The Rudolf Steiner Archive

From what I said yesterday about the course of historical evolution, you will have gathered that the way in which a human being confronts his fellow men at present was different before the year 333 A.D.

I assume that you are familiar with the soul principles of man according to anthroposophical knowledge. You know that we must differentiate in the soul between what was active in human nature up to the fifteenth century—the so-called intellectual or mind soul—and the consciousness soul which since that time has been principally active in those who have developed to the level of culture to which man has so far advanced.

In describing a particular activity of the soul as that of the intellectual or mind soul, it does not indicate that intellect, in itself, as we understand it today, is a special characteristic of the intellectual or mind soul. The intellectual or mind soul was developed particularly by the Greeks and among them intellect was certainly not what it is today. But you will have been able to gather that from yesterday's lecture.

Among the Greeks, concepts, ideas, were bestowed by the Spirit. But because of this, their intellect was not so cold, so lifeless and dry as ours is today when it is the result of effort. Intellectualism has first arisen through the special development in the consciousness soul. You can only get the right conception of the intellectual or mind soul by transporting yourselves into the mind of a Greek. Then you will certainly discover the difference between the relation of the Greek towards the world and our own. This will be made clearer by our lecture today.

These introductory words serve as a basis to understand that in the centuries preceding the modern age, that is, up to the fifteenth century, human beings met and spoke to one another out of the intellectual or mind soul. Today we face the consciousness soul. But to feel it the developing human being had to reach the turn of the nineteenth century. It has been brought about by circumstances already described. But because of this the problems of life have appeared in an entirely new way. Problems must be regarded in a new way nowadays, otherwise the connecting bridge between consciousness soul and consciousness soul, which means for modern humanity the bridge between one man and another, cannot be found. We are suffering from this at the present time—we cannot find the bridge between human being and human being.

Above all we must ask many of our questions in a new way, in a form that may at first seem grotesque. But it is not meant to be so. Now let us suppose that a three-year-old child were to resolve not to pass through the tedious process of waiting for its second teeth until the seventh year, but this child were to say: It is weary work to go through four more years until I get my second teeth; I will get them at once. (I could use other comparisons which would appear still more grotesque, but this one will suffice,) Such a thing is impossible, isn't it? For there are certain conditions of natural development.

And so, too, it is a condition of natural development, for which today only few people have any feeling, that only from a certain age onwards the human being can know something about the connections in life of which he must know, but which cannot be exhausted by information about external things. Naturally even at the age of nine we may know, for example, that the human being has ten fingers. But matters where a judgment formed by active thinking is necessary, cannot be known before we reach a certain time in life, that is, between about the eighteenth and nineteenth years. Just as it is impossible to get the second teeth before the seventh year so it is impossible to know something in its essential reality before the eighteenth year. It is simply impossible before the eighteenth year really to know about those things that are not just under our nose, things for which active judgment is necessary. Before this one may have heard something, may believe something on authority. But one cannot know anything about it. Before this we cannot unfold that inner activity of soul necessary for us to say: I know something about this or that which does not lie in a region accessible to mere eyes or ears. Such things are hardly mentioned today. They are, however, exceedingly important for life. If culture is to find roots again, one must speak about such things, and treat them in a knowledgeable way.

What, then, follows from the fact that before his eighteenth year the human being cannot, properly speaking, know anything? It follows that the human being before he is eighteen must depend upon those who are older, just as the infant is dependent on its mother's breast—it is in no way different. From this, however, there follows something of the greatest significance for the intercourse between teachers, educators, and the younger generation. If this is not heeded the connection is simply false.

Now, people are not conscious today that this is so; generally in the sphere of education, an opposite direction is taken. But it was not always so. If we look back before the first third of the fifteenth century, a real modern youth movement would not have been possible. At that time there could never have been a youth movement in the present form with a justified right of existence. Why could there have been no such thing? To answer this question we must turn to the conditions which obtained among those preparing for life in the monastic schools. We could also take the conditions for the young who were being prepared for trades. We should not find much difference. In the earliest of those times it was definitely realized that no one could be brought before his eighteenth year to the point of real knowledge. It would have seemed absurd had one maintained that it was possible to give anyone real knowledge before his eighteenth year. At that time it was known among older people, especially if they wanted to teach or educate: “The young cannot be brought to the point of actual knowledge. We must be capable of inducing the young to believe in what we, according to our knowledge, hold to be true.” And to lead the young to believe was a sacred task.

Today this is all upside-down, because what in earlier times was demanded only of the young, namely, belief, is now demanded in connection with the super-sensible of those who are grown-up. At that time the concept of belief was only there for those who were young. But it was regarded as something sacred. A man would have reproached himself with violating his most sacred duty if, as teacher or educator, he had failed to make the young believe in him out of the freshness and lively conviction of individual human nature, so that they thus received the truth. This shade of feeling lay in all education, in all instruction. In other respects the education and teaching of that time may today arouse a sense of antipathy because of its division into all kinds of classes and distinctions. But putting that aside, the desire was there to maintain the faith of the young.

Something else was connected with this: that teachers felt that it was first of all necessary to justify the claim that the young should believe in one. I shall explain this by means of an example in the monastery schools which were the only educational institutions in the time preceding the fifteenth century. One had first to justify the claim that one should be taken seriously; for this was the basis upon which the belief of the young was to be founded. A man did not think, just because he was a grown-up or because some authority had granted him a diploma or given him a post, that the young had to believe in him. It is true that diplomas and the like played a certain external role even in those days. But to justify the right to be taken seriously meant that to begin with one avoided giving them definite knowledge. It was not customary in those days to impart knowledge. It is so foreign to us today to connect any definite concept with the remark: We do not wish to impart knowledge to the young—that this saying is quite unintelligible. But at that time it was self-understood that before there was any wish to impart knowledge the young should be made to see and to feel that one was capable of something. It was only when the young people had reached a certain age that the teacher told them what he knew. The first step was to show what one could do, and for this reason the substance of the teaching was the trinity of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. These were not sciences. For it is only in the course of time that grammar has become the present pseudo-scientific monstrosity. In those times grammar was not at all what it is today; it was the art of combining and separating thoughts and words. Instruction in grammar was the teaching of an art, and all the more so in the case of dialectic and rhetoric. Everything given was so arranged that the pupils should feel the ability of their teachers, that they should feel their teachers capable of speaking and thinking and of letting beauty hold sway in their speaking. Grammar, dialectic and rhetoric—this was instruction in ability, in an ability closely connected with the human activity of the teacher and educator.

Today when we speak of the objective method of teaching, we keep the teaching quite apart from the personality of the teacher. We drag in every possible kind of gadget, even those dreadful calculating machines, in order that the teaching may be as impersonal as possible. We try to separate it entirely from the personal. Such a separation is not really possible. The endeavour to keep the teaching entirely apart from the personal only leads to the worst sides of the teacher coming into play, and his good side is quite unable to unfold when so much objectivity is dragged in.

Thus it was a natural demand on the teacher that he should first let the young feel what he was capable of in the very highest sense, as a human being. He had to show his mastery of speech, his mastery of thought, and how beauty was part of his speech. Only by letting the young for a time witness what one could do, was the right acquired to lead them gradually to what can be known, to arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music, to music as it was conceived of at that time, that is, as a permeation of the whole world-order by harmony and melody. Because a start was made from grammar, dialectic and rhetoric, one was able later to pour into arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music as much of the artistic as was possible, having had an artistic point of departure.

Now all this has evaporated, has vanished into thin air, with the first dawn of intellectualism. Of everything artistic that appeared then we have but the scantiest remains. Here and there, in certain universities, the doctor's degree still bears with it the title: “Doctor of Philosophy and of the Seven Liberal Arts.” But you know the real state of affairs where the Seven Liberal Arts are concerned! That can be established historically; for instance, the famous Curtius who taught in Berlin was an extraordinary personality who held a quite irregular diploma. If you ask for what subject he actually received the venia legendi, you would expect it to have been for history of art. But that is not correct. His teaching certificate was for Eloquentia—fluency of speech. But the times were such that this branch of knowledge was out of date. He was professor of eloquence, but in order to teach he took up history of art—and dealt with it most excellently. Even at the time when Curtius was teaching it would have been strange had eloquence been a branch of instruction. Eloquence or rhetoric, however, was one of the fundamental branches of instruction given to the young of earlier times, with the result that something thoroughly artistic came into education. But the introduction of the artistic into education was still in keeping with the old order in which intellectual or mind soul encountered intellectual or mind soul. And today people are still not able to put the question from the new point of view: How must things be in human affairs if consciousness soul is to meet consciousness soul? As soon as education is considered in the wider sense this question arises of itself. It has been put for a long time, for decades, but human beings have not yet developed an active enough thinking to formulate and feel it clearly. And where do we find an answer?

One answer to this question is found by learning to perceive—for it is a matter of the unfolding of will and not of a theoretical solution—that when the child enters earthly existence he brings with him the power of imitation; up to the time of the change of teeth, the child just imitates. Out of this power of imitation speech is learnt. Speech is, so to speak, poured into the child just as his blood circulation is poured into him when he comes into earthly existence. But the child should not come to a more and more conscious education by giving him out of the consciousness soul knowledge in the form of truth. In earlier times it was said: Before the eighteenth year the child cannot know anything, so he must be led through ability to knowledge which he accepts first as belief; thereby the forces of knowledge will be awakened in him between the eighteenth and nineteenth years. For it is out of the inner being that the forces of knowledge must be awakened. To keep the young waiting until their eighteenth year, adults behaved in relation to youth so as to show what they were capable of, afterwards educating them to experience together with the teacher in a provisional way, up to the eighteenth year, what later they would be expected to know. Up to the eighteenth or nineteenth year the “acquisition of knowledge” was provisional, because before the eighteenth or nineteenth year it is not possible really to know anything. But in fact no teacher can convey knowledge to any boy or girl if in their feeling there has not ripened the conviction: He is capable! A teacher has not the right sense of responsibility towards the human being if he wants to set to work before the young take it as a matter of course that be knows his job.

Before the students were given arithmetic—as arithmetic was understood in those days, and it was not the dry, abstract stuff of today—those who guided them into arithmetic, knowing too how to speak and think, had also the gift of eloquence. When the young know this out of their own feeling, it is a good reason for looking up to those who are older. When they only know that the teacher has a diploma, it sometimes happens that when the child is not more than ten everything goes to pieces. The question which was a living one in those days must again be given life. But because today consciousness soul encounters consciousness soul in human affairs, this question cannot be solved as formerly when human beings confronted each other with their mind souls. Today a different solution must be found.

Naturally, we cannot return to the liberal arts, although it would be preferable than what is being done today. We must reckon with modern conditions—not the external conditions but those dealing with the evolution of the human race. Here we must find the transition from imitation, which up to the change of teeth is natural in the child, to the stage when we can bring knowledge to the human being, reckoning first upon trust and belief and later upon his own judgment.

But there is an intermediate period, today a very critical one for the young. For this period we must find the solution of the most significant world-problem; upon these problems depends the future progress or otherwise of human evolution—even its total submergence. The question is: How must adults handle children between the years of imitation and the years when knowledge can be given? Today this is one of the weightiest of all cultural questions.

And what was the youth movement in so far as it is to be taken seriously? It can be summed up in the burning question: Have the older people an answer for this? And it became clear to the young that no such answer was to be found in the schools, so they drifted out—out into grove and meadow and into the fields. They preferred, instead of being school boys and girls, to become birds—birds of passage (Wandervögel).

We must look at life, not at theories, when one seeks to encompass the great problems of world-culture. If one really looks into life today one will find that the period between the age of imitation and the age at which the human being can receive knowledge in the form of truth must be filled if humanity is not to pine away. This must be done by giving the human being with artistic beauty what he needs for head, heart and will. The seven-foldness of grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music, grew out of an older cultural order; it was of the nature of art. Today too we need art but, according to the demands of the consciousness soul, it must not be specialized in the way of the Seven Liberal Arts. During the primary school age and far beyond it, for as long as education holds good, the whole teaching must be warmed through and fired by the artistic element. During the primary school years everything must be steeped in beauty, and in later years beauty must rule as the interpreter of truth.

Those human beings who have not learnt to walk in the ways of beauty, and through beauty to capture truth, will never come to the full manhood needed to meet the challenges of life. The great German writers divined this even if its full importance was not emphasized. They were not met with understanding. How clearly we see this search for truth through beauty in Goethe. Listen how he says: “Art is a manifestation of secret forces of Nature,” which simply means that only through an artistic grasp of the world does man reach the living truth—otherwise it is dead. And Schiller's words, the beautiful words: “Only through the dawn of beauty do you penetrate to the land of knowledge.” Unless we first permeate ourselves with the meaning of the path, [that] only through the artistic can we penetrate into the realm of truth, there can be no question of acquiring a real understanding of the super-sensible world in accordance with the age of the consciousness soul.

For you see, with the help of the recognized sciences, today knowledge of man is limited to the physical body alone. With modern science there is no possibility of knowing anything about the human being beyond his physical body. That is why science can only speak conclusively—yet grandly—about physiology or biology so long as it is a question of the physical body. True, people talk about psychology. It is only known as experimental psychology; phenomena of the life of soul are observed, but what figures as phenomena of the soul is connected with the physical body. They cannot form the slightest conception of any real phenomena of the life of soul. Hence they have hit upon the idea psycho-physical parallelism. Parallel lines, however, can meet only at infinity. So, too, the connection between the physical body and the soul can be understood only at infinity. Thus psycho-physical parallelism was setup.

All this is symptomatic of the incapacity of the age to understand the human being. For, firstly, if one seeks to understand the human being, the power of intellectualism ceases. Man cannot be understood out of the intellect. One may choose to adhere firmly and rigidly to intellectualism; but then, knowledge of the human being must be renounced. But for that one would be obliged to tear out the mind and heart and that is impossible. If it is torn out it withers way. For the head can renounce knowledge of man, but this entails the stunting of mind and heart. All our present culture is expressed in a withered life of mind and heart. And, secondly, understanding of man is not to be achieved with concepts that lead us in the domain of outer Nature. However much we can achieve outwardly with these concepts they cannot lead us to the second member of the human body, to the human etheric body, the body of formative forces.

Just imagine that with the methods of modern science man could know as much, let us say, as he will know at the end of earth evolution—quite an appalling amount! I will assume the existence of a very finished and very clever scientist. I am not saying that there are not among us scientists already near this stage. For it is not my belief that in the future there will be more progress in intellectualism. A different path will be taken. I have the very highest respect for the intellectualism of our learned men. Do not for a moment think that I am saying this out of a lack of respect. I mean this in all seriousness. There are vast numbers of very clever scientists, of this there is no doubt at all! But even were I to assume that science had reached its highest peak, it would still only be able to understand the physical body of man, nothing at all of the etheric body. Knowledge of the etheric body is not based upon phantasy. But the stimulus to acquire the faculty for perceiving this subordinate super-sensible member of man's nature can arise only out of artistic experience of the soul. Art must become the life blood of the soul.

