point, however, we try to lead everything the children have learned about writing descriptions and retelling stories in writing over into composing letters of all kinds. Then we try to awaken in the children a clear understanding of the tenses, of everything expressed by the various transformations of a verb. At around age nine, the children should acquire the concepts for what they need in this regard; they should get a feeling for it, so that they don’t say “The man ran” when they should have said “The man has run”—that is, that they don’t confuse the past tense with the present perfect. Children should get a feeling for when it is proper to say “He stood” rather than “He has stood,” and other similar things that have to do with transformations in what a verb expresses. In the same way, we attempt to teach the children to feel instinctively the relationship between a preposition and its object. We should always make sure to help them get a feeling for when to use “on” instead of “at,” and so on. Children who are going on ten should practice shaping their native language and should experience it as a malleable element.

In the fifth grade, it is important to review and expand on what we did in the fourth grade, and, from that point on, it is important to take into account the difference between active and passive verb forms. We also begin asking children of this particular age not only to reproduce freely what they have seen and heard, but also to quote what they have heard and read and to use quotation marks appropriately. We try to give the children a great deal of spoken practice in distinguishing between conveying their own opinions and conveying those of others. Through their writing assignments, we also try to arouse a keen distinction between what they themselves have thought, seen, and so forth, and what they communicate about what others have said. In this context, we again try to perfect their use of punctuation. Letter writing is also developed further.

In the sixth grade, of course we review and continue what we did in the fifth. In addition, we now try to give the children a strong feeling for the subjunctive mood. We use as many examples as possible in speaking about these things so that the children learn to distinguish between what can be stated as fact and what needs to be expressed in the subjunctive. When we have the children practice speaking, we make a special point of not allowing any mistakes in the use of the subjunctive, so that they assimilate a strong feeling for this inner dimension of the language. A child is supposed to say, “I am taking care that my little sister learn [subjunctive] how to walk,” and not, “I am taking care that my little sister learns to walk.”³

We now make the transition from personal letters to simple, concrete business compositions dealing with things the children have already learned about elsewhere. Even as early as the third grade we can extend what we say about the meadows and woods and so on to business relationships, so that later on the subject matter is already available for composing simple business letters.

In the seventh grade, we will again have to continue with what we did in the sixth grade, but now we also attempt to have the children develop an appropriate and flexible grasp of how to express wishing, astonishment, admiration, and so on in how they speak. We try to teach the children to form sentences in accordance with the inner configuration of these feelings. However, we do not need to mutilate poems or anything else in order to demonstrate how someone or other structured a sentence to express wishing. We approach it directly by having the children themselves express wishes and shape their sentences accordingly. We then have them express admiration and form the sentences accordingly, or help them to construct the sentences. To further educate their ability to see the inner flexibility of language, we then compare their wishing sentences to their admiring ones.

What has been presented in science will already have enabled the children to compose simple characterizations of the wolf, the lion, or the bee, let’s say. At this stage, alongside such exercises, which are directed more toward the universally human element in education, we must especially foster the children’s ability to formulate practical matters of business. The teacher must be concerned with finding out about practical business matters and getting them into the student’s heads in some sensible fashion.

In the eighth grade, it will be important to teach the children to have a coherent understanding of longer pieces of prose or poetry; thus, at this stage we will read a drama and an epic with the children, always keeping in mind what I said before: All the explanations and interpretations precede the actual reading of the piece, so that the reading is always the conclusion of what we do with the material. In particular, however, the practical business element in language instruction must not be disregarded in the eighth grade.

It will be important that we make it possible for children who have reached the fourth grade to choose to learn Latin. Meanwhile, we will have already introduced French and English [as foreign languages] in a very simple fashion as soon as the children have entered school.

When the children are in the fourth grade, we introduce them to Latin by having them listen to it, and we ask them to repeat little conversations as they gradually gain the ability to do so. We should certainly begin with speaking the language for the children to hear; in terms of speaking, we will attempt to achieve through listening what is usually accomplished in the first year of Latin instruction. We will then take this further according to the indications I gave in the lectures on educational theory, to the point where our eighth-grade graduates will have a mastery of Latin that corresponds to what is ordinarily taught in the fourth year of high school. In other words, our fourth graders must accomplish approximately what is usually taught in the first year of high school and our fifth and sixth graders what is usually taught in the second and third years respectively; the remainder of the time can be spent on what is usually taught in the fourth year.

Parallel to this we will continue with French and English [as foreign language] instruction, taking into account what we heard in the theoretical portion of these lectures.

We will also allow those who choose to study the Greek language to begin doing so. Here too, we proceed in the manner we heard about in the theoretical portion. Specifically, we attempt again to develop the writing of Greek letters on the basis of form drawing. It will be of great benefit to those who now choose to learn Greek to use a different set of letters to repeat the initial process of deriving writing from drawing.

Well, you have seen how we make free use of familiar things from the immediate surroundings for our independent instruction in general knowledge. In the third grade, when the children are going on nine, it is quite possible for this instruction to provide them with an idea of how mortar is mixed, for instance—I can only choose a few examples—and how it is used in building houses. They can also have an idea of how manuring and tilling are done, and of what rye and wheat look like. To put it briefly, in a very free way we allow the children to delve into the elements of their immediate surroundings that they are capable of understanding.

In the fourth grade we make the transition from this type of instruction to speaking about what belongs to recent history, still in a very free way. For example, we can tell the children how it happened that grapes came to be cultivated locally (if in fact that is the case), or how orchards were introduced or how one or the other industry appeared, and other similar things. Then, too, we draw on the geography of the local region, beginning with what is most readily available, as I have already described.

In the fifth grade, we make every effort to begin to introduce the children to real historical concepts. With fifth graders, we need not hesitate at all to teach the children about the cultures of Asian peoples and of the Greeks. Our fear of taking the children back into ancient times has occurred only because people in our day and age do not have the ability to develop concepts appropriate to these bygone times. However, if we constantly appeal to their feelings, it is easy enough to help ten- and eleven-year-olds develop an understanding of the Greeks and Asian peoples.

Parallel to this, as I showed you earlier, in geography we begin to teach the children also about soil formations and everything that is economically related to them, dealing first with the specific part of the Earth’s surface that is most readily available.

Greek and Roman history and its aftereffects (until the beginning of the fifteenth century) belong to the sixth grade. In geography we continue with what we did in the fifth grade, taking a different part of the Earth and then linking its climatic conditions to astronomical conditions, examples of which we experienced yesterday afternoon.

In the seventh grade, it is important to get the children to understand how the modern life of humanity dawned in the fifteenth century, and we then describe the situation in Europe and so on up to about the beginning of the seventeenth century. This is one of the most important historical periods, and we must cover it with great care and attention. Indeed, it is even more important than the time immediately following it. In geography, we continue with the study of astronomical conditions and begin to cover the spiritual and cultural circumstances of Earth’s inhabitants, of the various ethnic groups, but always in connection with what the children have already learned about material cultural circumstances—that is, economic circumstances—during their first two years of geography lessons.

