The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First let me express my deepest thanks for the words from Mr. H. A. L. Fisher which have just been read out. They give me great encouragement in the task of the next few days.

I have been informed that there was something difficult to understand in what I spoke about yesterday. In particular that difficulties had arisen from my use of the words “Spiritual” and “spiritual cognition.” This occasions me to depart somewhat to-day from the subject I had set myself and to discuss the use of the words “spirit” (Geist) and “spiritual life” (spirituelles Leben). This will lead us somewhat away from the subject of teaching and education. But from what I hear I gather we shall understand each other better during the next few days if I give these explanations of spirit, soul, and body to-day. During the next few days I shall find an opportunity of saying what I intended saying to-day.

Now such an exposition as that to be given to-day makes it necessary to speak in a more theoretical way, to speak in ideas and concepts. I beg you to acquiesce in this for to-day; in the following days things will be better again and I shall not cruelly torment you with ideas and concepts but shall hope to please you with concrete facts.

The word ‘Geist’ (Spirit) and also the word ‘Spirituell’ (Spiritual) as used from the point of view and world outlook from which I now speak, is generally not understood profoundly enough. When the word ‘Geist’ (spirit) is used, people take it to mean something like ‘intellectual’ or to mean much the same as the English word ‘mind.’ But what I mean here by ‘spiritual’ and by ‘spirit’ (Geist) is something quite different. It must definitely not be confused with all these things designated as ‘spirit’ and ‘spiritual’ in mystical, fanatical, or superstitious sects and movements: on the other hand it is quite distinct from what is meant by intellect or mind.

If we can obtain an immediate concrete knowledge, a true insight, into what is working in a small child up to the time of changing its teeth—a working not directly perceptible, but observable in expressions of the child's nature which may appear to us even primitive that, then is “Spirit” (Geist), and that then is “Soul.”

Nowhere in our observation of man and of nature are we confronted by spirit and soul so immediately as when we contemplate the manifestations of life in a tiny child. Here, as I said yesterday, in the moulding of the brain, in the shaping of the whole organism, spiritual forces are at work, soul essences are at work. What we see are manifestations of life in the child; we perceive these with our senses. But what works through from behind the veil of sense perceptible things is spirit, is soul;—so to be apprehended as nowhere else in life—unless we have accomplished an inner soul development.

Thus we must say: to immediate ordinary perception, spirit is quite unknown. At most, soul can manifest in ordinary percepts. But we must feel and sense it through the percept.

If I may use an image to indicate what is meant—not to explain it—I would say: When we speak, our speech comes from words, sounds made up of consonants and vowels. Observe the great difference between consonants and vowels in speech. Consonants round off a sound, give it angularity, make it into a breath sound or a wave sound [Usually called labials and dentals. But see Dr. Steiner's classification of vowels and consonants in his Dramatic and Eurhythmy courses.] according as we form the sound with one organ or another—with lips or teeth. Vowels arise in quite another way. Vowels arise while guiding the breath stream through the vocal organs in a particular manner. We do not give contour, we build the substance of the sound by means of vowels. The vowels, as it were provide the substance, the stuff. The consonants mould and sculpture the substance provided by the vowels.

And now—using the terms spirit and soul in the sense we are giving them here—we can say: In the consonants of speech there is spirit, in the vowels there is soul.

When a child first begins to say A (AH) it is filled with a kind of wonder, a marvelling—a soul content. This content of soul is immediately present to us. It streams out in the A. When a child expresses the sound E (EH) it has a kind of slight antipathy in its soul. It withdraws, starts back from the thing affecting it. E (EH) expresses something antipathetic in the soul. Wonder: A. Antipathy: E. The vowels show soul content.

When I form a consonant of any kind I give contour, I surround and shape the vowel substance. When a child says Ma Ma—A twice over—the gesture shows the child's need to reach out to its mother for help (The gesture of M is meant. See Eurhythmy.). A by itself would be what the child feels and experiences about its mother. M is that which it would like the mother to do. So that Ma-Ma contains the whole relationship to the mother both according to spirit and soul. Thus we hear language spoken, we hear its sense content, but we do not attend to the way spirit and soul lie hidden in language. True we are still occasionally aware of it in speech, but we fail to notice it in the whole human being. We see the outer form of a man. Within are soul and spirit as they are within speech. But this we no longer heed.

There was a time however, in ages past when men did heed it and they said, not ‘In the beginning was the Spirit,’—that would have been too abstract—but ‘In the beginning was the word,’ for men still felt livingly how spirit was carried on the waves of speech. It is this spirit and what is characteristic of it that we designate here when we use the word ‘spiritual’—a thing not revealed in intellect, nor yet in what we call mind. Mind and spirit are distinct from one another. They differ as much as my personality differs from the reflection I see in the looking-glass. When I stand there and hold a mirror and look at myself in it: my reflection is in the mirror. This reflection makes the same movements as I do, it looks like me, but it is not I; it differs from me in that it is an image, whereas I am a reality. ‘Spirit’ holds sway in hidden depths. Intellect only has the image of spirit. Mind is the reflected image of the spirit. Mind can show what spirit does, Mind can make the motions of spirit. But mind is passive. If someone gives me a blow mind can reflect it. Mind cannot itself give the blow. Spirit is activity. Spirit is always doing. Spirit is creative. Spirit is the essence of productivity, productivity itself. Mind, Intellect, is copy, reflection, passivity itself:—that thing within us which enables us, when we are older, to understand the world. If intellect, if mind were active we should not be able to understand the world. Mind has to be passive so that the world may be understood through it. If it were active it would continually alter and impinge upon the world. Mind is the passive image of the spirit.

Thus: Just as we look away from the reflection to the man himself when we seek reality, so when we seek the reality of spirit and soul we must endeavour to pass from the unproductive passive to the productive active.

This, men have endeavoured to do throughout all ages of human development. And to-day I wish to speak to you of one way of this seeking, so that we may agree upon the meaning of spirit and soul when I speak to you here. Commonly as adult human beings we only perceive spirit in its reflection as Intellect, Mind or Reason. We only apprehend the soul in its manifestations, or expressions. We are nearer to the soul than to the spirit but we do not perceive the full inner activity even of the soul. We perceive revelations of the soul: we perceive spirit in its reflection only. A reflection retains nothing of the reality.—But we do perceive revelations of the soul. What we know as feeling, our sympathies and antipathies, our experience of desire and passion—these belong to the soul. But we do not perceive what the soul is within us.

What is soul within us? Now I can perhaps indicate what soul is in us if I distinguish between what we actually experience and what happens within us in order that we may experience. When we walk over soft ground we tread on it, our footprints remain in it. Now suppose someone finds our footprints; will he say: “Beneath the earth, below there, are certain forces which have shaped the earth so that it shows these concave forms?” No-one would say such a thing. Any person would say: Someone has walked here.

Materialism says: I find imprints in the brain, the brain has impressions.—The earth too has impressions when I have gone over it!—But now Materialism says: There are forces in the brain, and these make the imprints. This is false. The soul makes the imprints, just as it is I who make them on the ground; and only because the imprints are there can I perceive the soul. I perceive a sensation in the soul. To begin with the soul is hidden. It has made the imprints in my body. If I make a very hard dent it hurts me, it is painful. I do not immediately see what I have done—(I can do it behind my back). But even if I do not see what I do I experience the pain. In the same way the soul scores an impression upon my body, itself hidden. I perceive the effect in passions, in sympathy, etc. I perceive the effect of what the soul does in the manifestation. Thus: Of the spirit we have an image; of the soul an expression.

We are closer to the soul. But let us keep in mind that spirit or soul must be sought in profounder depths than mind, or intellect or reason.

This may perhaps contribute to an understanding of spirit and soul.

To make the concept of spirit and soul yet clearer let me now turn to an historical aspect. And let me not here be misunderstood to-day, as has too often happened. I do this expressly for the sake of elucidation—not with any intention at all of maintaining that in order to reach spirit and soul we must proceed to-day in the manner used of old. But the present-day method of attaining to spirit and soul will be easier to understand when we turn to history.

In order to attain to the spirit in the twentieth century it is quite impossible to do the same as was done hundreds or thousands of years ago in ancient India. Neither can we do as was done before the event of the Mystery of Golgotha. We live within the development of Christianity. But we shall be helped in our understanding of spirit and soul if we look back to this older way and see, for example, how the way to soul and spirit of the spiritual man differs completely from the way of the merely intellectual man.

What do we do when to-day, in conformity with the general consciousness of our age, we want to get clear about ourselves? We reflect; we use our intellect. And what do we do when we want to get clear about nature? We experiment and bring our intellect to bear upon the experiments. Intellectual activity on all hands. In ancient times men sought to reach spirit and soul in quite a different manner. To take two examples from among many that I might cite: they sought to reach the spirit and soul, for instance, in very ancient times in the East by means of the so-called Yoga method, Now the mention of Yoga produces a feeling of slight horror in many people to-day, for only the later Yoga methods are known to history, methods based on human egoism and which seek power in the external world. The older Yoga methods (which can only be discovered to-day through spiritual science,—not through external science,) were ways which men took towards the spirit. They rested on the fact that men instinctively said to themselves: we cannot attain to the spirit by mere reflection, by mere thinking. We must do something which reveals action, activity, in ourselves far more than mere reaction does. Thinking goes on in us even when we stand aside from the world merely as onlookers: we do not then bring about any perceptible change in ourselves.

The Yogi was seeking out a far more real happening or process in himself when he wanted to learn about the spirit. Suppose we ask ourselves what takes place, according to our present-day physiological knowledge, when we use our intellect? Well, something happens in our nervous system, in our brain, and in those parts in the rest of our organism which are connected with the brain through the nervous system. But what takes place in the nerves could never come about if an activity far more perceptible were not intermingled with the processes of our brain. Unceasingly from our birth till our death we breathe in, retain our breath, breathe out. When we breathe in, the breath passes over our whole organ-ism. The thrust of the breath is through the spinal cord into the brain. We do not only breathe with our lungs, we breathe with our brain. But this means that our brain is in constant motion. The breath—inbreathing, breath-holding and out-breathing—surges and lives within our brain. This goes on continuously—unconscious of it though we are to-day. The Yogi used to say: Something is taking place in man of which I must be conscious. Thus he did not breathe unconsciously in the usual way, he breathed abnormally: he breathed in differently, held his breath differently, breathed out differently. In this manner he became conscious of the breath-process. And what takes place unconsciously for us, took place for him in full consciousness, for he conceived and experienced it. Thus he came to experience how in the brain, breath unites with the material process which under-lies thinking, which underlies intellectual activity. He searched into this union between thinking and breathing and finally experienced how thought, which is for us an abstract thing, pervades the whole body on the tide of the breath. Thus thought was not only in the brain, not only in the lungs, not only in the heart, thought was in the very finger tips. From real experience of the breath pulsing through him he learned how Spirit creates in man through the medium of the breath: “And God breathed the living breath into Man and he became a Soul.” Not only did He breathe the breath in “in the Beginning” but continuously He breathes where breathing takes place. And it is in the breath process, not in thinking, not in the intellectual process, that we become soul. We feel our own being when we feel our thought pulsing throughout the body on the tide of breathing. You see, spirit was here no longer shut off, separated, as an intellectual and abstract thing; hence it could be sensed and felt through-out the whole body. And manhood could be felt as a creation of the Gods. You see, they had active Spirit.

In intellectuality we have passive, not active spirit. Nowadays, since we are differently organised, we cannot copy this Yoga process, nor would it be right for us to do so. For what was the Yogi's aim? He aimed at feeling how the thought process was bound up with the breath process, and in the breath process, which was his mode of cognition, he experienced his humanity. He united thought more intimately with man's whole nature than we do to-day. But our human progress rests on the fact that we have freed thought itself far more, have made it far more intellectual than it was when Yoga nourished. Never could the discoveries of Copernicus, Gallileo, Faraday, Darwin, etc., have been made with a system of thought such as that produced by the ancient Indians when they were Yogis. These achievements have required a thinking reduced to the state of reflection, of image, of intellectuality. And our whole civilisation is based on the fact that we are no longer the same as those who developed the Yoga philosophy. People generally misunderstand this when I describe these things. They believe I wish to lead men back again to the Yoga philosophy. Not at all. On the contrary I wish to treat matters as they have to be treated in the age of Copernicus, Gallileo, Faraday. We must realise that it is through intellectuality that our western civilisation has achieved its greatness. But also we must feel differently from the way the Ancient Indians felt; and feel differently too from the way those who now practice Yoga, feel. To-day we must proceed in a way quite different from that of Ancient Indian times, a more spiritual way. And because it must be a more spiritual way, and because people do not much like spirit nowadays it follows that people do not like the new methods. It is easy, at least it seems easy, to perform Yoga-breathing to-day in order to find entry into the world of spirit. But this is not the means whereby men of to-day should come into spiritual realms. No, modern man must first have had to experience at some time the world of appearance (the unreality) which can be perceived by sheer intellectualism, the image nature of things. Man must for once go through all the suffering which goes with saying: “As long as I am merely engaged in intellectual activity, or in observations of that kind, I dwell in emptiness, in mere images. I am remote from reality.”

What I am saying here seems a small thing; but it is great in terms of inner experience. When one comes to experience that all thinking which is intellectual is unreal, is a mere image, then in one's own soul one experiences what in the body would be faintness: one experiences a fainting of the soul where reality is concerned. Actually, knowledge does not start by man's saying to himself: I can think, and can therefore reflect upon all things. Rather knowledge proceeds from a man's saying to himself: Even if I think about all things with the image thinking that I possess I shall be nothing but a weak, impotent being. The Yogi looked to find his manhood in the breath: we modern men have to lose our manhood, we have become weak and faint in contact with this intellectual image thought. And now we must be able to say to ourselves: We must not now go inwards, as was done in Yoga, into the breathing process. We must now go outwards, must look upon every flower, look upon every animal, look upon every man, and live in the outward environment.

In my book “Wie erlangt man Erkenntnis der hoheren Welten” which has been translated into English here under the title Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, I have described how one does this. How one looks upon the plant not merely externally, but how one participates in all its processes, so that one's thinking is taken right out of its image character and participates in the life of the external world. Or one sinks into the plant until one feels how gravity goes down through the root into the earth, how the formative forces unfold above. One participates in the blooming, the fruiting of the plant; one dives right into the external world. And then, O then—one is taken up by the external world. One awakens as from a swoon. But now one no longer receives abstract thoughts, now one receives “Imaginations.” One gets pictures. And a materialistic view would not recognise these pictures as knowledge. Knowledge, it is said, proceeds in abstract, logical concepts. Yes, but how if the world is not to be comprehended in the abstract concepts of logic? How if the world be a work of art; then we must apprehend it artistically, not logically. Then logic would be a means of discipline only. We should not understand anything about the world by logic. Thus we must enter into the objects themselves. Where Yoga went inwards we must go outwards, and endeavour in this manner to unite ourselves with all things. And thus actually we shall attain the same thing, only in a more psychic, a more spiritual way. By permeating with reality the endings of mere intellect, our concepts, our ideas, we can feel anew how spirit works in us creatively.

And from this we must come to feel that reality which is working in a child. It is not what we have called “mind” in us that is at work. That in a little child would not be a creative thing. That would only lead us astray. But it is what we come to know in the creative way just described which is at work in a child: it is this which forms the second teeth after the manner of the first, and reaches conclusion in the seventh year.

Now you may perhaps say: Yes, but a teacher cannot immediately become a seer, a clairvoyant. He cannot train himself in these methods! How shall we manage schooling and education if we are confronted at the outset with this complicated way of reaching spirit?

But one is not called upon to do this. A few people in the world can develop this higher knowledge. The rest only need sound judgment and sound observation. What the few discover these others will recognise by means of their sound judgment and sound observation. Just as not every person can observe the transits of Venus.—They are visible far too rarely; astronomers can observe them on the rare occasions when they are visible.—But would it on this account be absurd to speak of the transits of Venus, just because they had not been observed by everybody? What was observed, and how it was observed can be comprehended. It is the same thing with the spiritual world. It is only part of present day egoism to want to do everything oneself.

But there is another way of making spiritual things fruitful, of making use of them. Once more, I will illustrate this by an example: Suppose I am teaching a child of nine or ten years old. I want to tell the child about immortality, the immortality of the human soul. If I go into philosophic dissertations, however charming, the child at his age will make nothing of it. He will be quite untouched by my expositions. But if now I say to him: Dear child, see how the butterfly comes out of the chrysalis—there you have an image that you can apply to man. Look at the human body, it is like a butterfly's cocoon. And just as the butterfly flies out of the chrysalis, so after death does the soul fly out of the body. Only, the butterfly is visible, the soul is invisible.

If you yourselves have a well developed knowledge of the growing child, permeated by your own will and feeling, then you will be able to teach and educate well. Through an educational instinct which will awaken within you, you will be able to apply the results of this will-knowledge in the different departments of your work. But this knowledge must be truly real, which means it must rest upon a true understanding of the world of facts. Now in order to come to a real knowledge of the human being we have sought to place him before our minds from the standpoint first of the soul, and then of the spirit. We must be clear that a spiritual conception of man makes it necessary for us to consider the different conditions of consciousness, and to know that, primarily, our life spiritually takes its course in waking, dreaming and sleeping; and that all the different manifestations of human life can be characterised as fully awake, dreaming or sleeping conditions. We will try once more to descend gradually from the spirit through the soul to the body, so that we have the whole human being before us and also may be able to sum these observations at the end into a kind of hygiene of the growing child.

Now, as you know, the period of life which concerns us in teaching and education is that which includes the first two decades; and this time, as we know, is further divided into three periods. Up to the change of teeth the child bears a very distinct character, shown in his wanting to be an imitative being; he wants to imitate everything he sees in his environment. From the seventh year to puberty we have to do with a child who wants to take on authority what he has to know, to feel and will. And only with puberty comes the longing in man to gain a relationship to the world through his own individual judgment. Therefore in dealing with children of primary school age we must remember that at this age they long for the sway of authority from the innermost depths of their beings. We shall educate badly if we are not in a position to hold our authority in this age.

Now what we have to do is to survey the whole life activity of the human being in a spiritual description. This activity as we have already shown from varied points of view, includes thinking-cognition on the one hand, and willing on the other; feeling lies between. Now with regard to thinking-cognition it is man's task between birth and death gradually to permeate it with logic, with all that enables him to think logically. But what you yourselves, as teachers, have to know about logic must be kept in the background. For logic is, of course, something pre-eminently scientific; it must be brought to the children only through your whole general attitude. But as teachers you will have to have a mastery of logic.

Our exercise of logic, that is, of thinking-cognition, is an activity of three members. Firstly, in our thinking-cognition we always have what is called conclusions. In ordinary life thinking is expressed in speech. If you examine the structure of speech you will find that in speaking you are continually forming conclusions. This activity of forming conclusions is the most conscious of all human activities. Man could not express himself in speech unless he were continually uttering conclusions nor could he understand what another person said to him unless he were continuously receiving conclusions. Academic logic usually dismembers conclusions, thus falsifying them at the outset, in so far as conclusions appear in ordinary life. Academic logic takes no account of the fact that we form conclusions every time we look at any one single thing. Suppose that you go to a menagerie and see a lion. What do you do first of all when you perceive the lion? First you bring what you see in the lion to your consciousness; and only by this bringing to consciousness do you gain an understanding of your perceptions of the lion. Before you went to the menagerie, in your ordinary life, you learned that beings that have the form and habits of the lion you are now looking at are “animals.” This knowledge acquired in ordinary life you bring with you into the menagerie. Then you look at the lion and find: the lion is doing just what you have learned that animals do. You connect this with what you have brought with you out of your knowledge of life and then you form the judgment: the lion is an animal. It is not until you have formed this judgment that you can understand the particular concept “lion.” The first thing you form is a conclusion; the second is a judgment; the last thing you come to in life is a concept. Of course you are not aware that you are continuously carrying out this activity; but it is only by means of this activity that you can lead a conscious life which enables you to communicate with other human beings through speech. It is commonly thought that one comes to concepts first of all. This is not true. The first thing in life is conclusions. And in reality, if when we go into the menagerie we do not exclude our perception of the lion from the rest of our experience, but bring it into line with the whole of our previous experience, then what we accomplish first in the menagerie is the drawing of a conclusion. We must be clear on this point; going into the menagerie and seeing the lion is merely a single act and it belongs to the whole of life. We did not begin living when we entered the menagerie and turned our attention to the lion. This action is linked on to our previous life, and our previous life plays into it too, and what we take out with us when we leave the menagerie will again be carried over into the rest of life. If now we consider the whole process, what is the lion first of all? He is first of all a conclusion. That is absolutely true: the lion is a conclusion. A little later, the lion is a, judgment. And a little later still, the lion is a concept.

If you open a book on logic, that is, one of the older sort, you usually find amongst the conclusions the following famous one: “All men are mortal. Caius is a man. Therefore Caius is mortal.” Caius is indeed the most famous logical personality. Now actually this splitting up of the three judgments: “All men are mortal. Caius is a man. Therefore Caius is mortal,” is only to be found in the teaching of logic. In real life these three judgments weave into one another, forming a unity, for the life in thinking-knowing is in continual flux. You make all three judgments simultaneously when you approach the man Caius. What you are thinking of him already contains these three judgments within it. That is to say: first comes the conclusion. And only after that do you form the judgment, which is here put as the conclusion: “Therefore Caius is mortal.” And the last thing you get is the individualised concept: “The mortal Caius.”

Now these three things, conclusion, judgment and concept, exist in the knowing process, that is, in the living spirit of man. What is their relation to each other in the living spirit of man?

The conclusion can only live in the living spirit of man: only there can it have a healthy life; that means: the conclusion is only completely healthy when it occurs in fully waking life. This is very important, as we shall see later.

Therefore you ruin the soul of the child if you make him commit to memory ready-made conclusions. What I am now saying—and shall work out in detail with you later—is of the most fundamental importance for your teaching. In the Waldorf School you will get children of all ages who bear the result of former teaching. The children will have been taught in conclusions, judgments and concepts, and you will soon experience the result of this. You will have to build on the knowledge that the children have already acquired, for you cannot begin at the beginning with each child. We are so placed that we cannot build our school up from the bottom but have to begin with classes of all ages. You will thus find that the children's souls have already been prepared, and in your method of teaching in the early days you will have to be very careful not to worry the children to draw ready-made conclusions out of their sum of knowledge. If these conclusions are too firmly fixed in the children's souls it is better to leave them dormant and try to appeal to the child's present life in the making of conclusions.

Judgment, also, will make its appearance, and this of course in the full waking life. But judgment can also sink into the depths of the human soul, to where the soul is dreaming. The conclusion should not sink into the dreaming soul; only the judgment can do this. Thus every judgment that we form about the world sinks down into the dreaming soul.

Now what does this really mean? What is this dreaming soul? It is more of the nature of feeling, as we have already learned. When in life we form judgments and then pass on from them and continue on our way, we carry these judgments with us through the world. But we carry them through the world in feeling. This has also the further implication that forming judgments brings about a kind of habit of soul. You will be forming the soul habits of the child by the way you teach the children to form judgments. You must be absolutely aware of this fact. For it is the sentence which expresses judgment, and with every sentence you say to a child you are contributing a further atom to the habits of that child's soul. Hence the teacher, who possesses authority, must always be conscious that what he says will become part of the habits of soul of the child.

Now, to come from judgment to concept: we must realise that when we form a concept it goes down into the profoundest depths of man's being; regarding the matter spiritually, it goes down into the sleeping soul. The concept makes its way right down into the sleeping soul, and this is that part of the soul that is constantly at work upon the body. The waking soul does not work upon the body. The dreaming soul works upon it a little; it produces what lies in its habitual gestures. But the sleeping soul works right into the very forms of the body. In forming concepts, that is in formulating the results of judgments in men, you are working right into the sleeping soul, or in other words, right into the body of the human being. Now when the human being is born, he has reached a high degree of completion as far as his body is concerned; and the soul can only develop in a finer way what has been given to the human being by the stream of inheritance. But the soul does carry out this refining work. We go about the world and we look at people. These people we meet with have quite distinct faces. What is the content of these physiognomies? They contain, amongst other things, the result of all the concepts which teachers and educators inculcated in these people during their childhood. From the face of the mature man streams out to us the content of the many concepts poured into the soul of the child; for, in forming the man's physiognomy it is with fixed concepts—among other things—that the sleeping soul has wrought. Here we see what power educational work has upon the human being. He receives his stamp right down into his very body through the forming of concepts.

The most striking phenomenon in the world to-day is that we find men with such unpronounced features. Herman Bahr in the course of a lecture in Berlin once described an experience of his in a very spirited manner. He said that even as far back as the 1890's, if you were to go to the Rhine in the neighbourhood of Essen, and walking down the street were to meet people coming out of the factories, you would have the feeling: no one of these people is different from another; I am really looking at one single person who is coming out like a picture in a duplicating machine; it is impossible to distinguish these people from one another. A very significant observation! And Herman Bahr made another observation which is also very significant. He said: when in the '90s you were invited out to dinner in Berlin you had a lady on your right and on your left hand, but you really could not distinguish them from each other, except that you knew one was on your right hand and the other on your left. Then another day you were perhaps invited somewhere else, and it might easily happen that you could not be sure: is this yesterday's lady, or the lady of the day before?

In short, a certain uniformity has come over humanity, and this is a proof that there has been no true education in the preceding years. We must learn from these things what is really necessary in the transformation of our educational life, for education has a deep and far-reaching influence on the whole cultural life of the times. Therefore we can say: at those times in life when man is not confronted with any one particular fact, his concepts are living in the unconscious.

Concepts can live in the unconscious. Judgments can only live as habits of judgment in the semi-conscious, in the dreaming life. And conclusions should really only hold sway in the fully conscious waking life. That is to say, you must take great care to talk over with the children beforehand anything that is related to conclusions, and not let them store up ready-made conclusions. They should only store up what can develop and ripen into a concept. Now how can we bring this about?

Suppose you are forming concepts, and they are dead concepts. Then you graft the corpses of concepts into the human being. You graft dead concepts right into the bodily nature of man when you implant dead concepts on him. What kind of a concept should we then give the children? It must be a living concept if man has to live with it. Man is alive, thus the concept must also be alive. If in the child's ninth or tenth year you graft into him concepts which are meant to retain their same form in him until he is thirty or forty years of age, then you will be imputing him with the corpses of concepts, for the concept will not follow the life of the human being as he grows and develops. You must give the child such concepts as are capable of change in his later life. The educator must aim at giving the child concepts which will not remain the same throughout his life, but will change as the child grows older. If you do this you will be implanting live concepts in the child. And when is it that you give him dead concepts? When you continually give the child definitions, when you say: “A lion is ...” this or that, and make him learn it by heart, then you are grafting dead concepts into him; and you are expecting that at the age of thirty he will retain these concepts in the precise form in which you are now say: the making of many definitions is death to living teaching. What then must we do? In teaching we must not make definitions but rather must endeavour to make characterisations. We characterise things when we view them from as many standpoints as possible. If in Natural History we give the children simply what is to be found, for example, in the Natural History books of the present day, then we are really only defining the animal for him. We must try in all branches of our teaching to characterise the animal from different sides showing for example how men have gradually come to know about this animal, how they have come to make use of its work, and so on. But in a reasonable curriculum this characterisation will arise of itself, if, for instance, the teacher does not merely describe consecutively, say: first the cuttlefish, and then the mouse, and finally man, each in turn, in natural-historical order—but rather places cuttlefish, mouse and man side by side and relates them with one another. The interrelationships will prove so manifold that there will result, not a definition, but a characterisation. A right kind of teaching will aim, from the outset, at characterisation rather than definition.