The more people wish in our objective science to avoid carefully everything of the nature of art, the more are they led away from knowledge of man. Through the microscope and other instruments we have come to know a great deal. But it never leads us nearer to the etheric body, only farther from it. Finally we entirely lose the path to what is a prime necessity for understanding man. In the case of plants we may get the better of this, for they do not concern us so intimately. It does not worry the plant that it is not the product of the laboratory which modern science makes it out to be. It still goes on growing under the influence of the etheric force of the cosmos and does not limit itself to the forces presumed to exist by physics and chemistry. But when we confront men things are different. Then our feeling, our confidence, our reverence, in short all that is in our mind which in the age of the consciousness soul naturally rises above instinct—for with the consciousness soul everything rises above instinct—depends upon our having an education which allows us to perceive something more than merely the human physical body.

When teachers deprive us of insight into what man really is, we cannot expect those forces to flourish which in the right way place man over against man. Everything depends upon the human being to free himself from the shackles of mere observation and experiment. Indeed we can estimate observation and experiment at their right value only when we have become free of them, and the simplest way of breaking free is the artistic way.

Yes, when the teacher stands in front of the child again as—in an earlier epoch—grammar dialectic, rhetoric stood, that is to say, when the teacher stands before the young so that his way of teaching is again that of the artist, and is permeated by art, there will arise a different youth movement—it may appear unattractive to you, but nevertheless it will arise—which will crowd around the teachers who are artists, because there they will draw nourishment and receive what the young must expect from those who are older. The youth movement cannot be a mere opposition, a mere revolt against the older generation, for then it becomes like the infant who can do nothing because it cannot receive milk from its mother. What is to be learnt must be learnt. But it will be learnt when there is as natural an urge towards those who are older as the infant has towards its mother's breast, or as the small child feels when, by imitating, he learns to speak. This urge will be stimulated when the young find the artistic coming from the older generation, when truth first appears in the garb of beauty. In this way all that is best will be kindled in the young, not the intellect which always remains passive, but the will which stirs thinking into activity. Artistic education will be an education of the will, and it is upon the education of the will that everything else depends.

Tomorrow, then, we shall continue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

During the epoch of the consciousness soul the most abstract elements come consciously to life in the inner being of man, yet also in the subconscious, in what man desires of life, most concrete things are seeking to find their way into existence.

The human being who is growing into the epoch of the consciousness soul is held fast today in the abstract ideas of the head. But there lives outside man's head, if I may so express myself, the desire to experience more than the head is able to. To begin with man has only a connection with Nature formed between her and his head. Everything he absorbs in science, so far as he regards it as valid, is acquired from Nature through the head. Between man and Nature today there always stands man's head. It is as though everything that comes to the human being from the world were to pour itself into the head, as though the head were entirely choked up so that it lets nothing through its dense layers that could bring about a relation with the world. Everything remains stuck fast in the head. Man thinks everything through only with his head. But he cannot, after all, live merely as a head. For joined to the head there is always the rest of the organism. The life of the rest of the organism remains dull, unconscious, because everything is directed towards the head. Everything stops short there. The rest of man receives nothing from the world because the head allows nothing to reach it. The head has gradually become an insatiable glutton. It wants everything that comes from the world outside, and man is obliged to live, where his heart and the rest of his organism is concerned, as if he had nothing whatever to do with the surrounding world.

But these other parts of the organism develop wish, will, capacity for desire; they feel themselves isolated. For instance, the eyes catch colors and allow only scanty remains to be experienced in the head, so that the colors cannot work down, they cannot reach the blood nor the nervous system in the rest of the body. It is only in his head that man still knows something about the world. But he has all the more capacity for intensely desiring with the rest of his organism to meet the outside world. This again is something living in the maturing human being—this desire to find some kind of connection with the world not only with the head but with the rest of the organism; to learn to think not only with the head but with the whole man; to learn to experience the world with the whole man and not only with the head.

Now human beings today still have the capacity of learning to experience the world with the whole man at an early age. For what I have just been saying refers to the grown man. Before the change of teeth a child still has the faculty of grasping the world with his whole being. This is shown, for example, in the fact that it would be a mistake to suppose that the baby's experience when sucking milk is as abstract as an adult's. When we drink milk we taste it on our tongue, and perhaps round our tongue. But we lose the experience of taste when the milk has passed our throat. People ought to ask why their stomach should be less capable of tasting than the palate—it is not less but equally capable of tasting; only the head is a glutton. In the grown man the head claims all taste for itself. The child, however, tastes with its entire organism and therefore with its stomach. The infant is all sense-organ. There is nothing in him that is not sense-organ. The infant tastes with his whole being. Later this is forgotten by man; and this tasting is impaired by the child learning to speak. For then the head which has to take part in learning to speak begins to stir and develops the first stage of insatiability. The head in return for giving itself up to learning to speak reserves for itself the pleasures of tasting. Even as regards “tasting the world,” connection with the world is very soon lost. Now this “tasting the world” is of no particular importance, but the relation of the whole human being with the world is.

You see, we can get to know an important philosopher such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, for example, in various ways. Every way is right. I do not wish to stress any one of the following in particular. It is wonderful to go deeply into the philosophy of Fichte—which not many people do nowadays because they find it too difficult—and much is gained from it, yet they would have gained far more if with strong feeling they had walked behind Fichte and had seen him appear, planting the whole sole of his foot and especially his heels firmly on the ground. The experience of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's walk, the curious way he stumped his heel on the ground, is something of tremendous power. For those able to experience each step with the whole being, this would have been a more intensive philosophy than all Fichte was able to say from the platform. It may seem grotesque, but perhaps you will feel what I am trying to say.

Today such things have been entirely lost. At most a man, who not twenty but fifty years ago was a boy, can remember how some philosophy of this kind still existed among the country folk. In the country people still got to know each other in this way and many expressions with the wonderful plasticity of dialect reveal that what today is seen only with the head was then seen with the whole man.* (An incident is quoted here which is untranslatable because of the Austrian idiom.)

As I have said, these things have been lost. Human beings have reduced themselves to their head and have forced themselves to believe that the head is their most valuable part. But this has not brought them to an ideal condition, because the rest of human nature asserts its claims in the subconscious. Experiencing through something other than the head is lost today with the change of teeth in early childhood. If you have an eye for these things you can see the walk of the father or the mother in the son or daughter decades later. So exactly has the child lived itself into the adults around him that what he has felt becomes part of his own nature. But this living ourselves into something no longer spells culture with us. Culture is what the head observes and what can be worked out by means of the head. Sometimes people dispense with the head, and then they write down everything and put it in the archives! Then it goes out of the head into the hair where it cannot be retained because at thirty they no longer have any hair!

But really I am not saying this as a joke, nor for the sake of being critical, for this is all part of the necessary development of humanity. Men had to become like this to find through inner effort, inner activity, what they can no longer find in a natural way; in other words, to experience freedom.

And so today, after the change of teeth, we must simply pass over to a different way of experiencing the surrounding world from the way of the child who experiences it with his whole being. Therefore primary school education in future must proceed by way of the artistic I described yesterday, so that through the outer man the soul-nature of another human being is experienced. If you educate the human being by what is abstract and scientific, he experiences nothing of your soul. He only experiences your soul if you approach him through art. For in the realm of the artistic everyone is individual, each one is a different person. It is the ideal of science that everyone should be alike. It would be quite a thing—so say people today—were everyone to teach a different science. But that could not be, for science confines itself to what is the same for all human beings. In the realm of the artistic each human being is an individuality in himself. But because of this there can come about an individual, personal relation of the child to the man who is alive and active artistically, and this should be so. True, one does not come to the feeling for the whole man as outer physical being as in the first years of childhood, but to a feeling for the whole man in the soul of the one who is to lead.

Education must have soul, and as scientist one cannot have soul. We can have soul only through what we are artistically. We can have soul if we give science an artistic form through the way it is presented, but not through the content of science as science is understood today. Science is not an individual affair. Hence during the primary school age it establishes no relation between teacher and pupil. All instruction must therefore be permeated by art, by human individuality, for of more value than any thought-out curriculum is the individuality of the teacher and educator. It is individuality that must work in the school. What grows between teacher and pupil from the change of teeth to puberty—what is the link between them?

What binds them together is solely what man brings with him into his earthly existence from super-sensible, spiritual worlds, from his pre-earthly existence. My dear friends, it is never the head that recognizes what man brings with him out of his pre-earthly life. The head is made for the purpose of grasping what is on the earth. And on the earth there is only the physical part of man. The head understands nothing of what confronts one as the other human being and comes from pre-earthly existence. In the particular coloring the artistic impulse gives to the human soul there lives and weaves what the human being has brought down from pre-earthly existence; and between the period of the change of teeth and puberty the child is particularly disposed to feel in his heart what meets him in the teacher as coming out of pre-earthly existence. A young child has the tendency to feel the outer human form in its earthly shape; from his seventh to his fourteenth or fifteenth year he seeks—not through theoretical concepts but through the living-together with human beings—what does not lend it self to be grasped in concepts but is manifested in the teacher; and it resists conceptual form. Concepts have form, that is to say, external limits. But human individuality in the sense described has no external limits, only intensity, quality; it is experienced as quality, as intensity, very particularly in the period of life referred to. It is experienced, however, through no other atmosphere than that of art.

But we are now living in the epoch of the consciousness soul. The first treasures we acquire for the soul in this epoch consist in intellectual concepts, in abstractions. Today even the farmer loves abstractions. How could it be otherwise, for he indulges in the most abstract reading—the village newspaper and much else besides! Our riches consist really in abstractions. And therefore we must free ourselves from this kind of thinking, through developing what I spoke of yesterday. We must purify our thinking and mould it, into will. To this end we must make our individuality stronger and stronger, and this happens when we work our way through to pure thinking. I do not say this out of idle vanity, but because that is how I see it. Whoever works his way through to pure thinking as I have described in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity will find that this does not bring him simply to the possession of a few concepts which make up a philosophic system, but that it lays hold of his own individuality, of his pre-earthly existence.

He need not suddenly become clairvoyant; that will only happen when he is able to behold the pre-earthly. But he can confirm it by gaining the strength of will that is acquired in the flow of pure thoughts. Then the individuality comes forth. Then one does not feel happy with a philosophic system in which one concept proceeds from another and everything has rigid outlines. But one feels compelled to have one's being in a living and weaving world. We acquire a special kind of life of soul when we experience in the right way what is meant by the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.

Thus it is a bringing down of pre-earthly existence into the life of the human being. But it is also the preparation for the vocation of teacher, of educator. Through study we cannot become teachers. We cannot drill others into being teachers, because each one of us is already a teacher. Every human being is a teacher, but he is sleeping and must be awakened, and Art is the awakener. When this is developed it brings the teacher, as a human being, nearer to those whom he would educate. And as a human being he must come near to them. Those who are to be educated must get something from him as a human being. It would be terrible if anyone were to believe it possible to teach just because he knows a great deal. This leads to absolute absurdity. This absurdity will be apparent to you if you think about the following picture.

Now take a class in a school. There are perhaps thirty pupils in the class. Among these pupils there are, let us say, two geniuses, or only one, for that is enough. If we have to organize a school we cannot always give the post of teacher to a genius just for a future genius to be able to learn all he should be able to learn. You will say that this would not matter in the primary school. If the child is a genius he will go on to a higher school and there certainly find geniuses as teachers. You would not say this because experience does not bear it out—but you must admit the case may arise that the teacher is faced with a class in which there are children predestined to become cleverer than he is himself. Now our task of teacher consists in bringing the children not merely to our degree of cleverness, but to the full development of their own powers.

As teachers, therefore, we may come into the position of having to educate somebody who will be greater than we. It is impossible to provide schools with enough teachers unless one holds to the principle that it does not matter if the teacher is not as clever as the pupil will be some day. Nevertheless he will still be a good teacher because it does not depend on the giving out of knowledge but on activating the individuality of the soul, upon the pre-earthly existence. Then it is really the child who educates himself through us. And that is the truth. In reality we do not educate at all. We only disturb the process of education when we intervene too energetically. We only educate when we behave in such a way that through our own behavior the child can educate himself. We send the child to primary school in order to rid him of troublesome elements. The teacher should see to it that the troublesome elements are got rid of, that the child escapes conditions under which he cannot develop. So we must be quite clear upon this point: we cannot cram anything into a human being through teaching and education. What we can do is to see to it that the human being, as he grows up, should succeed in developing the abilities within him. That we can do, but not through what we know but through what stirs inwardly within us in an artistic way. And even if the rare thing should happen that as teachers we are not particularly endowed with genius—one should not say this, but in spite of your youth movement you are old enough for me to say it—if the teacher has only a kind of instinctive artistic sense he will offer less hindrance to the growth of the child's soul than the teacher who is inartistic and tremendously learned. To be tremendously learned is not difficult.

These things must for once be said most emphatically. For even when spoken clearly, our age does not hear them. Our age is terribly unreceptive for such things. And regarding those who assure one that they have understood everything, after thirty years it is often apparent that they have understood nothing whatever. Thus the configuration of soul in the human being is what is essential in practical pedagogy, in instruction and education, during the child's life between the change of teeth and puberty. And after this the human being enters a period of life in which, in this age of the consciousness soul, still deeper forces must work up out of human nature if men are to give anything to one another.

You see, the feeling with which one man meets another is tremendously complicated. If you wanted to describe the whole round of sympathies and antipathies, and the interworking of sympathies and antipathies with which you meet another man, you would never come to an actual definition. In fifty years you would not succeed in defining what you can experience in five minutes as the relations of life between man and man. Before puberty it is pre-eminently an experience of the pre-earthly. The pre-earthly sheds its light through every movement of the hands, every look, through the very stressing of words. Actually it is the quality of the gesture, the word, the thought, of the teacher that works through to the child and which the child is seeking.

And when as grown-up people—so grown-up that we have reached the age of fifteen or sixteen or even beyond!—we meet other human beings, then the matter is still more complicated. Then, what attracts or repels others in a human being actually veils itself in a darkness impenetrable to the world of abstract concepts. But if, with the help of Anthroposophy, we investigate what one can really experience in five minutes but cannot describe in fifty years, we find that it is what rises up from the previous earth-life or series of earth-lives into the present life of the soul, and what is exchanged. This indefinite, indefinable element that comes upon us when we meet as adults is what shines through from earlier lives on earth into the present. Not only the pre-earthly existence but everything the human being has passed through in the way of destiny in his successive earth-lives.

And if we study what is working upon the human being we find how today, in the epoch of the consciousness soul—because everything is pushed into the head and what we take in from the outer world cannot get through to man as a whole—our head culture sets itself against what alone can work from man to man. Human beings pass one another by because they stare at each other only with the head, with the eyes—I will not say, because they knock their heads together! Human beings pass one another by because only what plays over from repeated earth-lives can work between man and man, and modern culture does nothing to develop a sense for this. But this must also be brought into our education; we should be able to experience what is deeper down in man, what plays over from previous earth-lives. This will not be achieved unless we draw into our education the whole life of man as it is lived out on earth.

Today there is only a feeling for the immediate present. Therefore all that is asked of education is that it shall benefit the child. But if this is the only thing that is asked, very little service is rendered to life. Firstly, because the question is put one-sidedly, one gets a one-sided answer; and secondly, the child should be educated for the whole of life, not only for the schoolroom or the short period after school so that he does not disgrace us. But we need an understanding for the imponderable things in life, an understanding for the unity in man's life as a whole as it unfolds on earth.

