The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

I count it a special honour to be able to speak among you on the connection between that spiritually scientific outlook on the world to which I have devoted my life's work, and the educational activity, to which your lives are devoted. Let me begin with two introductory remarks. The first is, that what I now intend to say to you will, of course, have to be clothed in apparently theoretic words and phrases, for the simple reason that words are necessary in order to set forth our thoughts. But I say expressly at the outset, that it is not meant theoretically. For I should speak on this present subject least of all, were it not for the fact that I have always devoted a part of my activity to practical educational work, and indeed to the whole educational culture of mankind. What I want to put forward is definitely intended in this sense: it is derived from actual practice.

The second thing I would like to observe by way of introduction is this: The Spiritual Science, which I am here representing, is itself very widely and vehemently controverted and attacked as yet. And for the very reason that I represent this Spiritual Science, I can understand it well, if many an objection is brought forward at this present stage to one or other of the things I have to say. For in effect, the method which is adopted by Spiritual Science is new and unaccustomed from the points of view that still hold sway in modern thought. But it may be that the very way in which we are endeavouring to make it a real force in life, endeavouring to introduce it in so eminently practical a sphere as mar -of education, will contribute something towards an understanding, a way of approach to Spiritual Science itself.

There is no sphere in life that lies remote from the activity and interests of education. To one who has to work as a teacher or educator, the human being is entrusted at an age when he may still develop into anything in the wide world. And only when the teacher, the educator, is imbued with the very warmest interest in the whole life and civilisation of humanity, only then can he pour forth all that is needed for the teaching, the education of the child.

In bringing forward the particular subject of Spiritual Science and Education, I have this special reason: At this very point of time. Spiritual Science is intended as an element of thought and spiritual culture, to unite and gather up again the diverse spiritual and intellectual interests of mankind which have drifted so far apart in recent centuries, particularly in the 19th century. Through Spiritual Science, it is possible to draw together again into a concrete conception of the universe, all those things that have become specialised, without however failing to meet the demands of expert and special knowledge.

And to-day there is a very real reason to consider the relation of the Spiritual Science here intended, to Education. For Education, too, has had its share of the overwhelming influence that modern Natural Science, with its attendant triumphs, has exercised on all human thought and activity. Applied as a method in the sphere of Natural Science itself, the natural-scientific way of thought has led to glorious results. But at the same time—far more so than the individual realises or is conscious of—this way of thought has gained influence on all our activities. And it has gained especial influence on that activity which I call the Art of Education. Now while in the nature of the case I cannot go into the foundations of Spiritual Science as such—which I have often done in lectures in this town—there is one thing I would like to point out by way of comparison. It concerns the peculiar relation of the natural-scientific method to human life.

Consider, for example, how' the human eye comes to be this miraculous instrument, whereby in a certain sphere of sense-perception we see the outer world. This wonderful' function is fulfilled by the human eye, inasmuch as its whole construction fits it to see the surrounding world, and—I speak by way of comparison—ever and always to forget itself in the act of seeing. I might put it in this way: We must entirely invert the observing point of view (which we can only do- approximately with external scientific methods), if we would investigate and really penetrate our instrument of external, sensely sight. In the very act of seeing, we can never at the same time look back into the nature of our eye.

We may apply this image to the natural-scientific method in its relation to life. The man of modern times has carefully and conscientiously developed the natural-scientific method, until, in its Natural Law's and scientific conceptions, it reflects a faithful and objective picture of the outer world. And in the process, man has so formed and moulded his underlying mood and attitude of soul, that in his scientific observation of the world he forgets his own human self; he forgets all those things that have direct and immediate connection with human life. So it has come about, that the more we have! developed in the sense of Natural Science, the less able have we become, with this our scientific method, to see the essence of Man himself, and all that has to do with Man.

Now Spiritual Science—working entirely in the Spirit of Natural Science, but in this very spirit transcending natural- scientific knowledge—Spiritual Science would add to Natural; Science, if I may put it so, that inversion of observation which leads back again to Man. This can only be accomplished by really entering on those processes of inner life which are described in my books on the attainment of higher knowledge, or more briefly indicated in the second part of my book on “Occult Science.” Those processes do actually carry man's soul-life beyond the sphere wherein it moves in ordinary life and thought, including even Natural Science. [See “The Way of Initiation” and its sequel “Initiation and its Results” (particulars on back cover of this booklet). Dr. Steiner's book, “An Outline of Occult Science” is, unfortunately, out of print at present.]

In order to find our way into the thought of Spiritual Science, we must needs have what I would call: Intellectual Modesty. Some time ago, in a public lecture in this town, I used a certain image to indicate what is needful in this respect. Consider a child of five. Suppose you place a volume of Goethe's poems in the child's hand. A whole world is contained within its pages. The child will take it in its hand, turn it this way and that, and perceive nothing of all that would speak to the human being from out this volume. But the child is capable of development; powers of soul are slumbering within the child; and in ten or twelve years it will really be able to draw from the book what lies within it. This is the attitude we need, if we are to find our way into the Spiritual Science of which I am speaking here. We must be able to say to ourselves: By developing his intellect, his method of observation and experiment ever so carefully, the human being is brought up to a certain stage and not beyond. From that stage onwards he must take his own development in hand; and then he will develop powers which were latent and slumbering before. Then he will become aware, how before this development he confronted external Nature (so far as its spiritual essence is concerned), and, most particularly, he confronted Man, as the five-year-old child confronts the book of Goethe's poetry. In essence and in principle, everything depends on our making up our minds to this attitude of intellectual modesty. It is the first thing that counts, if we would find our way into what I have here called “Spiritual Science.”

Through adopting special methods of thinking, feeling and willing—methods which aim at making our thought independent and at training our will—through making our life of thought and will ever more and more independent of the bodily instruments, we become able, as it were, to observe ourselves. We attain the faculty of observing the human being himself. And once we are able to observe the human being, then we can also observe the growing human being, the human being in process of becoming—and this is of extraordinary importance.

It is true that the spirit is much spoken of to-day; and independence of thought is spoken of as well. But Spiritual Science as we understand it cannot join this chorus. For, by a real development of inner life, it seeks the spiritual methods to grasp the spiritual reality in actual and concrete detail. It is not concerned with that spirit of which people 'talk in a vague and misty sense, which they think of as vaguely underlying all things. The Spiritual Science here intended enters into the spiritual being of man in detail. To-day we are to speak of the being of man in process of growth, development, becoming.

People will speak, it is true—in abstract and general terms, if I may put it so—of the human individuality and of its development. And they are rightly conscious that the educator, above all people, must reckon with the development of the human being as an individual. But I may draw your attention to the fact that educationalists of insight have clearly recognised, how little the natural-scientific development of modern times has enabled man to understand any real laws or stages in the evolution of the growing human being. I will give you two examples. The Vienna educationalist, Theodor Vogt, who was well-known m the last third of the 19th century, speaking from out of the reformed Herbartian conception that he represented, made the following remark. He said: In the science of history, in our conception of the historic life of mankind, we have by no means got so far, up to the present, as to recognise how mankind evolves. ... From the evolution of species, the Natural Scientist arrives at the embryological development of the individual human being. But we have no historic conception of humanity's evolution, from which, in this sense, we might deduce conceptions about the evolving child.—This view was repeated by the Jena educationalist, Rein. It culminates in the admission, that we do not yet possess any real methods of spiritual science, such as might enable us to indicate what really lies beneath the human being's development.

In effect, we must first awaken such faculties as those to which I have just alluded, and of the cultivation of which you may read in further detail in my books. Then only are we able to approach that riddle, which meets us with such wonder when we observe how from birth onwards something works itself out from within the human being, flowing into every gesture, working itself out most particularly through language, and through all the relations which the human being enters into with his environment. Nowadays the different types of human life are, as a rule, considered too externally, from points of view of external Physiology or Biology. They make themselves no picture of the whole human being, in whom that which is bodily, that which is of the soul, and that which is spiritual, are working inwardly together. Yet if we would sensibly educate and instruct a child, it is just such a picture of the child which we must make.

* * *

Now one who, strengthened by the methods of Spiritual Science, observes the growing child, will discover, about that period of time when the change of teeth occurs—about the sixth ok; seventh year—a most significant break in the child's development. There is a constantly repeated proverb: “Nature makes no jumps.” Natura non facit saltus. That is true to a certain extent; but all these general ideas are after all one-sided. You can only penetrate their real truth, if you recognise them in their one-sidedness. For in effect Nature is continually making jumps. Take, for example, a growing plant. We can apply the proverb, “Nature makes no jumps.” Yet in the sense of Goethe's idea of metamorphosis we should have to say: “Although the green leaf of the plant is the same thing as the coloured petal, yet Nature makes a jump from the leaf to- the sepal of the calyx, from the sepal to the coloured petal, and again from the petal to the stamen.” We do not meet the reality of life if we abstractly apply the idea that Nature and Life make no jumps at all. And so it is especially in man. Man's life flows by without discontinuity, and yet, in the sense here indicated, there are discontinuities everywhere.

There is a significant break in the life of the child about the sixth or seventh year. Something enters the human organism, that penetrates it through and through. Of this, modern physiology has as yet no real conception. Outwardly, the change of teeth takes place; but something is also taking place in the spiritual and. soul-being of the child. Until this point of time, man is essentially an imitative being. His Constitution of soul and body is such that he gives himself up entirely to his surroundings. He feels his way into his surroundings; from the very centre of his will his development is such, that the lines of force, and rays of force, of his will are exactly modelled on that which is taking place in his environment. Far more important than all that we bring to the child, in this age of life, by way of admonition and correction, is the way in which we ourselves behave in the child's presence.

In real life, the intangible, imponderable elements are far more effective than what we observe externally and clearly. So it is with regard to the child's impulse to imitate. It is not only tin- gross external behaviour of the human being that matters. In every tone of voice, in every gesture, in everything the educator does in the child's presence during this period of life, lies something to which the child adapts itself.

Far more than we know, we human beings are the external impress of our thoughts. We pay little heed, in ordinary life, to the way we move our hand. Yet the way we move our hand is a faithful expression of the peculiar constitution of our soul, of the whole mood and attunement of our inner life. In the developed- soul-life of the grown-up human being, little attention is paid to the connection between the stride of the legs, the gesture of the hands, the expression of the face, and that which lies, within the soul as a deep impulse of wi)I and feeling. But the child lives its way right into these imponderable things of life. It. is no exaggeration to say: If a man most inwardly endeavours to be a good man in the presence of a child before the age of seven; if he endeavours to be sound in every way, if he conscientiously resolves to make no allowances for himself even in his inner life, in thoughts and feelings that he does not outwardly express—then, through the intangible, imponderable things of life, he works most powerfully upon the child.

In this connection there are many things still to be observed, things which, if I may so express myself, “lie between the lines.” We have become enmeshed in a more materialistic way of life, especially as regards life's more intimate and finer aspects. And so we have grown accustomed to pay little attention to these things. Yet it is only when they are rightly observed and estimated once again, that a certain impulse will enter into our educational thought and practice—an impulse that is very badly needed, especially in an age which claims to be a social age, an age of social thought.

There are certain experiences in life, which we cannot rightly estimate unless we take into account these real observations of the soul- and spiritual-life within the human being. I am referring to actual facts of experience. For instance, a father comes to you in some consternation and says: “What am I to do? My child has been stealing.” It is of course very natural for the father to be concerned about it.

But now you look into the matter more closely. You ask,

How did it happen?

The child simply went to the drawer and took out some money.

What did the child do with the money?

Well, it bought some sweets for its playmates.

Then it did not even steal for selfish reasons?

And so at length you are able to say: “Now look, the child did not steal at all. There is no question of its having stolen. Day after day the child saw its mother go to the drawer and take, out money. It thought that was the right thing to do and imitated it. The child's action was simply the outcome of the impulse which is predominant in this early age—the impulse to imitation.” Bearing in mind that this imitative impulse is the most powerful force in this first stage of childhood, we may guide the child rightly in this sense. We may direct its attention to actions, whose influence will be powerful at this stage and permanent in its effect. And rye must be fully aware that at this period of the child's life exhortations and admonitions are as yet of no assistance. It is only what works on the will, that really helps.

Now this peculiar constitution of the human being lasts until the point of time when that remarkable period, is reached physiologically—when, if I may put it so, the hardening principle makes its final onset and crystallises the permanent teeth from out of the human organism. To look into that process by the methods of Spiritual Science and see what lies beneath it. in the growing organism when this final period is reached, when the change of teeth takes place, is extraordinarily interesting. But it is still more important to follow what I just now described, namely, the spiritual psychical development that goes parallel with this Organic change, and that still takes its start from imitation.

About the seventh year a very distinct change begins to make itself felt in the spiritual and soul-nature of the child. With this change a new faculty bursts in upon the young child, a faculty of reacting to different things. Previously the eye was intent to imitate, the ear was intent to imitate. But now the child begins to listen to what goes out from grown up people as expressions of opinions, judgments, and points of view. The impulse to imitate becomes transformed into devotion to authority. Now I know that many people to-day will particularly disapprove if we emphasise the principle of authority as an important factor in education. Nevertheless, if one is out to represent the facts with open mind and serious purpose, one cannot go by programmes nor by catchwords; one must be guided simply and solely by empirical knowledge, by experience. And it must be observed how much it means for a child, to be guided by a teacher or educator, man or woman, to whom the child looks up with reverence, who becomes for the child a natural and accepted authority. It is of the very greatest significance for the growth of the human being, that at this age he will accept this or that thought as his own, because it is the thought of the grown-up man or woman whom he reveres; that he will live into a certain way of feeling, because it is their way of feeling, because in effect there is a real growing together between the young developing human being and the mature one. We should only know how much it means for the whole after life of man, if in this period of life—between the change of teeth about the sixth or seventh year, and that last great change that comes at the time of puberty in the fourteenth or fifteenth year—he had the good fortune (I use this word deliberately) to be really able to give himself up to a natural and accepted authority.

But we must not stop at the abstract generalisation; we must enter more deeply into this most important period of life—the period which begins about the sixth or seventh year and ends with puberty. The child is now taken from its home—educated or spoilt through the principle of imitation—and handed over to the school. The most important things for after life are to be done with the child during this time. Here indeed it is right to say, that not only every year but every month in the child's development should be penetrated and investigated with diligent care by the teacher or the educator. Not only in general terms—but as well as may be, even in teaching large numbers at a time, each succeeding month and year should thus be studied and observed in every individual child's development. As the child enters school, and until about the ninth year, we see the imitative impulse still working on alongside the impulse of devotion to authority, which is already making itself felt. And if we can rightly observe the working together of these two fundamental forces in the evolving human being, I hen the full and living result of such observation will provide the true basis for the method of teaching and for the curriculum.

This question came upon me very strongly during the present year, when the new “Waldorf School” had to be instituted in Stuttgart. By the sympathetic co-operation of our friend Emil Molt, we were in a position to found this school in connection with the Stuttgart firm, “The Waldorf-Astoria Cod' The Waldorf School is in the fullest sense of the word a unitary school, i.e., a school without distinction of class, a school for the whole people. [For further particulars of the Waldorf School, see Numbers 1, 2 and 5 in Volume I of the “Threefold Commonwealth” fortnightly (price 3d. each), and also Volume I, Number 2 of the bi-monthly magazine “Anthroposophy” (price 1/-). To be obtained from the Publishers of this booklet. The Waldorf School is a “unitary” school in that it makes no distinction of Class. About 500 boys and girls, between the ages of 6 and 14, or 6 and 19, are educated there; and among them the children of manual workers and of the “educated classes” are represented in fairly even proportion. They all receive the same education, up to the time when they leave school, which varies according to their future vocation and the wishes of their parents.] In its whole plan and method, and in the arrangement of the subjects, it proceeds from the impulse that Spiritual Science can give towards an Art of Education. During last September I had the privilege of giving a course of training for the group of teachers whom I had selected for this school. At that time, all these questions came upon me in a very vivid way. What I am now endeavouring to say to you is in its essential features an extract of what was given to those teachers in the training course. For they were to direct and carry on a school, founded on principles of Spiritual Science and on the social needs of this time—a real people's school, on a basis of unity.

Now in effect not only the method of instruction, but the curriculum, the arrangement of subjects, the definite aim of the teacher, can be drawn from a living observation of the evolving human being. So, for example, we shall find much in the young child's life, even after the sixth or seventh year, that still proceeds from the peculiar will-nature which alone could make it possible for the child to have so powerful an impulse to imitation. As a matter of fact, the intellect develops very much later, and it develops from out of the will. The intimate relationship which exists between the one human being—the grown-up teacher, for example—and the other human being—the growing child—this intimate relationship finds expression as a relationship from will to will. Hence in this first year of elementary school we can best approach the child if we are in a position to work upon the will in the right way. But that is just the question—How can we best work upon the will?

We can not work on the will by laying too' much stress, at this early stage, on external perception and observation—by directing the child's attention too much to the external material world. But we can very effectively approach the will if we permeate our educational work in these first years with a certain artistic, aesthetic element. And it is really possible to start front the artistic and aesthetic in our educational methods. It is not necessary to begin with reading and writing lessons, where there is no real connection between the instruction given and the forces which are coming- outwards from the soul-centre of the child. Our modern written and printed signs are in reality very far removed from the original. Look back to the early forms of writing, not among “primitive” peoples, but in so highly evolved a civilisation as that of ancient Egypt, for example. You will see how at that time, writing was thoroughly artistic in its form and nature. But in the course time this artistic element gradually became worn, down and polished away. Our written signs have become mere conventional symbols. And it is possible to go back to the immediate, elementary understanding, which man still has for that which later on became our modern writing.

In other words, instead of teaching writing in an abstract way, we can begin with a kind of drawing-writing lesson. I do not mean anything that is arbitrarily thought-out. But from the real artistic sense of the human being it is possible to form, artistically, what afterwards becomes transformed, as the child grows and develops, into the abstract signs of writing. You begin with a kind of drawing-writing or writing- drawing, and you enlarge its sphere so as to include real elements of plastic art, painting and modelling. A true psychologist will know, that what is brought to the child in this way" does not merely grasp the head—it grasps the whole human being. In effect, things of an intellectual colouring, things which are permeated by the intellect only, and by convention most particularly, like the' ordinary printed or written letters, do only grasp the head, part of man. But if we steep our early teaching of these subjects in an. artistic element, then, we grasp the whole human being. Therefore, a future pedagogy will endeavour to derive the intellectual element, and objective teaching of external things, object- lesson teaching also, from something that is artistic in character at the outset.

It is just when we approach the child artistically, that we are best able to consider the interplay of the principle of authority and the imitative principle. For in the artistic there lives something of imitation; and there also lives in it something which passes directly from the subjective man to the subjective man. Anything that is to work in an artistic way must pass through the subjective nature of man. As a human being, with your own deep inner nature, you confront the child quite differently if what you, are teaching is first steeped in an artistic quality. For there you are pouring something real and substantial into yourself as well, something that must appear to you yourself as a natural and unquestioned authority. Then you will not appear with the stamp of a merely external conventional culture; but that which is poured into you brings you near to the child in a human way, as one human being to another. Under the influence of this artistic education it will come about quite of its own accord: the child will live and grow into a natural and unquestioning acceptance of the authority of the person who is teaching him and. educating him.

This again may bring it home to us, that spirit must hold sway in education. For instruction of this kind can only be given by one who allows spirit to permeate and fill his teaching; Spirit must hold sway in our whole treatment of our teaching work, and we ourselves must fully live in all that we have to convey to the child. Here 1 am touching on another of the intangible things in the teacher's life. It is very easy, it seems to come quite as a matter of course, for the teacher as he confronts the child to appear to himself as the superior and intelligent person, compared with the simple ingenuous nature of the child. But the effects of this on our teaching work are of very great significance. I will give you a concrete example, one which I have already mentioned in other connections, in my lectures here. Suppose I want to give the child, a conception of the immortality of the human soul. I take an example, a picture of it, adapting myself to the child-like spirit. I draw the child's attention, in a real nature-lesson, to the chrysalis and the butterfly emerging from it. And now I explain to the child: Look, just as the butterfly rests in the chrysalis, invisible to- the external eye, so your immortal soul rests in your body. Just as the butterfly comes out from the chrysalis, so when you go through the gate of death, your immortal soul rises out of your body into another world. And as the butterfly enters an entirely new world when it emerges from the chrysalis, so the world into which you enter, when you rise out of the body, is a very different world from this one.

Now it is perfectly possible to think out an image like this with one's intellect. And as an “intelligent person,” while one teaches it to the child, one does not quite like to believe in it oneself. But that has its effect in education and in teaching. For by one of the intangible facts of life, through mysterious forces that work from hidden soul to hidden soul, the child, only really accepts from me what I, as teacher, believe in myself.

In effect, Spiritual Science does lead us to this point. If we have Spiritual Science, we do not merely take this picture of the butterfly and the chrysalis as a cleverly thought- out comparison, but we perceive: This picture has been placed in Nature by the divine creative powers, not merely to symbolise the immortality of the soul for the edification of man, but because, at a lower stage, the same thing is actually happening when the butterfly leaves the chrysalis, as happens when the immortal soul leaves the human body. We can raise ourselves to the point of believing in this picture as fully and directly as we should desire the child to believe in it. And if a living and powerful belief flows through the soul of the educator in this way, then will he work well upon the child. Then, his working through authority will be no disadvantage, but a great and significant advantage to the child.

In pointing out such things as this, we must continually be drawing attention to the fact that human life is a single whole, a connected thing. What we implant in the human being when he is yet a child will often re-appear only in very much later years as strength and conviction and efficiency of life. And it generally escapes our notice, because, when it does appear, it appears transformed. Suppose, for example, that we succeed in awakening in the child a faculty of feeling that is very necessary: I mean, the power of reverence. We succeed in awakening in the child the mood of prayer and reverence for what is divine in all the world. He who has learned to observe life's connections, knows that this mood of prayer rc-appears in later life transformed. It has undergone a metamorphosis, and we must only be able to recognise it in its re-appearance. For it has become transformed into that inner power of soul whereby the human being is able to influence other human beings beneficially, with an influence of blessing. No one who has not learned to pray in childhood, will in old age have that power of soul which passes over as an influence of blessing, in advice and exhortation, nay, often in the very gesture and expression of the human being, to children or to younger people. By transitions which generally remain unnoticed, by hidden metamorphoses, what we receive as an influence of grace and blessing in childhood transforms itself in a riper age of life into the power to give blessing.

