The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The talks on the basic concepts of theosophy should give a short outline of the world view and way of life which one normally calls theosophy. However, I have to say something in advance in order to prevent misunderstandings about this theosophy. Anybody could believe that the Theosophical Society or the theosophical movement propagates the world view which I will give as something dogmatic. This is not the case. What is reported in the Theosophical Society by single persons is a personal view, and the Theosophical Society should be nothing else as a union where such world views are cultivated which lead to the higher spheres of spiritual life; so that nobody should believe that theosophy means the propaganda of any dogmas.

Indeed, if today one speaks of ideological associations if one speaks of monistic or dualistic views, one understands by such associations or societies those which have united on account of any dogma unless they have committed themselves to any dogma whether it is a justified or an unjustified dogma. That does not apply to theosophy. However, one has to emphasise on the other side that only someone who has penetrated into the nature of the theosophical world view is able to represent his personal view of it.

For the theosophical world view is such that the individual human beings freely agree without committing themselves externally to a dogma. They not need to commit themselves because everybody who gets to know the facts must come to the same views. The differences between the single investigators are much slighter in these fields than in the fields of the sensuous-scientific investigation of the external facts. You will not hear if you really penetrate into these matters that this or that theosophist who really has the mastery over the method of the theosophical world view does not agree with any other in essential matters. For the errors do no longer happen which simply happen in the fields of the external sensuous facts if we ascend to the higher fields of existence. It is not possible that one theosophist produces this world view, the other theosophist another one. Only this is possible that the one is less advanced and can only represent a part of the theosophical world view. If he then believes that that which he has recognised is the whole of the world view, it may happen that he is apparently contradictory to those who are more developed. The theosophists standing on the same level will not be contradictory to each other.

Further I would like to emphasise in this introduction that it is a bad misunderstanding if one often supposes that the theosophical world view has to do anything with the propaganda of Buddhism or Neo-Buddhism as some like to call it. That is out of the question. When Mrs. Blavatsky, Sinnett and other theosophists spread the basic theosophical views, they got their first stimulation from the East, from India. From there the first great teachings came during the seventies. This was stimulation; but what are the contents of the view which lives within the theosophical movement is a common knowledge not only of all times, but also of all those human beings who have penetrated into these matters.

It would be wrong to believe that one must make a pilgrimage to India or become engrossed in Indian writings in order to get to know theosophy. This is not the case. You can find the same philosophies and the same theosophical teachings in all cultures. However, only in the Indian Vedanta nothing is dirtied as it were by the external sensory science. In certain way there has been preserved that core of the world view which has always lived as theosophy. So it does not concern Buddhist propaganda but a world view which everybody can get to know everywhere. Moreover, I would like to emphasise in particular that it has something strange, however, for the modern human being if he reads of the origin of this world view in theosophical books which were published in the beginning. Esoteric Buddhism by Sinnett was most spread and stimulated most people who have occupied themselves with it to continue their study of theosophy. In the first chapter of this book it is pointed to the great teachers from whom the theosophical teachings come. However, such a thing is a little bit unpleasant to the European civilisation. Nevertheless, it is for somebody, who thinks clearly and strictly, nothing that does not correspond with the generally accepted ideas. For who wanted to deny that among the human beings are more or less developed ones? Who wanted to deny the big distance between an African black and possibly Goethe? And why should there not be on this ladder upward still much more developed individualities?

It was basically only like a surprise that in our development really so advanced personalities are found as they are described in Sinnett's book. However, such personalities have a quite extraordinary knowledge, a universal wisdom. It would have been pointless to them appearing before the world. It is no strange idea if we say that the so-called masters are for us nothing else than great initiators in the spiritual fields. Indeed, their development goes far beyond the degree which the current culture offers. They are great initiators to us; however, they do not demand the belief in any authority, in any dogma. They appeal to nothing else than to the own human knowledge and give instructions how to develop forces and capacities using particular methods which exist in every human soul in order to ascend to the higher fields of existence.

So I give you an apparently personal view in the first talks, because I deliberately say nothing that I could not prove. On the other side, I have also convinced myself that that which I have to say that way absolutely corresponds with those who have represented the theosophical world view at all times and in particular with those who represent it today. They are like people who stand on different points and look at a city. If they draw a picture of the city, these pictures are somewhat different from each other, according to the perspective of the point of view in question. Also the world views are different which are described according to the own observations of the theosophical researchers, of course. But it is basically always the same. The world view, which I give, corresponds to the world views, which other theosophical researcher give. It absolutely corresponds and differs only in the perspective of the point of view.

In this talk, I will give a picture of the basic elements of the human being according to his physical and spiritual entity, at first in a more describing way. Then in the second talk, I move on to two essential concepts of the theosophical world view, on reincarnation or re-embodiment and on karma or on the big human destiny. Then in the following talks, I give a picture of the three worlds which the human being has to go through on his big pilgrimage from the physical world, which everybody knows, from the astral world, which not everybody knows which, however, everybody can get to know if he applies the corresponding methods in patient way and from the spiritual world, which basically the soul-being has to go through. Then I will give the theosophical world view on a large scale: origin and development of the world and of the human being, what one can call theosophical anthropology and theosophical astronomy. This is the plan.

Above all, the components of the human nature have to be clear to us. With a careful study which theosophy provides we get to know that of these components of the human being for the usual consideration only the first main part exists: the physical nature of the human being in the broadest sense of the word, that which we call body. The materialist considers this human body as the only component of the human being. The theosophical world view still adds two other components: what one has called soul at all times, and as the highest component the imperishable being of the human being, which has no beginning and no end in our sense of the word: the mind or spirit.

These are broadly the basic elements of the human being. Who learns to observe in the higher realms of existence learns to observe soul and spirit like the physical eye learns to observe the sensuous, the physical. Indeed, people have lost the consciousness and also the ability of observing in these higher psychic and spiritual realms to a large extent since the spreading of the pure sensory science in the West. It has remained restricted only to small circles. The last who spoke something of these higher fields of human observation from the podium was Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the great German philosopher. He still spoke in such a sense that one can recognise that he knew something about that which one can know. When he opened his talks in Berlin at the new-founded university he spoke quite differently than other professors of philosophy since the 17th century. He spoke so that one recognises: He does not only want to teach what one can understand with the reason, but he wants to point to the fact that the human being himself can develop that sensory perception is something secondary and that the human being can develop capacities in himself which simply do not exist in the everyday life. In the history of the German cultural development these lectures of Johann Gottlieb Fichte were epoch-making. Today, however, they can be important only for somebody who digs them out again. The following passage is unforgettable: “This teaching requires a totally new inner sense-organ with which a new world is given that does not exist for the everyday human being ... Imagine a world of blind-born to whom therefore only the things and their relations are familiar which can be touched. Go among those and talk to them about colours and about the other relations which exist only by the light for the sighted people. You talk to them of nothing, and this is the better case if they say it; for you will soon notice the mistake and stop speaking, unless you are able to open their eyes.”

The human beings should pay attention to the observation of soul and spirit. Theosophy is not at all in any contradiction to the generally accepted science. The theosophist does not need to deny only one of the tenets of modern science. All that holds good. Like people who are blind to blue can perceive everything that exists in yellow and red colour nuances, however, nothing in blue those who are spiritually blind cannot perceive soul and spirit. This becomes completely obvious if the blind person becomes sighted using appropriate methods. If he becomes sighted, a new world lights up around him which was there just as little for him as for the blue blind person the blue colour nuances were there, before he was able to see the blue beside the red after an ocular operation.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte knew that. The human beings also knew this in those times in which humanity was not yet dazed I do not say that in a reproving sense. The human beings of that time knew this, and with few of them the tradition was also kept always and the methods were developed. They knew that if one speaks of the entity of the human being one has to do it not only with the body, but that the soul can be also perceived, that the soul has laws and is also embedded in a world like the body. In higher sense it is also with the spirit. The human body is controlled by the same laws by which the other things round us are controlled. In the human body we have the same that we have in the physical world; we find the same chemical and physical laws also in the human body. This physical world is perceptible for the physical senses. It exists not only subjectively for the human being, but also objectively for his perception. The human being carries out his physical activity subjectively. He digests, he breathes, he eats and drinks, he carries out that internal physical activity of the brain which mediates the internal activity of thinking; briefly, the whole activity which biology, physics and the other physical sciences teach us is carried out by the human being. And one can also perceive that. If the human being faces his fellow man, he perceives immediately or by means of science what he is subjective, what he is also objective.

However, the human being is subjectively something higher; he is also a sum of feelings, of desires, of passions. Just as you digest, you feel, you long for. You are also that! A human being does not perceive this objectively under everyday circumstances. If he faces his fellow man, he does not see his feelings, desires and passions externally. If the human being were blind, he would not see a lot of physical activities. Only because he can carry out a physical sensory activity the physical-subjective is also objectively perceptible to him. Because he does not carry out a sensory soul-activity at first, the subjective part of the soul, the feelings, the desires, the passions exist subjectively in every human being. However, if he faces his fellow men, he cannot perceive this. He can develop his soul-eye to perceive the world of desires and passions in order to be able to perceive the soul objectively just as he has developed a physical eye to perceive the body activity.

We call this world the astral world or the soul-world in which the average human being lives today, indeed, without perceiving it. He can perceive it, however, if he develops the corresponding forces within himself using the appropriate methods. What our generally accepted psychology describes as soul is not what theosophy understands as soul-life, but only the external expression of it.

An even higher world than the astral one is the spiritual world. However, someone who is able to perceive the soul because his organs are opened to the soul cannot yet perceive the spirit in his environment. He can perceive the soul, but not the thought itself. The soul seer beholds desires and passions, but not the thinking, not the objective thoughts. Hence, those who cannot see the objective thought deny the objective thought generally. One did not understand Hegel when he spoke of the objective existence of the thought-world. And those who cannot perceive it are also right, of course, from their point of view if they deny it. However, they can say nothing else than that they do not see it, just as the blind-born states that he sees no colour.

Body, soul and spirit are the three basic elements of the human being. Every basic element has three components or graduations again. The body is not as simple as the materialistic researcher imagines. It is a composed thing which consists of three members or three components. The lowest, coarsest part is as a rule what the human being sees with his physical senses, the so-called physical body. This physical body has the same forces and laws in itself as the whole physical world round us. Modern natural sciences study nothing else of the human being than this physical body; for also our intricate brain is nothing else than a part of this physical body. The theosophist calls everything physical body that is room-fulfilling, what we can see with the bare eye or with the microscope, briefly, everything that is composed of atoms for the naturalist. This is the lowest component of the physical being. However, many researchers already deny the next member of the physical being, the etheric body. The term etheric body may not be the best. But it does not depend on terms. The fact that one denies the etheric body is only the result of modern scientific thinking. The denying of this etheric body is connected with a permanent scientific quarrel for a long time. I want to indicate provisionally only briefly what is to be understood by this etheric body. If you look at a mineral, a dead, lifeless body, and compare it with the plant, then you say to yourselves and all people have said this up to the turn from the 18th to the 19th century, because then the quarrel began because of the etheric body: the stone is lifeless, however, the plant is imbued with life. Theosophy calls etheric body what must be added, so that the plant is not a stone. This etheric body is probably better called life-force in future, because the etheric force or life-force is something that natural sciences have spoken of up to the 19th century. Modern natural sciences deny anything like the life-force or vital force.

Goethe has already mocked at those who do not accept that life requires something to its explanation that is higher than the lifeless. Everybody knows the passage in his Faust:

To understand some living thing and to describe it,
the student starts by ridding it of its spirit;
he then holds all its parts within his hand
except, alas! for the spirit that bound them together.
(Faust, verses 1936-1939)

Goethe meant the band of life-force. I have explained this case in my book Goethe's World View. Today there are some naturalists again who believe to not manage with the lifeless who assume at least anticipating what the theosophists call the etheric body. They are called neovitalists. I need to refer only to Hans Driesch (1867–1941, German biologist, representative of vitalism) and others to show how the naturalist comes again to this etheric body as something really existing, even if under another term. The farther natural sciences advance, the more they will also recognise that the plant already has such an etheric body, because, otherwise, it could not live. Also the animal and the human being have such an etheric duplicate body. That human being who develops the higher bodies can really observe this etheric body also with the simplest, most primitive organs of mental view. One only needs a quite simple trick; indeed, only the esoterically qualified theosophist can do it. You know the word suggestion. Suggestion consists in the fact that the human being can perceive things which are apparently not there. At first we are not interested in the suggestion with which one talks a person into believing something.

Another kind of suggestion is more important for us to behold the etheric body. Someone who has occupied himself with the theory of suggestion knows that the hypnotist is able to suggest things away from a person, so that he does not see the existing things. Imagine that a hypnotist would suggest to a person that here is no clock. Then the person concerned would see nothing here in the room. This is nothing else than diverting the attention to an unusual field, an artificial diverting of attention. Everybody can observe this process with himself. The human being is able to suggest away what is before him.

The theosophist must be able to carry out the following trick, and then he gets to the view of the etheric body: he has to suggest the physical body of an animal or a person away. If his spiritual eye is woken, then he does not see anything at that place where the physical body was, but he sees the room filled with particular colour pictures. This instruction must be carried out, of course, with the greatest care, because illusions of all sorts are possible in these fields. Who really knows with which care with which precision exceeding any scientific accuracy just the theosophical research is usually done knows about that. The room is fulfilled with luminous pictures. This is the etheric duplicate body. This luminous picture appears in a colour which is not included in our usual spectrum from infra-red to ultraviolet. It resembles possibly the colour of the peach-blossom. You find such an etheric duplicate body with every plant, with every animal, generally with every living being. It is the external, sensuous expression of that which the naturalist anticipates today again, of that which one calls vital force. Thus we have the second member of the physical body of the human being.

However, the physical body still has a third component. I have called it the soul-body. You can get an idea of it if you imagine that not any living body is also able to feel. I cannot enter into the discussion whether the plant can also feel, that is a different matter. You have to consider what one roughly calls feeling. We want to keep in mind how the plant differs from the animal. Just as the plant differs from the stone by the etheric body, the body of the animal is different as a feeling body again from the mere plant body. We call soul-body or astral body what goes in the animal body beyond mere growth and reproduction what makes sensation possible. In the physical body, in the etheric body and in the soul-body, the bearer of the sentient life, we only have the external side of the human being and the animal. Thus we have observed what lives in space.

Now we get to that which lives inside, what we call the feeling self. The eye has a sensation and leads it to that place where the soul can perceive the sensation. Here is the transition from the body to the soul if we ascend from the soul-body to the soul, to the lowest member of the soul which is called sentient soul. The animal also has a sentient soul, because it transforms to emotions, inner life or soul-life what the body prepares to it for sensation. The clairvoyant cannot separately perceive the soul-body and the sentient soul. These are, so to speak, inserted into each other and constitute a unity. Roughly one can compare what here forms a whole the soul-body as an external cover and the sentient soul within it with the sword in the scabbard. This forms a whole for the mental observation and is called kama-rupa or astral body in theosophy. The highest member of the physical body and the lowest member of the soul form a whole and are called astral body in the theosophical literature.

The second member of the soul encloses memory and the low reason. The highest member contains the consciousness in the proper sense. The soul as well as the body consists of three members. As the body consists of physical body, etheric body and soul-body, the soul consists of sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness-soul. Only someone can get the correct concept of it that develops the capacities which lead to the real beholding using the spiritual-scientific methods. What we feel of the things from without sticks to the sentient soul. What we call feeling, feeling of love, feeling of hatred, feeling of longing, so sympathy and antipathy, sticks to the second soul member, to the intellectual soul, to kama-manas. The third member, the consciousness-soul, is that which the human being can observe only in one single point. The child only has a consciousness of the two first soul members as a rule. It lives only in the sentient soul and in the intellectual soul, but it does not yet live in the consciousness-soul. In this consciousness-soul the human being starts living in the course of his childhood, and then this consciousness-soul becomes the self-conscious soul.

Those who know to observe their own lives well consider this point in their life as something especially important. You find this point described in Jean Paul's own biography (1763–1825, German Romantic writer), where he experiences the consciousness of the inner self. “Never will I forget the appearance in me not yet told to anyone where I stood at the birth of my ego-consciousness of which I can give place and time. In a morning, I stood as a very young child in the front door and saw on the left to a woodshed, when all at once the internal face: I am an ego! Like a thunderbolt from the heaven went before me and stood still luminously. There my ego had seen itself for the first time and for ever. Delusions of memory are hard to imagine, because no other stories could add anything to this occurrence which only in the veiled sanctum of the human being took place whose novelty only gave permanence to such everyday accidents.” Thus I have shown the highest member of the human soul to you.

Indeed, the clairvoyant can perceive the three members of the soul externally. Like the etheric body the three members of the soul really present themselves to the external soul observation. I already said that one cannot behold the sentient body and the soul-body separately. This higher part of the human being, the soul, shows itself in that which the theosophical literature calls aura. Who wants to have knowledge of it must learn to behold it. The aura is threefold. Three members are inserted into each other like three oval nebulous formations which wrap up and veil the human guise. In this aura, the soul-body of the human being presents itself to our observation. It gleams in the most manifold colours which can only be compared with the spectral colours. In these colours which are on the higher octave of red and violet the aura gleams in the most manifold way. The human being is embedded in this like in a cloud, and in this cloud the desires, passions and impulses of the human soul express themselves. The whole feeling organism of the human being expresses itself in the wonderful play of colours of the aura. This threefold aura is the human soul. This is the soul if one understands it objectively. Everybody can perceive it subjectively: everybody feels and desires and has passions. He lives them in such a way as he lives digesting and breathing.

But the external usual school of psychology only describes what I have called the soul-body, or it still describes the external expression of the soul-life at most, but not what theosophy regards as soul. What it understands of the soul is an objective fact. But one can indicate it as Fichte did when he called attention to the fact that in this world higher experiences exist toward which the only sensually perceiving human being is like a blind-born.

Thus we have described the three members of the human physical body and the three members of the human soul. Since the third member of the physical body forms a unity with a member of the soul, we have first two parts plus one plus two, so five parts: physical body, etheric body, soul-body, intellectual soul, consciousness-soul in which the ego lights up. This ego is a quite interesting point in the aura. At a certain place this ego becomes discernible. Within the outer oval you find a strange, blue shimmering or blue fluorescent place, also oval-shaped. It is real in such a way, as if you see a candle flame; but with the difference which the astral colours have compared with the physical colours it is in such a way, as if you see the blue in the middle of the candle flame. This is the ego which is perceived within the aura. And this is a very interesting fact.

If the human being develops ever so far, if he develops his clairvoyant capacities ever so far, at this point he sees this blue ego-body at first, this blue light body. This is an overcast sanctuary, also for the clairvoyant. Nobody is able to behold into the real ego of the fellow man. This remains a secret at first also for somebody who has developed his soul senses. Only within this blue shimmering place something new begins to gleam. There is a new flame which begins to gleam in the centre of the blue flame. This is the third member, the mind. This mind again consists of three members like the other components of the human being.

The Eastern philosophy calls these members manas, buddhi and atma. These three components are developed with the present-day human beings so that, actually, only the lowest part, the spirit-self this is the correct translation of manas is developed as a rudiment. This manas is connected as firmly with the highest member of the soul as the sentient soul with the soul-body, so that again the highest part of the soul and the lowest part of the mind form a whole because one cannot distinguish them. One just beholds in the aura the highest member of the soul in the centre of the blue shimmering place where the ego is, and one sees the mind lighting up within the ego. Today the mind is developed with humanity up to the manas. The higher parts, buddhi and atma life-spirit and spirit-man are developed as rudiments, and we will see how they will develop speaking about reincarnation and karma in the next lecture.

The highest part of the soul and the lowest part of the mind are bound together. The theosophical literature calls manas what cannot be observed separately. The two highest parts, buddhi and atma, are the core of the human being, are the immortal human mind. Thus we have three times three members of the human being whose third member is linked with the fourth one to a whole and whose sixth member with the seventh one. The notorious heptad, which you can read so often, thereby comes about in the composition of the human being. In reality, the human being consists of body, soul and mind and any member again of three parts; two times two members are combined to a whole so that seven instead of nine members result. The human being lives in the second of the three members, the higher one. He cannot perceive them with his outer senses.

I have already mentioned in the introductory talk that the theosophical literature gives not only a description of the different fields of life, but shows also the means and ways with which the human being can get the methods enabling him to perceive all that. However, a certain spiritual development is necessary to get a correct view of that which I have described just as the naturalist has to learn microscoping to gain insight into the physical nature. Everybody can get to know this; it is not the property of few favourite, but common property of everybody. Those who have got involved with the instructions of the Theosophical Society and have themselves come to these views can tell of their experiences like an Africanist tells of his experiences. These cannot be checked unless you yourselves go to Africa. However, the methods are normally not taken seriously enough. If that were carried out really and seriously which is given in the last chapter of my book Theosophy, then a person could come already very far in the observation of the higher fields of human mind.

Who can make a theosophical world view to himself understands something that he could not understand before in the usual course of life. In fact you cannot understand particular fields with Goethe unless you have any idea of theosophy. Only somebody understands Goethe's explanations of the plant realm who has an idea of that which Goethe calls life processes or metamorphosis of the plants. That Goethe was a theosophist follows from a “concealed” writing which exists, indeed, in every edition, however, is read by the fewest: from the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. This contains the whole theosophy, but in such a way as the theosophical truths have always been communicated. Only since the foundation of the Theosophical Society they have been expressed externally; in former times they could be shown only figuratively. The Fairy Tale is such a pictorial expression of the theosophical teachings. In Leipzig Goethe gained insight into that world of which we speak profoundly. Something in Faust points to the fact that Goethe belonged to the initiated theosophists. Something is with Goethe like the creed of a theosophist. I would like to finish this lecture with Goethe's words which could be like a motto of this lecture because they announce in general lines and in terse style that the world is not only physical nature, but also a psychic and a spiritual being. And Goethe expresses the fact that the world is a spiritual being where he allows the earth spirit to say the words which reveal the weaving of the spiritual life all over the world:

In the tides of life, in action's storm,
I surge and ebb,
move to and fro!
as cradle and grave,
as unending sea,
as constant change,
as life's incandescence,
I work at the whirring loom of time
and fashion the living garment of God.

(Faust I, verses 501-509)

Already eight days ago, I pointed to the fact that the basic question should be solved in Goethe's Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily how the human being develops from his lower self to the higher one, and that a big view of the future underlies the fairy tale.

How can the human being get to the gate which leads into the spiritual land? This was a basic problem for Goethe. He seizes this problem emphatically and tries to explain in many ways how the human soul forces develop.

Starting from this great point of view, he tries to show as a knowing man in all details which inner ways the human being has to finish.

We have stopped at the moment when the old man with the lamp and the snake meet in front of the statues of the kings, the representatives of the highest spiritual powers. We have to regard the temple as a symbol of the great occult schools which have always existed and exist even today. Into this temple the human beings are led and come gradually so far by the teachings and instructions which they receive there if they exercise them really that, finally, the initiation can be given to them.

We have seen that the snake hisses a word into the ear of the old man. We know that this is the resolution of the riddle, the most important word of which Goethe and Schiller said: “One reads the resolution in the fairy tale.”

In these words is the resolution, the behaviour of the old man reveals that to us. Immediately after the snake has spoken the words, the old man replies significantly: “The time has come!”

The snake knows the fourth secret; this is why the old man says: “The time has come!” When later the beautiful lily is informed about these words, she regards them as a ray of hope, as an indication of her redemption.

The old man returns home; he finds his wife upset. She tells him that two will-o'-the-wisps were there which did not behave adequately, licked off the gold from the walls, and then cast it off from themselves. The pug has eaten the gold and died. Then the wife still had to promise to pay the debts of the will-o'-the-wisps to the river. The old man approves this, because the will-o'-the-wisps would turn out grateful now and then. At first he neatens the house while he lets his lamp shine and covers the walls with gold anew that way.

A contradiction seems to be here. The golden king says to the old man: why do you come, although we have light? The old man answers: you know that I am not allowed to illuminate the dark. The human being must obtain an internal light first of all which he shows to the ancient wisdom; then only it can shine to him. However, when the old man has sunk to the west and walks with his lamp through the veins of the earth, one reads: all veins filled with gold behind him straight away; for his lamp had the miraculous quality to transform all stones into gold, all wood into silver, dead animals into precious stones and to delete all metals. However, it had to shine all by itself to show this effect. If another light was beside it, it only caused a nice bright light and refreshed everything living.

Thus you can understand this contradiction that it only shines if it meets with light; however, if no other light is there, it shines particularly and transforms everything that is round it: the stones become gold; the dead pug becomes an onyx. In such a way an interpretation results that gives the gist.

The old man now says to his wife: go to the ferryman, bring him the three kinds of fruit, and carry the dead pug to the beautiful lily; as she kills life, she brings the dead animal back to life touching it. His wife starts on her way. The basket with the dead pug is quite light; it becomes heavy when she adds the fruits. This is a significant feature.

The giant crosses her way; his shade robs one of each fruit and he consumes them. The ferryman cannot be contented with the remaining fruits; within 24 hours he must deliver the toll to the river. The woman commits to the river and dives her hand in it. Her hand becomes smaller and smaller and black and, in the end, it becomes invisible, while it is there according to her feeling; if the woman brings the toll, she will receive her hand again.

Just as the old woman arrived, the ferryman ferried a young man over who is like paralysed. Finally, both get across the bridge, which is formed by the snake at noon, to the kingdom of the lily. They find her surrounded by three servants, harp playing. She is of miraculous beauty, but sad, because the bird whose singing delighted her has fled from a hawk to her and has been killed by her touch. She is sorrowful about this new fright. Also the old woman complains her grief; however, at the same time she announces the message of her husband that the time has come.

Meanwhile, the snake and the will-o'-the-wisps have also arrived. The snake comforts the beautiful lily. The old woman asks for the missing fruits; however, in the kingdom of the lily nothing grows that blossoms and yields fruit, hence, she cannot receive them.

The point in time of something important seems to have come closer; there the young man tries to embrace the lily and sinks down dead. The snake draws a magic circle around the body to protect it against putrefaction which must meet it, otherwise, at sunset. Finally when the sun sets, the man with the lamp, led by the hawk, comes as well as the will-o'-the-wisps which the old woman has summoned.

Everybody prepares himself for contributing his part so that the harmonious resolution can take place. The will-o'-the-wisps have to open the temple; however, they cannot find the way to the temple. The dead young man and the body of the bird are carried off, the snake spreads about the river; when they all are over this bridge, it agrees to sacrifice itself.

All events are changed due to the sacrifice of the snake. The ancient wisdom once worked in all religions which were given to humanity by initiates. The religions brought refreshment to the souls which joined them vividly. The old man sinks to the west; he goes to the realm of the human beings. The snake, the intellect, which strives for enlightenment, sinks to the east, because from the east the spiritual light of the sun always shines bringing knowledge to the human soul.

The temple resounded, the metal statues sounded , this is a picture of the soul condition that takes the principles of the spiritual world upon itself by the sacrifice. In devachan everything sounds, expresses its being in sounds. Goethe speaks of a sounding sun in his Faust in the Prologue in Heaven this is devachan:

In ancient rivalry with fellow spheres
The sun still sings its glorious song.

Goethe means the spiritual sun, for the physical sun does not sound.

As long as the intellect strives only for enlightenment, as long as it acquires more and more inner light to itself by its striving one is able to do this also with the reason which becomes brighter and brighter , the old man with the lamp must have a soul light in which he can shine his light. Because the soul wants to sacrifice itself, the enlightenment takes place and everything changes. Everything is beheld in its spiritual condition, no longer in its physical one. Here conditions are described that the human soul goes through in the initiation.

The young man is reanimated by the sacrifice of the snake; however, he is still lacking consciousness. The body of the snake disintegrates into beautiful precious stones which the old man throws into the river. From them a nice constant bridge to the other bank comes into being. Thus a free transition from the sensuous realm to the spiritual land is created.

However, we have to hear first what happens within the temple. The gate is opened, the old man says again: the time has come! The temple lifts itself above the river; the hut of the ferryman forms a nice small temple within the other, an altar of sorts. The old man becomes a young man again; also the ferryman and the wife of the old man are rejuvenated. The latter joins the three companions of the beautiful lily and is the fifth in the alliance. The young man experiences the initiation in the further course of the fairy tale. The three kings give him what they have to give. The bronze king gives him the sword with the words: the sword on the left, the right hand free! The silver king presents the sceptre to him, speaking: graze the sheep! While the golden king presses the wreath of oak leaves on his head and reminds him: recognise the highest! He is endowed with strength, beauty and knowledge.