There are human beings whose very presence, at a certain age, is felt by those around them as a benediction. There are such human beings. If we were to look for the reason why such people, not through their acts but through their being, have become a blessing to those around them, we would find that as children they were fortunate to have been able in a natural way to look up to someone in authority whom they could revere. They had this experience at the right time of life. And because they were able to revere, after many years they become a blessing to the world around them. It can be expressed concisely by saying: There are human beings who can bless. There are not many who can bless. But it is a question of the power to bless. There are men who certainly have the power to bless. They acquire it in later life, because in their childhood they have learnt to pray. Two human gestures are causally connected: the gestures of praying and blessing; the second develops from the first. No one learns to bless who does not learn it from prayer. This must not be understood sentimentally or with the slightest tinge of mysticism, but rather as a phenomenon of Nature is observed—except that this phenomenon is nearer to us in a human way.

Now we have to care for a child hygienically so that he can grow in accordance with nature. If you were to devise an apparatus for a child that would keep him a certain size so that he could not grow, so that even the size of his arm would not change and the young human being would remain as he is all his life, this would be terrible. The human being must be treated in such a way that he can grow. What would it be like were the little child not to change, were he to look no different ten years hence? It would be dreadful were he to remain as he is at four or five. But in school we supply the children with concepts and cherish the notion that they should remain unchanged for the whole of the children's lives. The child is supposed to preserve them in memory; fifty years hence they are to be the same as they are today. Our school text-books ensure that the child remains a child. We should educate the child so that all his concepts are capable of growth, that his concepts and will-impulses are really alive. This is not easy. But the artistic way of education succeeds in doing it. And the child has a different feeling when we offer him living concepts instead of dead ones, for unconsciously he knows that what he is given grows with him just as his arms grow with his body.

It is heart-breaking to witness children being educated to define a concept, so that they have the concept as a definition only. It is just the same as if we wanted to confine a limb in an apparatus. The child must be given pictures capable of growth, pictures which become something quite different in ten or twenty years. If we give him pictures that are capable of growth, we stimulate in him the faculty through feeling to find his way into what is often hidden in the depths of the human individuality. And so we see how complicated are the connections We learn to come to a deeper relation to human beings through the possibility being given us in our youth for growth in our life of soul.

For what does it mean to experience another human being? We cannot experience other people with dead concepts. We can comprehend them only if we meet them in such a way that they become for us an experience which takes hold of us inwardly, which is something for our own inner being. For this, however, activity in the inner being is needed. Otherwise our culture will reach the point which it is fast approaching. People go out to luncheons, dinners and teas, without knowing much about one another. Yet it is about themselves that, relatively speaking, modern people know most. And what do they instinctively make of their experiences? Suppose they go about among the people they meet at lunch or dinner. At most they think—Is he like me or is he different? And if we believe him to be like ourselves, we consider him a fine fellow; if he is not like ourselves, then he is not a fine fellow and we do not trouble ourselves about him any longer. And as most men are not the same as ourselves, the most we can do is sometimes to believe—because really it would be too boring to find no fine fellow anywhere—that we have found someone like ourselves. But in this way we do not really find another human being but always ourselves. We see ourselves in everyone else. For many people this is relatively good. For if they were to meet somebody who in their opinion was not altogether, but yet to a certain extent, a fine fellow, and were really to comprehend him, this would be so overwhelming an experience that it would quite drown their own manhood, and by a second encounter their ego would be drowned still more deeply. In the case of a third or fourth there would be no approaching him at all, for by that time he would certainly have lost himself! There is too little inner strength and activity, too little kernel, too little inner individuality developed, so that people for fear of losing themselves dare not experience the other human being. Thus men pass one another by.

The most important thing is to establish an education through which human beings learn once again how to live with one another. This cannot be done through hollow phrases. It can be done only through an art of education founded upon a true knowledge of the human being, that art of education referred to here. But our intellectualistic age has plunged the whole of life into intellectuality. In our institutions we actually live very much as if no longer among human beings at all, we live in an embodied intellect in which we are entangled, not like a spider in its own web, but like countless flies which have got themselves caught.

When we meet anyone, do we feel in any sense what this human being can become for us? Do we judge today as humanly as this? No, for the most part we do not—present company is always excepted—for the most part we do not but we ask—well, perhaps on the door of a certain man's house there will be a little plate with an inscription “Counselor at Law,” conveying a concept of some kind. So now we know something about this man. In another case the inscription is “Medical Practitioner.” Now we know that the man can cure us. In another case the inscription is “Professor of English.” And now we know something about him—and so on and so forth. If we want to know something about chemistry, how do we set about it? We have no other means than to enquire if somewhere there is a man who is a qualified chemist. What he can tell us then is chemistry. And so we go on. We are really caught up in this spider's web of concepts. We do not live among human beings. We trouble ourselves very little about human beings. We only concern ourselves with what is on paper. For many people that is their only essential fact. How else should they know what kind of man I am unless it is written down somewhere on paper!

This, of course, is all rather an overstatement, and yet it does characterize our epoch. Intellectuality is no longer merely in our heads but it is woven around us everywhere. We are guided by concepts and not by human impulses.

When I was still fairly young, at Baden near Vienna I got to know the Austrian poet Hermann Rollett, long since dead. He was convinced that the right thing was development towards intellectualism, that one must develop more and more towards the intellectual. At the same time, however, he had an incurable dread of this, for he felt that intellectualism only takes hold of man's head. And once when I visited him with Schröer, we were talking with him and he began to speak in poetical fashion about his incurable fear in regard to culture. He said: When one looks at human beings today, they cannot use their fingers properly; many of them cannot write; they get writer's cramp, their fingers atrophy. When it is a question of sewing on trouser buttons, only tailors can do that! It is dreadful; the limbs are atrophying. The fingers and the limbs will not only get less skillful but they will also get smaller, they will wither away and heads will get larger and larger. That is how he described his poet's dream and then he said he thought the time would come when only balls, balls which are heads, would be rolling about over the surface of the earth.

That was the cultural dread I met with in this man in the last third of the nineteenth century. Now he was also a child of his age, that is to say, he was a materialist, and that was why he had so great a dread that at some point in the future such living heads would be rolling about on the earth. Physical heads will not do this. But to a serious extent the etheric and astral heads do it already today. And a healthy education of the young must preserve human beings from this, must set human beings upon their legs again, and lead them to the point where, if they are pondering over something, they will feel the beating of their heart again and not merely add something to their knowledge. With this we must reckon if in preparation for man's future, we penetrate ourselves with the art that must enter education. What more there is to be said on this subject I shall try to develop for you tomorrow.

From what has been said during the last few days it will be clear that nowadays one human being meets another in a different way from what was the case in the past, and this is of quite recent date—in fact, it entered human evolution with the century.

In poetical language no longer suitable for today, former ages foretold what in this century has come for the whole of humanity. Former ages spoke of how, at the end of the nineteenth century, the so-called Dark Age would have run its course, how in a new age there must come quite new conditions in human evolution, conditions difficult to attain because at first man is not accustomed to them. And in spite of the fact that we have now entered an epoch of light, much will seem more chaotic than what was brought by the long, gloomy Age of Darkness.

We must not merely translate into our language what was formerly presented in a picture derived from ancient clairvoyant vision: if so, we should be understanding only the old again. We must learn to perceive it anew with the spiritual means of today. We must permeate ourselves deeply with the consciousness that in this epoch for the first time human ego meets human ego in an intercourse of soul that is free of all veils.

Were we to go back to the first epoch after the great Atlantean earth-catastrophe, to the seventh or eighth millennium before Christ, we should find that fully grown men actually confronted one another as today only the child confronts grownups, with comprehension of the complete human being as I characterized it yesterday, a comprehension where soul and spirit are not found separated from the body but where the physical body is perceived as being of the nature of soul and spirit. In the epoch I have called the ancient Indian, which followed immediately upon the Atlantean catastrophe, the human being did not consider soul and spirit in the abstract way that we do today, with a certain justification.

It is precisely expressions used in this most ancient epoch which seem to us entirely spiritual which are misunderstood today. We misunderstand them if we believe that in the first post-Atlantean epoch of culture men overlooked all they saw in the outer world and were only willing to concentrate on what existed outside the world of the senses. This was by no means the case. They had a much fuller perception of, let us say, a human movement, or of the play of expression on a countenance, or of the way young people grow in five years, or of the plastic development of new leaves and blossoms in a plant, or in an animal of the way the whole of its forces pour into the hoof and other parts of its leg. Men did direct their gaze into the world we call that of the senses, but in the material processes they saw the Spiritual. For them what in the material world presented itself to their senses was at the same time spiritual. Naturally, such perception was only possible because over and above what we see in the sense-world, they actually perceived the Spiritual. They saw not only the meadow carpeted with flowers but over the flowers they saw in a vibrating, active existence the cosmic forces which draw forth the plants from the earth. In a certain way they saw—it seems grotesque to modern man but I am telling you facts—how the human being bears on his head a kind of etheric, astral cap. In this etheric, astral cap they experienced the forces underlying the growth of the hair. People today are prone to believe that the hair grows out of the head simply by being pushed from inside, whereas the truth is that outer Nature draws it forth. In olden times men saw the reality of things which later as an artistic copy shed their light into civilization. Just think of the helmet of Pallas Athene for instance which quite obviously belongs to the head. Those who do not rightly experience this helmet think of it as placed upon her head. It is not placed upon the head. It is bestowed by a concentration of raying cosmic forces that are working around the head of Pallas Athene and densifying, so that in olden times it would have seemed impossible to the Greek to form the head of Pallas Athene without this covering. They would have felt as we do today about a scalped head. I am not saying that this was the case among Greeks of later times.

In ancient times men were able to experience the sense-world as having soul and spirit, because they experienced something of an etheric and soul-spiritual nature. But these men did not ascribe any great importance to the soul and spirit. People readily believe that in the oldest Mysteries the pupils were principally taught that the sense world is semblance and the spiritual world the only reality, but this is not true. The strivings of the Mysteries were directed to making the material world comprehensible to the human soul by the roundabout way of comprehending what is of the nature of soul and spirit.

Already in the epoch of the first post-Atlantean culture, the Mysteries were striving to understand man as a being of soul and spirit, and particularly inwardly—not theoretically—to feel, to interpret any manifestation of the physical man in terms of the spirit. For example, it would have been impossible for them to have given a mechanistic explanation of walking, because they knew that when man walks he has an experience with every step, an experience which today lies deep beneath the threshold of consciousness. Why do we walk? We walk because when we stretch our leg forward and put down our foot, we come into a different relation to the earth and to the heavens, and in the perception of this change—that we place one foot into a different degree of warmth from that in which the other foot has remained—in the perception of this interchanging relation to the cosmos there lies something that is not only mechanical but distinctly super-dynamic.

This was the perception in more ancient times; the gaze of the human being even then was directed to man's external form, to his external movements. And it would never have occurred to the men of that time to imagine that what they saw as dumb show in Nature—the growth and configuration of plants, the growth and configuration of animals—was to be interpreted in the way that we scientifically do today. In the human heart and mind there was something altogether different; a man, belonging to the old Indian civilization to which I referred yesterday, felt it as entirely natural that during a certain period of the year the earth breathes in the being of the heavens, and during another period of the year she does not breathe in but works within herself by shutting out the heavens. It was natural for it to be different in ancient India because climatic conditions were different. But were we in imagination to extend our own climatic conditions we should have to say: During the summer the earth sleeps, gives herself up to the heavenly forces, receives the power of the sun in such a way that this power of the sun pours into the earth's unconsciousness. Summer is the sleep of the earth. Winter is her waking. During the winter the earth thinks through her own forces what during the summer in her sleeping and dreaming she has thought in relation with the heavens. During the winter the earth works over in her own being what during the summer has come to her through the in-working of the forces and powers of the cosmos.

Nowadays little is known of these things—in practical knowledge, I mean—as when the peasant out in the country puts potatoes into the ground during the winter. But nobody thinks about the fate of these potatoes because men have lost the faculty of getting right into the being of Nature. It would never have occurred to human beings who felt in this way to look out into Nature at animals, plants and minerals shining and sparkling in their color, to imagine that in this there is one single reality, a dance of atoms—that would have seemed utterly unreal. “But man needs this dance of atoms for his calculations about Nature.” Yes, that is just it, people believe they need the dance of atoms to be able to make calculations about Nature. Calculations in those days meant being able to live in numbers and magnitudes and not having to attach these numbers and magnitudes to what is only densified materiality. I do not want to raise objections against the service densified materiality renders today, yet one must mention how different the configuration of souls was in that more ancient age.

Then another age came in my book Occult Science. I have called it the old Persian; everything was built upon the principle of authority. People preserved during the whole of their life what is today experienced in a dull, repressed form between the seventh and fourteenth years. They took it with them into later life. It was more intimate but at the same time more intense. In a certain sense human beings looked through the external movement, through man's external physiognomy, or through a flower. They looked at something that was less outwardly objective. What they saw gradually became only a revelation of what exists as true reality. For the first post-Atlantean epoch of civilization the whole external world was simply reality, spiritual reality. The human being was spirit. He had a head, two arms and a body, and that was spirit. There was nothing to deter the ancient Indian from addressing the being he saw standing on two legs, with arms and a head, as spirit. In the next epoch men already saw more deeply into things. It was more in the nature of a surface behind which something more etheric was perceived, a human being more in a form of light. Man had the faculty of perceiving this form of light because atavistic clairvoyance was still present.

And then came the epoch of the third post-Atlantean culture. One felt the need for penetrating still further into the inner being of man or of Nature. The outer had become clearly perceptible and man is beginning to look through the outer perceptible to the spirit and soul within. The Egyptians, who belong to this epoch of the third post-Atlantean culture, mummified the human body. In the epoch of the old Indian culture, mummification would have made no sense; it would have been a fettering of the spirit. A distinction had arisen between body and spirit by the time mummification was practised. Formerly men would have felt they were imprisoning the human spirit, no distinction having been made yet between body and spirit, if the body had been embalmed as mummy.

Then among the Greeks—and actually into our own time—there was already a clearly established separation between the body and the spirit and soul. Today we can do no other than keep these two apart, the bodily and the soul-spiritual. Thus in earlier epochs man really saw the ego through sheaths.

Imagine the ancient Indian. He did not look at man's ego. His language was such that it really only expressed outwardly visible gestures and outwardly visible surfaces. The whole character of Sanscrit, if studied according to its spirit and not only according to its content, is of the nature of gesture, of surface; it expresses itself above all in movement and contour. The ego was therefore seen through the sheath of the physical body, in the next epoch through the sheath of the etheric, in the third epoch through the sheath of the astral man, man's ego still remaining indefinite, until in our epoch having cast off its veil it enters into human intercourse.

No one can adequately describe the impulse that has entered modern evolution, unless he draws attention to the relationship of ego to ego, free from the sheaths, which is emerging in a totally new way, though slowly, today. I shall not speak in the usual sense of our age being an age of transition. For I should like to know which age is not! Every age is an age of transition from the preceding one to the one that follows. And as long as one simply says—Our age is an age of transition—well, it remains just a hollow phrase. There is something to grasp only when one describes what makes a transition. In Our age we are going over from experiencing the other man through sheaths, to direct experience of the other man's ego.