It is of very great importance to make it your constant and conscious aim not to destroy anything in the growing human being, but to teach and educate him in such a way that he continues to be full of life, and does not dry up and become hard and rigid. You must therefore distinguish carefully between mobile concepts which you give the child and such concepts as need undergo no change.

These concepts will give the child a kind of skeleton in his soul. Therefore you must realise that you have to give the child things which can remain with him throughout his life. You must not give him dead concepts of all the details of life—concepts which must not remain with him—rather must you give him living concepts of the details of life and of the world, concepts which will develop with him organically. But you must connect everything with man. In the child's comprehension of the world everything must finally flow together into the idea of man. This idea of man should endure. All that you give a child when you tell him a fable and apply it to man, when in natural history you connect cuttlefish and mouse with man, or when in teaching the children Morse telegraphy you arouse a feeling of the wonder of the earth as a conductor—all these are things which unite the whole world in all its details with the human being. This is something that can remain with him. But the concept “man” is only built up gradually; you cannot give the child a ready-made concept of man. But when you have built it up then it can remain. In fact it is the most beautiful thing you can give a child in school for his later life: the idea, which is as many-sided and comprehensive as possible, of man.

What is living in the human being tends to transform itself in life in a really living way. If you succeed in giving the child concepts of reverence and devotion, living concepts of all that we call the mood of prayer in the widest sense, such a conception, permeated by the mood of prayer, is then a living conception and it lasts right on into old age; and in old age it transforms itself into the capacity of blessing, of being able to impart to others what comes from a mood of prayer. I once expressed this in a public lecture in the following way: a man or woman will only be able to impart blessing in old age if he or she has learned to pray rightly as a child. If as a child one learned to pray rightly then as an old man or old woman one can bless rightly and with greatest power.

Thus to give children concepts of this kind, which have to do with the most intimate nature of man, is to equip them with living concepts; and this living element is open to change, it transforms itself, changing with the very life of man. Let us once more consider this threefold division of childhood and youth from a rather different point of view. Up to the change of teeth man has a desire to imitate; up to puberty he longs for an authority to look up to; after this time he wants to apply his own judgment to the world.

This can be expressed in another way. When the human being comes forth from the world of soul and spirit and receives the garment of his body, what is it that he really wants to do? He wants to make actual in the physical world what he has lived through in the past in the spiritual world. In certain respects the human being before the change of teeth is entirely involved in the past. He is still filled with the devotion that one develops in the spiritual world. It is for this reason that he gives himself up to his environment by imitating the people around him. What then is the fundamental impulse, the completely unconscious mood of the child before the change of teeth? This fundamental mood is a very beautiful one, and it must be fostered in the child. It proceeds from the assumption, from the unconscious assumption that the whole world is of a moral nature. This is not exclusively the case in souls of the present day (I have already drawn attention to this in a lecture here) but by the very fact of becoming a physical being man has the tendency at birth to proceed from the unconscious assumption that the world is moral. It is good therefore for the whole education up to the change of teeth and even beyond this age, that one should bear in mind this unconscious assumption that the world is moral. I drew your attention to this by reading you two extracts, for which I had first shown you the preparation; this preparation rested entirely on the assumption that one describes things from a moral aspect. (In the lectures Discussions with Teachers.) I tried to show in the first piece about the sheep-dog, the butcher's dog and the lap-dog how human morals can be reflected in the animal world. And in the poem about the violet, by Hoffman von Fallersleben, I aimed at giving a moral without pedantry for children up to seven or beyond; thereby working in harmony with this assumption that the world is moral. This is the greatness and sublimity in the outlook of childhood, that children are a race who believe in the morality of the world, and therefore believe that the world may be imitated. Thus the child lives in the past and is to a great extent a revealer of the pre-natal past—not of the physical past, but of the past of soul and spirit.

From the change of teeth up to the time of adolescence the child really lives continually in the present, and is interested in what is going on in the world around him. When educating we must constantly keep in mind that children of primary school age want always to live in the present. How does one live in the present? One lives in the present when one enjoys the world around one, not in an animal way, but in a human way. And indeed the child of this age wants also to enjoy the world in the lessons he receives. Therefore from the outset we must make our teaching a thing of enjoyment for the children—not animal enjoyment, but enjoyment of a higher, human kind—not something that calls forth in them antipathy and repulsion.

There have of course been various good educational experiments on these lines. But here we are faced with a certain danger, namely that this principle of making teaching a source of pleasure and enjoyment can easily deteriorate into something paltry and commonplace. This must not happen. But the only sure preventive is for the teacher and educator to be ever willing to raise himself above what is commonplace, pedantic and philistine. This he can only do if he never neglects to make a really living contact with art. For in seeking to enjoy the world in a human, and not in an animal way one proceeds from a definite assumption: namely that the world is beautiful. And from the time he changes his teeth until puberty the child really proceeds on the unconscious assumption that he shall find the world beautiful. This unconscious assumption of the child that the world is beautiful is not met by the regulations laid down for “object lessons,” regulations which are often very crude and are drawn up purely from a utilitarian point of view. But this assumption is met if one will try and immerse oneself in artistic experience so that the teaching in this period may be artistic through and through. It sometimes makes one extremely sad to read present-day books on education and to see how the good principle that education should be made into a source of joy does not come into its own because what the teacher discourses on with his pupils is inartistic and commonplace. To-day it is much in favour to conduct object lessons on the Socratic method. But the nature of the questions asked is utilitarian in the extreme instead of partaking of the beautiful. And here no demonstrations or showing of set examples will be of any help. It is not a question of instructing the teacher that he shall adopt this method or that when choosing set pieces for his object lesson. What is essential is that the teacher himself by living in art should see to it that the things he talks about to his children are artistic.

The first part of a child's life, up to the change of teeth, is spent with the unconscious assumption: the world is moral. The second period, from the change of teeth to adolescence, is spent with the unconscious assumption: the world is beautiful. And only with adolescence dawns the possibility of discovering: the world is true. Thus it is not until then that education should begin to assume a “scientific” character. Before adolescence it is not good to give a purely systematising or scientific character to education, for not until adolescence does man attain a right and inward concept of truth.

In this way you will come to see that as the child descends into this physical world out of higher worlds the Past descends with him; that when he has accomplished the change of teeth the Present plays itself out in the boy or girl of school age, and that after fourteen the human being enters a time of life when impulses of the future assert themselves in his soul. Past, present and future, and life in the midst of them, this too is planted in the growing child.

When trying to understand the world through a natural scientific interpretation of its phenomena, whether through cognition or through everyday life, people tend to consider conditions only as they meet them in the moment. Such a statement might seem incorrect to those who merely look at the surface of things, but as we proceed, it will become evident that this is indeed true. We have grown accustomed to investigate the human physical organism with the accepted methods of biology, physics, and anatomy, but (though this may appear wrong at first) in the results we find only what the present moment reveals to us.

For example, we might observe the lungs of a child, of an adult, and of an older person, in their stages from the beginning to the end of life, and we reach certain conclusions. But we do not really penetrate the element of time at all in this way, because we limit ourselves to spatial observations, which we then invest with qualities of time. We are doing the same thing, to use a simile, when we read the time by looking at a clock. We note the position of the hands in the morning, for example, and positions in space indicate the time for us. We may look at the clock again at noon and deduce the passage of time from the spatial changes of its hands. We take our bearing in the course of time from the movements of the clock’s hands from point to point in space. This has become our way of judging time in everyday life. But through this method we cannot experience the true nature of time. Yet only by penetrating time with the same awareness we use to experience space can we correctly assess human life between birth and death. I would like to illustrate these theoretical remarks with examples to show the importance of living into the dimension of time, especially if you want to practice the art of education.

Let us take as our example a child who is full of reverence toward adults. Anyone with a healthy instinct would consider such an attitude in a child as something wholesome, especially if such reverence is justified, as indeed it should be on the part of the adult. However, people usually think no further, but merely attribute a feeling of reverence toward adults to certain aspects of childhood and leave it at that. But we cannot recognize the importance of such reverence unless we include the entire course of a human life in our considerations.

As we grows older, we may have the opportunity to observe old people. We may discover that some of them have the gift of bringing soul comfort to those who need it. Often it is not what they have to say that acts as balm on a suffering soul, but just the tone of voice or the way they speak. If now you follow this old person’s life back to childhood, you find that, as a child, that individual was full of reverence and respect for adults. Naturally, this attitude of reverence will disappear in later life, but only on the surface. Deep down, it will gradually transform, only to reemerge later as the gift of bringing solace and elevation to suffering and troubled minds.

One could also say it this way: If a young child has learned to pray and has learned to develop an inner mood of prayer, this mood will enter the subconscious and transform into the capacity of blessing in the ripeness of old age. When we meet old people whose mere presence radiates blessing upon those around them, you find that in their childhood they experienced and developed this inner mood of prayer. Such a transformation can be discovered only if one has learned to experience time as concretely as we generally experience space. We must learn to recognize the time element with the same awareness with which we experience space. Time must not be experienced only in spatial terms, as when we look at a clock. What I have been trying to illustrate regarding the moral aspects of life needs to become very much a part of our concept of the human being—certainly if we are going to develop a true art of education. I would like to elaborate this in greater detail.

If we compare human beings with the animals, we find that from the moment of birth, animals (especially the higher species) are equipped with all the faculties needed for living. A chick leaving its shell does not need to learn to walk and is immediately adapted to its surroundings. Each animal’s organs are firmly adapted to the specific needs of its species. This is not at all true, however, of human beings, who come into this world completely helpless. Only gradually do we develop the capacities and skills needed for life. This is because the most important period in our earthly life is between the end of childhood and the beginning of old age. This central period of maturity is the most important feature of human life on earth. During that time, we adapt our organism to external life by gaining aptitudes and skills. We develop a reciprocal relationship to the outer world, based on our range of experience. This central period, when human organs maintain the ability to evolve and adapt, is completely missing in the life of animals. The animal is born in a state that is fundamentally comparable to an old person, whose organic forms have become rigid. If you want to understand the nature of an animal’s relationship to its surroundings, look at it in terms of our human time of old age.

Now we can ask whether an animal shows the characteristics of old age in its soul qualities. This is not the case, because in an animal there is also the opposite pole, which counteracts this falling into old age, and this is the animal’s capacity of reproduction. The ability to reproduce, whether in the human or animal kingdom, always engenders forces of rejuvenation. While animal fall prey to the influences of aging too quickly on the one hand, on the other they are saved from premature aging because of the influx of reproductive forces until maturity.

If you can observe an animal or an animal species without preconceived ideas, you will conclude that, when the animal is capable of reproduction, it has reached a stage equivalent to that of old age in a human being. The typical difference in the human being is the fact that both old age and childhood (when the child’s reproductive system is slowly maturing) are placed on either end of the human central period, and during this period the human organism remains flexible, enabling human beings to relate and adapt individually to the environment. Through this arrangement, a human being will be a child at the right time, then leave childhood at the right time to enter maturity. And a person leaves maturity when it is time to enter old age.

If you look at human life from this aspect of time, you also understand certain abnormalities. You may encounter people who (if I may put it this way) slip prematurely into old age. I am not thinking so much of the obvious features typically associated with old age, such as grey hair or baldness; even a bald-headed person may still be childish. I am thinking of the more subtle indications, detectable only by more intimate observations. One could call such features the signs of a senile soul life, manifesting in people who should still be in the central period of flexibility and adaptability. But the opposite may also happen; a person may be unable to leave the stage of childhood at the right time and carry infantile features into the central stage of life. In this case, strange things may happen in the life of that person—the symptoms of which we can only touch on today. When we include the time element in our picture of the human being, we can diagnose aberrations in human behavior.

We know that, as we approach old age, we lose flexibility especially in the head. Consequently, all the capacities that we have acquired during life attain more of a soul and spiritual quality. But this is possible only at the expense of the head as a whole assuming certain animal-like qualities. From a physical point of view, an old person goes through conditions similar to those of a newborn animal. To a certain extent one becomes “animalized.” Thus old people gain something that they may preserve for the rest of their lives, provided their education was right. Their spiritual, soul experiences of the outer world no longer enter fully into the human organization. The cranium becomes ossified and fixed. Old people thus depend more on soul and spiritual links with the surrounding world. They are no longer able to transform outer events into inward qualities as well as they once did. Thus, a kind of animalization of the upper regions takes place.

It is possible for this animalization of the head structure to occur prematurely—during the middle period of life—but because we remain human despite such a tendency, we do not encounter external symptoms. Rather, we must look for certain changes in the soul realm. If the characteristic relationship of the older person to the outer world manifests prematurely—and this can happen even during childhood—a person’s experiences is drawn too much into the physical system, since the general flexibility of the rest of the human organization, typical of the younger age, naturally retains the upper hand. In this case, a person will experience inwardly, and too early, a relationship to the outer world typical of old age. Interaction between inner and outer world would thus be linked too much to the physical organization, bringing about soul properties more like that in the animal world than in normal human beings.

One can say (if you want to express it in this way) that animals have the advantage of a certain instinct over human beings, an instinct that links them more directly and intimately to the environment than is true of the normal human being. It is not simply a myth, but completely reflects the peculiarities of animal life, that certain animals will leave a place that is in danger of a natural catastrophe. Animals are gifted with certain prophetic instincts of self-preservation. It is also true that animals experience far more intensely the changing seasons than do human beings. They can sense the approaching time for migration, because they have an intimate and instinctive relationship with the environment. If we could look into an animal’s soul, we would find—although entirely unconsciously—an instinctive wisdom of life that manifests as the animal’s ability to live entirely within the manifold processes and forces of nature.

Now, if a person falls victim to encroaching age too early, this animal-like instinctive experience of the surroundings begins to develop, though in a sublimated form because it is lifted into the human sphere. Lower forms of clairvoyance, such as telepathy, telekinesis and so on—described correctly or wrongly—occur abnormally in human life and are simply the result of this premature aging in the central period of life. When this process of aging occurs at the proper time, people experience it in a healthy way, whereas if it appears in the twenties, a person gains clairvoyance of a low order. The symptoms of premature aging represent an abnormality in life that does not manifest outwardly but in a more hidden way. If these forms of lower clairvoyance were studied from the aspect of premature aging, a people would gain far deeper insight into these phenomena. This is possible, however, only when people observe life in a more realistic way. It is not good enough to investigate what we see with our eyes at the present moment. People must learn to recognize indications in these symptoms of a time shift from later to earlier stages of life.

We will see in the next few days how healing processes can occur through exact insight into human nature. It is possible that a kind of animalization could manifest not as an outwardly visible aging process but as a close, instinctive relationship to the environment encroaching on the lower regions of the human being and otherwise characteristic of an animal. The resulting phenomena of telepathy, telekinesis, and so on do not become less interesting because they are recognized for what they really are—the intrusion of a later stage of life upon an earlier, not manifestations of the spirit world. By developing time consciousness, we can fathom the very depths of human nature. To live in the dimension of time is to survey the course of time until we can see into both the past and future from the present moment.

You can get a sense of how present-day observation (though externally it may appear otherwise) is very remote from this more inward means of observation, which is more concurrent with time and its flow. Inadequate interpretation of what we encounter in life is the result of modern methods of observation. Contemporary scientific explanations and their effects on life are full of anemic interpretations.

Looking at the course of human life, we discover that the opposite of what we just described can also happen when childishness is carried into maturity. It is characteristic of children that they not only experience the external world less consciously than adults, but their experiences are also much more intimately connected with metabolic changes. When children see colors, their impressions strongly affect the metabolic processes; a child takes in outer sensory impressions all the way into the metabolism. It is not a mere metaphor to say that children digest their sensory impressions, because their digestion responds to all of their outer experiences. An old person develops certain animal characteristics within the physical, but a child’s entire life is filled with a sensitivity toward the vegetative organic processes that also affect the child’s soul life. Unless we are aware of this, we cannot understand a child’s nature.

In later years, human beings leave the digestive and metabolic processes more or less on their own; experiences of the external world are more independent of those processes. They do not allow their soul and spiritual reactions toward the outer world to affect the metabolism to the extent that a child does. The response of adults to their surroundings is not accompanied by the same liveliness of glandular secretion as in children.

Children take in outer impressions as if they were edible substances, but adults leave their digestion to itself, and this alone makes them adults under normal circumstances. But there are cases where certain vegetative and organic forces, which are properly at work during childhood, continue to work in an adult, affecting the psyche as well. In this case, other abnormal symptoms are also liable to occur. An example will make this clear. Imagine, for example, a girl who comes to love a dog that has made a deep impression on her nature. If she has carried childishness into later life, this tenderness will work right into the metabolism. Organic processes that correspond to her feelings of affection will be established. In this situation, digestive processes occur not only after eating or as the result of normal physical activities, but certain areas within the digestive system will develop a habit of secreting and regenerating substances in response to the strong emotions evoked by the love for the animal. The dog will become indispensable to the well-being of her vegetative system. And what happens if the dog dies? The connection in outer life is broken; the organic processes continue by force of inertia, but they are no longer satisfied. Her feelings miss something they had gotten used to, and inner troubles and strange disturbances may follow. A friend may suggest getting a new dog to restore the previous state of health, since the inner organic processes would again find satisfaction through external experiences. We will see later, however, that there are better ways to cure such an abnormality, but anyone may reasonably try to solve the problem this way.

There are of course many other examples, less drastic than a deep affection for a dog. If an adult has not outgrown certain childhood forces that absorb external impressions into the digestive system, and if that adult can no longer satisfy this abnormal habit, certain cravings within the vegetative organism will result. But there are other things that may have been loved and lost that cannot be replaced; then a person remains dissatisfied, morose, and psychosomatic. One must try to find the true causes of the seemingly inexplicable symptoms that arise from the depths of the unconscious. There are people who can sense what needs to be done to alleviate suffering caused by unsatisfied emotions that affect inner organic processes. They manage to coax and to bring to consciousness what the patient wants to recall, and in this way they can help a great deal.

Because of the present condition of our civilization, there are many who have not progressed from childhood to adulthood in the normal way, and the ensuing symptoms, both light and serious, have been widely noted. Whereas this led naturally to conversations in ordinary life among helpful, interested people, the situation has stimulated—in many respects rightly so—psychological research, and a new scientific terminology has sprung up. The patient’s psyche is examined through investigation of dreams or by freely or involuntarily giving oneself away. In this way, unfulfilled urges arise from the subconscious into consciousness. This new branch of science is called psychology or psychoanalysis, the science of probing the hidden regions of the soul. However, we are not dealing with “hidden regions of the soul,” but with the remains of vegetative organic processes left behind and craving satisfaction. When thwarted desires have been diagnosed, one can help patients readapt, and here lies the value of psychoanalysis.

When judging these things, anthroposophy, or spiritual science, finds itself in a difficult position. It has no quarrel with the findings of natural science; on the contrary, spiritual science is quite prepared to recognize and accept whatever remains properly within its realm. Similarly, spiritual science accepts psychoanalysis within its proper limits. But spiritual science tries to see all problems and questions within the widest context, encompassing the entire universe and the whole human being. It feels it is necessary to broaden the arbitrary restrictions laid down by natural science, which even today often investigates in an unprofessional and superficial way. Anthroposophy has no wish and no intention to quarrel and only puts what is stated in a lopsided way into a wider perspective. Yet this approach is distasteful and unacceptable to those who prefer to wear blinders, and, consequently, furious attacks are made against anthroposophy. Spiritual science must defend itself against an imbalanced attitude, but it will never be aggressive. This has to be said regarding the present currents of thought, as we find in psychoanalysis.

A person may draw the last period of life too much into middle age and, with it, experience abnormal relationships with the external world, manifesting as lower forms of clairvoyance, such as telepathy. In this case, one’s horizon extends beyond the normal human scope in an animal-like fashion. It is important to distinguish the two opposing situations, since a person may also move in the other direction by pushing what properly belongs to childhood into later periods of life. As a result, one becomes enmeshed too strongly with the physical organism, with the result that organic surges swamp the psyche, causing disturbances and inner abnormalities. Such a person suffers from a relationship that is too close to one’s own organic system. This relationship has been diagnosed by psychoanalysis, which should nevertheless direct its attention toward the human organs to understand the roots of this problem.

If we desire a comprehensive knowledge of the human being, it is absolutely necessary to include the entire human life between birth and death in our considerations. It is essential to focus on the effects of passing time and to inwardly live with and experience those effects. Spiritual science pursues knowledge of the whole human being by penetrating the suprasensory, using its own specific methods and fully considering the time element, which is generally ignored completely in our present stage of civilization. Imagination, inspiration and intuition, which are the specific methods of spiritual scientific work, must be built on an experience of time.

Imagination, inspiration and intuition, the ways leading to suprasensory cognition, should not be seen as faculties beyond ordinary human life but as a continuation, or extension, of ordinary human capacities. Spiritual science dismisses the bias that maintains we can attain this sort of cognition only through some special grace; spiritual science holds that we can become conscious of certain faculties lying deep within us and that we have the power to train them. The usual kind of knowledge gotten through modern scientific training and in ordinary practical life must certainly be transcended.

What happens when we try to comprehend the world around us—not as scientifically trained specialists but as ordinary people? We are surrounded by colors, sounds, varying degrees of warmth, and so on, all of which I would like to call the tapestry of the sensory world. We surrender to these sensory impressions and weave them without thoughts. If you think about the nature of memories rising in your soul, you will find that they are the result of sensory impressions woven into our thoughts. Our whole life depends on imparting this texture of sensory impressions and thoughts to our soul life. But what really happens? Look at the diagram. Let the line a to b represent the tapestry of the sensory world around us, consisting of colors, sounds, smells, and so on. We give ourselves up to our observation, this tapestry of the senses, and weave its impressions with our thinking (indicated here by the wavy line).

When living in our senses, we unite all our experiences with our thoughts. We interpret the sensory stimuli through thinking. But when we project our thoughts into our surroundings, this tapestry becomes a barrier for us, a metaphorical canvas upon which we draw and paint all our thoughts, but which we cannot penetrate. We cannot break through this incorporeal wall with ordinary consciousness. As the thoughts are stopped by this canvas, they are inscribed upon it.

The only possibility of penetrating this wall is gained by raising one’s consciousness to the state of imagination through systematic and regular meditation exercises. It is equally possible to undergo an inner training in meditation as a method of research in an outwardly directed study of chemistry or astronomy. If you read my book How to Know Higher Worlds and the second part of An Outline of Esoteric Science, you can convince yourselves that, if you want to reach the final goal, the methods for such meditative exercises are certainly not simple and less time-consuming than those needed to study astronomy or chemistry. On the other hand, it is relatively easy to read books giving information about such exercises and, using one’s common sense, examine the truths of spiritual scientific research. You do not have to take these on authority. Even if you cannot investigate the spiritual world yourself, it is possible to test given results by studying the specific methods employed.

Meditative practice is based on freeing ourselves from outer sensory impressions. In meditation, we do not surrender to sensory impressions, but to the life of thinking. However, by dwelling again and again in meditation on a given thought or mental image—one that is easily and fully comprehensible—we gradually bring our life of thought to such a strength and inner substance that we learn to move in it with the same certainty we have in our sensory impressions. You have all experienced the difference between the striking effects of outer sensory impressions and the rather limp and pale world of our thoughts during ordinary consciousness. Sensory impressions are intense and alive. We give ourselves up to them. Thoughts, on the other hand, turn pale and become abstract and cold. But the very core of meditating is learning, through regular practice, to imbue thoughts with the same intensity and life that normally fills our sensory experiences. If we succeed in grasping a meditation with the same inner intensity that we experience through the stimulus of a color, for example, then we have enlivened, in the right way, the underlying thoughts of a meditation. But all this must happen with the same inner freedom employed in the normal weaving of thoughts or ordinary sense perceptions. Just as we do not allow ourselves to be taken over by nebulous moods or mystical dreaming, or become fatuous visionaries when observing the external world, we must not lose our firm ground when meditating in the right way. The same sane mood with which we perceive the world around us must also take hold when we meditate.

This attitude of taking outer sensory perceptions as an example for one’s conduct when meditating is characteristic of the anthroposophic method. There are plenty of vague mystics who disparage sensory perceptions as inferior and advise leaving them behind. They claim that, when you meditate, you should reach a state of mystic dreaming. The result, of course, is a condition of half sleep, certainly not meditation. Spiritual science pursues the opposite goal, considering the quality, intensity, and liveliness of sensory perception as an example to be followed until the meditator moves inwardly with the same freedom with which one encounters sensory perceptions. We need not fear we will become dried up bores. The meditative content (which we experience objectively in meditative practice) saves us from that. Because of the inner content that we experience while freeing ourselves from ordinary life, there is no need to enter a vague, trance-like state while meditating.

Correct meditation allows us to gain the ability to move freely in our life of thinking. This in turn redeems the thoughts from their previous abstract nature; they become image-like. This happens in full consciousness, just as all healthy thinking takes place. It is essential that we do not lose full consciousness, and this distinguishes meditation from a hallucinatory state. Those who give themselves up to hallucinations, becoming futile enthusiasts or visionaries, relinquish common sense; on the other hand, those who wish to follow the methods advocated here must make sure common sense accompanies all their weaving thought imagery. And what does this lead to? Though fully awake, we experience the pictorial quality of the dream world. The significant difference between imagination and dream images is that we are completely passive when experiencing the imagery of dreams. If they arise from the subconscious and enter our waking state, we can observe them only after they have occurred. When practicing imagination, on the other hand, we initiate them ourselves; we create images that are not mere fantasy, but differ in intensity and strength from the fantasy as do dream images. The main point is that we initiate the images ourselves, and this frees us from the illusion that they are a manifestation of the external world. Those given up to hallucinations, however, always believe that what comes to them represents reality, because they know that they did not create what they see. This is the cause of the deception. Those who practice imagination through meditation cannot possibly believe that the images they create represent external reality. The first step toward suprasensory cognition depends on freeing ourselves from the illusion that the images we have created—having the same intensity as those of the dream world—are real. This, however, is obvious, because the meditator remains fully aware of having initiated them in complete freedom. Only the insane would mistake them for outer reality.

Now, in the next step in meditation we acquire the ability to allow these images to vanish without a trace. This is not as easy as one might expect, because, unless the one meditating has created them in full freedom, the images become quite fascinating and fix themselves on the mind like parasites. One has to become strong enough to let such pictures disappear at will. This second step is equally important as the first. In ordinary life, we need the ability to forget; otherwise we would have to go through life with the total of all our memories. Similarly, the complete extinction of meditative images is as important as their initial creation.

When we have thoroughly practiced these exercises, we have done something to our soul life that might be compared to the strengthening of muscles through repeated bending and stretching. By learning to weave and form images and then to obliterate them—and all this is done in complete freedom of the will—we have performed an important training of the soul. We will have developed the faculty of consciously forming images that, under normal circumstances, appear only in dreams, during a state that escapes ordinary consciousness and is confined to the time between falling asleep and awaking. Now, however, this condition has been induced in full consciousness and freedom. Training in imagination means training the will to consciously create images and to consciously remove them from the mind. And through this, we acquire yet another faculty.