Now the young man is not only alive, but is also mind-endowed. Hitherto he followed the old man with the lamp mechanically as it were from the world into the temple which is still subterranean. Then the temple rises upward. The man with the lamp gives light to the young man; he always stays on his side and leads him, finally, to the three kings who give him their gifts. You read then: “His eyes shone out of inexpressible spirit” , then the initiation is carried out! The young man is now allowed to unite with the beautiful lily, to embrace her in love, to consummate the marriage with her.

The fourth king collapses in himself, after the will-o'-the-wisps have licked all gold out of him. The giant arrives on the scene; in the beginning the young man is astonished, however, the shade does no longer cause damage. The giant becomes a kind of obelisk; he serves as a sundial with which artificial human figures instead of the numbers display the time.

The bridge and the temple are admirable buildings; people come in flocks, the bridge seethes with travellers, and the temple is the most visited on earth.

This is the end of the fairy tale.

This point in time is neither a present one nor a past one; it is one of a distant future of the human development when the consciousness of the present humanity which is directed completely unilaterally to the sensory world has gone through the soul path. This is described in the fairy tale; when the human being has got the wisdom, the initiation which grasps the things not only but also masters them. Then the whole humanity is able to receive the initiation.

What does this mean now? The old man with the lamp is, as already explained, the ancient wisdom, that wisdom which works by means of intuition which has the power to develop divine force not human force, to master the things, and to transform all things. It imprints the spirit into all things. It knows how to transform the stones into gold, how to destroy the metals. These are all qualities that are attributed to the elixir of life of the true alchemist. A profound knowledge is indicated with it. In the whole progress of the events which are shown in the fairy tale, Goethe shows a future condition of humanity and indicates how to attain this condition. If we consider Goethe wants to say what happens round us, we see the human development in a perpetual transformation; also nature changes perpetually. It is the task of the human being to penetrate the whole physical nature with his thinking.

The human being is able due to the progress of technology to transform the raw product of nature into something that serves the civilisation. In his art he breathes his mind into the lifeless marble. The human being converts nature into an art product; he transforms everything that nature presents to him into something that carries his character. Today nature is rationally spiritualised that way. The human being becomes the creator of a higher nature.

This is the development of humanity, this alchemy: bit by bit the human mind is imprinted on everything lifeless. Goethe looks in big perspective at a world where everything in the world is transformed, is infiltrated with the human mind, so that nothing of the realm of nature exists, but everything is converted by the human mind in such a way that everything lifeless is infiltrated with it.

This external transformation of the lifeless matter is shown in the fairy tale with the light that shines from the lamp of the old man and changes the stones and metals. However, if this light shines into the human soul, it has attained a quite different power, it not only controls the dead matter but it spreads also over life. The human being becomes able, taking up the ancient profundities in him and obtaining internal knowledge, to attain quite different forces. He will not only rule over the lifeless matter in future times but also over life. He will also change living beings by his spiritual alchemy. He takes up the same wisdom which once created the world, the ancient wisdom of the world, and that is why he is able to transform dead matter into living matter.

Wisdom transforms the plant which is lignified and withered. The dying plant realm becomes silver, the glamorous appearance. However, the living, the feeling, the animal goes another way; its lower nature is sacrificed, must die to ascend to the height. What Jacob Böhme said who probably knew these secrets of the alchemists: “death is the root of all life” and:

Who does not die, before he dies,
Ruins himself when he dies.

And what Goethe puts into the words:

As long as you don't have
This dying and growing,
You are any dull guest
On the dark earth only. (From West-Eastern Divan)

Hence, the human being is able to attain the ability to develop his higher self in himself if he deadens the lower one in himself. The human being is only able to approach the godhead if he has overcome his lower nature.

Only the prepared human being who has experienced the hard ordeals, the internal purification, and the catharsis can understand the divine. Hence, the young man is killed who approaches the lily, before he is prepared and purified.

Who lifts the veil of Isis, who walks through guilt to the image of the goddess must perish. Only after he has slowly prepared himself, has familiarised himself with all probations, he is able to receive the initiation. The young man, who faces us in the fairy tale at first, has not yet purified his inside. He is paralysed when he wants to get to the spiritual world with such a soul constitution, and later when he forces entry, he is killed by the lily. In Faust we find how Faust can probably get to the spiritual world using magic where those are who are no longer in the physical existence: Paris and Helena. But he is led by Mephistopheles, not by own internal soul work, and he is paralysed. Only the human being, purified by grief and pain, carried by serious desire and striving can find entry, after he has been well prepared by the “lamp.” Only then he can hope to get to the initiation.

The old man with the lamp returns to the hut. The will-o'-the-wisps have been there in the meantime. He finds his wife in big distress, because the will-o'-the-wisps were ill-behaved to her and have licked off all gold that covered the walls since ancient times. They have called her their queen wantonly, and then they have shaken off the gold licked from the walls. The pug has eaten of it, and now it lies there dead. The will-o'-the-wisps are the representatives of the lower personality full of desire; they take up all gold of knowledge wherever they find it, but in futile, complacent, selfish attitude. They cannot recognise the high value of the gold; they do not respect it and cast it off from themselves. They spread the gold to the ferryman. The ferryman is terrified from this gold in which the personality full of desire is involved. He says: the river the pure cosmic astrality cannot use it; the river wildly foams up.

However, the snake transforms the gold; it uses it for its searching striving. It feels that it has to bend its head to the earth to stir from the spot. Thanks to the gold the will-o'-the-wisps have ideas and concepts, but these are abstractions, are rigid; the will-o'-the-wisps themselves are unproductive. The snake makes the gold valuable; it becomes luminous from within. It makes the gold fertile; the gold changes its thinking, so that it can penetrate the nature of the things. With the will-o'-the-wisps it leads only to the vertical line, to the soul constitution, flitting about, without life. It loses the relation to that which is below.

The animal, the pug, cannot take up wisdom; it is killed. Now the effect of the lamp comes to the fore. As long as the pug lived, the lamp could not lead it to God; this is only possible by deadening the lower qualities. The old man with the lamp can transform the dead pug into a nice onyx. The change of the brown and black colours of the precious rock makes it the rare piece of art but he cannot reanimate it. Wisdom only cannot give life; other forces must be added. The pug can only receive life if it has gone through death. Death means deadening everything, all lower desires. Thus Goethe points to the fact that also the animal is developing, even if not the single animal; the animal type is determined to perfection.

Goethe was a theosophist; that is why he knows this ancient wisdom of ascending; from the purification of all beings which all religions contain in their core. The ancient wisdom of the world gleams in all religious systems; its truth shines on all confessions of the different peoples of the earth. Goethe shows this wisdom in the old man. But what suppresses the lower desires and passions only does not suffice. An even higher wisdom must come; the ancient wisdom will be replaced by an even higher wisdom. The events in the hut of the old man point to it: “The fire of the fireplace had burnt down, the old man covered the coal with a lot of ash, put the luminous golden pieces aside and now his lamp shone brightly again.”

The secret doctrine in which the ancient wisdom is hidden is a property of humanity since many thousand years. There was the strictest secrecy of it; only to somebody who was prepared the light of wisdom was allowed to shine. The snake sacrificing itself represents the higher self of the human being which gets to knowledge. The lamp must not illuminate the dark; the wisdom of the teacher is not allowed to approach anybody who wants to accept it only, but anybody who meets it with inner life. But this refers only to the highest enlightenment. The great teachers of humanity, the great initiates are always active. The effect of the ancient wisdom always takes place, takes also place if no other light shines unless it is disturbed. Thus we find profound significance in this apparent contradiction. Everything that happened in the course of human development was caused by the ancient wisdom. The administrators of this ancient wisdom, the initiates stood behind everything that happened from culture to culture by human beings; they direct the destinies and events that happen on the external plane of world history.

We look now at the wife of the old man; we face a female figure. Mysticism shows the different soul states of the human being as different female figures. The old woman is the soul state of the present humanity remaining in the sensuous life. With it something low is meant; it is the general condition of the human beings. She is married to the old man with the lamp. humanity is married to the ancient wisdom. The ancient wisdom also works on the present-day humanity; humanity could not survive without it. This ancient wisdom has always combined with the sensuous humanity.

The woman goes to the ferryman who represents the natural forces. She must clear away the debt of the will-o'-the-wisps. The present humanity owes something to nature. The lower self, the human being who feels himself gifted with the body has to pay the price to the remaining nature which also belongs to him even if he does not feel it belonging to him. The flickering soul-life of the will-o'-the-wisps does not accept this; they cannot get to such concepts. Nevertheless, the law has an effect: “they feel chained to the soil in incomprehensible way, it was the most disagreeable sensation which they ever had.” The will-o'-the-wisps represent, as already mentioned, the lower knowledge. The human being who is gifted with sensuousness has become this only because he has gone through the whole nature. This is shown in the picture of the river

The river, the passing current of passions, must receive the toll in form of “earth fruits.” Three bowl-shaped fruits are the single covers which surround the true human being, the real self. This self descended from the kingdom that is beyond the river. The river must be crossed in order to land in the astral kingdom; the river has to get the skinned fruits. The old woman the healthy prudent human soul-force is able to give the toll to the ferryman, the representative of the unconsciously active soul forces, but she cannot pay the complete one; for the present general consciousness does not suffice for that. Because the old woman remains in debts, the sense-perceptible disappears. It can reappear to new life only if she penetrates to the spiritual.

The giant hindered the old woman to pay the debt to the ferryman; he robbed and ate a part of her fruits which she wanted to carry to the river. Previously the snake said to the will-o'-the-wisps when they required knowing how they can get to the kingdom of the beautiful lily: “The giant is capable of nothing with his body; his hands lift no straw, his shoulders would carry no faggot; but his shade is capable of a lot, of everything. That is why he is most powerful with sunrise and sunset, and one needs only to sit down on the nape of his shade in the evening; the giant then gently approaches the bank and the shade brings the traveller over the water.”

The will-o'-the-wisps refuse the way over the snake which wants to lie down as a bridge over the river at the bright midday. What is the giant? About the snake that soul gets to the spiritual world which developing its own forces is able to devotedly cross the threshold with bright daytime consciousness. However, there is a second way, when this bright daytime consciousness is lessened, in the somnambulistic states. The human being is weak there, without own consciousness. Lower forces then work on the human being; the soul itself is without own forces, is powerless. Nevertheless, the human being can also experience something of the spiritual world that way even if it is subjected to errors.

There is grief in the kingdom of the beautiful lily. The lily is desolate; to her feet the canary, her last joy, lies dead who usually accompanied her songs. The lily is mourning; for the bird is dead which reminded her of the sensuous. However, the spiritual and sensuous realms belong together; harmony is there only where both penetrate each other. But a new harmonisation between both should be attained; this is why the memory of the sensuous has to go through death to become new afterwards.

In the companions of the lily again three beings face us. We hear about them next time. They complement each other with the lily. The old woman represents the present condition of consciousness, the human intellectual soul, the lily the higher consciousness that the human being obtains if he sacrifices himself like the snake. The old woman is the bright daytime consciousness, the lily the clairvoyant consciousness that will be given to the human being. Before humanity got the present consciousness, three former states of consciousness which are shown as the three companions led the way. These are states, like they appear in trance today; still appear in certain atavisms sometimes, dreamy, vague, but comprehensive states of consciousness. The human being experienced other conditions of consciousness, before he got his present waking consciousness. In them the harmony between sensory being and spiritual being was given by nature. The three companions sleep, while the transformation takes place; they live over into the new state without noticing the transformation. They already got by nature what the other soul forces have to acquire for themselves.

With the rise of the temple the lily also brings the old woman with her. Then the human being will combine all five states of consciousness, the previous ones and the future ones, in him. The young man attains the highest consciousness in the last scene which can be given to the human being for the time being.
The hawk has killed the canary. The harmonisation of the sensuous and the spiritual has no longer to be sought looking back at old achievements of humanity, but looking at the future. The hawk is the herald of the future, of the prophetic. He collects the last rays of the setting sun with his crimson chest. The sign leads the old man with the lamp who causes the transformation and leads all to the temple of initiation. The hawk hovers about this temple and throws the light of the newly rising sun to the temple, so that it is illuminated with a heavenly shine. Thus the hawk connects a setting world day with a newly dawning one. The hawk is that in the human soul which senses in advance what should come true in future.

In the temple the initiation takes place. There is shown how the young man is gifted with the three forces: manas, buddhi and atma. We see next time why Goethe depicts these three forces just as the three kings,

The temple was once in the abysses of the earth. One had to join an occult school which deeply hidden from the external world unfolded its effectiveness in order to get to the higher secrets. However, the time comes when the temple of the esoteric training does no longer rest in concealed depths, but ascends, is there open and free in front of the whole world, accessible to all human beings. When does this time come?

Remember the mystery word which the snake whispers into the ear of the old man in the subterranean temple; the solution of this mystery word is reserved to our time. What did it answer to him on the question what it has decided? I want to sacrifice myself, before I am sacrificed.

The time comes for humanity when the human being is really ready to sacrifice himself, to enter the whole nature, to feel effective in the elements of the whole nature, not in his narrow own being; when he will be ready to give up his self as single egoistic self and to enter the all-embracing self, to regard himself as part of the all-embracing self. Then the human being has achieved his goal, the gate of higher knowledge uncloses itself to him, as well as he gives up everything that closes him from the remaining world. The true initiation can now take place for humanity.

This time is when “the three are there who rule on earth: wisdom, appearance and power.” – The old man with the lamp says who brings about this state. The initiation is now described: “With the first word the golden king got up, with the second one the silver, and with the third one the bronze king slowly stood up, when the composed king suddenly sat down clumsily.” The golden, silver and bronze kings are the three highest forces of the human being in their purity. In these three forms the human being experiences the divine in himself. Only when the human being can survey the forces in him and in their origin worlds in full purity and integrity, he is ripe to initiation. These are the pure, divine forces which experience themselves in the human being as human thinking, feeling and willing. The course of the fairy tale shows the purification of these forces from the lower personal.

All that still lives chaotically in the human being. As long as the human being is still undeveloped, chaos prevails in the interaction of these forces. The fourth king is a representative of the present humanity; but he collapses in himself, that means that this state of humanity is replaced by the new state which the initiation of the young man shows. Everything is transformed. Then that happens which the hawk prophetically announces, while it collects the rays of the sun which shines to the new world day: “the king, the queen and their companions appeared in heavenly shine in the twilit vault of the temple;” there will be peace and the harmony which will bring the rest in the all-embracing consciousness of humanity.

The representative of humanity, the young man, is endowed in the temple with this new consciousness of humanity. He is endowed with a new life; previously he was directed mechanically by other forces, so to speak, not by his own forces. Now he has gained these new forces, he can get married to the beautiful lily, the clairvoyant consciousness, and this world and the next world can be combined with each other by the sacrificing snake which establishes the foundation of the bridge on which all human beings can walk to and fro.

The young man receives the force for that from the three kings. He is led by the old man first to the third, the bronze king. He receives a sword from him in a bronze scabbard; this is the symbol of the highest human force: atma. The king shouts: “the sword to the left, the right hand free!” In the left hand that should be which represents the human strength, where it does not serve quarrel, but only defence. The right hand should be free to the work, to the service of humanity. The young man is endowed by the silver king with that which buddhi can give the human being: wisdom in harmony with feeling is true philanthropy. With this love the young man should live among people and graze the sheep. The golden king presses the wreath of oak leaves on the head of the young man and speaks: “recognise the highest.” The young man receives the knowledge of the most perfect kind, manas, from the golden king. Now he can enter into the bond of marriage with the beautiful lily and the bond is much influenced by love: “love does not rule, but it cultivates, and this is more.”

The subconsciously working soul forces the giant have lost their destroying force; the giant damages for the last time when he staggers about the bridge to the temple. He is seized by the soil and is only a pointer of a past human cycle, a gigantic statue which displays the course of the hours and days and human cycles like a sundial.

If we want to summarise what Goethe wanted to express with his fairy tale, we can say: Goethe wanted to show the development and final redemption of the single human being and the whole human race in poetic pictures. The fairy tale contains the secret of the decay of the lower and of the rise of the higher human being and of the condition of the final union with the divine which any mysticism strives for as its loftiest goal, as salvation, as rest in salvation, as union with God. When this moment of sacrifice has come, when this “dying and growing” has become fact, then not only the spiritual comes to the sensuous, but also the sensuous to the spiritual. When this time has come, not only single esoteric students, single inspired mystics are able to get to the temple, but all human beings walk to it, to and fro, to the spirit-land.

Goethe pointed to this great moment in the evolution of humanity in his fairy tale. A lot could still be said that is included in this fairy tale. But one can indicate a lot only. If one can usually say of the poet:

Who wants to understand the poet
Has to walk to poet's land,

we must realise speaking of Goethe that we apply this saying to Goethe in such a way that Goethe's land is the land of spiritual reality. Only somebody who knows the mysteries and the mystery knowledge can completely penetrate into the rich contents of this fairy tale. What has only been indicated here can serve as a signpost to a more and more intimate understanding of the contents of this fairy tale.

As a continuation of the last lecture I should like to draw your attention to certain matters which will throw light on Luther's place in history. From the outset I must make it clear that today's considerations of Luther will be from the point of view of spiritual science rather than that of religion.

What strikes one immediately when considering Luther in the light of spiritual science is the enormous importance the epoch itself had for his prominence and whole activity. The significance of the epoch is much greater in Luther's case than in the case of most other personalities in history. When we study Luther it is very important to be conscious of the epoch in which he appeared; i.e., the 16th century; which according to the spiritual-scientific view of history is very early in the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. This epoch, as we know, began in the 15th century and the preceding Graeco-Latin epoch began some eight centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus Luther appeared in history soon after the thoughts and feelings, characteristic of the Graeco-Latin epoch, were fading in civilized humanity. To the unprejudiced observer Luther appears at first sight to have a dual personality, but one comes—as we shall see—to recognize that the two aspects meet in a higher unity. It must be realized that there is much more to the history between the 14th and 16th centuries than modern historians are inclined to admit. Great transformation took place, particularly in the human soul; this is something taken far too little into account. The people of the 13th and 14th centuries still had a direct relationship with the spiritual world through the very constitution and disposition of their soul. This is now forgotten but cannot be emphasized enough. When, at that time, man turned his gaze to external nature, to the sky, to cloud formations and so on, he would generally speaking still perceive elemental spirituality. It was also possible for him to commune with the dead with whom he had karmic links to a far greater extent than is believed today. In this period there was still, inherited from an earlier different consciousness, an immediate recognition that the world seen through the senses is not the only world. The transition in consciousness to later times was far more abrupt than imagined. Natural science, in itself fully justified, was then in its dawn, it drew a veil as it were over the spiritual world behind the physical world. I can well imagine that a modern student of history, who is in the habit of accepting what is taught as absolute truth, will not believe such abrupt transition possible. He would find it neither historical nor substantiated by records. However, spiritual science reveals that at this time the human soul came completely within the confines of the physical world by virtue of changes in man's inner being.

We saw last time that woven into Luther's soul was the after-effect of what he had absorbed, in a former incarnation, in the pre-Christian Mysteries that prepared the way for Christianity. Nevertheless he was in the fullest sense a true man of his time inasmuch as in this, the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch, man's former connection with the spiritual world has grown dim. This is so even when the experiences had been as vivid as those of former initiates in the Mysteries. It must not be supposed however, that what has become dim, and therefore fails to become conscious knowledge, is not present and active. It has its effect when, as in Luther's case, the person concerned through his inner karma is sensitive and receptive to what wells up from the depths of his being without reaching full consciousness.

It is not difficult to recognize in Luther the effects of what I have indicated. They reveal themselves in the agonizing torments he went through. These inner torments, while being expressions of his own soul, assumed in his words and ideas the character of his time. They were in fact caused essentially by a kind of realization that man in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, the epoch of materialism, would be deprived of contact with the spiritual world. All the deprivation a materialistic age would inflict upon the deeper strata of the human soul weighed heavily upon Luther. Today one has to use different words from those he employed to describe what he felt so strongly. It is therefore not Luther's own words that I use in characterizing his inner experiences. But what he felt may be expressed in these words: What is to become of man when his vision is cut off from the spiritual world, as he is bound to forget what he formerly received from that world? If you imagine this feeling intensified to its limit you have the keynote of Luther's inner suffering. But why was it Luther who in particular felt this so intensely?

The reason is to be found in what I mentioned as the duality of his nature. Luther was on the one hand very much a man of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. But because he was also inwardly very much a man of the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch he felt with great intensity the deprivation which the people of the fifth epoch were already experiencing in his time, albeit not consciously. The duality in his nature was caused by the fact that—while being in complete accord with his own time, the fifth epoch—the teachings in the pre-Christian Mysteries had taken such deep roots in his soul that he inwardly felt as a man of the fourth epoch. He felt as related to the fourth epoch as an ancient Greek or Roman had felt. Odd as it may seem this had the effect that he could not understand the Copernican system of astronomy; i.e., a system based purely on physical calculations. This system, however, is in complete harmony with the outlook of the fifth cultural epoch but would have seemed meaningless in the fourth. This fact will seem strange to modern man whose view is that the apex of knowledge has been reached and that the Copernican system cannot be superseded. This is a shortsighted view as I have often pointed out. Just as today the Ptolemaic system is put to scorn, so will the Copernican be looked down upon in the future when it is replaced by another. However, in the fifth cultural epoch the very soul constitution of man enables him to have ready understanding for a system of movement of the heavenly bodies based entirely upon physical calculations.

Luther had no such understanding; to him the Copernican view seemed so much folly. He was little interested in the materialistic, purely spatial conceptions of the phenomena of the universe which occupied the human mind at the dawn of the fifth cultural epoch. Whereas the way man felt and experienced his place within that universe interested him greatly. However the relation to the world, which man perforce had to have, in the fifth cultural epoch was experienced by Luther with all the inner soul impulses of a man of the fourth-, the Graeco-Latin epoch.

Thus we see Luther on the one hand looking back at the way man was related to the spirituality of the Cosmos in the fourth cultural epoch. And on the other we see him looking ahead, being aware of the kind of experiences, feelings and conceptions to which man would be exposed by virtue of a relation to the cosmos which separates him from its spiritual reality. Thus Luther felt and experienced the fifth cultural epoch as a soul belonging to the fourth cultural epoch. The experiences man had to undergo in the fifth cultural epoch weighed heavily on his soul.

In order to have a clearer picture let us for a moment compare a modern man of average education with a man of the comparatively ancient time of the fourth epoch. The former's thoughts and feelings, his whole relation to the world is determined by the natural-scientific view of the world, whereas the latter's thoughts and feelings were determined by the fact that he was still aware of his connection with spiritual reality. What we designate as Imagination and Inspiration were particularly vivid for man at that time. It was a common experience that colors are not seen only through eyes, or sound heard only through ears. Man was aware that by inner effort he received pictorial and audible revelations from the spiritual world. Everyone was aware that a divine spiritual-world lived in his soul. Man felt inwardly connected with his God.

In the fifth post-Atlantean epoch man is subjected to a test and his communion with the spiritual world has to cease. In this epoch he has developed, through special methods and a special kind of knowledge, the possibility to observe the external phenomena of nature and their relation to his own being with great exactitude. But he no longer has vision of the spiritual world; no longer is there a path leading from the soul to the spiritual world.

Let us visualize these two types of human beings side by side. As we saw in the last lecture, Luther's knowledge and religious feelings concerning the spiritual world were not abstract; the spiritual world was not closed to him. He had a living communion with the spiritual world, more especially with evil spirits of that world. But that in itself is not an evil trait. Thus he knew of the spiritual world through direct experience, but he also knew that for mankind of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch this experience of the spiritual world was fading away and would gradually disappear altogether. It became a great riddle for Luther how the human beings of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch would cope with the deprivation of not beholding the spiritual world. As he contemplated the man of the fifth epoch his heart was overflowing with impulses brought over from his incarnation in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. These living forces constituted a powerful link with the spiritual world which caused Luther to sense its reality with great intensity. It made him feel that it was essential to awaken in man a consciousness of that reality. At the same time he was under no illusion that human beings incarnating during the coming epoch would lose all consciousness of the spiritual world. They would have nothing but their physical senses to rely on, whereas in earlier times knowledge of the divine-spiritual-world had been attained through direct vision and experience. All Luther could do was to tell mankind: If in the future you look towards the spiritual world you will find nothing, for the ability to behold it will have vanished. If you nonetheless wish to retain awareness of its existence then you must turn to the Bible, the most reliable record in existence, a record that still contains direct knowledge of the spiritual world which you can otherwise no longer reach. In earlier times one would have said: besides the Gospel there is also the possibility to look directly into the spiritual world. This possibility has vanished for mankind of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch; only the Gospel remains.

So you see that Luther spoke from the heart and in the spirit of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, but as someone who also belonged to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. By means, still remaining from the fourth epoch, he wanted to draw attention to that which, because of his evolution, man in the fifth epoch could no longer reach. Luther may not have been conscious of these things exactly the way I describe them. However as things stood it is understandable that he, at the start of an epoch in which direct insight into the spiritual world would cease, pointed to the Gospel as the sole authority concerning the spiritual world. He wanted to emphasize that the Gospel was a special source of strength for mankind in the coming epoch.

Let us now turn our attention to something different. At the moment I am occupied with certain aspects of Christian Rosenkreutz and the “Chymical Wedding” by Johann Valentin Andreae and this brings certain things connected with the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries vividly before my soul. When one looks at those who during those centuries were engaged in science, one comes to realize that at that time knowledge of nature was alchemy in the best sense of the word. The natural scientist of today would have been an alchemist then. But to understand the spiritual aspect of alchemy it must not be thought of as connected with superstition or fraud. What were the alchemists attempting? They were convinced that there are other forces at work in nature besides those which can be discovered by external observation and experiment. They wanted to prove that while nature is indeed "natural" supersensible forces are at work in her.

To the alchemist it was obvious that, however firmly welded together the composition of a metal appeared to be, that composition could still be transformed into another. However they saw the transition as the result of a spiritual process, an effect of the spirit in nature. This is something that will be known again in future epochs, but in our time it is a deeply hidden knowledge. The alchemists were able to bring about alchemical processes which, if they could be demonstrated today, would greatly amaze modern scientists. In that earlier age it was part of man's knowledge that spiritual forces are at work in nature. The alchemical processes were brought about by manipulating those forces.

This knowledge inevitably had to be lost in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. A reflection still exists in religious conceptions of the universe. In the earlier centuries, right up to the 13th and 14th, what was taught concerning the Sacraments was different from what could be taught in the following centuries, though for Luther it was still vivid inner experience even if not a fully conscious one. But the experience, that spiritual forces were directly active in consecrated substance, was lost to the faithful. Today the teaching of the Catholic sacrament is something quite different than it was, for example the doctrine concerning the sacrament at the altar, when bread and wine are to be transformed through a mysterious process into real flesh and blood. When one discusses this issue with Catholic theologians the usual answer to modern man's objection is: If you do not understand that you have no understanding whatever of Aristotle's teaching on substances. Be that as it may, one has to say that in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch no real meaning can be connected with an actual transubstantiation; i.e., with real alchemy. Today this process takes place above material existence. Today when man receives the bread and wine these are not transmuted. The divine-spiritual reality of the Christ Being passes into man as he receives the bread and the wine.

This metamorphosis of the concept of the sacrament is also connected with the transition in man's evolution from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Luther, because of his very nature, had to speak out of the spirit of both epochs. He wanted to convey to man's soul the strength it had formerly gained from religious teaching. As the dawning natural science would never be able to acknowledge anything spiritual in matter, Luther sought to keep religious teaching aloof from the weakening effect of science. From the outset he kept spiritual issues strictly apart from physical processes. He thought of the latter, if not exactly as symbols, then at least as being merely physical.—It is not so easy to understand these things today but spiritual science must draw attention to them just the same.

We must envisage Luther turning his gaze, even if not fully consciously, towards the coming epoch spanning more than two thousand years, during which man would be able to experience something of the spiritual world only in exceptional cases and through special training. Historical personalities such as Luther must be seen in a wider perspective; their thoughts and actions must be seen as expressing the epoch in which they live. Luther as it were represented the human beings of his time, human beings to whom something was lost. What they had lost was caused by the fact that in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch human knowledge had assumed a form that made it impossible to strengthen the human soul, by means of the power inherent in knowledge itself, so that it could look into the spiritual world and have its own spiritual cognition. It is not normal for people of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch to have spiritual cognition through their own initiative. In his ordinary life in the fifth epoch man cannot be conscious of freedom in the real sense, of real freedom of will which is the ability to act directly out of that deepest region of the human soul where it is united with the divine. Today both freedom and knowledge are theoretical. As the fifth post-Atlantean epoch progressed the theory that there are limits to human knowledge has frequently been proclaimed. To speak of limits of knowledge in the sense of Kant³² or Dubois-Reymond³³ would have seemed meaningless in ancient times, even by the sceptics.