And this is the difficulty in our life of soul; we have to live into this quite new relation between man and man. Do not think that we must learn all the teachings about the ego. It is not a question of learning theories about the ego. No matter whether you are a peasant on the land or someone working with his hands, or a scholar, it holds good for all of you that at the present time, in so much as we have to do with civilized men, their egos meet without sheaths. But that gives its special coloring to the whole of our cultural development.

Try to develop a feeling for how in the Middle Ages there was still much that was elementary in the way in which one human being experienced another. Let us imagine ourselves in a medieval town.

Let us say, a locksmith meets a town councilor in the street. Now what was experienced was not just that the man knew the other to be a town councilor; it was not exhausted by the locksmith knowing—we have elected that man. It is true there existed a link which gave the men a certain stamp. One belonged to the tailors' guild, one to the locksmiths' guild. But this was experienced in a more individual way. And when one as locksmith met a town councilor, he knew from other sources than from the directory: That is a town councilor. For the man walked differently, his look was different, he carried his head differently. People knew that he was a town councilor from things other than documents, the newspaper or things of the sort. One man experienced the other, but experienced him through his sheaths.

But in the sense of modern evolution we must increasingly experience human beings without sheaths. This has gradually arisen. But in a certain sense men are afraid of it. If we had a cultural psychology then it would describe, in connection with recent centuries, men's fear of being obliged to consort with human beings whose egos are unsheathed. It is a kind of terror. In the form of a picture, one might say that those people who in the last century really experienced their own times have frightened eyes. These frightened eyes, which you would not have been able to find either among the Greeks or the Romans, make their appearance in the middle of the sixteenth century, especially in the sixteenth century. Then we follow up these frightened eyes in literature. For instance, one can form a clear mental picture on reading the writings of Bacon of Verulam. We can glean from his writings with what kind of eyes he looked out at the world. Still more so with the eyes of Shakespeare. They can be pictured quite clearly. One need only supplement the words by the descriptions which circulated of Shakespeare's appearance. And so we must picture the people of recent centuries who lived most deeply in their own times as having frightened eyes, an unconsciously frightened look. At least once in their lives they had this frightened look. Goethe had it. Lessing had it. Herder had it. Jean Paul never got rid of it to the day of his death. We must have an organ for perceiving these subtleties if we want to develop any understanding of historical evolution.

Men who want to find their way livingly into the twentieth century should realize that those who represented the nineteenth century can no longer represent the twentieth.

It goes without saying that books about Goethe written in the nineteenth century by the philistine Lewes, or the pedant, Richard M. Meyer, can give no real conception of Goethe. The only literary work of the last third of the nineteenth century which can give some idea of Goethe is at best the Goethe of Herman Grimm. But that is a nightmare to those suffering from the great cultural disease of modern times, philistinism. For in this vast volume on Goethe you find the sentence: “Faust is a work that has fallen from heaven.” Just imagine what the commentators who pull everything to pieces have said; and imagine someone comes along and says that this should not be pulled to pieces. This may not seem important, yet we must notice such things in speaking about cultural phenomena. Read the first chapter of Grimm's Raphael and you will have the feeling: this must be an abomination to every orthodox professor, nevertheless something of it can be taken over into the twentieth century, for the very reason that for the orthodox professor nothing in it is right.

Thus man was seen within sheaths. Now we must learn to see him as an ego-being without sheaths. This alarms people because they are no longer capable of perceiving what I have described as the sheaths in which, for insurance, one could have seen our town councilor. It is no longer possible, at any rate not in Middle Europe, to give people outer representations of the sheaths. For outer representations, the sheaths still had a connection with the spiritual content existing in medieval councilors. Today—I must confess—it would be difficult for me to distinguish by their outer sheaths between a councilor and a privy councilor. In the case of a soldier, in the days when militarism was supreme one could still do it. But one had studiously to learn to do it, to make it a special study. It was no longer connected with basic human experience.

So there existed a kind of terror, and people made themselves indifferent to it by means of what I described yesterday as the web of intellectualism that spreads itself around us, and within which all are caught. In the centers of culture which have retained something of the East, the inner is still brought into a relation with the outer, the basic with the intellectualistic. Those of you who come from Vienna will sense that in the last century this was still very much so. For in Vienna, for instance, a man who wore spectacles was known as “doctor.” People did not bother about the diploma; they were concerned about the exterior. And anyone who could afford to take a cab was an aristocrat. It was the exterior. There was still a feeling of wanting to live within what can he described in words.

The great transition to this newer age consists in man meeting man free of his sheaths—according to his inner disposition, to what the soul demands; but the capacities for this untrammeled encounter have not yet been acquired; above all we have not yet acquired the possibility for a relation between ego and ego. But this must be prepared for by education. That is why the question of education is of such burning importance.

And now let me tell you quite frankly when the great step forward in educational method can first be made towards the individual ego-men of the new age. But I beg you not to use what I am going to say to impress other people who are of an opposite opinion, for if you do so the only result will be a volley of abuse against Anthroposophy. We shall work rightly in education only when we have learned to feel a certain bashfulness about speaking about it at all, when we feel abashed at the idea of talking about education. This is astonishing but it is true. The way in which education is being talked about will be regarded as shameless in future. Today everyone talks about it and about what he considers right. But education does not allow itself to be tied down in formal concepts, nor is it anything we come to by theorizing. One grows into education by getting older and meeting younger human beings. And only when one has grown older and has met younger people, and through meeting younger people and having once been young oneself we penetrate to the ego—only then can education be taken quite naturally.

Many suggestions about education today seemed to me no different from the content—horrible dictum—of the book of the once famous Knigge, who also gave directions as to how grownup people should be approached. It is the same with books on good breeding. Therefore what I have said and written about education, and what is attempted practically in the Waldorf School, aims only at saying as much as possible about the characteristics of the human being, in order to learn to know him, not to give directions: “You are meant to do this in such-and-such a way.” Knowledge of man—that is what must be striven for, and the rest left to God, if I may use this religious phrase. True knowledge of man makes the human being a teacher. For we should really get the feeling that we are ashamed to talk about education. But under the cultural conditions of today we have to do many things that ought to make us ashamed. The time will come when we shall no longer need to talk about education. Today these ways of thinking are lacking, but only for a little more than a hundred years.

Now read Fichte or Schiller thoughtfully. You will find in their writings what to modern people appears quite horrible. They have spoken, for example, about the State and about organizations to make the State into what it should be. And they have spoken about the aim of the State, saying: Morality must be such that the State becomes superfluous, that human beings are capable out of themselves of becoming free men, capable through their morality of making the State superfluous.

Fichte said that the State should be an institution which gives over the reins and gradually becomes entirely superfluous. It would hardly be possible to demand this of our contemporaries nor would they take it seriously. Today it would make a similar impression as the following incident on a troupe of actors.—A play had been performed for the fiftieth time by a traveling company when the director said: “Now that we have performed this for the fiftieth time, the prompter's box can be dispensed with.” But the actors were quite terrified at the idea. Finally one of them pulled himself together and said: “But, sir, then one will see the prompter!” This is about what would happen with our men of the present day. They do not see that the prompter, too, can be dispensed with. Thus it is today. The State will have found its best constitution when it makes itself superfluous, but the government officials and the Chancellors and the Privy Councilors—what would they all say to such a thing?

Now in practical everyday life we must be right within this great revolution going on in the depths of modern souls if we are to reach an outlook where there is as little talk about education as there was in older cultural epochs. Education was not talked about in earlier days. The science of education first arose when man could no longer educate out of the primal forces of his being. But this is more important than is supposed. The boy or girl, seeing the teacher come into the classroom, must not have the feeling: “He is teaching according to theoretical principles because he does not grasp the subconscious.” They want a human relation with the teacher. And that is always destroyed when educational principles are introduced. Therefore if we are to get back to a natural condition of authority between young and old it is of infinite importance, and an absolute necessity, that education shall not be talked about so much, that there should be no need to talk or think about it as much as is done today. For there are still many spheres in which education is conducted according to quite sound principles, although they are beginning to be broken through.

You see, theoretically it is all quite clear, and theoretically people know how to handle the matter, just as it is handled by the academic opinion of the present-day. But in practice it is quite good if there should happen to anyone what happened to me. A friend had scales by his plate and weighed the different foods so as to take the right quantity of each into his organism. From the physiological point of view this was correct—quite definitely so. But picture this transposed into the realm of education. Unfortunately it does happen, though in a primitive way and only in certain connections. But it is more wholesome when this happens intuitively, if parents, instead of buying some special physiological work on nourishment, judge how to feed their children through the feeling of how they themselves were once fed. And so in Pedagogy one must overcome everything which lays down rules as to how much food should be taken into the stomach, and of striving in the sphere of education for real insight into the nature and being of man. This insight into the nature of man will have a certain result for the whole of human life.

You see, whoever comes to an understanding of the human being in the way I have been describing during these days, and thereby imbues his knowledge with artistic perception, will remain young. For there is some truth in this—once we have grown up we have actually become impoverished. Yet it is of the greatest importance that we should have forces of growth within us. What we have in us as a child is of the utmost importance. But to this we are led back in inner experience through true knowledge of man. We really become childlike when we acquire the right knowledge of man and thereby qualify ourselves to meet those who are young and those who are still children in the right way.

There must be a striving that says, not in an egoistical sense as often happens today: “Except ye become as little children ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” We must seek for this even in practical life. Unless we were imbued with an active human force which worked in us during childhood, we could never be educators. Pedagogics is not enough if it makes the teacher or educator merely clever. I do not say that it should make him empty of thought. But in this way one does not become empty of thought. Pedagogics that makes the teacher merely clever is not of the right kind; the right kind of pedagogics makes the teacher inwardly alive and fills him with lifeblood of the soul which pours itself actively into his physical life-blood. And if there is anything by which we can recognize a true teacher or educator, it is that his pedagogical art has not made him a pedant.

Now, my dear friends, that you can find a pedant working in some place is perhaps only a myth or a legend. If teachers are pedants, if these myths and legends are founded on truth, then we may be sure that pedagogy has taken a wrong road. To avoid giving offense I must assume these legends and myths to be hypothetical and say: If pedants and philistines were to be found in the teaching profession it would be a sign that our Education is going under. Education is on the ascent only when, in its experience and whole way of working, pedantry and philistinism are driven right out of men. The true teacher can be no philistine, can be no pedant.

In addition to this, so that you may be able to check what I have been saying, I ask you to consider from what vocation in life the word pedant is derived. Then, perhaps, you will be able to contribute to the recognition of the reality of what has been indicated; I do not want to enlarge upon it because already much that I have said is being taken amiss. It is only on the assumption mentioned that we can have a right Pedagogy, otherwise it would have to become a Pedagogy in accordance with what I have been giving you in these lectures. Thus in the lecture tomorrow I will attempt to bring these talks to some conclusion.

Naturally a great deal more could be said in conclusion to what I have put before you here. In speaking one is obliged to explain things in words and ideas. What is intended is the unity of character, the unity of force, that one would wish to make stream through the words and ideas. Let me sum up by using a half pictorial form to convey what I still wish to say to you. Elaborate it for yourselves and you will perhaps understand better what I mean.

Now from various aspects I have drawn your attention to how every civilized human being today lives in intellectualism in a life of concepts, which in our epoch has developed in the most intense, penetrating way. Mankind has worked itself up to the most abstract concepts. You need only compare, for instance, how in an age preceding our own, Dante received descriptions of the world from his teacher. Everything was still permeated with soul, everything was still of a spiritual nature; it wafted like a magic breath through the whole of Dante's great poem. Then came the time when humanity molded what was experienced inwardly into abstract concepts. Men have always had concepts but, as I have already explained to you, they were revealed concepts, not concepts that no longer corresponded to inner revelations of the soul. Only when men had wrestled through to concepts no longer springing from revelations did they evolve concepts from observation of external Nature, and from outer experiments—only then did they allow validity to what was received from outside through mere observation.

If we go deeply into the old world of thought, into that of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, we have the feeling that it was united with the inner being of the soul. There was still an inner life then, a living from within outwards, an experiencing which arose in man because he had united himself with this life.

The conceptual system even of the most primitive human being is acquired from outside today, from external Nature observed by the senses. And even those who still cling to the older concepts no longer hold to this belief with any depth of conviction, not even the peasant. When something is passed on from outside, something established scientifically and verified by Nature, it becomes the ideal towards which people strive. But concepts, ideas, arising out of the inner life of the soul, have the characteristic by thus struggling out of the soul, as I have already explained, of becoming dead concepts. And the human being feels it right that, in so far as they are born out of his inner being, these concepts shall die. But the strange thing that has come to pass during the last few centuries, reaching its culmination in the nineteenth century, is that the concepts dying in the inner being took on fresh life from the outer world. It can actually be proved by a historical phenomenon. Think how Goethe out of his inner being built up a whole conception of evolution. It reached its zenith in his concept of metamorphosis. We have the feeling that we are working out of the living into the dead, but that the human being has to work into what is dead because the living implies coercion. Freedom could only arise by concepts becoming dead. Yet these concepts have taken on new life from outer Nature. Inasmuch as Darwinism, for instance, has come upon the scene—even in our Middle European civilization—we have concepts and ideas which acquire new life from outer Nature. But it is a life which devours the human being.

Today we must feel the full intensity of being surrounded by a thinking bound to Nature but which devours the human being. How does it devour the human being? With the ideas the most advanced kind of thinking draws from Nature, we can never understand man. What does our magnificent theory of evolution provide? It gives us a survey of how animals evolve from animals, and how man stands before us—but only as the culminating point in the ranks of the animal kingdom, and not what we are as men.

This is what modern civilization tells us. Previous civilizations understood the kingdoms of Nature as arising out of man, modern civilization grasps man as arising out of Nature, as the highest animal. It does not grasp to what extent animals are imperfect men. If we fill our soul with what our thinking has become through Nature, there appears in the picture of the man-devouring dragon what is the most potent factor in modern civilization. Man feels himself confronting a being who is devouring him.

Consider how this devouring has taken effect. Whereas from the fifteenth century onwards natural science has been triumphantly progressing, knowledge of man has been more and more on the downgrade. The human being could only keep going with difficulty, by preserving and handing on the old no longer living ideas and traditions. Only with difficulty could man protect himself from having his innermost life devoured by the dragon. And in the last third of the nineteenth century the dragon stood with particular intensity before the human being, threatening in the most terrible way to devour the individual life of the soul. Those who had within them a fully developed life of soul felt how the dragon, who was destined for death, had acquired fresh life in the new age through observation and experiment, but it was a life that devoured the human being.

In more ancient times men played a part in producing the dragon, but endowed with the necessary amount of death-forces, they could master him. In those days man contributed to his experience only as much intellectuality as he could master through forces of the heart. Now, the dragon has become sternly objective; he meets us from outside and devours us as beings of soul.

This is the essential characteristic of civilization from the fifteenth century on into the nineteenth. We see it correctly only when we consider the picture of the dragon; in olden times it had a prophetic meaning and pointed to what would come in the future. But olden times were conscious of having given birth to the dragon, and also of having given birth to Michael or St. George, to forces capable of overcoming the dragon.