Everyone has this faculty automatically—not during sleep, but at the moments of awaking and falling asleep. It is possible that what was experienced between these two points in time comes to us as remnants of dreams, often experienced as though they come from the beyond. Naturally, it is equally possible that what we encounter on awaking surprises us so much that all memories of dreams sink below the threshold of consciousness. In general, we can say that, because dream imaginations are experienced involuntarily, something chaotic and erratic that normally lies beyond consciousness finds its way to us. If, while fully awake, we develop the ability of creating and of obliterating imaginations, we may reach a condition of emptied consciousness. This is like a new awakening, then, from beyond the tapestry of the sensory world; spiritual entities pass through the tapestry to reach us on paths smoothed by the meditation content (see the circle in the diagram). While thus persevering in emptied consciousness, we push through the barrier of the senses, and images come to us from beyond the sensory world, carried by inspiration. We enter the world beyond the sensory world. Through imagination, we prepare for inspiration, which involves the ability to experience consciously something that happens unconsciously at the moment of awaking. Right at the moment of awaking, something from beyond our waking soul life enters consciousness, so that something beyond the conscious sensory world enters us if, through imagination, we have trained our soul as described.

In this way, we experience the spiritual world beyond the world of the senses. The faculties of suprasensory cognition are extensions of those naturally given to us in ordinary life. It is one of the main tasks of spiritual science to train and foster the development of these higher faculties. And grasping the time element in human life is fundamental to such development.

If you look at the preparatory exercises for imagination, inspiration, and intuition as given in How to Know Higher Worlds or An Outline of Esoteric Science, you find that everything said there aims at one thing: learning to experience the flow of time. The human being goes through the various stages of experience in the world, first as a child, then as a mature person, and finally as an old person; otherwise, one may suffer from an abnormal overlap of one stage into the other. It is not imagination itself, but the meditative preparation, that should give the possibility of developing the full potential and of learning how to give ourselves to the world out of the fullness of life. To this end harmony must be brought about between the specific contributions to the world of childhood, middle age, and old age. These must flow together harmoniously into a worldview capable of reaching the spiritual world. Human beings in their wholeness, which includes the domain of time, must be actively engaged in work in the world. To achieve a worldview that reaches beyond the barriers of the sensory world, human beings must preserve the freshness of experience proper to youth; the clarity of thought and the freedom of judgment proper to the central period of life; and the power of loving devotion toward life that can reach perfection in old age. All these qualities are a necessary preparation for the proper development of imagination, inspiration, and intuition.

The lectures here published make in their substance a supplement to what Rudolf Steiner has given us in his book, ‘The Story of My Life’, and may be felt as forming a whole with it. Delivered with all the living flow of spoken word and narrative, they were not designed for a book; but the exceedingly important matter they contain, and the whole historic context, makes them a document of inestimable value, and not only for the Anthroposophist. He indeed learns to see in full light the conditions and circumstances of that movement to which he has attached himself; and so gains firm ground under his feet, through learning to recognize in these events a necessity that supersedes any sort of justificatory argument. But those people too, who otherwise know no more than the shallow judgments they hear uttered, or find printed in some reference book, may also be grateful for this occasion to acquire a real insight into the facts. Surely there must be an ever increasing number of human souls, who will eagerly seize such an opportunity to learn from personal experience that an answer can be found to those questions, which stand like sphinx-riddles before the inner eye, and that the way to the answer can be actually shown them.

No ground any longer exists for the eternal re-iteration in every paper and pamphlet, that the one salvation in mankind's desperate plight would he the appearance of a universal genius, one who should master all the multifarious branches of life and knowledge, co-ordinate and combine them, balance one with another, and thence new-create a civilization;—and that the only escape from uncertainty would be some breaking-through of the boundaries of knowledge,—but that this is impossible!

For this genius has been here amongst us; he has broken through the boundaries of knowledge. His work lies before us, and bears testimony that he has done so. No word of his, however intimately uttered, need shun the light; it can be thrown open to one and all. The moral power, the transcendent altitude of his whole life and. being shine forth from this work as luminously as the calm certainty of his all-embracing knowledge.

Why was it then that they shrank from no means to block and bar his way, to render him impotent by calumny, when mere silence no longer sufficed?

Why?—Because this age will not endure superiority, and hates it. Because it concedes no right of life to any-thing that transcends the common,—and thereby plays into the hands of those powerful organizations, whose interest it is to let nothing come to light which they themselves are not willing to give to mankind. The idol of the present day, materialistic science, is in their eyes more preferable. Those words still keep their truth, which Goethe dedicated to the Masters of Knowledge:

‘... What you call Knowing!’
‘Why, who dare give the child its proper name?
‘The few who had some knowledge of these things,
‘And, fool-like, set no guard on their full hearts,
‘Revealed their feelings, visions, to the herd,
‘—These from of old they crucified and burnt.’

No further explanation is needed for this hatred. It is the hatred that the world turns upon whatever is higher than itself. This hatred displays the face and works the works of the World's Adversary.

But now, when, the excesses of this hatred can scarcely be further surpassed; when the great messenger of human liberation is dead; when the base and selfish motives of the warfare on him have manifested themselves only too plainly,—there must now ever more and more come souls, who will desire to see further, to penetrate through all the rubbish and trace the process of the spiritual events, discover the source whence they emanated, and the first steps on the road. Those who are interested in the historic development of the movement will find in these pages the information they need, and will at the same time learn the self-evident explanation and very simple reason of what arose as a matter of course out of the existing circumstances: namely, the original association with that German society of theosophists who were looking about for a teacher possessed of knowledge. When someone is appealed to, and the accompanying conditions are accepted, why should he not go to the aid of those who call upon him? When he is solicited for guidance on the road, and when he never for a moment hesitates to make plain what this will mean for those who go along with him,—that it will mean completely changing old habits of mind, awaking to the demands of the times, developing a sense for the progress of evolution and for the mission of the Western World;—why then should one, who is secure of his own road, not take compassion on those who are groping leaderless, and point them the way to the Divine Leader and to their own liberation?

If Mrs. Besant, at the most critical moment of her life, when the ground failed beneath her feet, had not been blinded, all might yet have turned to good, and she might have found the missing bridge to the Christ, without needing to manufacture as substitute the little sham god who has now slipped through her hands. And with her, thousands in the Theosophical Society might have trod the road of inner deliverance.

On the Blavatsky question and its riddles, Rudolf Steiner alone has thrown light. For him, she meant no kind of stumbling block; for he saw the positive element in her work and influence, and knew how to direct this positive element into channels where, freed from all its aberrations, delusions and clogs, it could remain a fruitful factor of knowledge, without working harm. And thus Blavatsky, in her progress as an individuality, received her due meed of thanks, and had her Karma lightened. Her own inner self,—all that she was as honest soul and sturdy force,—will figure greater in history thus, than if she remained involved with the spiritualistic phenomena that represent the heavier weighted side of her Karma. It was difficult to make one's way to what one felt must be the true, inner core of her being, when one heard all the marvellous tales told about her by her intimate, as well as by her distant friends;—and so the present writer found in those days. Yet one received the impression of a quite peculiar power and big-ness from merely reading a few pages of Isis Unveiled or The Secret Doctrine, which were quite of a different calibre from anything in the whole collection of the Theosophical Society's writings. The key to this intricate character was given us by Rudolf Steiner; and although the reports of the year 1915 are very defective (for at that time we possessed no professional stenographer in Dornach), his lectures on this subject—despite their mutilations—will have to be published, in order to throw light on these puzzling phenomena.

H. P. Blavatsky was born in 1881. The centenary of her birthday falls in the present year; and one may imagine that many festivals and celebrations in honour of her memory will -be held by the theosophists in all countries. Blavatsky was a child of nature, with a temperament of great native vigour. She had suffered much under the conventionalisms, so foreign to her nature, of Anglo-American society; and to its representatives in turn she was merely a phenomenon, a semi-barbarian, not under-stood by any, the medium through which the border-world knocked at the door of the fast-closed world of materialism. What is more, she did not understand herself, and suffered horribly each time on awaking from states that eluded her consciousness. Those will do her memory best service, who interpret her in the light and connection of one who was involved with the first attempts of the occultists to break through the enchanted circle of materialism.—Not to let fall whatever has been accomplished, accompanied though it may be by mistakes and errors; but to rescue what is positive, and preserve it for the future;—this is the constant duty of every occultist who is spiritually mature; and this too is the light in which one must always understand that first association on the road, when the Anthroposophical Society kept company for a while with the Theosophical Society,—down to the day when Mrs. Besant would no longer tolerate any thwarting of her own personal aims.

Although Rudolf Steiner tells us in these lectures, that by the end of its second stage the anthroposophical movement had outgrown everything which had come over as a legacy from the Theosophical Society, yet still the fact remains, that the influx of new generations and of many theosophical members into our society has brought a constant recurrence of many previously outgrown and not very pleasing symptoms, which in the past he had applied himself with all severity to cure. It shows that people to-day are of the same make and kind as those who went before them, and that accordingly they must be expected to go through the same mistakes and the same nursery-epidemics,—only, unfortunately, with ever increasing self-assertiveness and greater determination to live-out their own peculiar bent. What, after all, were the faults which Rudolf Steiner so sharply censures in these lectures,—the adulation of Max Seiling (a little local episode), or Bhagavan Das (a mere whim of the hour),—compared to many phenomena that have made their appearance in the last few years? But he picked out such things as symptoms, to point out whither they lead, to lay bare the causes of these ever recurring signs of decay, and to show how societies may be wrecked when such things make their way into the leading circles. Of this last, he thought in those days there could be no question amongst us. But he left us too soon alone; and amongst those who had come too young, too soon to leader-ship, the old faults—humanly all-too-human—flamed up with double force.

It behoves us to come to self-recollection. Let us make ourselves out no better than we are. There is no need for shame-faced concealment of our faults; on the contrary; out of their darkness we must evoke the light that brings self-knowledge. Communal consciousness is hard to be won. The common ‘I’ can only grow up strong and firm amongst us on a soil of vigorous wakefulness, of will to active knowledge, of courage for truth. These things are not to be achieved in solitude and secrecy; they must be fought for and won in community. Honest mutual struggles will do us no harm, will gain us the respect of all well-wishers. And ill-wishers may look back and reflect what the Church went through and displayed in its communal life, notwithstanding all the strict discipline imposed from without; and what imperfections, what contradictions to its own ideals had there to be worked out in life! It will then be seen, that it is not the leader, not he who gives the impulse to a movement, who must be held responsible for the faults in the disciples of his doctrine, but the Species Homo, which needs many round-about roads and much rising and falling and oft-renewed climbing, before it can attain at last to its goal.

Anthroposophy is a way of education. The Anthroposophical Society certainly presents no model institute for the living demonstration of anthroposophic ideals. One might even say that in many respects it is a nursing-home; as is of course very natural in an age of sick and sorry humanity. There flock to it the halt and maimed of life, those crippled under the burden of the age. May we only have nursing-homes for the physically diseased? Is it not right, that there should be places, where human-beings may spiritually get upon their feet again? And this came to pass here in abundance. Letters there were in more than plenty and words of overflowing gratitude from people testifying, that through Anthroposophy and its Teacher they first had learnt to find life again worth living.—For people to find Anthroposophy, however, there had to be a society, where the work was carried on.

And so the Anthroposophical Society was a workshop; and a vast amount of work was done in it. Anthroposophy found means to bring fruit into all the branches of life, artistic, scientific, and practical, too. During the worst times of economic crisis, anthroposophists were very largely unsuccessful in carrying out what they had as an ideal in sight; but they had doubly strong obstacles to contend with. One must remember, that the people who flocked into the Society, and started working outwardly when the Society already had a name and stood for some-thing in the world, were people as the modern age has made them, not as the ideal of Anthroposophy would have them be; and so there were many, unquestionably, who succumbed again to the temptations and the practices of the day.

The young people who had been disappointed with their experiences in the organized ‘Youth-Movements’ and by what they failed to find there, not Only found here an answer to the problems that perplexed them, and not only sought to satisfy their aspirations in this new community Anthroposophy, but they also brought their own habits into the Society,—including much that they might have left behind them, to start in Anthroposophy afresh.

And so the Anthroposophical Society cannot yet be a model institute; it remains a place of education.—But does not mankind need places of education too, in the wider human sense, if it is to move onwards to a better future?

Turn the question then which way we will, the Society is a necessity. It must educate itself; and it must afford the possibility of being a place of education for mankind. The life-forces that have been laid in it, have strength to per-form this work, if people come together in it who are strong and capable and devoted,—people who know, that they must join together to work as a community for mankind in a larger sense, not to shut themselves off and indulge only in self-culture,—who know, that it would be but a thankless return to take what is given as a saving anchor for oneself alone; who know, that one takes with it also the obligation to pass this anchor on to others whose life's ship is in distress.

It is not possible, naturally, to educate or give instruction if in our education and instruction we are not able to sense inwardly the whole human being. For during the period of a child's development this whole man needs to be considered far more than later on. We know this whole man embraces the ego, the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body. These four members of our human nature are of course not subject to uniform development but unfold in quite different ways. We must distinguish accurately between the development of the physical and the etheric bodies and that of the astral body and ego. The outer signs of this differentiated development are furnished—as you know from the various hints I have given here or there—by the change of teeth and by that alteration in the human being which is announced by the change of voice accompanying sexual maturity in the male, appearing as clearly but in a different way in the female. The nature of this phenomenon in the female organism is fundamentally the same as in the man's change of voice, but it emerges in a broader way, not perceptible in a single organ only, as with the man, but spread more over the entire organism. You know that between the change of teeth and the change of voice or puberty lies the period of instruction with which we have to do preferably in elementary education. But the years that follow the change of voice (or what corresponds to it in the female organism) must also be given our close attention in education and teaching.

Let us call to mind what the change of teeth signifies. The change of teeth is the outer expression for the fact that in the child's organism up to then—that is, between birth and the second dentition—the physical and etheric bodies have been influenced strongly by the nerve-sense system, operating from above downward. The physical body and the etheric body are influenced most powerfully from the head until about the seventh year. These forces—particularly active through the years in which imitation plays such a major role—are concentrated so to speak in the head. And what happens formatively in the rest of the organism, in the trunk and limbs, takes place through rays proceeding from the head downward to the organism of trunk and limbs, to the physical and etheric bodies. What streams from the head into the whole of the physical and etheric bodies of the child, reaching the tips of his fingers and toes, this is soul activity, notwithstanding the fact that it proceeds from the physical body. It is the same soul activity that works in the soul later as intelligence and memory. It is only that later, after the change of teeth, the child's thinking begins to use his memories more consciously. The thorough modification of the child's soul life demonstrates that certain psychic forces, working earlier within the organism, are from his seventh year onward active in the child as forces of soul. The whole period up to the change of teeth, while the child is growing, is effected by the same forces that appear after the seventh year as forces of intelligence, as intellectual forces.

Here we have an interplay between soul and body that is quite real—by which the soul, on reaching the age of seven, emancipates itself from the body, is active no longer in the body but for itself. In the seventh year forces begin to be active, arising in the body anew as soul-forces, to work on and on into the next incarnation. Then it is that what streams upward from the body is thrust back, and conversely the forces shooting downward from the head are held in check. Thus during the time the teeth are changing, the most active of battles is taking place between forces striving downward from above and others springing upward from below. The change of teeth is the physical expression for this struggle between the two sets of forces—those that later appear in the child as his powers of understanding and intellect, and those that need to be used especially in drawing, painting and writing. We put all of these up-welling forces to use when we develop writing out of drawing, for what these forces really strive for is to pass over into sculptural activity, drawing, etc. These are the forces that have their termination at the change of teeth, having previously shaped the body of the child, the sculptural forces which we use later, when the second dentition is completed, to introduce the child to drawing and painting, etc. In the main these are forces planted in the child from the spiritual world in which the child's soul lived before conception. They are active first as bodily forces shaping the head and then from the seventh year onward as soul forces. Thus in the period after the seventh year we simply draw forth from the child for our authoritarian purposes, what the child had previously made unconscious use of in imitation, inasmuch as these forces had taken their course unconsciously within the body. If later on the child turns out to be a sculptor, a draughtsman or an architect (but a proper architect, one who works with forms), the reason is that such a man has the predisposition to retain in his organism somewhat more of the down-raying forces, to retain rather more of them in the head, so that later on these childhood forces are still raying downward. However, if they are not sustained, if with the change of teeth everything translates into the soul sphere, then we have children who have no talent for drawing, for the sculptural or for architecture—who could never become a sculptor.

The secret is this: such forces are related to what we have experienced between death and our new birth. We acquire the reverence we need in our teaching activity, something that can have a religious quality, if we raise this to consciousness: the forces I draw forth from the child around his seventh year, which I make use of when he learns drawing or writing—these are really furnished me by heaven. It is the spiritual world that sends these forces down—the child is the medium—and I am in fact working with forces directed down from the spiritual world. This reverence before the divine-spiritual, when it permeates my teaching, is actually a wonder-worker in teaching. If I have the feeling that I am in contact with forces that are unfolding down from the spiritual world, from the time before birth, if I have this feeling, it generates a deep reverence. And you will see that the presence of this feeling will accomplish more than all the intellectual speculation as to what you should do. The feelings that a teacher has are his most important teaching tools. And this reverence is something that works on the child with enormous formative effect.

Thus in what is happening to the child at the change of teeth we have something that is a direct transference of spiritual forces from the spiritual world through the child into the physical world.

Another process takes place during the years of puberty, although it has been preparing itself slowly throughout the cycle of years from seven to fourteen or fifteen. During this time something is stirring to life in the regions of the soul which are not already irradiated by the consciousness—for the consciousness is only now forming itself, and something is streaming into us continuously from the outer world unconsciously—something that is gradually emerging into consciousness wakens to life now, something that has irradiated the child from the outer world since his birth, that has collaborated in the building up of the child's body and has entered into the child, into his formative forces.

These are different forces again. Whereas the formative forces enter the head from within, these forces come now from outside and proceed from there down into the organism. These forces, working from the outer world through the head and into the body, forcing their way through the formative forces and sharing in what happens as the child's body is built up from the seventh year onward—I cannot characterize these otherwise than to say, they are the same forces that are active in speech and in music. They are forces taken in from the world.

Such forces as are of a musical kind are taken up more from the outer world, from the world outside of man, from the observation of nature and its processes, above all from observation of its rhythms and a-rhythms. A secret music pours through every natural occurrence—the earthly projection of the music of the spheres. In truth, a tone of this spheric harmony is incorporated in every plant, in every animal. This is true as well of the human body, but it lives no longer in human speech—that is to say, not in the expressions of the soul—yet most certainly in bodily structures and functions. All of this the child is taking in unconsciously, and for this reason are children musical to such a high degree. All of this they are taking up into their bodily organism. Whatever they experience of formed movement, of the linear, of the sculptural, this comes from within, proceeding from the head. Whatever, on the contrary, is taken up by the child as a configuration of tones or the content of language, this comes from outside. And against what is coming from outside works—but now somewhat later, around the 14th year—the spiritual element of music and language, developing gradually from within outward. This is compacted now, in the female in her entire organism, in the male more in the region of his larynx, bringing about the change of voice. All of this is caused by an element from within, bearing more the character of will, that is living itself out in battle with a willed element from outside. This struggle finds expression in the change of voice and what otherwise emerges at puberty. This is a battle between inner forces of music and language and outer musical-1inguistic forces.

The human being is basically up to the seventh year permeated more by the formative and less by musical forces, that is to say less by forces of music and language glowing through his organism. From the seventh year on, however, the activity of music and speech becomes particularly strong in the etheric body. Then the ego and astral body turn against this; a willed element from outside battles with a willed element from within, and this comes to visibility at puberty. The difference that exists between male and female has another outer manifestation in the difference of vocal pitch. The voice levels of a man and woman coincide only in part; the voice of the woman reaches higher, that of a man descends deeper into the bass. This corresponds precisely to the structure of the rest of the organism, formed out of the struggle between these forces.

These matters witness that in the life of the soul we have to do with something that also has a Share in the build-up of the body, but for quite definite purposes. All the abstract chatter you find today in books on psychology or in psychological discussions based on contemporary science, all the high-flown words about psychosomatic parallelism, are no more than a testimonial to the ignorance of our philosophers, who know nothing of the real relationship between the psychic and the bodily. For the soul is not related to the body in accordance with the nonsensical theories thought out by the psychosomatic parallelists. We are concerned with an influence of the soul in the body that is quite concrete, and then again with the reaction. Of the latter we are about to speak. Up to the seventh year the formative-structural works in collaboration with the musical lingual. This changes in the seventh year only insofar as from then on the relation between the musical-lingual on the one hand and the formative-structural on the other is a different one. But through the whole period of human life up to puberty such cooperation takes place between the formative-structural, proceeding from the head and having there its seat, and the musical-lingual, proceeding from the outer world, coming from outside, using the head as a point of entry to disperse itself throughout the organism.

From this we see that human speech too, but above all the musical element collaborates in the shaping of the human being. At first it helps form the man, and afterwards it stems itself, pausing at the larynx; it does not pass through this gate as before. Up to now it has been language which modified our organs, as deeply as into the skeletal system. A person who views a human skeleton with a true psycho-physical eye (and not with the purblind psycho-physical eye of today's philosophers) and focusses on the differentiation between a male and female skeleton, will see in the skeleton an incorporated musical achievement, played out in the interaction between the human organism and the outer world. The human skeleton can be understood figuratively thus: as if someone were to play a sonata and were then to preserve it by some sort of spiritual crystallisation process—in this way we would get the principle forms, the arrangement of forms in the human skeleton! This would also demonstrate for you the difference between man and animal. In an animal what is taken in of the lingual-musical element (very little of the lingual but very much of the musical) passes right through the animal, since it lacks in a certain way the human isolation that leads then to the change of voice. In the skeletal form of the animal we have a musical imprint too, but it is such that a musical coherence would be provided only if various skeletons were placed together as in a museum. The animal always manifests a one-sidedness in its structure.

These are matters we should consider carefully; they show us what feelings we should develop. If our reverence grows, as we cultivate our connection and intercourse with pre-natal forces, (as we have already characterized this) so do we gain more animation and enthusiasm in our teaching through immersing ourselves in the other human forces. A Dionysian element irradiates our musical and language instruction, while we acquire more of an apollonian element as we teach the plastic arts, painting and drawing. The instruction that has to do with music and speech we give with enthusiasm, the other with reverence.

The formative forces offer the stronger resistance; hence they are arrested as early as the seventh year. The other forces, counteracting more weakly, are not retarded before the fourteenth year. This you must not take to mean physical strength or weakness; meant is the answering pressure that is called forth. Since the formative forces, being stronger, would overrun the human organism, the counter pressure is greater. For this reason they must be arrested earlier, whereas the other forces are allowed to remain longer in the organism by a higher guidance. The human being is permeated longer by the musical than by the formative forces.

If you allow this insight to ripen in you and have the necessary enthusiasm for it, then you will be able to say: with what you permit to resound in the child in the way of language and music, precisely in the elementary school years, when that battle is still present and you are working also upon his bodily nature and not merely on his soul—with this you are preparing what will work beyond death, what man carries with him beyond death. In essence it is to this we are contributing through everything we impart to the child in the way of music and language during the elementary years. And because we know we are working into the future in this way, this provides us with a certain enthusiasm. If we are dealing with the formative forces, on the other hand, then we are in touch with what already lay in the human being before birth, before conception; this gives us reverence. But with the other forces we are working into the future; we are combining our own forces with these, knowing that we are fertilizing the musical-linguistic germ with something that, after the physical aspects of language and music have been laid aside, works over into the future. Music is physical by being a reflection of the spheric in the air. The air serves as medium for the tones to become physical; the air in the larynx in turn renders speech physical. But it is the non-physical in the air of speech, the non-physical in the air of music, that unfolds its true effect only after death. We gain a certain enthusiasm for our teaching by this, knowing that these are the means by which we weave the future.

I believe the future of education will consist in this: teachers will no longer be spoken to in the manner of today, but only in ideas and inner pictures that are capable of translation into feelings. For nothing will be of greater importance than this, that we are able as teachers to develop in ourselves the necessary reverence and the necessary enthusiasm, so that we may teach with reverence and enthusiasm. Reverence and enthusiasm—these are the two hidden, fundamental forces that must lend spirit to the teacher's soul.

To help you understand the matter still better, I should just like to mention that the musical element is at home particularly in the astral body. After death a man still bears his astral body for a time; as long as he does so, until he lays it aside—you are familiar with this from my book Theosophy—there still exists in man after death a kind of recollection TIT is no more than a memory) of earthly music. Thus it is that the music a man absorbs during his life works on after death as a musical memory, and endures roughly until the time he lays his astral body aside. Then in the life after death the earthly music is transformed into the music of the spheres and remains as spheric music until some time before the new birth. It will bring the matter closer to your understanding, if you know that the music a person takes in here on earth plays a powerful role in fashioning his soul-organism after death. This is fashioned during the period of kamaloca. This is the positive side of kamaloca, and if we know this we are essentially in a position to ease for people what the Catholics call the fires of purgatory. Not, certainly, by removing their contemplation of it; this they must have, or they would remain imperfect, not perceiving the imperfect things they have done. But we introduce a possibility that the human being will be better formed in his next life, if he can have many memories of musical experiences during the time after death when he still has his astral body. This can be studied on a relatively inferior plane of spiritual experience. You need only wake up during the night after hearing a concert; you will become aware that you have experienced the whole concert once more before waking. Indeed, you experience it still better now, on awaking in the night after the concert; the experience is most accurate. Thus is the musical impressed into the astral body, where it remains in vibration; some thirty years after death it is still there. A musical impression remains active much longer than a vocal one. The spoken word, as such, we lose relatively soon after death; only its spiritual distillation remains behind. The musical is preserved as long as the astral body maintains itself.

The spoken word can be of great benefit to us after death, particularly if we have taken it in often in the form I now frequently describe as the art of recitation. I have naturally every reason to point this out, when in describing the art of recitation I say that these things cannot be grasped properly unless we take into account the typical course of the astral body after death. But we need to describe things the way I do in lectures on eurythmy. We have to talk to people as if speaking the most primitive of languages. And it is truly so—from the standpoint of the other side of the threshold, men here are actually like savages; only beyond the threshold are men really men. We only work our way out of our primitive standpoint when we work our way into the spiritual. To this we can attribute the fury of primitive people against our efforts, which is becoming increasingly evident.

Now I would like to draw your attention to a fact that must have our particular concern in an art of education and can be worked on there. In the struggle I first described, whose outer expression is the change of teeth, and in the later battle whose equivalent is the change of voice, a certain characteristic is to be noted: everything which proceeds downward from the head in the period before the seventh year takes the form of an attack on what is coming to meet it from within in the nature of up-building forces. And everything that works outward from within, rising up towards the head to counter the stream originating there, acts like a defence against this descending stream. The one has the appearance of an attack, the other, working from within outward, gives the appearance of a defence.

It is analogous again with the musical. What emerges from within has the appearance of an attack, and what passes through the head organisation from above on its way downward shows itself as defence. Were we not to have music, then truly frightful forces would rise up in a human being. I am fully convinced that up to the 16th and 17th centuries traditions from the ancient mysteries were at work, and that people in these times still wrote and spoke subject to the after effects of the mysteries, but no longer knowing the full significance of these traditions; also that in much appearing in relatively later times we simply have recollections of ancient mystery knowledge. Thus I have always been particularly moved by the words of Shakespeare: The man that hath no music in himself...is fit for treason, murder and deceit...let no such man be trusted.¹ It was imparted to pupils in the ancient mystery schools: what acts as an attack from within man, what must be warded off continuously, what is damned back for the sake of man's human nature—that is treason, murder and deceit, and it is the music working in man that counteracts it. Music is the means of defence against the Luciferic forces rising up out of the inner man: treason, murder, deceit. We all have treason, murder and deceit within us, and it is not for nothing that the world contains the musical-lingual element, apart from the pleasure it affords man. The world includes this element in order that man may become Man. We must naturally keep in mind that the teachers in the ancient mysteries spoke rather differently. Their expressions were more concrete. They would not have said: treason, murder, deceit (in Shakespeare this has already been toned down), but rather: serpent, wolf and fox. The serpent, the wolf, the fox—these are repelled from man's inner nature by the musical element. The teachers in the ancient mysteries would always have used animal forms to describe what is rising up out of man, what must first be transformed to become human. And thus it is that we gain the right sort of enthusiasm, when we see the treacherous serpent rising up out of the child and combat it with our instruction in music and language, or similarly deal with the murderous wolf and the deceitful fox or cat. This is what can permeate us with a proper, reasoned enthusiasm—not with the glowing, Luciferic enthusiasm that alone is acknowledged today. In sum, we must come to know: attack and defence.