As mentioned already one should take what is said by a historical personality such as Luther as expressing the spirit of his epoch, not as having validity for all time. What Luther recognized as the outstanding characteristic of mankind in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch he interpreted in the light of Christianity. He understood it in the Christian, or better said Biblical sense, as a direct effect of original sin. The fact that man, out of his own forces, cannot attain either freedom, or knowledge of the divine, in the fifth epoch Luther saw as a direct outcome of original sin. Thus when he said that man was so corrupted by original sin that by himself he could not overcome it, Luther spoke a truth that holds good for the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. The force in man most closely bound up with his nature is the force that expresses itself in his will, in his actions. What a man does springs from the very center of his being. What he knows or believes is much more dependent on his environment, the time in which he lives and so on. In the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, the epoch of natural science and materialism, man is not able to perform actions that spring directly from the spirit. That in fact is the essential characteristic of this epoch. In the sixth post-Atlantean epoch it will again be different. But that man in the fifth epoch, in his ordinary consciousness, had lost the link connecting him with the spiritual world was also Luther's conviction.

Yet Luther was also aware that it is essential for man not to be torn out of that connection altogether. He saw that as an inhabitant of the external physical world man, through what he wills and does, has no connection with the Divine. He can only attain it if he regards this connection as something separate and apart from his external physical existence. From this thought originated the doctrine of salvation purely through faith. A typical man of the fourth epoch would have regarded salvation through faith alone as nonsensical. An ancient Greek or Roman would have found it meaningless if told that what he does, what he accomplishes in the world is not what gives him value in the eyes of the Highest Powers, but solely his soul's acknowledgement of the spiritual world. However, it is not meaningless to the man of the fifth epoch, for if his worth were dependent solely on what he accomplished in the physical world he would be in fact just a creature of that world. He would be more and more convinced that he merely represented the highest peak of the animal kingdom. Man had therefore to forge a link with the spiritual world by means of something that in no way linked him with the physical world. That something is faith.

What Luther thus impressed on his own and the following time could naturally not remain the only cultural influence in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. One may ask who at the present time is a Lutheran? The answer is that, inasmuch as he is a man of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, everyone is a Lutheran. Those with a sense for the subtle conceptual differences in world views will notice the enormous discrepancy between the views of a Catholic theologian in the 13th or 14th Centuries and those of his counterparts today. The reason is that the Catholic theologian of today is in reality a Lutheran, his outlook and impulses are those of a Lutheran. These are matters that go unnoticed because there is so little feeling for the inner truth of things, the attention is focused only on the external label applied to a person. It is after all merely an external matter that someone, because of family or some other connection, is entered in the Church register as Catholic or Protestant. What characterizes him inwardly is something quite different. The man of today who is truly of his time, who is stirred and influenced by what takes place, is inwardly a Lutheran. Like Luther he articulates the essence of the fifth epoch. Luther was especially suited to do so because of the characteristic duality of his nature. This made him question the fate of future mankind, but it also stirred in him an overwhelming impulse to speak to the people of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch with all the vigorous forces that he wanted preserved as they were in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. That he was able to speak in this way was due to the higher unity of his dual nature. He spoke out of the very souls of the people exposed to the conditions of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. He formulated and voiced the very concepts and ideas that stirred in them. But he also spoke so that everything he said was permeated with his impulse to preserve what had existed in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. That was the higher unity. However, the sixth post-Atlantean epoch could not be prepared within the fifth had the latter not been influenced by other cultural streams.

Thus we see that Lutheranism, in the way indicated, is more particularly an impulse of the fifth epoch, but other cultural streams make themselves felt. The most important for us is the one that came to expression in the German classical period: from Lessing to Herder, Schiller, Goethe and others. A remarkable phenomenon is the fact that we have in the same period a thoroughly Lutheran philosopher in Kant, whose concepts represent the very essence of Lutheranism. Schiller had at one time an inclination to follow Kant but found that he could not; and indeed no philosophic work better illustrates the striving to get beyond mere Lutheranism than Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. These letters—which are too little appreciated today—and also Goethe's Faust constitute as it were the apex of that other cultural stream. Both works stress that man must turn, not only to the Bible, but to the world and life itself in order to strengthen the human soul so that it can find, through its own forces, the path to the spiritual world. The concluding scenes of Faust represent the complete contrast to Lutheranism. Only a contrived interpretation could possibly bring Schiller's aesthetic letters, Goethe's Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily and the last scenes of Faust in line with Lutheranism. We see in these works the human soul attaining strength through an inner opposition to the natural-scientific interpretation of the world. And in this way it finds, through its own forces, the connection with the spiritual world.

Ideas concerned with the legend of “Dr. Faustus” emerged already in the 16th Century in opposition to Luther's strong proclamations, but these ideas could not yet gain ground… Luther's attention was focused on the man of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch who, though possessed by ahrimanic demons, yet refuses to acknowledge the, to Luther well known, devil. It is not really surprising that Ricarda Huch, after occupying herself so intensely with Luther, comes to place such great importance on his direct knowledge of the diabolical realm of the spiritual world. Bearing in mind the story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, it is indeed interesting that in our time it is a woman who has this yearning that man should again recognize the devil who—especially when his view of life is purely naturalistic—has him by the collar. In her book about Luther this longing comes to expression: that if only man could experience the devil it would awaken him to a consciousness of God.

This cry for the devil, expressed by Ricarda Huch lives in man's subconscious. It is a cry she wants mankind to hear. To understand Ricarda Huch is easy for someone who knows that in every laboratory, in every machine, in short in all the most important spheres of modern civilization, the actual devil is present and active. I say this in plain words for it would be much better for people to be aware of the devil rather than, unknown to them, he should have them by the collar.

Luther's consciousness of the devil was for him a living reality mainly because he still experienced the spiritual world as would a man in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. His vivid experience came to expression in his words, for he strove to make the man of the fifth epoch conscious of the devil by whom he was possessed without knowing it. Luther could not do otherwise than call up in the man of his time an awareness of the devil which differed from the way Faust experienced the devil. Faust deliberately sold himself in order to gain knowledge and power through the devil. Such a relationship to the devil was at first rejected in the 16th century. At that time only a negative submission to the devil could be envisaged. Goethe, and in fact already Lessing protested vigorously against that idea. One must ask why they had a different view of man's relation to the devil. It must be said that neither Lessing nor Goethe had the nerve openly to state their view of Faust's relation to the devil. Today it is much easier to speak openly of these things than it was at the time of Lessing and Goethe. An initiate may have wanted to tell his fellow men something different but if he had they would have torn him to pieces.

Let us attempt to understand Goethe's inner attitude to Faust. Goethe too had insight into the nature of man of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. He knew of man's close relationship to the devil in this epoch. He knew that whenever man's consciousness is restricted to the material alone the devil; i.e., ahrimanic powers are always present. This state of consciousness constitutes for these powers a door through which they gain entry. Ahriman has easy access to man whenever his consciousness is limited to the purely material aspect of things or dimmed down below normal, as can happen through organic causes, agitation, rage or other uncontrolled behaviour. Goethe's insight made it impossible for him to adopt the materialistic view generally held. While he knew that ahrimanic powers are universally present he could not in all honesty represent them as something to be avoided or rejected. On the contrary what he wanted Faust to attain he had to achieve through direct contest with the devil. In other words the devil must be made to surrender his power, he must be conquered. That is the real meaning behind Faust's struggle with the devil, the evil Ahriman or Mephistopheles.

Now let us turn to Schiller who tries to adopt Kant's philosophy but comes to recognize the futility of doing so. In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man he distinguishes between mere instinctive craving—which according to Luther arises from man's physical nature—and the spirit which reveals itself within his physical nature. A true Lutheran would say that man is addicted to his cravings and he cannot, through his own power, rise above them. Only faith can enable him to do so. He will then have been purified and redeemed through an externally existing Christ. Schiller said: No, something else is present in man: in the craving for freedom lives the power of the spirit which can ennoble the bodily cravings of man's physical nature. Schiller distinguishes physical nature, ennobled through the spirit, from the spirit becoming manifest through it. He shows that man is indeed separated from spiritual existence through matter, but that he nevertheless, out of himself, strives to reach the spirit by transforming matter; that is, physical existence, through inner alchemy.

One recognizes the spiritual greatness that could have enriched Western culture in works such as Schiller's aesthetic letters and also Goethe's Faust which presents in dramatic form the overcoming of ahrimanic powers in external life. What could have been achieved through the strong impulse towards the spirit contained in these works has not come about. And it fills one with pain and despair to see one's contemporaries turn instead, for their spiritual education, to such trash as the American “In Tune with the Infinite.”

I cannot refrain from repeating what happened to Deinhardt³⁴ of Vienna who wrote a very beautiful essay on Schiller's aesthetic letters in which he discusses the marvelous perspective their content opens up. I do not think anyone knows about Deinhardt today. He had the misfortune to fall and break his leg; when the doctor came he was told that he could not be healed because he was too undernourished. And so he died. But this small book by Deinhardt of Vienna is concerned with one of the deepest spiritual impulses that have sprung from Western culture. If only people would recognize and investigate what has actually germinated in Western culture we would cease to hear the empty phrase, “the best man in the best place,” and then people proceed, through lack of judgement, to select a nephew or a cousin as the best man in the best place. Continuously one hears it said that the right person for this or that position simply does not exist. That is not the case; what is lacking is rather people with judgement who know where to look. But that ability can only be attained through inner strength, developed by absorbing the spiritual impulses flowing through spiritual life. There is nothing abstract about what can be gained from great literary works. Rather they fill the human soul with spiritual impulses which further its development along the path that Goethe strode with such vigour, and whose goal he depicted with dramatic artistry in the last scene of his Faust. It has no meaning in our time to preserve the old just because it is old; but we must find those treasures of the past which contain seeds for the future. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the classic works of Goethe, Schiller and Lessing.

I wanted to show where Lessing, Goethe and Schiller belong in recent cultural development because it enables us to understand better their predecessor Luther. To understand a personality such as Luther it is necessary to understand what stirred in the depth of his soul and caused him to speak the way he did. I believe that if in the light of these thoughts you approach what, especially in our time, comes to meet us with such force in Luther, you will discover many things about him which I cannot go into now. I am convinced that it has a special significance to immerse oneself in Luther in the present difficult time. There is perhaps no one better suited to convey the many aspects of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch than Luther. He spoke so completely out of the spirit of the fifth epoch even though his words had their origin in the fourth epoch.

When faced with the way events are depicted in history we should sense how necessary it is to rethink them. We ought to sense that the present difficult time which has brought such misery upon humanity is the karmic effect of distorted, superficial thinking. We should sense that the painful experiences we go through are in many respects the karma of materialism. We must have the will to rethink history. I have often pointed out that history as taught today in elementary and secondary schools as well as in universities, perhaps particularly in the latter, is a mere fable, and is all the more pernicious for being unaware that it is but a fable that aims to present only external physical events. Should the events of the 19th century be presented just once as they truly were—merely those of the 19th century!—it would be an immense blessing for mankind. Referring to history Herman Grimm once said that he foresaw a time when those, now regarded as great figures of the 19th century, would no longer appear all that great, whereas quite other figures would emerge as the great ones from the grey mist of that century.

Because of the way history has come to be presented in the course of time the human soul must undergo a fundamental change in order to understand it properly. I have often said this but it cannot be stressed enough. Man's concepts nowadays lack the vigour and power required to cope with social needs, because they are based on such superficial views. This war is in reality waged because of shortsighted, obtuse and foggy ideas, and the men fighting it are in many respects mere puppets of those ideas. Today there is an incessant clamour for people's freedom, for international courts of arbitration and the like, all of which remains so many empty words because it makes no difference what is established as long as there is no deeper understanding of the real issues. Yet all these things could be achieved if, as is so greatly to be desired, spiritual science were able to rouse people to recognize the deeper impulses beneath the surface of ordinary life. But these things people today do not want to see. It is quite immaterial what is arranged whether in relation to war or to peace or whatever. What is needed is that our ideas, our understanding of the issues, cease to remain on the surface. One could wish that, just at this time, what Luther so forcefully proclaimed would be heard and understood. People would then come to recognize that in Luther spoke more than the man. In him the character of the epoch which began in the 8th century B.C. and ended in the 15th century A.D. united with the character of the epoch that followed; i.e., our own, which will endure for 2100 years.

In the true sense a historic personality is someone in whom there speaks a being from the Hierarchy of the Archai, a Time Spirit. Through such a personality the voice of the Spirit of the Time is heard. This must be recognized if one is to approach Luther with understanding.

• 32. Immanuel Kant 1724–1804 German Philosopher
• 33. Emil Du Bois-Reymond 1818–1896 German Physiologist
• 34. Heinrich Mariannus Deinhardt 1821–1879

The aim of these talks has been, and must continue to be, to show from all kinds of different aspects how people today and in the near future are moving into a period of civilization which will make special demands in different spheres of life. Speaking of processes deep down in the life of the spirit, I have sought to show what is happening today supersensibly, but all the same with powerful effect especially in the present time and which will influence the whole of human life, the whole of culture and the whole social sphere. We have been able to gather from these considerations that human soul nature will essentially become more inward.

When it is said that human soul nature will become more inward we must not fail to realize that this growing inwardness will, in many instances, go hand in hand with people becoming more superficial in their intellect, for instance with regard to the sciences. This will be due to the circumstances we have already considered and others which are still to be considered. It really has to be taken into account that, in reality, evolution is never as consistent as those who present the modern scientific theories of evolution would like it to be. Their ideas are not incorrect; yet ideas which are biased, even if correct, will often cause greater confusion than completely wrong ideas. They assume simple linear evolution from incomplete life-forms all the way to the human being. This is not how it is, however, for in the evolution of humanity and also of the world outside the human being, a more outward stream is always complemented by an inner one. Thus we are able to say: if a particular stream continues for some time in the outside world, an inner stream will run parallel to it (see Fig. 11a). This stream may be more material or materialistic on the outside, whilst inwardly it is more spiritual or spiritualistic. Then a more spiritualistic stream comes to the surface and the materialistic or material stream goes down into the hidden depths of human nature. And then the situation is reversed again: the more spiritual line goes inward and the material or materialistic one comes to the surface.

In the time immediately ahead of us, outer life will very much follow the course shown by the red line here (see Fig. 11a) where material events and material attitudes and considerations are concerned, and the depth of the human soul will be more spiritual. It may well be that people do not even want to know about this growing spiritual inwardness; but it will happen nevertheless.

If you really dwell on this in your soul, you will be able to give due consideration to two aspects which will be extraordinarily important for the future. Remember we said yesterday that in 1879 ahrimanic powers of a special kind descended from the heights of the spirit into the realm of human evolution, and specifically into the evolution of the human intellect and soul. These powers are here, they are living among us. They seek above all to take possession of our heads, of anything we think and inwardly feel. They are angelic Spirits, I said, who cannot continue their development in the spiritual world and want to use human heads to continue to develop in the immediate future. It is therefore particularly important that this line (blue line in Fig. 11a) of secret, hidden soul development is given due attention. As I have told you, many people probably do not want to give it conscious attention; they would far rather it stayed down below, so they need only concern themselves with material things. If it is not given attention, those ahrimanic powers will take hold of this very process of growing inwardness. This is one thing we must take into account. We must be ready to face the danger soon to come in the evolution of civilization, and stand guard in our most holy, inner human reality against the influences of ahrimanic powers.

Educational issues will be particularly significant in the immediate future. The inwardness of the human soul will be most significant during childhood and youth in the near future. Perhaps it is difficult to believe this today, but the time has long since come for us to say: the children and young people we see do not show their true nature in what we see on the outside. We see the red line here (see Fig. 11a), but beside it runs the blue one, a hidden inner life to which we must pay real attention. Teachers must pay attention to it, lest they surrender it to the ahrimanic powers. Education and training will have to change completely in many respects in the near future.

Let us consider the origin of the principles in our present system of education and training. Certain things always lag behind in the cosmic order. ‘Enlightenment’, as it was called, was a special feature of the eighteenth century. People even wanted to establish a kind of rational religion based only on human reflection, on the starveling among the sciences, as I have said in my public lectures in Basle.¹ The way people feel they must behave towards growing children and young people in education and training has entirely come out of this stream of rationality: always do everything in such a way that the child can immediately understand; children should never experience anything deeper than they are able to understand.

It will have to be realized that this is the worst possible way of providing for the life of a human being, for it takes us to a truly disastrous extreme in human life. Just consider this: if we make every effort to give children only such things as are in accord with their level of understanding, things they can grasp, we do not give them anything for later life when they are supposed to have deeper understanding. Care is taken, so to speak, to ensure that for the whole of their lives they have nothing but the understanding of a child. This approach has already borne fruit, and the fruits are what you would expect! Much of the thinking in our present-day civilized world, where people consider themselves to be so wise and enlightened, remains at a childish level. No one in the newspaper world is, of course, going to admit that the thinking in their world is largely childish, but it is true nevertheless. Essentially this is connected with the fact that only the child's understanding is addressed. This then remains the same throughout life. Something quite different will have to be done: we must fill our souls, especially if we are educators, with the inner awareness, the consciousness, that a mysterious inwardness reigns in a child and we must present to the child's heart and mind much that will only be understood later on in life, not in childhood. Later in life they can then recall these things from memory and say to themselves: this is something you heard or learned on that occasion; now at last you are able to understand many of these things. Nothing will be better for the soundness of human life in the future than for individuals to recall things they were told in childhood, and then be able to understand them.

When people are able to live with themselves in such a way as to recall from memory the things they could not understand before, this will be the source for a healthy inner life. People will be spared the inner emptiness which enters into so many hearts and souls today, and causes them to end up in institutions. There, souls which have remained empty and barren inside because education has failed to give them anything that can be recalled later on in life may be offered something from outside.

Something else needs to be considered in this context. Because of the circumstances I have spoken of in recent times, people of our present age have lost awareness of the close connection between human beings and the universe. People today believe they are just hunks of meat walking on this earth or travelling in a railway carriage. They will not always admit this, of course, but this is in fact what they have in mind. It is not true, however. Human beings are closely bound up with the whole universe. And it is good to bring this clearly to mind again by considering the following.

Consider the Earth. The Moon moves around it; let us say this is the orbit of the Moon (see Fig. 11b). The Earth is, of course, anything but the abstract mineral entity imagined by modern mineralogists, geologists and physicists. It is very much alive, and we can observe many forms of existence in connection with the Earth. For the moment, let us merely consider the currents which move around the Earth all the time. They move around it in all kinds of directions. They are etheric and spiritual by nature and have a real, substantial effect. Something is always present in these currents.

It is good to consider the source and origin of these currents. We shall be going into more detail as time goes on; for today I merely want to make some preliminary statements. If you read my Occult Science you will find that in very early times the Earth and the Sun were one. Our present-day Earth has been eliminated from the Sun. These currents are remnants from the life of the Sun; Sun life is still present in the Earth.

Yet the Moon, too, was one with the Earth in the past. And the Moon which orbits the Earth today also has currents within it. Those currents are remnants from a later time, from Moon evolution.

We thus have two kinds of currents and we may call them Sun currents and Moon currents. They take quite a different course, and they are a living reality. Let us assume a creature walking this Earth in a certain way has Sun currents passing through it; these pass through easily. Let us assume another creature is constructed in a different way, so that the Sun currents pass through it coming from one side and Moon currents from the other. Sun currents are not limited to specific places and actuality pass through everything; they can therefore pass through this creature in one direction. Thus there can be creatures on Earth who have only the Sun current passing through them in one direction, and there may be others who have the Sun current pass through them in one direction and the Moon current in another.

Animals are creatures which can only have the Sun current going through them. Imagine a four-legged animal: as it walks, its backbone is essentially parallel to the Earth's surface. The Sun current, which has now become an Earth current, can continually pass through this backbone. This creature, then, is related to the Earth.

It is different with human beings. In the living human body only the head has the position held by animals. Think of a line drawn from the back of the head to the forehead—it is the direction of the animal's backbone, and the same Sun current passes through the head. The human backbone, on the other hand, is lifted out of the currents which run parallel to the Earth, including the Sun current which has become Earth current. Being lifted out, human beings are in a position (this does, of course, depend a great deal on the geographical latitude and so on, but it is also what makes people different from each other) where under certain conditions the Moon current goes through them; not through the head, however, but through the backbone. The difference between animals and humans is tremendous. The cosmic current which passes through the animal backbone passes through the human head; the old Moon current, which does not relate to anything in the animal, passes through the human backbone. The human backbone even reflects its relationship to the Moon current in its composition, for human beings have approximately as many vertebrae as there are days in a month, between 28 and 31 vertebrae. The reason why the figure is only approximate will be considered at a later time. The whole life of the human backbone, and indeed of the human breast, is intimately bound up with the life of the Moon. Hidden beneath the life of the Sun, which relates to sleeping and waking and takes 24 hours, lies the rhythmical life of the Moon.

This is a basic reflection on the relationship between the human being and the whole universe. For just as the currents passing through the human backbone are part of the current which relates to the life of the Moon, so other currents in the human being relate to the other planets in our solar system. All these things are utterly real. In modern science they have been completely abandoned, and no one even ventures to consider these relationships. In consequence, scientists are not able to appreciate that the conscious human life which is outwardly apparent here on Earth goes hand in hand with an unconscious life which is connected with the human breast and arises from mysterious inner depths. This must be especially taken into account in times like those which lie ahead; it must be especially taken into account in the sphere of education, for otherwise the adversarial ahrimanic powers will take hold of the unconscious life. It would be utterly disastrous if people were to fail to note that part of their inner life, the part which is in the process of becoming more inward—the blue line in the diagram—is in danger of falling prey to the ahrimanic powers, unless it is taken up in full consciousness and deepened through the insights of a spiritual science in which courage is taken actually to say something about realities which outer science is unable to discover.

We must look at this in entirely concrete terms. Consider the way outer science is going. It is entering into all kinds of abstractions and, indeed, is most useful when it enters into all kinds of abstractions. People will need this science for their outer life; it must become part of human civilization. To use the outer scientific culture, such as it is now, in education will be particularly detrimental in the immediate future. To teach children abstract notions of nature and the laws of nature which people need to know will become an absurdity in the near future. On the other hand, it will be important—I can always only give examples—to consider the lives of animals in a loving way, with their special conditions of life described to give the children a real picture of how ants behave in their communities, how they live together, and so on. As you know, the beginnings of this are to be found in Brehm's Tierleben,² though they are not fully developed. Such symbolized stories of life in the animal world need to be more and more fully developed. Individual stories should be told in a truly thoughtful way, rather than dishing up elementary zoology to children in the dreadful way it is done now. We must tell them of the special things the lion does, and the fox, the ant, the ladybird, and so on. It is of no real consequence if the details which are told actually happen or not; what matters is that they are thoughtful and come from the heart. The kind of extract of natural history which is dinned into children today should only come in later years; children must first of all be able to take delight in stories which represent individual aspects in the lives of animals.

It will be particularly important to consider plant life in such a way that one has many stories to tell about the relationship of the rose to the violet, of shrubs to the weeds which grow around them, and long stories about the Spirits leaping above the flowers as one walks through a meadow, and the like. This is the botany children should be told. And they should be told of how certain green-coloured crystals which dwell in the earth behave towards colourless crystals, or a cubic crystal to an octahedral one. Instead of the abstract crystallography which is dished out to children who are still quite young, much to their detriment, we should have a symbolistic presentation of the life of the crystals down in the earth. Our views on everything which goes on in the depths of the earth can only be fruitful if we make them fruitful with the descriptions which are given in our anthroposophical literature. It will not be enough just to list items; these things must be the stimulus and give us ideas, so that we can tell many stories about the life shared by diamonds and sapphires, and so on. Think about it and you will know what I mean.

In a similar way it will be important not to dish up those horrible abstractions which are taught as history today, but again to bring life and liveliness into the course of human history and help the children to develop a feeling for what human hearts and minds experience in the course of human evolution. Conversations which did not actually take place in the physical world will have to be invented, a conversation between an ancient Greek and someone living in the fifth postAtlantean age, for example. To let those living human figures appear before the mind's eye of the children will be much more useful than all the historical abstractions presented to them today.

You can see where this is leading. The point is to fill the souls of children with living ideas so that the mysterious hidden undercurrent in them can be reached. Then you will see an inner life which is less arid and infertile and people who will be will also be less nervous later in life, because they will be able to recall stories which were told out of an insight into cosmic laws. They will also be familiar with the laws of nature and able to establish harmony between what was given to them in a living, vital form and the laws of nature. Their minds can only grow barren if they are given the abstract laws of nature. These are a few thoughts I wanted to put to you with special reference to the field of education.

It is, of course, much easier to get together in all kinds of associations today and proclaim over and over again “Education must be put on an individual basis”—and other abstract formulations of this kind. Of course, this is easier than to do what is now needed, which is that people interested in education should enter into the spirit of human and natural evolution and find imaginative tales which allow the life of the spirit to be concretely grasped in exactly the form it will take in the immediate future.

We will always, and in every field, need the stimulus of spiritual science. It alone will be able to let new life arise from the dying forms of the present life of mind and intellect—new life which can act as a stimulant in the way I have described, especially for the minds of children. Without the stimulus of spiritual science, one will be a dried-up school teacher who also dries up the children's minds. Worst of all, people will increasingly have the idea, especially with regard to educating the young, that the best we can do with everything we learn is to forget it again as quickly as possible. If a situation is created where in later life people do not want to miss any of the things they were given in their childhood, this will not merely be a pleasure but prove a wellspring, a true wellspring of human life. I would ask you to take this to heart.

Science itself also needs new stimulus. Yesterday I spoke of how difficult it is to bridge the gap between spiritual science in general and the special fields in which people are engaged in scientific life. Yet this will be absolutely one of the most essential things in future. You must have realized from some of the things said here and elsewhere that paucity and impoverishment of concepts and ideas have led to the conditions we have today.

I have said it in my public lecture in Basle and I have also repeated it here, that people who considered themselves competent believed when this war started that it would last no longer than four months. They thought they had studied the social and economic structure and they formed the idea on that basis. Their ideas of this kind did not relate to reality, and reality has proved them wrong. It is strange how little people are prepared to learn from events. Someone who had arrived at such an idea on the basis of their own scientific understanding surely ought to say to himself now: ‘The premises on which I based my conclusions were clearly quite inadequate.’ Surely, he must now be inclined to learn something. But he sleeps on, drawing further conclusions from those same premises, which have only changed a little under the pressure of experience, because he does not want to consider the inner connections. Of course, anyone who wishes to consider the inner connections in life will have to take this hurdle, which is such a problem, particularly to people who are involved in scientific issues. The last thing they want is to be bothered in the limited field in which they are active; they do not want to establish links with related fields.

This type of specialization was quite a good thing for a time. If it continues, and if our university students continue to be ruined by the bias which comes with specialization, the calamities which result when people's ideas are divorced from reality will get worse and worse. We will have people in municipal, rural and national representative bodies who simply have no real grasp of the issues they are supposed to regulate according to law, because their ideas are too limited to encompass reality. Reality is far richer than those ideas.

There can be no question, then, of being inclined to leave specialized areas as far as possible to ‘experts’, nor of using anthroposophy to satisfy subjective and egotistical needs. It has to be a matter of knowing how to unite these two opposites, and let one prove fruitful for the other.

Something we find again and again—you would also find it so if you were to focus your attention on these things—is that if you speak about special subject-areas to people who are sincerely devoted to anthroposophy, they do find the matter rather tedious. The request is always to speak about central issues—soul, immortality, God, and so on. This will, of course, satisfy their immediate egotistical religious needs, but it leaves no opportunity to give them what is needed more than anything for the near future, namely that people make themselves a real part of this real life. This is why we must take note when someone seeks to make a real connection between impulses to look at things on the basis of spiritual science and the specialist areas.