But from the fifteenth century and on into the nineteenth, humanity was powerless against this. It was the epoch that has gradually succumbed to complete belief in the material world. As a result it had become so paralyzed in its soul-life that in respect of the deepest treasures of the soul, truthfulness had gone. An era which made the world arise out of the Kant-Laplace primeval nebula which densifies into a globe, and in this process engenders living beings and finally man—could but say: Ultimately such activity must disappear into universal death by warmth, but that will also be the death of everything man has developed in the moral sphere! There have always been people who sought to prove that the moral world-order could find a place in a world-order as conceived by Kant-Laplace, ending with universal death, yet such a view is not sincere. And by no means sincere, by no means honest, was the view that considered moral development to originate in illusions and disappear when the universal death through warmth brings about complete annihilation.

Why did such a view of the world ever arise? Why does it fundamentally live in all souls today? Because the dragon penetrates even to the remotest country cottage—though not consciously recognized—and slays the heart. Why is this so? It comes about because man can no longer understand man.

For what takes place in man? There is taking place every moment in man what occurs nowhere else in the earthly world around us. He takes in the foodstuffs from the surrounding world. He takes them from the kingdom of the living and only to a small extent from what is dead. But foodstuffs as they pass through the digestive system are destroyed, even the most living ones. Man takes in living substance and completely destroys it in order to infuse his own life into what has been killed. And not until the foodstuffs pass into the lymph ducts is the dead made living again in man's inner being.

One can see if one penetrates the being of man that in the human organic process, permeated as it is with soul and spirit, matter is completely destroyed and then created anew. In the human organism we have a continual process of destruction of matter so that matter within the human organism can be newly created. Matter is continually being changed into nothingness and newly created in us.

The door to this knowledge was firmly barred in the nineteenth century, when man arrived at the law of the conservation of matter and of energy, and believed that matter is also conserved in the human organism. The establishment of the law of the conservation of matter is clear proof that the human being is no longer inwardly understood.

But now consider how infinitely difficult it is today not to be considered a fool if one fights against what is regarded in modern physics as a definite fact. The law of the conservation of matter and of energy simply means that science has entirely barred the way leading to man. There the dragon has entirely devoured human nature. But the dragon must be conquered, and therefore the knowledge must gain ground that the picture of Michael overcoming the dragon is not merely an ancient picture but that it has reached the highest degree of reality just at this time! It was created in ancient times because men still felt Michael within themselves permeating their unconscious, and by which they unconsciously overcame what arose out of intellectualism. Nowadays the dragon has become quite external. Nowadays the dragon encounters us from outside, threatening continually to kill the human being. But the dragon must be conquered. He can be conquered only through our becoming aware how Michael, or St. George, also comes from outside. And Michael, or St. George, who comes from outside, who is able to conquer the dragon, is a true spiritual knowledge which conquers this center of life (which, for man's inner being is a center of death)—the so-called law of the conservation of energy so that in his knowledge man can again become man in a real sense. Today we dare not; for so long as there is a law of the conservation of matter and of energy, moral law melts away in the universal death through warmth—and the Kant-Laplace theory is no mere phrase!

Man's shrinking away from this consequence is the fearful untruth that has penetrated right into the human heart, into the human soul, and has seized hold of everything in the human being, making him a being of untruth upon the earth. We must acquire the vision of Michael who shows us that what is material on earth does not merely pass through the universal death through warmth, but will at some time actually disperse. He shows us that by uniting ourselves with the spiritual world we are able to implant life through our moral impulses. Thus what is in the earth begins to be transformed into the new life, into the moral.

For the reality of the moral world-order is what the approaching Michael can give. The old religions cannot do this; they have allowed themselves to be conquered by the dragon. They accept the dragon who kills man, and by the side of the dragon establish some special, abstractly moral divine order. But the dragon does not tolerate this; the dragon must be conquered. He does not suffer men to found something alongside him. What man needs is the force that he can gain from victory over the dragon.

You see how profoundly this problem must be grasped. But what has happened in modern civilization? Well, every science has become a metamorphosis of the dragon, all external culture too is an outcome of the dragon. Certainly, the outer world-mechanism, which lives not only in the machine, but also in our social organism, is rightly called a dragon. But besides, the dragon meets us everywhere, whether modern science tells us about the origin of life, about the transformation of living beings, about the human soul, or even in the field of history—everywhere the result proceeds from the dragon. This had become so acute in the last third of the nineteenth century, at the turn of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth, that the growing human being, who longed to know what the old had received, saw the dragon coming towards him in botany, zoology, history, out of every science—saw himself confronted in every sphere by the dragon waiting to devour the very core of his soul.

In our own epoch the battle of Michael with the dragon has for the first time become real, to the highest degree. When we penetrate into the spiritual texture of the world, we find that with the culmination of the dragon's power there also came—at the turn of the nineteenth century—Michael's intervention with which we can unite ourselves. The human being can have, if he will, Spiritual Science; that is to say, Michael actually penetrates from spiritual realms into our earthly realm. He does not force himself upon us. Today everything must spring out of man's freedom. The dragon pushes himself forward, demanding the highest authority. The authority of science is the most powerful that has ever been exercised in the world. Compare the authority of the Pope; it is almost as powerful. Just think—however stupid a man may be yet he can say: “But science has established that.” People are struck dumb by science, even if one has a truth to utter. There is no more overwhelming power of authority in the whole of man's evolution than that of modern science. Everywhere the dragon rears up to meet one.

There is no other way than to unite ourselves with Michael, that is to say to permeate ourselves with real knowledge of the spiritual weaving and being of the world. Only now does this picture of Michael truly stand before us; for the first time it has become our essential concern as man. In olden times this picture was still seen in Imagination. That is not possible today for external consciousness. Hence any fool can say that it is not true that external science is the dragon. But it is the dragon all the same.

Yet some saw themselves confronting the dragon but were not able to see Michael: those who grew up with science and were not so bewitched by the dragon that they quietly let themselves be devoured, who reacted against the soul being investigated by apparatus for testing the memory—who found no answer to their search for man, because the dragon has devoured him. This lived in the hearts of many human beings at the beginning of the twentieth century—they felt instinctively that they saw the dragon, but could not see Michael. Hence they removed themselves as far as possible from the dragon. They sought for a land which could not be reached by the dragon; they wanted to know nothing more of the dragon. The young are running away from the old because they want to escape from the region of the dragon. That also is an aspect of the Youth Movement. The young wanted to flee from the dragon because they saw no possibility of conquering the dragon. They wanted to go where the dragon was not.

But here there is a mystery and it consists in the fact that the dragon can exercise his power everywhere, even where he is not spatially present. And when he does not succeed in killing man directly through ideas and intellectualism, he succeeds by so rarefying the air everywhere in the world that one can no longer breathe.

And this will certainly be the case—young people who ran from the dragon so as not to be injured, and who came into such rarefied air that they could not breathe the future, felt intensely the nightmare of the past because the air had become unwholesome where it was formerly possible to escape the immediate influence of the dragon. The nightmare that comes from within is, as regards human experience, not very different from the pressure that comes from without, from the dragon.

In the last third of the nineteenth century, the older generation felt direct exposure to the dragon. The young people then experienced the nightmare of the air corrupted by the dragon—air that could not be breathed. Here, the only help is to find Michael who conquers the dragon. Man needs the power of the victor over the dragon, for the dragon receives his life out of a world quite different from that in which the human soul can live. The human soul cannot live in the world out of which the dragon receives his life-blood. But in the overcoming of the dragon the human being must acquire the strength to be able to live. The epoch from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth, which has developed the human being so that he has become quite empty, must be overcome. The age of Michael who conquers the dragon must now begin, for the power of the dragon has become great!

But it is this above all that we must set going if we want to become true leaders of the young. For Michael needs, as it were, a chariot by means of which to enter our civilization. And this chariot reveals itself to the true educator as coming forth from the young, growing human being, yes, even from the child. Here the power of the pre-earthly life is still working. Here we find, if we nurture it, what becomes the chariot by means of which Michael will enter our civilization. By educating in the right way we are preparing Michael's chariot for his entrance into our civilization.

We must no longer nurture the dragon by cultivating a science with thoughts unconcerned with penetrating into the human soul, into man, so as to develop him. We must build the chariot, the vehicle for Michael. This needs living manhood, a living humanity such as flows out of super-sensible worlds into the earthly life and manifests there, precisely in the early periods of human life. But for such an education we must have a heart. We must learn—speaking pictorially—to make ourselves allies of the approaching Michael if we want to become true teachers. More is accomplished for the art of education than by any theoretical principles, if what we receive into ourselves works so that we feel ourselves Michael's confederates, allies of the spiritual being who is entering the earth, for whom we prepare a vehicle by carrying out a living art of education of the young. Far better than all theoretical educational principles is to lift up our eyes to Michael who, since the last third of the nineteenth century, has been striving to enter our outworn dragon-civilization.

This is the fundamental impulse of all educational doctrine. We must not receive this art of education as a theory, we must not take it as something we can learn. We should receive it as something with which we can unite ourselves, the advent of which we welcome, something which comes to us not as dead concepts but as a living spirit to whom we offer our services because we must do so, if men are to experience progress in their evolution. This means to bring knowledge to life again, it means to call forth in full consciousness what once was there in man's unconscious.

My dear friends, in olden times when an atavistic clairvoyance was still natural to human beings, there were Mystery centers. In these Mystery centers, which were at the same time church, school, and center of art, the pupils sought also for knowledge, though more of a soul nature, in their development. Many things could be found in such centers—but libraries did not exist. Do not misunderstand me—no library in our own sense. Something existed akin to our library, that is to say, things were written down; but everything that was written down was read with the purpose of working upon the soul. Nowadays a great deal of what constitutes a library is only there to be stored up, not to be read. The bulk is used only when a thesis must be written because there such things are discussed. But people would prefer entirely to eliminate livingness. What is supposed to come into these theses must be quite mechanical. The aim is for the human being to enter into them as little as possible. Man's participation in spirituality has been wrested from him.

Spirituality, but now in full consciousness, must become living again, that we do not merely experience what can be perceived by the senses but experience once more what can be perceived by the spirit. The age of Michael must begin. In fact everything that has fallen to man's lot since the fifteenth century has come to him from outside. In the age of Michael the human being will have to find his own relation to the spiritual world. And learning, knowledge, will acquire a quite different kind of value.

Now in the ancient Mysteries what was in the libraries was more of the nature of monuments upon which was inscribed what was intended to pass into man's memory. These libraries contained what cannot be compared in any way with our books. For all leaders in the Mysteries directed their pupils to another kind of reading. They said: Yes, there is a library—but they did not call it so—and this library is out there in the human beings walking about. Learn to read them! Learn to read the mysteries that are inscribed in every man. We must return to this. Only we must come to it, as it were, from another side so that as teachers we know: All accumulation of learning, of knowledge, is worthless. As such it is dead and gets its life only from the dragon. We should have the feeling that in wishing “to know,” knowledge cannot be stored up here or there, for then it would at once fall apart. In literature, what is Spirit can only be touched upon lightly.

How can you really find within a book what is Spirit? For the spiritual is something living. The spiritual is not like bones. The spiritual is like the blood. And the blood needs vessels in which to flow. What we recognize as spiritual needs vessels. These vessels are growing human beings. Into these vessels we must pour the spiritual in order that it may hold together. Otherwise we shall have the spirit so alive that it immediately flows away. We must so preserve our knowledge that it can flow into the developing human being.

Then we shall make the chariot for Michael, then we shall be able to become Michael's companions. And what you seek, my dear friends, you will best attain through being conscious of wishing to become companions of Michael.

You must once again be able to follow a purely spiritual Being who is not incarnated on the earth. And you will have to learn to have faith in a human being who shows you the way to Michael. Humanity must understand in a new and living way the words of Christ: “My Kingdom is not of this world.” For it is just through this that it is in the true sense “of this world!” For the task of man is to make the Spirit, which without Him would not be on earth, into a living content of this world. The Christ Himself came down to earth. He did not take man away to an earthly life in the heavens. The human being must permeate his earthly life by a mediating spirituality which gives him power to conquer the dragon.

This must be understood so thoroughly that one can answer the question: Why did human beings tear each other to pieces during the second decade of the twentieth century?—They tore each other to pieces because they carried the battle into a region where it does not belong, because they did not see the real enemy, the dragon. To the conquest of the dragon belong the forces which, only when developed in the right way, will bring peace upon earth.

In short, we must take seriously our entrance into the Michael age. With the means available at present, we shall have to guide man again to the experience of being surrounded by the picture of Michael, powerful, radiant; for Michael, through the forces developing in man towards a full life of soul, can overcome the dragon preying on humanity. Only when this picture can be received in a more living way than formerly into the soul, will there come forces for the development of inner activity out of man's knowledge that he is of the company of Michael. Only then shall we participate in what can lead to progress and bring peace between the generations, in what can guide the young to listen to the old, and the old to have something to say which the young long to receive and understand.

Because the older generation dangled the dragon in front of youth, they fled to regions poor in air. A true youth movement will only reach its goal when instead of being offered the dragon, the younger generation finds in Michael the forces to exterminate the dragon. This will show itself by older and younger generations having something to say to each other and something to receive from each other.

For, in fact, if the educator is a complete human being he receives as much from the child as he gives to the child. Whoever cannot learn from the child what he brings down from the spiritual world, cannot teach the child about the mysteries of earthly existence. Only when the child becomes our educator by bringing his message to us from the spiritual world will the child be ready to receive from us tidings of earthly life.

It was not for the sake of mere symbolism that Goethe sought everywhere for things that suggest a breathing—outbreathing, inbreathing; outbreathing, inbreathing—Goethe saw the whole of life as a picture of receiving and giving. Everyone receives, everyone gives. Every giver becomes a receiver. But for the receiving and the giving to find a true rhythm it is necessary that we enter the Michael Age.

So I want to conclude with this picture for you to see how the preceding lectures were actually meant. Their aim was that you should not merely carry away in your heads what I have said here, and ponder over it. What I should prefer is for you to have something in your hearts and then to transform what you carry in your hearts into activity. What the human being carries in his head will in time be lost. But what he receives into his heart, the heart preserves and carries into all spheres of activity in which man is involved. May what I have ventured to say to you not be carried away merely in your heads—for then it will certainly be lost—but if it is carried away in your hearts, in the whole of your being, then, my dear friends, we have been talking together in the right way.

Out of this feeling, let me give you my farewell greeting today by saying: Take what I have tried to express as if I had wanted, above all, to let something that cannot be uttered in words penetrate to your hearts. If hearts have found some connection with what is meant here by the Living Spirit, then at least in part what we wanted to achieve in these gatherings will have been fulfilled. With this feeling we will separate today; with this feeling, however, we shall also come together again. Thus we shall find association in the Spirit, even though we work apart in different spheres of life. The chief thing will be that in our hearts we have found each other; then the spiritual, all that belongs to Michael, will also flow into our hearts.