There are two levels in man on which this warding-off takes place. The defence is first in himself, finding visibility in the seventh year with the change of teeth. Then further, through what he has taken in of music and language, is warded off what is trying to rise up in him. Both battlefields are within man, the musical-lingual more towards the periphery, toward the outer world, the architectonic—formative more toward the inner man, toward the inner world. But there is a third battlefield as well, and that lies on the boundary between the etheric body and the outer world. The ether body is always larger than the physical body, reaching out beyond it on all sides. There we find another such battlefield. Here the battle is taking place more under the influence of the consciousness, whereas the other two are fought more in the unconscious. The third and more conscious battle manifests when everything that has been converted in the interplay between man and the formative-architectonic on the one hand, between man and the musical-lingual on the other hand, works itself out, when this lives itself into the etheric body and thereby takes hold of the astral body, thus to be displaced more toward the periphery or outer boundary. This is where that which pours through the fingers when we draw or paint, etc. has its origin. This is what makes the art of painting one that operates more in the environment of man. The man who draws or sculpts must work more out of an inner disposition, the musician more out of a devotion to the world. That which lives itself out in painting and drawing, for which we train the child when we have him draw forms or lines, that is a battle taking place wholly on the surface, a battle in essence between two forces, the one working inward from outside, the other working outward from within. The force working outward from within actually tends to dissipate a person constantly, it tends to prolong the formative activity in him, not strongly but in a delicate way. This force has the tendency (I must express this more drastically than it really is, but in this exaggeration you will see what I mean), this force working outward from within would make our eyes bulge, give us the goitre, make our nose puff out and our ears grow—everything would swell outward. But another force is present, one which we suck in from the outer world, by which this swelling is counteracted. And if we make no more than a line—draw something—this is a striving, using a force working in from the outer world, to counter the force from within that is trying to deform us. This is a complicated reflex motion we execute as men in painting, in drawing, in graphic activity. When we draw or set up a canvas before us, a feeling is actually glimmering in our consciousness: you are not letting something outside of you in, you are making thick walls—or barbed wire—out of your forms and strokes. In drawings we actually have such barbed wire, by which we constrain something that tends to destroy us from within, retarding its influence. For this reason our drawing classes will have their best effect, if our study of drawing begins with man. If you study the kinds of movement the hand tends to make, if you have a child in a eurythmy class contour these forms or movements that he wants to make of himself, then you have controlled the line that would work destructively and its effect is no longer destructive. If you begin by having the children draw eurythmic gestures and then let drawing and finally writing develop their forms from these, then you have something that man's nature really wills, something related to the being and becoming in human nature. This too we should know when we do eurythmy: there is always in the etheric body a tendency to do eurythmy. This is simply something the etheric body does of its own accord. Eurythmy is no more than a reading of all of its movements from what the etheric body wants to do; these are actually the movements it is making, and it is only inhibited when we cause these movements to be executed by the physical body. By allowing the physical body to execute them, these movements are checked in the etheric body, but react upon us again, this time with a health-giving effect.

This has a certain visible effect on man, both in a hygienic- therapeutic and a didactic-pedagogical way. But such things can only be understood if we know that something, striving to manifest in the etheric body of man, must be restrained at the periphery by the movements of the physical body. In one case an element pertaining more to the will is restrained through eurythmy, in the other case a more intellectual element through drawing and painting. But fundamentally speaking, these are merely the two poles of one and the same process.

If now we feel our way into this process and incorporate it into our sensitive capacity as teacher, then we arrive at the third feeling we have need of. This feeling should really permeate us through the whole of our elementary school teaching, namely that the human being on entering the world is exposed to things from which we must actually be shielding him through our teaching.

Otherwise he would flow out too actively into the world. In fact, a man always has the tendency to become rachitic in soul, to make his limbs rachitic, to become a gnome. While we instruct and educate him, we are forming him. We sense this formative activity best when we follow the way a child makes a form drawing and then smooth it out somewhat, so that the result is not what the child wants and also not what I want, but the product of both. If I am able to do this—to improve what the child lets happen through his fingers, yet having my feeling, my sympathy flow into it and live with the child—then the best will come of it. If I now transform this into a feeling and permeate myself with it, its result is a shielding of the child from being drawn too strongly into the outer world.

We have to let the child grow slowly into the outer world; we dare not let this happen too quickly. We hold a protective hand over the child at all time; this is the third feeling.

Reverence, enthusiasm and a sense of guardianship—these three things actually form the panacea, the universal remedy in the soul of the teacher and educator. And if we wanted to create something externally, artistically, that as a group¹ would incorporate art and education, then we should have to create this:

Reverence for what has preceded the child's earthly existence. Enthusiasm in regarding what is to follow the child's life. A protective gesture over all that the child is experiencing.²

By such a fashioning of the teacher's nature, its outer manifestation would also come to its best expression.

In speaking of such matters, drawn from the intimacies of world-mysteries, we sense how unsatisfactory it must always be to make use of conventional language. If we are forced to say such things in ordinary language, then we have the feeling a supplementation is needed. Something is always there that would shift over from the more abstract lingual form to the artistic. For that reason I wanted to make this final point.

This is something we must learn. We have to learn to carry in us something of that future conviction, which will consist in this: the possession of science alone turns a man into something like a dwarf in soul and spirit. No one who is merely a scientist will have the urge to transform the scientific into the artistic, even in the shaping of his thoughts. But only through the artistic do we grasp the world. And we can always say, the man to whom nature reveals her secrets feels a hunger for art.

You should have the feeling, that insofar as you are simply a scientist you are a moon-calf. Only when you transform your organism of soul, spirit and body, only when your knowledge assumes an artistic form, do you become a man. In essence, developments in the future—and in these education will have to play its part—will lead from science to an artistic grasp of the world, from the moon-calf to the full human being.

• 1. This is not an exact quotation, but altered slightly to correspond with the teachings of ancient mystery schools
• 1. cf. in this regard the Group statue at the Goetheanum. Tr.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner accompanied each of these sentences with a gesture. An indication for the first is missing; for the second a guiding, pointing hand; for the third both hands raised with finger-tips inclined toward each other.

It affords me the deepest satisfaction to find that here in England you are ready to consider founding a school on Anthroposophical lines.¹ This may truly signify a momentous and incisive event in the history of Education. In pronouncing such words as these one may well be accused of lack of humility, but there really is something very special underlying all that is to come about for the Art of Education as based on Anthroposophy. And I am overjoyed that an impulse has arisen to form the first beginnings of a College of Teachers, teachers who from the depths of their hearts do indeed recognise the very special quality of what we call Anthroposophical Education. It is no fanatical idea of reform that prompts us to speak of a renewal in educational life, but we are urged to do so out of our whole feeling and experience of how mankind is evolving in civilisation and cultural life.

In speaking thus we are fully aware of the immense amount that has been done for education by distinguished persons in the course of the nineteenth century, and especially in the last few decades. But although all this was undertaken with the very best intentions and every possible method has been tried, we are bound to state that a real knowledge of the human being was lacking. These ideas about education arose at a time when no real knowledge of man was possible owing to the materialism that prevailed in all departments of life and indeed had done so since the fifteenth century. When, therefore, people expounded their ideas on educational reform they were building on sand or on something even less stable; rules of education were laid down based on all sorts of emotions and opinions as to what life ought to be. It was impossible to know man in his wholeness and to ask the question: How can we bring to revelation in a man what lies, god-given, within his nature after he has descended from pre-earthly life into earthly life? This is the kind of question which can be raised in an abstract way, but which can only be answered concretely on the basis of a true knowledge of man in body, soul and spirit.

Now this is how the matter stands for present-day humanity. The knowledge of the body is highly developed. By means of Biology, Physiology and Anatomy we have acquired a very advanced knowledge of the human body; but as soon as we wish to acquire a knowledge of the soul, we, with our present-day views, are confronted with a complete impasse, for everything relating to the soul is merely a name, a word. For even with regard to such things as thinking, feeling and willing we find no reality in the ordinary Psychology of today. We still use the words thinking, feeling and willing, but there is no conception of what takes place in the soul in reference to these things. What the so-called psychologists have to say about thinking, feeling and willing is in reality mere dilettantism. It is just as though a physiologist were to speak in a general way of the human lungs or liver, making no distinction between the liver of a child and that of an old person. In the science of the body we are very far advanced. No physiologist would fail to note the difference between the lungs of a child and the lungs of an old man, or indeed between the hair of a child and the hair of an old man. He will note all these differences. But thinking, feeling and willing are mere words which are uttered without conveying any sense of reality. For instance it is not known that willing, as it appears in the soul, is young, while thinking is old; that in fact thinking is willing grown old, and willing is a youthful thinking in the soul. Thus everything pertaining to the soul contains youthfulness and old age, existing in man simultaneously.

Naturally, even in the soul of a young child we have the old thinking and the young willing together at the same time. There they are contemporaneous, and indeed these things are realities. But today no one knows how to speak of these realities of the soul in the same way as he can of the realities of the body, so that as teachers of children we are quite helpless. Suppose you were a physician and yet were unable to distinguish between a child and an old man! You would of course feel helpless. But as there is no science of the soul the teacher is unable to speak about the human soul as the modern physician can of the human body. And as for the spirit, there is no such thing! One cannot speak of it, there are no longer even any words for it. There is but the single word “spirit,” and that does not convey much. There are no other words in which to describe it.

In our present-day life we cannot therefore venture to speak of a knowledge of Man. Here one may easily feel that all is not well with our education; certain things must be improved upon. Yes, but how can we improve matters, if we know nothing at all of Man? Therefore all the ideas for the improvement of education may be inspired by the best will in the world, but they possess no knowledge of Man.

This can even be noticed in our own circles. For it is Anthroposophy which at the present time can help men to acquire this knowledge of man. I am not saying this from any sectarian or fanatical standpoint but it is so that he who seeks knowledge of man must find it in Anthroposophy. It is obvious that knowledge of the human being must be the basis for a teacher's work; that being so, he must acquire this knowledge for himself, and the natural thing will be that he acquires it through Anthroposophy. If, therefore, we are asked what the basis of a new method of education should be, our answer is: Anthroposophy must be that basis. But how many people there are, even in our own circles, who try to disclaim Anthroposophy as much as possible, and to propagate an education without letting it be known that Anthroposophy is at the back of it.

There is an old German proverb which says: Please wash me but don't make me wet! Many projects are undertaken in this spirit but we must above all both speak and think truthfully. So if anyone asks you how to become a good teacher you must say to him: Make Anthroposophy your foundation. You must not deny Anthroposophy, for it is only by this means that you can acquire your knowledge of Man.

We have no knowledge of Man in our present cultural life. We have theories, but no living insight, either into the world, life or men. A true insight will lead to a true practice in life, but we have no such practical life today. Do you know who are the most unpractical people at the present time? It is not the scientists, for although they are clumsy and ignorant of life, these faults can be clearly seen in them. But in those who are the worst theorists and who are the least practical in life these things are not observed. These are the so-called practical persons, the commercial and industrial men and bankers, the men who rule the practical affairs of life with theoretical thoughts. A bank today is entirely composed of thoughts arising from theories. There is nothing practical in A; but people do not notice this, for they say: It must be so, that is the way practical people work. So they adapt themselves to it, and no one notices the harm that is really being done in life because it is all worked in so unpractical a way. The “practical life” of today is absolutely unpractical in all its forms.

This will only be noticed when an ever increasing number of destructive elements enter our civilisation and break it up. If this goes on the World War will have been nothing but a first step, an introduction. In reality the World War arose out of this unpractical thinking, but that was only an introduction. The point now at stake is that people should not remain asleep any longer, more particularly in the domain of teaching and education. Our task is to introduce an education which concerns itself with the whole man, body, soul and spirit; and these three principles should be known and recognised.

Now in so short a course as that to be given here, we can only speak of the most important aspects of body, soul and spirit, in such a way as will give a direction to education and teaching. That is what we shall do. But the first requirement, as will be seen from the start, is that my hearers shall really endeavour to direct their observation, even externally, to the whole man.

How are the basic principles of education composed in these days? The child is observed, and then we are told, the child is like this or like that, and must learn something. Then one thinks how best to teach so that the child can learn such and such a thing quickly. But what is a child, in reality? A child remains a child for at most twelve years, or possibly longer, but that is not the point. The point is that he must always be thought of as becoming an older human being some day. Life as a whole is a unity, and we must not only consider the child but the whole of life; we must look at the whole human being.

Suppose I have a pale child in the school. A pale child should be an enigma to me, a riddle to be solved. There may be several reasons for his pallor, but the following is a possible one. The child may have come to school with some colour in his cheeks, and have become pale under my treatment of him. I must admit this, and be able to judge as to why he has become pale; I may perhaps come to see that I have given this child too much to learn by heart. I may have worked his memory too hard. If I do not admit this possibility, if I am a short-sighted teacher, having the idea that a method must be carried through regardless of whether the child grows rosy or pale thereby, that the method must just be persevered with, then the child will remain pale.

If, however, I were able to observe this same child at the age of fifty, I should probably find him suffering from terrible sclerosis or arterial hardening, the cause of which will be unknown. This is the result of my having overloaded the memory of the child when he was eight or nine years old. For you see, the man of fifty and the child of eight or nine belong together, they are one and the same human being. We must know what the result will be, forty or fifty years later, of our management of the child; for life is a unity, it is all connected. It is not enough merely to know the child, we must know the human being.

Again, I take great trouble to give a class as good definitions as I can, so that the concepts shall be firmly grasped, and the child will know: this is a lion, that is a cat, and so on. But is the child to retain these concepts to the day of his death? In our present age there is no feeling for the fact that the soul too must grow! If I furnish a child with a concept that is to remain “correct” (and “correctness” is of course all that matters!), a concept which he is to retain throughout his life, that is just as though I bought him a pair of shoes when he was three years old, and each successive year had shoes made of the same size. The child will grow out of them. This however is something that people notice and it would be considered brutal to try and keep his feet small enough to go on wearing the same sized shoes! Yet this is what we are doing with the soul. We furnish the child with ideas which do not grow with him. We give him concepts which are intended to be permanent; we worry him with fixed concepts that are to remain unchanged, whereas we should be giving him concepts capable of expansion. We are constantly squeezing the soul into the ideas we give the child.

These are some of the ways in which we may begin to answer the challenge that in education we must take the whole human being into consideration, the growing, living human being, and not just an abstract idea of man.

It is only when we have the right conception of man's life as a connected whole that we come to realise how different from each other the various ages are. The child is a very different being before shedding its first teeth from what it becomes afterwards. Of course, you must not interpret this in crudely formed judgments, but if we are capable of making finer distinctions in life, we can observe that the child is quite different before and after the change of teeth.

Before the change of teeth we can still see quite clearly at work the effects of the child's habits of life before birth or conception, in its pre-earthly existence in the spiritual world. The body of the child acts almost as though it were spirit, for the spirit which has descended from the spiritual world is still fully active in a child in the first seven years of its life. You will say: A fine sort of spirit! It has become quite boisterous; for the child is rampageous, awkward and incompetent. Is all this to be attributed to the spirit belonging to his pre-earthly life? Well, my dear friends, suppose all you clever and well-brought-up people were suddenly condemned to remain always in a room having a temperature of 144° Fahrenheit? You couldn't do it! It is even harder for the spirit of the child, which has descended from the spiritual worlds, to accustom itself to earthly conditions. The spirit, suddenly transported into a completely different world, with the new experience of having a body to carry about, acts as we see the child act. Yet if you know how to observe and note how each day, each week, each month, the indefinite features of the face become more definite, the awkward movements become less clumsy and the child gradually accustoms himself to his surroundings, then you will realise that it is the spirit from the pre-earthly world which is endeavouring to make the child's body gradually more like itself. We shall understand why the child is as he is, if we observe him in this way, and we shall also understand that it is the descended spirit which is acting as we see it within the child's body.

Therefore for one who is initiated into the mysteries of the spirit there is nothing that can fill him with such wonder and delight as to observe a little child. In so doing one learns not of the earth, but of heaven; and this not only in the so-called “good children.” In their case, as a rule, the bodies have already become heavy, even in infancy. The spirit cannot properly take hold of the body; such children are quiet; they do not scream and rush about, they sit still and make no noise. The spirit is not active within them, because their bodies offer such resistance. It is very often the case that the bodies of the so-called good children offer resistance to the spirit.

In the less well-behaved children who make a great deal of healthy noise, who shout properly, and give a lot of trouble, the spirit is active, though of course in a clumsy way, for it has been transported from heaven to earth; but the spirit is active within them. It is making use of the body. We may even regard the wild screams of a child as most enthralling, simply because we thereby experience the martyrdom the spirit has to endure when it descends into a child-body.

Yes, my dear friends, it is easy to be a grown-up person—easy for the spirit, I mean, for the body has then been made ready, it no longer offers the same resistance. It is quite easy to be a full-grown person but extremely difficult to be a child. The child himself is not aware of this because his consciousness is not yet awake. It is still asleep, but if the child possessed the consciousness he had before descending to earth he would soon notice this difficulty: if the child were still living in this pre-earthly consciousness his life would be a terrible tragedy, a really terrible tragedy. For you see, the child comes down to earth; before this he has been accustomed to a spiritual substance from which he drew his spiritual life. He was accustomed to deal with that spiritual substance. He had prepared himself according to his Karma, according to the result of previous lives. He was fully contained within his own spiritual garment, as it were. Now he has to descend to earth. I should like to speak quite simply about these things, and you must excuse me if I speak of them as I would if I were describing the ordinary things of the earth. One can speak of them thus because they are so. Now when a human being is to descend, he must choose a body on the earth.

And indeed this body has been prepared throughout generations. Some father and mother had a son or a daughter, and these again a son or a daughter, and so on. Thus through heredity a body is produced which he must now occupy. He must draw into it and dwell therein; but in so doing he is suddenly faced with quite different conditions. He clothes himself in a body that has been prepared by a number of generations.

Of course, even from the spiritual world the human being can work on the body so that it may not be altogether unsuitable, yet as a rule the body received is not so very suitable after all. For the most part one does not fit at all easily into such a body. If a glove were to fit your hand as badly as the body generally fits the soul, you would discard it at once. You would never think of putting it on. But when you come down from the spiritual world needing a body, you just have to take one; and this body you retain until the change of teeth. For it is a fact that every seven or eight years our external physical substance is completely changed, at least in the essentials though not in all respects. Our first teeth for instance are changed, the second set remain. This is not the case with all the members of the human organism; some parts, even more important than the teeth, undergo change every seven years as long as a man is on the earth. If the teeth were to behave in the same way as these we should have new teeth at seven, fourteen, and again at twenty-one years of age, and so on, and there would be no dentists in the world.

Thus certain hard organs remain, but the softer ones are constantly being renewed. In the first seven years of our life we have a body which is given to us by outer nature, by our parents and so on; it is a model. The soul occupies the same relation to this body as an artist to a model which he has to copy. We have been gradually shaping the second body out of the first body up to the change of teeth. It takes seven years to complete the process. This second body which we ourselves have fashioned on the model given us by our parents only appears at the end of the first seven years of life, and all that external science says today about heredity and so forth is mere dilettantism compared to the reality. In reality we receive at birth a model body which is there with us for seven years, although during the very first years of life it begins to die out and fall away. The process continues, until at the change of teeth we have our second body.

Now there are weak individualities who are weakly when they descend to earth; these form their second body in which they live after the change of teeth, as an exact model of the first. People say that they take after their parents by inheritance, but this is not true. They make their own second body according to the inherited model. It is only during the first seven years of our life that our body is really inherited, but naturally we are all weak individualities and we copy a great deal. There are, however, also strong individualities descending to earth, and they too inherit a good deal in the first seven years. That one can see in the teeth. Their first teeth are still soft and subject to heredity, but when children have good strong second teeth that can crack things easily, then they are strong individualities, developing in the proper way. There are children who at ten years of age are just like children of four—mere imitators. Others are quite different, the strong individuality stirs within them. The model is used, but afterwards they form an individual body for themselves.

Such things must be noted. All talk of heredity will not lead you far unless you realise how matters stand. Heredity, in the sense in which it is spoken of by science, only applies to the first seven years of man. After that age, whatever he inherits he inherits of his own free will, we might say; he imitates the model, but in reality the inherited part is thrown off with the first body at the change of teeth.

The soul nature which came down from the spiritual world is very strong in us, and it is clumsy at first because it has to become accustomed to external nature. Yet in reality everything about a child, even the worst naughtiness, is very fascinating. Of course we must follow the conventions to some extent and not allow all naughtiness to pass unreproved; but we can see better in children than anywhere else how the spirit of man is tormented by the demons of degeneracy which are there in the world. The child has to enter a world into which he so often does not fit. If we were conscious of this process, we should see what a terribly tragic thing it is. When one knows something of Initiation, and is able to see consciously what lays hold of this body in the child, it really is terrible to see how he must find his way into all the complications of bones and ligaments which he has to form. It really is a tragic sight. The child himself knows nothing of this, and that is a good thing, for the Guardian of the Threshold protects him from any such knowledge.

But the teacher should know of it. He must look on with the deepest reverence, knowing that here a being whose nature is of God and the spirit has descended to earth. The essential thing is that we should know this, that we should fill our hearts with this knowledge, and from this starting point undertake our work as educators.

There are great differences between the manner of man which one is in the spiritual-soul life before descending to earth, and that which one has to become here below. The teacher should be able to judge of this because he has before him the child in whom are the after-effects of the spiritual world. Now there is one thing which the child has difficulty in acquiring, because the soul had nothing of this in the spiritual life.

On earth man is very little able to direct his attention to the inner part of his body; that is only done by the natural scientists and the physicians. They know exactly what goes on inside man within the limits of his skin, but you will find that most people do not even know exactly where their heart is! They generally point to the wrong place, and if in the course of his social life today it were required of a man to explain the difference between the lobes of the right and left lungs, or to describe the duodenum, very curious answers would be given. Now before he comes down into earthly life a man takes but little interest in the external world, but he takes so much the more interest in what he may call his spiritual inner being. In the life between death and a new birth man's interests are almost entirely centred on his inner spiritual life. He builds up his Karma in accordance with experiences from previous earth-lives and this he develops according to his inner life of spirit. This interest which he takes in it is very far removed from any earthly quality, very far removed from that longing for knowledge which, in its one-sided form, may be called inquisitiveness. A longing for knowledge, curiosity, a passionate desire for knowledge of the external life was not ours before our birth or descent to earth; we did not know it at all. That is why the young child has it only in so slight a degree.

What he does experience, on the other hand, is to live right in and with his environment. Before descending to earth we live entirely in the outer world. The whole world is then our inner being and there exist no such distinctions as outer and inner world. Therefore we are not curious about what is external, for that is all within us. We have no curiosity about it, we bear it within us, and it is an obvious and natural thing which we experience.

So in the first seven years of life a child learns to walk, to speak and to think, out of the same manner of living which he had before descending to earth. If you lay stress on arousing curiosity in a child with regard to some particular word, you will find that you thereby entirely drive out the wish he had to learn that same word. If you count on a longing for knowledge or curiosity you drive out of the child just what he ought to have. You must not reckon on a child's curiosity, but rather on something else, namely that the child becomes merged into you as it were, and you really live in the child. All that the child enjoys must live and be as though it were his own inner nature. You must make the same impression on the child as his own arm makes on him. You must, so to say, be only the continuation of his own body. Then later, when the child has passed through the change of teeth and gradually enters the period between the seventh and fourteenth years, you must observe how little by little curiosity and a longing for knowledge begin to show themselves; you must be tactful and careful, and pay attention to the way in which curiosity gradually stirs into being within him.

The small child is still but a clumsy little creature, who does not ask questions, and one can only make an impression upon him by being something oneself. He questions his environment as little as a sack of flour. But just as a sack of flour will retain any impressions you make upon it (especially if it is well ground), so too does the little child retain all his impressions, not because he is curious, but because you yourself are really one with him and make impressions on him as you would do with your fingers on a sack of flour.

It is only at the change of teeth that the situation alters. You must now notice the way the child begins to ask questions. “What is that? What do the stars see with? Why are the stars in the sky? Why have you a crooked nose, grandmother?” The child now asks all these questions; he begins to be curious about the things around him. You must have a delicate perception and note the gradual beginnings of curiosity and attention which appear with the second teeth. These are the years in which these qualities appear and you must be ready to meet them. You must allow the child's inner nature to decide what you ought to be doing with him; I mean, you must take the keenest interest in what is awakening with the change of teeth.

A very great deal is awakening then. The child is curious, but not with an intellectual curiosity for as yet it has no reasoning powers; and anyone who appeals to the intellect of a child of seven is quite on the wrong lines; but it has fantasy and this it is with which we must deal. It is really a question of developing the concept of a kind of “milk of the soul” For you see, after birth the child must be given bodily milk. This constitutes its food and every other necessary substance is contained in the milk that the child consumes. And when he comes to school at the age of the changing of the teeth it is again milk that you must give him, but now, milk for the soul. That is to say, your teaching must not be made up of isolated units, but all That the child receives must be a unity; when he has gone through the change of teeth he must have “soul milk.” If he is taught to read and write as two separate things it is just as though his milk were to be separated chemically into two different parts, and you gave him one part at one time and the other at another. Reading and writing must form a unity. You must bring this idea of “soul milk” into being for your work with the children when they first come to school.

This can only come about if, after the change of teeth, the children's education is directed artistically. The artistic element must be in it all. Tomorrow I will describe more fully how to develop writing out of painting and thus give it an artistic form, and how you must then lead this over artistically to the teaching of reading, and how this artistic treatment of reading and writing must be connected, again by artistic means, with the first simple beginnings of Arithmetic. All this must thus form a unity. Such things as these must be gradually developed as “soul milk” which we need for the child when he comes to school.

And when he reaches the age of puberty he will require “spiritual milk.” This is extremely difficult to give to present-day humanity, for we have no spirit left in our materialistic age. It will be a difficult task to create “spiritual milk,” but if we cannot succeed in creating it we shall have to leave our boys and girls to themselves at the so-called hobbledehoy stage, for there is no “spiritual milk” in our present age.

I just wanted to say these things by way of introduction and to give you a certain direction of thought; tomorrow we will continue these considerations and go more into details.

• 1. “The New School,” Streatham Hill, London, S.W.16, was opened in January 1925. In 1935 the name was changed to “Michael Hall.” In 1945 the school was moved to Kidbrooke Park, Forest Row, Sussex.