In this way every conceivable force in life becomes transformed. Unless we observe these connections, unless we draw our art of education from a full, broad, whole view of life, a view that is filled with spiritual light, education will not be able to perform its task—to work with the evolving forces of the human being instead of working against them.

When the human being has reached about the ninth year of life, a new stage is entered once again—-it is not so distinct a change this time as that about the seventh year, yet it is clearly noticeable. The after-workings of the imitative impulse gradually disappear, and something enters in the growing child which can be observed most intimately if one has the will to see it. It is a peculiar relation of the child to its own ego, to its own “I.” Now of course a certain inner soul- relationship to the ego begins at a very much earlier stage. It begins in every human being at the earliest point to which ill alter life he can remember back. About this point of time, the child ceases to say “Charlie wants that” or “Mary wants that,” and begins to say “I want that.” In later life we remember hack up to this point; and for the normal human being what lies before it vanishes completely, as a rule. It is at this point that the ego enters the inner soul-life of the human being. But it does not yet fully enter the spiritual or mental life.

It is an essentially spiritual or mental experience of “I,” that first becomes manifest in the inner life of the human being about the ninth year, or between the ninth and tenth years (all these indications are approximate), Men who were keen observers of the soul have sometimes pointed out this great and significant moment in human life. Jean Paul tells us how he can remember, quite distinctly: As a very young boy he was standing in the courtyard of his parents' house, just in front of the barn (so clearly does he describe the scene), when suddenly there awoke in him the consciousness of “I.” He tells us, he will never forget that moment, when for the first time he looked into the hidden Holy of Holies of the human soul.

Such a transformation takes place about the ninth year of life, distinctly in some, less distinctly in others. And this point of time is extraordinarily important from the point of view of education and of teaching. If by this time we have succeeded in awakening in the young child those feelings, if we have succeeded in cultivating those directions of the will, which we call religious and moral, and which we can draw out in all our teaching work, then we need only be good observers of children, and we can let our authority work in this period of life—as we see it approach—in such a way that the religious feelings we prepared and kindled in the preceding period are now made firm and steadfast in the young child's soul. Tor the power of the human being to look up, with true and honest reverence from his inmost soul, to the Divine and Spiritual that permeates and ensouls the world, this period of childhood is most decisive. And in this period especially, lie who by spiritual perception can go out into the young child's life, will be guided, intuitively as it were, to find the right words and the right rules of conduct.

In its true nature, education is an artistic thing. We must approach the child, not with a normal educational science, but with an Art of Education. Even as the artist masters his substances and his materials and knows them well and intimately, so he who permeates himself with spiritual vision knows the symptoms which arise about the ninth year of life, when the human being inwardly deepens, when the ego- consciousness becomes a thing of the spirit—whereas previously it was of the soul. Whereas his previous method of teaching and education was to start from the subjective nature of the child, so now the teacher and educator will transform this into a more objective way of treating things. If we can perceive this moment rightly, we shall know what is necessary in this respect. Thus, in the case of external Nature-lessons, observation of Nature, things of Natural Science, we shall know, that before this moment these things should be brought to the child only by way of stories and fairy-tales and parables. All things of Nature should be dealt with by comparison with human qualities. In short, one should not separate the human being at this stage from his environment in Nature. About the ninth year, at the moment when the' ego awakens, the human being performs this separation of his own accord. Then he becomes ready to compare the phenomena of Nature and their relation to one another in an objective way. But before this moment in the child's life, we should not begin with external, objective descriptions of what goes on in Nature, in man's environment. Rather should we ourselves develop an accurate sense, a keen spiritual instinct, to perceive this important transformation when it comes.

* * *

Another such transformation takes place about the eleventh or twelfth year. While the principle of authority still holds sway over the child's life, something that will not appear in full development till after puberty already begins to radiate into it. It is, what afterwards becomes the independent power of judgment. After puberty, we have to work in all our teaching and education by appealing to the child's own power of judgment. But that which takes shape after puberty as the power of independent judgment, is already active in. the child at an earlier stage, working its way into the age of authority from the eleventh year onwards. Here again, if we rightly perceive what is happening in the soul-nature of the child., we can observe how at this moment the child begins to develop new interests. Its interest would be great, even before Ibis time, in Nature lessons, and descriptions, properly adapted, from Natural Science and Natural History. But a real power of comprehending physical phenomena, of understanding even the simplest conceptions of Physics, does not develop until about the eleventh or twelfth year. And when I say, a real power of understanding physical phenomena and physical conceptions, 1 know the exact scope and bearing of my statement.

There can be no real art of education without this perception of the inner laws and stages of development underlying human life. The Art of Education requires to be adapted to what is growing and developing outwards and upwards in the human being. From the real inner development of the child, we should read and learn and so derive the right curriculum, the planed teaching, the whole objective of our teaching work. What we teach, and how we teach it, all this should flow from a knowledge of the human being. But we shall gain no knowledge of the human being until we are in a position to guide cur attention and our whole world-outlook towards the spiritual—the spiritual realities that underlie the external facts of this world of the senses. Then too, it will be very clear that the intangible imponderable things of life play a real part, above all in the Art of Education.

Our modern education has evolved, without our always being fully conscious of it, from underlying scientific points of view. Thus, we have come to lay great value on lessons that centre round external objects, external objective vision. Now I do not want you to take what I am saying as though it were intended polemically or critically or by way of condemnation ex cathedra. That is by no means the case. What I want to do, is to describe the part which Spiritual Science can play in developing an educational art for the present and for the immediate future. If we have emphasised external objective methods of instruction overmuch, the reason lies, at bottom, in those habits of thought which arise from the methods and points of view of Natural Science. Now I say expressly, at the proper age of childhood and for the right subjects it is justified and good to teach the child in this external and objective way. But it is no less important to ask, whether everything that has to be communicated to the growing child can really flow from objective perception, whether it must not rather pass by another way, namely, from the soul of the teacher or educator into the soul of the child. And this is the very thing that needs to be pointed out: there are. such other ways, apart from the way of external, objective perception.

Thus, I indicated as an all-pervading principle between (be change of teeth and the age of puberty, the principle nl authority. That something is living in the teacher as an opinion or a way of feeling, this should be the reason why the child accepts this opinion or way of feeling as its own. And in. the whole way the teacher confronts the child, there must be something which works intangibly. There must in effect be something, which flows out from a knowledge and perception of life as a single whole, something which flows from the living interest that such a knowledge of life will kindle. I indicated the significance of this, when I said that what we develop in the age of childhood will often reappear, metamorphosed' and transformed, only in the grownup human being, nay, even in old age.

There is one thing we fail to observe if we carry the principle of external objective instruction to an extreme. We can, of course, bring ourselves down to the child's level of understanding. We can restrict ourselves and endeavour to place before the child only what it can see and observe and really grasp—or, at least, what we imagine it can grasp. But in carrying this principle to an extreme, we fail to observe an important law of life, which may be thus described: It is a very source of strength and power in life, if, let us say, in his 35th year a man becomes able to say to himself: “As a child you once heard this thing or that from your teacher or from the person who was educating you. You took it up into your memory and kept it there. Why did you store it in memory? Because you loved the teacher as an authority; because the teacher's personality stood before you in such a way that it was clear to you:—If he holds that belief, then you too must take it into yourself. Such was your instinctive attitude. And now you suddenly see a light; now you have become ready to understand it. You accepted it out of love for him who was your authority; and now by a full power of maturity, you recall it once again, and you recognise it in a new way. Now only do you understand it.”

Anyone who smiles at the idea of such a source of strength in after life, lacks living interest in what is real in human life. He does not know that man's life is a single whole, where all things are inter-connected. That is why he cannot rightly value how much it means, not to stop at ordinary objective lessons (which within limits are perfectly justified), but rather to sink into¹ the child's soul many things that may afterwards return into its life, from stage to stage of maturity.

Why is it that we meet so many, many people to-day, inwardly broken in their lives? Why is it that our heart must bleed, when we look out over vast territories where there are great tasks to perform, where men and women walk through life, seemingly crippled and paralysed before these tasks? It is because, in educating the children as they grew up into life, attention was not paid to the development of those inner forces that are a. powerful support to man in after years, enabling him to take his stand firmly in the world.

Such things have to be taken into account, if we would pass from a mere Natural Science of pedagogy to a real Art of Education. Education is a thing for mankind as a whole. For that very reason it must become an Art, which the teacher and educator applies and exercises individually. There are certain inner connections which we must perceive if we would truly penetrate what is so often said instinctively, without being clearly understood. For example, the demand is quite rightly being voiced that education should not be merely intellectual. People say that it does not so much matter for the growing man to receive knowledge and information; what matters, they say, is that the element of will in him should be developed, that he should become skilful and strong, and so forth. Certainly, this is a right demand; but the point is that such a demand cannot be met by setting up general principles and norms and standards. It can only be met when we are able to enter into the real stages and periods of the human being's evolution, in concrete detail.

We must know that it is the artistic and aesthetic that inspires the human will. We must find the way, to bring the artistic and aesthetic to bear on the child's life of will. And we must not seek any merely external way of approach to the will; we must not think of it merely in the sense of external Physiology or Biology. But we must seek to pass through the element of soul and spiritual life which is most particularly expressed in childhood. Many things will yet have to be permeated with soul and spirit. In our Waldorf School in Stuttgart, we have for the first time attempted to transform gymnastics and physical exercises, which in their method and organic force have generally been based on physiological considerations, into a kind of Eurhythmic Art. What you can now see almost any Saturday or Sunday in the performances of Eurhythme at Dornach, is of course intended, in the first place, as a special form of art. It is a form of art using as its instrument the human organism itself, with all its inner possibilities of movement. But while it is intended as a form of art, it also affords the possibility of permeating with soul and spirit those movements of the human being which are ordinarily developed into the more purely physiological physical exercises. When this is done, the movements that the human being executes will not merely be determined by the idea of working, in such and such a way, on such and such muscles or groups of muscles. But they will flow naturally, from each inner motive- of the soul into the muscular movement, the movement of the limbs. And we, who represent the spiritualisation of life from the point of view of Spiritual Science, are convinced that Eurhythme will become a thing of great importance, for Education on the one hand, and on the other hand for Health. For in it we are seeking the sound and natural and healthy relationship which must obtain, between the inner life and feeling and experience of the soul, and that which can evolve as movement in the human being as a whole. Thus, what is generally sought for through an external Physiology or through other external considerations, is now to be sought for through the perception of man as being permeated by soul and spirit. [For further information about Eurhythme (not to be confused with other forms of art known in England as “Eurhythme” see “The Threefold Commonwealth” fortnightly, Volume I, Numbers 2, 5 and 6. Demonstrations are given and classes arranged in London and other parts of Britain. For particulars, apply to the Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in London.]

Thus, in the first years of elementary school, the whole principle of teaching must be saturated with the different arts, in order to work upon the will. And most particularly; that part of education which is generally thought of as an education of the will—gymnastics and physical exercises—must now be permeated with soul and spirit. But that which is soul and spirit in man must first be recognised, in its real scope, in its potentialities, in its concrete manifestation.

So again, we must recognise the connection between two faculties of the human soul—a connection which has not yet been properly discovered by modern Psychology, for in effect modern Psychology is out of touch with Spiritual Science. If we can look objectively into that important period of change which I described as occurring about the ninth year, we shall see how at that moment a very peculiar thing is happening, on the one hand, in the child's faculties of feeling, in its life of feeling. The child grows more deeply inward. New shades of feeling make their appearance. It is as though the inner soul-life were becoming more independent, in its whole feeling of the outer world of Nature. On the other hand, something else is taking place, which will only be noticed if one can observe the soul really intimately. It is certainly true, as Jean Paul observed and stated in a very penetrating epigram, that we learn more in the first three years of our life than in the three years we spend at the University. In the first three years, our memory is still working organically, and for actual life we learn far more. But about the ninth year a peculiar relationship a relationship which plays more into the conscious H/c comes about between the life of peeling and the tile of memory. These things must be seen; for those who cannot see them, they are simply non-existent.

Now, it we can really perceive these intimate relationships between the life of feeling and the memory, and if we rightly cultivate and nurture them, we find in them the right aspect for all that part of our leaching work in which a special appeal has to be made to the child's memory. As a matter of fact, appealing to the memory we ought always at the same time to appeal to the life of feeling. Particularly in our History lessons, in all stories from History, we shall find just the right shades of colouring in the way to tell the story, if we know that everything that is meant to be memorised should be permeated, as we give it out, by something that plays over into the life of feeling—the life of feeling, which at this age has grown more independent. And if we recognise these connections in life, we shall rightly place our History lesson in relation to the whole plan and curriculum. In this way also, we shall gain a correct view of historic culture in general.

Through all that primarily works upon the memory, we shall at the same time influence the life of feeling; just as we began, through artistic elements, to work upon the life of will. Then, after this period in life, we shall gradually find it possible to let the intellectual element work it way out through the elements of will and feeling. If we do not proceed in this way—if in our teaching and educating work we do not rightly develop the intellectual element from out of the elements of will and feeling—then we are working against, not with, the evolving forces of the human being.

You will have seen from the whole tenor of this lecture that in outlining the relation between Spiritual Science and the Art of Education the real point is that we so apply our Spiritual Science that it becomes a knowledge and perception of man. And in the process, we ourselves gain something from Spiritual Science which .passes into our will, just as everything which has in it the germ of art passes over into the will of man. Thus, we get away from a pedagogic science as a mere science of norms and general principles which always has its definite answers ready to hand: “Such and such should be the methods of education.” But we transplant, into our own human being, something that must live within our will—a permeation of will with spiritual life- in order that we may work, from our will, into the evolving forces of the child. In the sense of Spiritual Science, the Art of Education must rest on a true and effective knowledge of man. The evolving man—man in process of becoming—is then for us a sacred riddle, which we desire to solve afresh every day and every hour. If we enter the service of mankind in this spirit with our Art of Education, then we shall be serving human life from out of the interests of human life itself.—In conclusion, I should like to draw your attention once again to the points of view from which we started.

The teacher or educator has to do with the human being in that age, when there must be implanted in human nature and drawn forth from human nature, all those potentialities which will work themselves out through the remainder of the human being's life. There is, therefore, no sphere of life, which ought not somehow to concern and touch the person 1 whose task it is to teach, to educate. But it is only those who learn to understand life from the spirit, who can understand it. To form and mould human life, is only possible for those who—to use Goethe's expression—are able spiritually to form il. And it is this which seems to me important above all things in the present day: that that formative influence on life, which is exercised through education, may itself be moulded according to the spirit, and ever more according to the spirit.

Let me repeat, it is not for purposes of criticism or laying clown the law that these words have been spoken here to-day. It is, because in ail modesty we opine that Spiritual Science, with those very points of knowledge that it gains on the nature of man, and hence on the nature of evolving man, can be of service to the Art of Education. We are convinced of its power to bring fountains of fresh strength to the Educational Art. And this is just what Spiritual Science would do and be. It would take its part in life, not as a strange doctrine or from a lofty distance, but as a real ferment of life, to saturate every single faculty and task of man. It is in this sense that I endeavour to speak on the most varied spheres of life, to influence and work into the most varied spheres of life, from the point of view of Spiritual Science. If to-day I have spoken on the relation of Spiritual Science to Education, you must not put it down to any immodest presumption on my part. You must ascribe it to the firm conviction, that if we in our time would work in life in accordance with the spirit, very serious investigation and penetration into spiritual realities will yet be necessary—necessary above all in this our time. You must ascribe it to the honest and upright desire, for Spiritual Science to take its share in every sphere of life, arid particularly in that sphere, so wonderful, so great, so full of meaning—the formative instruction and education of man himself.

Printed for the Publishers by Charles Raper (t.u.).
194a Mare Street, Hackney, E.8.

The subject I addressed last Monday here in Utrecht was the question of how anthroposophically oriented spiritual science can provide a method, a scientific path for penetrating the spiritual, supersensible world.

I have pointed out how it is only possible to penetrate into this environment if man brings forth from this soul certain abilities and powers that indeed lie dormant in every soul, and if he lifts up what is ordinary knowledge to the level of vision; to a vision that, for example, comes to develop full awareness of what it means to have a soul-spiritual life independent of all corporeality. We know precisely through modern science - and with regard to the everyday life of the soul, this science is absolutely right - that this ordinary life of the soul is bound to the instrument of the body. And only spiritual scientific methods can tear the spiritual-soul life away from the body, can thereby penetrate to the being in the human being that dwells in the spiritual world before it has united with a physical body through conception or birth, that passes through the gate of death, discards the human body and again consciously enters a spiritual world.

And I continued last Monday by saying that anyone who makes such an acquaintance with man's own supersensible being is also able to perceive, behind nature's sensuality and behind everything that can be explored with the ordinary mind, a supersensible environment, an environment of spiritual beings.

What is recognized in this way as the spiritual and soul life in man, what is recognized as the spiritual essence of the world in which we live, is what actually enables us to gain a true knowledge of the human being.

Over the last three to four centuries, we have acquired a complete natural science, but we have not been able to draw any knowledge about human beings from this natural science. In developmental theory, we start from the lowest living creatures. We ascend to the human being; we regard him, so to speak, as the end link in the animal series. We learn what humans have in common with other organisms, but we do not learn what humans actually are in the world as a separate being. We can only learn this through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. And what asserts itself in this way in knowledge ultimately also asserts itself in the feelings and impulses that modern humanity has developed in social life.

Just think how many people who, through modern technology, have developed as a new class of people, through the whole modern economy - actually under the influence of certain socialist theories - believe that what lives in people as morality, as science, as religion, as art, is not drawn from an original spiritual source, but that it is only drawn from what economic, material processes are. The theory professed by modern social democracy, the theory that has sought to become reality in such a destructive way in Eastern Europe, this theory basically sees the forces that rule history as being outside of the human. And what man brings forth in art, custom, law, religion, that appears only as a kind of smoke. People call it a superstructure that rises up on the substructure. It is like a smoke that comes out of the purely economic-material. There, too, in this placing of the human being in the practical world, the actual human being is extinguished. If we are to characterize what modern education and the modern social consciousness have brought about, we cannot say otherwise than: the human being has been extinguished.

What spiritual science, as it is meant here, is to bring to humanity again is the knowledge of the human being, the appreciation of the human being, the connection of the human being as a supersensible being to the supersensible, universal being of the world.

And only with this do we stand in true reality. Only with this do we stand on ground that leads into a truly practical life. This is what I would like to substantiate today, first in the question of education and teaching. And here, in the way it has emerged from the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has from the very beginning been conceived not as something unworldly and far removed from the world, but as something thoroughly realistic and practical. And one of the first practical foundations was in the field of education with the Free Waldorf School, which Emil Molt founded in Stuttgart and which I myself have the educational and didactic responsibility for. In this Free Waldorf School, the impulses of a true knowledge of the human being that can flow from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science are developed pedagogically and didactically.

For a long time people have been talking about the fact that education and teaching should not graft this or that into the child's soul, but rather develop what is in the human being out of the human soul. But when it is expressed in this way, it is, of course, initially only an abstract principle. The point, however, is not to have this principle intellectually, to extract something from the human soul, but to be able to truly observe the developing human soul in the child. And for that, one must first develop a sense for it. This sense is only developed by someone who is aware of how the actual individuality of the human being, the actual spiritual-soul entity from a spiritual world in which it has lived for a long time, descends; how from day to day, from week to week, from year to year, in all that develops physically and psychically in the child, a supersensible element lives; how we, as educators, as teachers, have been entrusted with something from a supersensible world that we have to unravel. When we see from day to day how the child's physiognomic traits become clearer and clearer, when we can decipher how a spiritual-soul element, sent down to us from the spiritual world, gradually unravels and reveals itself in these physiognomic traits , it is important to develop, above all, a sense of reverence for the supersensible human being descending from the spiritual worlds as the basis of a pedagogical-didactic art.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science makes it possible to observe the child's development from year to year. First of all, I would like to show the main stages of human development.

It is often said that nature or the world does not make any leaps. Such things are constantly repeated without actually looking at what they are supposed to mean. Does not nature constantly make leaps when it develops the green leaf and then, as if with a leap, the sepal and the colored petal and then again the stamens and so on? And so it is with human life. For the person who, unbiased by all the stimuli and impulses that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science can give him, observes this developing human life in the child, he finds, above all, not out of mystical grounds, but out of faithful observation, a leap in development around the seventh year, when the child begins to get the second teeth. Here we see how our knowledge of the soul, as it is currently used in science, has basically become somewhat exaggerated. Unless one has become completely materialistic, one differentiates between body and soul. But one speaks of the relationship between body and soul in an extraordinarily abstract way. One does not get used to observing in this field with the same kind of faithful and unprejudiced observation as one has learned in natural science. In natural science, for example, one learns that when heat appears through some process, and one has not added it, this heat was in some other form in the body. In physics one says “latent”. One says that the latent heat has been released. This attitude, which is provided by natural science, must also be adopted for the science of man, which, however, must then be spiritualized in relation to natural science. Thus, one must observe carefully: What then changes in the human being when he passes the age of changing teeth?

Now, if we really have the necessary impartiality for observation, we can see how the child, when it passes the age of seven, actually only begins to have outlined, contoured ideas, whereas before that it had no such ideas. We can see how it is only with this period that the possibility of thinking in actual thoughts, however childlike they may be, begins. We see how something emerges from the child's soul that was previously hidden in the human organism. Anyone who has acquired a spiritual eye for this matter can see how the child's soul life changes completely when the second dentition begins; how something emerges from the deepest, most hidden part of the soul and comes to the surface. Where did it come from, this thinking that now appears as a definite life of ideas? It was there as a principle of growth in the human being; permeating the organism; living as a spiritual-soul element in the growth that then comes to an end when the teeth are pushed out from within and replace the earlier teeth. When an end is put to this growth, which finds its conclusion in the change of teeth, then, so to speak, only one growth remains, for which less intensive forces are necessary. We see, then, how that which later becomes thinking in the child was once an inward organic growth force, and how this organic growth force is metamorphically transformed and comes to light as soul power.