I have previously drawn attention here³ to the important book our friend Dr. Boos⁴ has written on the Collective Agreement.⁵ The book is now generally available and I should like to draw your attention to it, for it is a perfect example of building bridges between the general approach used in anthroposophy and a whole specialist field, the sphere of law. The point is that our friends will not, I hope, consider special investigations of this kind as something outside their sphere but rather give them their attention, for in the time which lies ahead life itself will have to be the subject for anthroposophical consideration. If you read the book carefully and work through it, you will find aspects of everyday life are taken up in a living way, and also in such a way that one can see two things coming into play here: first, impulses to consider life in a truly comprehensive way, impulses altogether attuned to cosmic laws, and then also great historical perspectives. You will also find it infinitely helpful to consider the difference between Romance contracts and agreements on the one hand and Germanic social cohesion on the other. The relationship of Romance to Germanic human nature presents itself in a very profound way in a particular specialist field. And it is important, especially with this specialist book by Dr. Roman Boos, to work one's way up to what really matters for the immediate future from the point of view of spiritual science -to bridge the gap between the life that presents itself to the senses and in which we establish our social conditions, and the life which streams in from the spiritual world and lets the Spirit pulse through our forms of existence.

I also recommend that you read the new issue of Wissen und Leben,⁶ which has an article by Dr. Boos on the key issues in Swiss national policies.⁷ You will find that current political issues can also be considered from a different point of view than that of everyday journalism—if you do not mind my saying so. Awareness of the relationship between different forms of culture, such as different forms of art, for instance, and political forms, is brought out most beautifully in this essay.

Having read Dr. Boos' article, which takes a serious look at Swiss national policies and is truly in the anthroposophical spirit, you may glance at the first essay in the journal, which is on the significance of the Reformation and was written by Adolf Keller.⁸ It is an essay in the old style, even if it is thought to be in a very new style. In one and the same issue you therefore have a justifiably truly modern work side by side with the most antiquated stuff. People who write such antiquated stuff do, of course, believe they are particularly clever and logical, with penetrating thoughts. The significance of the Reformation is discussed from different points of view in elevated terms which are nothing but empty and vapid abstractions.

Having read Adolf Keller's article, which is decent and well-meant and one of the best pieces of work in this field, one is tired out from being tossed hither and thither between what are again and again the same abstractions: the Reformation created freedom of initiative; freedom of initiative arose through the Reformation; when the Reformation was in progress, free initiative came to life. One is tossed hither and thither in the typical fashion of all abstractionists who know no better than to wallow in a few impoverished notions, having nothing to do with the real world. Here you have a typical instance of the abstract way of thinking which must be overcome, when people live with notions that have little real thought to them, yet are positively smacking their lips with pleasure because they imagine they are saying something really outstanding when they put it in a particularly abstract way.

A few days ago I was sent a treatise on profound theosophical matters which was, in fact, merely a treatise on the ‘something’; it only dealt with the ‘something’—the ‘unimproved something’ and the ‘improved something’, and how the improved takes hold of the unimproved, and how the ‘improved something’ takes precedence over the ‘unimproved something’. And so: conscious and unconscious ‘something’, improved and unimproved ‘something’—going one way and then the other, here again, there again; and in the final instance you have no more than this strange modern way of working in the abstract—though here applied to things of the spirit—which likes to see itself in the abstract and in reality is flight from reality and no longer has anything to do with any kind of reality. This does, of course, have quite specific consequences. People's limited ideas make them unable to wend their way through the river of life. Their ideas are too limited to encompass the reality of life. As a result one reads things like the following, for instance, which is on page 51 of Adolf Keller's essay:

Yet although this experience causes the deepest wellsprings of heart and mind to open up, it is still more than a mere upsurge of feeling. Divine and human elements are not mixed together in this. Conscience takes care this does not happen. It keeps the distance and maintains reverence. Man remains man and God remains God. The Reformation and mysticism have it in common that the relationship to God is established through a personal experience; what separates them is that the Reformation experience does not come in a seething and boiling of emotions in the depths of the soul, as in the case of mysticism, but from a troubled and morally elevated conscience. Anything which is a must, an absolute demand, holds the greatest power in the inner life. Man can only withstand this with divine help that is inwardly experienced.

Nothing but abstractions, and we are pushed hither and thither among them. Then follow the words: ‘This is the gospel, Jesus Christ.’

The gentleman has gone so far in his abstract thinking that he identifies the message of Jesus Christ with Jesus Christ himself. This is what one gets when abstraction is taken to its extreme. What follows is strange indeed. He has rejected mysticism. With his limited ideas he says that the Reformation had nothing to do with mysticism but that it creates healthy life. As if mysticism were not exactly such a living experience. But you see, his limited ideas cannot encompass reality. They are therefore used to say exactly the same about completely opposite things Thus he rejects the ‘seething and boiling’ as something which true adherents of the Reformation should not have, for if they did they would be mystics.
Adolf Keller goes on to say:

This help is not merely presented outwardly, historically or in the sacraments. It, too, can only grow strong if it is inwardly made one's own. It does not act from outside, magically, but only in so far as it may become part of our inner feelings and will, and can set the soul aglow.

Thus the Reformation must not be a ‘seething and boiling’ in the depths of the soul, yet this same Reformation can only be active in the soul if it is able to set the soul aglow, that is make it seethe and boil. You can study the whole essay like this, and nowhere does its poverty of spirit prove adequate for entering into reality. Yet writings like these are read with real passion today. People consider them most erudite. They fail to realize that they only have to read two or three lines more and they get all confused in their minds, for the same ideas have to be used for quite different things, and there is such a paucity of ideas.

If, on the other hand, you study Roman Boos' beautiful essay on the key issues in Swiss national policies—I do recommend it, for it will show you how connections can be made between political life and other forms of culture, and how our ideas can really come alive and the life of ideas be enriched, how you can find an exemplary study here concerning the future of Swiss politics—you can compare this with the vapid maunderings of Adolf Keller's essay in the same issue of the journal. By spending just a single small sum you can have the opportunity of getting old and new absolutely side by side and really see for yourselves.

Sometimes I really have to take account of current issues which are in complete opposition, for anthroposophy does not exist for self-indulgence at exalted levels but to make exactly the observations which take us truly into the present, into the intents and purposes of the present time.

• 1. Lectures given in Basle on 18 and 19 October 1917. See Note 8, lecture 10.
• 2. Alfred Edmund Brehm (1829–1884) wrote Illustriertes Tierleben (The illustrated lives of animals), with the second, 10-volume edition appearing in 1876–1879. Later editions were revised by other authors, and the narratives that gave the kind of picture of which Rudolf Steiner was speaking were gradually replaced with ‘strictly scientific’ texts. Many other natural histories have been based on Brehm's work.
• 3. In an addendum to a lecture given on 6 August 1916 (GA 170). The addendum has not so far been published in German or in English.
• 4. Dr Roman Boos (1889–1952), social scientist, writer and lecturer; represented anthroposophy and later Rudolf Steiner's idea of the Threefold Social Order; he was head of a social sciences association at the Goetheanum in Dornach.
• 5. Der Gesamtarbeitsvertrag nach Schweizerischem Recht, Munich and Leipzig 1916.
• 6. Wissen und Leben (translates as ‘Knowledge and life’), a fortnightly Swiss journal edited by Alb. Baur which appeared from 1907 to 1925. The issue concerned was dated 15 October 1917.
• 7. ‘Die Kermfragen der Schweizer-Politik’, later reprinted in Boos' Michael gegen Michel, Basle 1926, pp. 36–47.
• 8. Adolf Keller (b. 1872), Swiss Protestant theologian, professor in Geneva and Zurich.

When speaking about the spiritual worlds as we are doing in these lectures, we should keep the following well in mind: the clairvoyant consciousness which the human soul can develop in itself will change nothing in the nature and individuality of a person, for everything entering that consciousness was already long present in man's nature. Knowing a thing is not the same as creating it; a person learns only to perceive what is already there as a fact. Obvious as this is, it has to be said, for we must lead our thoughts to realize that the nature of the human being is hidden in the very depths of his existence; it can be brought up out of those depths only through clairvoyant cognition. It follows from this that the true, inmost nature of man's being cannot be brought to light in any other way than through occult knowledge. We can learn what a human being actually is not through any kind of philosophy but only through the kind of knowledge based on clairvoyant consciousness. To the observation we use in the sense world and to the understanding limited to the sense world, the being of man, the true, inmost nature of man, lies in hidden worlds. Clairvoyant consciousness provides the point of view from which the worlds beyond the so-called threshold have to be observed; in order to perceive and learn, quite different demands are made on it from those in the sense world.

This is the most important thing: that the human soul should become more or less accustomed to the fact that the way of looking at and recognizing things that for the sense world is the correct and healthy one is not the only way.

Here I shall give the name elemental world to the first world that the soul of a human being enters on becoming clairvoyant and crossing the threshold. Only a person who wants to carry the habits of the sense world into the higher super-sensible worlds can demand a uniform choice of names for all the points of view the higher worlds can offer. (At the close of this course of lectures and also in my small book coming out in a day or two, The Threshold of the Spiritual World, I shall point out the connection between the terms chosen here—for example, elemental world and those in my books Theosophy and Occult Science, soul world, spirit world, and so on—in order that people do not look for contradictions in a superficial way where they do not exist.)

Fully new demands meet the life of soul when it steps over the threshold into the elemental world. If the human soul insisted on entering this world with the habits of the sense world, two things might happen: cloudiness or complete darkness would spread over the horizon of the consciousness, over the field of vision, or else—if the soul wanted to enter the elemental world without preparing itself for the peculiarities and requirements there—it would be thrown back again into the sense world. The elemental world is absolutely different from the sense world. In this world of ours when you move from one living being to another, from one happening to the next, you have these beings and events before you and can observe them; while confronting and observing them, you keep your own distinct existence, your own separate personality. You know all the time that in the presence of another person or happening you are the same person that you were before and that you will be the same when you confront a new situation; you can never lose yourself in another being or happening. You confront them, you stand outside them and you know you will always be the same in the sense world wherever you go.

This changes as soon as a person enters the elemental world. There it is necessary to adapt one's whole inner life of soul to a being or event so completely that one transforms one's own inner soul life into this other being, into this other event. We can learn nothing at all in the elemental world unless we become a different person within every other being, indeed unless we become similar to a high degree to the other beings and events.

We have to have, then, one peculiarity of soul for the elemental world: the capacity for transforming our own being into other beings outside ourselves. We must have the faculty of metamorphosis. We must be able to immerse ourselves in and become the other being. We must be able to lose the consciousness which always—in order to remain emotionally healthy—we have to have in the sense world, the consciousness of “I am myself.” In the elemental world we get to know another being only when in a way we inwardly have “become” the other. When we have crossed the threshold, we have to move through the elemental world in such a way that with every step we transform ourselves into every single happening, creep into every single being. It belongs to the health of a person's soul that in passing through the sense world, he should hold his own and assert his individual character, but this is altogether impossible in the elemental world, where it would lead either to the darkening of his field of vision or to his being thrown back into the sense world.

You will easily understand that in order to exercise the faculty of transformation, the soul needs something more than it already possesses here in our world. The human soul is too weak to be able to change itself continuously and adapt itself to every sort of being if it enters the elemental world in its ordinary state. Therefore the forces of the human soul must be strengthened and heightened through the preparations described in my books, Occult Science and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds from these the life of soul will become stronger and more forceful. It can then immerse itself in other entities without losing itself in the process. This being said, you will understand at once the importance of noting what is called the threshold between the sense world and the super-sensible world. We have already said that the clairvoyant consciousness of a human being on earth must go back and forth continually, that it must observe the spiritual world beyond the threshold while it is outside the physical body and must then return into the physical body, exercising in a healthy way the faculties which lead it to the right observation of the physical sense world.

Let us suppose that a person's clairvoyant consciousness, when returning over the threshold, were to take back into the sense world the faculty of transformation it has to have in order to be at all aware of the spiritual world. The faculty of transformation I've been speaking about is a peculiarity of the human etheric body, which lives by preference in the elemental world. Now suppose that a person were to go back into the physical world keeping his etheric body as capable of transformation as it has to be in the elemental world. What would happen? Each of the worlds has it's own special laws.

The sense world is the world of self-contained forms, for here the Spirits of Form rule. The elemental world is the world of mobility, of metamorphosis, of transformation; just as we continually have to change in order to feel at home in that world, all the beings there are continually changing themselves. There is no enclosed, circumscribed form: all is in continual metamorphosis. A soul has to take part in this ever-changing existence outside the physical body if it wants to unfold itself there. Then in the physical sense world we must allow our etheric body, as an entity of the elemental world capable of metamorphosis, to sink down into the physical body. Through this physical body I am a definite personality in the physical sense world; I am this or that distinct person. My physical body stamps my personality upon me; the physical body and the conditions of the physical world in which I find myself make me a personality. In the elemental world one is not a personality, for this would require an enclosed form. Here, however, we must note that what the clairvoyant consciousness recognizes in the human soul is, and always has been, present within it. Through the forces of the physical body, the mobility of the etheric body is restrained only for the time being. As soon as the etheric body sinks back into the physical encasement, its powers of movement are held together and adapted to the form. If the etheric body were not tucked into the physical body as if into a tote bag, it would always be impelled to continuous transformation.

Now let us suppose that a soul, becoming clairvoyant, were to carry over into the physical world this desire of its etheric body for transformation. Then with its tendency towards movement, it will fit rather loosely into the physical body, and thus the soul can come into contradiction with the physical world that wants to shape it into a definite personality. The etheric body, which always wants to move freely, can come back over the threshold in the wrong way, every moment wishing to be something or someone else, someone that may be quite the opposite of the firmly imprinted form of the physical body. To put it even more concretely: a person could be, say, a Scandinavian bank executive, thanks to his physical body, but because his etheric brings over into the physical world the impulse to free itself from physical constraints, he may imagine himself to be the emperor of China. (Or, to use another example, a person may be—let us say—the president of the Theosophical Society, and if her etheric body has been loosened, she may imagine that she has been in the presence of the Director of the Universe.)⁹

We see that the threshold that sharply divides the sense world from the super-sensible world must be respected absolutely; the soul must observe the requirements of each of the two worlds, adapting and conducting itself differently on this side and that. We have emphasized repeatedly that the peculiarities of the super-sensible world must not unlawfully be carried over when one comes back into the sense world. If I may put it more plainly, one has to understand how to conduct oneself in both worlds; one may not carry over into one world the method of observation that is right for the other.

First of all then, we have to take note that the essential faculty for finding and feeling oneself in the elemental world is the faculty of transformation. But the human soul could never live permanently in this mobile element. The etheric body could as little remain permanently in a state of being able to transform itself, as a human being in the physical world could remain continually awake. Only when we are awake can we observe the physical world; asleep, we do not perceive it. Nevertheless we have to allow the waking condition to alternate with the sleeping one. Something comparable to this is necessary in the elemental world. Just as little as it is right in the physical world to be continually awake, for life here must swing like a pendulum between waking and sleeping, so something similar is necessary for the life of the etheric body in the elemental world. There must be an opposite pole, as it were, something that works in the opposite direction to the faculty of transformation leading to perception in the spiritual world. What is it that makes the human being capable of transformation? It is his living in imagination, in mental images, the ability to make his ideas and thoughts so mobile that through his lively, flexible thinking he can dip down into other beings and happenings. For the opposite condition, comparable to sleep in the sense world, it is the will of the human being that must be developed and strengthened. For the faculty of transformation: thinking or imagination; for the opposite condition: the will.

To understand this, we should consider that in the physical sense world the human being is a self, an ego, an “I.” It is the physical body, as long as it is awake, that contributes what is necessary for this feeling of self. The forces of the physical body, when the human being sinks down into it, supply him with the power to feel himself an ego, an I. It is different in the elemental world. There the human being himself must achieve to some degree what the physical body achieves in the physical world. He can develop no feeling of self in the elemental world if he does not exert his will, if he himself does not do the “willing.” This, however, calls for overcoming something that is deeply rooted in us: our love of comfort and convenience. For the elemental world this self-willing is necessary; like the alternation of sleeping and waking in the physical world, the condition of “transforming oneself into other beings” must give way to the feeling of self-strengthened volition. Just as we have become tired in the physical world and close our eyes, overcome by sleep, the moment comes in the elemental world when the etheric body feels, “I cannot go on continually changing; now I must shut out all the beings and happenings around me. I will have to thrust it all out of my field of vision and look away from it. I now must will myself and live absolutely and entirely within myself, ignoring the other beings and occurrences.” This willing of self, excluding everything else, corresponds to sleep in the physical world.

We would be mistaken if we imagined that the alternation of transformation with strengthened ego feeling were regulated in the elemental world just as naturally as waking and sleeping are in the physical world. According to clairvoyant consciousness—and to this alone it is perceptible—it takes place at will, not passing so easily as waking here passes into sleep. After one has lived for a time in the element of metamorphosis, one feels the need within oneself to engage and use the other swing of the pendulum of elemental life. In a much more arbitrary way than with our waking and sleeping, the element of transforming oneself alternates with living within with its heightened feeling of self. Yes, our consciousness can even bring it about through its elasticity that in certain circumstances both conditions can be present at the same time: on the one hand, one transforms oneself to some degree and yet can hold together certain parts of the soul and rest within oneself. In the elemental world we can wake and sleep at the same time, something we should not try to do in the physical world if we have any concern for our soul life.

We must further consider that when thinking develops into the faculty of transformation and begins to be at home in the elemental world, it cannot be used in that world in the way that is right and healthy for the physical world. What is thinking like in our ordinary world? Observe it as you follow its movement. A person is aware of thoughts in his soul; he knows that he is grasping, spinning out, connecting and separating these thoughts. Inwardly he feels himself to be the master of his thoughts, which seem rather passive; they allow themselves to be connected and separated, to be formed and then dismissed. This life of thought must develop in the elemental world a step further. There a person is not in a position to deal with thoughts that are passive. If someone really succeeds in entering that world with his clairvoyant soul, it seems as though his thoughts were not things over which he has any command: they are living beings. Only imagine how it is when you cannot form and connect and separate your thoughts but, instead, each one of them in your consciousness begins to have a life of its own, a life as an entity in itself. You thrust your consciousness into a place, it seems, where you don't find thoughts that are like those in the physical world but where they are living beings. I can only use a grotesque picture which will help us somehow to realize how different our thinking must become from what it is here. Imagine sticking your head into an anthill, while your thinking comes to a stop—you would have ants in your head instead of thoughts! It is just like that, when your soul dips down into the elemental world; your thoughts become so alive that they themselves join each other, separate from each other and lead a life of their own. We truly need a stronger power of soul to confront these living thought-beings with our consciousness than we do with the passive thoughts of the physical world, which allow themselves to be formed at will, to be connected and separated not only sensibly but often even quite foolishly. They are patient things, these thoughts of our ordinary world; they let the human soul do anything it likes with them. But it is quite different when we thrust our soul into the elemental world, where our thoughts will lead an independent life. A human being must hold his own with his soul life and assert his will in confronting these active, lively, no longer passive thoughts. In the physical world our thinking can be completely stupid and this does not harm us at all. But if we do foolish things with our thinking in the elemental world, it may well happen that our stupid thoughts, creeping around there as independent beings, can hurt us, can even cause real pain.

Thus we see that the habits of our soul life must change when we cross the threshold from the physical into the super-sensible world. If we were then to return to the physical world with the activity we have to bring to bear on the living thought entities of the elemental world and failed to develop in ourselves sound thinking with these passive thoughts, wishing rather to hold fast to the conditions of the other world, our thoughts would continually run away from us; then hurrying after them, we would become a slave to our thoughts.

When a person enters the elemental world with clairvoyant soul and develops his faculty of metamorphosis, he delves into it with his inner life, transforming himself according to the kind of entity he is confronting. What is his experience when he does this? It is something we can call sympathy and antipathy. Out of soul depths these experiences seem to well up, presenting themselves to the soul that has become clairvoyant. Quite definite kinds of sympathy and antipathy appear as it transforms itself into this or that other being. When the person proceeds from one transformation to the next, he is continually aware of different sympathies or antipathies. Just as in the physical world we recognize, characterize, describe the objects and living beings, in short, perceive them when the eye sees their color or the ear hears their tones so correspondingly in the spiritual world we would describe its beings in terms of particular sympathies and antipathies. Two things, however, should be noted. One is that in our usual way of speaking in the physical world, we generally differentiate only between stronger and weaker degrees of sympathy and antipathy; in the elemental world the sympathies and antipathies differ from one another not only in degree but also in quality. There they vary, just as yellow here is quite different from red. As our colors are qualitatively different, so are the many varieties of sympathy and antipathy that we meet in the elemental world. In order therefore to describe this correctly, one may not merely say—as one would do in the physical world—that in diving down and entering this particular entity one feels greater sympathy, while in immersing oneself in another entity one feels less sympathy. No! Sympathies of all sorts and kinds can be found there!

The other point to note is this: Our usual natural attitude to sympathy and antipathy cannot be carried over into the elemental world. Here in this world we feel drawn to some people, repelled by others; we associate by choice with those who are sympathetic and wish to stay near them; we turn away from the things and people who are abhorrent and refuse to have anything to do with them. This cannot be the case in the elemental world, for there—if I may express it rather oddly—we will not find the sympathies sympathetic nor the antipathies antipathetic. This would resemble someone in the physical world saying, “I can stand only the blues and greens, not the red or yellow colors. I simply have to run away from red and yellow!” If a being of the elemental world is antipathetic, it means that it has a distinct characteristic of that world, which must be described as antipathetic, and we have to deal with it just as we deal in the sense world with the colors blue and red, not permitting one to be more sympathetic to us than the other. Here we meet all the colors with a certain calmness because they convey what the things are; only when a person is a bit neurotic does he run away from certain colors, or when he is a bull and cannot bear the sight of red. Most of us accept all the colors with equanimity and in the same way we should be able to observe with the utmost calmness the qualities of sympathy and antipathy that belong to the elemental world. For this we must necessarily change the attitude of soul usual in the physical world, where it is attracted by sympathy and repelled by antipathy; it must become completely changed. There the inner mood or disposition corresponding to the feelings of sympathy and antipathy must be replaced with what we can call soul-quiet, spirit-peacefulness.¹⁰ With an inwardly resolute soul life filled with spirit calm, we must immerse ourselves in the entities and transform ourselves into them; then we will feel the qualities of these beings rising within our soul depths as sympathies and antipathies. Only when we can do this, with such an attitude toward sympathy and antipathy, will the soul, in its experiences, be capable of letting the sympathetic and antipathetic perception appear before it as images that are right and true. That is, only then are we capable not merely of feeling what the perception of sympathies and antipathies is but of really experiencing our own particular self, transformed into another being, suddenly rising up as one or another color-picture or as one or another tone-picture of the elemental world.

You can also learn how sympathies and antipathies play a part in regard to the experience of the soul in the spiritual world if you will look with a certain amount of inner understanding at the chapter of my book Theosophy that describes the soul world. You will see there that the soul world is actually constructed of sympathies and antipathies. From my description you will have been able to learn that what we know as thinking in the physical sense world is really only the external shadowy imprint, called up by the physical body, of the thinking that, lying in occult depths, can be called a true living force. As soon as we enter the elemental world and move with our etheric body, thoughts become—one can say—denser, more alive, more independent, more true to their own nature. What we experience as thought in the physical body relates to this truer element of thinking as a shadow on the wall relates to the objects casting it. As a matter of fact, it is the shadow of the elemental thought-life thrown into the physical sense world through the instrumentality of the physical body. When we think, our thinking lies more or less in the shadow of thought beings. Here clairvoyant spiritual knowledge throws new light on the true nature of thinking. No philosophy, no external science, however ingenious, can determine anything of the real nature of thinking; only a knowledge based on clairvoyant consciousness can recognize what it is.

The same thing holds good with the nature of our willing. The will must grow stronger, for in the elemental world things are not so obliging that the ego feeling is provided for us as it is through the forces of the physical body. There we ourselves have to will the feeling of ego; we have to find out what it means for our soul to be entirely filled with the consciousness, “I will myself”; we have to experience something of the greatest significance: that when we are not strong enough to bring forth the real act of will, “I will myself,” and not just the thought of it, at that moment we will feel ourselves falling unconscious as though in a faint. If we do not hold ourselves together in the elemental world, we will fall into a kind of faint. There we look into the true nature of the will, again something that cannot be discovered by external science or philosophy but only by the clairvoyant consciousness. What we call the will in the physical world is a shadowy image of the strong, living will of the elemental world, which grows and develops so that it can maintain the self out of its own volition without the support of external forces. We can say that everything in that world, when we grow accustomed to it, becomes self-willed.

Above all, when we have left the physical body and our etheric body has the elemental world as its environment, it is through the innate character of the etheric body that the drive to transform ourselves awakens. We wish to immerse ourselves in the other beings. However, just as in our waking state by day the need for sleep arises, so in the elemental world there arises in turn the need to be alone, to shut out everything into which we could transform ourselves. Then again, when we have felt alone for a while and developed the strong feeling of will, “I will myself,” there comes what may be called a terrible feeling of isolation, of being forsaken, which evokes the longing to awaken out of this state, of only willing oneself, to the faculty of transformation again. While we rest in physical sleep, other forces take care that we wake up; we don't have to attend to it ourselves. In the elemental world when we are in the sleeping condition of only willing ourselves, it is through the demand of feeling forsaken that we are impelled to put ourselves into the state of transformation, that is, of wanting to awaken.

From all this, you see how different are the conditions of experiencing oneself in the elemental world, of perceiving oneself there, from those of the physical world. You can judge therefore how necessary it is, again and again, to take care that the clairvoyant consciousness, passing back and forth from one world to the other, adapts itself correctly to the requirements of each world and does not carry over, on crossing the threshold, the usages of one into the other. The strengthening and invigorating of the life of soul consequently belongs to the preparation we have often described as necessary for the experience of super-sensible worlds.

What must above all become strong and forceful are the soul experiences we can call the eminently moral ones. These imprint themselves as soul dispositions in firmness of character and inner resolute calm. Inner courage and firmness of character must most especially be developed, for through weakness of character we cripple the whole life of soul, which would then come powerless into the elemental world; this we must avoid if we hope to have a true and correct experience there. No one who is really earnest about gaining knowledge in the higher worlds will therefore fail to give weight to the strengthening of the moral forces among all the other forces that help the soul enter those worlds. One of the most shameful errors is foisted on humanity when someone takes it on himself to say that clairvoyance should be acquired without paying attention to strengthening the moral life. It must be stressed once and for all that what I described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds as the development of the lotus flowers that crystallize in the spirit body of a student-clairvoyant may indeed take place without attention to supportive moral strength but certainly ought not to do so.

The lotus flowers must be there if a person wants to have the faculty of transformation. That faculty comes into existence when the flowers unfold their petals in a motion away from the human being, in order to grasp the spiritual world and adhere to it. Whatever a person develops as the ability to transform himself is expressed for the clairvoyant vision in the unfolding of the lotus flowers. Whatever he can acquire of a strengthened ego-feeling becomes inner firmness; we can call it an elementary backbone. Both of these must be correspondingly developed, the lotus flowers so that one can transform oneself, and an elementary backbone so that one can unfold a strengthened ego in the elemental world.

As mentioned in the lecture yesterday, what develops in a spiritual way can lead to a high order of virtues in the spiritual world, but if this is allowed to stream down into the sense world, it can bring about the most terrible vices. It is the same with the lotus flowers and elemental backbone. By practicing certain methods it is also possible to awaken the lotus flowers and backbone without aiming for moral firmness—but this no conscientious clairvoyant would recommend. It is not merely a question of attaining something or other in the higher worlds, but of knowing what is involved. At the moment we pass over the threshold into the spiritual world, we approach the luciferic and ahrimanic beings, of whom we have already spoken; here we meet them in quite a different way from any confrontation we might have in the physical world. We will have the remarkable experience that as soon as we cross the threshold, that is, as soon as we have developed the lotus flowers and a backbone, we will see the luciferic powers coming towards us with the intention of seizing the lotus flowers. They stretch their tentacles out towards our lotus flowers; we must have developed in the right way so that we use the lotus flowers to grasp and understand the spiritual events and so that they are not themselves grasped by the luciferic powers. It is possible to prevent their being seized by these powers only by ascending into the spiritual world with firmly established moral forces.