In the eighth grade, we try to bring the children right up to the present in history, including a thorough consideration of cultural history. Most of what is included in history, as it is ordinarily taught, will only be mentioned in passing. It is much more important for children to experience how the steam engine, the mechanized loom, and so on have transformed the Earth than it is for them to learn at too young an age about such curiosities as the corrections made to the Emser Depesche.⁴ The things our history books contain are the least important as far as the education of children is concerned. Even great figures in history, such as Charlemagne, should basically be covered only in passing. You will need to do a lot of what I told you yesterday about aids to guiding abstract concepts of time over into something concrete. Indeed, we must do a very great deal of it.

Now I probably do not need to tell you that even the subjects we have discussed so far will help the children develop an awareness of the spirit that permeates everything present in the world, an awareness that the spirit lives in our language, in the geographical elements covering the Earth, and in the flow of history. When we try to sense the living spirit in everything, we will also find the proper enthusiasm for conveying this living spirit to our students.

Whenever we do this, we will learn to compensate our students for what the religious denominations have been doing to humanity since the beginning of the modern era. These religious denominations, which have never made the free development of the individual a priority, have cultivated materialism from various angles. When it is not permissible to use the entire content of the world to teach people that the spirit is active, religious instruction becomes a breeding ground for materialism. The various religious denominations have made it their task to eliminate all mention of spirit and soul from any other form of instruction because they want to keep that privilege for themselves. Meanwhile the reality of these things has dried up as far as the religious denominations are concerned, and so what is presented in religious instruction consists merely of sentimental clichés and figures of speech. All the clichés that are now so terribly apparent everywhere are actually due more to religious culture than to international culture, because nowadays the emptiest clichés, which human instincts then carry over into outer life, are being promoted by the religious denominations. Certainly ordinary life also creates many clichés, but the greatest sinners in this respect are the religious denominations.

It remains to be seen, my dear friends, how religious instruction—which I will not even touch on in these discussions, because that will be the task of the congregations in question—will affect other types of instruction here in our Waldorf school. For now religious instruction is a space that must be left blank; these hours will simply be given over to the religion teachers to do whatever they choose. It goes without saying that they are not going to listen to us. They will listen to their church’s constitution, or to their church gazette or that of the parochial school administration. We will fulfill our obligations in this respect, but we will also quietly continue to fulfill our obligation to summon up the spirit for our children in all the other subjects.

• 1. Steiner is referring here to the fact that the German language at that time was written in Fraktur, a specifically Germanic style of print and handwriting, rather than in the Latin, or Roman, alphabet now universally used for Western European languages.—TRANS.
• 2. The German translates literally as “in their eighth or ninth year” and is sometimes mistranslated in English as “eight or nine years old”; thus references to beginning school in “the seventh year” can be taken to mean that “children shouldn’t go to school until they are seven.” What Steiner said, however, was “in the seventh year of their life—that is, “six-going-on-seven.”—TRANS.
• 3. These distinctions are not as readily detected in current English. In Steiner’s example, the difference is between lerne and lernt; the first is perhaps closest to the process of learning (not yet fact), the second to having learned (fact).
• 4. Emser Depesche: An incident that touched off the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Bismark publicized an abridged and misleading version of a telegram (known as the “Ems Dispatch”), and the effect of this action was to feed the fury of the opposing parties in France and Prussia.

You have come to this Youth Conference with all the questions and problems in your hearts that assail young people today everywhere in the world—some more, some less—ever since the turn of the century, the time which those who can see deeply into human evolution call the end of Kali Yuga and the beginning of an epoch of light.

We don't see much light yet. You can even say that events in these last two decades have become even darker and more chaotic than before. But just as in ordinary natural phenomena there is resistance in an object to changing either its motion or its lack of motion, inertia is also a property of human beings. We can observe this in the many people who don't seem to belong at all to the 20th century; sometimes we feel we must have seen them a hundred years ago or even earlier. Not only have they remained at a certain age but they are still (however ridiculous this sounds) at the same standpoint where they were before they were born.

Nevertheless we should look at the divine forces concerned with the destiny of the earth. Then we will discover that we have emerged from an epoch in time when we were unconsciously guided by creative spiritual forces that led our souls with supernatural strength. Now we have matured into a new era; certain spiritual beings have withdrawn, while others, whose central impulse is the growing freedom to be allotted to human beings, have begun to influence our development. Young people born since the turn of the century feel this in their unconscious, feel it inwardly, like an earthquake shaking human evolution. But people merely say, “It's the same as always. Youth continually rampages against everything their elders or traditions have brought about.” The clever ones put it like this: “The emperor's enemy is the crown prince.” Certainly in every epoch the young have rebelled against the old.

However, what is living and working today in young people, more or less unconsciously, has never before been experienced. And one must say, there has never been such a discrepancy, such a total contradiction, between what comes to the surface in response to this inner experience they are having and the actual inner experience itself. We have already seen the various groups and the movements young people are taking up—Wandervögel¹ and other youth groups—we've seen them all; they were attempts to escape from what older people call civilization, a flight to the powers which cannot yet be identified.

You see, it's been clear to me from the very beginning that in the deep subconscious of most of today's young people there is the peculiarly solid realization: that an earth-shaking change must take place in human evolution. Sometimes you can observe this quite intensely, as happened to me in Norway. A very young high school lad wanted to see me but was being discouraged away; people in the house thought such a young fellow would only bother me. (In these matters it's usually just the opposite.)

However, fate decreed that I should step out of my door just at that moment, and I realized that even though he was so young, in ninth or tenth grade, I should listen to him. “All of us High School students want to begin something our High School doesn't have, a publication for young people, doing everything ourselves. Couldn't you help us?” “I will help in every way possible,” I told him, “if you can get things started.” We talked together and what he said showed clearly that subconsciously in him was what older people call “the adolescent crisis” they can hardly understand.

I have asked many of these older people what they think about adolescence; their answer was usually, “Young people have always been rebels.” I have also asked many young people about the “adolescent crises” some of them claim to be taking part in—but they, too, haven't had much of an answer for me. Yet I know that many of them know very well this youth experience in their subconsciousness but are not able to describe it. Even though young people can say very little about it, it is clearly present within them. What they feel clearly and very strongly emerges, for one thing, on looking at a beautiful landscape. People in the past have always admired “scenery,” but not in the same way as the younger generation does today. Perhaps they go at it less perfectly but as they look out at nature, their distinct feeling is, “We are helpless. Even to come to a primitive kind of appreciation for nature, we should develop the most elementary forces within us!”

You see, when you are aware of such an attitude, you will feel deeply, very deeply indeed, the inner meaning of these youth movements. We all remember the powerful claims for nature and the natural order, for instance, by Rousseau and his disciples. That was also a youth movement, one that burst out like an explosion, much more alarming than any in our own time. What was the result of that early 19th century rebellion? Imagine! It was followed by the greatest amount of narrow-mindedness and pedantry than at any time in the last century. Its result was the loneliness that young people feel today within modern civilization. They feel that the world has grown old. The young feel this strongly. They feel even much more. (However, in this regard I put greater value on the mind than on feelings).

Today there is a lot of revolution and too much horrible willingness thereby to commit suicide. Young people born around the turn of the century find this sort of thing, if they are honest with themselves, not altogether what they are looking for. They feel that they did not grow up, even as children, alongside older people who could have helped them develop a really joyful enthusiasm for nature. Actually, we have had to see souls maturing alone into something quite wild. Therefore their urge: Away! Get away—anywhere! Leave behind everything the centuries have piled up on us!