By adopting this approach, we arrive at a science of the soul that is not clichéd, which, when it comes down to it, is simply transposed into the spiritual and is based on the same methods as those on which natural science is also based. Just as natural science is a faithful observation of a physical nature, so in order to understand the human being, a faithful observation is necessary, but now of the soul and spirit. If one learns to see through the human being in this way, then this way of looking at the human being is transformed into an artistic way of looking. It is indeed the case that today people often say, when someone expresses something like I just did: Yes, one should just look at something scientifically, in terms of knowledge; one should stick to sober logic; one should work through the intellect to arrive at abstractly formulated natural laws. This may be a comfortable human demand. It may appear to man that he would like to grasp everything in the wide-meshed logic of concepts in order to get to the bottom of things. But what if nature does not proceed in this way? What if nature works artistically? Then it is necessary that we follow her on her artistic path with our capacity for knowledge. Anyone who looks into nature and the world in general will perceive that what we bring about in natural laws through sober logic bears the same relation to the whole, full, intense reality as a drawing made with charcoal strokes does to a painting done in full color.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science draws from the full physical and spiritual reality. Therefore, it transforms mere logical recognition into artistic comprehension. But this also enables one to turn the teacher, the instructor, the educator into a pedagogical-didactic artist who acquires a fine sense for every single expression of the child's life. And indeed it is the case that every child has their own particular, individual way of expressing themselves. These cannot be registered in an abstract pedagogical science, but they can be grasped if one receives anthroposophically oriented impulses from the fullness of humanity and thereby gains an intuitive view of the spiritual and soul life in the human being, which then has an effect on the physical and bodily life. For what works roughly as the power of thought before the change of teeth in the growth of the child, we see more finely as a spiritual-soul activity in the child. As teachers and educators, we must pursue this from day to day with an artistic sense, then we will be able to be for the child what a real educator, a real teacher should be for the child.

I would like to give a brief description of how the first period of life, from birth to the change of teeth, and the second period of life, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, now emerges.

In the first period, from the first to the seventh year of life, the human being is primarily an imitative being. But we must understand this in the fullest sense of the word. The human being enters the world and gives himself completely to his surroundings. In particular, he develops what he initially brings to light as his impulses of will and instinct in such a way that he imitates what is around him. Language, too, is initially learned in such a way that it is based on imitation. Between birth and the age of seven, the child is entirely an imitator. This must be taken into account. In such matters, one must be able to draw the right conclusions. If you associate with the world in these matters, people sometimes come to you for advice on one matter or another. For example, a father once told me that he had a complaint about his five-year-old child. “What did the five-year-old child do?” I asked. “He stole,” said the father sadly. “But then you have to first understand what theft actually is.” He told me that the child had not stolen out of ill will. He had taken money from his mother's drawer and bought sweets, but then distributed them to other children on the street. So it was not blind selfishness. What was it then? Well, the child had seen his mother take the money out of the drawer day after day. At the age of five, the child is an imitator. It did not steal, it simply imitated the things that its mother does day after day, because the child instinctively regards what its mother always does as the right thing to do. - This is just one example of all the subtle things one needs to know if one is to understand the art of education in a way that truly corresponds to the human being.

But we also know that children play at imitating. Basically, the play instinct is not something original, but an imitation of what is seen in the environment. If we look with unbiased eyes, we can see that imitation is at the root of play. But every child plays differently. The teacher of a small child before the age of seven must acquire a careful judgment about this, and one necessarily has to have an artistic sense to make such a judgment, because it is different for each child. Basically, each child plays in its own way. And the way a child plays, especially in the fourth, fifth, or sixth year, goes down into the depths of the soul as a force. The child grows older, and at first we do not notice how one or other of the special ways of playing comes to light in the child's later character traits. The child will develop other powers, other soul abilities; what was the special essence of his play slips into the hidden part of the soul. But it comes to light again later, and in a peculiar way, between the ages of twenty-five and thirty, in the period of life when the human being has to find his way into the outer world, into the world of outer experience, of outer destinies. Some people adapt to this world skillfully, others awkwardly. Some people come to terms with the world in such a way that they derive a certain satisfaction from their own actions in relation to the world; others cannot intervene with their actions here or there, and they have a difficult fate.

You have to get to know the life of the whole person, you have to see how, in a mysterious way, the sense of play comes out again in this sense of life in the twenties. Then you will gain an artistically oriented idea of how to direct and guide the play instinct, so that you can give something to the person for a later period of life.

Today's pedagogy often suffers from abstract principles. By contrast, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science aims to give pedagogy an artistic-didactic sense, to work in the earliest youth in such a way that what is formed there is a dowry for the whole life of the human being. For anyone who wants to teach and educate children must get to know the whole of human life. The magnificent scientific development of the last few centuries has not taken this kind of knowledge of human nature into account. Consider the social significance of really being able to give children the kind of education I have described.

When the child has now changed its teeth, or at least has got them, the second epoch of the child's life begins. Then the actual school age sets in, that which one has to study particularly carefully if one wants to pursue pedagogy from the point of view of true human knowledge. While the child up to the age of seven is essentially an imitator, from the age of seven until sexual maturity, that is, from about the age of thirteen to sixteen, there develops (and this varies from individual to individual) what the unbiased observer recognizes as a natural urge to submit to an authority, a human authority, a teacher or educator. Today, it is a sad day when one hears from all sorts of political parties that some kind of democratic spirit should enter the school; that children should, to a certain extent, already practice a kind of self-government. With such things, which arise from all kinds of partisan views, one rebels against what human nature itself demands. Those who truly understand human nature know what it means for one's entire later life if, between the ages of seven and fifteen, one has been able to look up with devoted veneration to one or more human authorities; if one has called true that what these human authorities said was true; if one felt that what these human authorities felt was beautiful; if one found that what such revered personalities presented as good was also good. - Just as one imitates until the age of seven, so one wants to believe in what comes from authority until sexual maturity. This is the time when one must be open to the imponderable influences that can come from a soul, from a personality.

We founded the Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart. Many people say they would like to attend the Waldorf School to get to know something of the method and so on of this Waldorf School. Imagine a copperplate engraving of the Sistine Madonna, and someone cuts a piece out of it to get an idea of the Sistine Madonna. That would be the same as perhaps looking at what happens in the Waldorf School for a fortnight or three weeks. You wouldn't even see anything special. Because what happens in the Waldorf School is a result of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Those who are teachers there have acquired their artistic pedagogy and didactics from the impulses of anthroposophical spiritual science. If you want to get to know the Waldorf school, you have to get to know anthroposophically oriented spiritual science above all. But not in the way one gets to know it from the outside, where people are led to believe that it is some kind of complicated, nebulous mysticism, some kind of sectarianism; no, one has to get to know this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science from the inside, how it draws from the full humanity what the human being really is as a sensual and supersensible being within the world and within time.

These things do, however, lead one to perceive the supersensible nature of the working of such an authoritative personality. Let me give an example. One could imagine a picture – and it is best to speak in pictures to children from seven to fourteen years of age, especially up to the age of ten. Let us take any picture by which we want to teach the child an idea, a feeling, about the immortality of the soul. One can think up this picture. But one can also point out to the child the butterfly pupa, how the butterfly crawls out of the pupa. And one says to the child: the human body is like the pupa. The butterfly flies out of the chrysalis. When a human being dies, the immortal soul leaves the body as the butterfly leaves the chrysalis. It passes over into the spiritual world. There is much to be gained from such a picture. But a real intuitive perception of the immortality of the soul can only be conveyed to a child under very definite conditions. If, for example, a teacher thinks, “I am clever, the child is stupid, it must first become clever” – and the teacher thinks something like this in order to make the child understand something – then the teacher may perhaps achieve something, but what really brings the child to a sense of immortality will certainly not be achieved. For only that which one oneself believes, in which one oneself is completely immersed, has an effect on the child. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science gives you the opportunity to say: I myself believe in this image; for me, this crawling out of the butterfly from the chrysalis is absolutely the one that I did not think up, but what nature itself presents at a lower level for the same fact that, at a higher level, is the emergence of the immortal soul from the body. If I myself believe in the picture, if I stand within the content of the picture, then my faith has the effect of awakening faith, imagination and feeling in the child. These things are absolutely imponderable.

What happens on the outside is not even as important as what takes place between the feelings of the teacher and those of the pupil. It matters whether I go into the school with noble thoughts or ignoble ones, and whether I believe that simply what I say is what has an effect. I will give what I say a nuance that does not affect the soul if I do not enter the classroom with noble thoughts and, above all, with thoughts that are true to what I am saying. - That, first of all, about the relationship between the pupil and the teacher in the second epoch of life from the seventh to the fifteenth year. There would be much more to say about this, but I will only highlight a few specific points so that you can get to know the whole spirit that inspires the pedagogy and didactics that flow from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

Then we started at the Waldorf school with really bringing out what the child should learn. We are faced with very significant questions, especially when we take the child into primary school. We have to teach the child to read and write; but when it comes to what lives in the human being, writing, the printed word, has long since become something quite abstract within human civilization, something that has taken on the nature of a sign and is no longer intimately connected with the full, original, elementary soul life of the human being. The external history of civilization does provide some information about such things, although only to a limited extent. If we go back to the various cultures, we find pictographic writing, where, however, what was fixed externally was pictorially recorded, which is what was actually meant. In older cultures, writing had not been developed to the point of the mere sign being as abstract as it is today. In fact, when we teach reading and writing in the usual way, we introduce something to the child that is not initially related to his nature. Therefore, a pedagogy and didactics that is truly based on a full knowledge of the human being will not teach reading and writing as it is usually done. Instead, we start from the child's artistic nature in our method. We do not begin with reading at all, not even with writing in the usual sense of the word, but with a kind of painting-drawing, drawing-painting. We lead the child to learn to form letters not only from the head, but from the whole human being, bringing lines and forms, even in colored drawing, onto paper or some other surface; lines and forms that naturally emerge from the human organism. Then we gradually introduce what has been taken from the artistic into the letter forms, first through writing, and from writing we only then move on to reading. That is our ideal. It may be difficult to implement in the early days, but it is an ideal of a true didactics that follows from a full knowledge of the human being. And as in this case, the essence of human nature is the basis for all education and teaching.

We start, for example, from the child's musical and rhythmic abilities because these flow from human nature and because we know that a child who is properly stimulated in a musical way around the age of seven experiences a particular strengthening and hardening of the will through this musical instruction.

Now, we try to teach the child in pictorial form what is to be taught to the child, so that the child is not introduced too early into an intellectualized life. We also note that there is an important turning point between the ninth and tenth to eleventh year of the child's life. Anyone who can observe childhood in the right way knows that between the ages of nine and eleven, there is a point in a child's development that, depending on how it is recognized by the educator and teacher, can influence the fate, the inner and often also the outer destiny of the person in a favorable or unfavorable sense. Up to this point, the child does not isolate itself much from its surroundings, and it must be borne in mind that a plant described by a child before the age of nine must be described differently than afterwards. Before this time, the child identifies itself with everything around it; then it learns to distinguish; only then does the concept of the self actually arise – before that, it only had a sense of self. We must observe how the child behaves, how it begins to formulate certain questions differently from this point on. We must respond to this important point in time for each individual child, because it is crucial for the whole of the following life.

We must also be aware, for example, that subjects such as physics and the like, which are completely separate from the human being and only attain a certain perfection by excluding everything subjective from the formulation of their laws, may only be introduced to the child from the age of eleven or twelve. On the other hand, we teach our children the usual foreign languages in a practical way right from the beginning of primary school. We see how, by not teaching a foreign language by translation but by letting the child absorb the spirit of the other language, the child's entire soul structure is indeed broadened. This is how an artistic didactics and pedagogy is formed out of this spirit. I could go on talking here for another eight days about the design of such a pedagogy and didactics as art. But you can see how what comes from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science flows directly into the practical side of education.

And how does this apply to the individual teacher? It applies in such a way that he actually gets something different from this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science than can be obtained from the rest of today's scientific education. And here we touch on one of the most significant social issues of the present day.

The social question is said to be the fundamental question of our time, but it is usually understood only as an external economic question, not really grasped in its depth. This depth only comes to mind when one becomes aware of how, in the broad masses of today's proletariat, one word can be heard again and again. That word is ideology. What does the modern proletarian mean when he speaks of ideology, according to his Marxist instruction? He means: When we develop any ideas about custom, law, art, religion, it is not something real in itself, it is only an abstraction, it is only an unreal idea. Everything we have in this way is not reality, it is an ideology. Reality is only the external, material production processes.

From this fact one can sense the radical change that has taken place in human development in terms of world view and state of mind. Consider the basic tenet of ancient Oriental wisdom. Last time I spoke here, I said that we should not long for the past, but there are many things we can take from it for our own orientation. The ancient Oriental spoke of Maja. What did Maja mean in the ancient Orient? It meant everything that man can recognize in the external sense world. For reality was that which lived within him, which sprouted within as custom, religion, art, science. That was reality. What the eyes saw, what the ears heard, what one otherwise perceived, that was Maja. Today, in the Orient, only a decadent form of that which, from a certain point of view, can be characterized as I have just done, is present. Our broad masses of people have come to the opposite through Marxist guidance. One could say that the development of humanity has taken a complete turn. The external, the sensual, is the only reality, and that which is formed within, custom, religion, science, art, is Maya. Only one does not say Maya, but one says ideology. But if one were to translate Maja in a general sense, then one would have to translate it with ideology, and if one wanted to translate into the language of the old world view of the Orient what the modern proletarian means by ideology, then one would have to translate it with Maja, only that the application is the opposite.

I mention this because I want to show what an enormous turn human development has taken, how we in the West have in fact developed the final consequences of a world view that runs directly counter to what is still contained in the Orient in a decadent way. Those who are able to observe the conflicts of humanity from such depths know what potential for conflict exists between East and West today. Things appear differently in the various historical epochs; but however materialistic the striving of today's East may be, in a certain way it is the striving that was also present in ancient Buddhism and the like, which has now become decadent. And our Western culture has undergone a complete turnaround in relation to this. We have now arrived at a point where broad masses of people do not speak of the fact that spiritual reality fills them within, but that everything that fills them within is only Maya, ideology.

This is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science gives back to humanity: not just thoughts that can be seen as ideology, not just unrealities; but man is again filled with what he was filled with at that time, with the consciousness: Spirit lives in my thoughts. The spirit enters into me; not a dead, ideological spirit, but a living spirit lives in me. To lead people back to the direct experience of the living spirit is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to give. This is then what is incorporated into anthroposophical pedagogy and didactics. This is what should live in the teacher's dealings with the pupil.

But it is also that which is directly involved in dealing with the social question. Those people who talk about ideology today have gone through our schools. But we need a humanity that actually develops social impulses from the very depths of its being. This humanity must emerge from other schools. What has emerged from the schools we so admire has led to the social chaos we see today. We need a humanity that has been educated in such a way that the education corresponds to a real, comprehensive knowledge of the human being. This is what makes the question of education a universal social question. Either we will have to decide to see the question of education in this sense as a social question, or we will be blind to the great social demands of the present.

But we must sense what is necessary for the teacher, for the educator, in order to practise such an education, in order to allow knowledge of the human being to be transformed into a pedagogical-didactic art. We must sense that this is only possible if the teacher, the educator, does not need to follow any other norm than the norm that is within his or her own inner being. The teacher and educator must be answerable to the spirit that he experiences. This is only possible within the threefold social organism, in a free spiritual life. As long as the spiritual life is dependent on the economic life on the one hand and on the state life on the other, the teacher is in the thrall of the state or of economic life. You will find, when you study the connections, what this thrall consists of.

In truth, one can only establish a surrogate for a free school today. It was possible in Württemberg to establish the Waldorf School as a free school in which only the demands of the pedagogical art prevail, before socialism created the new school law.

If freedom is to prevail, then every teacher must be directly involved in the administration; then the most important part of spiritual life - like all spiritual life, in fact - must have its free self-government. One cannot imagine a spiritual life in which such free schools are common other than in such a way that from the teacher of the lowest elementary school class to the highest teacher, everything falls into corporations that are not subordinate to any state or economic authorities and that do not receive instructions from any side. What happens in the administration must be such that every teacher and instructor needs only so much time to teach or instruct that he still has so much time left to help administer. Not those who have retired or who have left the field of teaching and education, but those who are currently teaching and educating should also be the administrators. Hence the authority of the capable arises as a matter of course. Just try self-administration and you will find that because you need someone who can really achieve something, their authority will naturally assert itself. If the spiritual life administers itself, it will not be necessary to use this authority or the like. Just let this free spiritual life develop and you will see that because people need the capable, they will also find them.

I have only been able to sketch out the issues here, but you will have seen how a truly artistic approach to education requires a free spiritual life. We can see how it is necessary to first separate the free spiritual life from the entire social organism.

Just as Karl Marx or Proudhon or other bourgeois economists base what they want to base, so one does not base things of life experience, things of life practice. What is said in my book “The Key Points of the Social Question” or in other writings on the threefold social organism is based on decades of all-round observation of life, and is spoken and written from practice. Therefore, one cannot grasp it with lightly-draped concepts. I know exactly where one can easily start a logical critique. But what has just been taken from reality is as multifaceted as reality itself. And just as little as reality can be captured in lightly-draped logical concepts, so little can something that is supposed to fit reality be captured in such concepts. But anyone who has ever inwardly felt what it means to be in school, in class, in education, as it is necessary to do so through a true understanding of the developing human being, the child, has, in their feeling, in the whole experience, full proof that the spiritual life must be given its free administration. And all the objections do not apply, so that one simply raises them, but only so that one must eliminate them through reality.

Then people come and say: If spiritual life is to be based on free recognition, people will not send their children to school, so you cannot establish a free spiritual life. — That is not what someone who thinks realistically says. Above all, he feels the full necessity of liberating spiritual life. He says: spiritual life must be freed; it may perhaps have the disadvantage that some people do not want to send their children to school; then one must think of means to prevent this from happening. One must not treat this as an objection, but one must raise such a thing and then think about how it can be remedied. In many things that concern the full reality of life, we will have to learn to think like this.

They sense that a complete turnaround must occur, especially with regard to intellectual life – and public intellectual life is, after all, essentially provided in its most important parts through teaching and education. Those who are accustomed to working in today's intellectual life will not go along with these things. I know that certain teachers at secondary schools, when they were approached with the suggestion of moving towards self-management, said: I would rather be under the minister than manage with colleagues; it's not possible. I am less likely to be with my colleagues from the faculty than with the minister, who is outside.

Perhaps one will not exactly get the necessary impetus in this direction. But just as, with regard to the big questions of life today, it is not the producer but the consumer who is becoming more and more decisive, so one would like the consumers of the educational system to reflect on what is necessary in the teaching and educational system as the most important public part of intellectual life. These are, above all, people who have children. We have seen the impression that parents have gained from the end of the school year, from everything else that children have experienced during the school year at the Waldorf School. We have seen how, when these children come home, their parents have realized that a new social spirit is actually emerging that is of tremendous importance for the next generation — provided, of course, that the Waldorf School does not remain a small school in a corner of Stuttgart, but that this spirit, which prevails there, already becomes the spirit of the widest circles.

But it is not only parents who are interested in what goes on in schools and educational institutions. Basically, every person who is serious about human development has an interest in it. Every human being must care about the next generation. Those who think this way and who have a sense of how we need a spiritual renewal today, as I explained in the last lecture here in Utrecht, should become interested in this new education that can be achieved through the school system from the lowest to the highest levels.

At the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, we are trying to establish an educational institution in the highest sense of the word, based on this spirit. We still have a hard time of it today. We can give people renewal and inspiration in the individual specialized sciences; we can give them something like our autumn courses were, like our Easter courses will be. We can show them how, for example, medicine, but also all the other sciences of practical life, can receive through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science what is necessary for the present and especially for the near future.

But for the time being we can give nothing but spirit, and that is not yet highly valued today. Today, people still value the testimonies that we cannot yet give. We must fight for what is recognized as a necessity for the development of humanity and for the near future to become official. This can only come about if a mood develops in the widest international circles for what I would call a kind of world school association. Such a world school association need not limit itself to founding lower or higher schools, but should include all impulses that lead to something like what has been attempted in Dornach in a certain special way. Such a world school association would have to embrace all those people who have an interest in the forces of ascent entering into the developmental forces of humanity in the face of the terrible forces of descent that we have in humanity today. For such a world school association would not become a kind of federation from the impulses that are already there; it would not try to shape the world according to the old diplomatic or other methods. Such a union, such a world school association would try to form a world union of humanity out of the deepest human forces, out of the most spiritual human impulses. Such a union would therefore mean something that could really give a renewal of that life, which has shown its fragility so much in the terrible years of the second decade of the 20th century.

The people who are educated there will have the social impulses, and they will be the ones who can develop the right strength in the other areas of social life, in the area of an independent legal or state or political life and in the area of an independent economic life. Just as a free spiritual life can only be built on objectivity and expertise, and not on what comes to the fore through the majority, economic life can only be beneficial for humanity if it is separated from all majority rule, from all those areas in which people judge simply from their humanity, not from their knowledge of the subject or field. In economic life we need associations where people who belong to the sphere of consumption, people who belong to the sphere of production, and people who belong to the sphere of trade, join together. I have shown in my writings that these associations, by their very nature, will have a certain size. Such associations can truly provide that in economic life which I would call a collective judgment, just as it is true [on the other hand] that in spiritual life everything must come from the human personality. For through birth we bring with us our gifts from the spiritual world. Every time a human being is born, a message comes down from the spiritual world into the physical world. We have to take it in, we have to look at the human individuality; the teacher at the human individuality in the child, the whole social institution at the free spiritual life, in which the teacher is so situated that he can fully live out his individuality.

What can turn out to be a blessing for humanity in this free spiritual life would turn out to be a disaster in economic life. Therefore, we should not have any illusions. As much as we have to strive for a comprehensive and harmonious judgment through our individuality in spiritual life, we can do so much less in economic life. There we are only able to form a judgment together with the other people, to form a judgment in associations. One knows, by having worked, in a certain area, but what one knows there is one-sided under all circumstances. A judgment comes about only by not merely dealing theoretically with the others, but by having to supply a certain commodity to the other, to satisfy certain needs for the other, to conclude contracts. When the real interests face each other in contracts, then the real, expert judgments will form.

And what is basically the main thing in economic life is also formed from what works within the associations: the right price level. You can read all this in more detail in my books “The Key Points of the Social Question” and “In the Execution of the Threefold Order”, as well as in the journals. There is even a Dutch magazine about threefolding. There you can read about how a collective judgment must be sought in economic life. Since we have had a world economy instead of the old national economies in economic life, it has become necessary for the organization of economic life to be based on free economic points of view, for economic life to be lived out in associations that deal only with economic matters, but in such a way that majorities are not decisive anywhere, but rather expertise and professional competence are decisive everywhere. The result will be a division of labor. Those who have the necessary experience or other reasons will be in the right place. This will happen naturally in the associations, because we are not dealing with abstract definitions but with the activity of a contract. For example, if an article is being overproduced in a particular area, it must be ensured that people are employed in other ways; because where this is the case, the article becomes too cheap, and the one that is underproduced becomes too expensive. The price can only be set when a sufficient number of people are employed by associations in a particular area. If such a thing is to become real, it requires an intense interest in the entire economic life of humanity. It is a matter of developing, not merely as an empty phrase, what is called human brotherhood, but of bringing about this human fraternization in associations in the economic sphere.