Yesterday I wanted to show how we must come to an education, steeped in artistic form. I drew attention to how in earlier times the teacher took his start from the artistic, which he did in higher education by treating as arts what today has become entirely abstract and scientific, namely, grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. This was done in such a way that the young human being started by recognizing in his teacher: This man can do something which I cannot do. And through this alone the right relationship was established between the younger and the older generations. For this relationship, my dear friends, can never develop along the path of intellectuality. As soon as one stands consciously on the ground of the intellect or without the ideas inwardly revealed in the intellectual or mind soul, there is no possibility of differentiating between human beings. For human nature is so constituted that when it is a matter of making something clear through the consciousness soul, everyone thinks that the moment he has concepts he is capable of discussing them with anyone. Thus it is, with the intellect. For the intellect neither man's maturity nor his experience comes into consideration; they only do so when it is a question of ability. But when their elders have ability the young quite as a matter of course pay tribute to maturity and experience.

Now, in order to understand these things thoroughly we must consider from a different point of view the course taken by mankind's evolution. Let me tell you what spiritual science has discovered about the course of history, with regard to the intercourse between men.

External documentary history can go back only a few thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha and what is to be found can never be estimated rightly because spiritual achievements, even in the time of ancient Greece, cannot be grasped by modern concepts. Even for the old Grecian times quite other concepts must be used. Nietzsche felt this. Hence the charm of his brief, unfinished essay on Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, where he deals with philosophy in connection with the general development of Greek culture up to the time of Socrates. In Socrates he saw the first flicker of pure intellectuality; everything philosophical in the tragic age of Greek development proceeded from wide human foundations for which, when expressed in concepts, these were only the language through which to convey what was experienced. In the earliest times philosophy was quite different from what it later became. But I only want to mention this in passing.

I really want to point out that with spiritual Imagination, and especially with Inspiration, we can look back much further into human evolution and, above all, into men's souls. Then we find when we go very far back, some seven or eight thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, that the young had a natural veneration for great age. This was a matter of course. Why? Because what exists today only in earliest youth existed then for the whole evolution of man.

If we look at the human being with less superficiality than is often done today, we find that the whole evolution of the human soul changes at about the change of teeth, during the sixth, seventh or eighth year. Man's soul becomes different, and again it changes at the time of puberty. I have discussed this fully in my book The Education of the Child from the Standpoint of Spiritual Science. On occasion it is noticed that man's soul becomes different in the seventh year and again in the fourteenth or fifteenth. But what people no longer notice is that changes still take place at the beginning of the twenties, at the end of the twenties, in the middle of the thirties, and so on.

Whoever is able to observe the life of soul in a more intimate way knows such transitions in man, that human life runs its course in rhythms. Try to perceive this, let us say, in Goethe. Goethe records how he was cured of certain childlike religious ideas by the Lisbon earthquake, thus about the time when he was changing his teeth, and how puzzling everything was for him. He tells how as a small child he began to reflect: Is there a good God ruling the world, when one sees that countless people have been swept away through these terrible fiery forces in the earth?—Especially in these decisive moments of his life, Goethe was prone to let external events work upon his soul so as to be conscious of its changes. And he says concerning this period of his life that he became a strange kind of pantheist, how he could no longer believe in the ideas imparted by the older people in his home and by his parents. He tells how he took his father's music-stand on which he set out minerals, placing on top a little candle that he lit by holding a burning-glass to catch the first rays of the morning sun. In later life he explained that he had wanted to bring an offering to the great God of Nature by lighting a sacrificial fire, kindled from Nature herself.

Take the first period of Goethe's life, then the following one, and so on till you piece together this whole life out of parts of about the length of his childlike episode, and you will find that with Goethe something always happened during such times fundamentally to change his soul. It is extraordinarily interesting to see that the fact of Schiller's urging Goethe to continue Faust only found fruitful soil in Goethe because at the end of the eighteenth century, he happened to be at a transitional period of this kind. It is interesting too that Goethe re-wrote Faust at the beginning of a following life-period. Goethe began Faust in his youth in such a way that he makes Faust open the book of Nostradamus. There we have the great scene:

“What powers celestial, lo! ascend, descend
Each unto each the golden vessels giving!”

But turn the page and there we find:
“Thou, Spirit of the Earth, to me art nearer.”

Goethe rejects for Faust the great tableau of the macrocosm and allows only the earth-spirit to approach him. And when at the beginning of the nineteenth century he was persuaded by Schiller to revise Faust he wrote the “Prologue in Heaven.” Anyone who observes his own life inwardly will discover that these changes hold good. Nowadays we only notice them when we deliberately train ourselves to look deeply into our own life.

In ancient times, six thousand, seven thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, these changes were so noticeable that they were experienced in the life of soul as the change of teeth or puberty is today. And, indeed, approximately up to the middle of life, up to the thirty-fifth or thirty-sixth year, life was on the up-grade. But then it began to decline. People experienced the drying-up of life. But while certain products of metabolism become deposited through sluggishness in the organism and the physical organism becomes increasingly heavy and lethargic, it was also felt that up to the greatest age the soul and spirit were on the ascent, how the soul is set free with the drying up of the body. And people in olden days would not have spoken with such ardour of the patriarchs—the word itself only arose later—had they not noticed externally in men: True, he is getting physically old, but he has to thank his physical aging for lighting-up his spirit. He is no longer dependent on the body. The body withers, but the soul becomes free.

In this modern age it is most unusual that such a thing happens, for instance, as occurred at the Berlin University. Two philosophers were there, the one was Zeller—the famous Greek scholar—and the other Michelet. Zeller was seventy years old and thought he ought to be pensioned off. Michelet was ninety and lectured with tremendous vivacity. Eduard von Hartmann told me this himself. Michelet is supposed to have said: “I don't understand why that young man doesn't want to lecture any more.” Michelet was, as I said, ninety years old!

Today people seldom keep their freshness to such a degree. But in those times it was so, especially among those who concerned themselves with spiritual life. What did the young say when they looked at the Patriarchs? They said: It is beautiful to get old. For then one learns something through one's own development that one cannot know before. It was perfectly natural to speak in this way. Just as a little boy with a toy horse wants to be big and get a real horse, so, at that time, there was the desire to get old because it was felt that something is then revealed from within.

Then came the following millennia. It was still experienced up to a considerable age, but no longer as in the old Indian epoch—in the terminology of my Occult Science. At the zenith of Greek culture, man still had living experience of the change occurring in life in the middle of the thirties. Men still knew how to distinguish between body and spirit, and said: At the age of thirty, the physical begins to decline, but then the spiritual begins to blossom forth. This was experienced by the soul and spirit in the immediate presence of men. The original feeling of the Greeks was based upon this, not upon that phantasy of which modern science speaks. To understand the fullness of Greek culture, we should bear in mind that the Greeks were still able in consciousness to come to thirty, five-and-thirty, six-and-thirty years, whereas a more ancient humanity grew in consciousness to a far greater age. Herein consists the evolution of humanity. Man has more and more to experience out of Nature unconsciously what is for a later time; this requires him to experience it consciously for consciously it must again be experienced. Whoever observes himself can recognize the seven-yearly changes; the length of time is not pedantically exact, but approximate. A man who looks back to the period of his forty-ninth, forty-second, thirty-fifth years can recognize quite well: At that time something happened in me by which I learnt something which out of my own nature I could not previously have done, just as I should not have been able to bite with my second teeth before I had them. To experience life concretely is something that has been lost in the course of man's evolution. And today if anyone does not inwardly train himself to observe, these epochs from the thirtieth year onwards are completely blurred. Comparatively speaking, an inner transformation can still be noticed at the beginning of the twenties—even up to the end of the twenties, though it is then rather less noticeable. But with the present human organization man receives something from his natural evolution only up to his twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh year, and this limit will recede more and more. In earlier times men were not free in their organization, destined as they were to have these experiences out of their own nature. Freedom has become possible only by the withdrawal of Nature. To the extent Nature ceases freedom becomes possible. Through his own striving, through his own powers, man must arrive at finding the spiritual, whereas formerly, the older he became the more did the spiritual thrive.

Today emphasis is no longer placed on what the old become merely by growing older. Intellectualism is left which, between the eighteenth and nineteenth years, can develop so that from then onwards one can know with the intellect. But as far as intellectuality is concerned, one can at most reach a greater degree of proficiency but make no qualitative progress. If one has fallen a victim to the desire to prove or to refute everything intellectually, one cannot progress. If someone puts forward what is the result of decades of experience but wants to prove it intellectually, an eighteen-year-old could refute him intellectually. For whatever is possible intellectually at sixty is equally possible at nineteen, since intellectuality is a stage during the epoch of the consciousness soul which in the sense of deepening is of no help to progress, but only to proficiency. The young may say: “I am not yet as clever as you are; you can still take me in.” But he will not believe the other to be his superior in the sphere of intellect.

These things must be emphasized to become intelligible. I do not wish to criticize. I am saying this only because it is part of the natural evolution of humanity; we should be clear about the following characteristic of our age, namely, that if man does not strive out of inner activity for development and maintain it consciously, then with mere intellectualism at his twentieth year he will begin to get rusty. He then receives stimuli only from outside, and through these external stimuli keeps himself going. Do you think that if things were not like that people would flock to the cinema? This longing for the cinema, this longing to see everything externally, depends on the human being becoming inwardly inactive, on his no longer wanting inner activity.

The only way to listen to lectures on Spiritual Science, as meant here, is for those present to do their share of the work. But today that is not to people's liking. They flock to lectures or meetings with lantern slides so that they can sit and do as much as possible without thinking. Everything just passes before them. They can remain perfectly passive.

But our system of teaching is ultimately of this character, too, and anyone who on educational grounds objects to the triviality of the modern object lesson is said to be behind the times. But one has to oppose it, for man is not a mere apparatus for observing, an apparatus that wants simply to look at things. Man can live only by inner activity. To listen to Spiritual Science means to invite the human being to co-operate with his soul. People do not want this today. Spiritual Science is an invitation to this inner activity, that is to say, it must lead all studies to the point where there is no more support in external sense-perception because then the inner play of forces must begin to move freely. Not before thinking moves freely in this inner play of forces can Imagination be reached. Thus the basis for all Anthroposophy is inner activity, the challenge to inner activity, the appeal to what can be active when all the senses are silent and only the activity of thinking is astir.

Here there lies something of extraordinary significance. Just suppose you were capable of this. I will not flatter you by saying that you are. I only want to ask you first to assume that you are capable of it, that you can think in such a way that your thoughts are only an inner flow of thoughts. What I called pure thinking in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity was certainly not well named when judged by outer cultural conditions. For Eduard von Hartmann said to me: “There is no such thing, one can only think with the aid of external observation.” And all I could say in reply was: “It has only to be tried and people will soon learn to be able to make it a reality.” Thus take it as a hypothesis that you could have thoughts in a flow of pure thought. Then there begins for you the moment when you have led thinking to a point where it need not be called thinking any longer, because in a twinkling—in the twinkling of a thought—it has become something different. This rightly named pure thinking has at the same time become pure will, for it is willing, through and through. If you have advanced so far in your life of soul that you have freed thinking from outer perception, it has become at the same time pure will. You hover with your soul, so to speak, in a pure flight of thought. But this pure flight of thought is a flight of will. Then the exercise or the striving for the exercise of pure thought begins to be not an exercise in thinking only but also an exercise of the will, indeed an exercise of the will that goes right to the center of the human being. For you will make the following remarkable observation. It is only now, for the first time, that you can speak of thinking, as it is in ordinary life, as an activity of the head. Before this you really have no right to speak of thinking as an activity of the head, for you know this only as external fact from physiology, anatomy, and so on. But now you feel inwardly that you are no longer thinking so high up, you begin for the first time to think with the heart. You actually interweave your thought with the breathing process. You actually set going of itself what the Yoga exercises have striven for artificially. You notice that as thinking becomes more and more an activity of the will it wrenches itself free first from the breast and then from the whole human body. It is as though you were to draw forth this thinking from the extremity of your big toe! And if with inner participation you study what has appeared with many imperfections—for I make no claims for my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity—if you let it work upon you and feel what this pure thinking is, you will experience that a new man is born within you who can bring out of the spirit an unfolding of the will.

Does man know before this that he has a will? He really has no will, for he is given up to instincts connected with his organic development. He often dreams that he does this or that out of an impulse of the soul, but he really does it because of the good or bad condition of his stomach. But now you know that you have permeated the physical organism with what fills it with consciousness. You do not need to be a clairvoyant for this. All you need do is to be interested in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and let it work upon you. For this Philosophy of Spiritual Activity cannot be read as other books are today. It must really be read so that once you get into the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity you have the feeling that it is an organism, one member developing out of another, that you have found your way into something living. People immediately say: Something is going to get into me which will take away my freedom. Something is entering me that I do not want to have.

People who entertain such thoughts are like those who were to say that if the human being at two or three years has to get used to speaking a certain language, he will thereby lose his freedom. The human being ought to be warned against language for he will no longer be free when brought into this chance association of ideas. He ought to be able to speak at will now Chinese, now French, now German. Nobody says this because it would be too absurd, and life itself refutes such nonsense. On the other hand there are people who either hear or see something of Eurythmy and say that it, too, rests upon the chance association of the ideas of individuals. But one should be able to assume that philosophers would say: One must look into this Eurythmy and see if in evoking gestures we may not have the foundations of a higher freedom and find that it is only an unfolding at a higher level of what is in speech.

So one need not be surprised—for really nothing that goes beyond intellectualism is regarded without prejudice today—that people get goose-flesh when one tells them that a certain book must be read quite differently from other books, that it must be read in such a way that from it something is really experienced. What is it that must be experienced? It is the awakening of the will out of the spiritual. In this respect my book was intended as a means of education. The intention was not only to give it content but to make it work educationally. Hence you find in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity an exposition on the art of forming concepts, a description of what takes place in the soul when one does not keep with one's concepts to the impressions from outside, but lives within the free flow of thoughts.

That, my dear friends, is an activity which aims at knowledge in a far deeper sense than the external knowledge of Nature, but it is at the same time artistic, wholly identical with artistic activity. So that the moment pure thinking is experienced as will, man's attitude becomes that of an artist.

And this, my dear friends, is like-wise the attitude we need today in the teacher if he is to guide and lead the young from the time of the change of teeth to puberty, or even beyond puberty. The mood of soul should be so that out of the inner life of soul one comes to a second man, who cannot be known as is the outer physical body, which can be studied physiologically or anatomically, but who must be livingly experienced and may rightly be called, in accordance with the real meaning of the terms, “life body” or “ether body”. This cannot be known through external perception but must be inwardly experienced. To know this second man a kind of artistic activity must be unfolded. Hence there is this mood in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity which most people never discover—everywhere it touches the level of the artistic. Only most people do not discover this because they look for the artistic in the trivial, in the naturalistic and not in free activity. Only out of this free activity can education really be experienced as art, and the teacher can become an artist in education when he finds his way into this mood. Then in our epoch of the consciousness soul all teaching will be so arranged as to create an artistic atmosphere between teacher and pupil. And within this artistic atmosphere there can develop that relation between led and leader which is an inclining towards the leader, because he can do something which he is able to show forth artistically, and one feels that what he can do one would like to be able to do oneself. Thus no opposition is aroused because it is felt that one would destroy oneself by opposing.

Because of the way writing is taught today, it often happens that even as a child—for in the child there is always a being who is cleverer than the teacher—one asks: Why should I be bothered to write? I have no kind of relationship to writing—which is really what the North American Indians felt when they saw European script. They felt the black signs to be witchcraft. The feeling of the child is very similar. But let us awaken in the child what it means to look at black, red, green, yellow, white. Let us call up in him what it is when we surround a point by a circle. Let us call up the great experience contained in the difference there is when we draw two green circles and in each of them three red circles, then two red and in each of them three green, two yellow with three blue ones in them, then two blue containing three yellow circles. We let the children experience in the colors what the colors as such are saying to the human being, for in the world of color lives a whole world. But we also let the children experience what the colors have to say to one another, what green says to red, what blue says to yellow, blue to green and red to blue—here we have the most wonderful relation between the colors. We shall not do this by showing the child symbols or allegories, but we shall do it in an artistic way. Then we shall see how out of this artistic feeling the child gradually puts down figures out of which the letters then develop as writing once developed from picture-script. How foreign to the child today are B, G, or any other sign that has developed through inner necessity to its present form. What is a G, K, or U to a seven-year old? He really has not the slightest kinship with it. it has taken the human being thousands of years to acquire this relationship. The child must acquire an aesthetic relation to it. Everything is exterminated in the child because the written characters are not human; and the child wants to remain human.

In order to understand youth in its relation to the older generation we must go right into the art of education. The cleft between age and youth must be bridged not by hollow phrases but by education that is an art, education which is not afraid to find its support in real spiritual-scientific knowledge. That is why I said a few days ago: Where does this art lead to? It leads to experience of the real spiritual. And where goes what the age has gradually developed in such a way that it believes it must be given as a matter of course to the young? Where does that lead? It does not lead to the Spirit but to that which is devoid of Spirit. It is regarded a sin to bring the Spirit into what goes by the name of knowledge and science.

Science does not leave the human being alone even in earliest childhood. It cannot very well be otherwise. For the teacher is so drilled in systematized botany (and many books are entirely given over to systematized botany) that he believes he is committing a sin if he speaks to the children about botany in a way that is not scientific. But what is found in a botanical textbook cannot mean anything to a child before he is ten, and it is not until he is at least eighteen or nineteen that it can acquire any real significance for him.

Such is the situation. Now I have no intention of creating another intellectual theory about education. The aim is to create an artistic atmosphere between the older and the younger. But when this comes about, something happens which must occur if young people are to grow into the world in a healthy way. What the human being of today grows into can be described quite concretely. Between the ninth and tenth years an undefined feeling lives in the soul of every human being who is not a psychopath. There need not necessarily exist either a clear or unclear concept of this. But it begins to live within the human being from his ninth or tenth year. Up till then what is called the astral body alone is concerned with man's life of soul. But from that time onwards the force of the ego nature first begins to stir. It is not formulated in concepts. But in the life of feeling, deep within the soul, there lives unconsciously a question in the heart of the growing human being. This question takes different forms in different people. But a question arises which put in the form of a concept might be expressed as follows: Up to now the astral body has believed in other human beings; now I need something that somebody says to me so that I may believe in him or in others in my environment. Those who as children have most resisted this are those who need it most. Between the ninth and tenth years the human being, to strengthen his ego, begins to be dependent on an older person in whom he can trust—without this trust needing to be drummed in—in whom he can believe with the help of the artistic atmosphere that has been created. And woe betide it if this question which may still be one for many children up to their sixteenth or seventeenth year and sometimes even to the years I mentioned yesterday, the eighteenth or nineteenth—woe betide it if nothing happens to enable this question of the young to be answered by the old so that the young say: I am grateful that I have learnt from the old what I can learn only from the old; what he can tell me, he alone can tell me, for it will be different if I learn it when I am old.

Through this can be created something in an educational way which, applied in the right way, can be of the greatest significance for the epoch of the consciousness soul, which, in fact, in the earliest times of the Patriarchs, was already alive between young and old. Then, every young person said to himself: The old man with his snow-white hair has experiences which can only come when one is as old as he. Before then the necessary organs are not there. Therefore he must tell his experiences to us. We are dependent on what he relates because he alone can relate it. Certainly I shall one day be as old as he. But I shall not experience what he tells for thirty-five or forty years. The times will have progressed by then and I shall experience something different. But what I want to learn is only to be learnt from him.

Here is something in the spiritual realm which may be compared with feeding at the mother's breast. Just as the infant might say: “I too shall one day give the breast to a child, but now it is my mother who must give it to me”—so it is in the spiritual life. In the foundations of the spirit life of the world it is as though a chain were there, reaching from the past over into the future, which must be received by each generation into itself, must be carried onwards, re-forged, perfected. This chain has been broken in the age of intellectualism. This was generally felt among those growing up about the turn of the nineteenth century. Try to feel that you did experience something of the kind, even if at the time you were not able to express it. Try to sense that by feeling this, you were feeling about it in the right way. And if you sense this you will realize the true significance of the youth movement today, the youth movement which has, and must have, a Janus-head, because it is directed towards experience of the spiritual—an experience of the spiritual which carries thought so far that it becomes will, that it becomes the innermost human impulse.

We have been seeking now for will at its abstract pole where it is thought. In the days to follow we will seek it in the deeper spheres of man's being.

Although it is difficult in a certain respect to deal with the fundamentals of spiritual science, as it is meant here, as it was done in the lecture the day before yesterday, it may well be said that the communications relating to those research results, which are to form the subject of today's lecture, are in a certain respect actually a risk in relation to the ways of imagining and thinking of the present age. For although one may have to find some paradoxes in the lecture of the day before yesterday from the point of view of these ways of thinking and habits of mind, from such a point of view one will certainly and understandably not find it easy to see serious research in what is to be said today. Rather, many people in the present day will be inclined to see it only as the ravings of a strange fantasist. One must be fully aware of this when speaking about these things; aware that everything that enters into general consciousness at a later time, much of what then later becomes a matter of course, is something paradoxical and fantastic in the time when it first appears.

I would just like to say this in advance to characterize how aware the spiritual researcher is of all the things that can understandably be felt when he allows himself to share his research results, which still seem paradoxical for today's time.

Before I come to these research results, I would like to characterize the basic mood of the spiritual researcher's soul in a few introductory words. This basic mood is quite different from the mood towards another field of research. While in our knowledge of the external world and also in our knowledge of ordinary science, we today have the feeling, with a certain amount of justification, that we have the powers of knowledge within us, that we only need to put them into effect, so to speak, and then we can judge everything that nature itself and the researcher discovers in nature. While in this research one devotes all one's efforts to the very purpose of research, to observe things and to recognize their laws through the intellect, the attitude of the spiritual researcher towards the truth, towards all striving for knowledge, is quite different. By working one's way into this spiritual research, one increasingly feels the need to devote all one's soul-work, all one's inner striving, to preparation; and more and more one gets the feeling that, when one wants to approach some truth in this or that field, one would actually like to keep waiting, keep preparing oneself further and further, because one is aware that The more effort and work one puts into the path of the soul that must be traveled before one can research, the more one matures and is ready to receive the truth. For it is the receiving of the truth that is the real subject of spiritual science. And this feeling, this mood, comes over the soul so strongly that one feels a holy awe at the approach of these things, and that one would rather wait again and again for important, essential insights of spiritual research than allow these things to enter into consciousness too soon. This requires a very special mood in the spiritual researcher himself, that mood which gradually permeates all the work, as was mentioned the day before yesterday as an inner soul work in exercises, and which brings about a certain attitude in the spiritual researcher towards the truth, precisely the attitude of holy awe towards the truth.

Having said this, I would now like to enter, without prejudice, into what will be said about the important, meaningful subject so close to every soul this evening. Certainly, there are not the worst minds in our present time that still hold on to the opinion that the truths of faith are special and the truths of knowledge are also special, and that everything that man can imagine as going beyond birth and death is only an object of faith, not of strictly provable science. It is precisely this strict separation between faith and knowledge that is abolished by spiritual science. And one feels in harmony with what has long wanted to enter into modern spiritual striving when the truths that lie beyond death are developed in the sense in which it is to be done here; one feels in harmony with it when one repeatedly bears in mind the fact that that the great Lessing did indeed deal with one of the main truths of this spiritual science, in the work that he wrote as his spiritual testament shortly before his death, the mature fruit of his thinking and meditating: his “Education of the Human Race”. Lessing does not shy away from saying that the belief in repeated lives on Earth does not necessarily have to be an error because it occurred, as it were, as something that the human race came up with before the prejudices of school and philosophers had yet cast something of a hazy veil over what humanity knew from the beyond of death at the beginning of its cultural development. In this way one feels in harmony with the best personalities who have integrated their striving into the cultural development of humanity, especially if one stands on the ground of this spiritual science.

It was said the day before yesterday that the things of spiritual life, the processes of the same, can only be researched when, through what was described the day before yesterday, the human being really comes to strengthen the forces slumbering in his soul so much that this soul finds the possibility - it was said comparatively: as the chemist extracts hydrogen from water — so the soul of the spiritual researcher finds the possibility, through soul exercises, to withdraw from the physical body and to experience itself separately from the physical body, so that it can then associate a meaning with the word: I experience myself as a spiritual being outside of my body, and my body, with everything that belongs to it in the sense world, stands before me as an external object stands before us when we look at it with our eyes or touch it with our hands. And already during the last time when I was allowed to give some public lectures here, I was able to draw attention to the significant moment that occurs in the life of the spiritual researcher when, through the exercises mentioned the day before yesterday, this spiritual researcher has truly matured. If you want to know more about these exercises, you can find it in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' and in my 'Occult Science in Outline'. Here too, only the principle of what the spiritual researcher experiences is to be pointed out. When he has brought his soul to the point where it can emerge from its body, then one day, or one might also say one night, the experience comes; for both are possible: in the midst of the usual events of the day, in the midst of the night, and if properly prepared, neither will disturb it. It can occur in a hundred different ways, I would just like to describe the typical character. It can occur either way, it will always occur in a typical way, what I am now describing: It happens that the person wakes up as if from sleep; he knows: something is happening that is not a dream. He is removed from all external perception, all sorrows, all passions, all that connects him to the day. Or in the middle of the day the event occurs where one's imagination must stand still, where something completely different enters into the imagination, into consciousness. That which then enters can be like this — it will always be similar to how I describe it; I would like to describe as concretely as possible how this harrowing event can really happen for the spiritual researcher. One can have the feeling: You are now like in a house that has been struck by lightning. Your surroundings are disintegrating like a house that has been struck by lightning. The lightning goes right through you. You feel how everything to which you are materially connected is being separated from you as if by the elements, and you feel as if you are being detached from yourself, maintaining yourself as a spiritual being. It is the deepest, most harrowing impression imaginable. From that moment on, or from a similar one, one knows what it means to experience oneself in the soul, apart from one's body. And the spiritual researchers of all times have used an expression for this experience that seems fully appropriate to the one who knows this experience. For there has been a kind of spiritual research at all times, just as the different cultures required. Today's is different from those of earlier times; it is commensurate with the advances of modern science. But what is achieved through it has also been achieved through the methods that had been made possible by the different cultures. Thus, spiritual researchers of the most diverse times have described the experience just mentioned with the words: as a human being, one arrives at the gate of death. And indeed, what one can first imagine as being experienced through death actually occurs. It does not occur directly as a reality; for the spiritual researcher returns to his body and everything is as before; he perceives the external world again. But everything he experiences is a picture of what really happens when a person passes through the gate of death, when the outer, physical life ends and the life after death begins.

If we now wish to understand how the spiritual researcher comes to know the things that are mentioned here, we must bear in mind that, through the careful preparation of his soul, as has been mentioned, he attains a perception that is quite different from that of the outer senses; he can truly look into those spheres of existence that are to be discussed.