I have already mentioned that in the physical sense world the ahrimanic forces approach us more from outside, the luciferic more from within the soul. In the spiritual world it is just the opposite: the luciferic beings come from outside and try to lay hold of the lotus flowers, whereas the ahrimanic beings come from within and settle themselves tenaciously within the elementary backbone. If we have risen into the spiritual world without the support of morality, the ahrimanic and luciferic powers form an extraordinary alliance with each other. If we have come into the higher worlds filled with ambition, vanity, pride or with the desire for power, Ahriman and Lucifer will succeed in forming a partnership with each other. I will use a picture for what they do, but this picture corresponds to the actual situation and you will understand that what I am indicating really takes place: Ahriman and Lucifer form an alliance; together they bind the petals of the lotus flowers to the elementary backbone. When all the petals are fastened to the backbone, the human being is tied up in himself, fettered within himself through his strongly developed lotus flowers and backbone. The results of this will be the onset of egoism and love of deception to an extent that would be impossible were he to remain normally in the physical world. Thus we see what can happen if clairvoyant consciousness is not developed in the right way: the alliance of Ahriman and Lucifer whereby the petals of the lotus flowers are fastened onto the elementary backbone, fettering a person within himself by means of his own elemental or etheric capacities. These are the things we must know if we wish to penetrate with open eyes and with understanding into the actual spiritual world.

• 9. Leadbeater wrote that he had “stood with Mrs. Besant in the presence of the Director of the Universe.” Mrs. Besant was at that time the President of the Theosophical Society.
• 10. See The Souls' Awakening, Scene 4. The Guardian of the Threshold says:
  You see myself, too in delusion's form
  while vain desires are joined to inner sight
  and spirit peacefulness as sheath of soul
  has not yet taken hold of your whole being.

We have now reached a point in our studies from which we must proceed with extreme caution, in order to see where there is a danger of allowing our thought to depart from reality and to see also when we are avoiding this danger, by keeping within the bounds of what is real.

Last time, we suggested the comparison of two facts: The appearance within the planetary system of the cometary phenomena, and, alas within the planetary system, though perhaps not bearing quite the same relationship to it, all that we observe in the phenomena of fertilization. In order, however, to come to ideas about this which are at all justified, we must first see whether it is indeed possible to find connections between two so widely separated things, with which we are confronted in the external world of facts. In scientific method, we shall not make real progress, unless we can refer from one realm of facts to another, manifesting something of a similar nature and thus leading us on.

We have seen how on the one hand we have to use the element of figure and form, the mathematical, and then how we are again and again impelled to come to terms in one way or another with the qualitative aspect, in some way to find a qualitative approach. And so today we will bring in something which arises in regard to man if one really studies this man, who is, after all, in some way an image of the heavenly phenomena,—as the many statements in these lectures may enable us to deduce. Yet we still have to establish in what way he is this image. If this is what he is, we must first of all gain a clear understanding of man himself. We must understand the picture from which we intend to take our start,—understand its inner perspective. Just as in looking at a painting one must know what a foreshortening means, and so on, in order to pass from the picture to the real spatial relationships and to relate the picture to what it represents in reality, so, if we would approach reality in the universe, interpreting it through man, we must first be clear about man. Now it is, extraordinarily difficult, as a human being, to come near to the human being with palpable ideas. Therefore, I should like today to bring before your souls what I might call “palpably impalpable” thought-pictures arising from quite simple foundations, ideas with which most of you are probably already well acquainted, but which we must nevertheless bring before our minds in a certain connection. These ideas, which seem in part to be quite easy to grasp and yet again, beyond certain limits, to elude our comprehension, will afford us a means of orientation in the striving to take hold of the outer world through ideas.

It may appear somewhat forced to keep emphasizing the necessity of referring back to man's life of pictorial imagination in order to understand the phenomena of the heavens. But after all it is obvious that however carefully we may describe the heavenly phenomena, we have, to begin with, nothing more than a form of optical picture, permeated with mathematical thoughts. What Astronomy gives us has fundamentally the character of a picture. To be on the right path, we must therefore concern ourselves with the arising of the picture in man, otherwise we shall gain no true relationship to what Astronomy can say to us. And so I should like today to proceed from some quite simple mathematics and to show you how, in a different domain from that to which we were led through the ratios of the periods of revolution of the planets, there appears within Mathematics itself this element of the incomprehensible, the impalpable. We meet with it when in a certain connection we study quite familiar curves. (As I said, many of you already know what I am about to describe, I only want to elucidate the subject today from a particular aspect.)

Consider the Ellipse, with its two foci \(A\) and \(B\), and you know that it is a definition of the ellipse that for any point \(M\) of the curve, the sum of its distances \((a + b)\) from the two foci remains constant. It is characteristic of the ellipse, that the sum of the distances of any one of its points from two fixed points, the two foci, remains constant (Fig. 1).

Then we have a second curve, the Hyperbola (Fig. 2). You know that it has two branches. It is defined in that the difference of the distances of any point of the curve from the two foci, \((b - a)\) is a constant magnitude. In the ellipse, then, we have the curve of the constant sum, in the hyperbola, the curve of constant difference, and we must now ask: What is the curve of constant product?

I have often drawn attention to this: The curve of constant product is the so-called Curve of Cassini (Fig. 3). We find it when, having two points, \(A\) and \(B\), we consider a point M in regard to its distances from \(A\) and \(B\), and establish the condition that the two distances \(AM\) and \(BM\) multiplied together should equal a constant magnitude. For the sake of simplicity in the calculation, I will call the constant magnitude \(b^2\) and the distance \(AB\), \(2a\). If we take the mid-point between \(a\) and \(b\) as the center of the axes of a co-ordinate system and calculate the ordinates for each point that fulfills these conditions,—take \(C\) as the center of the co-ordinate system and let the point whose ordinate we will call y move round so that for each point of the curve \(AM•BM = b^2\), we get the following equation. (I will only give you the result, for the simply reason that everyone can easily work out the calculation for himself; it is to be found in any mathematical text-book relating to the subject.) We find for \(y\) the value:

Taking here into account that we cannot use the negative sign because we should then have an imaginary y, and considering therefore taking only the positive sign, we have:

If we then draw the corresponding curve, we have a curve, rather like but not identical with an ellipse, called the curve of Cassini (Fig. 4). It is symmetrical to the left and right of the ordinate axis and about and below the abscissa axis.

But now, this curve has various forms, and for us at any rate this is the important thing about it. The curve has different forms, according to whether b, as I have taken it here, is greater than a, equal to a, or less than a. The curve I have just drawn arises when b ˃ a, and furthermore when another condition is fulfilled, namely, that b is also greater than or equal to a √2. Moreover, when b ˃ a√2, there is a distinct curvature above and below, If b = a√2, then at this point above and below, the line of the curve becomes straightened,m it flattens so much that it almost becomes a straight line (Fig. 4). If, however, b ˂ a√2, then the whole course of the curve is changed and it takes on this form (Fig. 5). And if b = a, the curve passes over into a quite special form, it changes into this form (Fig. 6). It runs back into itself, cuts through itself and comes out on the other side, and we obtain the special form of the Lemniscate. The lemniscate, then, is a special form of Curve of Cassini—these curves are so named after their discoverer. The particular form assumed by the curve is determined by the ratio between the constant magnitudes which appear in the equation characterizing the curve. In the equation, we have only these two constant magnitudes, b and a, and the form of the curve depends on the ratio between them.

Then the third case is possible, that b ˂ a. If b ˂ a, we can still find values for the curve. We can always solve the equation and obtain values for the curve, ordinates and abscissae, even when b is smaller than a, only the curve then undergoes yet another metamorphosis. For when b ˂ a, we find two branches of the curve, which look something like this (Fig. 7). We have a discontinuous curve. And here we come to the point where the mathematics itself confronts us with what I called the “palpably impalpable”, something that is difficult to grasp in space. For in the sense of the mathematical equation, this is not two curves, but one; it is a single curve in exactly the same way as all these are single curves (Figs. 3 through 5). In this one (the lemniscate) there is already a transition. The point which describes the curve takes this path, goes round underneath, cuts its previous path here and continues on here (Fig. 7). Here, we must picture the following: If we let the point M move along this line, it does not simply cross over from one side to the other,—it does not do this. It runs along the path just as in the other curves, describes a curve here, but then manages to turn up again here (Fig. 7) You see, that which carries the point along the line disappears here in the middle. If you want to understand the curve you can only imagine that it disappears in the middle. If you try to form a continuous mental picture of this curve, what must you do?

It is quite easy, is it not, to imagine curves such as thes. (I only say this in parenthesis for the ordinary philistine!) You can go on imagining points along the curve and you do not find that the picture breaks off. Here (in the lemniscate) admittedly, you have to modify the comfortable way of simply going round and round, but still it goes on continuously. You can keep hold of the mental picture. But now, when you come to this curve (Fig. 7), which is not so commonplace, and you want to image it, then, in order to keep the continuity of the idea you will have to say: Space no longer gives me a point of support. In crossing over to the other branch in my imagination, unless I break the continuity and regard the one branch as independent of the other, I must go out of space; I cannot remain in space. So you see, Mathematics itself provides us with facts which oblige us to go out of space, if we would preserve the continuity of the idea. The reality itself demands of us that in our ideas we go out of space. Even in Mathematics therefore we are confronted with something which shows us that in some way we must leave space behind, if the pure idea is to follow its right path. Having ourselves and going the idea is beginning to think the process through, we must go on thinking in such a way that space is no longer of any help to us. If this were not so, we should not be able to calculate all possibilities in the equation.

In pursuing similar line of thought, we meet with other instances of this kind. I will only draw your attention to the next step, which ensures if one things as follows. The ellipse is the locus of the constant sum,—it is defined by the fact that is is the curve of constant sum. The hyperbola is the curve of constant difference. The curve of Cassini in its various forms is the curve of constant product. There must then be a curve of constant quotient also, if we have here A, here B, here a point M, and then a constant quotient to be formed through the division of BM by AM. We must be able to find different points, M 1, M 2, etc., for which

etc. are equal to one another and always equal to a constant number. This curve is, in fact, the Circle. If we look for the points M1, M2 etc. we find a circle which has this particular relationship to thee points A and B (Fig. 8). So that we can say: Besides the usual, simple definition of a circle,—namely, that it is the locus of a point whose distance from a fixed point remains constant,—there is another definition. The circle is that curve, very point of which fulfills the condition that its distances from two fixed points maintain a constant quotient.

Now, in considering the circle in this way there is something else to be observed. For you see, if we express this

(it could of course be expressed in some other way), we always obtain corresponding values in the equation, and we can find the circle. In doing this we find different forms of the circle (that is, different proportions between the radius of the circle and the length of the straight line AB), according to the proportion of m to n. These different forms of the circle behave in such a way that their curvature becomes less and less. When \(n\) is much greater than m, we find a circle with a very strong curvature; when n is not so much greater, the curvature is less. The circle becomes larger and larger the smaller the difference between n and m. And if we follow this proportion of m to n still further, the circle gradually passes over into a straight line. You can follow this in the equation. It passes over into the ordinate axis itself. The circle becomes the ordinate axis when \(m=n\), that is, when the quotient \(m/n=1\). In this way the circle gradually changes into the ordinate axis, into a straight line.

You need not be particularly astonished at this. It is quite possible to imagine. But something very different happens it we wish to follow the process still further. The circle has flattened more and more, and through becoming flatter from within, as it were, it changes into a straight line. It does this because the constant ratio in the equation undergoes a change. Through this the circle becomes a straight line. But this constant ratio can of course grow beyond \(1\), so that the arcs of the circles appear here (on the left of the \(y\)-axis). What must we do, however, if we try to follow it in our imagination? We have to do something quite peculiar. We have, in fact, to think of a circle which is not curved towards the inside, but is curved towards the outside. Of course, I cannot draw this circle, but it is possible to think of a circle which is curved towards the outside.¹ In an ordinary circle the curvature is towards the inside, it is not? If we follow the line round it returns into itself. But defining the circle in this other way, if we use the necessary constant, we obtain a straight line. The curvature is still on this side (right of the \(y\)-axis). But it now makes things not nearly so comfortable for us as before! Previously, the curvature always turned towards the center of the circle, while now (in the case of the straight line), we are shown that the center is somewhere in the infinite distance, as one says. Following on from this, there arises for us the idea of a circle which is curved towards the outside. Its curvature is then no longer as it is here (Fig. 9a)—that would be the ordinary, commonplace, philistine circle,—but its curvature is here (Fig. 9b). Therefore, the inside of this circle is not here; this is the outside; the inside of this circle (Fig. 9c) is to the right.

Now compare what I have just put before you. I have described the curve of Cassini, with its various forms, the lemniscate and the form in which there are two branches. And now we have pictured the circle in such a way that at one time it is curved in the familiar way, with the inside here and the outside here; while in a second form of circle (in drawing it we are only indicating what is meant) we find that the curvature is this way round, with an inside here and an outside here. Comparing it with the Cassini curve, the first form of the circle would correspond to the closed forms, as far as the lemniscate. After this we have another kind of circle, which must be thought of in the other direction, being curved this way, with the inside here and the outside here. You see, when we are concerned with the constant product we find forms of the curve of Cassini where, it is true, we are thrown out of space, yet we can still draw the other branch on the other side. The other branch is once more in space, although in order to pass from the one to the other we are thrown out of space. Here, in the case of the circle, however, the matter becomes still more difficult. In the transition from circle to straight line we are, indeed, thrown out of space, and moreover, we can no longer draw a self-contained form at all. This we are unable to do. In passing over from the curve of constant product to the curve of constant quotient, we are only just able to indicate the thought spatially.

It is extraordinarily important that we concern ourselves with the creating of ideas which, as it were, will still slip into such curve-forms. I am convinced that most people who concern themselves with mathematics take note of such discontinuities, but then make the thought more comfortable by simply holding to the formula and not passing on to what should accompany the mathematical formula in true continuity of thought. I have also never seen that in the treatment of Mathematics as subject matter for education any great value is laid upon the forming of such thoughts in imagination.—I do not know,—I ask the mathematicians present, Herr Blümel, Herr Baravalle, if this is so; whether in modern University education any importance is attached to this? (Dr. Unger here mentioned the use of the cinema.) Yes, but that is a pretense. It is only possible to represent such things within empirical space by means of the cinema or in similar ways, it some sort of deception is introduced. It cannot be pictured fully in real space without the effect being achieved through some form of deception. The point is, whether there is anywhere in the sphere of reality something which obliges us to think realistically in terms of such curves. This is the question I am now asking. Before passing on, however, to describe what might perhaps correspond to these things in the realm of reality, I should like to add something which may perhaps make it easier for you to pass transition from these abstract ideas to the reality. It is the following.

You can set another problem in the sphere of theoretical Astronomy, theoretical Physics. You can say: Let us suppose that here as \(A\), is a source of light, and this source of light in a illumines a point \(M\) (Fig. 10). The strength of the light shining from \(M\) is observed from \(B\). That is, with the necessary optical instruments, observation is made from \(B\) of the strength of the light shining from the point \(M\), which is illumined from \(A\). And of course, the strength of the light would vary, according to the distance between \(B\) and \(M\). But there is a path which could be described by the point \(M\), such that, being illumined from A, it always shines back to \(B\) with the same intensity. There is such a path; and we can therefore ask: What must be the locus of a point, illumined from a fixed point \(A\), such that, seen from another fixed point \(B\), its light is always of the same intensity? This curve—the curve in which such a point would have to move—is the curve of Cassini! From this you see that something which takes on a qualitative nature is set into spatial connection, fitting into a complicated curve. The quality that we must see in the beam of light—for the intensity of light is a quality—depends in this case on the element of form in the spatial relationships.

I only wished to bring this forward for you to see that there is at least some way of leading over from what can be grasped in geometrical form to what is qualitative. This way is a long one, and what we will now discuss is something to which I want to draw your attention, although it would take months to present in all detail. You must be fully aware that I only intend to give you guiding lines; it is left to you to develop them further and to go into all the details which would testify to the truth of what is said. For you see, the connection which must be formed between spiritual science and empirical sciences of today demands very far-reaching and extensive work. But when lines of direction are once given, this work can to some extent be undertaken and carried forward. It is at all events possible. One must only be able in a quite definite way to penetrate into the empirical phenomena.

If we now tackle the problem from quite another angle,—we have sought to some degree to understand it from the mathematical aspect, then, to anyone who is studying the human organism, there is something which cannot escape unnoticed, something which has often been brought forward in our circle, especially in the talks which accompanied the course of lectures on Medicine in Dornach in the spring of 1920. It is not to be overlooked that certain relationships exist between the organisation of the head and the rest of the human organisation, for example the metabolism. There is indeed a connection, indefinable to begin with, between what takes place in the third system of the human being—in all the organs of metabolism—and what takes place in the head. The relationship is there, but it is hard to formulate. Clearly as it emerges in various phenomena,—for example, it is obvious that certain illnesses are connected with skull or head deformities and the like, and these things can easily be traced by one who tries to follow them with biological reasoning,—it nevertheless difficult to grasp this relationship in imagination. People do not usually get beyond the point of saying that there must be some sort of connection between what takes place in the head, for instance, and in the rest of the human organism. It is a picture which is difficult to form, just because it is so very hard for people to make the transition from the quantitative aspect to the qualitative. If we are not educated through spiritual-scientific methods to find this transition, quite independently of what outer experience offers,—to extend to what is qualitative the kind of thought we use for what is quantitative, if we do not methodically train ourselves to do this, then, my dear friends, there will always be an apparent limit to our understanding of the external phenomena.

Let me indicate but one way in which you can train yourselves methodologically to think the qualitative in a similar way as you think the quantitative. You are all acquainted with the phenomenon of the solar spectrum, the usual continuous spectrum. You know that we have there the transition of colour from red to violet. You know, too, that Goethe wrestled with the problem of how this spectrum is in a sense the reverse of what must arise if darkness be allowed to pass through the prism in the same way as is usually done with light. The result is a kind of inverted spectrum, and as you know Goethe arranged this experiment also. In the ordinary spectrum, the green passes over on the one side towards the violet and on the other towards the red; whereas in the spectrum obtained by Goethe in applying a strip of darkness to the prism there is peach-blossom in the middle and then again red on the one side and violet on the other (Fig. 11). The two colour bands are obtained, the centres of which are opposite to one another, qualitatively opposite, and both bands seem to stretch away as it were into infinity. But now, one can imagine that this axis, the longitudinal axis of the ordinary spectrum, is not simply a straight line, but a circle, as indeed every straight line is a circle. If this straight line is a circle, it returns into itself, and we can consider the point where the peach-blossom appears to be the same point as the one in which the violet, stretching to the right, meets the red, which stretches to the left. They meet in the infinite distance to the right and left. If we were to succeed—maybe you know that one of the first experiments to be made in our newly established physical laboratory is to be in this direction—if we were to succeed in bending the spectrum in a certain way into itself, then even those who are not willing to grasp the matter to begin with in pure thought will be able to see that we are here concerned with something real and of a qualitative nature.

We come to certain limiting ideas in Mathematics, where—as in Synthetic Geometry—we are obliged to regard the straight line as a circle in a quite real though inner sense; where we are obliged to admit of the infinitely distant point of a straight line as being only one point; or to understand as bounding a plane, not some line above and then again below, but a single straight line; or to think of the boundary of infinite space, not in the nature of something spherical, but as a plane. Such ideas, however, also become, in a way, limiting ideas for sense-perceptible empirical reality, and we are made to realise it if we insist on restricting ourselves to sense-perceptible reality.

This brings us to something which would otherwise always remain perpetually in the dark. I have already mentioned it. It invites us really to think-through the thought-pictures to which we come when we allow the lemniscate-form of the Cassini curve to pass over into the double-branched form,—the form with the two branches for which we must go out of space,—and them compare this with what confronts us in the empirical reality.

You are indeed already doing this, my dear friends, when you apply Mathematics in one way or another to the empirical reality. You call a triangle a triangle, because you have first constructed it mathematically. You apply to the outer form what has been evolved in an inner constructive way within you. The process I have just described is only more complicated, but it is the same process when you think of the two branches of that particular form of the Cassini curve as one. Apply this thought to the correspondence between the human head and the rest of the human organism and you will have to realise that in the head there is a connection with the remaining organism of precisely such a character as is expressed by the equation which requires, not a continuous curve, but a discontinuous one. This cannot be followed anatomically; you must go out beyond what the body comprises physically, if you would find the connection of what comes to expression in the head with what comes to expression in the metabolic system. It is essential to approach the human organism with thoughts which are quite unattainable if for every element of the thought you insist on an entire correspondence within the sense-perceptible empirical realm. We must reach out to something else, beyond the sense-perceptible empirical realm, if we are to find what this relationship really is within the human being.

Such a study, if one really gives oneself up to it and carried it out methodically, is extraordinarily rich in its results. The human organisation is of such a nature that it cannot be embraced by the anatomical approach alone. Just as we are driven out of space in the Cassini curve, so in the study of man we are driven out of the body, by the method of study itself. You see, it is quite possible to understand in the first place in thought, that in a study of the whole man we are driven out of the realm of what can be grasped in a physical-empirical sense. To put forward such things is no offence against scientific principles. Such ideas are far removed from the purely hypothetical fantasies which are often entertained in connection with natural phenomena, for they refer to the whole way in which man is membered into the universe. You are not looking for something which is otherwise non-existent, but rather for something which is exactly the same as what is expressed in the relationship between a man thinking mathematically and the empirical reality.

It is not a question of looking for hypotheses which in the end are unjustifiable; it is a question, since the reality is obviously complicated, of looking for other cognitive relations to the inner reality, in addition to the simple relation of mathematical man to empirical reality. When once you have accepted such thoughts, you will also be led to ask whether what takes place outside the human being in other domains besides the astronomical,—for example, in those phenomena which we call the chemical and physical,—whether those same phenomena, which we regard as chemical phenomena outside of man, take the same course within man, when he is alive, as they do outside him, or whether here, too, a transition is necessary which leads in some way out of space.

Now consider the important question arising out of this. Suppose we have here some kind of chemical phenomena and here the boundary leading over to the inside of the human being (Fig. 13). Supposing that this chemical phenomenon were able to call forth another, so that the human being reacted here (inside); then, if we remain in the field of the empirical, space would of course be the mediator. If, however, the continuance of this phenomenon within the human being comes about by virtue of the fact, say, that the human being is nourished by food, and the processes already taking place outside him continue inside him, then the question arises: Does the force which is at work in the chemical process remain in the same space when it taking place within man as when it is taking its course outside him? Or must we perhaps go out of space?

And there you have what is analogous to the circle which changes over into a straight line. If you look for its other form, where what is usually turned outward is now turned inward, you are entirely outside of space.

The question is, whether we do not need such ideas as these, thought-pictures which, while remaining continuous, go right out of space,—when we follow the course of what happens outwardly, outside of man, into the interior of the human being. The only thing to be said against such things, my dear friends, is that they certainly impose greater demands on the human capacity of understanding than the ideas with which he phenomena are approached today. They might therefore be rather awkward in University education. They are, no doubt, thoroughly awkward, for they imply that before approaching the phenomena we must awaken in ourselves what will enable us to understand them. Nothing like this exists in our educational system today; but it must come, it must certainly come, otherwise simply in speaking of a phenomenon we get into the greatest disparities, without in any way seeing the reality. Just think what happens when someone observes the circle as it curves to this side (Fig. 9a), and then sees how it curves to this side (Fig. 9b), but then remains a philistine and simple does not conceive that the circle now curves towards the other side. He says: This is impossible, the circle cannot curve this way; I must put the curvature this way round, I must simply place myself on the other side. What he is speaking about seems to be one and the same thing; but he has changed his point of view.

In this way today we make matters simple, in describing what is within the human being in comparison with what takes place in Nature outside him. We say: What is within man does not exist at all; I must simply place myself within man and say that the curvature is facing this way (Fig. 9c). I will then consider what is inside, without taking into account that I have reversed the curvature. I will make the interior of the human being into an outer Nature. I simply imagine outer Nature to continue through the skin into the interior. I turn myself round, because I am not willing to admit the other form of curvature, and then I theorise. That is the trick which is performed today, only in order to adhere to more comfortable motions. There is no desire to accent what is real; in order not to have to do so, we simply turn ourselves round, and—this is now a comparison—instead of looking at the human from in front, we look at Nature from behind and thus arrive in this way at all the various theories concerning man.

We will continue, then, tomorrow.

• 1. If it were drawn it would look like an ordinary circle, only one would have to bear in mind that “outside” and “inside” had changed places. (Editor's note.)

If the process of the change of teeth in a child is gradual even more gradual is that great transformation in the bodily, psychic and spiritual organism of which I have already spoken. Hence, in education it is important to remember that the child is gradually changing from an imitative being into one who looks to the authority of an educator, of a teacher. Thus we should make no abrupt transition in the treatment of a child in its seventh year or so—at the age, that is, at which we receive it for education in the primary school. Anything further that is said here on primary school education must be understood in the light of this proviso.

In the art of education with which we are here concerned the main thing is to foster the development of the child's inherent capacities. Hence all instruction must be at the service of education. The task is, properly speaking, to educate; and instruction is made use of as a means of educating.

This educational principle demands that the child shall develop the appropriate relation to life at the appropriate age. But this can only be done satisfactorily when the child is not required at the very outset to do something which is foreign to its nature.

Now it is a thoroughly unnatural thing to require a child in its sixth or seventh year to copy without more ado the signs which we now, in this advanced stage of civilisation, use for reading and writing.

If you consider the letters we now use for reading and writing, you will realise that there is no connection between what a seven-year old child is naturally disposed to do—and these letters. Remember, that when men first began to write they used painted or drawn signs which copied things or happenings in the surrounding world; or else men wrote from out of will impulses, so that the forms of writing gave expression to processes of the will, as for example in cuneiform. The entirely abstract forms of letters which the eye must gaze at nowadays, or the hand form, arose from out of picture writing. If we confront a young child with these letters we are bringing to him an alien thing, a thing which in no wise conforms to his nature. Let us be clear what this ‘pushing’ of a foreign body into a child's organism really means. It is just as if we habituated the child from his earliest years to wearing very small clothes, which do not fit and which therefore damage his organism. Nowadays when observation tends to be superficial, people do not even perceive what damage is done to the organism by the mere fact of introducing reading and writing to the child in a wrong way. An art of education founded in a knowledge of man does truly proceed by drawing out all that is in the child. It does not merely say: the individuality must be developed, it really does it. And this is achieved firstly by not taking reading as the starting point. For with a child the first things are movements, gestures, expressions of will, not perception or observation. These come later. Hence it is necessary to begin, not with reading, but with writing—but a writing which shall come naturally from man's whole being.

Hence, we begin with writing lessons, not reading lessons, and we endeavour to lead over what the child does of its own accord out of imitation, through its will, through its hands, into writing. Let me make it clear to you by an example: We ask the child to say the word “fish,” for instance, and while doing so, show him the form of the fish in a simple sketch; then ask him to copy it;—thus we get the child to experience the word “fish.” From “fish” we pass to f (F), and from the form of the fish we can gradually evolve the letter f. Thus we derive the form of the letter by an artistic activity which carries over what is observed into what is willed:

By this means we avoid introducing an utterly alien F, a thing which would affect the child like a demon, something foreign thrust into his body; and instead we call forth from him the thing he has seen himself in the market place. And this we transform little by little into ‘ f .’

In this way we come near to the way writing originated, for it arose in a manner similar to this. But there is no need for the teacher to make a study of antiquity and exactly reproduce the way picture writing arose so as to give it in the same manner to the child. What is necessary is to give the rein to living fantasy and to produce afresh whatever can lead over from the object, from immediate life, to the letter forms. You will then find the most manifold ways of deriving the letter form for the child from life itself. While you say M let him feel how the M vibrates on the lips, then get him to see the shape of the lips as form, then you will be able to pass over gradually from the M that vibrates on the lips to M.

In this way, if you proceed spiritually, imaginatively, and not intellectually, you will gradually be able to derive from the child's own activity, all that leads to his learning to write. He will learn to write later and more slowly than children commonly do to-day. But when parents come and say: My child is eight, or nine years old, and cannot yet write properly, we must always answer: What is learned more slowly at any given age is more surely and healthily absorbed by the organism, than what is crammed into it.

Along these lines, moreover, there is scope for the individuality of the teacher, and this is an important con-sideration. As we now have many children in the Waldorf School we have had to start parallel classes—thus we have two first classes, two second classes and so on. If you go into one of the first classes you will find writing being taught by way of painting and drawing. You observe how the teacher is doing it. For instance, it might be just as we have been describing here. Then you go into the other Class I., Class I. B; and you find another teacher teaching the same subject. But you see something quite different. You find the teacher letting the children run round in a kind of eurhythmy, and getting them to experience the form from out of their own bodily movements. Then what the child runs is retained as the form of the letter. And it is possible to do it in yet a third and a fourth manner. You will find the same subject taught in the most varied ways in the different parallel classes. Why? Well, because it is not a matter of indifference whether the teacher who has to take a lesson has one temperament or another. The lesson can only be harmonious when there is the right contact between the teacher and the whole class. Hence every teacher must give his lesson in his own way. And just as life appears in manifold variety so can a teaching founded in life take the most varied forms.