Today I can only sketch out the main lines. The literature on threefolding already discusses the details. But what I want to suggest is only how spiritual science oriented to anthroposophy can practically take hold of life here as well.

And so, in the social organism, we have on the one hand the free spiritual life based on the human individuality; on the other, economic life based on associations that come together to form the global economy as a whole – without taking into account the political state borders, which today contradict economic interests. This may still be uncomfortable for some people to think, but it is what can bring about change from the chaotic conditions.

Between the two, the free spiritual life and the associative economic life, stands the actual political life, the actual state life, where majority decisions have their justification; where everything, including human work, comes up for negotiation, for which every mature person is competent. In the free life of the spirit, not every mature person is competent; here, majority decisions could only spoil everything, as they can in economic life. But there are, for example, the nature and measure of work, of human work; there are areas where every human being, when mature, is competent, where one person stands before another as an equal. This is the actual state-judicial, political area in the threefold social organism. This is what spiritual life is already pointing to most clearly today, but it can also be pursued in the other areas of social existence in accordance with the demands and necessities.

Threefold social organism: a free spiritual life, based on the full and free expression of the individual human personality; a legal or state life that is truly democratic, where people face each other as equals and where majorities decide, because only in this link of the social organism does it come to a decision on which every adult person is competent; an economic life that is built on associations, which in turn decides on the basis of factual and technical knowledge, where the contract applies, not the law.

There are people who say that this would destroy the unity of the social organism. For example, someone objected to me that the social organism is a unified whole and must remain so, otherwise everything would be torn apart. At that time I could only answer the objection: A rural family is also a unit. But if one claims that the state must also manage the economy and administer the schools, then one could also claim that a rural household, which is also a unit with master and mistress and maid and cow, because the whole is a unit, everyone should give milk, not just the cow. The unity would arise precisely from the fact that each one does the right thing in its place. The unity arises precisely from the fact that the three links arise. One should just not rush into a matter that is based on correct observation of those things that are pressing for transformation in contemporary social life, based on a partial or incomplete understanding.

Liberty, equality, fraternity – these are the three great ideals that resound from the 18th century. What human heart would not have felt deeply about the three ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Nevertheless, there were always clever people in the course of the 19th century who constructed a contradiction between freedom and equality: How could one be free if, after all, all people had to develop their abilities to the same extent and how that was also not true of fraternity? — Much clever and concise things have been said in favor of the contradictory nature of these three ideals. Nevertheless, we feel them and feel their justification. What is actually at issue here? Well, people have formed the three ideals of freedom, equality and fraternity out of the intense depths of the soul, and these are truly as justified as anything historical and human can be justified. But for the time being people remained under the suggestion of the unitary state. In the unified state, however, these three ideals contradict each other. Nevertheless, they must be realized. Their realization will lead to the tripartite social organism. If one realizes that this is something that can be started tomorrow, that it is thought out and formed out of practice, that it does not remotely have a utopian character like most social ideas, that it is thoroughly practical, if one realizes how the unity state today, out of itself, creates the necessity to divide itself into three parts: then one will also understand the historical and human significance of the three great ideals that have been resonating in humanity since the 18th century. Then we will say to ourselves: the threefold social organism is what first consolidates these three ideals, it is what gives these three ideals the possibility of life. In conclusion, let me express, as a summary of what I wanted to say today about the practical development of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, how it must come about in humanity: the threefold social organism, Spiritual life administered for itself, economic life administered for itself, and in the middle the state-legal-political life administered for itself. Then, in a genuine, true sense, humanity will be able to realize itself: freedom in spiritual life, equality in democratic state life, brotherhood in associatively shaped economic life.

Answering questions

Question: How can we differentiate in the spiritual-scientific field between human and animal blood? The I expresses itself in human blood, but not in animal blood?

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, the materialistic way of thinking, which had been in preparation since the middle of the 15th century, but which became particularly strong in the 19th century and developed into the 20th, has gradually caused the sense of it to die away, that the external expression [of a thing] is not decisive for the inner structure and for the whole context [in which it stands]. I have to refer to some of this, which of course I cannot explain in detail today. You can find it in the spiritual scientific literature, but I have to say a few words about the question.

We have to distinguish between the physical body, which can be seen with the eyes and which is also considered in ordinary science through anatomy and physiology, for example. We then distinguish the etheric or life body, which we become aware of when we observe something like the release of thinking during the change of teeth; this is how we get to know the life of the etheric body. We must not confuse this with the old, hypothetical life force; it has nothing to do with it. This is the result of direct observation. Then we learn to recognize what part of the soul governs this etheric body, what one can call the soul organism, and the actual I.

These four members, however, express themselves in turn in the physical. For example, the etheric body has a particular effect on the glandular system, the I has a particular effect on the blood system in humans. Now one can raise such a question as the one asked here, but one must first acquire something that I would like to make clear through the following comparison. Imagine someone were to say: a knife is just a knife, it is used to cut meat. You cannot say that. Nor can you say: man has red warm blood, animals have red warm blood – the expression for the I. Suppose someone finds a razor and uses it to cut meat because it is a knife. It is not a matter of how something is outwardly and materially formed, but how it fits into a whole context. For an animal, the red warm blood is the expression of the soul organism; for a human being, the same red blood is the expression of the I, just as the razor is a knife for shaving and the knife on the table is a knife for cutting meat. One should not ask: What is blood as blood? It can be an expression for this in one context and for something else in another context.

Question: Is it also possible in other countries to establish schools like the Waldorf School?

Rudolf Steiner: Whether such schools can be founded in other countries depends on the laws of the country concerned. I have already expressed myself appropriately with regard to the Waldorf School. I said: Before the new democratic, republican school constitution came into being, it was possible to found the Waldorf School. Recent developments have been such that we are gradually forfeiting one freedom after another. And if we in Central Europe were to arrive at Leninism, then the Central Europeans would also get to know what the grave of human freedom means. But it depends everywhere on the laws in question whether you can found schools like the Waldorf School. So it depends entirely on the individual state laws. You can try to go as far as possible. Recently, for example, I was asked to appoint teachers for a kind of initial school in another place, and I said that we would of course have to do a trial first. I initially appointed two very capable teachers for the first class, but they had not taken an exam, so that people could see whether they could implement such teachers. It is certainly not out of the question in a Waldorf school to employ teachers who have not taken the exam. For example, when I was recently asked by a teacher whether it would be possible to employ her even though she had not yet passed her exams, but was on the exam list, I said: That doesn't matter; you will also have the exam one day.

Now, the point is to work towards a real liberation of the spirit and of school life on a large scale. For this, something like a world school association is needed. It must become possible that the question of whether schools like the Waldorf School can be established in different countries will no longer arise, but that this possibility will be created everywhere through the power of conviction of a sufficiently large number of people. We also experienced the same in other areas, as is also beginning today in the area of education. Many people do not agree with conventional medicine, so they turn to those who want to go beyond conventional medicine – not in a quackish way, but in a thoroughly appropriate way. I even met a minister of a Central European state who trumpeted the monopoly of conventional medicine in his parliament with all his might, but then came himself and wanted help in a different way. This is the striving, on the one hand, to leave what the feeling actually wants to overcome, but to leave it and to achieve the other through all possible back doors. We have to get beyond that. We don't have to want to set up private schools, but we have to create the opportunity everywhere to set up a free school in the sense described today. If we do not have the courage to do this, then those who understand these things will not allow themselves to be used to establish private schools or to appoint teachers for them. A great movement should arise in which every person who reflects on the tasks of the time should become a member, so that through the power of such a world federation, what could lead to the creation of such schools everywhere.

But above all, in the case of such a world school association - please allow me to mention this only in passing, in parentheses - a certain idealism in humanity must disappear, I mean the kind that says: Oh, spiritual things, anthroposophy, that's so high, the material must not approach it; it would defile anthroposophy if the material were to approach it. This idealism, which is so idealistic that it uses all kinds of phrases to describe the spiritual and elevates it to heaven, to a cloud-cuckoo-land, while keeping a firm hand on the purse, does not go together with the reasoning of a world school association or the like. Here one must muster an idealism that does not disdain the purse in order to do something for the ideals of humanity. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must think its way into practical life, that is, not just into the clouds, but also into the stock market. There are also nooks and crannies there that belong to practical life. —- That is just a characteristic of what a right worldview is.

Question: Are there contradictions between anthroposophical spiritual science and Protestant Christianity?

Rudolf Steiner: There is no need to construct contradictions. Two things must be distinguished: The Mystery of Golgotha is a fact: that a spiritual being from the supermundane worlds descended to earth and united with the man Jesus of Nazareth. This spiritual fact, which alone gives meaning to our earthly development, will be grasped in different ways by each age. Our age needs a new understanding of this fact. We can best grasp this fact if we learn to understand spiritual facts in general. Anyone who believes that some discovery, whether in the physical or spiritual realm, should somehow shake Christianity, thinks little of it. If the official representatives of Christianity, or rather of the traditional denominations, turn so fiercely against anthroposophy today, it only speaks against these official representatives, who do not really have true Christianity in mind, but the rule of their respective church. True Christianity has indeed grasped anthroposophical spiritual science, but only in a supersensible way, through supersensible knowledge. You can read more about this in my book 'Christianity as Mystical Fact' and in other writings.

Question: Does spiritual life have a kind of supremacy over the other two areas in the threefold social organism?

Rudolf Steiner: You can see in my book on “The Core Points of the Social Question” how capital is used in the threefold social organism. It enters into a kind of circulation, like blood in the human organism, and remains with the one who is best qualified to manage it and thus also manages it in the interest of the community. For this, however, spiritual life must constantly interact with the other limbs. This is the peculiar thing about such a natural structure of the social organism as the human organism. The human organism – and this is the result of thirty years of research for me – is tripartite by nature. Firstly, there is the nervous-sensory organism, which is mainly localized in the head; secondly, the rhythmic system, which is localized in the chest as breathing and blood circulation; and thirdly, the metabolic system, which is connected to the limbs. But these three limbs work together in such a way that, in a sense, the head is indeed leading, but in another sense, the other two limbs are leading as well. So one cannot say that something has supremacy, but precisely because of the way the three limbs are structured according to their essence, a harmonious wholeness will arise in the social organism. Question: Should children from seven to fourteen believe what the teacher says, or are they taught freely?

Rudolf Steiner: The nature of the human being demands what I have expressed in the lecture: a certain self-evident authority. This demand for a self-evident authority is based, in turn, on a certain development of human life as a whole. Certainly, no one can develop more feeling for the social rule of human freedom than I, who wrote my “Philosophy of Freedom” in 1892, which is intended to provide the foundations for a liberal, social human life. But still, if a person is to face life freely in the right way, he must develop a sense of authority within himself between the ages of seven and fifteen. If one does not learn to recognize others through this self-evident authority, then the later demand for freedom is something that leads precisely to the impossibility of life, not to true freedom. Just as man only comes to a true brotherhood if he is educated in the appropriate way, by being guided in the right way in his imitation in the childhood years until the seventh year, so the sense of authority is necessary if man is to become free. Everything that is said today about governing school communities in a republican form is only asserted out of party considerations. That would destroy human nature. I say this out of a thorough knowledge of the human being. Such a demand for a healthy, authoritative way of teaching between the ages of seven and fifteen must be made. Only objectivity can be considered. Buzzwords should not be the deciding factor. It is precisely those who stand on the ground of freedom who must demand an authoritative education for this age group.

In my first lecture, which I gave here in Amsterdam on the 19th of this month, I tried to explain how spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy fits into present-day civilization. This anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which today already has an artistically executed outer place of care in the Free University for Spiritual Science, the Goetheanum in Dornach near Basel in Switzerland, wants to add supersensible knowledge through exact spiritual scientific methods to the tremendous, great results of natural scientific knowledge, which it fully recognizes. And in my last lecture here on February 19, I took the liberty of pointing out that in the present time, numerous souls long for knowledge that is just as securely based as the knowledge that is considered scientific today, but precisely knowledge that extends to the realms of the world with which the eternal in the human soul is connected.

I pointed out that these supersensible insights can only be attained by developing certain abilities that are present in the human soul. These abilities are, however, still unknown to broad sections of our educated society today. Yet it is precisely this ignorance of these abilities that is the cause of the catastrophic developments of our time, which are apparent to everyone.

If we want to approach what is meant here by spiritual science, we must first start from what I called 'intellectual modesty' in my lecture on February 19. This intellectual modesty will be regarded as a paradox in our own time, which is particularly proud of its intellectuality. But anyone who wants to penetrate into the supersensible worlds — to which the human soul with its essential being does, after all, belong — needs this starting point of intellectual modesty. And I would like to repeat the parable, which I already used the other day to point out this intellectual modesty, because I have to assume that, due to the change of venue, a large number of the audience gathered here today were not present at my first lecture.

If we have a five-year-old child in front of us and we give him a volume of Shakespeare, he will play with it, perhaps tear it up, but in any case not do what is appropriate for the volume of Shakespeare. But if the child has lived for another ten or fifteen years, then those abilities that were previously latent in the child's soul will have been developed through education and instruction; he will now read the volume of Shakespeare. The child has ascended to a higher level of human existence, has become a different being after fifteen to twenty years.

If you really want to penetrate into the supersensible world, you have to be able to say to yourself: Perhaps as an adult you are in the same position as the five-year-old child in relation to the volume of Shakespeare, with regard to nature with its secrets and its deeper laws, and perhaps there are forces within the soul that first have to be brought out. If we seriously approach these slumbering powers and abilities in our soul with this intellectual modesty as adults, we will develop higher insights than the ordinary ones of everyday life and ordinary science.

First of all, the faculty in the human soul must be developed, which in ordinary life we know as the ability to remember. Through this ability to remember, we bring coherence into our lives. Through this ability to remember, our soul conjures up images of what we have experienced up to a very early age in childhood. This ability to remember makes permanent what would otherwise flash by as a mere idea. If we could only surrender ourselves to the outside world, if we would only surrender ourselves to ideas of the events and experiences that flash by, our whole soul life would be different. If one now further develops what is present in memory as lasting images, then one attains a quite different capacity for knowledge. And one can develop this through methods that I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, in my “Occult Science” and in other of my writings. One can develop this through certain processes of meditation and concentration, through a devoted resting on certain easily comprehensible ideas, which must not be reminiscences, must not be based on any kind of auto-suggestion; therefore they must be easily comprehensible.

One must rest with the whole structure of one's soul on such ideas. And these studies, which the true spiritual researcher must make regarding the knowledge of the supersensible worlds, are no easier than the studies one does in the clinic, in the physics or chemistry laboratory, or in the observatory, and they by no means take less time. This meditation, this concentrating with the whole power of the soul on certain ideas, which one does continually and on which one rests, must be continued for years. The powers of knowledge that lie dormant deep within the soul, of which the human being has no other idea, must be brought up. When they are brought up, one is able to perceive, through these higher powers of knowledge, that which surrounds us just as the physical-sensory world surrounds us. At first one perceives one's own experiences, but not as the vague stream of consciousness that goes back to just before birth, where the memory fragments emerge. Rather, one perceives the whole panorama of what one has gone through in this life since birth, like a unified, all-at-once present life panorama. And when one gets to know this, one experiences what it means to live in one's soul outside of the body. Materialism usually claims – and at first glance it seems justified – that all ordinary thinking, all ordinary remembering, all ordinary feeling and willing is bound to the physical body. But in ordinary life, this feeling, this willing, this thinking is interrupted. Every day, through sleep, that which is the ordinary soul life bound to the body is interrupted. People do not feel deeply enough the significance of the riddle associated with falling asleep, sleeping and waking up again. After all, the human being must be present in sleep, otherwise he would have to arise anew each time he woke up. But one only learns to recognize the form in which the human being is present in sleep by doing the exercises, some of which I have mentioned here.

When you are actually able to imagine mentally in such a way that you do not use your external eyes, do not use other senses, and do not use the ordinary mind that is connected to the brain, but only the purely spiritual-soul - and you achieve this when you develop the ability to remember in the way I have described it - then one comes to know that from the moment of falling asleep until the moment of waking up, the human being does indeed exist as a spiritual-soul entity outside of his body and that only the desire to return to his body then asserts itself. And this desire, which obscures consciousness.

Anyone who develops their powers of recollection as I have described will be able to behave exactly like the sleeping person – that is, not to perceive with the senses, not to combine the sensory perceptions with the mind – only to be fully conscious. He knows the spiritual soul independently of the body. This also enables him to recognize this spiritual soul before birth or conception and after death in its true essence and in connection with the rest of the supersensible world.

And if, in addition, he further develops a second soul power that is also present in ordinary life, namely the power of love, if he makes the power of love a power of knowledge, then the human being gets to know the images, which he otherwise experiences as a supersensible panorama, in their direct reality as well.

Today I would like to draw attention to something that is, in the most eminent sense, a link in a life practice that must interest all people. I would like to draw attention to the way in which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as I am referring to here, can enrich the art of education and teaching.

What do you actually gain from such a spiritual science, the methods of which I have now very briefly outlined? Above all, one acquires a real knowledge of the human being. Without being able to see into the supersensible, it is indeed impossible to have knowledge of the human being. After all, the human being is not only the outer physical organization, about which the outer scientific world view gives us such great, powerful, and insufficiently appreciated insights. Man is also soul and spirit. Man harbors within himself the eternal core of his being, which passes through births and deaths, which has a consciousness after death, because then he has no desire for the body, which lies in bed during sleep and after which he has desire during sleep, which his consciousness in ordinary sleep extinguishes.

When this physical body is discarded at death, the human being attains an all the more clear consciousness because it is not extinguished by any desire for a body. Through all this and much more, which I do not wish to describe now but which you can read about in my writings, the human being attains true knowledge of the human being. And only out of real knowledge of the human being can true teaching and true educational art arise.

We have tried to address this area of practical life in the Waldorf School founded by Emil Molt in Stuttgart, which I run and whose pedagogy and didactics flow entirely from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Firstly, the attitude of the teaching staff is such that something is brought into the classroom with every lesson, with every new morning, which turns teaching and educating into a kind of spiritual service. Does it not mean something special when we know through anthroposophical spiritual science that this human being, who reveals himself to us so wonderfully in the growing child, has descended from the spiritual worlds through conception or birth? If this is a true realization, if it is conveyed through anthroposophical spiritual science, then we face the developing human being, the child, in such a way that we have a task entrusted to us from the spiritual worlds. Then we see how the eternal, which has descended from spiritual worlds, works its way out of the initially indeterminate physiognomic features and the indeterminate movements of the child from day to day, from week to week, from year to year, with ever greater certainty. We see the spiritual soul at work on the physical development of the human being.

This is not the place for a careless criticism of what pedagogical geniuses have produced over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries. Certainly, some beautiful principles have been expressed with regard to pedagogy. For example, it is rightly emphasized that pedagogy has such principles as “one should not graft anything from the outside into children; one should draw everything one wants to introduce to children from their own abilities and capacities”. Quite right, an excellent principle – but abstract and theoretical. And so, by far the greatest part of our life practice confronts us in abstractions, in theoretical programs. For what is needed to carry out something like this, to extract from individuality what the child should develop within itself, requires real knowledge of the human being. Knowledge of the human being that goes into all the depths of the human being. But the science that has existed in modern civilization so far, despite its great triumphs, cannot have such knowledge of the human being.

I would now like to show you very specific things that will help you to see how this spiritual science, as it is meant here, can achieve real knowledge of the human being. There is a cheap saying that is thoughtlessly repeated over and over again: “Nature does not make leaps!” In fact, nature is constantly making leaps, and this expression is only thoughtless, as I said. Think of a plant: it develops green leaves, then it makes the leap to the calyx, then the leap to the colored petals, the stamens, and so on. And so it is with all life. It is just a phrase to say that nature does not make leaps. And so it is especially in human life. We have in human life, when we can observe it uninhibitedly through the impulses that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science provides, clearly distinct life epochs. The first life epoch goes from birth to the change of teeth, around the age of seven. It ends, then, with the year in which we start sending children to primary school. If one has the necessary insight and impartiality of observation, if one gets into the habit of observing life only at a higher level in the same way that one would otherwise observe at the lowest level in the natural sciences, one can sharply characterize the major differences between the first and second phases of human life. The first phase of life ends with the change of teeth, the second with sexual maturity. Both phases of life are quite distinct from one another. The first phase shows us the child as an imitative being. Even in play, the child is an imitative being. Of course, some believe that a certain imaginative being is formed during play. This is also the case, but if you study play in its deepest essence, you will perceive the moments of imitation everywhere, especially in children's play. And in connection with this play, I would like to remark right away how tremendously important knowledge of the human being, knowledge of the human being in relation to his totality, is for an education and pedagogical art that is full of life and truly engages with the world.

You see, every child plays differently. Anyone with an unbiased sense of observation can tell exactly how one child plays and how another child plays. Even if the difference is not a big one – you have to be a psychologist to be able to observe something like this if you want to become an educator at all. But if you can do that, then you have to relate the different ways of playing to a completely different epoch of a person's life. In terms of observing human beings, the natural sciences are such that they only rank what is nearest to what is nearest. But you won't get very far with that. What can be observed in children's play does not remain in the next phase of life. The child is turned to other things, that is, in the period from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. Even if it continues to play, the actual play age is no longer as characteristic as it used to be. What the play passions are withdraws into the depths of the soul and only comes to light again at a much later age: in the second half of the twenties, when the human being is supposed to enter into practical life. Some adapt themselves with great skill to the tasks of fate, while others become dreamers far removed from the world. The way in which a person can adapt to practical life in these years can be fully explained if one knows how the person played at the age of four, five, six, or seven.