Indeed, you notice that I'm speaking about these matters rather indecisively. Sometimes this is necessary in life—but at the same time one must be warmly concerned, even though indecisive. It's better not to falsify the issue by spelling it out with ordinary narrow-minded logic.

I saw this “youth crisis” in its very dawning; now it is already noonday. I observed it in its first misty light, when the youth of the 1870s were also full of enthusiasm and later kept their enthusiasm into what they regarded as grey middle age, still acting like the young people they had been. Such a young person—to put it concretely—I met in the 1880s, giving vent to his enthusiasm in an oration on the death of a workman killed in the 1848 revolution. As I listened to the oration, I thought to myself, “There is a conservative attorney general stuck inside that young man,” and this he really did become some years later. On the other hand, I knew several in that period who were not able to grow into the traditional professions awaiting them. I saw young people in those years die early when it seemed impossible to them to step into the human conditions of the time. There seemed to be an unconscious youth movement that I'd like to describe—please don't misunderstand the phrase—as filled with shame. Young people were not able to reveal what they felt. What was underneath did not rise to the surface. Rather than appear in daylight it turned sick inside. Above all, it could not be brought into the stream of ordinary life.

Years went by, decades even, and one could say the vessel was full and spilling over. The feeling of shame could no longer continue. Young people had to ask themselves the reason for their suffering and what they were actually longing for. This has been moving them into the various youth groups of our time.

Not so long ago a number of these young people came also into the anthroposophical movement. A singular understanding came about between the anthroposophical movement and what was living in their hearts. Today, although it's been only a short time, many of them have grown into the various activities of the movement. However, what we need from young persons is first and foremost the will to try to understand other people in the most human way. Otherwise we won't get beyond the endless unproductive discussions. The will to understand human beings humanly! All the subjects of the discussions we have with each other are downright unimportant; the essential thing is that our hearts recognize what the others are feeling. In this way we can find some agreement, can always discover how much we really agree. What is so necessary is that we fully and heartily understand others; it is also necessary that the individual leaders within the youth movements acquire more confidence in the integrity of the anthroposophical movement and its principles. Otherwise we will not be able to accomplish very much with our Youth Section.

This Section, I originally believed, I had to found for all those who clearly and honestly perceived in themselves “hunger for a truly modern life style.” If they can actually find their way to the anthroposophical movement, we will be able to achieve everything I wrote about in the Mitteilungen [Anthroposophical Newssheet] concerning youthful sagacity, something that should not be at all pedantic but rather distinguish itself through heartfelt action and heartfelt efforts at human understanding. You see, it was an attempt to search out and explore warmly what is alive in the young today. We tried first of all sending around a questionnaire to find out what young people imagined a Youth Section should be; we hoped to hear what thoughts were emerging or if not thoughts, even better, what strong, “balled-fist” feelings, what spade-thrusts of will. We were ready to accept anything like this—but there was no response. Now I have gone at it more rigorously and have sent out the following question to young people, which you yourselves may have read by now: “How do you imagine the world and humanity should be by 1935, if what you are now hoping for shall have a rightful place in it?” If someone could take this question seriously it would require plenty of good solid thought and sensitivity. How we are to proceed depends actually on our honest efforts, without a lot of blather.

What is this old world steering towards? If we're comfortable in it, we're not living in the three dimensions revealed by the threefold nature of the world order. Instead, we're living in clichés, in convention, in routine, and habit. Cliché, convention, routine—we find them everywhere in every sphere of life. We hear from childhood on how we are to relate to other people—just so or so, one particular way or another. But a young person can't agree to that, for since the turn of the century there has been a completely new impulse entering our souls.

Routine is what can be learned very quickly, for it remains just on the surface of things. Leave everything else for later on, people say. What, however, is very much needed in the world, is something that I could feel emerging many years before the end of Kali Yuga [The “dark ages” up to 1879, when the regency of the Archangel Michael began.]: one cannot be pressed into a profession or work in the old, traditional way. I took this very seriously. I myself never entered any specific profession. Had I done so, there would be no anthroposophical movement today, for this had to be created entirely free from tradition. Even the smallest link to something from the past would have made it impossible. Anyone who cannot understand this is an enemy of what we have tried to do from the very beginning.

The anthroposophical movement is therefore one of pure youthfulness. Shouldn't youth find its way to youth? If this anthroposophical movement is sincere and if young people find it necessary to be honest, what is needed above all?—Courage! Something one learns very fast or not at all. Real courage! The courage to say: the world as it is today must get a new foundation underneath it. This is clearly inscribed in the subconsciousness of the young; I have never seen anything different but what is written there: the world must be changed to its very foundation.

But you can cover up this inscription with negation, argumentative remarks and lots of discussion; you can cover it up and pervert what lies there in the subconscious that wants to be completely honest and courageous. The anthroposophical movement can well be the school par excellence to develop courage, since for many people today anthroposophy is not given first place but is rather something incidental. You can observe this at our lecture series and other events. It seems to be becoming more and more fashionable (and one has to get used to it somehow) to be invited to take part in workshops and seminars held in the country, as though on a holiday trip. And why shouldn't one have a bit of anthroposophy while there instead of band concerts?

But it is a symbol—not bad in itself but nevertheless a symbol—of the lack of thoroughgoing courage in grasping the living substance of anthroposophy, the spiritual essence of anthroposophy in its full reality, not just the shadow of anthroposophy. It is really a matter of our feeling life. I am not criticizing but rather pointing out symptoms.

The youth movement must be able to find its way to unite with what I have described as the great task of the century, the spur to action of the Archangel Michael. To do this, however, young people should learn to descend more deeply into themselves, while giving up all their abstract kind of dreaminess. Then the big problems will turn up. No narrow-minded man on the street will understand what you mean when you say: Michael has lost the cosmic intelligence; he himself has remained in the cosmos; now human beings must rise up and win back with Michael what he once had under his dominion. Young people will begin to understand this when they begin to understand themselves. To others, today, it will sound like abstractions dressed up in a poetic costume. But this it certainly is not. We must realize that the spirit is alive and real; we must learn how to deal with it. We have also to begin to feel how everything spiritual is different in our time than it was in any earlier time.

A century ago the morning sunrise, shining mistily, was an image of the spiritual world. Behind the glimmering image like a curtain one saw the spirit, alive and luminous. But during the 19th century up into our time this was changing. The sunrise has become flaming red. Out of the shining sun, flames break forth. If we describe for modern times the kind of sunrise Herder or Goethe wrote about we would be guilty of untruthfulness—for it has become altogether different. In Herder and Goethe's time it was a shining glimmer; today it is fiery. Out of the flames comes a summons to active, fervent spirituality. The spiritual world has taken on a new gesture towards our physical world.

If we can begin to understand these gestures of the spiritual world we can perhaps prevent the youth movement of the 20th century from becoming the sort of middle-class narrow-mindedness and pedantry that came after Rousseau. If today's youth can become enthusiastic about what is truly young, if today's youth, with understanding, can lay hold of the real spiritual world that is here, then Michael's time will come. If today's youth cannot do this, the middle-class narrow-mindedness and pedantry will be infinitely greater in our century than that which followed Rousseau. In all the many centuries before, there were never better or more proper citizens than in the 19th century; people in the earlier times never knew Rousseau or his ideas.