Usually, when pedagogic principles are laid down it is expected that they shall be carried out. They are written down in a book. The good teacher is he who carries them out punctiliously, 1, 2, 3, etc. Now I am convinced that if a dozen men, or even fewer, sit down together they can produce the most wonderful programme for what should take place in education; firstly, secondly, thirdly, etc. People are so wonderfully intelligent nowadays;—I am not being sarcastic, I really mean it—one can think out the most splendid things in the abstract. But whether it is possible to put into practice what one has thought out is quite another matter. That is a concern of Life. And when we have to deal with life,—I ask you now, life is in all of you, natural life, you are all human beings, yet you all look different. No one man's hair is like another's. Life displays its variety in the manifold varieties of form. Each man has a different face. If you lay down abstract principles, you expect to find the same thing done in every class room. If your principles are taken from life, you know that life is various, and that the same thing can be done in the most varied ways. You see, for instance, that Negroes must be regarded as human beings, and in them the human form appears quite differently. In the same way when the art of education is held as a living art, all pedantry and also every kind of formalism must be avoided. And education will be true when it is really made into an art, and when the teacher is made into an artist. It is thus possible for us in the Waldorf School to teach writing by means of art. Then reading can be learned afterwards almost as a matter of course, without effort. It comes rather later than is customary, but it comes almost of itself.

While we are concerned on the one hand in bringing the pictorial element to the child—(and during the next few days I shall be showing you something of the paintings of the Waldorf School children)—while we are engaged with the pictorial element, we must also see to it that the musical element is appreciated as early as possible. For the musical element will give a good foundation for a strong energetic will, especially when attention is paid—at this stage—not so much to musical content as to the rhythm and beat of the music, the experience of rhythm and beat; and especially when it is treated in the right manner at the beginning of the elementary school period. I have already said in the introduction to the eurhythmy demonstration that we also introduce eurhythmy into children's education. I shall be speaking further of eurhythmy, and in particular of eurhythmy in education, in a later lecture. For the moment I wished to show more by one or two examples how early instruction serves the purpose of education in so far as it is called out of the nature of the human being.

But we must bear in mind that in the first part of the stage between the change of teeth and puberty a child can by no means distinguish between what is inwardly human and what is external nature. For him up to his eighth or ninth year these two things are still merged into one. Inwardly the child feels a certain impression, outwardly he may see a certain phenomenon, for instance a sunrise. The forces he feels in himself when he suffers unhappiness or pain; he supposes to be in sun or moon, in tree or plant. We should not reason the child out of this. We must transpose ourselves into the child's stage of life and conduct everything within education as if no boundary existed as yet between inner man and outer nature. This we can only do when we form the instruction as imaginatively as possible, when we let the plants act in a human manner—converse with other plants, and so on,—when we introduce humanity everywhere. People have a horror nowadays of Anthropomorphism, as it is called. But the child who has not experienced anthropomorphism in its relation to the world will be lacking in humanity in later years. And the teacher must be willing to enter into his environment with his full spirit and soul so that the child can go along with him on the strength of this living experience.

Now all this implies that a great deal shall have happened to the teacher before he enters the classroom. The carrying through of the educational principles of which we have been speaking makes great demands on the preparation the teachers have to do. One must do as much as one possibly can before-hand when one is a teacher, in order to make the best use of the time in the class room. This is a thing which the teacher learns to do only gradually, and in course of time. And only through this slow and gradual learning can one come really to have a true regard for the child's individuality.

May I mention a personal experience in this connection, Years before my connection with the Waldorf School I had to concern myself with many different forms of education. Thus it happened that when I was still young myself I had corded to me the education of a boy of eleven years old who was exceedingly backward in his development. Up to that time he had lied nothing at all. In proof of his attainment I was shown an exercise book containing the results of the latest examination he had been pushed into. All that was to be seen in it was an enormous hole that he had scrubbed with the india-rubber; nothing else. Added to this the boy's domestic habits were of a pathological nature. The whole family was unhappy on his account, for they could not bring themselves to abandon him to a manual occupation—a social prejudice, if you like, but these prejudices have to be reckoned with. So the whole family was unhappy. The family doctor was quite explicit that nothing could be made of the boy. I was now given four children of this family to educate. The others were normal, and I was to educate this one along with them. I said: I will try—in a case like this one can make no promises that this or the other result will be achieved,—but I would do everything that lay within my power, only I must be left complete freedom in the matter of the education. So now I undertook this education. The mother was the only member of the family who understood my stipulation for freedom, so that the education had to be fought for him in the teeth of the others. But finally the instruction of the boy was confided to me. It was necessary that the time spent in immediate instruction of the boy should be as brief as possible. Thus if I had, say, to be engaged in teaching the boy for about half-an-hour, I had to do three hours' work in preparation so as to make the most economical use of the time. Moreover, I had to make careful note of the time of the music lesson, for example. For if the boy were overtaxed he turned pale and his health deteriorated. But because one understood the boy's whole pathological condition, because one knew what was to be set down to hydrocephalus, it was possible to make such progress with the boy—and not psychical progress only,—that a year and a half after he had shown up merely a hole rubbed in his exercise book, he was able to enter the Gymnasium. (Name given to the Scientific and Technical School as distinct from the Classical.) And I was further able to help him throughout the classes of the Gymnasium and follow up the work with him until near the end of his time there, Under the influence of this education, and also because everything was spiritually directed, the boy's head became smaller. I know a doctor might say perhaps his head would have become smaller in any case. Certainly, but the right nurture of spirit and soul had to go with this process of getting smaller. The person referred to subsequently became an excellent doctor. He died during the war in the exercise of his profession, but only when he was nearly forty years old.

It was particularly important here to achieve the greatest economy in the time of instruction by means of suitable preparation beforehand. Now this must become a general principle. And in the art of education of which I am here speaking this is striven for. Now, when it is a question of describing what we have to tell the children in such a way as to arouse life and liveliness in their whole being, we mast master the subject thoroughly beforehand and be so at home with the matter that we can turn all our attention and individual power to the form in which we shall present it to the child. And then we shall discover as a matter of course that all the stuff of teaching must become pictorial if a child is to grasp it not only with his intellect but with his whole being. Hence we mostly begin with tales such as fairy tales, but also with other invented stories which relate to Nature. We do not at first teach either language or any other “subject,” but we simply unfold the world itself in vivid and pictorial form before the child. And such instruction is the best preparation for the writing and reading which is to be derived imaginatively.

Thus between his ninth and tenth year the child comes to be able to express himself in writing, and also to read as far as is healthy for him at this age, and now we have reached that important point in a child's life, between his ninth and tenth year, to which I have already referred. Now you must realise that this important point in the child's life has also an outward manifestation. At this time quite a remarkable change takes place, a remarkable differentiation, between girls and boys. Of the particular significance of this in a co-educational school such as the Waldorf School, I shall be speaking later. In the meantime we must be aware that such a differentiation between boys and girls does take place. Thus, round about the tenth year girls begin to grow at a quicker rate than the boys. Growth in boys is held back. Girls overtake the boys in growth. When the boys and girls reach puberty the boys once more catch up with the girls in their growth. Thus just at that stage the boys grow more rapidly.

Between the tenth and fifteenth year the outward differentiation between girls and boys is in itself a sign that a significant period of life has been reached. What appears inwardly is the clear distinction between oneself and the world. Before this time there was no such thing as a plant, only a green thing with red flowers in which there is a little spirit just as there is a little spirit in ourselves. As for a “plant,” such a thing only makes sense for a child about its tenth year. And here we must be able to follow his feeling. Thus, only when a child reaches this age is it right to teach him of an external world of our surroundings.

One can make a beginning for instance with botany—that great stand-by of schools. But it is just in the case of botany that I can demonstrate how a formal education—in the best sense of the word—should be conducted. If we start by showing a child a single plant we do a thoroughly unnatural thing, for that is not a whole. A plant especially when it is rooted up, is not a whole thing. In our realistic and materialistic age people have little sense for what is material and natural otherwise they would feel what I have just said. Is a plant a whole thing? No, when we have pulled it up and fetched it here it very soon withers. It is not natural to it to be pulled up. Its nature is to be in the earth, to belong with the soil. A stone is a totality by itself. It can lie about anywhere and it makes no difference. But I cannot carry a plant about all over the place; it will not remain the same. Its nature is only complete in conjunction with the soil, with the forces that spring from the earth, and with all the forces of the sun which fall upon this particular portion of the earth. Together with these the plant makes a totality. To look upon a plant in isolation is as absurd as if we were to pull out a hair of our head and regard the hair as a thing in itself. The hair only arises in connection with an organism and cannot be understood apart from the organism. Therefore: In the teaching of botany we must take our start, not from the plant, or the plant family but from the landscape, the geographical region: from an understanding of what the earth is in a particular place. And the nature of plants must be treated in relation to the whole earth.

When we speak of the earth we speak as physicists, or at most as geologists. We assume that the earth is a totality of physical forces, mineral forces, self-enclosed, and that it could exist equally well if there were no plants at all upon it, no animals at all, no men at all. But this is an abstraction. The earth as viewed by the physicist, by the geologist, is an abstraction. There is in reality no such thing. In reality there is only the earth which is covered with plants. We must be aware when we are describing from a geological aspect that, purely for the convenience of our intelligence, we are describing a non-existent abstraction. But we must not start by giving a child an idea of this non-existent abstraction, we must give the child a realisation of the earth as a living organism, beginning naturally with the district which the child knows. And then, just as we should show him an animal with hair growing upon it, and not produce a hair for it to see before it knew anything of the animal—so must we first give him a vivid realisation of the earth as a living organism and after that show him how plants live and grow upon the earth.

Thus the study of plants arises naturally from introducing the earth to the child as a living thing, as an organism—beginning with a particular region. To consider one part of the earth at a time, however, is an abstraction, for no region of the earth can exist apart from the other regions; and we should be conscious that we take our start from something incomplete. Nevertheless, if, once more we teach pictorially and appeal to the wholeness of the imagination the child will be alive to what we tell him about the plants. And in this way we gradually introduce him to the external world. The child acquires a sense of the concept “objectivity.” He begins to live into reality. And this we achieve by introducing the child in this natural manner to the plant kingdom.

The introduction to the animal kingdom is entirely different—it comes somewhat later. Once more, to describe the single animals is quite inorganic. For actually one could almost say: It is sheer chance that a lion is a lion and a camel a camel. A lion presented to a child's contemplation will seem an arbitrary object however well it may be described, or even if it is seen in a menagerie. So will a camel. Observation alone makes no sense in the domain of life.

How are we to regard the animals? Now, anyone who can contemplate the animals with imaginative vision, instead of with the abstract intellect, will find each animal to be a portion of the human being. In one animal the development of the legs will predominate—whereas in man they are at the service of the whole organism. In another animal the sense organs, or one particular sense organ, is developed in an extreme manner. One animal will be specially adapted for snouting and routing (snuffling), another creature is specially gifted for seeing, when aloft in the air. And when we take the whole animal kingdom together we find that what outwardly constitutes the abstract divisions of the animal kingdom is comprised in its totality in man. All the animals taken together, synthetically, give one the human being. Each capacity or group of faculties in the human being is expressed in a one-sided form in some animal species. When we study the lion—there is no need to explain this to the child, we can show it to him in simple pictures—when we study the lion we find in the lion a particular over-development of what in the human being are the chest organs, the heart organ. The cow shows a one-sided development of what in man is the digestive system. And when I examine the white corpuscles in the human blood I see the indication of the earliest, most primitive creatures. The whole animal kingdom together makes up man, synthetically, not symptomatically, but synthetically woven and interwoven.

All this I can expound to the child in quite a simple, primitive way. Indeed I can make the thing very vivid when speaking, for instance, of the lion's nature and showing how it needs to be calmed and subdued by the individuality of man. Or one can take the moral and psychic characteristics of the camel and show how what the camel presents in a lower form is to be found in human nature. So that man is a synthesis of lion, eagle, ape, of camel, cow and all the rest. We view the whole animal kingdom as human nature separated out and spread abroad.

This, then, is the other side which the child gets when he is in his eleventh or twelfth year. After he has learned to separate himself from the plant world, to experience its objectivity and its connection with an objective earth, he then learns the close connection between the animals and man, the subjective side. Thus the universe is once more brought into connection with man, by way of the feelings. And this is educating the child by contact with life in the world.

Then we shall find that the requirements we always make are met spontaneously. In theory we can keep on saying: You must not overload the memory. It is not a good thing to burden the child's memory. Anyone can see that in the abstract. It is less easy for people to see clearly what effect the overburdening of memory has on a man's life. It means this, that later in life we shall find him suffering from rheumatism and gout—it is a pity that medical observation does not cover the whole span of a man's life, but indeed we shall find many people afflicted with rheumatism and gout, to which they had no predisposition; or else what was a very slight predisposition has been in-creased because the memory was overtaxed, because one had learned too much from memory. But, on the other hand, the memory must not be neglected. For if the memory is not exercised enough inflammatory conditions of the physical organs will be prone to arise, more particularly between the 16th and 24th years.

And how are we to hold the balance between burdening the memory too much or too little? When we teach pictorially and imaginatively, as I have described, the child takes as much of the instruction as it can bear. A relationship arises like that between eating and being satisfied. This means that we shall have some children further advanced than others, and this we must deal with, without relegating less advanced children to a class below. One may have a comparatively large class and yet a child will not eat more than it can bear—spiritually speaking—because its organism spontaneously rejects what it cannot bear. Thus we take account of life here, just as we draw our teaching from life.

A child is able to take in the elements of Arithmetic at quite an early age. But in arithmetic we observe how very easily an intellectual element can be given the child too soon. Mathematics as such is alien to no man at any age. It arises in human nature; the operations of mathematics are not foreign to human faculty in the way letters are foreign in a succeeding civilisation. But it is exceedingly important that the child should be introduced to arithmetic and mathematics in the right way. And what this is can really only be decided by one who is enabled to overlook the whole of human life from a certain spiritual standpoint.

There are two things which in logic seem very far removed from one another: arithmetic and moral principles. It is not usual to hitch arithmetic on to moral principles because there seems no obvious logical connection between them. But it is apparent to one who looks at the matter, not logically, but livingly, that the child who has a right introduction to arithmetic will have quite a different feeling of moral responsibility from the child who has not. And—this may seem extremely paradoxical to you, but since I am speaking of realities and not of the illusions current in our age, I will not be afraid of seeming paradoxical, for in this age truth often seems paradoxical.—If, then, men had known how to permeate the soul with mathematics in the right way during these past years we should not now have bolshevism in Eastern Europe. This it is that one perceives: what forces connect the faculty used in arithmetic with the springs of morality in man.

Now, you will understand this better probably if I give you a very small illustration of the principles of arithmetic teaching. It is common nowadays to start arithmetic by the adding of one thing to another. But just consider how foreign a thing it is to the human mind to add one pea to another and at each addition to name a new name. The transition from one to two, and then to three,—this counting is quite an arbitrary activity for the human being. But it is possible to count in another way. And this we find when we go back a little in human history. For originally people did not count by putting one pea to another and hence deriving a new thing which, for the soul at all events, had little connection with what went before. No, men counted more or less in the following way: They would say: What we get in life is always a whole, something to be grasped as a whole; and the most diverse things can constitute a unity. If I have a number of people in front of me, that can be a unity at first sight. Or if I have a single man in front of me, he then is a unity. A unity, in reality, is a purely relative thing. And I keep this in mind if I count in the following way: One | = | two | = | = | three | = | = | = | four | = | = | =| = | and so on, that is, when I have an organic whole (a whole consisting of members): because then I am starting with unity, and in the unity, viewed as a multiplicity, I seek the parts. This indeed was the original view of number. Unity was always a totality, and in the totality one sought for the parts. One did not think of numbers as arising by the addition of one and one and one, one conceived of the numbers as belonging to the whole, and proceeding organically from the whole.

When we apply this to the teaching of arithmetic we get the following: Instead of placing one bean after another beside the child, we throw him a whole heap of beans. The bean heap constitutes the whole. And from this we make our start. And now we can explain to the child: I have a heap of beans—or if you like, so that it may the better appeal to the child's imagination: a heap of apples,—and three children of different ages who need different amounts to eat, and we want to do something which applies to actual life. What shall we do? Now we can for instance, divide the heap of apples in such a way as to give a certain heap on the one hand and portions, together equal to the first heap, on the other. The heap represents the sum. Here we have the heap of apples, and we say: Here are three parts, and we get the child to see that the sum is the same as the three parts. The sum = the three parts. That is to say, in addition we do not go from the parts to arrive at the sum, but we start with the sum and proceed to the parts. Thus to get a living understanding of addition we start with the whole and proceed to the addenda, to the parts. For addition is concerned essentially with the sum and its parts, the members which are contained, in one way or another, within the sum.

In this way we get the child to enter into life with the ability to grasp a whole, not always to proceed from the less to the greater. And this has an extraordinarily strong influence upon the child's whole soul and mind. When a child has acquired the habit of adding things together we get a disposition which tends to be desirous and craving. In proceeding from the whole to the parts, and in treating multiplication similarly, the child has less tendency to acquisitiveness, rather it tends to develop what, in the Platonic sense, the noblest sense of the word, can be called considerateness, moderation. And one's moral likes and dislikes are intimately bound up with the manner in which one has learned to deal with number. At first sight there seems to be no logical connection between the treatment of numbers and moral ideas, so little indeed that one who will only regard things from the intellectual point of view, may well laugh at the idea of any connection. It may seem to him absurd. We can also well understand that people may laugh at the idea of proceeding in addition from the sum instead of from the parts. But when one sees the true connections in life one knows that things which are logic-ally most remote are often in reality exceedingly near.

Thus what comes to pass in the child's soul by working with numbers will very greatly affect the way he will meet us when we want to give him moral examples, deeds and actions for his liking or disliking, sympathy with the good, antipathy with the evil. We shall have before us a child susceptible to goodness when we have dealt with him in the teaching of numbers in the way described.

In the previous lectures I have shown that when the child reaches the usual school age (after the change of teeth) all teaching should be given in an artistic, pictorial form. To-day, I propose to carry further the ideas already put before you and to show how this method appeals directly to the child's sentient life, the foundation from which all teaching must now proceed.

Let us take a few characteristic examples to show how writing can be derived from the artistic element of painting and drawing. I have already said that if a system of education is to harmonize with the natural development of the human organism, the child must be taught to write before he learns to read. The reason for this is that in writing the whole being is more active than is the case in reading. You will say: Yes, but writing entails the movement of only one particular member. That is quite true, but fundamentally speaking, the forces of the whole being must lend themselves to this movement. In reading only the head and the intellect are engaged, and in a truly organic system of education we must draw that which is to develop from the whole being of the child.

We will assume that we have been able to give the child some idea of flowing water; he has learnt to form a mental picture of waves and flowing water. We now call the child's attention to the initial sound, the initial letter of the word ‘wave.’

We indicate that the surface of water rising into waves follows this line:

Then we lead the child from the drawing of this line over to the sign W derived from it. The child is thus introduced to the form of the letter ‘W’ in writing. The W has arisen from the picture of a wave. In the first place the child is given a mental picture which can lead over to the letter which he then learns to write. Or we may let the child draw the form of the mouth:—

and then we introduce to him the first letter of the word “Mouth.” In one of our evening talks [Between the lectures there were meetings for discussion and questions at which Rudolf Steiner was often present.] I gave you another example. The child draws the form of a fish; when the fundamental form is firmly in his mind, we pass on to the initial letter of the word “fish.”

A great many letters can be treated in this way; others will have to be derived somewhat differently. Suppose, for instance, we give the child an imaginative idea of the sound of the wind. Obviously the possibilities are many, but this particular way is the best for very young children. We picture to the child the raging of the wind and then we allow the child to imitate and to arrive at this form:—

By drawing the child's attention to definite contours, to movements, or even to actual activities, all of which can be expressed in drawing or painting, we can develop nearly all the consonants. In the case of the vowels we must turn rather to gesture, for the vowels are an expression of man's inner being. ‘A’ (ah), for example, inevitably contains an element of wonder, of astonishment. Eurhythmy will prove to be of great assistance here for there we have gestures that truly correspond to feeling. The ‘I’ the ‘A’ and all the other vowels can be drawn from the corresponding gesture in Eurhythmy, for the vowels must be derived from movements that are an expression of the inner life of the human soul.

In this way we can approach the abstract nature of writing by way of the more concrete elements contained in painting and drawing. We succeed in making the child start from the feeling called up by a picture; he then becomes able to relate to the actual letters the quality of soul contained in the feeling. The principle underlying writing thus arises from the sentient life of the soul.

When we come to reading, our efforts must simply be in the direction of making the child aware, and this time in his head, of what has already been elaborated by the bodily forces as a whole. Reading is then grasped mentally, because it is recognized in the child's mind as an activity in which he has already been employed. This is of the very greatest significance. The whole process of development is hindered if the child is led straight away to what is abstract, if he is taught, that is, from the beginning to carry out any special activity by means of a purely mental concept. On the other hand, a healthy growth will always ensue if the activity is first of all undertaken, and then the mental idea afterwards unfolded as a result of the activity. Reading is essentially a mental act. Therefore if reading is taught before, and not after writing the child is prematurely involved in a process of development exclusively concerned with the head instead of with the forces of his whole being.

By such methods as these all instruction can be guided into a sphere that embraces the whole man, into the realm of art. This must indeed be the aim of all our teaching up to the age of about nine-and-a-half; picture, rhythm, measure, these qualities must pervade all our teaching. Everything else is premature.

It is for this reason utterly impossible before this age to convey anything to the child in which definite distinction is made between himself and the outer world. The child only begins to realize himself as a being apart from the outer world between the ninth and tenth years. Hence when he first comes to school, we must make all outer things appear living. We should speak of the plants as holding converse with us and with each other in such a way that the child's outlook on Nature and man is filled with imagination. The plants, the trees, the clouds all speak to him, and at this age he must feel no separation between himself and this living outer world. We must give him the feeling that just as he himself can speak, so everything that surrounds him also speaks.

The more we enable the child thus to flow out into his whole environment, the more vividly we describe plant, animal and stone, so that weaving, articulate spirituality seems to be wafted towards him, the more adequately do we respond to the demands of his innermost being in these early years. They are years when the sentient life of the soul must flow into the processes of breathing and of the circulation of the blood and into the whole vascular system, indeed into the whole human organism. If we educate in this sense, the child's life of feeling will unfold itself organically and naturally in a form suited to the requirements of our times.

It is of incalculable benefit to the child if we develop this element of feeling in writing and then allow a faint echo of the intellect to enter as he re-discovers in reading what he has already experienced in writing. This is the very best way of leading the child on towards his ninth year.

Between the ages of seven and nine-and-a-half, it is therefore essential that all the teaching shall make a direct appeal to the element of feeling. The child must learn to feel the forms of the various letters. This is very important. We harden the child's nature unduly, we over-strengthen the forces of bones and cartilage and sinew in relation to the rest of the organism, if we teach him to write mechanically, making him trace arbitrary curves and lines for the letters, making use only of his bodily mechanism without calling upon the eye as well.

If we also call upon the eye—and the eye is of course connected with the movements of the hand—by developing the letters in an artistic way, so that the letter does not spring from merely mechanical movements of the hand, it will then have an individual character in which the eye itself will take pleasure. Qualities of the soul are thus brought into play and the life of feeling develops at an age when it can best flow into the physical organism with health-giving power.

I wonder what you would say if you were to see someone with a plate of fish in front of him, carefully cutting away the flesh and consuming the bones! You would certainly be afraid the bones might choke him and that in any case he would not be able to digest them. On another level, the level of the soul, exactly the same thing happens when we give the child dry, abstract ideas instead of living pictures, instead of something that engages the activities of his whole being. These dry, abstract concepts must only be there as a kind of support for the pictures that are to arise in the soul.

When we make use of this imaginative, pictorial method in education in the way I have described, we so orientate the child's nature that his concepts will always be living and vital. We shall find that when he has passed the age of nine or nine-and-a-half, we can lead him on to a really vital understanding of an outer world in which he must of necessity learn to distinguish himself from his environment.

When we have given sufficient time to speaking of the plant world in living pictures, we can then introduce something he can learn in the best possible way between the ninth and tenth years, gradually carrying it further during the eleventh and twelfth.

The child is now ready to form ideas about the plant world. But naturally, in any system of education aiming at the living development of the human being, the way in which the plants are described must be very different from such methods as are used for no other reason than that they were usual in our own school days. To give the child a plant or flower and then make him learn its name, the number of its stamens, the petals and so forth, has absolutely no meaning for human life, or at most only a conventional one.

Whatever is taught the child in this way remains quite foreign to him. He is merely aware of being forced to learn it, and those who teach botany to a child of eleven or twelve in this way have no true knowledge of the real connections of Nature. To study some particular plant by itself, to have it in the specimen box at home for study is just as though we were to pull out a single hair and observe it as it lay there before us. The hair by itself is nothing; it cannot grow of itself and has no meaning apart from the human head. Its meaning lies simply and solely in the fact that it grows on the head of a man, or on the skin of an animal. Only in its connections has it any living import. Similarly, the plant only has meaning in its relation to the earth, to the forces of the sun and, as I shall presently show, to other forces also. In teaching children about a plant therefore, we must always begin by showing how it is related to the earth and to the sun.

I can only make a rough sketch here of something that can be illustrated in pictures in a number of lessons. Here (drawing on the blackboard) is the earth; the roots of the plant are intimately bound up with the earth and belong to it. The chief thought to awaken in the child is that the earth and the root belong to one another and that the blossom is drawn forth from the plant by the rays of the sun. The child is thus led out into the Cosmos in a living way.

If the teacher has sufficient inner vitality it is easy to give the child at this particular age a living conception of the plant in its cosmic existence. To begin with, we can awaken a feeling of how the earth-substances permeate the root; the root then tears itself away from the earth and sends a shoot upwards; this shoot is born of the earth and unfolds into leaf and flower by the light and warmth of the sun. The sun draws out the blossoms and the earth retains the root.

Then we call the child's attention to the fact that a moist earth, earth inwardly watery in nature, works quite differently upon the root from what a dry earth does; that the roots become shrivelled up in a dry soil and are filled with living sap in a moist, watery earth.

Again, we explain how the rays of the sun, falling perpendicularly to the earth, call forth flowers of plants like yellow dandelions, buttercups and roses. When the rays of the sun fall obliquely, we have plants like the mauve autumn crocus, and so on. Everywhere we can point to living connections between root and earth, between blossom and sun.

Having given the child a mental picture of the plant in its cosmic setting, we pass on to describe how the whole of its growth is finally concentrated in the seed vessels from which the new plant is to grow.

Then—and here I must to some extent anticipate the future—in a form suited to the age of the child we must begin to disclose a truth of which it is difficult as yet to speak openly, because modern science regards it as pure superstition or so much fantastic mysticism. Nevertheless it is indeed a fact that just as the sun draws the coloured blossom out of the plant, so is it the forces of the moon which develop the seed-vessels. Seed is brought forth by the forces of the moon. In this way we place the plant in a living setting of the forces of the sun, moon and earth. True, one cannot enter deeply into this working of the moon forces, for if the children were to say at home that they had been taught about the connection between seeds and the moon, their parents might easily be prevailed upon by scientific friends to remove them from such a school—even if the parents themselves were willing to accept such things! We shall have to be somewhat reticent on this subject and on many others too, in these materialistic days.

By this radical example I wished, however, to show you how necessary it is to develop living ideas, ideas that are drawn from actual reality and not from something that has no existence in itself. For in itself, without the sun and the earth, the plant has no existence.

We must now show the child something further. Here (drawing on the blackboard) is the earth; the earth sprouts forth, as it were, produces a hillock (swelling); this hillock is penetrated by the forces of air and sun. It remains earth substance no longer; it changes into something that lies between the sappy leaf and the root in the dry soil—into the trunk of a tree. On this plant that has grown out of the earth, other plants grow—the branches. The child thus realizes that the trunk of the tree is really earth-substance carried upwards. This also gives an idea of the inner kinship between the earth and all that finally becomes earthy. In order to bring this fully home to the child, we show him how the wood decays, becoming more and more earthy till it finally falls into dust. In this condition the wood becomes earth once more. Then we can explain how sand and stone have their origin in what was once really destined for the plants, how the earth is like one huge plant, a giant tree out of which the various plants grow like branches.