Therefore, it is of the utmost importance for the pedagogue and educator to guide the child's play; to observe what the child wants to express and to guide what should not be expressed, because it would make the child awkward in later life. For when we guide play in the right way at the earliest age, we give the child something for life practice, as it develops in the twenties. The whole life of a human being is interrelated, and what we plant in the child's soul in youth only comes to light much later in life in the most diverse metamorphoses. Only a total knowledge of the human being, as provided by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, can truly see through the connections that lie as far apart as the twenties and childhood, as well as the finding of one's way into practical life and the play instincts; only such spiritual science can see so deeply into life. This will give you an idea of the scope of human knowledge that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to work with in order to develop a pedagogical art.

I said that the child is an imitative being until about the age of seven. And I do not say the number seven out of some mystical inclination, but because the change of teeth is actually an important event in the child's overall development. The child learns the particular nature of his movements, and also his speech, through imitation; he even develops the form of his thoughts in this way. Because the connection between the child's environment and the child itself depends not only on external factors but also on imponderables, parents or educators who live in the child's environment must be clear about how the child adapts to what the adults around him do, not only externally – not only what they speak – but also what they feel, what they sense, what they think. It is usually not believed in our materialistic age that there is also a difference in terms of the child's education, whether we indulge in noble or ignoble thoughts in the presence of the child, because we see the connections in life only in terms of external material entities, and not in terms of how things are connected internally by imponderables. This can be seen if one really observes life according to its internal structures.

I would like to give an example of what is actually important in such matters: a father once came to me and complained bitterly – and I could give many similar examples – that his five-year-old boy had stolen something. He was very unhappy about it. I said: Let's see if the five-year-old boy really has stolen. – I had the case described to me. What had actually happened? The boy had taken some money out of the drawer where his mother kept her pennies, which she always needed for her daily needs. He had not even done it out of selfishness, but had distributed the money among other children. I said to the father: The child did not steal, but what the mother always does, the child also considers right to do, because at the age of five she is still very much an imitative being. We must be aware of this: we do not influence children through admonitions, through commandments, but only through what we do in their environment.

And we can only arrive at a sound judgment of the child's entire soul configuration if we know that this soul configuration of the child will change significantly with the change of teeth. The mere imitation is replaced by the mental behavior towards the environment as a self-evident authority. And we are dealing with this desire of the child for the self-evident authority of the teacher, the educator or whoever else is around the child throughout the entire school period. One only has to know what it means for the whole of life if, in this childhood from the seventh to the fifteenth year, one has looked up with a real, great inner awe to those who, as adults, were around with educational authority were around, that what we thought was true and false emerged from the way these educators saw true and false; from what was the standard of true and false for the educators. We enter into the human, not into some abstraction, when we want to distinguish true and false, good and evil in this childhood age.

You will not believe that I advocate this necessity – that all teaching and education between the ages of seven and fifteen should also be based on unquestioning authority – out of some kind of preference for conservative or reactionary ideas when I tell you that as early as 1892 I wrote a small pamphlet in which I firmly presented the individual freedom of the human being as a basic social requirement. But no one can become a truly free human being, no one can find the right social relationship with their fellow human beings in freedom if they have not recognized an authority beside them between the ages of seven and fifteen, and from this authority learned to shape the standard for right and wrong, good and evil, in order to only later arrive at their own standard of intellectual or other purely internal, autonomous judgment.

And then the soul of the child at this age is still so constituted that it is still completely merged with its surroundings. Only when we come to the end of this phase of life, which falls in the twelfth or thirteenth year, do we see that the child is clearly different from its surroundings, that it knows that the I is within and nature is without. Of course, self-awareness is present in the very earliest childhood, but it is more of a feeling. If you want to educate properly, you need to know that an extraordinarily important point in a child's development lies between the ages of nine and ten and a half. It is the point where the child becomes so absorbed inwardly that it learns to distinguish itself from nature and the rest of the external world. Before this point, which is a strong turning point in human life, the child basically sees his surroundings in images, because they are still connected to his own inner life, in images that are often symbolic. He thinks about his surroundings in a symbolic way. Later, a different era begins. The child differentiates between nature and the external environment. It is of immense importance that the educator is able to assess this point in life, which occurs a little later for one child and a little earlier for another, in the right way. For how the teacher and educator behaves in the right way between the ninth and tenth year – fatherly, friendly, lovingly guiding the child over this Rubicon – that means an incursion into human life that is lasting for the whole of the following existence until physical death. Whether a person has a zest for life in the decisive moments or carries inner soul barrenness through life depends in many respects - though not in every respect - on how the teacher and educator has behaved towards the child between the ages of nine and ten and a half. Sometimes it is a matter of simply finding the right word at the right moment when a boy or girl meets you in the corridor and asks a question, or of making the right expression when you answer. The art of education is not something that can be learned or taught in the abstract – any more than painting or sculpting or any other art can. Rather, it is something that is based on an infinite number of details that arise from the rhythm of the soul. This sense of rhythm is derived from anthroposophical spiritual science.

It is also important to distinguish between what we need to teach children before and after this important point in their lives between nine and a half and ten and a half years of age. Above all, we must bear in mind that in our present, advanced civilization, we have something that has become external, abstract and symbolic. Go back to ancient civilizations, take any pictographic writing, and what was grasped by the senses was fixed. This was made into an image with which the human being was connected, with which the human being lived through feeling and emotion. Today, however, all this has become a symbol. We must not introduce reading and writing to the child as something alien, because it wants to grow together with its environment before the age of nine; we must not teach it from that abstract level, as is the case today. In Waldorf schools, we begin teaching in an artistic way by letting the child draw, even paint, the forms that arise out of the fullness of humanity. We let the child do this at first, and then, when we guide the child further in this drawing-painting way, we develop the letter forms, the writing, from this drawing. We proceed from the artistic, and from the artistic we first bring out writing and then reading. In this way we really correspond to what lies within the child.

It is not a matter of saying in some abstract way in education that one should only bring out what is in the child. One must know how to do it practically, how to really meet human nature. Anthroposophical spiritual science is never theory, but always real practice. That is what enables it to develop such an art of education.

What I have said about authority can also make us aware of something else that may perhaps seem paradoxical to you. In today's materialistic age, an enormous amount of emphasis is placed on so-called illustrative instruction. To anyone who understands the true nature of the child, it is a terrible thing to see the abstract calculating machines and all the things that children are often subjected to today. Today, children are expected to understand everything immediately. The aim is to organize teaching in such a way that nothing goes beyond the usual eight- or nine-year-old understanding. It seems extraordinarily scientific. But believe me, ladies and gentlemen, even a person with thorough anthroposophical knowledge can grasp the obviousness of such a principle just as well as those who defend such principles today as something that should be taken for granted. But what is self-evident is that, above all, between the ages of seven and fourteen, the child must have its memory and sense of authority developed in a healthy way, as I have just described.

Those who only want vividness and vividness that is adapted to the child's understanding do not know the following: they do not know what it means for the whole of life if, let us say in the eighth or ninth year or in the tenth to fifteenth year, one has taken something on the authority of the teacher; because the revered authoritative personality tells one, one considers it to be true. It is still beyond the horizon, but it is absorbed into the soul. Perhaps it is only in the thirty-fifth or fortieth year that it is taken out again. What one has already had in one's memory is now understood through the power that has matured. This awareness of having matured, this awareness of being able to bring something up, refreshes and invigorates the soul's strength in a way that is not appreciated in ordinary life, whereas it deserts the soul if one wants to tailor everything to the understanding of the child in the eighth, ninth, twelfth year. This is something that must be said today, because people, out of their materialistic cleverness, are no longer able to see what is natural, right and essential in such matters.

And from the foundations of human nature, from what seeks to develop from week to week, from year to year, the curriculum of such a school is derived, as it is the Waldorf School. This curriculum arises entirely from the knowledge of the essence of man. It is not an abstract curriculum, but something that underlies the pedagogy of this school, just as painting can do for the painter, sculpting for the sculptor.

Here, I have described to you how anthroposophically oriented spiritual science enters into practical life from the fields of education and teaching. But just think about what kind of spiritual life would be needed if such educational and teaching practices were to really take hold! We are accustomed to seeing this spiritual life only as an appendix to the state, perhaps as an appendix to economic life. We are accustomed today to having the most important part of intellectual life, namely the teaching and education system, prescribed by the state. What anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must now assert for modern civilization, based on a truly penetrating knowledge of teaching and educational methods that are based on true human knowledge, is that intellectual life, teaching and education must be placed in its own free administration. I would like to be quite specific: teachers and educators should not only teach and educate, but they should also have the entire administration of teaching and education in their hands, freely and independently of the state and economic life. From the lowest elementary school up to the highest teaching institutions, every teacher and educator should be so busy teaching that there is still enough time left for them to also be administrators of the teaching and education system. And only those who are still actively involved in teaching and education, the real teachers and educators in any field, not those who have become civil servants and are no longer involved in education, should also be the administrators of the education system. Nothing should be spoken into the teaching and education system except what also speaks into knowledge and art and religious world view. People do not want to recognize that what was necessary for one period of historical development, and perhaps extraordinarily good, does not apply to every period of history. When the modern era dawned, with its centralized state, it was a good and self-evident thing that the old confessional administrations should be relieved of the schools. At that time, it was a blessing for the development of humanity. But now we have arrived at a point in human development where this cannot continue; where what the state could do for the school system has been exhausted and where the free spiritual life, the spiritual life that draws from real spiritual sources, wants the independent administration of the school system.

Here the school question, the question of education, touches directly on the great social question, on everything that is the very essence of the social question. You see, regarding the social question, many people think that the essence of it lies in external institutions, that one only has to look at these external institutions to recognize the social question, that one has to work on these external institutions to do something for the social question. Those who have really come to know life cannot think this way. I have come to know proletarian thinking. I had the opportunity to do so not only in my own youth, but also because I worked for many years as a teacher of various subjects at a workers' education school and saw what actually lives in the broadest strata of the proletariat, which basically only emerged as a class, as a social stratum, through modern technology.

There it is not the external institutions, not even the bread-and-butter questions, from which the actual social question arises; there it is the state of mind, which is connected with the fact that the kind of intellectual life that has developed among the leading classes over the last three to four centuries has passed over to the broad masses of the proletariat like a kind of religion. I have seen this world view arise from materialistic principles in serious people, in deeply-rooted souls who were part of the bourgeoisie, who belonged to the leading classes, and I have learned the following: They said to themselves: Take the external scientific world view seriously; look at how it shows how the Earth developed from some kind of nebulous state through purely natural necessities to its present stage and how the various living beings have gradually developed along with it up to the point of humans. And a time will come again when either glaciation or heat death will occur to the earth – one may imagine it either way – but then the great churchyard will be there. What will have become of that which man must surely see as the noblest in human nature, which arises within him as moral ideals, as religious impulses, as art, as science? I have known people who seriously asked themselves this question, while the majority of modern people thoughtlessly juxtapose these two worlds, the world of external natural necessity and the world of what is actually humanly valuable, of moral ideals, of religious convictions, of knowledge, of artistic creation. Then serious souls say to themselves: Yes, man becomes aware of that which wells up from the soul; but that is an illusion, it is like smoke rising from the material basis. But one day the great churchyard will be there, and what we call the great ideals will have disappeared and faded away. - I have come to know the tragedy and pessimism that deeply inclined people have come to. But I also witnessed how this world view then penetrated into the proletarian soul and how a word was encountered that has a tremendous impact but denotes many things. If one understands how it lives in the proletarian soul, then one knows a lot about the foundations of contemporary civilization and its social issues. The word “ideology” lives in the souls of proletarians. What these proletarian souls know as intellectual life, as custom, law, science, art and religion, they call a superstructure above the production processes, which are historically the only real thing for them. This is the legacy of the world view that I have just described as tragic and that the proletarian souls, the millions of souls, have desolate.

One may appear an idealist today if one seeks the actual proletarian question in what the terrible word ideology expresses. But these idealists will be right. And those who believe that they have a monopoly on human wisdom and the routine of life will see history marching over them. This 'ideology' means that the souls of these masses remain desolate, have no connection with the living spirit – just as the leading classes do not either, who prevent this science from reaching the proletarians.

And here I may say something that should make clear to you the essential task and mission of Dornach, of the Goetheanum in Dornach, in the present age of civilization. Many people today realize that enlightenment and science must be brought to the broad masses. People's libraries and people's colleges are being founded, and all kinds of other things, in order to bring the science that is in our universities and our secondary schools to the people. Dornach cannot go along with this. Dornach wants to do what was the purpose of that autumn course that we held in the fall of 1920 and which we will repeat at Easter on a smaller scale, in keeping with our modest circumstances. The aim was to fertilize the individual sciences from the perspective of spiritual science. Thirty lecturers from all branches of science, including industrialists, merchants and artists, presented at this autumn course to show how all branches of science, art and life can be fertilized by this spiritual science. The aim is to renew science. The aim is to bring the spiritual into the sciences, to bring in a spirit that does not arise from a culture of the head but from the fullness of the human being.

That, then, is the purpose of the Goetheanum in Dornach: that a new spirit be brought into the colleges, only then will it be able to become popular. - One wants to bring the spirit of our college into the people - can one not see in modern civilization what use this spirit has been to those who have it? This spirit must be renewed. It is not that the schools must spread education among the people, but that a spiritual education must first be brought into the schools. That is the point in which Dornach differs from all other efforts along these lines today. For in this field people are thoroughly convinced that they are very free-thinking, but that they have a terrible belief in authority when it comes to conventional science. I say this not out of disdain for modern scientific thinking, but out of decades of engagement with all branches of this thinking. We need to work towards the liberation of spiritual life and thus the liberation of the school and education system, just as the state was once forced to take on teaching and education and wrest them from the old denominations.

I know what objections can be raised to developing a free spiritual life as the first link in the tripartite social organism. But when people express their fear that people would then not send their children to these free schools, it means looking at the matter wrongly. The question is not whether people voluntarily send their children to school or not, but rather that a free system of teaching and education is a necessity for humanity today and that one must then ensure that children go to school despite this. This should not be seen as an objection to a free spiritual life, but should merely lead to a consideration of how to get the children of negligent or unscrupulous parents into school despite a free spiritual life. This is the first link in the impulse of the threefold social organism, as formulated by the anthroposophical world view, to move towards possible solutions to social issues: a free spiritual life, administered by spiritual workers alone.

One can find logically slighted terms that teach all sorts of things in defense of this necessary freedom of spiritual life, as well as to attack it and condemn it. But that is not the issue. Anthroposophy proceeds everywhere from life practice and life observation. Those who know what a real spiritual science will mean to humanity also know how necessary the liberation of spiritual life is. People speak of ideology because spiritual life consists of abstractions, because they have no concept that an idea, that which lives in the soul, is something other than the image of something, because they no longer know that the old religions have given to man, that living spirit lives in every human being, that man with his eternal belongs to the living spirit and not only in his soul live abstract images. A living spiritual world that fills us inwardly and connects us with the eternal is not an ideology. It is the rise of ideology that has led to the catastrophes of our time. But a school and education system that aims to bring the living spirit into humanity must be a school system that is as free as the one I have described. This free school system appears to me as something that must be understood in the most eminent sense as a necessity of modern humanity - provided that it is sincere about human salvation and human progress.

Therefore, I consider it – I say this without wanting to agitate – as absolutely necessary to eliminate many of the forces of decline in our modern civilization by means of forces of ascent, that something be created on the broadest international basis, such as what I would call a world school association. This world school association would have to include all nations and the broadest circles of people. These people must be aware that a free spiritual life is to be created. It is of no use at all if people think that our Waldorf School in Stuttgart is something practical that one must see for a few hours or for a few weeks. To want to see something that arises out of a whole spiritual life is like cutting out a piece of the Sistine Madonna to get an idea of the whole picture. You cannot learn anything about the spirit of the Waldorf School by sitting in on lessons, but by getting to know anthroposophy, the anthroposophical spiritual science that lives in every teacher, in every lesson, in the children, and that also lives in the school reports. I would like to briefly describe how we at the Waldorf School gradually get to know each child, despite the fact that we also have large classes. We do not give them grades, certificates that say “almost satisfactory”, “hardly sufficient” - that is all nonsense. You cannot grade like that. Rather, we give the children a true description of their character, which holds up a mirror to them for the whole of the following year, and a saying that has been chosen from the depths of our souls. We have also seen the value that these reports have for Waldorf school children. So we have experienced what the anthroposophical spirit has brought to this Waldorf school.

But we do not want as many Winkel schools as possible to be established along the lines of the Waldorf School. Rather, we want the widest possible international recognition that the old idea of basing the school system only on the state must be fought. We must strive to force the state to allow the free spiritual life to create its own free schools. We do not want to establish isolated schools by the grace of the state; we will not lend a hand to this, but what is necessary is an understanding of the kind of alliance of peoples that would lie spiritually in a world school association. This would bring people together across the wide expanse of the earth in a great, a gigantic task.

This is what I want to say first about the first link of the threefold social organism. I can only touch on the other links, because they belong to life in other areas. Over the last four to five centuries, we have developed the unified state in today's civilized world. On the one hand, it has absorbed intellectual life with the school and education system; it has also absorbed economic life, at least to a large extent. And social democracy, of course, strives to use the entire state, the state framework, to basically set up a kind of barracked economy, whereby all economic freedom and individuality is destroyed, as we see in Trotskyism, in Leninism, precisely in what has become there, what is happening there in such a terrible way in Eastern Europe and as far as Asia, causing humanity to convulse. The point is that people learn how certain things are necessary for humanity today.

Economic life has its own conditions, just as intellectual life has its own. Anyone who, like me, has spent thirty years, half of his life, in Austria, which was precisely the experimental country for the work of the socially destructive forces – which is why Austria became the first victim of this world catastrophe – anyone who has lived in Austria with open eyes could see as early as the 1970s how it was rushing towards its end. I can refer to an example of how this country worked its way into decline on a large scale. In the 1970s, they also wanted to democratize parliament. How did they do that? They set up four constituencies: the constituency of the large landowners, the constituency of the chambers of commerce, the constituency of the cities, markets and industrial towns, and the constituency of the rural communities. All economic interests were drawn into parliament. The representatives of mere economic interests in four curiae were to make the decisions for everything concerning the state. They made them, of course, according to economic interests. As a result, neither the legitimate state interests nor the economic interests were given their due.

I could give you hundreds and hundreds of reasons that would show you that just as intellectual life must be separated from actual state life on the one hand, economic life must also be separated on the other. Just as intellectual life must be organized for the completely free human being and the administration of free human beings, economic life must be organized according to the associative principle.

What does that mean, an associative principle? Well, today we already have a striving for the formation of consumer associations. People who consume join together. And we have a movement in which people from the most diverse circles who produce join together. But ultimately we actually only have a surrogate, composed of consumers and producers. Only when production is organized according to need, not the barometer of profit, when the interrelations between consumers and producers are guided by those people who are experts in the various branches of the economy, when we we strive for totality in relation to spiritual life, but never in economic life, where we are in contact with people in other sectors, as soon as we take this seriously, the associative principle will be introduced into economic life. Association will not be organization. Although I have spent some of my life in Germany, the word 'organization' has a terrible connotation for me, and it was in Germany that I first experienced what it means to want to organize everything possible. You achieve terrible things when you always want to organize from a central point. Association is not organization. There the individualities remain in full effect, join together, so that through the union a collective judgment comes about. You can read more about this in my book “The Crux of the Social Question” and in the book “In Ausführung der Dreigliederung” (In the Execution of the Threefold Order), which summarizes a number of articles that I have published in the Stuttgart journal “Die Dreigliederung”, which is published by the Bund für Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus.

In it, I showed how these associations can be formed out of real practical economic life; how these associations will lead to fair pricing, to tolerable pricing. Whereas today we only have random pricing, it will be a matter of pricing that really arises from associative cooperation between consumers and producers. For in economic life, the price question is the central question of the whole economic existence. Those who do not realize that prices must be regulated above all by associations and not by statistics or the like, but by the living interaction in associations, do not know what is important. There is no need to be afraid of bureaucracy; it will certainly not be greater than it is today. But the fact that the same people who are involved in practical business life will also be the leaders will simplify the whole process. And everyone will receive enough when they produce something for themselves and their families, for the other things they have to provide for, until they have produced the same product again. Roughly speaking: if I make a pair of boots, I must receive enough for it to make another pair of boots. This is not to be laid down in some utopian way, but will be the final result when the associations are in existence as I have described them in my book, The Core of the Social Question. The essential thing about this impulse of the threefold social organism is that it contains nothing utopian, but is born entirely out of practical life and the demands of the time. Knowledge of the subject and expertise must guide spiritual life; knowledge of the subject and professional ability must guide economic life in associations that combine to form a large world economic association independent of national borders.

With regard to the spiritual and economic life, majority decisions are an absurdity; everything must develop out of expertise and professional competence. Majority decisions, real democracy, is only possible for those matters in which every person is competent. There is a wide range of political and legal matters that then remain between a free spiritual life and an economic life based on the principle of association. These are all those matters in which every mature person faces the other as an equal in parliamentary life, where all the questions are decided that then remain by themselves from economic life and spiritual life.

Strangely enough, the experts have objected that they understand that in the tripartite social organism there must be free spiritual life and associative economic life, but then there is nothing left for state life. — This is very characteristic. Modern state life has absorbed so much of the economic and intellectual life, even in terms of ideas, that it has not developed the most important things, so that experts have no idea what tasks state life can perform.

What I have presented to you today is only a sketch. It is further developed in the books mentioned. But it is basically linked to the most intense historical necessities.

We see the great human ideals of freedom, equality and fraternity radiating from the 18th century into our own. How could we not feel what lies in these three great human impulses! And yet, there were clever people in the course of the 19th century who showed irrefutably that freedom, equality and fraternity cannot coexist in a unified state. Thus, on the one hand, we have the strange phenomenon that our hearts beat faster when we hear about these three great human ideals, when we feel them inwardly, but on the other hand, the clever statesman - and I say this quite without irony - can prove that these three ideals are incompatible in the unified state. What is the reason for this? The reason is that in the eighteenth century people felt that liberty, equality and fraternity were incontrovertible ideals and impulses of humanity. But they were still under the illusion that everything had to be done by the unified state. Today we must mature to the threefold social organism. Only in it will liberty, equality and fraternity be truly realized. In a free spiritual life, which I hope can really be brought to light by a world school association, real freedom for people will prevail. In the state life, which stands between the free spiritual life and economic life, everything will be built on equality; in its administration there will only be those things in which every mature person is competent and can face another mature person as an equal. In economic life, consumer and producer interests will join together in associations, find a balance and ultimately culminate in a pricing structure that respects people.