The first thing that the spiritual researcher comes to when he has overcome such a moment at the gateway of death, the first thing could be called in a sense: one reaches beyond human memory. Human memory, the human power of recollection, is indeed something that lives in our soul, as it were, as the beginning, one might say, of something spiritual. Even external philosophical researchers who know nothing of spiritual science can see this. The French researcher Bergson, who has achieved such brilliant successes, sees something purely spiritual in the memory of man that has nothing to do with biological or physiological processes. And when the prejudices of natural science, which still cling to almost everyone today, have passed, then people will realize that our memory contains something for the human soul that is, as it were, the beginning of a transition from what is bound to the senses and the brain to something purely spiritual and soul-like. When we push our perceptions back into our memory, we do not store them through any physical process, but purely in the soul. I can only hint at this. A scientific justification of what has just been said would take a great deal of time and require special lectures. Just as in ordinary life we perceive memory images that arise from the treasure trove of our soul, which, as they occur, have nothing that could lead us to mistake them for an illusion or hallucination, so now, not from the treasure of the soul, but from spiritual worlds, the spiritual processes and spiritual facts now arise before the soul of the spiritual researcher; and one then notices that behind what we call the treasure of memory, the human soul can experience something else. The spiritual researcher then sees, as it were, the following: Now you have been drawn out of your body with your soul; now you can really get an overview because it has become an external object, that which you have acquired through the sense world: the treasure of memory. But this treasure of memory is like a veil that covers something that always lives in the soul, only unconsciously; but what is covered by memory and remembrance is veiled. Yes, in the depths of the human soul there is something that is always alive in it; but when a person unfolds his memories in his soul, he covers up this subconscious spiritual-soul life. When the spiritual researcher rises into the spiritual-soul realm, one might say that his memories are attached to the comet's tail of his spiritual-soul nature. But through these memories he can see something that could be called: forces of a higher kind than those that are preserved for us by memory. If the expression were not so frowned upon – but it is difficult to find appropriate expressions for these areas that have nothing to do with the sensory world – one could use the expression: one ascends to a super-memory from memory. One gradually enters into what was imaginatively called imaginative imagining the day before yesterday. Whereas with memory one always has the feeling that the images of memory are rising and presenting themselves to the soul as you passively surrender to them, now you are immersed in what lies beyond memory and you know that you have to actively help bring forth what then arises as imagination, as the content of supermemory. But through the soul prepared for these things, one also knows that what reveals itself as lying behind memory is always there, that it was only covered by memory, and one knows, by recognizing it in its essence, that what descends into the depths that lie beneath the treasure trove of memory is itself something that is now working on our physical organism, that is active in it. A quite different discovery is made. The following discovery is being made, and it is of extraordinary significance for the relationship between spiritual research and natural science. Natural science presents itself to us today by saying: everything that a person feels, thinks and wills is bound to processes in his nervous system. It is right in saying this, but with its methods it cannot find out how the soul life is bound to the nervous system, or how thinking, for example, is bound to the brain. One has to go to much deeper foundations of the soul life. When one comes up with spiritual research, one realizes: Yes, it is quite correct for the ordinary conception of everyday life, and also for scientific work, that all the thoughts we form, and also all sensations, for example, are bound to the brain; but how are they bound to the brain? The deeper soul, of which ordinary consciousness knows nothing, which is only discovered through spiritual research, only works on, we say, a certain part of the brain, only sends its workers into the senses and brain; and through the fact that this “subconscious” soul works on the nervous system, the latter becomes a mirror to reflect what occurs in ordinary life. What occurs in ordinary life is the mirror image of the soul-spiritual. Just as if a mirror were placed here and you were to approach it, you would not see yourself but only your mirror image, so it is when you develop your everyday thinking, feeling and willing. The deeper soul works specifically on the nervous system and brain, and what it develops there makes it possible to perceive something. So it is the soul-spiritual that works on the eye, and what causes certain processes in the eye. When these processes are triggered, the eye reflects back into the spiritual-soul that which we call color. Thus it is the deeper soul-spiritual that works in the body. And spiritual research will lead humanity to this: to recognize that it is we ourselves who live in the interior of our conceptions, and that it is we ourselves, with our deeper being, who first prepare the body to become a mirroring apparatus for what the soul then experiences. This is how it is in ordinary, external, spatial life. But at the moment when our perceptions become images of memory, something else must happen; if we do not want our perceptions to flash past us like dreams before they become memory, we have to pay attention to them. Anything that is to become a memory, that is to remain with us in our soul, requires longer concentration than is necessary for mere perception, say. A color impression would not remain in our memory if we only looked at it for just as long as it takes to evoke the color. If we look at it longer, we appeal to that power that preserves all of this in our soul as a memory. We push back, as it were, our soul activity into a deeper being and this turns out not to be the physical body, but something finer, more ethereal than the physical body; and what in spiritual research with the term “ethereal,” which is frowned upon and not at all popular today. However, the word does not have the meaning usually associated with it. It presents itself as an ethereal body that is already of a spiritual nature.

But our soul does not only work by creating these images of memory; it works much more through its contact with the outside world in the life between birth and death. And that is where the spiritual researcher discovers the remarkable fact that our memories only remain images because they are stopped by the etheric body and not allowed into the physical body. If they were to flow into the physical body, they would become activity in it, these ideas, so they would merge into the formative forces, into the living forces of the physical body, would organize it thoroughly. The fact that we let our ideas be ideas, that we do not let them merge into organic forces, means that they retain the character of memory, we preserve them in their imaginative power. They can remain memories.

But the soul also develops much stronger forces in life than those that develop the memories, and these stronger forces are now also initially stored in the soul. But they lie like an over-memory behind the ordinary store of memory; they are within us. This is what the spiritual researcher experiences when he looks through memory at this super-memory treasure, that he knows: something lives in your soul that cannot have an effect on your physical body, that lies below the surface of memory, but also does not come into effect in your physical body, now, as it is between birth and death. There is something that does not remain a mere idea, but which does not become an organically active force either. The spiritual researcher experiences this by being outside of his body. But at the same time he experiences something else, which he can express when he has become clear about the fact, by saying: Yes, I experience something in my soul, which is in it, which so to speak has no application because it cannot enter the body, which is formed since birth or, let us say, conception, because it finds no accommodation in it. And now, by delving into this, which I have indicated here, the spiritual researcher experiences it in such a way that he can recognize it, as one recognizes the germ that is in a plant. The plant develops from the root to the fruit, in which the germ is. But the germ is already inherent in the whole plant. That, which is the germ, has no meaning for this plant; it cannot sink its powers into this plant; but it is in it, it is the disposition for a following plant, let us say, of the next year. When the spiritual researcher delves down, he delves into something that is a soul core, a soul germ, in him, which he knows is formed in this life between birth and death, but it does not develop its powers not in this life; he dives into the deeper layers of the soul and lies ready for a following life, as in the fruit of a plant the germ lies ready for the following plant, which could not develop without the preceding one.

In this way one comes to an understanding of the harmony of successive human lives on earth with all of nature, if one knows how to dive into the soul. The important thing is that the spiritual researcher never loses sight of the fact that what you are experiencing can only be such that you become aware of your own activity again and again; because if you are not aware of it, you do not understand how it came about, then it becomes an illusion, a hallucination or mere fantasy. It is a complete fallacy to object: Yes, how can the spiritual researcher know that what he discovers is not a hallucination, an illusion, or fantasy? It could be a hallucination that one has suggested to oneself. If the spiritual researcher would place himself in relation to what he experiences as it has been described, as the morbid mind places itself in relation to a hallucination, then this objection would be fully justified. For it presents itself in the mind like an external perception, one does not see through it. But the spiritual researcher gets to know exactly through the right preparations - as you can read in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds?” - that he can distinguish what is only reminiscence of the outside world, and what is imagination and hallucination , to which he remains passive, that he must distinguish this from what presents itself in such a way that he recognizes it in the same way as one is aware of a letter or a word: that which is written on the paper does not mean itself, but something else. For the spiritual researcher does not use what he has seen as one uses hallucinations, but in such a way that one can compare it with a spiritual reading in a writing of imaginations that present themselves. Only when one learns to use in one's mind, in a free way, what one presents there through one's own activity, in such a way that one lives in it as one lives in the writing, through which one sees through to what what they mean; only by rising in such an inwardly strengthened way to that which enters into the vision of the soul can one attain to truly seeing what processes and entities of the spiritual world are. But then, because one gradually becomes familiar with the element of our soul that is not the same as the body, one comes to understand the being of which one can say that the quality of immortality applies to it.

Spiritual science is not a speculative philosophy in which one reflects on the reasons that may arise for the immortality of the soul: spiritual science shows how to arrive at the soul itself and, from this true soul, it shows what it really is. It lays bare, as it were, the soul; and then it turns out that what is laid bare as the soul is not a product of the external body, but that this body is the result of what is discovered there. For when, on the one hand, one discovers within oneself the core of the soul, one senses and experiences that it is the germ of a next earthly life, then one also experiences in this content of consciousness, which lies above the store of memory, what has been drawn into the human being as the human physical body before he began his existence as a physical being at birth or, let us say, at conception. Just as the soul itself spatially prepares its brain when we perceive, so that it reflects its content, so one experiences that the spiritual-soul that one has reached before birth, before was present in a spiritual world and acquired the powers in this world to unite with the physical substance given by father and mother, to permeate this substantiality, to organize itself with it. We experience that the human being, as he enters the world, is not merely the product of father and mother, but that the spiritual unites with the material, with that which is given by father and mother; the spiritual that comes down from spiritual worlds, where it has lived between the last death and this conception. And by getting to know that in the soul which lies beyond memory, the spiritual researcher can also learn to recognize how the soul behaves when the physical, so to speak, no longer holds back the activity of this spiritual-soul, when death has come upon the person. When death has overtaken a person, the soul initially lives – this is the fact that presents itself to spiritual research – in that which has not become physical during life; it lives in its store of memories. In the first period after death, a wide range of memories unfolds before the soul of everything the person has experienced between birth and death. Even all those events come up that have been forgotten during life. This experiencing of all the memories lasts only a few days. The spiritual researcher can see through what is occurring as the first experience after death, because he is, after all, getting to know the nature of memory. When the soul has left the body, the content of consciousness for the spiritual researcher is really something like what it is for the dead person when he has passed through the gate of death. As soon as he is out of the body, the spiritual researcher also experiences everything that his entire thought content is, but now as a world; just as one usually has mountains and clouds and stars and sun and moon and rivers and cities around oneself, so out of the body one has a tableau of what one has experienced; only one can see through this tableau, one can see its effect. By getting used to, to use a trivial expression, really seeing through these things outside the body, one also gradually comes to be able to consciously cast one's gaze on what the soul experiences after death, what it has experienced after the last death, what it faces after the death that will come. At first it is this memory picture that spreads, the thoughts that have accumulated. But behind it, another soul power appears. Now that death has passed, this soul power is no longer inhibited by the body; now it works in such a way that this memory picture disappears from the person's surroundings after a few days.

As I said at the beginning, one comes to daring things when one wants to talk about the subject of today's lecture, but one cannot avoid touching on these things if one does not want to indulge in generalities. I have tried to explain what spiritual research has revealed about the duration of this first experience after death. It has been found that this review of the thought images of the experiences of the last life takes a different amount of time for different people: longer for one person and shorter for another. But in general, it lasts about as long as the strength can last during life, through which the person can stay awake when he is prevented from falling asleep. One person can hardly keep himself awake for one night without being overcome by sleep, while another can for many nights. This inner strength to fight sleep is the measure for the number of days that this remembering back lasts after death. Then it disappears and something else occurs.

What now occurs can only be absorbed if one already knows it through out-of-body experiences; but it is very difficult to find words for these experiences of the soul, which are very different from those experienced in everyday life. Our language is, after all, shaped for the sensual world. What lies outside the sensual world, the soul experiences quite differently than here in the sensual world. Therefore, I ask you to excuse me if some expressions seem awkward or paradoxical to you; but you can be assured that when someone sets out to describe with the very ordinary words of language that for which words are difficult to find, he will not be able to describe directly from the experiences of the soul that which is experienced after the return. What the soul experiences now, what the spiritual researcher experiences outside the body, is what I would like to give the term to, because it is neither feeling nor willing, it is something between feeling and willing. In ordinary life, one does not have this soul power, which one develops inwardly. One recognizes it as a spiritual researcher. It is as if the will moves with us in the world; and as if this will, I would like to say, by moving, carries on its wings or its tides what now comes to us as a feeling in such a way that it is as if it is outside of us, as if it plays on the waves of the will. While we are otherwise accustomed to feeling this feeling as something that is inwardly grown with us, now it becomes like surging and weaving on the waves of the will; and yet we know that in this experience we into the world, that what is out there as willing feeling, as feeling willing, what is out there as the color and tone perceptions of the sense world, is permeated by our being. There is feeling out there that we perceive as light; but at the same time we know we are connected with it.

But in the first period after the review, the person experiences this in such a way that the only world he perceives at first is basically the one from which he emerged, so to speak, at death. After the memory tableau has dawned, this feeling-wanting, wanting-feeling unfolds in the soul; but it expresses only things that are still connected with the last life on earth, so that we can characterize these things that we experience there in something like the following way: Earth life never gives man all that it could give him in his experience. A lot of things remain so that we can say: We have not enjoyed everything that could have been enjoyed, that could have made impressions between birth and death. There is always something left between the lines of life, so to speak, of desires, of wishes, of love for other people and so on. Unfinished business – to use the trivial expression – in the last life, that is what we look back on spiritually with desire, and now we look back spiritually with desire for years. During these years it is so that we have our world mainly in what we have been, so to speak. We look into our last existence on earth and see what remains undone. And only by living in a sphere for years in which nothing can be satisfied as it is satisfied on earth, because we have indeed discarded the bodily organs for it, do we work our way out of such connections with the last life on earth in the soul.

Here too, spiritual science has to survey the length of these experiences, and the following can be said: the time a person lives through in the earliest childhood up to the point where he remembers back, has no influence on the duration of the experiences that have now been described. Likewise, the time that we continue to live through after the age of twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven has no influence. The years from about the age of four into the twenties also indicate the length of time in which one – so connected with one's last life on earth – has to gain experiences in the spiritual world, to withdraw from earthly life. Spiritual observation shows that the time taken to build up the body with the upward striving forces after the previous spiritual life, after going through conception and birth, lasts until the mid-twenties, and that the time taken long it took to imbue life with the physical, organic-fertile forces, to imbue it with the forces that desire and enjoy in life, it takes about the same amount of time to find one's way out of the last earthly life. So that if you turn twelve years old, for example, you may only need five years to emerge from your last life on earth, or seven years; but if you turn fifty, for example, the years after the mid-twenties no longer contribute anything special to the extension of the period just mentioned.

It must be said of this period that it already contains to a certain extent what can be called: the human being perceives spiritual processes and spiritual beings in his environment. I already indicated the day before yesterday that when the spiritual researcher experiences himself in his spiritual and mental self, he is in a real spiritual world. The dead person moves into this spiritual world; but at first he is so busy with his connections with his previous world, in the way we discussed before, that he can only gain a connection with what is in his spiritual surroundings by taking a detour through his earlier life. To give an example: let us assume that someone has passed through the gate of death. The retrospective view is over. He is living in this time of tearing himself away from the contexts of his previous life on earth. Someone he has loved is still in the physical body. The one who is still in this stage of experience, of which we are just speaking, cannot look directly at the soul that is still on earth; but a kind of switchover is formed, as it were: in the last life on earth, we loved the person who has remained behind; we look at the feeling of love when we are in the stage that we are now discussing. Feelings are our outside world. By looking at them, we find the way to the soul that is still on earth. Likewise, we must also find the way to a soul that has already passed through the gate of death through feeling. So one can say: a person lives with human souls as a soul after death, but initially in a roundabout way through his own life.

But more and more a power develops in man, a soul power, which only the spiritual researcher knows when he experiences himself spiritually and soul-wise outside of the body. There is no expression for this. For the other power one can at least say: 'Volitional feeling' or 'feeling volition', because it has something in common with volition and feeling. Even when volition and feeling have become objectified, they still have something in common with the impulses of feeling and will that we otherwise have in life with the things that surge around in volitions and feelings out there. But what the soul now experiences, what awakens in it as a power, the more it moves away in the manner described from the last life on earth, I can only describe with an expression that may sound clumsy in relation to ordinary language, but which is nevertheless indicative. I can only call it: creative soul power, soul creativity. It is something that the soul experiences directly now. That one is absorbed in an activity is something the soul experiences completely; but at the same time, that this creative power really develops, really radiates from the soul into the environment and - again it is clumsy, but it has to be used to make oneself understood, this expression - this power is something that radiates into the environment like a spiritual light, illuminating the spiritual processes and beings all around, so that we see them; just as when the sun rises, we see external objects through the sun, we see spiritual processes and beings through our own inner luminosity, which is poured out. Now the time is approaching when the soul is in the spiritual environment to the extent that this creative power awakens in her to illuminate this world. And here the religions have not used an insignificant expression when they say, to describe life after death: This feeling of being in the creative power, this living in a spiritual environment, which becomes visible when one sends one's own creative power into it, this experiencing of oneself in the outpouring of light is a feeling of bliss. Even the pains are experienced as bliss in this world. There the soul now experiences its further life.

Now it is a matter of the soul only being able to go through this experience in alternating states, which has just been described. I do, however, enter spheres that to the ordinary person are pure fantasy. But according to the preparatory instructions that have now been given, I am also allowed to discuss these things, for it must be clear that the spiritual researcher will never claim anything other than that such things can only be revealed to him when he experiences out of the body. So the soul experiences alternating conditions. It is not always in a state in which it radiates its spiritual luminosity emotionally over its surroundings, so that human souls and other entities are now around it and spiritual processes are experienced by it. It is not always the case that the soul therefore lives in the external spiritual world, but this state must alternate with the state in which the soul feels that this radiance of spiritual luminosity is, as it were, being dampened. The soul becomes inwardly dull, it can no longer radiate its light into the surroundings, it must withdraw into itself. And now comes the moment when, in the meantime between death and a new birth, the soul lives a completely lonely life. This lasts a long time. If you want to compare it to ordinary life, you can say: just as in ordinary life a person has to alternate between sleeping and waking, after death he has to alternate between a life that pours out into the outer world and a life of inner solitude. When everything that was previously experienced in the state of expansion has been taken in, but when the soul knows: you are now completely alone with yourself. Just as one becomes unconscious during sleep, here one withdraws into oneself, but does not become unconscious. The soul experiences a strengthened consciousness precisely in these times of loneliness, but it experiences it in such a way that it knows: out there is the spiritual world, but you are alone with yourself, everything you experience, you experience within yourself. What you experience within yourself are the echoes of what you have experienced outside of yourself. Only through this can the inner luminosity grow stronger again and emerge from the soul once more. And then you wake up spiritually again and experience the other state.

It is one of the most remarkable experiences to really learn to associate a meaning with the words that for the time between death and a new birth the soul lives in spiritual companionship and loneliness, that for this alternation of social experiences and loneliness in the spiritual world, although through much longer periods than day and night, that for this after-death experience it means something similar to sleeping and waking for the physical experience. I have indicated these conditions in my penultimate book: 'The Threshold of the Spiritual World'. But the soul experiences so, by continuing to live between death and a new birth, gradually a down-dumping, a dimming of their luminous power. One would like to say: the experiences of inner loneliness are becoming stronger and stronger. They gradually become so that the person experiences a whole world within, one might say a whole cosmos. Truly, it becomes so that one is justified in saying: the person is overcome by something like a feeling of fear of himself when he discovers what is all down there in the depths of the soul, and what now comes out in the middle of life between death and a new birth.

And then the time comes that I tried to depict in my fourth mystery drama: 'The Awakening of the Soul'. I tried to show this time when a person can only have inner experiences; when the nights of loneliness become longer and longer; when a person can no longer awaken spiritually to a consciousness in which he radiates his luminosity all around. I have tried to express what the person experiences then with a symbolic expression, with the expression: the midnight of spiritual existence between death and a new birth. It is the time when a person experiences everything in the depths of his soul as his world, when he only knows: beyond the shores of your soul are the spiritual worlds, where everything that exists of spiritual beings is, where all human souls are, disembodied or embodied, and where all other beings are; but one only knows it because one has the echoes of it within oneself. And now something arises in the soul that again cannot be described with an ordinary word. Isn't it true that ordinary language has the word 'longing' for the most passive state in the soul. When we are longing in physical experience, we are at our most passive. We long for something, we desire something we do not have – and longing certainly cannot bring about what we long for. We can only behave passively. But the soul forces take on a completely different character when the soul is outside the body. From the depths of loneliness, from what the soul experiences in the manner described in the world midnight of the spirit, the longing arises to live again into the world from which one has been torn in one's loneliness. And now this longing becomes active, and out of it arises something spiritually real, an organizing power. It really becomes a new power of perception. This spiritual longing gives birth to a new soul power, again a power that can now perceive an external world, but a world that is both external and internal: external because it really is outside our being; internal because we look at it as the world we lived through in the previous life, the world of our previous incarnation on earth. This now becomes our outside world through our longing. We look at everything that remained unfinished in the previous life, and our longing builds up forces within us to create balance for what the soul has done in the previous earthly life that was bad, foolish, evil, ugly, in order to create balance for it in a new life.

This is the time when every person can look back on his previous earthly lives, the time when, between death and a new birth, a person is confronted – confronted in his mind – with all the deeds of his previous lives, and the tendency awakens in him to make amends in a new earthly life, to live out the new earthly experiences and make good what was experienced in previous earthly lives. I have met people who said that one life was enough for them; I even met someone who was on the verge of finding something sensible in these repeated lives on earth. But then he wrote me a card from the nearest railway station saying that he didn't want to know about the next life on earth. But the important thing is not that we can form an idea of these repeated lives on earth, but that every soul is able to look back on its previous lives on earth and at the same time absorb the tendency to experience a new life on earth that will make up for its previous ones. And one also experiences that there are people to whom one owes something, or who owe something to one: this appears before the soul as a supplement to one's own life on earth. And the tendency arises to live together again with those people to whom one owes something, in order to make up for what one owes. And the same tendency arises in other people. As a result, forces arise in different people who used to live at the same time; spiritual forces are aroused that tend down to earth. This is why such people, who had been together earlier, come together in the new earth life. What these souls have remained indebted to each other must be settled. As I said, the tendencies come together there. And then one experiences this spiritual life between death and a new birth over and over again: more and more the tendencies I spoke of become apparent and take hold. They become living tendencies. And from what he has experienced in past lives, the person creates the archetype, the spiritual archetype of the new life on earth.

He now creates this himself as time moves on; he now creates what connects with the material substance given by father and mother to enter a new life on earth. And depending on the inherited qualities of the father and mother in the material substance and how closely they are related to the spiritual archetype, the spiritual archetype is drawn to the material substance before conception. So that one can say: the elective affinity between the inherited qualities and the archetype, which decides to which parental couple the soul is magnetically drawn, in which life one finds oneself. In this way the person returns to earth again, unites again with an earthly body. And spiritual research can now see what develops in the child, one might say, in such a mysterious way – anyone who knows how to observe a child's life will see it is so – by the gradual appearance of expressive features from within, by the skillful movements developing from the clumsy ones develop from the clumsy ones, and in that what so visibly works from within models and plasticizes the body; in all this the spiritual researcher sees that which has gone through the experiences between death and a new birth, as we have been talking about, and how it connects more and more with the body – that is what the spiritual researcher sees. Now he understands why initially no memories of these experiences before birth can be present: The forces that could become powers of memory are used up to organize the body. The child would remember everything from before, because it has these powers; but the powers are transformed; just as the pressure forces that I develop when I run my finger over the table are transformed into warmth, so these powers of memory are transformed into organizing forces. What the child organizes internally, what makes the brain plastic so that the child can think later, that it can develop memory powers in the physical body: that is transformed, retrospective power; it disappears in this form, in which it can develop the retrospective view, and organizes the body. And the spiritual that organizes the body is the soul that has been transformed and flows into the body. And so we understand the life we are currently living by understanding what happened outside of life beyond death. What is at work in a person in earthly life has appropriated his powers between death and a new birth. The forces that come to light in a purely spiritual way are the powers of memory, which have been transformed, flowing into the body and organizing it through and through.

Natural scientists will one day discover how the forces that lie purely in heredity are also depleted in the human being at the time when the ability to inherit arises. Certain lower animals die at the same time as they mature for the birth of another being; what powers the human being must develop in order to have physical offspring and to pass something on to them must be concluded by the time they reach sexual maturity; I can only hint at this. Natural science and spiritual science together will be able to provide important insights into this. But in all that works as physical forces in man, spiritual forces are at work. It is the spiritual forces that are active in the physical body in such a way that they permeate this physical body. The physical body is, as it were, the reflection of the spiritual. And basically, it is actually destructive processes that bring about the aforementioned reflection. It is always destructive processes when we see colors, when we hear sounds; even when we form memories, we undergo destructive processes within us. This is the reason for the necessity of sleep, so that the human being does not allow the destructive processes to work alone.

Thus we live, permeating and empowering our body with the forces we acquire outside of the body, and life can only be understood if we consider the spiritual and mental aspects at work in it. Spiritual science is not as fortunate as other sciences in that it can speak of death in plants and animals in the same way as it does in humans. What I have said now applies only to man. In this way spiritual research broadens our view beyond what lies between birth and death. Yes, spiritual research even explains details. I can well imagine that those of you who have a little time for these results of spiritual research would like to hear more details, but I can only give a few examples.

First of all, an example is given that may seem particularly mysterious to the spiritual researcher himself, despite the fact that it sounds paradoxical. This is the existence of criminal natures. It is not true that spiritual research is not at all of the opinion that criminals deserve only compassion and should not be punished. It is not the business of the spiritual researcher to interfere in the external affairs of the world; but to understand what meets us in human life is what the spiritual researcher wants, and he wants it from the depths of the spiritual world. So we ask ourselves: What about a life that manifests itself as criminal? Well, things are easily said, but the answers to such questions must first be wrung from the spiritual researcher, and he must also, in fact, force himself to speak about these things because they seem so utterly paradoxical to the present-day way of thinking. When the criminal is examined, by means of clairvoyance, it turns out that criminal natures are a kind of spiritual premature birth. There is a possibility for every soul to descend from the spiritual worlds and to connect with physical materiality, which is, so to speak, the normal one; but the tendencies that lead to this normal one intersect with other tendencies, so that most people – but criminals especially – descend into earthly life much earlier than would normally be the case. This turns out to be strange. Now that has something else in its wake. To really penetrate with the whole body, to stand in the physicality of the earth as a complete human being, that is only possible if one reincarnates at least approximately at the normal time. But if there are reasons to come down earlier due to previous earthly lives, then one takes something with one that lives in the subconscious, of which one is not at all aware. There is something living in the depths of the soul that makes one take life too lightly, because one did not come down at the time when one could have connected most perfectly with the physical. So one connects only superficially. But one knows nothing about it. It becomes an inner mood of the soul; not to take life fully. And so it may be that in his ordinary consciousness he even has an abnormally developed sense of self-preservation, so that he faces the social world with hostility, develops the strongest egoism, so that he becomes a criminal – and yet in his inner nature, which he does not know, there is a certain superficiality, a carelessness about life, he does not want to place any value on this life. This is caused by a spiritual premature birth. If that is the case, then this life also comes into existence in such a way that the person can fuel the ever-present instinct for self-preservation through what he does not know, which is a taking life lightly, and you see that sprout in the souls of criminals. Only when I knew that this was the case did another thing become clear to me. There is a dictionary of crook language. One can only understand the peculiar nature of the language of crime, this taking of life lightly in the words that come from the subconscious of the soul, when one knows what has been indicated above. But it must be pointed out again and again that in the totality of human lives on earth, what one life breaks is balanced again, so that the criminal, precisely through what he has to experience as a result of his crimes, ascends to other lives on earth in which a balance occurs.

But other things also become understandable when we look at the mysteries of life with spiritual research. We see people who are taken away by misfortune for my sake. Strangely enough, it turns out that when people are killed by an accident at a time when they would not otherwise have left the earth, that is, at a time when the earthly-physical forces are still present; for example, if someone is run over by a locomotive in the thirty-fifth year of their life without seeking death, then the forces in his body that could still have been effective are still present. When one departs from the physical world, these powers do not vanish into nothingness, but one sees how the soul-spiritual, the powers of intelligence, the powers of exact thinking can be strengthened by such an accident, so that such a person can be reborn with stronger powers of intelligence than another who dies a natural death. One must realize that spiritual research, in that it surveys life from a broad horizon, must speak differently about many things than one speaks in ordinary life. Someone who dies at an early stage of life, let us say, through an illness, who undergoes much through this illness, prepares his soul through this illness in such a way that his powers of will can be strengthened. Dying young from illness strengthens the willpower.