We have been talking a good deal here in Arnhem about the new education and the principles of Waldorf education.² The most important principle is to continue growing. Every day there's danger that things will get sour. We have to make sure that when we have to plan something new or get something done, we don't fall asleep sticking to our old habits. Let us try to divide our sleeping and waking, to keep a clear gulf between them. We must be able to sleep in the right way but also to be awake in the right way. Unfortunately we're continually sleeping when we should be awake. It is just not in our nature to tell ourselves over and over to wake up, otherwise all the reform movements and revolutions will be useless; it is almost always the best endeavors that suffer the most when they are taken over by narrow-mindedness and pedantry: a strong light produces a strong shadow. What should we do?—not think out something to be done one way or another, but rather to feel how different the sunrise is now in our time and how nature with its flaming color speaks to us of the spirituality that surrounds us.

Our hearts, too, have changed. We have a different kind of heart in our body. Our physical heart has become hard, but our etheric heart is more flexible. We must find the way to make use of this supersensible heart of ours. It then will help us to understand spiritual science. To put it plainly, just about everybody and his uncle are talking about spiritual science but only because most science can be taken in lazily. We have to be quite clear about it: spiritual science must come alive in our hearts. And the hearts of young people are perfectly formed to feel what is true in this sphere—if there's enough courage for such thoughts.

Friedrich Schiller³ with his warm enthusiasm had much to give the world. He died in very peculiar circumstances. There was an autopsy. His heart was examined; it was found to have become an empty pouch, completely dried up, burned out.

All our hearts will burn out like this if we can lay hold of them and make them new. And if we are to be serious about spirituality we will have to tell ourselves with a certain amount of courage: “Whenever we seem not to be able to live with the rest of the world, it is because we need to have a new kind of heart!”

However, this should not be just a phrase. Let us be awake to the fact that our new hearts should be aware of the world in quite a different way from the old hearts. If wetake this very seriously the youth movement will become something like a flame blazing towards the flames of the sunrise. This will not result from discussions about being young or from talk about inner feelings; in this regard peculiar things can happen. In Breslau the elderly members in their welcome called me “Papa”; in the youth group there they said I was the youngest of all, though I was three times older than most of them.

Indeed it is important to be able to admit this about oneself. The flames from within, the flames from outside, the two flames must strike against each other. It is not at all important to decide or define anything. It is important that we bring about a new kind of enthusiasm. It comes down to this: we should not only learn to sit down but we should learn to stand up. Nietzsche had an apt phrase for Carlyle, who impresses many people with his talent for enthusiasm. “Carlyle's enthusiasm,” said Nietzsche, “is the kind that takes off its coat.” In other words, Carlyle always had time to take off his coat whenever he was seized by enthusiasm. Carlyle always had time as he got warmly enthusiastic, without hesitation, to take off his coat. One can imagine how this fellow would pull on a silk vest after he has had time to get fully into his enthusiasm and slowly to take off his coat.

But the right enthusiasm is the kind that doesn't give you time to take off your coat; it makes you sweat, wearing your coat, and you don't even notice how you're perspiring! This is the right enthusiasm, my dear friends! It should overpower us so completely that we keep our coats on.

That enthusiasm we should feel compelled to bring into being out of the fullness and immediacy of life itself. We need today to overcome our heavy, sticky tiredness. It is actually lazy to insist on “being clear.” There may well be no time to become clear in the old sense of the word. But there is the real necessity to become enthusiastic—for enthusiasm will be able to accomplish everything. The word itself will then reach its true meaning. The German word Begeisterung carries Geist, spirit, in itself. That is self-evident: we need spirit. The English-Greek word enthusiasm has the divine within it (Gr. Theos). A god is in the word.

Grow inwardly with the flame that is kindled in you today, for then the Michael impulse will be achieved! Without fire, it cannot be achieved. But if you are to live and work, glowing through and through, you yourself will have to become a flame. The only thing not burned up by flames is a flame; when we can begin to feel we are becoming one, and cannot be burned up by other flames, we can safely let our physical heart remain behind as an empty pouch, for we have an etheric heart. It is our etheric heart that will understand that humanity is moving into a new epoch, into a life in the spirit. Our growing into this life in the spirit will form the youth movement, the youth experience, in all its strength.

• 1. we call them hippies today. Tr.
• 2. In these July days of 1924, Dr. Steiner was giving the course published in English as Human Values in Education, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1971
• 3. Poet and dramatist 1759-1805. See also Rudolf Steiner, The Karma of Human Vocation, Lecture 2, Anthroposophic Press 1944.

Dr. Steiner: First, I would like to return to the situation in the 9b class. Although I already spoke about this, I want to return to it because that situation has some principle significance. First, I would like to say that the discussion with the boys occurred, and I would like to hear what consequences it has had in their behavior. The discussion also showed that something we could expect at this age is present in the boys, namely very strongly developed intellectual forces. These intellectual forces become apparent at puberty. Particularly with boys, this often arises as a certain subconscious desire to exercise their intellectual strength. It is natural that, when left to themselves, boys see rowdy behavior as the only possibility of expressing those intellectual forces. If we do not want them to do that, we must direct them toward other things. Intelligence is simply bursting out of those five boys, though to the least extent with K.F., and it demands to be freed.

At that age, pedagogical activity needs to take a different direction, as I have mentioned in some lectures. The boys must learn to take interest in something that will use their intellect. Otherwise, it remains unused and will live itself out in such things as we have experienced. The main thing is that we work with the boys during the course of instruction so they can exercise their intellect in a way that brings it into a kind of tension and then finds resolution. That is something you can weave into every lecture. You can pose questions that lead to a kind of tension and then allow the students to experience the resolution. Particularly at this age, simply listening has an unfavorable effect. There is no doubt that in the 9b class, you have counted too much upon their simply listening, at least at times. As soon as the boys are occupied, they become well behaved. If they have to just listen, that changes because their intellect, their inner strengths, stagnate.

It would be good if you recognized that their behavior was not the result of disrespect, but arose from a genuinely appropriate human standpoint, and that they denied nothing. You should also be aware that they did not try to gloss over anything. They were quite convinced that they had done quite useless things and that they really should not have done them. They showed an honorable human perspective when they described how T.L. made himself into their spokesman in a most natural way. He began by stating that he actually had no right to speak about the situation since he was the one who had most misbehaved. But, since things had gone so far, he wanted to speak. He spoke very reasonably. They are really very good boys, including F.R. In regard to their understanding of themselves, many adults could learn something from them. They do not embellish things. They recognized that it was very wrong to write on the bathroom doors. Something goaded them on. All the other bathrooms were smeared, and that one was still clean. They did not see why they should not decorate that one, too. When such thoughts arise out of latent intelligence, then that intelligence forces them to smear over blank surfaces so that they are like the others. In that case, a certain attitude has taken over, which we cannot say arises out of boredom.

They said that the school administration signed other documents, so when they wrote something, they thought it should also be signed by the administration. In all these things, we can see that they acted with a great deal of style. The boys were as though possessed, and now they are all very sorry about it. All these things are moods we need to look into, but we need to have some humor; otherwise the boys will get us down.