We will have an opportunity to incorporate the three great ideals of human development if we free ourselves from the suggestion of the unitary state by striving for: freedom in the spiritual life, equality in the state life or political or legal life - the second link in the social organism - and fraternity in the associatively organized economic life, which results from the objectivity of production and consumption.

Freedom in spiritual life, equality in state life, fraternity in economic life: only this gives the three greatest social ideals of humanity – freedom, equality, fraternity – their proper meaning.

Question: The principle of direct observation in teaching has been rediscovered in recent times. Now it turns out that when children leave school, they are helpless in the face of life when they are supposed to think. They have become stuck on the image as a result of direct observation.

Rudolf Steiner: This is an extraordinarily important pedagogical question of the present day, the question of the concreteness or the exclusive concreteness of teaching. Now this question is perhaps not so specialized, but can only be treated exhaustively by looking at the whole of pedagogical thinking. I would like to mention first of all that teaching in the Waldorf school is based on our knowledge of human development. The Waldorf school is certainly not a school of world view, but all the educational skill, all the educational methodology, all the educational handling of things that can be achieved from an anthroposophical state of mind should be put into practice to benefit the Waldorf school. In this practical respect, the insight that children up to about the age of six or seven imitate everything plays a major role. Children continue to imitate up to this age. This means that at this age, at kindergarten age, one should not actually teach in the usual sense, but should rely on the child's ability to imitate. You see, when you have been dealing with such things for decades, as I had to, you gain all kinds of experience. People come to you and ask about all sorts of things. Once a father came to me, very unhappy, and said: What should we do, our boy, who has always been a good boy, has stolen. - I asked the father: How old is the boy? - Four to five years. - Then, I said, we must first examine whether he really stole. - The examination showed that he had not stolen at all, the little boy, even though he had taken money from a drawer. He had only seen every day that his mother gave money to the delivery people from her drawer. He thought: if that's how mom does it, then it's okay - and he just took money from the drawer too. He bought sweets, but did not eat them himself, but gave them away. The child was simply an imitator, according to his age. What he did was simply an act of imitation. The point is that you don't actually lead children of this age to do anything that they are not allowed to imitate. Then begins the age of life that starts with the change of teeth and ends with sexual maturity, which is the actual elementary school age. This elementary school age simply demands – what is demanded today from some party lines must be set aside, the factual must be brought to the fore – this age demands that the child learn to understand and act on the basis of authority. It is of very special significance for the whole of later life, especially for the education during the early years for later difficult times and for everything that can happen in life, that the child during this phase of life, from about seven to fourteen years of age, accepts something in terms of authority. This relationship of a self-evident authority of the teacher and educator to the child is something that cannot be replaced by anything else for the human being in his whole later life. It would be easy to find proof of something that cannot be acquired later in life if one has not had the good fortune to have a natural authority in one's life.

And so it is at this age that the question of object lessons arises. The extreme form of this teaching method, as it is practised today, has grown out of materialism. They want to put everything right in front of the eye. They believe in nothing but what is before the eye; so everything should be put before the child. But not only the difficulties you have emphasized arise, but also others that arise on the part of the teachers. Take the auxiliary books written for teachers, in which instructions are given for visual instruction. The banalities and trivialities that are dished up there are nothing short of outrageous. The instinctive tendency is always to push everything to the lowest possible level. This is the kind of object lesson in which the child is taught nothing more than what he already knows. This is the worst kind of teaching imaginable, which provides insight in this way. The best teaching is that which not only caters for childhood but for the whole of human life. If life is not such that one still has something to gain from one's school days in one's forties or fifties, then the teaching was bad. One must be able to look back on one's school days in such a way that there are living forces in this reminiscence. We also grow as our limbs grow and many other things within us are transformed; everything about us grows. When we teach children concepts, ideas and views that do not grow, that remain, and on which we place great emphasis, then we sin against the principle of growth. We must present things to the child in such a way that they are placed in the context of living growth. Again, we cannot do this with flat, banal object lessons, but rather when we as educators face the child, imponderables then come into play.

I often use an example like this: let us assume we want to teach a child a concept – one that can be derived purely from an understanding of child psychology at a certain age – the concept of immortality. One can make this concrete in natural processes, for example, in the butterfly in the chrysalis. One can say: the immortal soul in man is contained in it, like the butterfly in the chrysalis, only that it develops in a spiritual world, just as the butterfly develops out of the chrysalis. That is an image. One can teach this image to the child in two different ways. The first is this: one thinks, “I am the teacher, I am tremendously clever; the child is young and terribly stupid.” So I will set up this symbol for the child to represent this concept. I am, of course, long since beyond it, but in this way the child is to grasp the immortality of the soul. Now I am explaining this in an intellectualistic way. This is not the way to teach a child; not because what has been said is wrong, but because one is not attuned to the child in the right way. When I immerse myself in anthroposophical spiritual science, it is not an image that makes me feel smarter than the child, but a truth. Nature itself has created the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis at a lower level, and the process of passing through the gate of death at a higher level. If I bring what lives so vividly in me to the child, then the child benefits.

You can't just say that you should do it this way or that, but rather it depends on imponderables, on a certain state of mind that you yourself have as a teacher - that is the important thing. Difficulties arise when one stops at the flat illustrative teaching, which is becoming more and more impersonal; at the age when the teacher should play the important role as a self-evident authority, he withdraws. There are, for example, certain things that should simply be handed down to the child on the authority of an adult. You cannot teach everything to the child on the basis of direct instruction. Moral concepts, for example, cannot be based on direct instruction; nor on mere commandments. They can only be conveyed to the child through unquestioning authority. And it is one of the most significant experiences that one can have in later life, when one has absorbed something in the eighth, ninth, twelfth year, because a revered personality regards it as correct – this relationship to the revered personality belongs to the imponderables of . You reach the age of thirty, and with a certain experience it comes up from the depths of human consciousness; now you understand something that you actually took in twenty or thirty years ago, at that time on authority. This means something tremendous in life. This is in fact a living growth of what one has taken in during childhood. Therefore, all this discussion about more or less intuition is not so important. These things must arise out of the object itself. Also, the discussion about more or less thinking and so on, is not very important. The important thing is that teachers are placed in their proper place, that the human element is brought together in the right way in a school organization. That is the main goal. In real life – and the life of teaching and education is a real life – you can't do anything with curricula or anything that can be formulated in paragraphs. Because if three or six or twelve people sit down together, no matter what their antecedents are, what circle they come from, what education they have, they will be able to work out an ideally beautiful curriculum. If you somehow put something together in paragraphs from your own reflections, it can become ideally beautiful, the most wonderful things can be included. I am not mocking; it does not have to be bad, it can be extraordinarily beautiful and magnificent, but that is not the point. What matters is that in the school, which has a number of teachers, real life takes place; each of these teachers has his or her special abilities, and that is the real thing that has to be worked with. What use is it if the teacher can point out: this and this is the teaching goal? That is only an abstraction. What he can be for the children as a personality, in that he stands in the world in a certain way, that is what matters. The school question in our time is essentially a teacher question, and from this point of view all the more detailed questions, such as the question of teaching by demonstration and the like, should be treated. So can you, for example, teach children in an extremely effective way through teaching by demonstration? I must say that I feel a slight horror when I see these tortures with the calculating machines in a class, where they even want to transform things that should be cultivated in a completely different way into visual instruction. If you just want to go further with pure visual instruction, you will end up with clumsy children. This has nothing to do with phenomenology or phenomenalism: to develop proper phenomenalism, one must first be able to think properly. In school, we are dealing with pedagogical methodology, not scientific methodology. But we must know how closely proper thinking is connected not only with the brain and the head of the person, but with the whole person. It depends on the way in which someone has learned to think, on the skill in his fingers. For in reality, man thinks with his whole body. It is only believed today that he thinks with his nervous system, when in reality he thinks with his whole organism. And the reverse is also true: if one can teach a child quick thinking in the right way, and even presence of mind to a certain extent in a natural way, one is working for physical dexterity; and if one carries this quickness of thinking to the point of physicality, then the children's dexterity also comes to one's aid. What we have now established in the Waldorf school is much more important: instead of the usual visual instruction in manual skills, the children move on to self-forming, through which they get a sense of the artistic design of the surface. This then leads in turn to the mathematical conception of the surface in later years. This living into the subject matter, not through mere visual instruction for the senses, but through a living together with the whole environment, which is achieved for the whole person, is what we must work towards.

I just wanted to point out that such questions should be placed in the context of pedagogical thinking as a whole and that today we spend far too much time discussing the specifics.

Rudolf Steiner in response to other questions: What has been said and often emphasized before must be firmly held: the Waldorf School does not want to be a school of world view as such. The fact that it is based on anthroposophical soul-condition is only the case insofar as it is implemented in educational practice. Thus, what is at issue in the Waldorf School is the development of what can be achieved by purely pedagogical means from the anthroposophical movement. The Waldorf School does not want to be, and cannot be, a school of any kind that teaches a particular worldview. That is why the Waldorf School has never claimed – until now – to take responsibility for the religious education of the children in its care. What the one or other anthroposophist may think about questions of world view is not important. The point is that anthroposophy in the school and all that goes with it is intended to have an effect only in pedagogical practice. For this reason, the religious education of the Catholic children was handed over to the Catholic priest and that of the Protestant children to the Protestant pastor. Now it happened – this simply arose from the contemporary circumstances – that there were quite a number of dissident children who would actually have grown up without religion. For these children, religious education is now provided, but it is not considered part of the school, but rather it presents itself as free religious education alongside Protestant and Catholic religious education. We have at least had the success that children who would otherwise not have been admitted to any religious education at all now grow up with a religious life as a result. This is a free religious education that is taught by someone who understands it and is called to do so, like the others who teach Catholic and Protestant religion. However, it must be strictly maintained that the intentions of the Waldorf School are not to promote any particular world view. The aim is not to indoctrinate children with anthroposophy but to apply anthroposophy in practice. So questions on this topic are irrelevant. At the beginning we had to find an appropriate approach to what follows from practice. We have our views about how a seven-, eight- or nine-year-old child should be taught, and these are appropriate. We believed that we had to decide these things on the basis of purely objective principles. Now, of course, the Waldorf school is not an institution for hermits or sects, but an institution that wants to fully engage with life, that wants to make capable people out of children for the sake of contemporary, very practical life. Therefore, it is important to organize the lessons in such a way that, on the one hand, the strict pedagogical requirements are met, and on the other hand, it is important that the Waldorf school is not just any institution for eccentrics. I then worked out the matter in such a way that from the time of entering school until the completion of the third class, you have an absolutely free hand in the individual years, but by the time they have completed the third class, the children are ready to transfer to any school. From the ninth to the twelfth year, you again have a free hand, and then the child must be ready to transfer to any other school, and the same applies when they have completed primary school. We are currently setting up one class each year; what happens next remains to be seen.

As you can see, it is not a matter of working from party-political or ideological considerations, or anything like that, but purely of putting Anthroposophy into educational practice. The ideal would be that the children initially – because anthroposophy is only developed for adults, we have no children's teaching, and have not yet been in a position to want to have one – would not know that there is an anthroposophy, but that they would be kept objective and thus placed in life. These things cannot be achieved in the ideal; no matter how hard the teacher tries to remain objective, one child will live in a circle of parents and the other in a circle of parents; there are also anthroposophical fanatics, and their children bring anthroposophical mischief into the school, as well as all kinds of other things. It must be made absolutely clear that it can never be a question of the Waldorf School in any way being a school of world view or anything of the sort. It is not that at all, but it wants to make children into capable people in the immediate present, that is, in the life in which we are placed within the state and everything else, so that they are capable within it. It is self-evident that the Waldorf school does not bring the ideas of threefolding into the school. This cannot happen through the efforts of Waldorf education. No party politics are brought into the Waldorf school from the anthroposophical side.

Question: Isn't the methodology that the pastor uses somewhat opposed to the rest of the teaching? Isn't there a conflict here?

Rudolf Steiner: You can't achieve anything completely in life. It would be very nice if we could find not only a Protestant pastor but also a Catholic one who would teach according to our methodology. As I said, our school only wants to put pedagogical practice into practice, not a worldview. The other can go hand in hand with this. Now it is self-evident that in free religious education – because the question was asked about such education to be taught only by anthroposophists – our methodology is also used. We would very much like the Protestant and Catholic education to be taught in the same way, but we have not yet achieved that.

Question: What is the content of the material taught to anthroposophical children?

Rudolf Steiner: The material is determined in such a way that an attempt is made to take the child's age into account. This is what is always at the psychological basis. That is why it is important in all things that they are most effectively brought to the child when they are introduced at the exact age at which the child's inner being resonates most strongly with them. It is a fact that in the seventh or eighth year of life, little is achieved with objective gospel or Bible knowledge, and nothing at all with catechism knowledge. It is not absorbed by the child. This is an anthropological law. On the other hand, everything religious that can be directly formed from a certain shaping of natural processes is very well absorbed by the child at this age, all ethical and genuinely religious concepts that can be formed from natural processes. Above all, one can lead the child to religious feeling indirectly through images of nature.

It is only from the age of eight, or even closer to nine, that one can lead the child to the actual Christian feeling. Only then does he begin to grasp, for example, what lies behind the figure of Christ Jesus. The concepts that the child must be taught if it is to grasp the content of the Gospels are only really assimilated by the child in the course of time. It is good if it has a foundation and is only properly introduced to the content of the Gospels around the age of nine, and then gradually led up to the deeper mysteries of Christianity. It must be emphasized that this free religious education is, in the most eminent sense, a thoroughly Christian one, that is, the various denominations that take part in it are introduced to true Christianity. It is the case that if you are a teacher at the Waldorf School, you have come to this [Christian] conviction yourself, precisely from the anthroposophical point of view. You have come to Christianity from this side. You may put it differently, but children are introduced to real Christianity. Just as we leave Protestant and Catholic religious education to themselves, we also leave religious education from an anthroposophical perspective to them entirely. It has never been my aim to ensure that children attend these free religious education classes. They came in large numbers, but it is really not the aim to damage the external reputation of the school by making it happen in such a way that it could be said to be a school of world view. One does not want to be that at first. That is why we are careful about free religious education and only give it because it is requested.

Man really only faces the riddles of existence when he has developed a degree of awareness of life, when he feels compelled to form ideas, sensations, feelings about his relationship to the world. But then, when he has reached such a situation, then the riddles of existence mean to him what can be called a vital question, because they are not only connected with some theoretical longings, with mere external questions of education, but the whole position of man in the world depends on them, the way in which man can find his way in the world, the degree of security he can have in life, and the inner support with which he can move through this life.

But now there is a considerable difference between the various types of riddle of existence. Man stands in the face of nature, must form ideas and feelings about his relationship to nature, and if I may use a comparison, I would like to say: When man has come to consciousness in the way I have characterized it, and he cannot find his way into certain things that confront him as mysteries of nature of nature, then existence, to which he once belonged — as I said, it is only expressed as a comparison — appears to him as a spiritual darkness; he feels as if he has been placed in a dark world, he feels that he cannot orient himself in this dark world. But to a certain extent this whole relationship to the world secrets of outer natural existence remains something external for the human being; it concerns his outer relationship to existence.

The human being's attitude to the riddles of his own soul is quite different. These riddles are what he lives by, and what basically constitute mental health and illness, but which can also become physical health and illness. For the life of the soul is something extraordinarily complicated, however simple it may initially appear. What we carry in our consciousness during our waking hours from morning to evening – it is indeed scientifically recognized today – is only a part of our soul life. A large part of our soul life rests in unconscious or, I could also say subconscious depths; it rises to the surface in the form of vague feelings, of vague moods, and also of all kinds of other soul content, and forms what is an indefinite basic state of our soul life. But what takes place and surges up in this more or less indeterminate way in the depths of our soul life is intimately connected with what actually constitutes the happiness or suffering of our lives. And anyone who tries to penetrate into the soul life of a human being by anthroposophical means will soon notice how everything that surges up indeterminately from the depths of the soul is connected with the physical body, and then more and more our entire state of health, which makes us capable of living or unable to live, can depend on these subconscious soul moods.

Today, however, I do not want to speak to you in the way that this unconsciousness of the soul is currently spoken about very often, by simply placing everything that shimmers unclearly in consciousness into the great container of this unconscious and by having more or less vague ideas about how this unconscious or subconscious works. I have been speaking here in this place about questions of anthroposophical research for many years and therefore cannot start from the most elementary of this research today, but I would like to consider the questions of soul life in their very essence in the way that they are connected to the happiness or unhappiness of life. But to do that, we must enter into what, flooded with all kinds of elements that are initially unknown, can have a disturbing or calming, happy or sorrowful effect on human mental life, which we want to point out more or less clearly through today's reflections, and what lies in between.

Now, if we look at our soul life, even if only superficially, we find two clearly distinguishable poles: on the one hand, the life of the imagination, which encompasses everything that takes place clearly and brightly in our consciousness, and on the other hand, the life of the will, which, in a certain way, initially emerges from the depths of the soul in darkness and darkness.

We distinguish – as I have often mentioned here – in the ordinary course of a person's life between two states of consciousness, of which only one is actually a distinct state of consciousness: the waking state and the sleeping state. In the sleeping state, the conscious life of imagination ceases; the entire soul life sinks down into a more or less dark darkness. But when we look at our soul life in the waking state with complete impartiality, we can only speak of the fact that we are truly awake with regard to everything that is conceptual. We have, so to speak, taken possession of ourselves as waking human beings, in that we have filled our consciousness with clear images, with thoughts full of light. We also accompany our volitional impulses, we accompany our actions with thoughts. But even in the simplest movement of the human body, how the thought of consciousness is connected with what actually happens during a volitional impulse, during an action, remains completely dark. How dark it is, what actually happens inside the arm when I just raise this arm, when the thought that has the goal of raising this arm wants to realize itself, so to speak, wants to shoot in and voluntarily set the arm in motion.

What happens in our own organism eludes our waking consciousness just as much as what happens in the human soul from falling asleep to waking up, so that we actually have to say: It is the case for the human soul that even in the waking state we have an element of sleeping, that the state of sleeping constantly permeates us and that we are only fully awake in the act of imagining, in the experience of clear, luminous thoughts. Between these two states, between the, I would say, fully waking state of imagination and the will life immersed in darkness, participating in both, lies the life of feeling and of the mind. Our feelings permeate our ideas. We bring certain sympathies and antipathies from our feelings into our imaginative life, and in doing so we usually either connect or separate our ideas. We accompany what flows into our will impulses with our emotional judgment, in that we perceive some actions as being in accordance with duty and others as transgressions of duty. And because we experience a certain emotional satisfaction when we perform our duties or dissatisfaction when we fail to fulfill our duties or for some other reason, our emotional life flows back and forth between our mental and our volitional life.

But the real soul mysteries do not present themselves to the dull person who, in the manner just described, devotes himself to the life of ideas on the one hand and to the life of feeling and the life of will on the other, but these soul mysteries emerge as man becomes more and more aware and aware. And even then the riddles of the soul do not arise in full consciousness, but they belong to the more or less subconscious experiences of the human being. Man never becomes quite clear in his consciousness as to the actual origin of the moods and dispositions of his soul life, which so influence his daily happiness and daily suffering. One must seek out and clearly express that which lives unclearly in the consciousness. And this is what I ask you to bear in mind first of all when I make the following remarks: that I will be obliged to express something in clear words that never lives in this clarity in the consciousness, but that is present in the soul life, healing and causing illness, that the person feels without being able to bring it to consciousness. And because this is so, the riddles of the soul are not merely theoretical, they are riddles of existence that are thoroughly experienced.

When man devotes himself to the life of imagination — as I said, I am speaking clearly about what is only felt vaguely, what is never fully brought to consciousness — he feels something like the vanity of his own existence. The life of imagination is an experience of images. The life of imagination is something that fills up during our waking day-to-day life with what we receive from the outer world in the way of impressions and perceptions. What we experience from nature forms the content of our imagination, it lives in us, it is what we draw up out of our memories. But we are aware: Yes, you are active in that you process your ideas in your ideas, in that you separate and connect the ideas; you are active inwardly, but you do not have your activity fully present in your mind; what is present in your mind is basically a reflection of the outer world. We know that we have to base our imaginative life on this external world. What we have is merely a picture of the external world; we live in pictures when we live in our imaginations, we do not feel fully alive in our imaginative life.

And this feeling, it lives subconsciously, as strange and paradoxical as it may sound. And as little as it is present in consciousness, it is alive in the subconscious; this feeling lives out in certain anxious feelings in relation to the life of ideas, in feelings of fear.

It sounds paradoxical, but this undercurrent of the human soul does exist. Most people know nothing about it, but most people, or actually all people, are constantly under its influence. And this undercurrent is an anxious current, that we could, so to speak, lose ourselves in the world, that we stand over an abyss because our world of imagination is a world of images. And again, the indefinite longing lives in the human soul: How do I find existence in this mere world of images?

This unconscious feeling in the undercurrent of the soul can be compared to the feeling that a person has when they are physically short of air, when they suffer from air hunger and thus consciously fall into anxious feelings. What a person consciously experiences through physical conditions is actually always unconsciously felt as a concomitant of the life of ideas. And so, on the one hand, attention can be drawn to a mystery of the soul, not in theoretical formulation, but by bringing up from the depths of the soul something that germinates or slumbers in this soul.

On the other hand, by living towards the element of will, the human being feels the opposite state. There is a different undercurrent in the life of the soul. Here the human being senses how he is exposed to his drives, his emotions, his instincts, how something natural plays into the human soul life that does not open up to the clarity of thinking, that is always immersed in a certain way in a reality that we cannot penetrate with light, that forms a darkness within ourselves. And if one can penetrate into these undercurrents of the soul with unbiased observation, one can indicate - one must always say a contradiction if one wants to characterize that which exists in the depths of the soul - how that which lives there is unconsciously felt. One must then characterize it by saying: It is felt in the same way as anger is felt in consciousness, or also the way a person feels when he cannot breathe out, when his blood circulation is so disturbed that the inhaled air is not properly converted in his body, when a kind of suffocation sets in. Something like anger-patience is always there in the human soul as a result of such a way of living towards the element of the will.

These are forces that live deep in the unconscious of the human soul, that surge up and constitute the real mystery of the human soul's life. And if you merely take the ideas in their pictorialness, the will in its instinctuality, as they present themselves to consciousness, you may feel these soul mysteries as something vague, as an indefinite sensation of the soul, but he does not make these soul riddles clear to himself, he does not really know what the indeterminate workings in him are that deeply influence his happy or unhappy mood in life.