The younger generation is always faced with the dilemma of being heir to the old while about to become a guide for the new. Never did this dilemma seem greater than after the turn of this century when Rudolf Steiner spoke; for us today it looms even larger, with no end of its precipitate growth in sight. Uncountable remedies have been offered, and self-appointed pundits of many nations, creeds and convictions continue to peddle their wares. Instant diagnosis is followed by suggestions of all kinds of therapies—from more money to nihilistic revolutions. To be “deeply involved” is the demand of the day, but this is naturally followed by the question as to how to be so without losing one's identity. If a fresh view can be maintained—despite the “systems” which tend to make us into interchangeable items within a catalogued society, the problem of providing the incentive for this is somewhat like that faced by the inexperienced gardener who lifts each sprouting plant from its seedbed to check on its root development. The very manner of growth—first a stillness, then a sprouting, a sudden spurt of leafing followed by a pause before further growth—a way necessary for all living things in order to be alive and to be themselves, is even less within our understanding today than at the time these lectures were given.

Therefore these lectures are not less applicable today. The reader, provided he can be guided by the circumspect sequence of the thoughts and images contained in them, will be stirred as well as strangely quieted. Here we are led, not thrust forward or backward; here we are guided, not badgered, threatened or left direction-less. Yet the direction we receive is not merely a signpost to all too obvious and all too fallible remedies. Rather, we are enabled to begin assembling convictions from within until the conflux of such inner preparedness can meet with the final image of “the chariot of Michael.”

To achieve the image of this chariot, however, demands a new education. By its nature it signifies not so much the content and circumference of material as the way in which it becomes, as conveyance, a transmitter of substance. We may time and again consult one single paragraph, to know what was meant then and is still implied for us today:

“The great transition to this newer age consists in man meeting man free of his sheaths—according to his disposition, to what the soul demands; but the capacities for this untrammeled encounter have not yet been acquired. Above all we have not yet acquired the possibility for a relation between ego and ego. But this must be prepared for by education. That is why the question of education is of such burning importance.”

As can readily be felt throughout, this cycle of lectures was given to a group of young people in whom an active current—sometimes even causing divisions—was to be carried into the inner meaning of education. Destiny spoke throughout their sometimes heated discussions, awakening one and beclouding another. The call to carry a new education out into this world—an education for life, for the spirit in Man and in the universe—had begun to sound. It was the year of challenge, 1922, and Rudolf Steiner responded to it, traveling and lecturing untiringly—from the East-West Congress in Vienna to his visits to England. At Stuttgart, where these particular lectures were given, the young listeners had to develop a new ear to perceive something of a new dawn of the spirit, even while Rudolf Steiner was speaking to them—surveying, explaining, developing and guiding them toward an understanding of themselves in their present world-situation. In this new dawn some of those listeners, like the readers of these lectures today, could understand the necessity for self-education as the preliminary to all other education. And from their desire to become educators, to be able to dispense true nourishment, they began to recognize that the growth of such food demands that the plough first be turned inward and seeds of spirit sown. Eventually—in good time and according to the rhythms of growth, with the power of the sun and the moon and the stars—a harvest may mature, which will yield bread, not stones, in man's relation to man.

This cycle of lectures “To the Younger Generation” speaks of a pathway to a Michaelic harvest for ears which have the good will to hear. If they only now appear in English—forty five years after the sowing—we should neither be disheartened by the slowness of growth nor complacent about the fruits already gathered. Much rather when we have read, listened and heard and have become better aware of the pathway—may we continue toward that universal harvest with greater singleness of purpose, without dismay and, however lonely, with a certainty of spirit-companionship transcending all generations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Address given during the first Anthroposophical College Course at the Goetheanum, in response to the call to academic youth.

Dear fellow students! You will understand that I cannot speak about the content of the call itself, since it is too closely associated with my person. And so it will be best if I, in the words that I am allowed to speak to you today, refer more to what actually announces itself as a desire from the current student body for new scientific and general cultural goals, as well as for social life.

When I consider this appeal, it reminds me of another appeal that was also supposed to start from Stuttgart some time ago: the appeal that was then intended to form a cultural council.

In 1919, when our work began in Stuttgart, it was initially based on the “Appeal to the German People and the Cultural World”, which I was allowed to write and which made its way around the world in March of the previous year. And this work was based on what I tried to set out as social guidelines in my book “The Key Points of the Social Question”. At that time a number of prominent people who stood by the convictions and social aims of the Kernpunkte decided to found a Cultural Council as one of their most important undertakings. They intended to show the world how to approach the renewal of spiritual life and the permeation of spiritual life with new impulses.

You know, in the “Key Points of the Social Question” attention is drawn to the fact that the most important aspiration of our time must be to raise a subconscious goal of present humanity to conscious action. That is precisely: the shaping of the social organism into a threefold one.

Anyone who has the slightest insight into the seething and pulsating life of humanity today can already feel that there is nothing utopian in these “key points”. Rather, it is the result of thirty to thirty-five years of observation that years of observation, what actually the majority of people fundamentally want, or let us say, actually should want according to their instincts, according to their feelings, but what they do not yet admit to themselves because they have a certain fear of raising it to their consciousness.

We can see the need for new paths to be taken in all three areas of life: in the spiritual, in the legal, state and political, and in the economic. And in my “Key Points” I tried to show how the main obstacles to walking on such new paths arise from the fact that over the last three to four centuries we have become accustomed to the suggestion that the unitary state must do everything. One could say that the unified state has gradually occupied the university system as well. The university system was annexed and occupied. Just consider that this university system has developed out of intellectual life itself. Consider that, in a time not so long behind us, the validity of the university system was based entirely on the individual fertility of the individual universities. Consider how people spoke of the law faculty in Bologna, how they spoke of the medical school in Salerno, how they spoke of other important schools; how they derived the reputation of the university system in the world from the special individual achievements of what was available in the individual universities. And it is basically only a more recent occupation or annexation, carried out by the states that were increasingly seizing power, that our higher education system finally ended up serving the external needs of the individual states. Today, in particular, anyone who feels connected to the pursuit of knowledge and the spirit and to the cultural aspirations of humanity should have some kind of historical memory of times when it was up to the universities to decide what they wanted to give the state and what they wanted to make of the state. And, I would like to say, a certain inner impulse, which comes from reflecting on things, should lead one to realize that, as was emphasized again and again at the end of the 18th century, at the beginning of the 19th century of the Age of Enlightenment, in the times of the Middle Ages, science was the servant of the theological and ecclesiastical establishment. How often has it been repeated, what Kant – you know that I am no Kantian – said with the words: the time is over when all the sciences followed in the train of theology. The sciences have become independent. They are called upon to carry the banner of all other culture. But basically only after such words had become popular from a justified feeling towards the spiritual life in the branches of science, only after that the state has created the current that has now made the university system the servant of the state, of politics, of jurisprudence. And, my esteemed fellow students, whether it is better for theology, that is, at least for something spiritual, to trail behind, or for the external state to trail behind, is still an open question. The coming times will have to pass judgment on that. For it was not nice, either, that, so to speak, a century after Kant spoke, science no longer wanted to follow theology, the rector of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, the famous physiologist Du Bois-Reymond, said that the gentlemen members of the Berlin Academy of Sciences felt very honored to be allowed to call themselves: the scientific protection force of the Hohenzollerns. This is ultimately the result of what I would like to call the occupation of the higher education system by the state. And it goes without saying that the state does not care for science, but for its “civil servants”. Recently, my dear fellow students, the rector of the University of Halle was able to publish an essay that throws a very strange spotlight on the old attitudes that he has come from after becoming rector. The rector of the University of Halle seems to be reasonably well informed about important events behind the scenes, because he points out with concern and in great detail in a newspaper article that there is an intention to close a large number of German universities and to establish civil service schools in their place, where civil servants will be trained in the right way. Yes, my dear fellow students, one must look at these things if one wants to understand that a relatively sharp language was used at the time in that appeal to a cultural council that originated in Stuttgart. Because what has had an effect on the university system has not only affected the appointment of professors and the inconvenience of the examination system, but has also affected the sciences, knowledge, and the spirit itself. And that is why a remedy was sought at the time, by calling upon everyone who was believed to have a heart and a mind for furthering the cause of education and spiritual matters in general. And it was the hope of those people who set to work on this appeal with a warm heart for such a cause that the first step was to turn to the representatives of spiritual life itself. Many well-meaning people thought that the university teachers themselves would see reason and go along with the emancipation of the university system from the state.

Well, my esteemed fellow students, a truly active support was not found. But all the more often one could hear how the gentlemen expressed themselves in a peculiar way. They said: Yes, if this threefold social order were realized, with its free spiritual life, then it would come about that instead of the minister of education and his civil servants, the teachers at the universities themselves would exercise a kind of administration of the entire educational system. No, said the gentlemen, I would rather be under the minister of education and his deputies than be subject to the decrees and measures that my colleagues make. And one could hear very strange statements about one's colleagues. And since one had the opportunity, in this journey through the opinions of university teachers, to hear what A said about B and B about A, not many of those remained who could be relied upon in this self-administration, this desire of the spiritual organism to be left to its own devices. One had quite sad experiences. You may already be aware that this whole cultural appeal, with all its good intentions, was in vain, that basically no one from the circle of spiritual workers wanted to stand up for a free spiritual life.

But one can also sense from external appearances what has happened in recent decades. Some people do not yet appreciate things in the right way. I would just like to emphasize that, for example, what one used to become by being part of the School of Spiritual Science was expressed in something that, so to speak, grew out of the scientific and the striving for knowledge itself. What had something to do with the quest for knowledge is the degree system at the various faculties. One only notices how the state examination system has crept into this degree system, which emerged from the self-administration of the universities. Finally, compared to the state examinations, what grew out of the universities, out of the sciences themselves, has become only a decoration.

Of course, such things are only symptoms at first. But as symptoms they show very clearly that a process of absorption of intellectual life by the political, by the external state life, has taken place to a high degree. And you can be quite sure that the state system, which I have pointed out today, and which only wants to be a state system, will kill the universities altogether because it does not need them as universities, as centers of learning. Because it has needed what it has needed from the universities so far only as a school for state officials, it will transform everything into schools for state officials. That is the tendency of the time. When something like this is mentioned, people always want to dismiss it as utopian, as the words of a false prophet. But one must also be able to see a little in the direction in which the times are moving. And finally, it has already progressed so far that we see a school of civil servants emerging from the law faculty, and an aspiration emerging from the medical faculty that aims to turn the healer of people into a mere cog in the state machine. And at the philosophy faculty? What is of much value today is what prepares people to be teaching officials, not educators, in the sense of the state! In Germany, the model country, in democratized Germany, teachers are no longer even called teachers or professors, but – horror of horrors! – Studienassessor or Studienoberassessor and the like. But these outward appearances have to do with the whole inner spirit of the sciences. And it was truly a sad thing that one had to realize that on the part of the teachers there is absolutely no heart and no sense for an independent intellectual life.

I must bear this in mind when I now take up the call that comes from the student body. If old age cannot do it – there is no other way to put it – then young people must feel it as their sacred duty to stand up for the freedom of intellectual life. Because we can be sure of one thing: if no one stands up for the freedom of intellectual life, if no one stands up for the original sources of a renewal of knowledge, then the times in which the next generation of our civilized humanity grows up will be dire. It is not without significance that a man as brilliant as Oswald Spengler can already prove scientifically, that is, with the means of the old science, that Western civilization is heading towards barbarism. We have learned to prove many things scientifically. Today, it is really being proved with great force that all our knowledge leads to barbarism.

This is something that, as one can believe, must weigh like a nightmare on the youth, who, after all, must not grow up today in blind faith in authority, who must not allow themselves a blind faith in authority, but who must look with seeing eyes at what is going on at the institutions they enter in order to grow into life. And one may therefore believe that it can make a certain beneficial impression, apart from everything - and I will and can disregard all that relates to me personally in the appeal - it makes a beneficial impression that now, in contrast to the old leaders, the led are speaking out and saying what they want, and that they are saying it in concrete terms. Because, my dear fellow students, the liberation of intellectual life, the independence of the intellectual organism, cannot be achieved through tirades or rhetoric. That which has been absorbed by the state must be pulled out again. But this can only happen if there is a real intellectual force. And just as in the age of materialism science was powerless in the face of the state's desires for absorption, so would a material science remain powerless in the face of the state's desires for absorption, transforming science into barbarism. To lift the spirit of science and knowledge out of politics, out of all that it is involved in today to its detriment, can only have a positive effect. Just as material science has fallen prey to unscientific powers, so too will spiritual science, through its own essence, through its own power, be able to pull this science out of the unspiritual powers again. And only it will be able to establish the free spiritual life, the spiritual part of the social organism that is independent.

Of course, you who are signing this appeal must realize that it will be perceived as a storm, especially when it comes from such a source. But, my esteemed fellow students, we cannot make progress without a storm today; without the will and courage to truly transform what needs to be transformed, we will not move forward, but instead continue to decline, into barbarism. It must be clear from the outset that this appeal cannot be favorably received by certain quarters. But I believe that all those who wholeheartedly and courageously subscribe to it are also aware that nothing at all could be achieved with an appeal that would be favorably received by certain quarters, to which I am alluding here. We must be prepared for a fight with those who want to do the opposite today.

Of course, it will be important not to simply issue a call in words and send it out into the world. My dear fellow students, I have seen many calls in the course of my life. And I know that appeals mean nothing if there are no people standing behind them, for whose will such an appeal is basically only an expression, even an external means of expression. People whose strength does not wane when they see how everything is opposed to what one wants in the early days, energetic people must stand behind such a cause, otherwise words of such severity are not justified. But they must be justified in our time, basically after all the experiences that have been made. But all that must be made clear as criticism to those who are concerned in this way through such criticism of the existing, all that must be juxtaposed to the positive work. And we will probably have to see, if what is intended is to succeed, that circles are formed and more and more circles are formed, ever larger and larger areas, completely internationally, that really work in the sense of spiritual science, that they fertilize the individual scientific disciplines with spiritual science.

It has gradually come to something strange when it has been a matter of connecting young, aspiring minds to the operation of spiritual life. I would think of many things if I wanted to talk about this chapter. I will just tell you an example of a nice scene that once took place at a philosophical faculty, where a young, hopeful doctor wanted to habilitate for – yes, for philosophy. He went to the professor, who held him in high esteem, and told him that he wanted to habilitate, and what would now be pleasant for him was that this would be chosen as the topic for his inaugural lecture. Then the professor, who, as I said, was well disposed towards the young doctor and who wanted this young doctor to become a private lecturer at his side, said: Yes, but that's not possible at all! I can't recommend you to my colleagues for a lectureship; they'd all turn on me. You've only written about philosophical events and personalities of the 19th century in philosophy; we can't allow someone like that to become a lecturer. You must have written about much, much older things. – Yes, said the young doctor, what should I do now, Mr. Hofrat? I thought what I wrote about Schopenhauer, about the development of aesthetics in the 19th century, would be good? Perhaps the Viennese present already realize who it is? Yes, said the Privy Councillor, it doesn't depend on what you write about, but only on it being old and unknown. Let us look up an old Italian esthete in the encyclopedia. They opened the encyclopedia and came to G, where the name Gravina was listed. Neither of them knew anything about him, but the professor in question thought it was the right thing to do. And the young doctor wrote his habilitation thesis on this interesting topic, a completely unknown, insignificant Italian esthete. And now the professor could admit him as a private lecturer. But the whole process took much longer than that; he had to work on it for at least a year and a half, I think, because it was not that easy to put the merits of this unknown Italian esthete in the right perspective.