The boys see the actual cause of the problem in the statement by the 9a class teacher that the 9b class was worthless. They said that if he came into their class, which he knows nothing about, he would learn what it is like. That is quite intelligent. They are filled with a kind of feeling for truth. The boys are not dumb. If we can guide their intelligence in the proper direction, they may, without doubt, be able to achieve a great deal. They are really wonderful boys. I have to say that if you judge them too harshly, then, in my opinion, you have forgotten your own youth some fifteen years ago. Things are different, but if you can remember, some of you will certainly have been there. The main difference is that some years ago, boys did such things more secretively, but now they are more open.

To me, the important thing is that we can expect no improvement if we do not succeed in getting the boys to use their intelligence in class. The situation is such that we must find a way to use their intelligence in our teaching, otherwise it will remain unoccupied and they will use it for getting into trouble.

I asked F.R. how it was that he came to place the discussion between Raphael and Grünewald in the Marquardt Hotel in his essay. He said he knew nothing about Raphael or Grünewald, so he wrote it that way. T.L. then added that he had written something reasonable later.

I said they should let me see something they had written on the walls, but they said they could not say such things to a polite person. They are ashamed and trying to behave.

I would now like to hear what has happened since then. They promised me they would behave as proper young men with the teacher and would be polite to the girls.

A report is given about what occurred in the class since then.

Dr. Steiner: We cannot give the children riddles. I tried that with the anthroposophists in Dornach. You need to use their intelligence as you teach. A great deal is needed to direct your teaching toward the thinking of children at that age and then to maintain that.

In the humanities, there is a danger of teaching unprepared. That is, you are in danger of leaving the material as you know it now, as you learned it yourself. You need to rework it. That is one problem.

The other problem is that you are often too anthroposophical, like Mr. X. Yesterday, I was sitting on pins and needles worrying that the visitors would think the history class was too religious. We should not allow the history class to be too religiously oriented. That is why we have a religion class. The visitors seem to have been very well-meaning people. Nevertheless, had they noticed that, they could easily have categorized the Waldorf School as being too anthroposophical and of bringing that into the classroom.

I came into one class, eurythmy, and it was immediately obvious not only that the students were well behaved, but that they had behaved well before I arrived. We could present such an exemplary class as the 9a eurythmy class to the entire world. You could quite clearly see the class had been well behaved before I came in. You can easily see if a class begins to behave well only when you step into the room. That was a very exemplary class.

Concerning the 8a and 8b classes, I could not see that they were such terribly clever misbehaved children. Initially, you will have to reach B.B. in the only way you can reach him, through his intellect. You cannot reach him through commands. On the other hand, if you make it clear to him that what he wants to do is nonsense, he will do what you ask of him. You could explain things to him as I recently did. He had written in his notebook with a pencil. There is no sense in telling someone with his temperament that he may not write with a pencil. If you do so, you can be certain that things will get worse. I told him he had smeared over everything, and that it looks horrible. I had barely turned around before he picked up his feather, prepared it, and then began to write in ink. Everything depends upon the way you present it. You need to meet the boy with what he understands and does not understand. He is a troubled boy. Sometimes it will occur to him to make a face, but he is a very well intentioned boy. You need to teach him that his faces do not look good. At the proper time, you need to teach him that he looks ugly when he does that. That is something you need to take into account at this age. They no longer accept commands. The power of authority quickly diminishes just when you have become strongly oriented in that direction. Then you encounter opposition. You need to be observant there. I would recommend that you read the four lectures I gave about adolescents. Read them and you will find all kinds of ways you can avoid that. I hope we can move beyond it.

A teacher gives a detailed report about a visit Dr. Steiner and three teachers made to the Ministry of Education and about what they learned regarding the requirements in the various subjects of the final examination.

Dr. Steiner: They are also tested in freehand drawing. Mr. Wolffhügel should take that up in the twelfth grade. I told the men that after we have sufficiently developed our curriculum, I would attempt to develop the teaching of freehand drawing using Dürer’s Melancholia as a basis. It contains all possible shades of light and dark, and it can also be transformed into color. If the children really understand that picture, they should be able to do everything.

In order to find something out, I asked whether, aside from the condition that the student must be eighteen years old, a student who had studied completely privately, who had never gone to school, would be allowed to take the examination. I was told that such a student would be admitted. From that, he admitted that we are not required to obtain official certification from the school board. I asked this question to see if there was some possibility that people could force us to come under the control of the School Review Board. Aside from some of the things that have occurred, the Education Law in Württemberg is one of the most liberal. No other place in Germany or Switzerland has such a liberal education law. Nevertheless, things could change for the twelfth grade.

Now that we know the students will be tested only on the material from the twelfth grade, I think it would be advisable to complete everything else and then begin on what the people there want.

We need to do a little more to complete chemistry and then go on to more of what is required in the final examination. We have done little in geology and the children learn about geological formations only very slowly. Before the holidays, we should at least awaken a little geological thinking, so they know what geological formations are, what kinds of stone and fossils they contain. We could give an overview before the holidays so that the students could learn the details afterward. We need to limit some things. Technology and eurythmy will end in February, as will religious instruction.

You could give some work to X. (a newly hired teacher). I have hired X. so that he will find support within the faculty. If he wastes his time, I will hold you responsible for it. He is so talented that you could give him work; he can do it if he wants to. The whole faculty is responsible for looking after him. For the time being, you need to try to finish chemistry. Before the holidays, give the students an overview about geology up to the Ice Age. Afterward, we will have to teach them about alcohol, the nature of alcohol, concepts about ethers, the nature of essential oils, then the nature of organic poisons, alkaloids, and some idea about cyanide compounds in contrast to organic compounds. They need to understand qualitative relationships. They can understand all of it from that perspective.

When speaking about geology, I recommend you go backward, beginning with the present, the alluvial period to the diluvial. Then discuss the Ice Age. Use the change in the axis of the Earth to give them an idea of the relationship of such events as the Ice Age to things outside the tellurian, without tying them to specific hypotheses. From there you can go back to the Tertiary period. Explain when the second and first realms of mammals arose. When you get back to the carbon period, you can simply teach the change. It would be better if you made the transition in the following way. In the later formations, we have the minerals precipitated out and the vegetable and animal fossilized. Now we are back in the Carboniferous period. What could be fossilized of animals does not exist. We only find fossilized vegetable material. The Carboniferous period is all plant. There is no differentiation, as nothing more than plant material exists. We can go still further back where we find things completely undifferentiated. Tell them in that way.

Perhaps you could give a lecture of mine. I once explained geology to the workers in a living way. I told them everything about geology in two hours. Those two lectures were certainly important. You could find them and work in the same way.

Earlier forms were only etheric. We should imagine the Carboniferous period such that we recognize that the individualization of plants was not nearly so strong as people imagine. Today, people think there were ferns, but actually what petrified was a much more undifferentiated soup. The etheric was continuously active in that soup, resulting in secretions that precipitated and held the organic mass in a nascent state, which then petrified. I would like to take this opportunity to give you, with some reservations, the divisions that can serve as a theme. Though there are some limitations, you could treat the entirety of zoology by dividing the animals into three groups with four divisions each, resulting in twelve classes or types of animals.