Here we develop an idea intelligible to the child; the whole earth as a living being of which the plants are an integral part.

It is all important that the child should not get into his head the false ideas suggested by modern geology—that the earth consists merely of mineral substances and mineral forces. For the plants belong to the earth as much as do the minerals. And now another point of great significance. To begin with, we avoid speaking of the mineral as such. The child is curious about many things but we shall find that he is no longer anxious to know what the stones are if we have conveyed to him a living idea of the plants as an integral part of the earth, drawn forth from the earth by the sun.

The child has no real interest in the mineral as such. And it is very much to the good if up to the eleventh or twelfth years he is not introduced to the dead mineral substances but can think of the earth as a living being, as a tree that has already crumbled to dust, from which the plants grow like branches.

From this point of view it is easy to pass on to the different plants. For instance, I say to the child: The root of such and such a plant is trying to find soil; its blossoms, remember, are drawn forth by the sun. Suppose that some roots cannot find any soil but only decaying earth, then the result will be that the sun cannot draw out the blossoms. Then we have a plant with no real root in the soil and no flower—a fungus, or mushroom-like growth. We now explain how a plant like a fungus, having found no proper soil in the earth, is able to take root in something partly earth, partly plant, that is, in the trunk of a tree. Thus it becomes a tree-lichen, that greyish-green lichen which one finds on the bark of a tree, a parasite.

From a study of the living, weaving forces of the earth itself, we can lead on to a characterization of all the different plants. And when the child has been given living ideas of the growth of the plants, we can pass on from this study of the living plant to a conception of the whole surface of the earth.

In some regions yellow flowers abound; in others the plants are stunted in their growth, and in each case the face of the earth is different. Thus we reach geography, which can play a great part in the child's development if we lead up to it from the plants.

We should try to give an idea of the face of the earth by connecting the forces at work on its surface with the varied plant-life we find in the different regions. Then we unfold a living instead of a dead intellectual faculty in the child. The very best age for this is the time between the ninth or tenth and the eleventh or twelfth years. If we can give the child this conception of the weaving activity of the earth whose inner life brings forth the different forms of the plants, we give him living and not dead ideas, ideas which have the same characteristics as a limb of the human body. A limb has to develop in earliest youth. If we enclosed a hand for instance in an iron glove, it could not grow. Yet it is constantly being said that the ideas we give to children should be as definite as possible, they should be definitions and the children ought always to be learning them. But nothing is more hurtful to the child than definitions and rigid ideas, for these have no quality of growth. Now the human being must grow as his organism grows. The child must be given mobile concepts, concepts whose form is constantly changing as he becomes more mature. If we have a certain idea when we are forty years of age, it should not be a mere repetition of something we learnt at ten years of age. It ought to have changed its form, just as our limbs and the whole of our organism have changed.

Living ideas cannot be roused if we only give the child what is nowadays called “science,” the dead knowledge which we so often find teaches us nothing! Rather must we give the child an idea of what is living in Nature. Then he will develop in a body which grows as Nature herself grows. We shall not then be guilty, as educational systems so often are, of implanting in a body engaged in a process of natural development, elements of soul-life that are dead and incapable of growth. We shall foster a living growing soul in harmony with a living, growing physical organism and this alone can lead to a true development.

This true development can best be induced by studying the life of plants in intimate connection with the configuration of the earth. The child should feel the life of the earth and the life of the plants as a unity: knowledge of the earth should be at the same time a knowledge of the world of the plants.

The child should first of all be shown how the lifeless mineral is a residue of life, for the tree decays and falls into dust. At the particular age of which I am now speaking, nothing in the way of mineralogy should be taught the child. He must first be given ideas and concepts of what is living. That is an essential thing.

Just as the world of the plants should be related to the earth and the child should learn to think of it as the offspring of a living earth-organism, so should the animal-world as a whole be related to man. The child is thus enabled in a living way to find his own place in Nature and in the world. He begins to understand that the plant-tapestry belongs to the living earth. On the other hand, however, we teach him to realize that the various animals spread over the world represent, in a certain sense, stages of a path to the human state. That the plants have kinship to the earth, the animals to man—this should be the basis from which we start. I can only justify it here as a principle; the actual details of what is taught to a child of ten, eleven or twelve years concerning the animal world must be worked out with true artistic feeling.

In a very simple, very elementary way, we begin by calling the child's attention to the nature of man. This is quite possible if the preliminary artistic foundations have already been laid. The child will learn to understand, in however simple a sense, that man has a threefold organization. First, there is the head. A hard shell encloses the system of nerves and the softer parts that lie within it. The head may thus be compared with the round earth within the Cosmos. We shall do our utmost to give the child a concrete, artistic understanding of the head-system and then lead on to the second member, the rhythmic system which includes the organs of breathing and circulation of the blood. Having spoken of the artistic modelling of the cup-like formation of the skull which encloses the soft parts of the brain, we pass on to consider the series of bones in the spinal column and the branching ribs. We shall study the characteristics of the chest, with its breathing and circulatory systems, that is, the human rhythmic system in its essential nature. Then we reach the third member, the system of metabolism and limbs. As organs of movement, the limbs really maintain and support the metabolism of the body, for the processes of combustion are regulated by their activities. The limbs are connected with metabolism. Limbs and metabolism must be taken together; they constitute the third member of man's being.

To begin with, then, we make this threefold division of man. If our teaching is pervaded with the necessary artistic feeling and is given in the form of pictures, it is quite possible to convey to the child this conception of man as a threefold being.

We now draw the child's attention to the different animal species spread over the earth. We begin with the lowest forms of animal life, with creatures whose inner parts are soft and are surrounded by shell-like formations. Certain members of the lower animal species consist, strictly speaking, merely of a sheath surrounding the protoplasm. We show the child how these lower creatures image in a primitive way the form of the human head.

Our head is the lower animal raised to the very highest degree of development. The head, and more particularly the nervous system, must not be correlated with the mammals or the apes, but with the lowest forms of animal life. We must go far, far back in the earth's history, to the most ancient forms of animal life, and there we find creatures which are wholly a kind of elementary head. Thus we try to make the lower animal world intelligible to the child as a primitive head-organization.

We then take the animals somewhat higher in the scale, the fishes and their allied species. Here the spinal column is especially developed and we explain that these “half-way” animals are beings in whom the human rhythmic system has developed, the other members being stunted. In the lowest animals, then, we find at an elementary stage, the organization corresponding to the human head. In the animal species grouped round the fishes, we find a one-sided development of the human chest-organization, and the system comprising the limbs and metabolism brings us finally to the higher animals.

The organs of movement are developed in great diversity of form in the higher animals. The mechanism of a horse's foot, a lion's pad, or the feet of the wading animals, all these give us a golden opportunity for artistic description. Or again, we can compare the limbs of man with the one-sided development we find in the limbs of the ape. In short, we begin to understand the higher animals by studying the plastic structure of the organs of movement, or the digestive organs.

Beasts of prey differ from the ruminants in that the latter have a very long intestinal track, whereas in the former, while the intestinal coil is short, all that connects the heart and blood circulation with the digestive processes is strongly and powerfully developed. A study of the organization of the higher animals shows at once how one-sided is its development in comparison with the system of limbs and metabolism in man. We can give a concrete picture of how the front part of the spine in the animal is really nothing but head. The whole digestive system is continued right on into the head. The animal's head belongs essentially to the digestive organs, to the stomach and intestines. In man, on the other hand, that which has remained, as it were, in the virginal state—the soft parts of the brain with their enclosing, protecting shell of bone—is placed above the limb and metabolic system. The head organization in man is thus raised a stage higher than in the animal, in which, as we have seen, it is merely a continuation of the metabolism. Yet man, in so far as his head organization is concerned, preserves the simplest, most fundamental principles of form, namely, soft substance within surrounded by a cup-like bony formation.

One can show too how in certain animals the structure of the jaw can best be understood if the upper and under jaw are regarded as the foremost limbs. This best explains the animal head. In this way, the human being emerges as a synthesis of three systems—head system, chest system, system of limbs and metabolism. In the animal world there is a one-sided development of the one or other system. Thus we have first, the lower animals, the crustaceans, for example, but also others; then the mammals, birds and so on, where the chest system is predominantly developed; and finally the species of fishes, reptiles and so on.

We see, as it were, the animal kingdom as a human being spread out in diversity over the earth. We relate the world of the plants to the earth, and the diverse animal species to man who is, in fact, the synthesis of the entire animal world. Taking our start from man's physical organization, we give the child, in a simple way, an idea of the threefold nature of his being. Passing to the animals, we explain how in the different species there is always a one-sided development of certain organs, whereas in man these organs are united into one harmonious whole. This one-sided specialized development is manifested by the chest organs in certain animals; in others by the lower intestines, and in others again, by the upper organs of digestion. In many forms of animal life, birds for instance, we find metamorphoses of certain organs; the organs of digestion become the crop, and so forth.

We can characterize each animal species as representing a one-sided development of an organic system in man, so that the whole animal world appears as the being of man spread over the earth in diversity of forms, man himself being the synthesis of the animal kingdom.

When it has been made clear to the child that the animal world is the one-sided expression of the bodily organs of man, that one system of organs comes to expression as one species, another as a different species, then we can pass on to study man himself. This should be when the child is approaching his twelfth year, for he can then understand that because man bears the spirit within him, he is an artistic synthesis of the separate parts of his being, which are mirrored in the various species of animals. Only because man bears the spirit within him can he thus unite the lower forms of animal life in a harmonious unity. The human head and chest organizations arise as complex metamorphosis of animal forms, all of which have evolved in such a way that they fit in with the other parts of his body.

Thus he bears within himself that which is manifested in the fishes and that which is manifested in the higher animals but harmonized into a limb. The separate fragments of man's being scattered over the world in the realm of the animals are in man gathered together by the spirit into unity; man is their synthesis. Thus we relate man with the animal world, but he is at the same time raised above the animals because he is the bearer of the spirit.

Botany, taught in the way I have indicated, brings life into the child's world of ideas so that he stands rightly in the world through wisdom. A living intelligence will then enable him to become efficient in life and to find his place in the world.

His will is strengthened if he has acquired an equally living conception of his own relation to the animal world.

You will naturally realize that what I have had to discuss here in some twenty minutes or so must be developed stage by stage for a long period of time; the child must gradually unite these ideas with his inmost nature. Then they will play no small part in the position a man may take in the world by virtue of his strength of will. The will grows inwardly strong if a man realizes that by the grace of the living spirit he himself is the perfecting and the synthesis of the animal kingdom.

And so the aim of educational work must be net merely to teach facts about the plants and animals, but also to develop character, to develop the whole nature of the child. A true understanding of the life of plants brings wisdom, and a living conception of his relation to the animals strengthens the will of the child. If we have succeeded in this, the child has entered between the ninth and tenth years, into a relationship with the other living creatures of the earth such that he will be able to find his own way and place in the world through wisdom on the one hand and on the other through a purposeful strength of will.

The one great object of education is to enable the human being to find his way through life by his intelligence and will. These two will develop from the life of feeling that has unfolded in the child between the ages of seven and nine-and-a-half. Thinking, feeling and willing are then brought into a right relationship instead of developing in a chaotic way. Everything is rooted in feeling. We must therefore begin with the child's sentient life and from feeling engender the faculty of thought through a comprehension of the kingdom of the plants. For the life of the plants will never admit of dead conceptions. The will is developed if we lead the child to a knowledge of his connection with the animals and of the human spirit that lifts man above them.

Thus we strive to impart sound wisdom and strength of will; to the human being. This indeed is our task in education, for this alone will make him fully man and the evolution of the full manhood is the goal of all education.

For quite a number of years now Education has been one of those branches of civilised, cultural activity which we foster within the Anthroposophical Movement, and, as will appear from these lectures, we may perhaps just in this sphere look back with a certain satisfaction on what we have been able to do. Our schools have existed only a few years, so I cannot speak of an achievement, but only of the beginning of something which, even outside the Anthroposophical Movement, has already made a certain impression on circles interested in the spiritual life of the cultural world of today. Looking back on our educational activity it gives me real joy, particularly here in Holland, where many years ago I had the opportunity of lecturing on subjects connected with anthroposophical spiritual science, to speak once more on this closely related theme.

Anthroposophical education and teaching is based on that knowledge of man which is only to be gained on the basis of spiritual science; it works out of a knowledge of the whole human being, body, soul and spirit. At first such a statement may be regarded as obvious. It will be said that of course the whole man must be taken into consideration when it is a question of educational practice, of education as an art; that neither should the spiritual be neglected in favour of the physical, nor the physical in favour of the spiritual. But it will very soon be seen how the matter stands when we become aware of the practical results which ensue when any branch of human activity is based on anthroposophical spiritual science. Here in Holland, in the Hague, a small school has been founded on the basis of an anthroposophical knowledge of man, a daughter school, if I may call it so, of our Waldorf School in Stuttgart. And I believe that whoever gets to know such a school, whether from merely hearing about the way it is run, or through a more intimate knowledge, will find in the actual way it deals with teaching and education, something arising from its anthroposophical foundation which differs essentially from the usual run of schools in our present civilisation. The reason for this is that wherever we look today we find a gulf between what people think, or devise theoretically, and what they actually carry out in practice. For in our present civilisation theory and practice have become two widely separated spheres. However paradoxical it may sound, the separation may be observed, perhaps most of all in the most practical of all occupations in life, in the business world, in the economic sphere. Here all sorts of things are learnt theoretically. For instance, people think out details of administration in economic affairs. They form intentions. But these intentions cannot be carried out in actual practice. However carefully they are thought out, they do not meet the actual conditions of life. I should like to express myself still more clearly, so that we may understand one another. For example, a man who wishes to set up a business concern thinks out some sort of business project. He thinks over all that is connected with this business and organises it according to his intentions.

His theories and abstract thoughts are then put into effect, but, when actually carried out, they everywhere come up against reality. Certainly things are done, thought-out ideas are even put into practice, but these thoughts do not fit into real life. In actual fact something is carried over into real life which does not correspond with what is real. Now a business that is conducted in this way can continue for some time and its inaugurator will consider himself to be a tremendously practical fellow. For whoever goes into business and from the outset has learnt absolutely nothing outside customary practice will consider himself a “practical” man.

Today we can hear how really practical people speak about such a theorist. He enters into business life and with a heavy hand introduces his thought-out ideas. If sufficient capital is available, he may even be able to carry on for a time, after a while, however, the concern collapses, or it may be absorbed into some more established business. Usually when this happens very little heed is paid to how much genuine, vital effort has been wasted, how many lives ruined, how many people injured or impaired in their way of life. It has come about solely because something has been thought out—thought out by a so-called “practical” man. In such a case however the person in question is not practical through his insight but by the use of his elbows. He has introduced something into reality without considering the conditions of reality.

Few people notice it, but this kind of thing has become rampant in the cultural life of today. At the present time the only sphere where such things are understood, where it is recognised that such a procedure does not work, is in the application of mechanical natural science to life. When the decision is made to build a bridge it is essential to make use of a knowledge of mechanics to ensure that the bridge will stand up to what is required of it; otherwise the first train that passes over it will be plunged into the water. Such things have already happened, and even at the present time we have seen the results of faulty mechanical construction. Speaking generally, however, this sphere is the only one in practical life in which it can be stated unequivocally that the conditions of reality have or have not been foreseen.

If we take the sphere of medicine we shall see at once that it is not so evident whether or not the conditions of reality have been taken into account. Here too the procedure is the same; something is thought out theoretically and then applied as a means of healing. Whether in this case there has been a cure, whether it was somebody's destiny to die, or whether perhaps he has been “cured to death,” this indeed is difficult to perceive. The bridge collapses when there are faults in its construction; but whether the sick person gets worse, whether he has been cured by the treatment, or has died of it, is not so easy to discover.

In the same way, in the sphere of education it is not always possible to see whether the growing child is being educated in accordance with his needs, or whether fanciful methods are being used which can certainly be worked out by experimental psychology. In this latter case the child is examined by external means and the following questions arise: what sort of memory has he, what are his intellectual capacities, his ability to form judgments and so on? Educational aims are frequently found in this way. But how are they carried into life? They sit firmly in the head, that is where they are. In his head the teacher knows that a child must be taught arithmetic like this, geography like that, and so it goes on. Now the intentions are to be put into practice. The teacher considers all he has learnt, and remembers that according to the precepts of scientific educational method he must set about things in such and such a way. He is now faced with putting his knowledge into practice, he remembers these theoretical principles and applies them quite externally. Whoever has the gift for observing such things can experience how sometimes teachers who have thoroughly mastered educational theories, who can recount admirably everything they had to know for their examination, or had to learn in practice class-teaching, nevertheless remain utterly removed from life when they come face to face with the children they have to teach. What has happened to such a teacher is what, daily and hourly, we are forced to observe with sorrowing heart, the fact that people pass one another by in life, that they have no sense for getting to know one another. This is a common state of affairs. It is the fundamental evil which underlies all social disturbances which are so widespread in the cultural life of today: the lack of paying heed to others, the lack of interest which every man should have for others. In everyday civilised life we must perforce accept such a state of affairs; it is the destiny of modern humanity at the present time. But the peak of such aloofness is reached when the teacher of the child or the educator of the youth stands at a distance from his pupil, quite separated from him, and employs in a completely external way methods obtained by external science. We can see that the laws of mechanics have been wrongly applied when a bridge collapses, but wrong educational methods are not so obvious. A clear proof of the fact that human beings today are only at home when it comes to a mechanical way of thinking, which can always determine whether things have been rightly or wrongly thought out, and which has produced the most brilliant triumphs in the life of modern civilisation—a proof of this is that humanity today has confidence only in mechanical thought. And if this mechanical thinking is carried into education, if, for instance, the child is asked to write down disconnected words and then repeat them quickly, so that a record can be made of his power of assimilation, if this is the procedure in education it is a sign that there is no longer any natural gift for approaching the child himself. We experiment with the child because we can no longer approach his heart and soul.

In saying all this it might seem as though one had the inclination or desire only to criticise and reprove in a superior sort of way. It is of course always easier to criticise than to build something up constructively. But as a matter of fact what I have said does not arise out of any such inclination or desire; it arises out of a direct observation of life. This direct observation of life must proceed from something which is usually completely excluded from knowledge today. What sort of person must one be today if one wishes to pursue some calling based on knowledge—for instance on the knowledge of man? One must be objective! This is to be heard all over the place today, in every hole and corner. Of course one must be objective, but the question is whether or not this objectivity is based on a lack of paying due heed to what is essential in any particular situation.

Now for the most part people have the idea that love is far more subjective than anything else in life, and that it would be utterly impossible for anyone who loves to be objective. For this reason when knowledge is spoken about today love is never mentioned seriously. True, it is deemed fitting, when a young man is applying himself to acquire knowledge, to exhort him to do so with love, but this mostly happens when the whole way in which knowledge is presented is not at all likely to develop love in anybody But the essence of love, the giving of oneself to the world and its phenomena, is in any case not regarded as knowledge. Nevertheless for real life love is the greatest power of knowledge. And without this love it is utterly impossible to attain to a knowledge of man which could form the basis of a true art of education. Let us try to picture this love, and see how it can work in the special sphere of an education founded on a knowledge of man drawn from spiritual science, from anthroposophy.

The child is entrusted to us to be educated, to be taught. If our thinking in regard to education is founded on anthroposophy we do not represent the child to ourselves as something we must help to develop so that he approaches nearer and nearer to some social human ideal, or whatever it may be. For this human ideal can be completely abstract. And today such a human ideal has already become something which can assume as many forms as there are political, social and other parties. Human ideals change according to whether one swears by liberalism, conservatism, or by some other programme, and so the child is led slowly in some particular direction in order to become what is held to be right for mankind. This is carried to extreme lengths in present-day Russia. Generally speaking, however, it is more or less how people think today, though perhaps somewhat less radically.

This is no starting point for the teacher who wants to educate and teach on the basis of anthroposophy. He does not make an “idol” of his opinions. For an abstract picture of man, towards which the child shall be led, is an idol, it is in no sense a reality. The only reality which could exist in this field would be at most if the teacher were to consider himself as an ideal and were to say that every child must become like him. Then one would at least have touched on some sort of reality, but the absurdity of saying such a thing would at once be obvious.

What we really have before us in this young child is a being who has not yet begun his physical existence, but has brought down his spirit and soul from pre-earthly worlds, and has plunged into a physical body bestowed on him by parents and ancestors. We look upon this child as he lies there before us in the first days of his life with indeterminate features and with unorganised, undirected movements. We follow day by day, week by week how the features grow more and more defined, and become the expression of what is working to the surface from the inner life of soul. We observe further how the whole life and movements of the child become more consequent and directed, how something of the nature of spirit and soul is working its way to the surface from the inmost depths of his being. Then, filled with holy awe and reverence, we ask: “What is it that is here working its way to the surface?” And so with heart and mind we are led back to the human being himself, when as soul and spirit he dwelt in the soul-spiritual pre-earthly world from which he has descended into the physical world, and we say: “Little child, now that you have entered through birth into earthly existence you are among human beings, but previously you were among spiritual, divine beings.” What once lived among spiritual-divine beings has descended in order to live among men. We see the divine made manifest in the child. We feel as though standing before an altar. There is however one difference. In religious communities it is customary for human beings to bring their sacrificial offerings to the altars, so that these offerings may ascend into the spiritual world; now we feel ourselves standing as it were before an altar turned the other way; now the gods allow their grace to stream down in the form of divine-spiritual beings, so that these beings, acting as messengers of the gods, may unfold what is essentially human on the altar of physical life. We behold in every child the unfolding of cosmic laws of a divine-spiritual nature; we see how God creates in the world. In its highest, most significant form this is revealed in the child. Hence every single child becomes for us a sacred riddle, for every single child embodies this great question—not, how is he to be educated so that he approaches some “idol” which has been thought out.—But, how shall we foster what the gods have sent down to us into the earthly world. We learn to know ourselves as helpers of the divine-spiritual world, and above all we learn to ask: What may be the result if we approach education with this attitude of mind?

Education in the true sense proceeds out of just such an attitude. What matters is that we should develop our education and teaching on the basis of such thoughts as these. Knowledge of man can only be won if love for mankind—in this case love for the child—becomes the mainspring of our work. If this is so, then the teacher's calling becomes a priestly calling, for then the educator becomes the steward of what it is the will of the gods to carry out with man.

Here again it might appear as though something obvious is being said in rather different words. But it is not so. As a matter of fact in today's unsocial world-order, which only wears an outer semblance of being social, the very opposite occurs. Educationists pursue an “idol” for mankind, not seeing themselves as nurturers of something they must first learn to know when actually face to face with the child.

An attitude of mind such as I have described cannot work in an abstract way, it must work spiritually, while always keeping the practical in view. Such an attitude however can never be acquired by accepting theories quite unrelated and alien to life, it can only be gained if one has a feeling, a sense for every expression of life, and can enter with love into all its manifestations.

Today there is a great deal of talk about educational reform. Since the war there has been talk of a revolution in education. We have experienced this. Every possible approach to a new education is thought out, and pretty well everybody is concerned in some way or other with how this reform is to be brought about. Either one approaches some institution about to be founded with one's proposals or at the very least one suggests this or that as one's idea of how education should take shape. And so it goes on. There is a great deal of talk about methods of education; but do you see what kind of impression all this makes when one surveys, quite without prejudice, what the various societies for the reform of education, down to the most radical, put forward today in their educational programmes? I do not know whether many people take into account what kind of impression is made when one is faced with so many programmes issuing from associations and societies for educational reform. One gets the impression: Good heavens, how clever people are today! For indeed everything which comes about like this is frightfully clever. I do not mean this ironically, but quite seriously. There has never been a time when there was so much cleverness as there is in our era.

There we have it, all set out. Paragraph 1. How shall we educate so that the forces of the child may be developed naturally? Paragraph 2 ... Paragraph 3 ... and so on. People today of any profession or occupation, and of any social class can sit down together and work out such programmes; everything we get in this way in paragraphs 1 to 30 will be delightfully clever, for today one knows just how to formulate everything theoretically. People have never been so skilful in formulating things as they are today. Then such a programme, a number of programmes can be submitted to a committee or to Parliament. This again is very clever. Now something may perhaps be deleted or added according to party opinion, and something extremely clever emerges, even if at times strongly coloured by “party.” Nothing can be done with it, however, for all this is quite beside the point.

Waldorf School education never started off with such a programme. I have no wish to boast, but naturally, had this been our purpose, we could also have produced some kind of programme no less clever than those of many an association for educational reform. The fact that we should have to reckon with reality might perhaps prove a hindrance and then the result would be more stupid. With us however there was never any question of a programme. From the outset we were never interested in principles of educational method which might later on be somehow incorporated in a legalised educational system. What did interest us was reality, absolute true reality. What was this reality? To begin with here were children, a number of child-individualities with varying characteristics. One had to learn what these were, one had to get to know what was inherent in these children, what they had brought down with them, what was expressed through their physical bodies. First and foremost then there were the children. And then there were teachers. You can stand up as strongly as you like for the principle that the child must be educated in accordance with his individuality—that stands in all the programmes of reform—but nothing whatever will come of it. For on the other hand, besides the children, there are a number of teachers, and the point is to know what these teachers can accomplish in relation to these children. The school must be run in such a way that one does not set up an abstract ideal, but allows the school to develop out of the teachers and out of the pupils. And these teachers and pupils are not present in an abstract kind of way, but are quite concrete, individual human beings. That is the gist of the matter. Then we are led by virtue of necessity to build up a true education based on a real knowledge of man. We cease to be theoretical and become practical in every detail.

Waldorf School education, the first manifestation of an education based on anthroposophy, is actually the practice of education as an art, and is therefore able to give only indications of what can be done in this or that case. We have no great interest in general theories, but so much the greater is our interest in impulses coming from anthroposophy which can give us a true knowledge of man, beginning, as here of course it must do, with the child. But today our crude observation completely ignores what is most characteristic in the progressive stages of life. I would say that some measure of inspiration must be drawn from spiritual science if today we are to develop a right sense for what should be brought to the child.

At the present time people know extraordinarily little about man and mankind. They imagine that our present state of existence is the same as it was in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, and indeed as it has always been. They picture the ancient Greeks and the ancient Egyptians as being very similar to the man of today. And if we go back still further, according to the views of present-day natural science, history becomes enveloped in mist until those beings emerge which are half ape, half man. No interest is taken, however, in penetrating into the great differences which exist between the historical and pre-historical epochs of mankind.

Let us study the human being as he appears to us today, beginning with the child up to the change of teeth. We see quite clearly that his physical development runs parallel with his development of soul and spirit. Everything that manifests as soul and spirit has its exact counterpart in the physical—both appear together, both develop out of the child together. Then, when the child has come through the change of teeth, we see how the soul is already freeing itself from the body. On the one side we shall be able to follow a development of soul and spirit in the child, and on the other side his physical development. The two sides however are not as yet clearly separated. If we continue to follow the development further into the time between puberty and about the 21st year the separation becomes much more defined and then when we come to the 27th or 28th year—speaking now of present-day humanity—nothing more can be seen of the way in which the soul-spiritual is connected with the physical body. What a man does at this age can be perceived on the one hand in the soul-spiritual life and on the other hand in the physical life, but the two cannot be brought into any sort of connection. At the end of the twenties, man in his soul and spirit has separated himself completely from what is physical, and so it goes on up to the end of his life.

Yet it was not always so. One only believes it to have been so. Spiritual science, studied anthroposophically, shows us clearly and distinctly that what we see in the child today, at the present stage of human evolution—namely, that in his being of soul and spirit the child is completely dependent on his physical bodily nature and his physical bodily nature is completely dependent on his being of soul and spirit—this condition persisted right on into extreme old age—a fact that has simply not been noticed. If we go very far back into those times which gave rise to the conception of the patriarchs and ask ourselves what kind of a man such a patriarch really was, the answer must be somewhat as follows: Such a man, in growing old, changed in respect of his bodily nature, but right into extreme old age he continued to feel as only quite young people can feel today. Even in old age he felt his being of soul and spirit to be dependent on his physical body.