It must be said again and again: the soul riddles are not the same as those we feel in nature; the soul riddles are those that are experienced inwardly, that flood up from the deep undercurrents of the soul and that must first be interpreted. That is why all science – which of course, as I have already emphasized here, has nothing to object to in its legitimate field – knows little about the actual mysteries of the soul. We see it – and I would like to cite two examples of this – in all of modern scientific thinking, how helpless science, which celebrates such great triumphs in other fields, actually is when it comes to the soul life, despite the fact that the greatest riddles of existence are connected to this soul life of man. I would like to recall two examples, which, however, I am convinced are deeply significant of what is there and of what is scientifically necessary in order to penetrate into the actual realm that the human being experiences as a soul mystery.

Almost half a century ago, the great physiologist Du Bois-Reymond gave a speech at the 45th Naturalists' Conference in Leipzig that must be referred to again and again, although it has been discussed extensively and is now almost forgotten and has disappeared from the discussion. This speech was about the “limits of knowledge of nature”, and Du Bois-Reymond rightly states, on the one hand, that the material world is the limit of knowledge of nature in its essence. He says: Into the realm of matter the human spirit cannot penetrate. It penetrates into the outer observation of the outer sense phenomena to the revelation of material existence, but it cannot state what matter itself actually is. Du Bois-Reymond states this as the one limit. As the other limit, he states that of human consciousness; but today this is nothing other than that of the human soul life. He says: With the most perfect knowledge of nature, one cannot even gain any idea of how the simplest sensation in the human soul comes about. Even if one knew quite clearly how atoms of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen move in the human brain, one would never be able to fathom from a clear insight into these movements how the simplest sensation - “I see red”, “I smell the scent of roses” - comes about, that is, how the first elements of mental life come about.

And Du Bois-Reymond is actually completely right in this statement. There is a second limit for external natural science here, except that Du Bois-Reymond's conviction is precisely the one that must be overcome through anthroposophical research. Du Bois-Reymond believes that the boundaries of knowledge of nature are the boundaries of all science. Therefore, he says: If one wants to penetrate into this realm of the spiritual and soul, one must do so by means other than scientific ones, because where supernaturalism begins, where, in other words, one enters the realm of the spiritual and soul, science ends. Anthroposophical research seeks to defend the idea that science need not be limited to the external natural world, but can develop the means to penetrate into the spiritual and soul realms.

The other example I would like to give is that of an outstanding personality, Franz Brentano, who wanted to establish a psychology entirely according to the method of modern natural science. That was his ideal. I have discussed the whole situation underlying Franz Brentano's research in detail in the third part of my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Puzzles of the Soul) and would like to mention only a few principles here. Franz Brentano then tried to write a psychology at the beginning of the seventies of the last century. The first volume was published in spring 1874. The second volume was promised for the fall; it never appeared. The whole work was intended to be in four volumes; except for the first volume, nothing was ever published except individual attempts, which, however, are always only attempts. The whole work remained a torso. In the work mentioned, I have discussed why this had to be so. Franz Brentano wanted to conduct research into the life of the soul in the same way as in the natural sciences, and in this first volume one finds a remarkable confession by Franz Brentano. He says, for example: With this scientific research, it is possible to find one's way around the details of mental life in a modest way; one can indicate how one idea connects with another, how one idea separates from another, how certain feelings attach to ideas, how volitional impulses attach to ideas, how memory works, and so on. But if, as Franz Brentano says, it had to remain the case that one could only investigate these details of mental life, and if knowledge of the most important questions of human existence had to be bought with this strict scientific method, where would that get us? For Brentano finds justified the yearning that already lived in Plato, in Aristotle, in ancient Greece: to pursue that which can be investigated in detail about the human soul all the way to the great questions from birth to immortality. And it would be sad, says Franz Brentano, if, in the desire to be scientific in our exploration of the soul's life, we had to renounce knowledge of how the better part of the human being in us fares when the physical part is handed over to the earth at death.

And it can be seen from what Franz Brentano has expounded in the first volume of his psychology that his whole scientific yearning is to lead the individual questions, which basically have little to do with the wider public and which this wider public is willing to leave to the scholars, on a long path to the great questions of human immortality and the divine-spiritual content of the world, as reflected in the soul. But Brentano did not find this way out of his natural scientific way of thinking, and because he was an honest researcher by nature, he left the following volumes, for which he found no research path, unwritten until his death a few years ago.

I would like to say that it is precisely this researcher's fate that shows in the truest sense how tragic it is that what is often recognized today as the only scientific approach must falter when faced with the great riddles of the human soul. That is it - again I have to say it - that anthroposophy must defend before the world today: that the path that Brentano could not find from natural science can be found! And it can be found if we do not stop at the ordinary capacities of the soul life, as they present themselves in outer life and as they are used in ordinary science.

I have often said that there are dormant, let us say, scientifically latent cognitive abilities in every human soul that must first be brought out of this soul, just as certain abilities must be brought out of a child through education. Those who have already matured for the ordinary cognitive abilities must train themselves in devotional inner soul exercises so that they develop those soul abilities through which not that which I have characterized on both sides as human, enigmatic soul - the experience in relation to the ideas, the experience in relation to the impulses of the will - but so that the human soul process becomes, so to speak, transparent, so that one can penetrate into what actually takes place in the human life of ideas and in the human life of will. For without penetrating into these everyday soul riddles, one cannot find the way to the great questions of human immortal existence and the divine-spiritual content of the world, in which the human soul also originates.

Now, in my lectures here, I have often described how a person can do inner exercises, purely soul-spiritual exercises, through which he awakens the otherwise dormant cognitive abilities to existence, so that they can really help him in his knowledge. I have pointed out how one can strengthen one's own power of imagination. Just as we strengthen a muscle when we use it continually in work, so we can strengthen our imaginative life when we, in the way I have described in detail in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” , when we direct this life of imagination in a certain direction through inner soul work, when we bring certain easily comprehensible images into the center of consciousness and thus repeatedly devote ourselves to this kind of imaginative work to which we would otherwise not devote ourselves. I can only hint at this in principle here, but you will find clear indications in the work just mentioned and also in the second part of my “Occult Science” that the imaginative life of the human being can become something quite different through such meditation and concentration exercises of thinking. I would like to say: without any kind of abnormal practice, but through the mere development of what is normal in a person's thought life, a stronger, more powerful thought life can be created.

And by generating this stronger imaginative life, by elevating oneself through meditation and concentration above that which is merely pictorial in our ordinary imaginative life, one comes to what I call in the books mentioned, the imaginative presentation rich in content.

This imaginative presentation lives with such inner vividness in the mere thought as otherwise man lives in his outer perceptions. But through this, one gradually comes to the point where the life of the imagination is no longer merely abstract, I might say merely pictorial, but through purely inward research — which, however, is pursued with the same seriousness as any scientific research — one makes the discovery that the soul, which could otherwise only fill its imaginative life with the results of external impressions, is inwardly filled with forces that, so to speak, shoot into the soul life. The images are no longer merely this light fluid when they are formed through meditation and concentration, but they are imbued and permeated with forces that I would like to call formative forces, forces that make up an inwardly spiritual-plastic element. And after a while one discovers that through this training of the life of imagination one grows together with that which the formative forces of the human body itself are; after some time one makes the discovery that the life of thought is, so to speak, nothing other than the rarefied life of forces of human growth. What gives us our physical body from birth to death in a plastically formative way is, I would say, in a 'diluted' state our imaginative life in ordinary consciousness.

We look at the newly born child. We know that in this newly born child, starting from the brain, the plastic forces are at work shaping the body. We follow the growth of the child, how it radiates straight from the plastic brain activity, we follow it to a certain point in human life on earth, until the teeth change, until around the age of seven. We will initially perceive this life of forces, which pulsates in man and is vividly active in him, as something indeterminate. On the other hand, by powerfully developing our life of ideas through meditation and concentration, we are unconsciously led to the same element that has been vividly working in us from our earliest childhood. And this is a significant discovery of the inner human life: that one can strengthen the life of the imagination to such an extent that one can make it so intense inwardly that one then feels oneself in it, in what the human formative forces are, what formative forces are in one's growth, in one's metabolism. However strange it may still sound to today's research, it is the case that it is possible to grow into what, so to speak, then takes us up as that which plastically shapes our outer physical body as its formative forces, by strengthening our soul life. One grows into reality through the life of the imagination; one grows into a formative element.

And in this way one gets to know what lies behind the mere thought process; one learns to recognize how a spiritual, with which one has now connected oneself, works in the human organism from birth to death. The life of thinking acquires its reality; the life of thinking is no longer the mere life of picturing, the life of thinking becomes a life of strength that is inherent in existence itself.

And only through such an insight can that which the undercurrent of anxiety and fear produces in the human soul be conquered from consciousness, so that it is indeed not a theoretical solution to the riddles of the soul that anthroposophy points to here, but a thoroughly inward, practical solution that can be experienced.

Anthroposophy must point out that, on the basis of its research, what lives in the human being, what, I might say, only appears to have become so rarefied as to emerge as our ordinary life of thought, but which in truth is the inner sphere of growth of our existence, can enter into human consciousness and be grasped through human consciousness. And on the other hand, when a person loses the main focus of their mental life and enters into a fearful undercurrent of this soul life, they can absorb the results of spiritual science anthroposophy through their mental life and can consolidate this mental life through the path of knowledge. Anthroposophy does not offer a solution to this soul riddle by putting forward a theory, but by putting a result in front of the human being that he can fully grasp with his common sense and that then - like giving weight - appears in the life of ideas for his consciousness, for his soul life, so that the soul mood, the soul constitution, can flow into it, solving riddles, which Anthroposophy seemingly asserts as mere knowledge about the life of ideas.

On the one hand, we can see how the human being is a formed being, how he appears as a whole in a certain form, how his individual organs are formed out of the spirit and how we — so that we can be free beings, so that we do not act only through these inner forces, but can surrender to free mirror images until our merely pictorial representations develop into something vividly formed. I explained this at the beginning of the nineties of the last century in my 'Philosophy of Freedom', by showing that man is a free being precisely because he can live in pure thoughts that are not connected with any external reality for his consciousness, that he can form his moral impulses in these pure thoughts. In relation to mirror images, one will be in the position of having to do something oneself if the mirror image is to change; mirror images do not determine one causally. A human being would never be free if he were determined by a reality in his ordinary consciousness. In his ordinary consciousness, ideas live as images, but he is not determined by them, just as one is not determined by mirror images. He is free. In order for him to be free, his life must be distinguished from that which permeates it in a plastic way as a growth force, as a body of growth, one could say, as a body of formative forces. But this life in freedom must be paid for by the person with the characterized anxious undercurrent in his or her soul life, and therefore, in his or her ordinary consciousness, the person must come to fully experience his or her sense of freedom, but also, as a polar opposite, to be able to counter this experience of freedom with what anthroposophy can give as a way of strengthening the life of ideas in the way indicated.

But if one continues along this path, one does indeed advance from what I would call the very rarefied, purely pictorial life of ideas to what is real reality, what lives in the human being in a formative way. It is not the physical body, it is not the physical organs, it is a supersensible force, but it is there. One grasps something that lies outside the physical body, and by simply pursuing the riddles of the soul in one direction, one penetrates into that which has a supersensible reality in man, independently of the human physical body. One advances to that which is prepared by birth or by conception as a human physical body, by mere hereditary conditions, by mere external natural facts. One learns to recognize how the inherited traits, which come from parents or ancestors, combine with the whole body, which is formed in the maternal organism, from the spiritual world, to create what one finds in life when one strengthens one's imaginative life.

One arrives, I would say, at one side of the question of immortality. One looks at what is immortal, what is eternal in human nature, because it penetrates from a spiritual world through conception and birth into what is humanly physical, and because it continues to have an effect during earthly life as the inner plastic formative power with which we connect by strengthening our thought life in the manner indicated.

In this way, anthroposophy offers the perspective that someone like Franz Brentano was looking for. Brentano also began with an investigation of thoughts, but he left thoughts as they are in ordinary consciousness. He confined himself to merely registering what was present in ordinary consciousness. It is only by strengthening the life of thought through meditation and concentration that this life of thought leads to the inner, plastic formative power, and it really leads along the path that begins with the grasping of the simple everyday thought and ends with the spiritual-soul that lived in the spiritual and soul realm before birth, before conception, and that has connected with the hereditary forces and the physical forces of the human body.

There is no other solution to the riddle of the soul than to really find this path from the simplest phenomena of everyday life to the great riddle of existence.

So far, I have pointed out what a person can achieve in relation to their thoughts. There he comes to what, so to speak, drives the human being out into space, what vividly permeates the human being's spatial corporeality, what is lived out in form, what, as I have indicated, descends from the spiritual world and flows into the outer form of the human being, and also into the form of his inner organs. But this is only one side of human life, and the soul also participates in the other side of human life. Just as we can develop our thinking through meditation and concentration, we can also develop our will, not in the sense of strengthening it, but in the sense of making it more devoted and spiritualized.

This can be achieved by, in a sense, tearing the life of the will away from its everyday nature. I have given many individual exercises. Spiritual science is no easier than research in an observatory or in a clinic. These exercises would have to be practised for years, but I would like to pick out just a few to suggest the principles. It can happen that [this breaking away] by the fact that one, which works in ordinary thinking as a will - because in thinking there is always a will, the thoughts are shaped by the will, the thought is only one side, in the life of the soul is always the will is interwoven with the thoughts and the thoughts with the will - that one tears this element of will, which lives in the thoughts, away from its usual course, which adheres to external physical facts, by, for example, presenting something backwards. Let us say, for example, that instead of presenting a drama from the first act to the fifth, we present it backwards, starting from the last scenes and working back to the beginning. We then proceed to present external facts backwards. For example, one can imagine one's usual daily life in reverse, proceeding in as small portions as possible, from evening to morning, even to the point of imagining going up a staircase in such a way that one imagines it as going down backwards from the top step to the penultimate step and so on.

Because we are accustomed to thinking in the same direction as external facts unfold, thinking actually plays a passive role for us in relation to the will that unfolds in it. It becomes actively inwardly active, permeated with inner initiative, when we train it through such exercises as retrospection, where we tear it away from the course of external facts and make it rely on itself. For if we reinforce what we achieve in this way through careful and energetic exercises with a truly serious self-observation, observing what we do as a person of will as if we were standing beside us and observing ourselves piece by piece in our development of will, or even if we were to proceed to action, if we were to do exercises with the express purpose of making a resolution and then executing it with iron energy exactly, so that we live completely in the element of will. I just wanted to mention in principle such exercises that not only tear the will away from external facts, but also from its ties to the body itself, that make the will independent, spiritualize it. Then we actually come to a development of the will in this way, so that we experience ourselves with our soul life, which now develops the will, outside of our body. It is a momentous experience. But only through this do we begin to understand what the will is. In ordinary life, the will is bound to the organs. We see it unfold as we move our limbs. We observe the processes, the effects of our will, only through our thought life. We see into it when we have detached it from the body, when we experience it in itself, when we become completely one with it. Then it is permeated by an elevation of the power that is otherwise also bound to our physical organism, permeated by the power of love. And that devoted element in our soul life is developed into a transparent, bright clarity, which - I would say dark, as an emotional life of will in love - rode towards us.

I know how little people today want to accept love as a force of knowledge. In ordinary life it is not; but when it is so developed that the will is no longer rooted in instincts, in drives, in emotions, but that it lives in the purely soul realm, apart from the body, then this will is actually only recognized in its essence, and then it shows itself as something quite different from what the thought element has shown itself to be. The thought element, in its intensified form, has shown itself to be that which shapes in a constructive way, which, I might say, allows an organ to flow out of an organ, which culminates in human reproduction. The thought element unfolds as the plastic activity, from the soul into the human body. The will element unfolds in the body in such a way that, when it is recognized separately from the body, one can see how it affects the body. The physical body is not shaped plastically, but rather the plastic form is reduced, dissolved, atomized, made to flow. The element of will is what continually — please do not misunderstand me — I would like to say, again burns the formed elements of the human being, lets them go up in flames, spiritually speaking. The expression is meant figuratively, but it means something very important.

Human life, as it pours out of the soul into the body, can only be understood by seeing it, on the one hand, as this plastic element and, on the other hand, as the re-dissolving of the plastic element, as that which, I would like to say, lets the plastic element enter into the atomized and the deliquescent. And in that everything that unfolds as will in the human being is such a dissolving, atomizing, and deliquescent element in the human body, this will-like element is what is now experienced as pointing the way to the other side of human life, pointing the way to death.

Just as we first get to know the spiritual-plastic element of the human soul through the sculpture of thinking, which moves into the physical body through birth or conception, so we learn to recognize how the will-like element dissolves the human body, but in dissolving - as I said, figuratively speaking - pure spirituality emerges from the flame. We get to know the soul's departure from the body. In this way we learn to understand death through the dissolution of the will element. We learn to understand what happens to a person in death because we learn to understand what happens in a person in everyday volitional decisions. The everyday volitional decision brings about a kind of burning process in the physical body, but it is out of this burning process that our inner soul life emerges. What we feel inwardly as soul could not be there if we were always merely body, merely shaped in a plastic way. The plastic must be broken down, flow, and from the flowing of the plastic, from the ever-continuing destruction of the bodily, the experiencing of the soul arises. And we comprehend the departure of the human soul from the physical body at death, which, summarized into a single moment, represents that which is always represented in the unfolding of the will to the spirituality of the soul. Just as I experience my will in the present moment, how it forms a kind of process of combustion, dissolution in the body, how through this destruction the spiritual comes to life in the human body, so I learn to recognize how the other destruction of the body in death, which is nothing other than the last effect of the will hidden in the body, how the spiritual returns to the spiritual and soul world.

This is what leads us from anthroposophy into the riddles of the soul in a living way. Anthroposophy is not intended to be a theory; it certainly wants to provide knowledge, but not theoretical knowledge. It wants to provide knowledge that nourishes the soul. And in this way it can present the individual daily experiences of the soul being before the spiritual eye; it can then proceed from these individual experiences to the great questions of soul life.

Allow me to go into one detail so that you can see what is at the very basis of what anthroposophy is meant to bring to the riddles of the human soul. Allow me to give the details of human memory.

Once one has attained the intensified life of imagination that I have characterized, and once one has also become acquainted with how the plastic is continually being broken down by the life of will, then one also sees the inner soul processes with transparent clarity for the first time. One sees how the human being stands in relation to the outer world, how he receives his impressions from the outer world, how he then forms ideas and thoughts about these outer impressions, how after some time - or even after a long time - he brings up these ideas as memories from certain backgrounds or how they also arise of their own accord, as one says today, as “free-rising” memory ideas. For anyone who wants to look at the human soul with an open mind, the mere emergence of these memories heralds a significant psychological puzzle. It can be said that, in a very curious way, people have spoken of what the essence of memory actually is. People have imagined – and sometimes still do today – that impressions are evoked by the senses, then they are passed on through the nervous system, and finally they are transformed by the power of imagination. These images then enter into certain depths of the soul and come to the surface when they are remembered. Now, no person who thinks impartially can form any clear idea about how these ideas, when we do not have them, are supposed to go for a walk down there in unknown depths of the soul's life, only to come up again through arbitrariness when they are either needed or want to lean against something that appears as a new perception, as a new impression of the outside world.

Anthroposophy goes beyond this to the real, true observation of the human soul life itself. By knowing the intensified life of imagination and the spiritualized life of will, it sees through the whole process that takes place from the perception of the external thing through the formation of imagination, through the formation of memory, to the re-emergence of the remembered imaginations. The fact that anthroposophical research penetrates to the forces of knowledge through such a shaping of the life of imagination and will, as I have indicated, transforms the whole process of soul and body and the way in which these two interact with each other, is so transformed that, if I may compare it to something very dark and opaque that I have before me, it is suddenly made transparent by being illuminated. The whole human soul process becomes transparent through this strengthened life of imagination and spiritualized life of will.

And what do we now see with regard to what I have indicated? We see how the outer impressions stretch for miles, how the whole process continues and how, in fact, what I have described as the formative, plastic element of the intensified life of thought, works in the ordinary process of perception as a continuation. I perceive outwardly, but it is not only the abstract thoughts that I have in my ordinary consciousness that work in me, but also what is merely fathomed through spiritual science, that works continually; this plastic quality in the perceptions works down into the depths of the human soul and body. And then, when this has happened, when the thought has taken shape in the depths of the soul and body, then the human being moves on to something else. A volitional decision is at work here, the will is active, but the spiritualized will is present. In that part of the human being that is connected to the external brain, this will unfolds, it builds by dissolving the plasticity of the brain, what the impression has built up for the ordinary consciousness, so that we have spread an outer brain surface, if I may express myself roughly, over substrates, but where the plasticity continues to have an effect.

Now let us assume that I remember something in an arbitrary way, then it happens in such a way that I unfold this will out of a certain series of images. The development of the will is in turn connected with a breakdown, if external impressions do not now penetrate; and the fact that these do not come is ensured by the development of the will, which is a breakdown. And this dismantling allows what is in the subconscious during the voluntarily evoked memory to emerge as a sculpture of the human being. If free-floating ideas arise, the opposite happens. There is some external impression that forms into a thought. The thought is vividly active. It is imprinted on the brain. This plastic activity is similar to that which has formed in the subsoil that which can live in a certain form in the subsoil. This lives in the plastic that the thought has now formed.

You see, in this way the life of the soul becomes transparent; one learns to recognize it in its interaction with the life of the body, in the interaction of the spiritual with the bodily and with the soul; one learns to recognize it in its inner plastic structure, in its continuous extinguishing, burning away through the will element. And by learning to understand every single moment of life, one learns to grasp in these currents of life what the great questions of life are. One learns to recognize from the thoughts what moves into physical life at birth, one learns to recognize from the will what moves out into the spiritual world at death.

In this way, the results of anthroposophical research appear to penetrate from the details of life to the enigmatic essence of the human soul.

In this way, by recognizing how thought already works plastically in ordinary memory, as if something is being formed in the body, we also experience how that which is not yet in the body, but connects with the body through birth and conception, how that intervenes plastically in the body. We get to know the human life element in this plastic form because we get to know the individual plastic element that already appears in the formation of memory.