FIRST GROUP

1. Protists, completely undifferentiated infusoria, and protozoa
2. Sponges, corals, and anemones
3. Echinoderms from sea lilies to sea urchins
4. The ascidians, in which a proper outer shell is no longer present, that is, the shell formation has receded.

SECOND GROUP

5. Mollusks
6. Worms
7. Articulates
8. Fish

THIRD GROUP

9. Amphibians
10. Reptiles
11. Birds
12. Mammals

In discussing the zodiac, you should begin with the mammals, represented by Leo; then birds, Virgo; reptiles, Libra; amphibians, Scorpio; fish, Sagittarius; articulates, Capricorn; worms, Aquarius. Then continue on the other side, where you have the protists, Cancer; corals, Gemini; echinoderms, Taurus; ascidians, Aries; mollusks, Pisces. You should realize that the zodiac arose at a time when the names and classifications were very different. In the Hebrew language, there is no word for fish, so it is quite reasonable that you would not find fish mentioned in the story of creation. They were seen as birds that lived in water. Thus, the zodiac is divided in this way, into seven and five parts for day and night.

There is also something in that which corresponds to the threefolding of the human being. The first group are the animals related to the head, namely, the protists, sponges, echinoderms, and ascidians. The second group are the rhythmic animals, the mollusks, worms, articulates, and fish—that is, the middle part of the human being and the head. The third group are the animals of the limbs, so you can see how each aspect is added. Thus, we have the limbs, the rhythmic system, and the head. These all tend toward a threefolding, but are not yet complete.

If you look at it from the perspective of the human being, the head corresponds to the first group, the human rhythmic system to the second group, and the human limbs to the third group.

From a geological perspective, things begin with the head. You need to follow geological formations through the twelve stages. You should begin with the first group, go on to the second, and then to the third. You need to complete that with geological formations. The infusoria go back to the beginning and are the first group. The forms of that first group that still exist are degenerated forms of the etheric forms from very early times. The forms of the second group are half degenerated. Actually, only their antecedent nondegenerated forms belong to that. Only in the third group do we find really primary forms not yet degenerated, which therefore form the basis for teaching about formations.

When teaching animal geography, you need to consider the zodiac in connection with what I have just said, that is, look at the projection of the zodiac upon the Earth. You will then find the areas of the animal groups on the Earth. You have some globes where the zodiac is drawn upon the Earth. They will provide you with what you need.

We can actually not speak about volcanic formations, only volcanic activity that goes through geological formations.

We should also try to bring the plants into twelve groups. I will do that later.

A teacher makes a comment.

Dr. Steiner: You have already read nineteenth-century German literature. You should, of course, try to give the students some examples. You could read Tieck’s Phantasus and some small pieces from Zacharias Werner. They should also read from Wilhelm Müller, Novalis, Immermann, Eichendorff, Uhland, including some small examples from Herzog Ernst, then Lenau, Gustav Schwab, Justinus Kerner, Geibel, Greif, Heine, but only his decent things, Hebbel, a little of Otto Ludwig, and Mörike. That is approximately what they need. Also, Kleist and Hölderlin. I would advise some of the other things in the curriculum for other classes, namely, Lessing, Herder, and Klopstock. Logau was good—better sayings were never written. He makes up wonderful sayings. Then, also, Gottfried Keller and Grillparzer. From the poets that I mentioned, use only lyric examples. The students need to read something from Keller, but tell them Der grünen Heinrich (Green Henry). Read Richard Wagner also.

[That was all given as preparation for the final examination.]

Dr. Steiner: I wanted to discuss the zoological division and the curriculum. What remains to discuss?

A teacher: What should we tell students about the examination?

Dr. Steiner: You need to tell them only that we are completely informed about it. There is a basic inner rule of pedagogy that those being taught should never know or discuss the secrets of education. That has become a problem here and must be eliminated as quickly as possible. It cannot continue. The perspective which has slowly arisen that no differences of age are taken into account has led to the children’s thinking about how they are taught and the methods used.

We could tell them the following: You need to be eighteen years old, and you need a report from us. We could go on to say that we know what is needed, and that if they study industriously, they will pass the examination. What more can we do? We can say only external things. It is not good for the children to become accustomed to having conferences with us. They should feel that the teachers will do what is right. They are afraid they will miss a number of interesting things.

A number of classes were cancelled because of the heat.

Dr. Steiner: Those are natural events. Winter will certainly be cold again.

(Speaking to an eighth-grade teacher) The children should know that when you are occupied with one or two, others may still be questioned. The children should be interested in the others in the class. Basically, when it is not a question of helping with an arithmetic problem, but is some instruction that can be heard by the others, it should be interesting not only to one individual, but to everyone. They should expect to be called upon at any time. You should do it in such a way that you continue with one of the others who has been inattentive. Then, they will get the feeling that they may be required to continue with the reading at any time.

When you ask about material previously covered, you must do it in a different way. You must ask the questions so that the children can answer. In time, you will learn how to do that in practice, but you will need to be lively in your manner. You should skip from one student to the other so that the children notice that you are skipping around. You now have a contact with the students that a few years ago you did not have at all. On the other hand, I think you too often “show them how.” Many classes are terribly restless because they are always being shown how to do something. That should be limited. You can do that by calling more often upon specific students who are able to respond.

One thing is troubling me, and that is the question of how to solve the problem of painting in the notebooks. The children should paint only on stretched paper. We cannot afford painting boards because they are too expensive. We could just use smooth boards. Wouldn’t it be possible in the shop class to make smooth boards for stretching the paper? It is not good to have the children paint in their regular notebooks. When they begin painting, they should also stretch their paper.

Ch.O. has a dangerous condition. He is clearly malnourished, and he will soon have a blood problem. When you go through these classes and look at the children, it is terrible. We need to determine which children are right on the edge. The real problem is not how much they eat, but that they digest it properly.

There are also a number of troubled children we need to give some attention to. St.B. in the first grade sees astral flies. He needs to be treated with something. His whole astral body is in disarray. There is a strong asymmetry of the astral body in all directions. Try to have him do some curative eurythmy exercises where he has his hands behind his back. Have him do exercises we normally do toward the front, but have him do them toward the back.

What we have really been endeavouring to do in our talks together here is to delve a little more deeply into Waldorf School pedagogy, in order to find in that pedagogy the kind of education with which we can approach the so-called abnormal child. It will have been clear to you from our discussions that, if you want to educate an abnormal child in the right manner, you will have to form your judgement and estimation of him in quite another way than you do for the so-called normal child—and of course differently again from the way he is regarded in ordinary lay circles, where people are for the most part content merely to specify the abnormality and not trouble themselves to look further and enquire into the causes of it. For there is no denying it, the man of today is not nearly so far on (in his study, for example, of the human being), as Goethe was in his study of the growth and nature of the plant. (And, as we saw, Goethe's work in this direction was a beginning, it was still in its elementary stage.) For Goethe took a special delight in the malformations that can occur in plants; and the passages where he deals with such are among the most interesting in all his writings. He describes, for example, how some organ in a plant, which one is accustomed to find in a certain so-called normal form, may either grow to excess, becoming abnormally large, or may insert itself into the plant in an abnormal manner, sometimes even going so far as to produce from itself organs that would normally be situated in quite another part of the plant. In the very fact that the plant is able to express itself in such malformations, Goethe sees a favourable starting point for setting out to discover the true “idea” of the archetypal plant. For he knows that the idea which lies hidden behind the plant manifests quite particularly in these malformations; so that if we were to carry out a whole series of observations—it would of course be necessary to make the observations over a wide range of plants—if we were to observe first how the root can suffer malformation, then again how the leaf, the stem, the flower, and even the fruit can become deformed, we would be able, by looking upon all these malformations together, to arrive at an apperception of the archetypal plant.