Today we no longer feel our physical body to be dependent upon what we think and feel. A dependence of this kind was however felt in the more ancient epochs of civilisation. But people also felt after a certain age of life that their bones became harder and their muscles contained certain foreign substances which brought about a sclerotic condition. They felt the waning of their life forces, but they also felt with this physical decline an increase of spiritual forces, actually brought about by the breaking up of the physical. “The soul is becoming free from the physical body.” So they said when this process of physical decline began. At the age of the patriarchs, when the body was already breaking up, the soul was most able to wrest itself free from the body, so that it was no longer within it. This is why people looked up to the patriarchs with such devotion and reverence, saying: “O, how will it be with me one day, when I am so old? For in old age one can know things, understand things, penetrate into the heart of things in a way that I cannot do now, because I am still building up my physical body.” At that time man could still look into a world order that was both physical and spiritual. This however was in a very remote past. Then came a time when man felt this interdependence of the physical and the soul-spiritual only until about the 50th year. The Greek age followed. What gives the Greek epoch its special value rests on the fact that the Greeks were still able to feel the harmony between the soul-spiritual and the physical-bodily. The Greek still felt this harmony until the 30th or 40th year. He still experienced in the circulation of the blood what brought the soul into a unity with the physical. The wonderful culture and art of the Greeks was founded on this unity, which transformed everything theoretical into art, and at the same time enfilled art with wisdom.

In those times the sculptor worked in such a way that he needed no model, for in his own organisation he was aware of the forces permeating the arm or the leg, giving them their form. This was learned, for instance, in the festival games; but today when such games are imitated they have no meaning whatever.

If however we have such a sense for the development of mankind then we know what has actually taken place in human evolution. We know too that today we only have a parallelism between the physical-bodily and the soul-spiritual until about the 27th or 28th year, to give a quite exact description. (Most people observe this parallelism only up to the age of puberty.) And so we know how the divine-spiritual springs up and grows out of the developing human being. Then we feel the necessary reverence for our task of developing what comes to meet us in the child, that is to say, of developing what is given to us and not developing those abstract ideas that have been thought out.

Thus our thoughts are directed to a knowledge of man based on what is individual in the soul. And if we have absorbed such universal, great historical aspects, we shall also be able to approach every educational task in an appropriate manner. Then quite another life will be brought into the class when the teacher enters it, for he will carry the world into it, the physical world and the world of soul and spirit. Then he will be surrounded by an atmosphere of reality, of a real and actual conception of the world, not one which is merely thought out and intellectual. Then he will be surrounded by a world imbued with feeling. Now if we consider what has just been put forward we shall realise a remarkable fact. We shall see that we are founding an education which, by degrees, will come to represent in many respects the very opposite of the characteristic impulse in education at the present time. All manner of humorists with some aptitude for caricature often choose the so-called “schoolmaster” as an object which can serve their purpose well and on whom they can let loose their derision. Well, if a schoolmaster is endowed with the necessary humour he can turn the tables on those who have caricatured him before the world. But the real point is something altogether different; for if the teacher, versed in present-day educational methods, carries these into school with him, and has therefore no means of learning to know the child, while nevertheless having to deal with the child, how can he be anything other than a stranger to the world? With the school system as it is today, he cannot become anything else; he is torn right out of the world. So we are faced with a truly remarkable situation. Teachers who are strangers to the world are expected to train human beings so that they may get on and prosper in the world.

Let us imagine however that the things about which we have been speaking today become an accepted point of view. Then the relation of the teacher to the children is such that in each individual child a whole world is revealed to him, and not only a human world, but a divine-spiritual world manifested on earth. In other words the teacher perceives as many aspects of the world as he has children in his charge. Through every child he looks into the wide world. His education becomes art. It is imbued with the consciousness that what is done has a direct effect on the evolution of the world. Teaching in the sense meant here leads the teacher, in his task of educating, of developing human beings, to a lofty conception of the world. Such a teacher is one who becomes able to play a leading part in the great questions that face civilisation. The pupil will never outgrow such a teacher, as is so often the case today. The following situation may arise in a school. Let us suppose that the teacher has to educate according to some idea, some picture of man which he can set before himself. Let us think that he might have 30 children in his class, and among these, led by destiny, were two, who in their inborn capacity, were far more gifted than the teacher himself. What would he want to do in such a case? He would want to form them in accordance with his educational ideal; nothing else would be possible. But how does this work out? Reality does not permit it, and the pupils then outgrow their teacher.

If on the other hand we educate in accordance with reality, if we foster all that manifests in the child as qualities of soul and spirit, we are in the same situation as the gardener is in relation to his plants. Do you think that the gardener knows all these secrets of the plants which he tends? O, these plants contain many, many more secrets than the gardener understands; but he can tend them, and perhaps succeed best in caring for those which he does not yet know. His knowledge rests on practical experience, he has “green fingers.” In the same way it is possible for a teacher who practises an art of education based on reality to stand as educator before children who have genius, even though he himself is certainly no genius. For he knows that he has not to lead his pupils towards some abstract ideal, but that in the child the Divine is working in man, is working right through his physical-bodily nature. If the teacher has this attitude of mind he can actually achieve what has just been said. He achieves it by an outpouring love which permeates his work as educator. It is his attitude of mind which is so essential.

With these words, offered as a kind of greeting, I wanted to give you today some idea of what is to be the content of this course of lectures. They will deal with the educational value of a knowledge of man and the cultural value of education.

Dr. Steiner: I think that first I need to hear what has happened with the class schedule during the short period it has been implemented. I would like to know whether you see it as a possible solution.

A teacher: A father wrote a letter indicating things have gotten worse.

Dr. Steiner: We should include those opinions in a practical evaluation. We need to ask ourselves how it is that a boy in the fourth grade has class until ten minutes to 7:00 in the evening.

A teacher: We had to put one of the language classes into the afternoon, and then handwork follows it.

Another teacher: In general, the situation is not worse.

Dr. Steiner: That is the way it should be. We have not increased the number of hours, but actually reduced them, and the instruction is more concentrated.

A teacher says something about the free periods.

Dr. Steiner: If we had more teachers, such free periods would not occur. What do the students do during that time?

A teacher: They are put together in one room, and we keep an eye on them. The older children work alone.

Dr. Steiner: We should answer such a letter by pointing out the advantages. There must certainly be some advantages.

A teacher: In the eighth grade, there do not seem to be any advantages.

Dr. Steiner: We have to recognize that as unavoidable. Is it really so obvious? Certainly, the number of classroom hours has not increased.

A teacher: It is only a temporary disadvantage and will exist only as long as we have shop in the afternoon.

Dr. Steiner: This situation can last only for the darkest months of winter. Instruction begins relatively late, at 8:30 a.m. I always assumed that was for reasons of economy. We could also say that if the parents paid for the additional lighting, we would begin at 8:00. We could ask the parents whether they want it or not, and then decide according to the majority. We could begin a half hour earlier and use electric light.

We could survey the parents after we explain the basic issues of the class schedule. The main complaint of the person who wrote that letter is that he does not see his children. He is quite sorry his son does not arrive home until 7:30 in the evening. We need to take a survey. We could ask him whether he would be willing to pay more in order to have school begin a half hour earlier. The gymnastics teacher: The children have asked whether we could have gymnastics from 7:30 until 8:30 in the morning.

Dr. Steiner: The children would then come to main lesson tired. They would be just as tired as if they had a regular period before main lesson.

We need to speak with the students about their dissatisfaction, and we should send a questionnaire to the parents. For the students, our task is that they have the same perspective as you, the teachers. Where would we be if the students’ viewpoint was different from that of the teachers? It is absolutely necessary that the students support the teachers’ perspective. We should try to achieve better harmony between the students and teachers, so that the students would go through fire for the teachers. Each time that does not happen, it is painful for me.

A teacher: Things would improve if we could have shop in the morning.

Dr. Steiner: If that is possible, go ahead.

It is curious that the students criticize the class schedule. Why is that?

A teacher: The children criticize a great deal.

Dr. Steiner: That should not be. In general, you should not lose contact with the children. I think every class schedule would have advantages and disadvantages. If you had good contact with the students, the class schedule would not be a problem. I would like to hear from the teachers what you think the practical results have been. We could send out a questionnaire to the parents, but student criticism is unacceptable. What I said at the beginning referred to the perspective of the teachers.

A number of teachers report.

A handwork teacher: Can we allow the boys in the upper grades to have handwork as an elective? The girls have asked if we could leave out the boys. The boys who have grown with the classes like to participate, but the new ones do not.

Dr. Steiner: How could we do that? We have included those things in our curriculum that are appropriate in handwork; that leaves no room for variation. We cannot allow handwork to become an elective. How would you do that? Your guiding rule would then be that the children go only to what they want.

You can vary things within the class. There are a number of good possible variations. You can give the children many kinds of activities. Things to not need to be the same everywhere. As far as I am concerned, you can give the boys and girls different activities beginning in the eighth or ninth grade, but if it becomes an elective, we will destroy our plan.

A teacher: I would like stenography to be an elective. The children do no homework.

Dr. Steiner: That is too bad. When does that class begin? Oh, in the tenth grade. I do not understand why they do not want to learn it.

We are so close to some things that we often forget that we have a different method and a different curriculum than in other schools. You see, now that I’ve been in the classes more often, I can say we are achieving results with what we might call the Waldorf School method; the results are apparent. A comparison with other schools, in fact, shows that, to the extent we are using the Waldorf School pedagogy, we are achieving results. The question we need to ask ourselves is whether we are unconsciously not using the Waldorf method where we have not achieved results.

I do not want to be too hard. Things do not always need to end in a storm about how the Waldorf School method is not being used everywhere. Sometimes you fall back into the usual school humdrum. You get results when you use the methods. Even though the results in foreign languages are uneven, there are, nevertheless, quite good results. We are also achieving good results in the lower grades with what is normally called penmanship. In arithmetic I have the feeling that the Waldorf School method is not often used.

I think we need to continually ask ourselves how we need to work in these different conditions. Of course, it is easier to flunk a third of the class at the end of the school year than to continue bringing them along. That would result in different conditions. If we continue to use the same guidelines and think in the same way, we will not move forward. We would then have to allow the students to fail. You cannot have one without the other.

On the other hand, we also need to consider that the work done at home needs to be done happily. The children must feel a need to do it. If you teach at one of the public schools with compulsory attendance, where you have no interest and can operate like a slave owner, you are in a different situation. If the children do not bring their homework, you simply punish them. The children would simply run away. If we were like other schools, they would simply run from us. We need to get the children to want to do their homework. But, their work is well done, isn’t it?

I work so hard to unburden the teachers because I must admit to feeling that you do not always have the necessary enthusiasm to really put something into your teaching. We need more fire, more enthusiasm in our teaching. So much depends upon that. If, for example, a boy does not want to participate in handwork, you need to give some thought to giving him something he finds interesting. I know stenography can be learned in nothing flat, without much homework. I have, unfortunately, not been able to see what you do there. How do you explain stenography to the children?

A teacher: I gave an introductory lecture on the history of stenography, then taught them the vowels.

Dr. Steiner: You can generate much more excitement if you also teach abbreviations when you teach them the vowels,. All that relates to what we must overcome. What is that supposed to mean, “The children don’t want to”?

A teacher: One girl told me she does not need stenography. She is interested only in art.

Dr. Steiner: One thing must support the other. The students do not need to consider the question, “Why do I need to learn this?” We must direct our education toward being able to say to the student, “Look here, if you want to be an artist, there are a number of things that you need. You should not imagine you can simply become an artist. There are all kinds of things you need to learn that are not directly connected with art. As an artist, you may well need stenography. There was once a poet, Hamerling, who once said he could not have become what he was without stenography.” We must learn to teach so that as soon as the teacher says something, the children become interested. That should simply happen. We begin teaching stenography in the tenth grade. By now, the children should be so far that they understand they should not question their need to learn what we teach.

A teacher: The children asked before we even began. Some of them had already learned the Stolze-Schrey method.

Dr. Steiner: That is a real problem. If there were enough children, it might lead to needing a special course for those who want to learn the Stolze-Schrey method.

A teacher asks about the visit of someone from England.

Dr. Steiner: Concerning this visitor, it is important that we develop a kind of “visitor attitude” so that we appear to be accustomed to having visitors. Don’t you agree that we do not really do that when we have German visitors? Englishmen will be terribly disappointed if you receive them the way you normally receive visitors in the Waldorf School. I do not want to suggest that you take up “Emily Post” in your free time, but there is something you might call a kind of “natural manners.” It is different when you have a visitor than when you speak in the faculty meeting. The main thing is that you are gracious to visitors. I mean that not only in connection with your external demeanor, but also inwardly. You need to want to allow the visitors to see what is special about our instruction. Otherwise, they will go away with no impression at all. The impression our visitors receive depends upon how we act with them. That is the first thing. The other thing is that we need to make the visit as efficient as possible. It will not do to have thirty visitors in a class on the same day, but only as many as we can handle. We should not allow them simply to watch us.

When the Theosophical Society had a conference in London some time ago, they had a “Smiling Committee.” When we had our meeting in 1907 in Munich, there was a great deal to see. There were the celebrities of the Theosophical Society. I thought it was really horrible that these famous people left with the opinion that people are right, Germans are impolite. I once suggested to someone that he should say a few words to a well-known person. He replied, “With them?” He thought it was a terrible imposition that I thought he should be polite. He thought he should simply ignore someone he did not like. These things happen. They should not happen here. Otherwise, we would have to not allow the visit, and that is something we cannot easily do.

A teacher: We thought we would serve tea in one of the classes. We’ve also prepared a display table.

Dr. Steiner: That is certainly good, but I am referring more to your attitude. You could certainly say we should not allow these people to come, but that is not easily avoided. You need to show them what is special about our teaching methods, and you need an opportunity for doing that.

Sometimes when you say something, it feels like you are taking the morning dew from the flower. It is all so easy to say in a lecture, but with concrete questions, you seem so dry and barren. Then, it is like taking away the dew. Everything depends upon how you do it, whether it seems you want to help someone or not. What I want to say is—I can say this today because it will not seem as though I wanted to praise Dr. B.—when I come into his class he seems to think it is important and correct to point out certain things to me. The same is also true of Dr. S., but I also do not want to praise you. I do not think it would disturb your teaching if you were to point out what you are doing. Perhaps it is not so necessary with me, but I am convinced it is more important that you make sure visitors see what you are doing instead of simply having them stand there noticing nothing at all. Englishmen with their lack of concepts will understand nothing if you do not point out the basis of it. If you only give the class and let them watch, they won’t have the faintest idea of what happened. You need to forcefully point out what is special about the instruction.

An earlier visitor left without the faintest idea of what the Waldorf School is. He left and went home with only a proof that the methods he used in his English school are good. The only impression he had was that we are doing the same things he does. You shouldn’t believe people notice things by themselves. Many of you have not yet noticed it, so many things continue on in their normal trot, even with our own teachers. That is what I meant. Not much more can be done.

We should give a very impressive 5:00 o’clock tea at the branch office on Landhausstraße. Otherwise, the Englishmen will leave Stuttgart saying they have seen nothing of the Society, all we wanted was to lecture. In England, everybody introduces themselves, and they consider lectures as something to do on the side. They just put their hands in their pockets. Most of their lectures are simply long sentences. Germans say something in a lecture, something special about life, and they should notice that here. If you can show them that, they will slowly gain some respect. No Englishman can understand the German nature. They do not understand it, they have no concept why we see something in a lecture that we associate with conviction. For them, it is only a longer speech within a conversation, but they do have a good sense of ceremony for formal occasions. You can certainly see that in everything they do. We do not need to imitate English culture, we do not need to imitate English nature, but we do need to give these people the impression that we simply do not stand around, but are truly active. That is what we need to do. We do not need to do much more, and there is not much more we can do during a twoweek visit than to try to get people to respect our Waldorf School methods. Nevertheless, we do need to gain their respect. You need to remember that there is no way of expressing the word “philistine” in the English language. An Englishman cannot properly express the peculiarities of a philistine. People’s most prominent characteristics cannot be expressed in their own language. Nowadays, Germans have taken on so many characteristics of the English that they are almost incapable of saying the word “philistine” with the proper feeling. We should eliminate everything that is philistine from the Waldorf School.

A teacher: Should we tell the children about this now?

Dr. Steiner: I would not do that. What I have said should remain within our four walls. Outside our circle we will have to arrange things so that the children consider the visit as a matter of course. Don’t tell them. Don’t do things as though they were something outside our normal life. The visitors should not notice anything. They should not believe we made any special preparations. They should think their visit does not bother us at all. There can be no talk of taking their visit into account. Do that as little as possible.

A teacher: Won’t the children bring some resistance from home?

Dr. Steiner: I visited the school of a man who will be coming. I went through all of Mr. Gladstone’s classes. The children, of course, knew I was a German just as the children here will know that the visitors are from England, but it was natural that I was treated as a guest.

A teacher: I would always ask an English visitor to tell something.

Dr. Steiner: I would prefer to tell it myself. You should understand that all other classes will be of interest, but the English class will interest them only a little. I would try to make them understand, in a polite way, of course, that it is unimportant to me if they find the class not well done. If they say something, you could reply that you would probably say the same thing in their German class. You are probably right. That is what is important. Don’t give the impression they are important for you, but treat them as guests. It is important that people feel they have been treated as guests. It is important that they believe the things that happen while they are here are what occurs normally, not that they believe we prepared something for them. They should not believe that. When we give a 5 o’clock tea at the branch house, they should think that that is the custom here. We are moving a little too strongly in the direction of becoming bureaucrats rather than people of the world, but we need to become people of the world, not bureaucrats. It is bad for the school if bureaucracy arises here. All German schools are bureaucracies, but that is something that should not happen at the Waldorf School. Basically, we do not need to show the people anything other than what happens here. Everything else lies in the way we do that.

I will be here on the eighth and ninth of January, perhaps also on the tenth, and then at the end of the visit. I was thinking it might be possible in that connection to give a short pedagogical course that would deal primarily with the aesthetics and pedagogy of music.

A teacher asks about Parzival in the eleventh grade.

Dr. Steiner: In teaching religion and history, what is important is how you present things. What is important is how things are treated in one case and then in another. In teaching religion, three stages need to be emphasized. In Parzival, for instance, you should first emphasize a certain kind of human guiltlessness when people live in a type of dullness. Then we have the second stage, that of doubt in the heart, “if the heart is doubting, then the soul must follow.” That is the second stage. The third stage is the inner certainty he finally achieves.

That is what we need to especially emphasize in teaching religion. The whole story needs to be directed toward that. You need to show that during the period in which Wolfram wrote Parzival, a certain segment of the population held a completely permeating, pious perspective, and that people at that time had these three stages in their own souls. You need to show that this was seen as the proper form, and that this was how people should think about the development of the human soul. You could speak about the parallels between the almost identical times of Wolfram’s and Dante’s existence, although Dante was something different. When you go into these things, you need to give each of the three stages a religious coloring.

In teaching literature and history, you need to draw the children’s attention to how one stage arises from an earlier one and then continues on to a later stage. You could show how it was proper that common people in the ninth and tenth centuries followed the priests in complete dullness. You can also show them how the Parzival problem arises because the common people then wanted to participate in what the priests gave them. In other words, show them that people existed in a state like Parzival’s and grew out of that state just as Parzival grew out of it. Show them how common people actually experienced the priests, just as Wolfram von Eschenbach did. He could not write, but he had an intense participation in the inner life of the soul.

Historically, Wolfram is an interesting person. He was part of the whole human transition in that he could not write and in that the whole structure of education was not yet accepted by common people. But it was accepted that all the experiences of the soul did exist. There is also some historical significance to the fact that it is a cleric who is the scribe, that is, who actually does the writing. The attitude in Faust, “I am more clever than all the fancy people, doctors, the judges, writers, and priests,” persists into the sixteenth century. Those who could write were from the clergy, who also controlled external education. That changed only through the ability to print books. In the culture of Parzival, we find the predecessor of the culture of printed books.

You could also attempt to go into the language. You should recall that it is quite apparent from Parzival that such expressions as “dullness,” “to live in the half-light of dullness,” were still quite visual at the time when people still perceived things that way. With Goethe, that was no longer the case. When Goethe speaks of a dog wagging its tail, he refers to it as a kind of doubting, whereas in Faust, it means nothing more than that the dog wags its tail. You see, this doubting is connected with dividing the dog into two parts: the dog’s tail goes to the left and the right and in that way divides the dog. This is something that is no longer felt later. The soul became completely abstract, whereas Goethe still felt it in a concrete way. This is also connected with the fact that Goethe once again takes up the Parzival problem in his unfinished Mysteries. That is exactly the same problem, and you can, in fact, use it to show how such things change. They return in an inner way.

Take, for example—well, why shouldn’t we speak about Goethe’s Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily? You have probably already done this, that would be just like you. Why should we not take into account that the story of the kings is pictorially the same in Andreae’s Chymical Wedding, where you also have pictures of the kings? If you go back to that, you will see the natural connection to the Arthurian tales and the Grail story. You would have the whole esoteric Grail story. You would inwardly comprehend the Arthurian tales and the particular cultural work as the Knights of the Round Table, who set themselves the task of destroying the lack of consciousness, the dull superstition of the common people, while the Grail Castle’s task is to comprehend external life in a more spiritual way. Here you have the possibility for an inner deepening of Parzival, but at the same time you can place him in his own time. I have mentioned this in some of my lecture cycles, as well as Poor Heinrich, which can also be treated historically as a theme of the willingness to sacrifice. A moral understanding of the world coincided with the physical understanding of the world, something that was lost in the next cultural period. Something like Poor Heinrich could not have been written in the fifteenth century.

I have also made a comparison between Parzival and von Grimmelshausen’s Simplicius. In Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s time, people were already so advanced that they could treat the Parzival problem only in a humorous manner. You can still find an echo of it in Simplizism. This is something you can do in literary history.

When you continue on to the present, things become very hidden, but you nevertheless should uncover them. It is also good to uncover much of what has been hidden. Take, for example, the training of Parzival by Gurnemanz. The question could arise whether a Gurnemanz existed in the nineteenth century. The answer is, yes, but you must understand the situation. It was Trast in Sudermann’s Honor. There you will find Trast and the inexperienced Robert. There you have a real Gurnemanz figure. You will find all the characteristics translated into silliness. But, you will again have an opportunity of showing that Robert is a kind of Faust, but made silly, and Trast a kind of Mephistopheles. Sudermann is a silly fellow and translated everything into silliness. Here you have an opportunity to show the tremendous superficiality that lies in the transition from the Middle Ages into the most modern times.

A teacher asks why there is talk of twelve religions in The Mysteries.

Dr. Steiner: For the same reason that I spoke about twelve world views in a lecture in Berlin. Goethe was not interested in discovering these twelve religions. He knew that the twelve religions were connected with the twelve pictures of the zodiac, and for that reason he spoke about twelve religions. It was not that he imagined a priori that there were twelve possible religions. I prefer to keep to Goethe’s attitude. As soon as you construct something of that sort, it becomes dry. The number is enough, and then you can give examples. Such things need not be particularly clear empirically.

There are also only twelve consonants, the others are variations. That is something that occurs in no other language except Finnish, where there are only twelve consonants. That is how you can treat such questions, and you need only fill in the holes.

A teacher: How should we handle the Klingsor problem? That is such a difficult theme for the children.

Dr. Steiner: Avoid it. But, there is one important thing you can mention. You could discuss Wagner’s Parsifal with the children, but avoid bringing up questionable things. The result of your teaching will be that these things will be taken in with a much greater amount of inner purity later than they are today.

A teacher: I wanted to ask you to say something about methodology.

Dr. Steiner: I don’t understand your question. Isn’t that something that comes from the material itself? You have told the children a number of things, and the methodology lies in the things themselves. You have behaved in a way so that the children slowly came to behave in the same way. And the result is that the faculty could have sat on the school benches, and the children could have become the teachers. Everything is connected with that, with theory. You need to teach things much more naturally. There is no value in, for instance, saying that we need to ask the children if we want to know what it is that we should do. You should not repeat such things.

A teacher: When teaching the Song of the Niebelungs in the tenth grade, I had the feeling I was right on the edge because I do not understand the language.

Dr. Steiner: You see how difficult it is to speak in terms of general principles. The details are what is important. I think that if properly handled, the language is always interesting to the students. Things that can be learned from the inner structure of the language itself would always interest the students. I also think that the teachers working together would bring a great deal of good. For example, Mr. Boy presented a number of very interesting things, things that really interested the students in spite of the fact that a number of philologists would not consider them. Although they are rules, such things are interesting. Everything connected with language is interesting. Nevertheless, it is difficult to generalize. What I have had to say in that regard, I said in my language course, but I connected it with specific things. It is not possible to generalize. We could achieve a great deal if those who know certain things would tell the others who do not know them. This is a possibility for real collaboration. It is a shame that there is so much knowledge here and the others do not learn it. In the faculty, there could be a really great cooperation.

A teacher: I do not understand Middle High German.

Dr. Steiner: I’m not sure that is so important. I once knew a professor who lectured about Greek philosophy, but who could never read Aristotle without a translation. What is important is that you come into the feeling of the language. Who is there who really understands Middle High German well? There is much that the other teachers could tell you.

A teacher: I cannot pronounce it well. You read it then.

Dr. Steiner: Not everyone reads it the same. It is colored by various dialects. We all speak High German differently. In some cases, it is important that you don’t speak High German like an Austrian.

A teacher: Then you mean we should give only some examples from the original text.

Dr. Steiner: The original version of Parzival is really boring for students, and now one of them is translating it. One of you might write to Paris to order a book that you could get much more quickly if you simply ask Mr. B. to loan it to you.

A teacher: We could also make a connection with etymology.

Dr. Steiner: Regarding languages, my main desire is that the aesthetic or moral, the spiritual, and the content is emphasized more than the grammar. That is true for all languages and is what we should emphasize here. A word like “saelde” is really very interesting, “zwifel,” too. There is much that could be said about that, as well as about “saelde” that relates to the entire soul.

A teacher: Could you say something about the spiritual scientific perspective?

Dr. Steiner: All you have to do is look it up in How to Know Higher Worlds. Recently, there have been a number of lectures in Dornach about literary problems that Steffen found very interesting.

A teacher asks about periodicity in teaching art at various levels: I will be going to the ninth grade on Monday. I have already spoken about the themes in Albrecht Dürer’s black-and-white art.

Dr. Steiner: You can certainly do that. Do you really believe that the many things in Melancholia are attributes of Dürer? I think the difference between Dürer and Rembrandt is that Rembrandt treats the question of light and dark simply as a question of light and dark per se, whereas Dürer attempts to show light and dark through as many objects as possible. The many things contained in the Melancholia should not be seen as attributes, but more as his desire to place all possible objects into it. For me, the problem with Dürer is more how light behaves when reflected from all kinds of objects. With Rembrandt, the problem is more the interactions between light and dark. That is what I think. Rembrandt would not have seen the problem of Melancholia in the same way. He would have done it much more abstractly, where Dürer is more concrete. I think that is how you can draw a very fine line.

A teacher: I wanted to include the problem of north-south, and then that of east-west.

Dr. Steiner: You could contrast Rembrandt’s light and dark with the southern painting style. In that way, you can bring such things together. Of course, when you describe that, you can also mention that Rembrandt treats the question of light and dark only qualitatively. Space is only an opportunity to solve the problem through painting. If you show how a sculpture is entirely a question of space, you can then go on into sculpture. Of course, it is probably best if you make a connection with French sculpture of the late classical period. In the rococo—of course, you need to leave out the good side of the rococo—you find in sculpture an extreme contrast to Rembrandt. You can show how the question of light and dark is treated in the rococo quite differently than by Rembrandt. You always need to mention the thought that the rococo, even though it is often not valued artistically as highly as the baroque, is actually a higher development in art.

A teacher: Should I then develop a kind of art-historical stages?

Dr. Steiner: I would show how these stages in their various forms are expressed in various regions. It is interesting how, during the time when Dürer was active, there existed in Holland something different from what Rembrandt was doing. Different times for different places.

I would arrange things so that I begin in the ninth grade only by concentrating upon the class and then develop the stages more strongly as I progress. Thus, by the eleventh grade, a review would awaken a strong picture of the various stages.

A teacher: Our proposal in teaching languages was to begin with the verb with the lowest beginners. From the fourth grade onward, we would develop grammar, and beginning with the ninth grade, we would do more of a review and literature.

Dr. Steiner: It is certainly quite right to begin with the verb. Prepositions are very lively. It would be incorrect to begin with nouns. I would like to explain that further, but this is a question I want to discuss when everyone who gives a language class is here, and N. is not here today. He did something today that is directly connected with how the verb and noun should be treated in class. We also need to answer the question of what is removed from the verb when it becomes a noun. When a noun is formed from a verb, a vowel is removed, and it thus becomes more consonant, it becomes more external. In English, every sound can become a verb. I know a woman who makes a verb out of everything that she hears. For instance, if someone says “Ah” she then says that he “ahed.”

We want to turn our attention to this as soon as possible.