Yes, some of it may seem like pure fantasy; but I am also aware – I may as well admit it – that I have a certain responsibility when I discuss these things, and that I would not discuss them if I did not know the means of spiritual research with which these things can be known with the same certainty as the things of the external world can be known. I would consider it the greatest frivolity if these things were said without a knowledge lying in the soul that is imbued with such a mood as has just been indicated.

Thus man's life becomes understandable precisely through that which lies outside the physical life; and as life develops between birth and death, so it is a result of the life that lies beyond birth and death. To some this may appear to be a devaluation of life. So that it does not appear so to the honored listeners, I would like to repeat something very briefly. Someone may say: We are being made aware that what we experience in an earthly life, we have prepared for ourselves. It is true. But if we experience misfortune, we experience it because we have previously implanted the tendency of our soul to enter into this misfortune. Just as the Alpine plant does not thrive in the lowlands but seeks the heights, so the human soul seeks out the situation in which misfortune can befall it; it grows into what it experiences as fate. Just as it is a matter of course for the plant to live in the Alps, so it is a matter of course for the human soul to plunge into misfortune when it absorbs the tendency through insight: only if you overcome this misfortune can you become more perfect in a relationship where you would have to remain more imperfect if misfortune did not happen to you. If someone says: so we are made the smiths of our own misfortune; and if it is said that we should not only bear and endure our misfortune, but in a certain way have even earned it supernaturally: This cannot be a consolation for us! – so, on the other hand, it must be said what I already made clear earlier by means of a comparison: if someone has lived up to the age of eighteen in abundance, without learning anything, out of his father's pocket, and his father then goes bankrupt, then, seen from the outside, it can be a great misfortune when life now lets him down. And he is right to find life unhappy now. But let us assume that he has reached the age of fifty and looks at his life from a different point of view: “If I had not been struck by misfortune, I would not have become what I am now.” For my father it was misfortune, for me it was a developmental catalyst for my life. Thus we are not always in a position to find the right point of view for an accident at the time we experience it. Before birth, we stand on a completely different point of view than afterwards: on the one that what has happened earlier must be experienced in a new life, which creates a balance for what has happened earlier. There we prepare the misfortunes that we later justly endure with suffering ourselves, and which we justly lament because we then consider them only from the point of view of physical-earthly experience.

I would still like to say a little about the time that passes between death and a new birth. The short time of hindsight after death, which only lasts for days, I have already indicated; the time that comes afterwards lasts longer, it lasts for decades. The spiritual researcher comes to it in the following way, how long this time lasts. He must first ask himself, so that he can develop the powers within himself to see something like this: What is it in your soul that, when you experience yourself outside the body, appears to you as something that can be carried by the soul through death? And strangely enough, one experiences that one takes something out of the body, while otherwise one leaves everything behind. As a spiritual researcher, you leave your passions, memories and so on behind when you leave your body; but you take with you your conquests, you take with you what you can only acquire in an earthly life, say, after the age of twenty. People today don't like to hear this, because today people are considered mature even before the age of twenty. You can see that in the newspapers, above and below the line, many people today have not reached the age of twenty. But the truth is that what one experiences through oneself, so that it really becomes accumulated wisdom, happens through having already experienced something and looking back on the earlier experience with a later one. This inward ascent through its conquests, this inward experience of the soul, is what already germinates – so it turns out – what the soul then experiences between death and a new birth. And so the soul must live in a continuous process of such conquests, of transforming its powers. Normally the soul remains in the spiritual world between death and a new birth as long as it has something to transform. From the other side, the following can be said: We live in a certain time; we absorb this or that, experience this or that by belonging to this or that tribe. Having gone through death, we have formed our life experiences from this. But the earth is changing. Not only are the physical conditions changing. Let the honored listeners think back to the time around the founding of Christianity when the areas here, where Vienna now lies, have changed. But in even shorter periods of time, the cultural face of the earth, the spiritual content of our surroundings, from which we draw our memory, our store of memories, is changing. Now the soul does not normally return to a new life on earth until it can enter a completely new spiritual environment. It turns out that the soul is not reborn without reason, but so that it can experience new things. To do that, it has to change everything it experienced in the previous life, for example, the ability to express itself in a particular language. This must be transformed; it must acquire another language ability. So that is the time. It usually lasts from one to one and a half millennia. But as I said, spiritual premature births can occur due to certain circumstances.

Time is pressing; I cannot go into the description of the special circumstances any further. I would just like to say this: that those of the esteemed listeners who might go home with the feeling, 'Yes, none of this is really credible; how can a person possibly know about this!' — may be mindful of what I mentioned at the beginning, that in fact later self-evident truths — insights that have penetrated into all souls — first communicated themselves to earthly culture as paradoxical. And anyone who wants to cultivate spiritual science today must already familiarize themselves with how understandable it is that what is so certain to become established in the minds of people as the Copernican world view has done, after it was first regarded as fantasy, even as something harmful, by many. But once more I may draw attention to the picture that presents itself to the spiritual researcher and to the one who is able to understand spiritual science in the sense mentioned the day before yesterday, in order to give him the strong awareness of the truth that will gradually assert itself. Even if it has to force its way through the narrowest crevices, so that it is pressed down by the heaviest masses of prejudice, it will still force its way through. This consciousness is strengthened when we look at Giordano Bruno; here we have a picture of someone who, by saying: ” People believed that when they looked up into the vast space above, the blue vault of heaven spread out; the sun and planets orbited it, and the blue vault of heaven is a wall, a blue wall! At that time Giordano Bruno could say: This wall only appears to you because your perceptive faculty only reaches up to it. You build this boundary yourselves; it is not there at all. Infinities of space spread out. And infinities of space are filled with infinite worlds.

Today, the spiritual researcher must consider this expansion of the human gaze into the infinities of space; he must consider how Giordano Bruno first pointed out that the boundaries of space in the vault of heaven are only created by the limitations of human perception itself; he must point out that there is also such a firmament for the time of human experience. By surveying human life with the physical organs of perception and the mind, one sees these limits, the limits of birth and death, as one once saw the limit of space in the blue vault of heaven, but which in reality does not exist. So too the limit of the time of human experience between birth, or let us say conception and death, is only posited by the limitedness of the human faculty of perception. And beyond birth or conception and death, temporal infinity expands, and embedded in this temporal infinity are the backward and forward repetitions of human life on earth and those lives that flow between death and a new birth. I cannot, however, go into detail about the fact that all these repetitions once had a beginning, that man was born out of the spiritual and found his dwelling place here – at that time the earth itself arose out of the spiritual world – and that man, after he has gone through the earthly repetitions, when the earth itself detaches itself from human souls, then man passes over into another, again spiritualized life. This can only be hinted at here; more exact details will be found in my Secret Science.

Even if the insights of spiritual science are in contradiction to the thinking of the present time in the way indicated, it must still be said that in the intuitions of those who were the leaders of humanity - I closed the same reflection the day before yesterday - one nevertheless finds what is being revived in spiritual science today. Spiritual science, as it is meant here, has not been had by men; for it is a child of our time, and will arise out of the education of our time; but those who knew themselves united in soul with the spirit of the universe, which surges and weaves in all men, they shaped the words into that to which spiritual science can say 'Yes' in the full sense. Spiritual science shows us how to understand life between birth and death by showing us that in this physical body, in all of physical life, what is immortal, what can also live in a spiritual world, is at work and weaving. Spiritual science shows us that we have life in the body through the life outside the body, so that no one can understand the life between birth and death who does not understand the life outside the body, in the spiritual firmament. Goethe expresses this with the words – intuitively sensing the later insights of spiritual science – with words that not only clearly state Goethe's belief in an immortal life, but also express how he knew that the real value in realization of present life, in the experience of earthly existence, depends on one's glowing through, illuminating through, permeating through this earthly existence with knowledge of that which is extrinsic, supernal, and immortal. Therefore, it is precisely this realization of spiritual science, that a true inner essence of the mortal is recognized by the immortal, as summarized in a feeling in the words in which Goethe once expressed his conviction: “To those who, out of the peculiar essence of their present life, do not want to form an opinion about another life, to them I would like to say with Goethe: ‘I would not want to miss out on the happiness of believing in a future continuation; yes, I would like to say with Lorenzo de Medici: ’I would not want to miss out on the happiness of believing in a future continuation; yes, I would like to say with Lorenzo de Medici: ‘I would not want to miss out on the happiness of believing in a future continuation; yes, I would like to say with Lorenzo de Medici: ’I would not want to miss out on the happiness of believing in a future continuation; yes, I would like to say with Lorenzo de Medici: 'I would not want to miss out on the happiness of believing present life, to those I would say with Goethe: “I would not for the world renounce the good fortune of believing in a future life; nay, I would say with Lorenzo de' Medici that all those are dead even to this life who have no hope of another.”

Yesterday, we were able to discuss with a somewhat larger group the paths that lead to the higher worlds. Today, we may be permitted to say a few words about the higher worlds themselves. In particular, we want to pick out one of the most important chapters from the realm of the supersensible worlds and take a look at the processes that take place in a person between death and a new rebirth. This is one of the most important chapters in the realm of higher life because it concerns the most fundamental facts and processes of human development. And since the physical existence of man is connected and interwoven with significant processes in those worlds, one must penetrate into these secrets if one wants to understand the human being at all.

I would like to start by describing the life of a person between death and a new birth, but in order to understand what happens in this interim period, we must first consider the nature of the human being. For those who have been involved in anthroposophical studies for some time, the information in the introduction should not be new. But we must nevertheless consider these things very carefully from the outset in order to prepare ourselves for a complete understanding of the subsequent descriptions.

For anthroposophical spiritual science, the essence of man is not merely that essence of a material nature, as it appears to the external senses, which we can touch with our hands and which is bound to the physical world by physical laws. Spiritual science shows that this physical body of man is only part of his entire being, and that man has this physical body in common with the mineral world. We can see for ourselves outside in nature, everything that appears to be dead, mineral nature, consists of the same materials from which the human body is built. The same physical processes occur in stone and in the human body, but there is a big difference between the processes of ordinary, inanimate physical bodies and the nature of man. An external physical body, like a stone, has a form, and it retains its form until an external process, such as smashing or some other force, destroys the form. The human physical body, on the other hand, or that of any other living being, is destroyed in death by the inherent laws of physical and chemical substances, and the human body is a corpse in this case.

Spiritual science now shows us that in the state between birth and death, that is, during our physical lifetime, a second part of the human being is present as a constant fighter against the disintegration of the physical body. We call it the etheric body or life body. It is present in all of us. If this second link were not present in the human being, the body would only follow the physical forces in every moment; it would disintegrate. The fighter against this disintegration is the etheric body or life body. Only at death does this life body separate from the physical body. Man has this life body in common with every other living being; the animal has it, and the plant also has such a continuous fighter. In them too, there must be such a continuous fighter against decay.

If the physical body has been described as a first link of living beings, and the life body as a second, then man has a third link in addition to these. We are able to see this with our intellect alone, with logic. Let us assume that a person is standing before us. Is there nothing more in this space that he occupies, in this hand that he uses, than what has been mentioned so far? Oh, there is something more in it than just bones and muscles, than all kinds of chemical components that we can see with our eyes and feel with our hands. And each one of us also knows very well that there is something more to it. This something more is the sum of his suffering and his joy; everyone knows this something, for it is everything that takes place in sensations and feelings, from morning to evening, throughout one's entire life. There is an invisible carrier of these sensations, and we refer to it as the astral body or the human being's body of sensation. This astral body, which is not perceptible to the physical eye of man, is considerably larger than the physical body. To the clairvoyant consciousness, it is recognizable as a cloud of light in which the physical body is embedded. This third link of his being man has in common with the animal, because the animal also has an astral body.

But then there is still a fourth link in the human being, the crown of the earthly kingdom, the crown of human nature. We can see this fourth link when we trace an intimate movement of the human soul. There is one thing in man that can never approach him from the outside. It is this one name, the simple name 'I'. Only from the deepest depths of the soul can this name, this designation 'I', resound. Never can another human being say 'I' to a fellow human being. Man can only speak this to himself; it can only come from within him, from his own deepest inner being, and here something completely different, something divine, begins to resound through the name “I”. All great religions also felt that there is something sacred in the I. This is also clearly recognizable in the Old Testament. There the name 'I' is equivalent to the name of God. Only the priest was allowed to pronounce the name of God on particularly solemn occasions, at particularly solemn services, and when he reverently uttered the name 'Yahweh' in the temple, the name 'Yahweh' meant nothing other than 'I' or 'I am'. It was meant to signify that the God within man expresses himself. And only that being can utter these words in the soul to its soul in whose nature the divine essence reveals itself. The revelation of God in man is a fourth link in the human being. But we should not think that we are now God ourselves. It is a spark from the ocean of divinity that flashes in man. Just as a drop from the ocean is not the ocean itself, but only a drop from it, so the human ego is not God, but a drop from the divine substance: God begins to speak in the human soul.

Only the priest was allowed to pronounce the holy name, Yahweh, on particularly solemn occasions. To make this divine being resound in the soul of man, so that man can say, “I am,” is the crowning of creation. This I-bearer, the fourth link in human nature, makes man the first among the beings that are visible in earthly creation. That is why the ancient mysteries everywhere spoke of the holy tetrad, the first link of which is the visible physical body, the second link the etheric body or life body, the third link the astral body or sentient body, and the fourth link the I. These are the four links that we want to look at first. And human life, human consciousness, depends on the way in which they are connected with each other.

Only in day consciousness, in waking, do the four aspects of human nature interpenetrate. Then we have the physical body permeated by the etheric body, only finer and somewhat larger, rising above the physical body. Then we have the astral body, the carrier of our feelings, permeating the etheric body and, like a large shiny oval, surrounding the physical body, which is connected to the etheric body. And then we have the ego body. However, the four aspects of human nature only permeate each other when we are awake. When a person sleeps, the astral body with the ego carrier emerges, while the physical body, connected to the etheric body, remains in bed. In the morning, or when the person wakes up, the former two of the four members descend again and reconnect with the other two.

What does the astral body do at night in the ordinary person? It is not inactive. To the clairvoyant's eye it appears as a spiral cloud, and currents emanate from it, connecting it to the physical body lying there. When we fall asleep tired in the evening, what is the cause of this tiredness? The fact that the astral body uses the physical body during the day when we are awake and thus wears it out appears as tiredness. But during the whole of the night, while we are asleep, the astral body is at work dispelling the fatigue. That is why we feel refreshed after a good night's sleep, and it shows how important it is for a person to have a truly healthy sleep. It properly restores what has been worn out by waking life. The astral body also repairs other damage during sleep, such as diseases of the physical and etheric bodies. You will not only have observed this in yourself and in other people from your own life experience, but you will also have learned that every sensible doctor says that in certain cases sleep is an indispensable remedy for recovery. That is the significance of the alternating state between sleeping and waking.

Now we will move on to consider an even more important alternating state, that between life and death. As we have seen, as soon as sleep sets in, the astral body with the vehicle of the ego leaves the physical body connected with the etheric body. In ordinary life, this separation of the etheric body from the physical body hardly ever occurs, except in certain exceptional cases, which will be mentioned later. It is only at death that the physical body and ether body normally separate for the first time. Now, at death, not only does the astral body leave the four-part human being with the ego, as in sleep, but the three parts, ether body, astral body and ego, leave the physical body, and we have on the one hand the physical body, which remains behind as a corpse, is immediately attacked by physical and chemical forces and falls prey to destruction; on the other hand, we have a connection between the etheric body, astral body and I-bearer.

The question now arises as to how anyone can possibly know how these conditions develop at death. Well, if you followed yesterday's public lecture, you will understand that those people who are able to see into higher spheres are also able to report on the conditions after death. And means are available and ways are offered for every human being to acquire such abilities, which is why there is also the possibility of knowing what a person experiences when he passes through the gate of death. If any facts are reported that cannot be immediately verified by anyone, then only those who really know can decide on their correctness. But if the reproach were made to the one who knows by those who know not, that he too could not know anything, then the reproach of arrogance would lie entirely with those who know not and yet claim that one can know nothing. Thus only the one who knows can decide what can be known.

When a person has passed through death, he first has a feeling that he is growing into a world in which he becomes bigger and bigger and that he is no longer outside of all entities as in this physical world, not facing all other things, but, as it were, within them, as if he were crawling into all things. At the moment immediately following death you feel not a here and there, but an everywhere; it is as if you yourself were slipping into all things. Then there is a total recollection of your entire past life, which stands before you with all its details like a large tableau. This recollection cannot be compared with any recollection, however good, of your previous life, as you know it in earthly life, but this memory tableau suddenly stands before you in all its grandeur. What is the reason for this? It is because the etheric body is in fact the carrier of memory. As long as the etheric body was still enclosed in the physical body during earthly existence, it had to function through the physical body and was bound to physical laws. There it is not free; there it forgets, for there all memory steps aside that does not directly belong to the very next thing that the person is experiencing. But in death, as explained earlier, the etheric body, the carrier of memory, becomes free. It no longer needs to function through the physical, and so memories suddenly arise in an unbound way.

In exceptional cases, this separation of the physical and etheric bodies can also occur during life. For example, in cases of mortal danger, when drowning, when falling, that is, in such cases where the consciousness receives a great shock through the horror. People who have been subjected to such a shock sometimes report that for a few moments their whole life stood before them like a tableau, so that the vanished experiences from the earliest period of their lives suddenly emerged from oblivion with full clarity. Such stories are not based on deception, but on truth; they are facts. At that moment of the flash of the memory tableau, something very special happens to the person; only, with such a shock, consciousness must not be lost. At that moment of the crash or other horror that caused the shock, something occurs that the clairvoyant can see. Not always, but sometimes, the part of the etheric body that fills the head region emerges from the head, either completely or in part, and even if this only happens for a moment, it still frees the memory, because at such a moment the etheric body is freed from the physical matter that hinders uninhibited memory.

We can also observe a partial emergence of the etheric body on other occasions. If you press or bump any part of your body, a peculiar tingling sensation may occur, and we tend to describe this feeling by saying that the limb has fallen asleep. Children who want to describe what kind of feeling they have when this happens have often been heard to say: “I feel like seltzer water in my hand.” What does that mean? The actual cause is that the corresponding part of the life body has been removed from this limb for a while. The clairvoyant person can then perceive the elevated part of the etheric body near the physical body, like a copy of it. For example, when a person falls, the corresponding part of the etheric body is pushed out of the head by the falling movement.

At death, this tableau of memories occurs immediately and with full intensity because the entire physical body is abandoned. The duration of this tableau of memories after death is also known. It is three to four days. It is not easy to give the reasons for this. This period of time is different for each person and roughly corresponds to the ability of the person concerned to stay awake without falling asleep for as long as they could have done so during their lifetime.

After that, something else happens. What happens then is that a kind of second corpse is released. The human being now also leaves the etheric body behind; but he retains a certain essence of it, and that is what the person takes with him and retains for all eternity. Now, after discarding the etheric body, the time of the Kamaloka begins for the person, the Kamaloka state. If you want to understand what kind of state this is, you have to bear in mind that after leaving the physical and etheric bodies behind, the human being still has the astral body and the ego of his four limbs, and the question now arises for us as to what the astral body, with which the ego now lives into the time of the Kamaloka, is all about. The astral body is the carrier of pleasure and pain, of enjoyment and desire, so these do not cease when the physical body is discarded; only the possibility of satisfying desires ceases, since the instrument for satisfying desires, the physical body, is no longer available. Everything that the person was as a sentient being in the physical body does not cease to be. The person retains all of this in their astral body. Let us think of an ordinary desire, and for the sake of simplicity, let us choose one of a rather banal nature, for example, the desire for a tasty dish. This desire is not based in the physical body, but in the astral body. Therefore, this desire is not discarded with the physical body; it remains. The physical body was only the instrument with which this desire could be satisfied. If you have a knife to cut with, that is the instrument, and you do not lose the ability to cut when you put the knife away. So at death only the tool for enjoyment is laid down, and therefore man is first in a state in which all his various desires are represented, which now must be laid down or rather must be learned to be laid down. The time when this happens is the Kamaloka time. It is a time of testing, and it is very good and important for the further development of man. Imagine you were suffering from thirst and you were in a region where there was no water, and of course no beer or wine, no drink of any kind at all. You would suffer from a burning thirst that cannot be quenched. In a similar way, a person experiences a certain feeling of thirst when he no longer possesses the instrument with which he was the only one able to satisfy his desires.

Kamaloka is a period of weaning for the person, since he must give up his desires in order to live in the spiritual world. This Kamaloka period lasts for a longer or shorter time for each person, depending on how well he has mastered the habit of giving up his desires. It depends on how the person has already acquired the habit of regulating his desires in life, and how he has learned to enjoy and to renounce in life. But there are pleasures and desires of a lower and a higher kind. We call those pleasures and desires, for the satisfaction of which the physical body is not the actual instrument, higher pleasures and desires, and these are not among those that a person has to get rid of after death. Only as long as a person still has something that draws him towards the physical existence - lower pleasures - does he remain in the astral life of the Kamaloka period. When nothing draws him back down after this period of disaccustoming, then he has become capable of living in the spiritual world, and then a third corpse emerges from the human being. The human being's stay in this Kamalokai period lasts approximately as long as a third of one's lifetime.

It depends on how old the person was when they died, that is, how long they had lived in the physical body. However, this time of transition is not always terrible or unpleasant. In any case, the human being becomes more independent of physical desires through it, and the more he has already made himself independent in life and acquired interests in the contemplation of spiritual things, the easier this time of the Kamaloka will be for him. It makes him freer, so that the human being becomes grateful for this time of the Kamaloka. The feeling of deprivation in physical life becomes bliss in the time of the Kamaloka. Thus opposite feelings arise, for everything one has learned in life one is glad to do without in the time of the kamaloka period. When, as already mentioned, the third corpse emerges from the human being, then everything that the person cannot use in the spiritual world floats away with this astral body. These astral corpses are visible to the clairvoyant and take twenty, thirty, even forty years to dissolve. Since such astral corpses are continually present, they occasionally pass through the bodies of the living, through our own bodies, especially during the night, when our astral bodies are separated from the physical bodies during sleep. Just as an extract, a certain essence, remains for all eternity for the actual human being after the ethereal corpse has left, so too does a certain essence remain for him for all eternity after the astral corpse has left, as the fruit of the last embodiment.

And now the time of Devachan begins for the person, the entry into the spiritual world, into the home of the gods and all spiritual beings. When a person enters this world, he experiences a feeling that can be compared to the liberation of a plant that grew in a narrow crevice and suddenly grows up into the light. For when man enters this heavenly world, he experiences complete spiritual freedom and from then on enjoys absolute bliss. What, in fact, is the time of Devachan? You can get an idea of it if you consider that man is preparing here for a new life, for a new reincarnation. In the physical world, in this lower world, man has experienced and learned so much, and he has taken these experiences with him. He has absorbed them like a fruit of life, which he can now freely process within himself. He now forms an archetype for a new life during the devachan period. This happens during a long, long time. It is a working on one's own being, and every working, every producing is connected with bliss. You can get an idea of the fact that every producing, every working is connected with bliss by observing a hen brooding an egg. Why does she do that? Because it feels like doing it. In the same way, it is a pleasure for a human being to weave the fruits of the past life into the plan for a new life in Devachan.

In the chain of reincarnations, the human being has indeed already gone through many lives, but at the end of a life he is never the same as he was at the beginning of that life. In this life, forced into the physical body, he must behave quite passively. But now that it is free, freed from the physical body, from the etheric body and from the astral body, it weaves an image into its eternal essence, and this weaving in is perceived as bliss, as a feeling that cannot be compared to anything that it can ever experience in the physical world as bliss. His life is bliss in the spiritual world. But do not think that the physical life has no significance in this spiritual world. When bonds of love and friendship have been formed from soul to soul in life, only the physical part is lost with death, but the spiritual bond remains and forms lasting, indestructible bridges from soul to soul, which condense into effects in the archetypes. These are then able to be lived out in the physical in the following re-embodiments. It is the same in the relationship that exists between mother and child. A mother's love for her child is the answer to the prenatal love of the child for the mother, who, because of the affinity of her soul with the child, felt drawn to her as a result of her longing for re-embodiment. What then takes place in the life, in the jointly experienced embodiment between mother and child, forms new, soul ties that remain. And everything that bound soul to soul is already woven into the spiritual life that you find when you enter the spiritual world after death. The life between death and a new birth is such that what was done in the previous physical life has an effect. Yes, even the favorite pastimes that a person was devoted to in life have an effect. But after death, the human being becomes freer and freer, because he becomes a preparer for the future, for his own future.

Does a person do anything else in the hereafter? Oh, he is very active in the hereafter. Someone might ask why a person is reborn and why he comes back to this earth at all if he can also be active in the hereafter. Well, this happens because re-embodiments never occur in such a way that a person is unnecessarily reborn in the course of them. He can always learn new things, and conditions on earth have always changed so that he enters completely different circumstances to gain experience for his further development. The face of the earth, the regions, the animal kingdom, the plant cover, all this is constantly changing in a relatively short time. Think back a hundred years. What a difference compared to today! It is not so long ago that every child learns to read and write by the age of six, as is the case in our society today. In ancient times, there were highly educated people who were at the head of the state and could neither read nor write. Where are the forests and animal species that populated the land five hundred years ago, which is now criss-crossed by railways? What were the localities like where our big cities are today, what were they like a thousand years ago? Only then is man reborn, only then does he enter into a new rebirth when conditions have changed so much that man can learn something new. Follow the centuries as the face of the earth is changed, torn down and built up by the intellectual powers of men. But there is also much that changes that cannot be worked on by the external intellectual powers of people. The plant cover and the animal world change before our eyes; they disappear and other species take their place. Such changes are brought about from the other world. A person walking across a meadow can see how a bridge is built over the stream, but he cannot see how the plant cover is built up. The dead do that. They are working to reshape and rework the face of the earth in order to create a different setting for themselves for a new reincarnation. After man has been busy with the preparations for the new reincarnation in this way for a long, long time, the moment approaches when it is to take place. What happens now? What does man do when he enters into his new incarnation? At that time man finds himself in his Devachan, and there he feels that he must first attach a new astral body to himself. Then, as it were, the astral substance rushes towards him from all sides, and depending on his character, it crystallizes around him, so to speak. You have to imagine it like iron filings being drawn to a magnet and grouping themselves around it. In the same way, the astral substance groups itself around the re-embodied ego. But then it is still necessary to choose suitable parents, and so the person is led to this or that pair of parents, but not merely in obedience to his own attraction. For in this process, exalted beings intervene and take action, who, in keeping with the present state of human development, have taken on the work of karmically ordering these relationships in a correct and just manner. If, therefore, parents and children occasionally appear to be out of harmony, there need be nothing wrong or unjust in that. Sometimes it is good for man to be brought into the most complicated conditions and to have to adjust himself to the strangest circumstances, in order to learn thereby.