That is just an extreme case. But you can imagine the huge number of such cases.

Let us just take a look at how it came about that, little by little, all freedom in the choice of dissertation topics basically ceased. In a subject such as modern philology, Wilhelm Scherer, for example, actually managed to schematize and organize the entire dissertation process. A student who came and asked for a dissertation topic was simply allowed to do that dissertation, whether it suited him or not, whether he had done something special on the subject or not, it did not matter. He was allowed to do the dissertation that could serve some professor who then wanted to write a detailed book on the subject by collecting the individual dissertations and the like. But this external activity corresponds more closely than one might think to the inner workings of the spiritual life. And I do not think I am mistaken if I say that it would be of the greatest benefit to you, my esteemed fellow students, if you could really counter the spirit that is blowing from there with a fresh, elementary source of scientific work. If you formed circles and, with all the tools and sources at your disposal, tried real, original, elementary scientific work. From group to group in individual cities, those who want to work in this spirit may come together – I would say that if you want my advice. If you want to work for the lively flourishing of scientific life, of the life of knowledge, then the chemist, the physicist, the philosopher, the lawyer, the historian, the philologist will be able to contribute to some common topic in a common effort. And if it is desired, then we who work in Dornach for these university courses will endeavor to create a kind of free committee of those lecturers who have lectured on the various branches of science that have been fertilized by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, and that this committee can make suggestions about what should be dealt with first. The topics should not be chosen out of the spirit that has come from people who govern in these fields to this day, but rather, it should be suggested more out of the need for the general spiritual life of humanity. And again, the free choice should be counted on. Those who have had some experience may say what is necessary. Those who see what is needed from this free committee may decide what they are particularly suited for. And so those who have now pioneered a kind of free college system here in Dornach by giving lectures could work together with those who, as enthusiastic students, are interested in the question of what will become of the spiritual life of Western civilization through this spiritual science.

This is roughly the way in which one could initially attempt to put the words of the appeal into practice in a positive way in scientific work. Of course, it is not yet time to give more detailed advice. But you can be sure that those working here in Dornach or in Stuttgart will always be ready to use all their strength to support, to support, to advise, to help wherever an enthusiastic student body wants to contribute its mite, there or there, in this or that group to what today must be a great, comprehensive, intensive task, an enormous ideal: to lead from a renewed spiritual research going back to the original sources, to a spiritual life - and thus to the general cultural and civilizing life of humanity - to an ascent, to a dawn, not to a decline, not to a sunset, as some believe.

And by promising that everything in me will be done to ensure that intensive scientific collaboration based on inner harmony takes place, by promising you this, I would like to answer the question that was put to me: what I advise as a positive thing to do first. If we really work together in this spirit, then the student body will be able to produce the results that have unfortunately not been produced by those who supposedly lead the student body, whose task it would be, however, to provide the student body with leaders. If they do not prove themselves as such, well, then a good school in breaking away from all belief in authority will be what you will have to go through if you stand on the ground of free scientific work. I believe I can foresee that you will be able to work well together with spiritual science and with all that is wanted from Dornach and from Stuttgart, if you place yourself on such ground. And it is from this attitude that I would like to have addressed you today, my esteemed fellow students.

My dear fellow students! It is clear from many statements of this kind that we are counting on you with all our hearts for what we are thinking of here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. We are counting on you with all our hearts because, if we are to work against the impending downfall of Western civilization, it can only come from science, given the state of affairs today. Consider that what has brought us into today's situation, after all, basically also comes from science. I will point out much less what is actually, so to speak, on the palm of your hand: that the destructive anti-cultural institutions of the latest time are basically scientific results. It is easy to imagine that, so we don't have to discuss it here. But we want to consider something else. You see, the proletariat, if I may use the grotesque expression, has a kind of Janus face today. It is quite true that the proletariat must be brought in if the situation is to be reorganized today. That, again, is something that is as self-evident as can be. And perhaps I may remind you that in Stuttgart, among the nearer and more distant surroundings, the cold was at its worst when I once used a certain word in a public lecture, but which, I believe, was spoken out of a real insight into present conditions. I said that the bourgeoisie suffers first of all from a decadent brain and that it is absolutely dependent on replacing brain work with the work of the ether brain, with something spiritualized. That is as obvious as anything can be. By contrast, the proletarian, in the context of the present vertical migration of peoples, does not yet have a decadent brain. He can still work with his physical brain if only he can be persuaded to do so. This, of course, has caused a great deal of resentment among the bourgeoisie in the immediate and more distant vicinity. But today it is not a matter of whether people are more or less resentful, but of bringing the truth to light.

Now, however, the proletariat is revealing this. On the one hand, the proletarians will always be inclined to say to themselves: Yes, we don't want to know anything about what you are bringing us. It's too difficult for us; it's not of interest to us for the time being. But on the other hand, these proletarians are completely fed up with the waste products of the science of the 19th and early 20th centuries. They only work with what has fallen away from it. We must make up our minds to look at it that way. We must say to ourselves: Of course it will be quite difficult to enter the proletariat with what we are working out of science in a very serious way. But if we do not let up, if we do not let ourselves be deterred, but rather base ourselves on this social action: we must win the proletariat from science! then we will also certainly get through to the proletariat with something sound, just as one has come to the proletariat with Marxism and Bolshevism. It is only a matter of not losing our breath too soon, that we actually carry out what we have once recognized as correct. That was always and always my principle in anthroposophical work. Therefore, I never compromised, but simply made enemies with full insight into the matter, because there was no other way than to simply reject everything that came up amateurishly. And if it were worth the effort, it would be very easy to prove that the majority of our current enemies are people who were once rejected because of over-amateurism. You would see, if you went into the details, that this is the case. All you need is a substitute for memory. After all, memory is no longer as strong! If you have access to spiritual training, you know that. Then you know how to assess the enemies. They often emerge from the shallows only after years.

Therefore, you must not shrink from a powerful adherence to what was once recognized as correct, then it will also go with the proletariat. For the proletariat suffers only from an exaggerated sense of authority. But as soon as you have it for yourself, you would win it. It is still difficult today to make people understand that their leaders are their greatest enemies from the bottom to the top; that they are pests. But this must be taught to people little by little; then it will work. Then one will probably give the proletariat an interest in this healthy scientific work that we are scientifically developing. Then one will have an extraordinarily good audience in the proletariat. And for a long time to come, the proletariat itself must, of course, be an 'audience' in its mass.

But now I would like to point out something else. You see, for many years I have been active in the anthroposophical movement and have always tried to work in a certain direction, which consisted of bringing together the anthroposophical and the specifically scientific. I could give you specific examples of the difficulties that have always arisen in this regard. For example, many years ago a scholar approached us who was an extraordinarily learned man in terms of Orientalism and Assyriology. On the other hand, he was enthusiastic about anthroposophy. It would have been natural for someone who really had Orientalism and so on in his fingers as a scholar and was enthusiastic about anthroposophy to work on these two things at the same time. But he could not be brought to do that; the man could not be brought to build a bridge from one area to another. He could make progress in both, but he could not build a bridge. Nevertheless, it must also be the case that this bridge must be tried absolutely. And you can find it; you can find the entrance to every single science through anthroposophy.

On the other hand, I found a well-known professor of botany who was also an enthusiastic 'theosophist'. The man in question wrote botanical works and he wrote about theosophy. He did not belong to the Anthroposophical Society, but to the Theosophical Society. He wrote about theosophy in the same way that Annie Besant wrote about it. He was completely a botanist when he closed the book on Theosophy and completely a 'Theosophist' when he taught or wrote books on Theosophy, without one being able to recognize that he was a botanist. He even found it abhorrent when I spoke to him about botany and wanted to prepare a kind of bridge.

You see, this is the result of the culture of the last few centuries, this double bookkeeping – that is what I must always call it. One wants that which relates to life in the specialist journal, and that which one then needs for the mind, for the “interior”, as one calls it, in the Sunday supplement of one's political newspaper. Politics is in between; according to the “tripartite structure” that has existed up to now, you want to get that from the political paper. These things are the ones that you actually have to see through above all. And then you will perhaps be the ones most qualified to help find this bridge everywhere. In a sense — it won't always appear so radically — things are like that.

You see, poor Hölderlin already expressed the beautiful word at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century when he said to himself, when he looks around his Germany, he finds officials, factory owners, carpenters and tailors everywhere, but — no people. He finds scholars, artists and teachers and so on, but — no people. He finds young and older and old, sedate people, but – no people.

One would like to say today: We actually have the least of all in our learned professions, that there are people there! We have sciences, and the scientists actually swim around as something factual. Basically, we actually live to a high degree quite apart from science, in that we feel like human beings. Just think, if we today – I mean, if we summarize all of our scholarly knowledge – if we do a piece of work today to habilitate, what do we do then? We cannot just sit down and write what flows from our soul into such a scholarly work. That doesn't work. Then we would very soon be reproached: Yes, he writes from the wrist. You mustn't do that. You mustn't write from the wrist, but you have to study the books for your doctoral dissertation, which you otherwise don't pay attention to, maybe don't even read, only open at the pages where something is written that you have to quote. In short, you have to have as external a relationship as possible to what you are working on, and you absolutely must not have an internal relationship to it! When people meet again, I can tell you about a strange meeting in Weimar that took place during my working hours at the local Goethe-Schiller Archive, where I was able to attend the meetings of the Goethe Society. As soon as someone said something that was related to Goethe, or as soon as someone touched on something scientific, they would say: There's another group talking shop, that's not on! The purpose of the gathering was something that had to be avoided at all costs, so as not to be seen in a bad light of talking shop. But all of this is essentially to blame for the fact that we have ended up in this situation. In Weimar, one could really see all the specialists – many of them offered a kind of combination of all subjects – in these seven years, and there was basically no strong differentiation by nationality. For example, when Mr. Thomas from a very Western university in America writes, there is no real difference between the work and thinking of any Schmidt or Scherer student, even in his work and thinking - he worked on Goethe's “Faust.” It was basically international, because Thomas only differed from the others in that he sat on the floor and crossed his legs when he sat on the floor in front of the bookcase. That was how he distinguished himself as an American. But otherwise he worked like the others. The only exception was a Russian councilor. The man didn't know what questions he was researching. But when he came to an inn in the evening, where people would gather, they would always say to the others: “Don't look around, because the councilor is walking around!” Because he kept starting to talk about what he knew of Goethe's Faust, people avoided sitting with him. These things are actually more important than one would usually think; for they could be amply multiplied and would still explain something about how the scientific life has developed bit by bit. And we want to get out of this! We certainly do not want to become pedants or new-fangled simplifiers, but we must realize that man stands higher than all science, that he need not let himself be tyrannized by it. And the emancipation of the spirit is actually working towards combating science as such in its abstraction, and putting man first. So that we not only have science as Bölsche writes about the “immortality” of science. Wilhelm Bölsche has also set up a kind of spiritual science, but he seeks it in libraries, which are, however, full of paper and blackened print of the actual spirits.

But this is what we must work towards: this humanization of scientific life, this: putting people in the foreground in so-called objective science. Objective science must actually have its existence in life in man. And having this does not make one dry and arid. On the contrary, by combating abstract thinking, one becomes a useful co-worker in that which we so urgently need: the combating of barbarism in the life of Western civilization.

This is what is most urgently needed by those who enter the learned professions, or professions supported by the sciences. Therefore, I believe that it will be extraordinarily beneficial if you get together at the individual universities and freely address such topics scientifically, develop such topics, as it is to be attempted from the bodies that we already have, especially from the Waldorf school. I am not thinking that a school-like operation should be set up, not at all, my dear fellow students, but I am thinking of something else. We will try, so to speak, to shape the threads in such a way that they are woven out of the necessities of the time, that they are basically found in view of what actually lies in the ethos of the overall context of our culture. And then certain individuals among our Waldorf school teachers, the body of teachers, which in turn should maintain a kind of unity with those who have presented here, should simply be given the task of identifying the topics that need to be resolved today. And it should only be said to the student body what tasks are necessary according to the insights that these circles can have. The rest is therefore not letting oneself be led by the tasks, but it is a fathoming of what is particularly necessary today. And there will be the opportunity to work really correctly from scientific foundations. I would like to emphasize that it must be avoided that small scientific circles, more or less really or supposedly working, isolate themselves and believe that they can do enough with that today. This could, of course, be very useful and will be very useful, and it must also be done, but we also need a broad student movement that is truly aware today: things cannot go on as they would among young people if these young people were only to follow in the footsteps of those who still hold office today out of old traditions and old times. If one says that the Social Democrats must get rid of their leaders, then it is above all necessary that the youth of today get rid of the old leaders in a certain way. That will be more difficult than it should be.

Because, you see, I cannot, of course, avoid the issue that is actually at stake. And I must ask you to be quite clear about the fact that I am talking about these things with complete honesty and sincerity. You can be quite sure: we would make easy progress in the anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement if we had the freedom to work only for the spirit and as a stimulus to the spirit. Assigning posts, awarding degrees, letting students fail their state exams – that is what the others do. And that is an important factor. We certainly do not underestimate it in our field. For we know full well what courage and boldness are needed today, especially for the prospective scholar and prospective scientific worker, to be and remain with us. Because, in fact, we can offer him very little today. If we can gradually build up our individual movements, then things will improve. When the Waldorf School was founded, I said: the founding is nice, but it has no meaning if at least ten more schools are not founded in the next quarter, because then it is only established. And I have definitely envisaged – as I always follow up practical ideas, not just ideas that can be handed down – that if we can found schools everywhere, then we will be able to appoint to our schools those who, under certain circumstances, do it the way Dr. Stein told us himself. But it is not a system. He enrolled, saw what a few lectures were like, but otherwise he read cycles and other things, read what was quoted there, and completed his academic studies. Of course, this cannot be generalized, because probably only three quarters of the professors would agree that if there were only students like Dr. Stein, they could actually only attend the first three lectures and then go for a walk. This cannot be easily realized for the general public today. So I do not want to propagate that. But I just want to draw your attention to the fact that at any rate the spirit that sits on the chairs in the lecture halls today, if it is transferred to the school benches, does not bring us any future. Out of this necessity you must already find the courage to at least in some way ally yourselves with what is wanted here. But on the other hand, I thought practically, as the Waldorf School was founded: if we are able to truly emancipate spiritual life, we will have more and more Waldorf Schools, and then we will also be able to offer our young friends from the student body a future. It is not at all unidealistic for me to say that. But then it will be easier. But we have to support each other from both sides. We will only be able to work on founding independent schools and universities if we see an understanding student body coming towards us. To do this, we need not only small groups, but a student movement that wants to work on a large scale and advocate on a large scale for what is being considered here.

I must point out that what I have said in these days as the reason for the World School Association is meant very seriously. I think of it as international, so that it is to be created, so to speak, out of the thinking and feeling of today. If we can first make the world understand that there are really only two movements today that have to struggle with each other, on the one hand Bolshevism, which is leading the world into the swamp, and on the other hand the threefold social organism, then people will also be faced with a choice as soon as they see that the old impulses will no longer work! Either it must happen, that those who want to advance civilization in a reasonable way must gradually live into the impulse of threefolding, or, if people are too lazy to do so, Bolshevism will flood Europe and barbarize European culture. If people understand this, they will be easier to win than they are today.