And it is fundamentally the same with all living entities—even with beings who live in the spirit. More and more does our observation of the human race lead us to perceive this truth—that where we have abnormalities in man, it is the spirituality in him which is finding expression in these abnormalities.

When once we begin to look at the phenomena of life from this aspect, it will at the same time give us insight into the way men thought about life in olden times; and we shall understand how it was that education was regarded as having an extremely close affinity with healing. For in healing men saw a process whereby that in man which has received Ahrimanic or Luciferic form and configuration is made to come nearer to that in him which, in the sense of good spiritual progress, holds a middle course between the two extremes. Healing was, in effect, the establishment of a right balance in the human being between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. And then, having a more intimate and deep perception of how it is only in the course of life that man comes into this condition of balance, of how he needs indeed to be brought into it by means of education, these men of an older time saw that there is something definitely abnormal about a child as such, something in every child that is in a certain respect ill and requires to be healed. Hence the primeval words for “healing” and “educating” have the very same significance. Education heals the so-called normal human being, and healing is a specialised form of education for the so-called abnormal human being.

If it has become clear to us that the foregoing is a true and fundamental perception, we can do no other than carry our enquiry further along the same road. All the illnesses that originate within the human being have, in reality, to do with the spiritual in him, and ultimately even the illnesses that arise in him in response to an injury from without; for when you break your leg, the condition that presents itself is really the reaction that arises within you to the blow from without—and surgery could certainly learn something by looking at the matter in this light. Starting therefore from this fundamental perception, we find ourselves ready to approach in a much deeper and more intimate manner the question: How are we to deal with children, having regard to the whole relationship of their physical nature to their soul and spirit?

In the very young child, physical and spiritual are intimately bound up together, and we must not assume—as people generally do today—that when some medicament or other is given to a child, it takes effect physically alone. The spiritual influence of a substance is actually greater in the case of a very little child than it is with a grown person. The virtue for the child of the mother's milk, for example, lies in the fact that there lives in it what was called in the archaic language of an earlier way of thought the “good mummy” in contrast to the “bad mummy” that lives in other products of excretion. The whole mother lives in the mother's milk. Mother's milk is permeated with forces that have, as it were, only changed their field of action within the organisation. For up to the time of birth, these forces are active in the region that belongs in the main to the system of metabolism and limbs, while after birth they are chiefly active in the region of the rhythmic system. Thus they migrate within the human organisation, moving up a stage higher. In doing so, the forces lose their I content, which was specifically active during the embryonic time, but still retain their astral content. If the same forces that work in the mother's milk were to rise a stage higher still—moving, that is, to the head—they would lose also their astral content and have active within them only the physical and etheric organisation. Hence the harmful effect upon the mother, if these forces do rise a stage higher and we have all the abnormal phenomena that can then show themselves in a nursing mother.

In mother's milk we still have therefore astral formative forces that work spiritually; and we must realise what a responsibility rests upon us when the time comes to let the little child make the transition to receiving his nourishment directly for himself. The responsibility is particularly great for us today, since there is now no longer any consciousness of how the spiritual is active everywhere in the external world, and of how the plant, as it ascends from root up to flower and finally to fruit, becomes gradually more and more spiritual—in its own nature and also in its activity and influence. Taking first the root, we have there something that works least spiritually of all; in comparison with the rest of the plant, the root has a strongly physical and etheric relation to the environment. In the flower however begins a life which reaches out, in a kind of longing, to the astral. In a word, the plant spiritualises, as it grows upwards.

Then we must carry our study a stage further, and enquire into the place of the root within the whole cosmic connection. Its part and place within the cosmos is expressed in the fact that the root has grown into the soil of the Earth, has embedded itself right into the light. The truth is that the root of the plant has grown into the soil in the same way as we have grown with our head into the free expanse of air and into the light. We can therefore say that here below

we have that which in man is of the head nature and has to do with perception; while here above we have the part of the plant that in man has to do with digestion, with nourishment. The upper part of the plant contains the spirituality that we long for in our metabolism-and-limbs system, and is on this account related to that system in us. One who is able with occult perception to regard first the mother's milk, and then the astral which hovers over the plant and for which the plant longs and yearns, can behold—not indeed a perfect similarity, but an extraordinarily close relationship between the astrality that comes from the mother with the mother's milk, and the astrality that comes from the cosmos and hovers over the blossoms of the plants.

These things are said, not in order that you may possess them as theoretical knowledge, but in order that you may come to cherish the right feeling towards what is in a human being's environment and enters thence into the sphere of his deeds and actions. As you see, we shall have to take care that we find the right way to accustom the little child—gradually—to external nourishment, stimulating him with the fruiting part of the plant, fortifying his metabolic system with the flowering part, and coming to the help of what has to be done by the head by means of a gentle admixture of root substance in his food. The theoretical mastery of these relationships will serve merely to start you off in the right direction; what should then happen is that in the practice of life the knowledge of them flows into all your care for the child, not as theory but more in a spiritual way.

In this connection we cannot but recognise how extraordinarily difficult it is in our day to “behold” a human being as he really is. Again and again, in every field of knowledge into which we enter, our attention is drawn away from that which is essential in man as man. Modern education and instruction is not calculated to enable us to see man in his true being. For it is a fact that in the course of the first half of the nineteenth century the power to behold what is essential in man died right away. Up to that time, and even still during that time, an idea was current which survives now only in certain words that have remained in use—lives on, here and there, so to speak, in the genius of language. We might describe this idea in the following way.

Surveying the whole human race, we find it subject to all manner of diseases. We could, if we chose to be abstract, write these all down. We could take some plane surface and write upon it the names of the various illnesses in such a way as to make a kind of map of them. In one corner, for instance, we might write illnesses that are inter-related one with the other; in another corner, illnesses that are fatal. In short, we could classify them all so nicely as to produce in the end a regular chart or map, and then it would not be difficult to find the place on the map where a child with a particular organisation belonged. One could imagine how some special pre-disposition in regard to illness could be shown in a kind of diagram on transparent paper and then the name of the child be written in on the region of the map where he belonged. Let us suppose, then, that you regarded illnesses in this way and made such a map as I have described. In the first half of the nineteenth century people still had the idea that whenever the name of an illness had to be written in, they could always write in, for that illness, the name of some animal. They still believed that the animal kingdom inscribes into Nature all possible diseases, and that each single animal, rightly understood, signifies an illness. For the animal itself the illness is, so to speak, quite healthy. If however this same animal enters into man, so that a human being, instead of having the organisation that properly belongs to him, is organised on the pattern of that animal, then that human being is ill.