The succession of these repeated re-embodiments is not, however, an endless one. There is a beginning and there is an end. Once, in the distant past, man did not descend to incarnations. He did not yet know birth and death. He led a kind of angelic existence, not interrupted by such drastic changes in his condition as are present today in the form of birth and death. But just as surely as man will come to a time when he has gained sufficient experience in the lower worlds to have acquired a sufficiently mature, enlightened state of consciousness to be able to work in the exalted upper worlds without being forced to descend again into the lower worlds.

After hearing the conditions presented here about repeated lives on earth, some people believe they should be afraid that the feeling of parental love could be affected by a mother learning that the child is not entirely of her flesh, because there is something about this child that is not of her, something foreign. But the bonds that span parents and children are by no means subject to chance and lawlessness. They are not new bonds. They already existed in previous lives and once existed in kinship and friendly connections. These bonds of love unite them permanently even in the higher worlds in eternal reality, and all people will one day be embraced in eternal love, even if they no longer descend into the cycle of re-embodiments.

Ladies and Gentlemen! From the time of Ancient Greece, a familiar and much discussed phrase has come to us like a warning cry to the depths of the human soul: “Human Being, know yourself!” These words, though rarely heeded as such, call us with power. They can be interpreted as asking us to become aware, not only of our true being in the most important activities of soul and spirit, but also of our significance as human beings in the world order.

Ordinarily, when such a call sounds forth from a culturally significant center at a particular time in history, it does not indicate something easily attainable, but rather to the lack of ability; it points toward something not easily fulfilled.

If we look back at earlier historical epochs, not superficially or theoretically but with a real feeling for history, we shall experience how such a call indicates a decrease rather than an increase in the power of human self-knowledge. In previous times of human evolution, religious experience, artistic sense, and the inner comprehension of ideals still worked together in harmony. One can feel how, at that time when religion, art, and science still formed a unity, human beings felt themselves, naturally, to be likenesses or images of the divine spirit, living within and permeating the world. They felt themselves to be God-sent entities on Earth. During those ancient days, it was self-evident that seeking knowledge of the human being was also part of seeking knowledge of the gods—divine knowledge—the spiritual foundations, experienced and thought of as the ground of the world, and felt to be working also in the human being.

In remote times, when human beings spoke the word that would represent the word I in our current language, it expressed for them both the essence of fundamental world forces and their inherent world-being. The word thus indicated that the human self resonated with something much greater than the individual self, something pointing at the creative working in the universe. During the course of evolution, it became more and more difficult to reach what had been accepted naturally at one time, just as perceptible as color is today to our eyes. If these earlier people had heard the call for self-knowledge (which could hardly have come from an earthly being), if they had perceived the call “Know yourself!” as coming from a supersensible being, they may well have answered, “Why is it necessary to make such an effort for self-knowledge?” For human beings saw and felt themselves as reflections of the divine spirit that shines, sounds, warms, and blesses throughout the world. They felt that if one knows what the wind carries through the trees, what the lightning sends through the air, what rolls in the thunder, what constantly changes in the cloud formations, what lives in a blade of grass, what blossoms in the flower, then one also knows the human self.

A time came when such knowledge of the world, which was simultaneously knowledge of the divine spirit, was no longer possible, due to humanity’s increasing spiritual independence; the phrase “Know yourself!” began to be heard in the depths of human consciousness. It indicated something that had been a natural gift until that point, but was now becoming an exertion.

There is an important epoch of human evolution between the earlier admonition “Know yourself!” and another phrase coined much later, in our own times, in the last third of the nineteenth century. The later saying, voiced by the eminent natural scientist Du Bois-Reymond, rang out like a negative answer to the Apollonian call “Know yourself!” with the word Ignorabimus—“we are fated to ignorance.” Ignorabimus expressed Du Bois-Reymond’s opinion that modern knowledge of nature, despite its immense progress, was fated to be arrested at the frontier of natural science. A significant stretch of human soul development exists between these two historically momentous utterances. In the meantime, enough inner human strength survived as a residue of ancient times that, what previously had been a matter of course—that is, to look for the essence of the human being in the outer appearance of divine existence—now meant that, in due time, by strength of inner effort, the human being would gradually attain self-knowledge again. But this force of self-knowledge became increasingly weaker. By the last third of the nineteenth century, it had become so weak that, after the sun of self-knowledge had set, the negative counterpart of the Apollonian positive was heard: “Human being, you will never know yourself.”

For contemporary natural history, attuned to the needs of our time, to confess it impossible to fathom the secrets of consciousness working in matter, amounts to admitting that knowledge of the human being is completely unattainable. At this point something else must be mentioned: When the call “Human Being, know yourself!” was heard, self-knowledge, which in earlier times had also been knowledge of God, was already passing through its twilight stages; and in just that way the renunciation of self-knowledge was in its twilight stages by the time we were told, “Resign yourself! There is no self-knowledge, no knowledge of the human being.”

Again the words indicate not so much what is said directly, as to its opposite, which is what present-day humanity is experiencing. Precisely because the power of self-knowledge has increasingly weakened, the urge for the knowledge of the human being has made itself felt, an urge that comes, not from the intellect, nor from any theoretical ideas, but from the realm of the heart, from the deepest recesses of the soul. It was felt generally that the methods of natural science could not discover humankind’s true nature, despite the brilliant successes of natural-scientific research that had benefited humanity to such a degree. At the same time there was a strong feeling that, somehow, paths must exist.

The birth of this new search for knowledge of the human being, as expressed by natural scientists, included, side by side with other fundamental branches of life, the pedagogical movement, the movement to evolve a proper relationship between the human being and the growing human being—between the adult and the child who needs to be educated and taught. This movement prompted the call most strongly for a renewal of knowledge of the human being, even if outwardly expressed in opposite terms—namely, that such knowledge was beyond human reach. At the very time that these sentiments were being expressed, there was a growing conviction among those who really cared for the education of the young, that intellectualism, knowledge based only on external sense observation and its consequent interpretation, was unsuitable to provide human beings with what they need to teach and educate young people, the growing young men and women. One therefore heard increasingly the call for changing priorities between the training of rational thinking, which has made such precious contributions to the modern world, and the education of the children’s feeling life and of the forces of human will. Children were not to be turned into “know-it-alls,” but overall capacities for practical life were to be nurtured and encouraged.

There is one strange omission in this general demand for a renewal of education, however: the necessity to base educational demands on a clear insight into the evolving human being, into the child, rather than to depend on the teachers’ vague subconscious instincts. The opinion is that, while nature can be known, it is impossible to penetrate human nature in depth and in full consciousness in a way that would help educators. Indeed, one particular trend of modern pedagogy renounces any attempt to develop a conscious, thoughtful understanding of the human being, depending instead on the teachers’ supposed educational instincts. Any unbiased judge of the current situation has to acknowledge the existence (among a wide range of very praiseworthy pedagogical movements) of a strong tendency to build educational aims on elementary and instinctual human nature. One depends on vague, instinctive impulses because of a conviction that it is impossible to gain conscious knowledge of the depths of the human being.

Only when one can see through such an attitude in the contemporary spiritual and cultural life with the human interest it deserves, can one appreciate the aims of the science of the spirit as it applies to the development of pedagogical sense and competence. This science of the spirit does not draw its substance from ancient forms of human knowledge; nevertheless, it offers new possibilities in the praiseworthy natural-scientific urge to penetrate into the depths of human nature, especially in the field of education. Knowledge of the human being can only be attained in full consciousness, for we have definitely passed the stage when human beings lived by instinct. We cannot, of course, jettison instinct or elemental-primeval forces altogether, yet we need to work toward a fully conscious penetration into all the beings that come to meet us in human life.

It may feel nice to hear that we should not depend too much on intellect and reason, and thus we should trust again in the mysterious working of instinctive impulses. But this nice feeling is inappropriate for the current time, because, due to our being human and thus caught in human evolution, we have lost the old certainty of instinctual experience. We need to conquer a new certainty that will be no less primeval and no less elementary than earlier forms of experience, one capable of allowing us to plunge into the sphere of consciousness.

The very people who rush enthusiastically toward knowledge using the approach and methods that are used quite justifiably today to explore nature, will also come to realize that this particular way of using the senses, this way of using instruments in the service of experimental research cannot lead to knowledge of the human being; nor will we find it in a certain way of making rational judgments about sensory knowledge, a particular way of investigating nature. The natural scientists themselves will have to concede that a knowledge of the human being must exist that flows from completely different sources than the ones we tap these days in an attempt to invade the being of external reality.

In my books How to Know Higher Worlds and An Outline of Occult Science, I have described the forces that the human being must extract from the depths of the self. I have shown that it is possible to awaken forces in the human soul so that one can recognize something purely spiritual behind outer appearances, and that, by allowing dormant forces to reveal themselves, one can recognize spirit working in, and permeating, all matter.

Two things must be understood fully about spiritual science: First, it is impossible to fathom the secrets of human nature by knowledge gained exclusively from natural science; second, it is possible to penetrate the spiritual world in the same fully conscious state that so-called empirical research uses in the sense world, and with the same clarity. However, I must quickly add that the importance of what has just been said can be appreciated and confirmed only through personal, practical experience in matters of spiritual knowledge.

People who try—and this has been done again and again—to apply the methods of experimental laboratory research to the investigation of the human being will not succeed, for the essence of human nature must be experienced in one’s own self to be experienced at all in a living way. It is well known that, in the absence of self-knowledge, one remains always at the periphery of the human being, and I would like to make the following paradoxical statement: If a researcher were to apply the natural-scientific research method to the study of the human being, and then to verify the findings, applied them to his or her own being, believing this to really be what true humanity is about, the following would happen. Precisely when such a person felt most enthusiastic, the following realization would jump up in front of the soul: When I experience myself through the natural-scientific method, applying all my senses and all my powers of knowledge, I still feel the way one would feel looking at one’s own skeleton. The experience of such natural- scientific investigation would in fact be devastating. Human beings would “skeletize” themselves. To experience this feeling is to touch on the impulse that gave rise to spiritual science. We must bring the essence of the human being out in ways other than through bringing forth lifeless nature.

What kind of human knowledge will lead to this goal? It certainly cannot be the kind that makes us feel as if in our soul and spirit we were mere skeletons; there must be a way of evoking different images. Let us look at our blood circulation and our breathing. Although we are not generally aware of them in any great detail, they form an essential part of our life. The way we normally experience our blood circulation and our breathing when in good health represents a wholeness, even without our being able to put this perception into so many words. We experience it simply as part of our feeling healthy. Something similar must surely exist with regard to our knowledge of the human being. It must be possible to form ideas and perceptions of the human being that can be worked through inwardly, so that one experiences them as a natural part of the human entity, comparable with experiencing one’s breathing and blood circulation as a natural part of health. But then the question arises: What will lead us to an understanding of the child’s nature, with which we, as educators and teachers, must work?

How do we learn to know external sensory nature? Through our senses. Through our eye we gain knowledge of the multiple world of light and color. In order to make any of the world phenomenon part of our soul content, we must have the appropriate sense experiences, and we need the relevant sense organs for what is to become part of our soul content. If we study the wonderful construction of the human eye and the way it is linked to the brain, we will experience deeply what Goethe felt when he repeated the verse of an ancient mystic:

Were not the eye alike the Sun,
How could we ever see the light?
Lived not in us God’s own great power,
How could the Divine ever bring delight?

This Sun-like element of the eye, working selflessly within the inner human being, enables us to receive the external light.

We must look at the sense organs themselves if we want to understand the human connection with the external world, or if we wish to make any soul experience our own. Now let us look at the specific organ that can lead us to a true knowledge of the human being. Which sense organ would lead us to such a knowledge? We get to know external nature through our eyes, our ears and the other senses. For knowledge of the spiritual world, it is the spiritually enlightened being, which can be attained by following the paths described in How to Know Higher Worlds. In that book I describe two polarities in human striving for knowledge: On the one side is the knowledge resulting from what the physical senses give us; on the other side is the knowledge of the spirit, which pervades and weaves through both outer nature and the inner realm of the human being. This spiritual knowledge can be gained whenever human beings make themselves into spiritual sense organs by somehow transmuting all the forces of their human nature.

The field of knowledge of the human being lies precisely between these two poles. If we restrict ourselves to knowing external nature as transmitted to us through the senses, we cannot reach the essence of the human being for the reasons already stated. If we are cognizant of the spiritual aspects only, we have to transport ourselves to such heights of soul and spirit that the immediacy of the human being standing before us in the world vanishes. (You can read about this aspect in Occult Science and in my other writings dealing with the spiritual science I am speaking of here.) We need something that gives us even more intimate access to the human being than the subtle sense allowing us to see human beings as a part of the spirit nature that permeates the whole world. Just as I need the eye to perceive color, so a particular sense is needed for unmediated perception of the human being. What could such a sense be like at the present stage of human evolution? How can we penetrate the nature of human beings as they exist in the world, in the same way that we can penetrate the multiplicity of colors through the wonderful organization of the eye or the multiplicity of sounds through that of the ear? Where do we find this sense for the perception of the human essence?

It is none other than the sense granted us for the appreciation of art; the artistic sense can transmit to us spirit shining in matter, and revealed as the beauty we appreciate in art. At the present stage of evolution, this artistic sense allows us to apprehend the essence of what is truly human so that it can enter practical spheres of life. I know very well how paradoxical such a statement must sound to the ears of our contemporaries. But if I have the courage to think, to their very end, the concepts and ideas by which we comprehend external nature, and if having felt my way into them with all my humanity, I can say to myself that my ideas, my concepts have really brought me very close to nature, then I will feel that something at that very boundary is pulling me free of the limitations of these concepts and ideas, allowing me to soar up toward an artistic formulation of them.

This was why in 1894 I wrote the following words in the introduction to The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: “To fully understand the human being, an artistic appreciation of ideas is needed, not merely an abstract comprehension of ideas.”3A real enlivening is required to make the leap that transforms the abstraction of concepts we use to understand nature into artistic display. This is possible. It requires that knowledge be allowed to flow into art, which leads to the development of the artistic sense. As long as we remain within the boundaries of natural science, we have to acknowledge that we will never understand how consciousness is connected with matter; but the moment we allow anything to flow naturally from the realm of ideas into an artistic view, the scales fall from our eyes. Everything in the realm of idea and concept is transformed into an artistic seeing, and what we see in this way spreads over the essence of humanity, just as the colors conceived by the eye spread their hues over the outer appearance of plants or other natural phenomena. Just as the physical organ of the eye, in the process of conceiving color, merges with the essence of color phenomena in nature, so the artistic sense grows inwardly in conjunction with the nature of the human being as a whole. We need to have seen colors with our eyes before we can think them. Likewise, only after we have had a vision of the nature of the human being through this artistic sense, can our abstract concepts and ideas fully encompass it.

If science thus becomes an art, then all our knowledge of the human being, and all our deliberations about first forming an artistic picture of the human being, will not turn to a bag of bones in the soul; instead, we will be at one with our own concepts and artistic ideas about the human being, and they will flow into and through the soul just as blood and breath circulate through the body. Something will reside in us that is as full of life as our sensations are when our breathing and blood circulation function normally and give us a sense of health and well being.

A sense of wholeness then embraces the entire nature of the human being, similar to a general feeling of health with regard to our physical organization; this sense will include something that is possible only when the artistic sense has attained the intimate contemplation of the human being living here in the present, not the elevated human being of insufficiently grounded spiritual speculation.

If we consider what such knowledge will eventually yield—knowledge that, like our breathing and blood circulation, continuously and in each of its aspects becomes will and activity—we will find that this extended metaphor helps us even further; for it is more than a mere comparison, and it has not been picked out in the abstract, but grows out of reality itself. What is it that causes our feeling of health, emanating from our entire constitution? What happens in such a general feeling of health, which, by the way, can be a very subtle feeling? It is the recognition that I, the human being, am so organized that I can look at myself as a healthy person standing in the world. What does it mean to be a healthy human being?

The crown of human life, the power of love is expressed in the healthy human being. Ultimately health and all healthy soul forces stream together into a feeling permeated with love, enabling me to acknowledge the person next to me, because I acknowledge the healthy human being in myself. Thus, out of this knowledge of the healthy human being sprouts love for our neighbor, whom we recognize as being like us. Our own self is found in another human being. Such knowledge of human nature does not become the theoretical instruction given to a technician who then applies it mechanically; rather, it becomes a direct inner experience leading immediately into practical life. For in its transformation it flows into the power of love and becomes an active form of human knowledge. If as teacher and educator, I meet a child through my knowledge of what a human being is, then an understanding of the child will blossom within my unfolding soul and spiritual love. I no longer need instructions based on the example of natural science and on theories about child development. All I need is to experience the knowledge of the human being, in the same way that I experience healthy breathing and healthy blood circulation as bases of my general health. Then the proper form of knowledge, correctly stimulated and enlivened, will become a pedagogical art.

What must this knowledge of the human being become? The answer will be found in what has been already said. We must be able to allow this knowledge of the human being to fly out on the wings of love over all our surroundings, and especially upon the children. Our knowledge of the human being must be transformed into an inner attitude where it is alive in the form of love. This is the most important basis for teaching today. Education must be seen as a matter of one’s own inner attitude, not as a matter of thinking up various schemes, such as how to avoid training the child’s intellect exclusively. We could constantly reiterate this tenet, of course, and then go about it in a thoroughly intellectual way, taking it for granted, for example, that teachers should use their intellects to think up ways to protect their pupils from intellectualism! It goes without saying that our work must begin with the teachers. We must encourage them not to fall back entirely on the intellect, which, by itself, never has an artistic nature. Starting with the teachers, we will create the proper conditions for the theory and practice of education, based on our knowledge of the human being and given in a form suitable for nurturing the child. This will establish the necessary contact between teacher and child, and it will turn our knowledge of the human being, through the working of love, into right education and training.

Natural science alone cannot understand how consciousness works in the physical organization. Why is this? Because it cannot comprehend how the artistic experience occurs and how it is formed. Knowledge of the human being makes us realize that consciousness is an artist whose material is the material substance of the human being. As long as knowledge of the human being is not sought with an artistic sense, the state of ignorabimus will hold sway. We must first begin to realize that human consciousness is an artist working creatively with matter itself; if we want to comprehend the true nature of the human being, we must acknowledge the artistic creator in each individual. Only then will we get beyond the stage of ignorabimus. At the same time, knowledge of the human being cannot be theoretical, but must able to enter the sphere of will. It will directly enter the practical sphere of life and feel at home there.

If the evolving child is viewed from this perspective, with insight stemming from an artistic sense and carried on wings of love, we will see and understand very much. I should like to describe just one example: Let us look at the extraordinary phase when the child undergoes the transition from playing to working. All children play. They do so naturally. Adults, on the other hand, have to work to live. They find themselves in a situation that demands it. If we look at social life today, we could characterize the difference between the child at play and the adult at work in the following way: Compared to the activities of the adult, which are dictated by necessity, the child’s play is connected with an inner force of liberation, endowing the playing child with a feeling of well-being and happiness. You need only observe children at play. It is inconceivable that they are not in full inner accord with what they are doing. Why not? Because playing is a liberating experience to children, making them eager to release this activity from the organism. Freeing, joyful, and eager to be released—this is the character of the child’s play.

What about the adult’s work? Why does it often, if not usually, become an oppressive burden? (And this will be even more so in the future.) We could say that the child grows from an experience of liberation while playing into the experience of the oppressive burden of work, dictated to the adult by social conditions. Doesn’t this great contrast beg us to ask: How can we build a bridge from the child’s liberating play activity to the burdensome experience in the sphere of the adult workday?

If we follow the child’s development with the artistic understanding I spoke of just now, we will find such a bridge in the role art plays at school. If applied properly as an educational tool, art will lead from the child’s liberating play activity to the stage of adult work. With the help of art, this work no longer needs be an oppressive burden. Unless we can divest work of its oppressive character, we can never solve the social question. Unless the polarity between the young child’s playing and the adult’s burdensome daily work is balanced by the right education, the problem of labor will reappear again and again in different guises.

What does it mean to introduce the artistic element into education? One could easily form misconceptions about artistic activities, especially at school. Everyone agrees that it is essential to train the child’s intellect. This notion has become so deeply ingrained in modern consciousness that indifference toward training the intellect is very unlikely to spread. Everyone can see also that, without moral education, one cannot do justice to human dignity, and the human being cannot be considered fully developed. In general, there is still a certain feeling that an immoral person is not fully human, but is disabled, at least in regard to the human soul and spirit. And so, on the one hand people assume that the intellect must be trained, and, on the other, that genuine human dignity must also be cultivated at school, including the concepts of a sacred sense of duty and human virtues. But the same attention is not given to what the human being can be presented with in full freedom and love—that is, the artistic element.

The high esteem for what is human and an extraordinary love for the human being are needed during one’s evolving childhood days; this was the case for Schiller, whose (alas!) insufficiently known Letters on the Esthetic Education of the Human Being was based on those qualities. We find in them a genuine appreciation of the artistic element in education, rooted in German culture. We can begin with these letters, and spiritual science will deepen our understanding. Look, for example, at child’s play and how it flows forth simply because it is in a child’s nature to be active. See how children liberate from their organization something that takes the form of play; their humanity consists of something that takes the form of play. Observe how necessity forces us to perform work that does not flow directly from the wholeness of our human nature; it can never express all of our nature. This is how we can begin to understand human development from childhood to adulthood.

There is one thing, however, that we should never lose sight of; usually, when observing children at play, people do so from the perspective of an adult. If this were not so, one would not hear again and again the trifling exhortation that “children should learn through play.” The worst thing you could do is teach children that work is mere play, because when they grow up, they then will look at life as if it were only a game. Anyone who holds such a view must have observed children at play only with an adult’s eyes, believing that children bring the same attitude to play as adults do. Play is fun for an adult, an enjoyment, a pleasure, the spice of life. But for children, play is the very stuff of life. Children are absolutely earnest about play, and the very seriousness of their play is a salient feature of this activity. Only by realizing the earnest nature of child’s play can we understand this activity properly. And by watching how, in play, human nature pours itself in complete seriousness into the treatment of external objects, we can direct the child’s inborn energy, capacity and gift for play into artistic channels. These still permit a freedom of inner activity while at the same time forcing children to struggle with outer materials, as we have to do in adult work. Then we can see how precisely this artistic activity makes it possible to conduct education so that the joy of engaging in artistic activities can be combined with the seriousness of play, contributing in this way to the child’s character.

Particularly after the child enters school, until the ninth or tenth year, one may be in a position to use the artistic element, and this must be more than dallying in fairy tales; rather, whatever subject is being taught, the child’s inherent impulse to play, which is such an intrinsic part of its makeup, can be guided into artistic activities. And when children enter the first or second grade, they are perfectly able to make this transition. However clumsy children of six or seven may be when modeling, painting, or finding their way into music and poetry, if teachers know how to permeate their lessons with artistry, even small children, as miniature sculptors or painters, can begin to have the experience that human nature does not end at the fingertips, that is, at the periphery of the skin, but flows out into the world. The adult human being is growing in children whenever they put their being into handling clay, wood, or paints. In these very interactions with the materials, children grow, learning to perceive how closely the human being is interwoven with the fabric of the world. And when working with musical sounds and colors, or handling wood, children grow outward into the world. If children are introduced to these artistic activities properly—however clumsy their first efforts may appear—they will greatly benefit from what is received in this way from the world. When music and poetry are brought to children, they experience the musical and poetical element in their own being. Then it is as if a heavenly gift had been bestowed on young students, enabling them to experience a second being within. Through sounds of music and poetry, it is as if a grace-filled being were sinking down into us through sounds of music and poetry, making us aware even in childhood, that in each of us something lives, which has come from spiritual heights to take hold of our narrow human nature.

If one lives this way with children, with the eye and mind of an artist and teaching them with a sensitive and artistic touch, their responses will reveal qualities that the teacher must endeavor to cultivate, however clumsy the children’s first efforts may be when working with color, sound, or other artistic media. One learns to know children intimately, both their gifts and limitations; watching the artistic element of the sculpture as it flows from little hands, living in empathy with the child, one learns to recognize the strength with which the child directs every bit of attention and forces toward the spirit worlds, and then brings that back into the physical world of the senses. One learns to know the children’s entire relationship to a higher spiritual world. And if music and poetry are brought to the children, as a teacher, one gains a glimpse of the latent strength in them, ready to develop later in life.

Having brought the children into close contact with the plastic, poetic, and musical arts, and having brought eurythmic movements into their bodies, having awakened to life through eurythmy what would otherwise be the abstract element of language, we create in the human being an inner harmony between the spirit-winged musical and poetic elements, and the spirit-permeated material elements of modeling and painting. Human consciousness, spiritually illumined, weaves soulfully and artistically into the physical corporeal part of the human being. One learns to teach by awakening spirit and soul in children, in such a way that teaching becomes health-permeating, stimulating growth and strength for all of life. This brings to mind a beautiful and deeply meaningful Greek expression. The ancient Greeks spoke of Phidias’s statue of Zeus as “healing magic.” Genuine art will not only take hold of soul and spirit, but it will also enhance health and growth. Genuine art has always had healing powers.

Educators and teachers who have the proper love for art and the necessary respect for human nature will always be in a position to implant the artistic element as a magic healing into all their teaching. Then training the intellect, which is a necessary part of schooling, as well as religious teaching and training the heart forces, will be permeated by an element that is inextricably connected to human freedom and human love. If teachers themselves feel a strong bond with the artistic element and appeal to the artistic appreciation in their pupils, and if they create an artistic atmosphere in the classroom, the proper teaching methods and human influence will stream out into all other aspects of education. Then they will not “save” the artistic element for other subjects, but let it flow and permeate all their teaching. The attitude must not be: Here are the main subjects—this one will train the intellect, this one the feelings and the sense of duty, and over there, separate, more or less on a voluntary basis, is the art lesson. On the contrary, art is in its proper place only when all teaching is arranged so that, at the right moment, the students’ souls feel a need for the artistic; and art itself must be cultivated so that, in the artistic activities themselves, students feel the need for a rational understanding of, and dutiful concentration on, the things they have come to see as beautiful, as truly free, and thus as human. This is intended to indicate how art can pervade the entire field of education, how it can illumine and warm through the entire pedagogical and sermonizing realm of education. Art and the esthetic sense place knowledge of the human being at the meeting of purely spiritual knowledge on the one side, and external sensory knowledge on the other. It also helps lead us most beautifully into the practical aspects of education.

Through an art of teaching such as I have outlined, those who love art and respect humanity will assign art the proper place in the life of a school. They will do so from a feeling for human nature, condensed into a pedagogical attitude and a pedagogical life through daily contact with the students. They will not neglect the spiritual aspects nor those more connected with the physical world. If art occupies the proper place in school life it will also stimulate the correct approach to the students’ physical training, since wherever art is applied in life, it opens a person to the spiritual light necessary for inner development. By its very nature, art can become permeated with the light of the spirit, and when this has happened it retains this light. Then, wherever art radiates, it permeates whatever it touches with the light it received from the spiritual Sun. It also permeates matter with light so that, outwardly radiant and shining with the light of soul, it can express spirit. Art can collect in itself the light of the universe. It can also permeate all earthly and material substance with shining light. This is why art can carry secrets of the spiritual world into the school and give children the light of soul and spirit; the latter will allow children to enter life so that they do not need to experience work as just a negative and oppressive burden, and, in our social life, therefore, work may gradually divest its burdensome load. By bringing art into school properly, social life can become enriched and freed at the same time, although that may sound unbelievable.

I will address other aspects tomorrow, when I speak of the place of morality and ethical attitudes in education. Today I only want to show that the spirit needed in schools can be magically engendered through art. If done properly, this light-filled art can produce a radiance in children that allows the soul to integrate into the physical body, and thus into the world, for the person’s entire future life.