There are three things that must be taken into account. When one speaks to the international world today about a project such as the one in Dornach, and that money is needed for it, people take the view that it must all be idealism! You can't be so mean as to give money for it! Money is much too dirty to be used for such an idealistic cause. In short, people are not easily won over to something like this unless they are prepared for it for a long time. And since we cannot complete our building in Central European countries because of the foreign currency, we are dependent on other parts of today's civilized world. But they don't give us any money just like that. Basically, they are very tight-fisted. On the other hand, people are still relatively easy to win over if you tell them you want to set up sanatoriums. You can get as much money as you want. We can't do that now, set up sanatoriums, but we can get involved in the middle way. The middle way is what I mean by the world school association. The World School Association can finance all cultural institutions if it is understood in the right way. And there is still some understanding for the establishment of the school-based approach, but less for something that is directly the building. We have to work for what is in the middle, so to speak. Therefore, it is important that this foundation of the World School Association, which we will have as something universal, be prepared in a certain way, that the mood be set for this World School Association. And so I would like to suggest that it would be best if you were to include in your decisions, in your strongest initiative, that you approach everyone you can, and convince them that this World School Association must spread across all countries, that it is up to them to emancipate intellectual life. That it must finance as many free schools across the world as possible. The emancipation of spiritual life must be pursued on the grandest scale. We must come to emancipate ourselves from that which, in essence, enslaves us spiritually. But we can only do that if we create the right mood. The tyranny is greater than one might think. From a place in Europe, I will attempt to inaugurate this founding of the World School Association myself. But what must come first is to create the right mood for it. Because today you can't achieve anything by forming groups of twelve or fifteen people to work things out. Rather, it is important that we spread this idea as widely as possible: a world school association must come into being. Now, I can well imagine, and I am quite satisfied with the fact, that of course the students can't exactly open their wallets very wide. That is not necessary. The others belong to this. But what the student can open, that is – you know, I mean this cum grano salis – what the student can open, that is his mouth. That is what I mean: that you can make it possible for the World School Association to open its mouth wherever you go. So that when we establish this World School Association in the near future, we will not fall on deaf ears, but on prepared people. That is what must be.

As you can see, we have enough to do. What we need is nothing more than real courage and a clear view of the world. Why should we not be able to overcome with youthful strength the things that must be overcome because they still tower over our time with all the hallmarks of the old age and seek to oppress us? We must not let ourselves be oppressed. We must realize today that we are dancing on a knife's edge, or, as we might say, on a volcano. It is not the case, my dear fellow students, that things will continue as they are now. We are heading for very, very sad times. But we can remedy these sad times by growing into them with courage and energy. And I believe that spiritual science, anthroposophy, can be of help to you in this. It can be of help to everyone.

I ask you in conclusion only: do not pursue things particularistically, sectionally, but in the broadest style. Do not exclude anyone, but include everyone who wants to work with you. The only thing that should count is the will to work honestly with us in the direction we have set, the direction of growing into the scientific professions. It seems to me, my dear fellow students, that we must not sin in this direction any longer. We must be broad-minded. We must regard everyone who honestly wants to work with us as a very welcome co-worker. We must not allow any distinction to arise between people and people, but we must let everyone who simply has the will to work with us, work with us. This should also be the case, as it has always been in the anthroposophical movement. We have never demanded that anyone give up anything they otherwise represent in the world. No one has ever had to give up anything; they only had to accept what the Anthroposophical movement could give them. And perhaps I may recall something personal. You know how I am always reproached for having once been part of the Theosophical movement. It was not a matter of me going along with it! The Theosophical Society actually approached me; it joined me for a time, until it threw out what I stood for. But I said to the Theosophists at our first meeting in London that it was not a matter of us accepting anything from the center, but rather of us bringing to the common altar what we had to bring at that particular time.

In this sense, we can work together to the greatest extent possible. And if you work in the style of such work, especially in student circles, then we will make progress.

Question: What was the youth movement, what is it, and how can one arrive at anthroposophy through it? Those who went through the youth movement believe that they will find in anthroposophy a continuation of what they sought in the youth movement. They want to hear about the significance of the youth movement from a spiritual scientific point of view.

Rudolf Steiner: The youth movement belongs to an age in which I myself was no longer young; so those who belong to the youth movement must be better informed about it than I am.

Taken externally, the youth movement is not an entirely abstract, unified movement, but rather it brings together people from the most diverse worlds of ideas and worldviews. People may come together through their feelings. That is one aspect of the youth movement. Other forces, more fundamental than ideological ones, for example, hold it together and keep it together. There are many personalities within the youth movement who could not give a clear and precise answer to the question of what they want; they could not say, consciously, what they want.

The second aspect of the youth movement is that it has emerged everywhere to such an extent that, for example, one cannot say that 'the youth movement in Switzerland and the youth movement in Germany have influenced each other reciprocally, but rather that the youth movement has shot up internationally out of elementary forces. It is a general human cause. One must conscientiously observe the characteristics of the youth movement. When one encounters something like this, one has the feeling that one can only understand it from a profound point of view. If one approaches the youth movement with knowledge of history and the humanities, it becomes clear that it is connected with the inner-human, historical change that is strongly characterized for the humanities scholar as having occurred at the end of the 19th century. This becomes clear when one looks closely at the characteristics found in the pronouncements of those who were still young or children at that time.

I have examined these moments more closely and, on the basis of my observations, have come to the conclusion, or rather, the insight that the youth movement is connected with the great upheaval at the end of the 19th century and is one of the symptoms that points to the advent of a new era at this point in time. When one is very close to something, one does not recognize it in its full essence; one only recognizes it when one moves away from it. Through the spiritual scientific method, one can achieve a certain distance and thereby learn to observe accurately and gain insights into interrelations. In this way, people will one day think about the end of the 19th century and realize that a significant impulse came in that time, which is still hidden today.

This impulse, which is a human impulse, seems to live in the minds of those who have turned to the youth movement. In these minds there is a flash of the tremendously significant turning point at the end of the 19th century. Sometimes it can be quite unimportant to get involved in discussions about it, but it is important to recognize that important impulses are at work and are felt by those who have joined the youth movement. Spiritual science aims to consciously capture what is at work in the development of humanity, and it takes the view that without it, the great world catastrophe cannot be understood either. The philistines, who cannot understand a thing, will think they are eccentric and do not know that they themselves are eccentric. The people who grew old in the ideas of before can no longer keep up. Decadent brains live in those who still carry the old into the 20th century.

It is not a contradiction for the youth movement to live into spiritual science. One can even speak of a certain predestination of the youth movement for spiritual science. The youth movement is conditioned by a feeling for what is more or less consciously present in spiritual science. One must not become vain. One must not come to say, for example, “The epoch lives in me”. We are partly conditioned by the impulse of the end of the 19th century. We have to look at such things externally, not patriarchally like our forefathers. You can't get along with something like that in our time.

Question: How do you find the bridge from the youth movement, in which there are people who rebel against the prevailing worldview, to anthroposophy? One can find a certain rejection of anthroposophy. Some people find it a bit brusque. The path is too strictly prescribed for them. Anthroposophists put the spiritual too much in the foreground, while they are trying to find themselves.

Rudolf Steiner: This is connected with the impulse I mentioned earlier. We can look at the same question from the opposite point of view. Anthroposophy is the one spiritual movement that can approach certain spiritual things in our age. People who find their way into anthroposophy are uprooted from what immediately preceded it in terms of culture. One example is Friedrich Nietzsche. He lived in the transitional epoch; he was condemned by fate to go through all the most intimate cultural sufferings of the soul. Nietzsche went through everything that one can suffer in culture. If you look at him during his student days, in the Wagner-Schopenhauer period, in the period of positivism, he suffers from what was most uplifting for the culture of the time. You can see how this person first suffers from the culture of the 19th century and then perishes because of it. He was still stuck in the culture of the 19th century.

Some individuals were able to work their way out of it and then came to anthroposophy. They found something in it that, at the end of the 19th century, had no father and no mother, so to speak; it was something that had to be placed on new ground. Compared to what has gone before, anthroposophy stands alone. One does not become an anthroposophist in order to have a world view, but rather one does so with one's whole being. Those who do not want to develop a relationship to anthroposophy expose themselves to danger, and if those who are capable of it, who are from the opposite pole even without a father or mother, do not try to find the bridge, then the others may miss out on connecting to the development of humanity.

I can well understand that such misgivings are expressed. One should, however, make an effort to seek the bridge. But if this is anxiously avoided, one would quite expose oneself to the danger that has just been characterized, and no progress would be made at all. The youth movement has recently come to a halt. It strove everywhere towards union; people wanted to find each other and come together. In recent years this has changed in some individuals; they strove towards a certain shutting themselves away. This also appeared as a sweeping international nuance. Not fulfilling oneself with a spiritual content leads to an encapsulation of the individual.

There are numerous paths to anthroposophy. One should go beyond being bothered by the nature of individual people who want to be anthroposophists and should try to really experience anthroposophy. At present, anthroposophy is actually the only thing that is not dogmatized and that is not keen on presenting something in a very specific way, but that strives to look at something from different sides. The essence of anthroposophy lies in life and not in form. If one wants to be understood, one is indeed forced to use forms that are currently customary.

An American once asked me: I have read your writings, including your social writings. Do you think they will still be valid for future ages? I answered: They are constructed in such a way that they can metamorphose, and then quite different conclusions can arise for the coming time than for the present. What matters is that life finds life.

A participant: A bridge must be found for young people by implementing in life that part of the teaching that directly concerns them. Young people cannot relate to the teaching. Teachers, for example, who have emerged from the youth movement, have been fighting for a long time for what happens in the Waldorf school; bridges could be built there. Also, what has been made intellectually accessible through the various courses of anthroposophy has already been unconsciously experienced in the youth movement.

Rudolf Steiner: We have to bear in mind that in our age the individual must find access to general evolution through thought; it is only through thought that they can do so. It is entirely possible to introduce anthroposophy to young people and even to children. Of course, we must not approach it from the standpoint of the old. For example, if you want to teach a child the idea of the immortality of the soul, you take the example of the butterfly and the chrysalis. The child will be able to understand what it is about, because it is a truth. In the emergence of the butterfly from the chrysalis, nature itself presents the same thing at a lower level as what is the immortality of the soul at a higher level. If we start from the standpoint that the child is stupid and I am clever, then the child will never learn anything right, especially if we ourselves do not believe in what we are teaching the child. This is where there is the possibility of introducing everything from anthroposophy to children. In history lessons, what is effective as life in history must be properly introduced to life.

Question: A large part of the youth movement has now moved over to the philistine camp. The youth movement is very much a spiritual movement. They are guided by a strong life of nature and feeling, and this leads people to rebel against much of what has gone before. People wanted to live out their own laws, they could not get out of their emotionalism, they could not recognize that life can only truly become fruitful out of inner truthfulness if it is fully thought through. That is why there is a tendency not to think things through to the end. If one recognizes the importance of anthroposophy for young people, one can prove to young people, whether in terms of world view or philosophy, that they must come to anthroposophy, that anthroposophy only wants them to be more aware, and that it wants the same thing that they want. So far, three solutions have been proposed for the gender question: Kurella's body soul, asceticism and marriage at a young age. However, none of these three solutions has brought a real solution.

Rudolf Steiner: In these three ways, a new problem that confronts humanity is being tried to be solved with old dogmatic thinking. The essence of the free human being cannot be reduced to mere thought.

In anthroposophy, I see something that is alive, that is capable of making a different being out of the human being than he was before. He becomes free through this substantiality, he becomes a truly free human being in the course of a short development. You cannot solve a question that is posed by life through thinking. The question will resolve itself through the practice of life, when it is grasped from the standpoint of freedom. There is no need to worry that something unsocial will come about as a result. Imagine that one day someone wanted to know how to arrange the conception so that a male or female being would be born. If this were made a matter of the intellect, there would certainly not be as many men as women in the world. Although this only takes place at the individual level, social conditions arise through inner laws. [Rudolf Steiner points to his book “The Philosophy of Freedom” and continues:] You cannot arrive at a new life in one leap, least of all through programs. You prepare yourself for it by having a free attitude as your inner foundation. This problem must be solved by each individual. Youth literature is quite dogmatic when it comes to the gender issue.

Question: The youth movement was initially quite romantic. They recognized something that came to them out in nature. They recognized that they could grasp the divine not only with their minds. Anthroposophy wants to draw everything into consciousness. It aims at a striving for knowledge. Most people do not find the bridge between these two, nor can they.

Rudolf Steiner: In this, people think too selfishly; they do not consider how to find a connection to the overall development of humanity. The age is characterized by thinking and conceptualizing. Today, we experience the world through thinking. It is necessary to rise from the dullness of feeling and come to a luminous conception through thinking. We are only truly human through thinking. Our emotional life is transformed through thinking, and we are more human through what thinking releases in us. Life in feeling is sought because there is a fear of clarity. Feeling can be very intense when it passes through thinking. 'Living in nature' is so often understood as if one were striving for something special. One must realize that in so doing one is not bringing anything new, but only regaining something that was lost earlier. Yes, the longing must live in the modern human being. Too little was given to him by the old; he must acquire something for himself. It is recommended to read Schiller's essay “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry.” “The Philosophy of Freedom” is built on a natural relationship with nature.

Question: There is a gulf between older and younger youth. The youth that is now in secondary school is different from the youth of the youth movement. The spirit of the secondary school youth, from which the youth movement grew, was characterized by the slogan “romanticism of rebellion.” The spirit of today's secondary school youth should be described as “resignation of reconstruction.” Everything that was a profound experience for the youth movement: nocturnal journeys, campfires, aimless wandering – that appears to today's youth as Bolshevism. They reject it and long for boundaries to which they can adhere, for authorities. Is this fact to be seen only as a temporary reaction or as the emergence of a new epoch by young people?

Rudolf Steiner: The period that people between the ages of thirty-five and fifty have gone through was a difficult one. The last years of the 19th and the first years of the 20th century were a difficult time; spiritually, people were focused on material things. The good, spiritual life of the fifties and sixties of the 19th century has been buried. The people who are effective today have grown too old; most of those who do something in the world are at least fifty years old. And those young people who have plans to do something are not being allowed to. Between the two stands an inwardly inactive generation, and these are the fathers of today's high school students. These fathers have gained a bad influence on the youth, who look up to them as their leaders. Authority is all very well, but it depends on what kind of personalities it is linked to. And what are the ideals that live in the generation between thirty-five and fifty and are transferred to their sons? One can only feel sorry for these young people.

Question: Does Dr. Steiner consider it desirable for an organization to develop among young people who are involved in the movement and are also anthroposophists?

Rudolf Steiner: Well, I don't think much of organization. You see, in my “Key Points” I deliberately spoke of the social organism, not of organization. We have been overfed with this food in recent years.

Question: The question was whether there would be common tasks for young people in the anthroposophical movement, or whether each person has their own task.

Rudolf Steiner: In the future, all the tasks that individuals have will be the tasks of the community, and each person must make the tasks of the community their own. There is no other way. But you can't organize something like that, only associate.