It was not superstitious people alone who continued to hold such conceptions in the first half of the nineteenth century; this idea of the nature of disease in man was held, for example, by Hegel—and a very fruitful and productive idea it was. Think what a light can be thrown upon the nature and character of a particular human being if one can say: he “takes after” the lion, or the eagle, or the ox; or again, he gives evidence of being wrenched away in the direction of the spiritual—the spiritual works too powerfully in him. Or, let us say, carrying the idea a step further, suppose the ether body of a certain human being is too soft and flabby and shows obvious affinity to physical substance, then that would be for one an indication of a type of organisation that generally occurs only in the lower animal kingdom. These are fundamental conceptions of a kind that it is important for you to acquire.

And now I would like to go on to speak of what you as educators must undertake for your own self-education. You can take your start from certain given meditations. A meditation that is particularly effective for a teacher is the one I gave here two days ago. Meditating upon it inwardly with the right orientation of heart and mind, it will in time bear fruit within you. For you will discover that as you are carried along in your feeling on the waves of an astral sea, borne hence away from the body, you will begin to find yourself in a world—you can liken it only to a world of gently surging billows—where you are given the possibility to see around you the very things that provide answers to your questions.

But here, I must warn you that if you desire really to make your way through to the place where such things are possible, you must comply with the conditions—I do not mean merely knowing them in theory, I mean faithfully fulfilling in real earnest the conditions that are necessary for development on the path of meditation, and that are described in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. [Now published by the Rudolf Steiner Press as Knowledge of Higher Worlds—how is it achieved? ] You will remember how mention is made there of egoism as a hindrance on the path of development—egoism in the sense that man centres his attention upon his own I, values his I too highly. What does it mean when we hold our I in such high esteem?

We have, as you know, to begin with, our physical body, which derives from Saturn times and has been gradually formed and completed with such wonderful artistic power in four majestic stages of development. Then we have the etheric body, which has undergone three stages of development. And we have besides the astral body, which has undergone only two. These three members of man's being do not fall within the field of Earth consciousness; the I alone does so. Yet it is really no more than the semblance of the I that falls within the field of Earth consciousness; the true I can be seen only by looking back into an earlier incarnation. The I that we have now is in process of becoming; not until our next incarnation will it be a reality. The I is no more than a baby. And if we are able to see through what shows on the surface, then, when we look at someone who is sailing through life on the sea of his own egoism, we shall have before us the Imagination of a fond foster-mother or nurse, whose heart is filled with rapturous devotion to the baby in her arms. In her case the rapture is justified, for the child in her arms is other than herself; but we have a spectacle merely of egoism when we behold man fondling so tenderly the baby in him. And you can indeed see people going about like that today. If you were to paint a picture of them as they are in the astral, you would have to paint them carrying each his child on his arm. The Egyptians, when they moulded the scarab, could at least still show the I carried by the head organisation; but the man of our time carries his I, his Ego, in his arms, fondling it and caressing it tenderly. And now, if the teacher will constantly compare this picture with his own daily actions and conduct, once more he will be provided with a most fruitful theme for meditation. And he will find that he is guided into the state I described as swimming in a surging sea of spirit.

Whether we are able to get in this realm the answers to our questions will depend upon whether we have in our soul the inner peace and quiet which we must seek to preserve in such moments. If someone complains that things are constantly happening that prevent him from meditating, the complaint will of itself afford a pretty sure indication as to whether or not he is in a fair way to make progress in this direction. For you will never find that one who is genuinely undergoing development will complain that this or that hinders him from meditating. In point of fact we are not really hindered by these things that seem to come in our way. On the contrary, it should be perfectly possible to carry out a most powerful meditation immediately before taking some decisive step, before doing a deed of cardinal importance—or, on the other hand, to carry out the meditation after the deed, in entire forgetfulness of what has been experienced in the performance of the deed. Everything depends, you see, upon having it in our power to wrest ourselves away from the one world and live for the time being completely within the other world; and whenever we want to summon up our inner spiritual powers, right at the very beginning must come the ability to do this.

Watch for yourselves and observe the difference—first, when you approach a child more or less indifferently, and then again when you approach him with real love. As soon as ever you approach him with love, and cease to believe that you can do more with technical dodges than you can with love, at once your educating becomes effective, becomes a thing of power. And this is more than ever true when you are having to do with abnormal children.

Wherever people have the right feeling about their activities, these activities do work together in the right way. Just as in the physical organism heart and kidneys must work together if the organism as a whole is to have unity, so must the Constituents work together for the great end they all have in view, while each of them fosters within itself that element in the whole for which it is in particular responsible. And anyone who then sets out to undertake some new task in the world, must bring what he is doing into co-ordination with what emanates from the Constituents.

Suppose you have the intention of undertaking work with backward children. The first thing you have to do is to study and observe the pedagogy that is followed in the anthroposophical movement. That whole living stream of activity must flow into all that you do and undertake. For within this educational stream is contained that which can heal the typical human being, and enable him to take his place rightly in the world. And then you will find that the Medical Section is able to give you what you need in order that you may deepen this pedagogy and adapt it to the abnormality of the individual in question. If you set out in all earnestness to accomplish this, yon will soon realise that there can be no question of expecting simply to be told: This is good for this, that is good for that. No, what is wanted is a continual living intercourse and connection between your own work and all that is done and given in the educational and in the medical work of the [Dynamic] movement. No break in this living connection must ever be permitted. Egoism must not be allowed to creep in and assert itself in some special and individual activity; rather must there always be the longing on the part of each participant to take his right place within the work as a whole.

Curative Eurythmy having come in to collaborate with Curative Education, the latter is thereby brought into relation also with the whole art of Eurythmy. Here too it should be evident that you must look for a living connection. This will mean that anyone who practises Curative Eurythmy must have gone some way towards mastering the fundamental principles of Eurythmy as an art. Curative Eurythmy has to grow out of a general knowledge of Speech Eurythmy and Tone Eurythmy—although the knowledge will not necessarily have been carried to the point of full artistic development. Nor must we lose sight of the importance before all else of human contacts. If Curative Eurythmy is being given, the one who is giving it must on no account omit to seek contact with the doctor. When Curative Eurythmy was first begun, the condition was laid down that it should not be given without consultation with the doctor. You see from all this how closely, how livingly interlinked the different activities have to be in Anthroposophy.

It will thus be necessary to take care that the work you are initiating at Lauenstein—a work, let me say, that I regard as full of hope and promise—is carried on in entire harmony with the whole Anthroposophical Movement. You can rest assured that the Anthroposophical Movement is ready to foster and encourage any plans with which it has expressed agreement—naturally through the channels that have been provided in accordance with the Christmas Foundation Meeting. And conversely you should keep constantly in mind that whatever you, as a limb or member of the movement, accomplish—you do it for the strengthening of the whole Anthroposophical Movement, for the enhancement of its work and influence in the world.

This then, my dear friends, is the message I would leave with you. Receive it into your hearts, as a message that comes verily from the heart; may it go with you, and may its impulse continue to work on into the future.

If we who are in this spiritual movement are constantly thinking: how can this spiritual movement be made fruitful for practical life?—then will the world not fail to see that it is verily a movement that is alive.

And so, my dear friends, let me wish you all strength and good guidance for the right working out of your will.

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