Anthroposophy wants to look at the riddles of the soul with a full life! This should be understood as the essence of anthroposophical research: that it stops everywhere at the scientific conscientiousness that has been cultivated today through the great, powerful advances of external natural science, but that by stopping at this conscientiousness, it simultaneously goes beyond what mere external observation and mere external experiment can offer, that it progresses from the abilities which, precisely by their special presence, make the human soul a mysterious being for the human being himself, that through the development of these abilities it leads to the soul's riddles being solved not theoretically but practically.

There is no need to fear that someone who approaches the so-called solution of the soul's riddle from this point of view might one day, as if it were a fait accompli, present the solution as a completed insight, so that the soul might then fall into lethargy and carelessness towards its own life. No, the soul poses the riddles that I have mentioned today as the living, as the experienced soul riddles, in every moment of life, and in every moment of life we need the results of spiritual research anew, which have a balancing effect on that which arises so mysteriously from the dark depths of the soul. What I have called the anxious undercurrent of human soul life and the wrathful undercurrent are nothing other than the inner call of the human soul not to take itself for granted, but to accept itself in such a way in its full ongoing experience that this human soul is constantly a mystery to itself, that it constantly needs the solution to this mystery. And it is precisely such a continuous solution to the mystery of the soul that anthroposophical research seeks to offer, linking it to the reality of existence in such a way that one can say – if I may use a trivial comparison – Just as a person in their physical life is a being that must constantly take in nourishment, that cannot be satisfied with a single intake of nourishment because they consume this nourishment, because they combine this nourishment with their life process, so it is with what is offered to us by anthroposophy as the result of the soul's riddle. Its intense inner effectiveness eludes us if we do not constantly contemplate it, if we do not constantly progress. Because we are dealing here with a reality, not with a theory that can be learned and memorized, as with the reality of nourishment, we are dealing with something that must penetrate the ongoing process of life through anthroposophy.

And it is true. The human being will become aware of the following when dealing with the results of anthroposophy in relation to the riddles of the soul: learning – as strange as it may sound, it is a truth that anyone who deals with anthroposophy can experience with regard to the riddles of the soul – basically, you cannot learn anthroposophy; you can let its results approach you, you can read books, listen to lectures; but if you do not continually experience what you have absorbed in this way, if you do not, in a continuous process, just as one continually connects the bodily substances of the external world with the bodily processes through the process of nutrition and metabolism, one connects that which is presented in anthroposophy with the human soul, with the soul process. If this is not continually introduced into this bodily process, one will see that it loses its significance for the soul, just as the physical loses its significance for the body if it is not continually introduced into this bodily process. And just as hunger and thirst express themselves physically in the absence of physical nourishment, so a fearful and morbidly angry nature that wells up from the depths of the soul expresses itself when it is influenced by a real knowledge of the spiritual significance of the life of the imagination and the will. And if a person advances by always being able to cultivate in his consciousness, as a nourishment for his soul, what anthroposophical research gives him, then he finds what he needs to balance his soul life, what he must feel and experience as a continuous living solution of the soul riddles that are also continuously alive.

And it must be said again and again: although the fact that one allows and examines what is set out in the books mentioned above can lead one to embark on the path of independent anthroposophical research, anthroposophy does not depend on every person being able to verify what is presented in anthroposophy by following this path. Even if one does not do this, one can still use one's common sense to find what comes to light in anthroposophy reasonable or unreasonable. A person can use his or her common sense to follow what the anthroposophical researcher claims without becoming an anthroposophical researcher himself. But apart from this common sense, a person has something else. A person, even if he is a layman in the physiological or biological field, does not know the chemical composition of his food; but he tests what food really is for a human being by consuming it, by combining the forces with the forces of his bodily processes. In this way, he can unite the results that anthroposophy offers him, and the way in which it solves the soul's riddles, with his soul life, and he will find that it satisfies him soulfully. And what, in essence, are soul riddles in front of this anthroposophical forum? Soul riddles, grasped in their vitality, are nothing other than the expression of soul-spiritual hunger and soul-spiritual thirst. And the solution of soul riddles is basically nothing other than the assimilation of true spiritual content, true spiritual beings, which unite with the human spirit and with the human soul life. And so, I would say, spiritual saturation, which must continually repeat itself, is the solution to the riddle of the soul. The more vividly one grasps the process and the more one realizes how anthroposophy seeks to reach into every aspect of practical life, how it seeks to take root in the most mundane things and reach up to the great riddles of existence, by introducing the human being to the divine spiritual source of existence, by leading him to his own immortality, the more one will realize that anthroposophy cannot be theory, but something that can be experienced.

From this point of view, anthroposophy tries to have an effect on the most diverse practical areas of life; from this point of view, it has tried to shape what I have often presented here as the founding of our Waldorf School by Emil Molt, that is, something that is done in the practical social sphere.

Anthroposophy, as you can see, solves the riddle of the soul by addressing the whole living human being, body, soul and spirit. In doing so, it overcomes the one-sidedness of the knowledge and soul life that necessarily had to arise with the fully recognized results of modern natural science in their field, which is also thoroughly recognized as a triumph by anthroposophy.

But people would take note of such things – and they would be taken note of if anthroposophy were not so misunderstood – as happened, for example, here in Stuttgart at the anthroposophical Congress, where Dr. von Heydebrand, in a lecture that was also printed, used Waldorf education to explain the one-sidedness of mere external experimental psychology. Not because opposition should be taken against this experimental psychology – it will be possible to appreciate it in the right way in its own field with its own results, if on the other hand what is explored in such an external way can be combined with what can be achieved spiritually and soulfully through anthroposophy. For it is through anthroposophy that what works spiritually and soulfully out of spiritual and soulful worlds in the physical body of man is understood. But in this way, all external research can be enlivened, as can education, medicine (this too has been discussed here in earlier lectures), and social life.

Here, too, I would like to refer to a fine example in the lecture given by Emil Leinhas at the above-mentioned congress – which is also available in print here – which explains what economics, which has been developed purely on the basis of imitated natural science methods, cannot achieve. A start has been made here on a real recovery of social life that comes from the spiritual and soul realms. And what is the reason for this in the end?

Through anthroposophy, we can see how thought has a formative effect. Now, it not only has a formative effect in the human body as the soul-spiritual, it also has a formative effect when we can introduce it into human social life in the right way as social ideals, and the will that has been understood in the right way also works in a social relationship. For just as we know that the human body is dissolved through it and led to a certain combustion, so that which is introduced into social life as a comprehended element of will will recognize at the right moment when any institution has outlived itself and must disappear so that its fruits can be reborn in a new form. Just as the soul and spirit rise up out of the physical in the way described, so the higher structures of social life rise up through the disappearance of certain external institutions that have outlived their purpose, and through this disappearance working together with the formative and constructive. What is seen in the right anthroposophical understanding of the human soul riddle can flow out into social life, I would even say, solving the riddle of social problems as well.

But this is how the human being comes to understand himself in the right way, to be filled with the right inner strength, with the true strength of his real self, which lives in human feeling, in human soul. Between the life of imagination and the life of will, there lives the always incomprehensible, always unfathomable, but no less tangible emotional life of the human being; and in this emotional being, for those who are able to look at life in this way, as I have characterized it today in relation to the riddles of the soul, the eternal self is revealed, which goes through repeated lives on earth. Then one knows how to look at the plastic-creative, developed life of the imagination and the spiritualized life of the will, which breaks it down.

In this way one learns by touching the human being what has entered into the human being through birth or conception in such a way that it initially points back to earlier earth lives to the state in which, in all primeval times, the outer cosmic was so little separated from the inner human life that it required not repeated earth lives but a continuously progressing spiritual-soul-natural life in order to bring about progress. One learns to look at repeated earth lives, at spiritual-soul lives lying between them; one learns to look into the future until a state where man will again have connected himself so strongly with the spiritual that the repeated earth-lives lose their meaning - in that man rises to the spiritualization of his existence, I might say, with an experience that rises out of the mere inanimate into spirituality.

One is led to the true solution of the riddle of the world through the solution of the riddle of the soul; one rises to the human soul, to the cosmos. But through this one attains living knowledge, living insight, which, as I have already indicated, is spiritual nourishment. But through this, knowledge as it is presented by anthroposophy becomes a real inner support for the soul in the element in which life wants to falter. Security, support and orientation in life can be found by seeking the spiritual nourishment that comes from anthroposophy. It brings us back to ourselves, transforming it into inner support, giving our inner balance an inner center of gravity. And in the difficult moments of life, when we are often in danger of sinking into misfortune, we can also find support in a mood of the soul that is carried inwardly by the full consciousness of the spirituality that fills the human being, when we become fully aware that the life of thought is not in vain, that it can find reality in the power of the soul to shape the world in a plastic way, and that the will is that which always gives this plastic shaping of the soul power. that the life of thought is not in vain, that it can find reality in the power of the soul and the world, and that the will is that which brings this power of the soul back to the spirit again and again. This gives support in the difficult moments of life, it puts life on a firm foundation and leads in the right way to the end of life.

And so, here, in reference to what has been said today, we can be reminded of the saying of an old Greek, pre-Socratic sage, who, out of an initially intuitive realization, speaks the weighty word: “When the human soul, freed from the body, soars into the free ether, it is an immortal spirit, freed from death.”

Yes, the riddles of the soul can be solved through real science. One can come to this conviction by trying to solve the riddles of everyday life of the soul through real spiritual insight. One can see a reflection of the knowledge of immortality in the ordinary events of life. And he who can judge the individual unfolding of thought, of feeling, of will in the right way, already sees the immortal in them, and he then looks up to the immortal in the all-embracing sense and thus comes to a real grasp of the eternal in human nature, which is rooted in the eternal ground of the existence of the Cosmos, of the evolution of the world.

First of all, I must apologize for not being able to give the following explanations in the language of this country tonight. So I ask you to receive them in the language I am accustomed to.

Now, anyone who is unbiased and anyone who experiences the life of the present with an alert mind and an alert heart feels that we are living in a time that puts severe obstacles in the way of people. Times have become difficult. But it would be a mistake to think that the causes of today's difficulties can be found only in the external world. What confronts us in the external world — especially since this external world is composed of the actions of human beings themselves — ultimately has its roots in the depths of the human soul. We do not always see how man's strength, confidence, efficiency and especially his grasp of life fade away if he cannot form a view of life out of the spiritual and soul foundations of his being, a view that gives him inner strength as such.

As I said, we do not always realize this, especially because we do not know how even the physical powers of man, which we apply in the outer world, ultimately depend on the soul life that permeates and flows through our whole being. Therefore, anyone who is interested in our ascent in the broad orbit of our present civilization – for it is not a matter of individual narrow fields – must come from the joyful human heart. to enter into the life of the human soul, to ask how forces can arise from the deepest inner being for work, for looking around in life, for forces in general, in order to be able to go the paths of life in an appropriate way.

And if we want to look at the conflict that is actually unconscious in many people today, it still confronts us in the way the conflict appears, on the one hand, to our heads and, on the other hand, especially to our hearts, in the insights and impressions that we can gain from the scientific world view that has grown over a series of centuries.

This scientific worldview has celebrated triumph after triumph and has transformed all of modern life. Everything we encounter in the outside world today, especially if we live in cities, is a result of today's scientific thinking, as it has developed over centuries.

But this scientific thinking is contrasted with another, that which arises from the needs of the human breast, indeed, of the whole human being, as the moral, as the religious world view of man. If we take a brief look around at the development of humanity, we have to admit that the further back we go in this development, the more we find that in older and older times, people derived everything they thought they knew from a moral, from a religious world view. When he looked out at nature, he believed he perceived guiding and directing spiritual entities behind natural phenomena everywhere. And when he looked up at the stars, he believed that the formation of the stars, the movement of the stars, was directed and guided by divine spiritual entities. And when he looked into his own soul, looked into his own being at all, then he thought to himself that this divine-spiritual guidance and direction continues; he assumed that when he himself moved an arm, when he went about his daily life, the divine-spiritual guides were actually at work in him.

The ancient man did not really have a view of nature as we have it today in such magnitude. This is evident from many details. Consider, for example, what close connection there was in ancient times between human thought, illness, and even death, and what was called sin. It was believed that man could only fall ill for moral reasons. In particular, it was believed in ancient times that death was imposed on the human race as a result of the original sin. Wherever you looked, you did not see natural phenomena in the way we see them today; you saw the rule and work of divine spiritual powers, whose realm in the human race itself is the moral world view and to which one turned one's heart, to which one turned one's mind when one wanted to feel oneself in one's spiritual-eternal core, in the bosom of the divine world.

Alongside this moral and religious world view, there was no natural world view. And in the present day, humanity has only retained the remnants of what was handed down to it from ancient times in the form of a moral and religious world view, without a natural world view.

Today we have a magnificently developed view of nature, and we have included human beings in this view of nature; the 19th century has learned to reflect in particular on how the human being is formed from natural foundations, how he has gradually developed from lower animal forms. The 19th century – and to an even greater extent the beginning of the 20th century – has learned to reflect on how what we carry in our limbs, our ability to live, is basically the natural consequence of heredity. Modern times have placed the human being in the natural order. Everywhere we see natural laws that we cannot think of in connection with anything moral.

The way plants grow, how electricity and magnetism work through natural processes, how the development of animals, yes, how the physical development of humans happens: into all that, into which natural science has brought such clarity, moral thoughts cannot be introduced at first. And even if man can have his intimate joy, his deep contentment, yes, in a certain sense, an aesthetic devotion to nature, he cannot have a religious devotion to the world order, especially to the nature that science presents to him today.

And so modern man has come to see the true, the existing, the only thing that has reality, in nature. But in his heart, the urge for a moral world order still struggles to the surface, the intimate need to be connected to something that, as a supersensible force, stands in opposition to all that is sensual in nature, the urge to be able to feel religiously in the face of powers that cannot speak to people from within the laws of nature. And more and more, this modern man is losing his way in maintaining the old traditions from a moral, from a religious world view; more and more, he finds them in contradiction to what a newer view of nature gives. Thus, the modern man stands in discord, as he looks at the world, which is completely interwoven with natural laws, which has taken its beginning from natural laws, which, according to his hypothesis, must take its end according to natural laws.

And above that stands that which he says actually makes him human in the first place; above that stands moral sense, above that stands religious devotion. And man stands there with his anxious riddle of existence: Am I able to give reality to that which I bring out of my moral sense, since nature gives it no reality? Am I able to turn my religious sense towards something that it can strive for in truth and honesty, since this sense cannot turn to that which only appears to it as natural law?

Thus this man feels as if his moral ideals, his religious feelings, were beginning more and more to hang as abstractions in an airless space, as if they were doomed to be buried and lost in the merely natural-law universe when the earth comes to an end in a kind of heat death.

In this way, the man of the present age is placed in a state of profound conflict. He is not always aware of this conflict. But something else comes to his attention. He becomes aware that he does not know his way around the world, that he has neither the strength nor the joy to work in the world. And often, in order to have at least some support for his sense of morality and his sense of religion, he turns to all kinds of old world views, to all kinds of old mystical or, as they are also called, occult world views. He warms them up because he cannot find any evidence of the supersensible in man and the world from what surrounds him today.

Nevertheless, it is possible to find this supersensible in the world and in man. And how it can be found is what we want to talk about this evening.

Between what is purely moral and purely religious, and what is natural and sensual, there has always been something in the middle that comes to the surface in people during their lifetime. In older times, when the world was viewed only morally or only religiously, it was seen differently. But still, even today one can only place that which is in man in a one-sided way into the mere natural order.

There are three things in man that, I would say, fluctuate back and forth, oscillate between that which is felt to be supersensible and that which is merely natural. It may seem strange to you that I am emphasizing these three phenomena in human nature; but you will see that it is precisely these that, when transformed and metamorphosed, will lead us to a consideration of supersensible knowledge and world views.

The first thing we encounter in a human being, when he, I would say, has to go through his first experiences of life as a very young child in the struggle with his environment, is that he fights for this own situation out of his nature, which is not yet given in the world: the upright walk, the stand.

The second thing that man finds himself in is learning to speak. And only through speaking – anyone who is able to observe childhood uninhibitedly knows this – does the gift of thinking develop. To orient oneself in the world so that one does not look down to the earth like an animal, but looks freely out into the universe to the stars, to be able to carry one's own inner being out to one's fellow human beings in language , to bring the soul life into the world in the form of thoughts: an older world view perceived this as something that, in a sense, is given to man down here in the sensual world as a gift from the supersensible. The connection between the supersensible human being and the supersensible world was perceived by looking at these three characteristics of human nature. That man is so constructed that out of his build the upright walk, the looking out into the heavens, arises, that an older worldview, which looked at the moral and religious of the world order, saw as a gift of divine spiritual powers that worked in man. And learning to speak was seen even more as a gift of these divine spiritual powers.

Never in the early days of human development was it otherwise than that man said to himself: When thoughts take hold within him, then angelic spiritual beings live in these thoughts. — It was only in the course of the Middle Ages that man began to discuss whether his thoughts were only his own creation or whether divine spiritual powers within his bodily organization live out in his thoughts.

Thus in ancient times these three gifts were regarded as something that comes into man from supersensible worlds and lives and breathes there. Therefore, these three gifts, which come to man during his childhood, have been used as a starting point when one wanted to direct the person, who stands on the earth and lives on the earth and has to do his work on the earth, up to the powers of the moral, religious world order.

I will now disregard those exercises that an even older humanity, for example, has done by regulating the breath in order to gain knowledge of the external world through the supersensible. I will look back on views and exercises of humanity that lie far before Christ, but are not exactly the oldest, and which were based on these three characterized peculiarities of human nature.

There we see how in the Orient, where in older times there was a powerful striving for a knowledge of the divine-spiritual, man first of all wanted to develop that which lies in the power of his orientation, that which lies in the power that leads him as a child to become an upright being looking out into the vastness of the world. Look at the positions and postures prescribed by the wise oriental teacher for his pupil, because he, as an adult, is tackling in a different way what becomes the orientation of the gait and the orientation of the posture in the child. It was said: When the child learns to walk upright from crawling, then the Divine-Spiritual enters. When the student of the Oriental sage crosses his legs and rests his upper body on the crossed legs, he takes up a different position. And when he then becomes fully aware of this position, the spiritual-soul world can have an effect on him, as it has on the child, inspiring him to walk upright. And when man, instead of learning to speak as is the case in the sensual world, turns speech inwards, then he turns this gift of God into a clairvoyant and clairaudient power, so that he can thereby connect his own supersensory with the supersensory of the world.

That is why in ancient Oriental times, the recitative-like speaking of certain sayings, which were called mantrams, was associated with a certain breathing discipline. These mantrams were not spoken out in order to communicate with other people , but were directed inward, so to speak, vibrating throughout the human organism, directing inward that which we otherwise express outward in speech, so that the whole human organism participates in the power and potency of these mantric words. And what the child poured out into speech, through which it communicated with people, as a gift from the supersensible that had become his, the disciple of the Oriental sage poured into his own body. For him, the words did not vibrate outwards alone so that he could communicate with the other person; for him, the words vibrated down into the lungs, vibrated further into the blood, vibrated in the blood with the breath up into the brain. And just as the one who listens to our language feels the beat of our soul, the sensation of our soul from the words, so the Oriental sage sensed the supersensible of the world from what vibrated as a word in his body, from this supersensible experience of the mantric word.

And when the child develops thinking out of speech, this Oriental sage, as a third stage, developed not only a thinking that was only within him, but also a thinking that was outside of him, through the supersensible that he sensed through the mantric word, through the mantric verse. For just as our soul vibrates out to the other person in ordinary language, so the world vibrated in through the inner word that he experienced. And what spoke to him was not another person, it was not human thoughts; what spoke to him were world thoughts, it was the spirit, the supersensible of the world, which poured into his own organism as a supersensible being.

In ancient times, people sought to bring the supersensible world of the human being into relationship with the supersensible world of the universe. And everything that has come down to us in the way of religious and moral worldviews, everything that lives in tradition, comes from the connection that human beings once established between their own supersensible world and the supersensible world of the universe.

For a certain period of time, man has ceased to experience the divine-spiritual in the world. Teachers who sought their way into the supersensible parts of the world became increasingly rare; and people who had a need for such teachers and who wanted to listen to what such teachers had to say in order to draw their own soul nourishment from it, became increasingly rare. For a while, man went through an epoch in which everything that was to develop in him, including his soul and spirit, was to be in the closest connection with his body, with his physical body, with his sensuality. For that older human being, who felt completely secure in a moral world order that was not within him but permeated the world, who felt completely secure in a divine world that completely absorbed nature, this human being would never have been able to come to freedom as such - to that freedom that of the own I as a firm point of support within man; to that freedom which does not derive the action that man performs directly from the Divine-Spiritual, which works in man and actually acts in man; to that freedom which seeks to find the impulse for action in man himself.

Humanity had to come to this sense of self, to this experience of freedom, and it has come. But now we stand at an important turning point in human development. We have lost the old connection with the divine. And even those who, as I have already indicated, want to revive the old ways in every possible way, look to Gnosticism and Oriental occultism for consolation for what they cannot find in the scientific view of the present. No, the view of life I am speaking of here is often slandered to the effect that it also seeks to revive only the old Gnosticism or Orientalism. But that is not the case. This world view is based on the idea that we can find the way into the supersensible from the same strictly exact way of thinking that we apply today in our knowledge of nature, if only we strengthen and sharpen it in the right way.

However, what I have just characterized as the trinity of special qualities in human nature, and which in older times was regarded as gifts of the moral-divine world order, appears to the modern man, on whom the scientific world view has a powerful and convincing authority, only as a natural, sensual gift. And so it is taken for granted today – and from a certain point of view it is quite right to do so – that the particular structure that results from the human way of life, which has grown out of the animal way of life, can be used to derive the different organization of the individual human limbs and thus to understand the upright gait as arising from purely natural conditions. One seeks to understand language from the natural organization and from the connection that this natural organization of the child has with the older human being. And one also seeks to understand thinking itself, the cultivation of thoughts, as something that is connected with the human organization.

How could we not? After all, natural science has shown that people's thoughts are very dependent on their natural organization. It only needs this or that part of the human brain to be paralyzed; a certain part of the thought activity can fail. We see everywhere how human mental activity can be impaired, even by the application of toxic substances that work in the human body. The habit of looking at everything scientifically has placed this trinity – orientation of the human being in the universe, learning to speak, learning to think – in a natural sensory world order in a natural sensory way. And from there, other things have been placed in such a world order.

Now, what a person becomes for this earth, initially through his birth, or, let us say, through his conception, can be seen to emerge from a mere natural order. On the one hand, one can look ahead, to birth, and one can see in birth and heredity everything that pulsates and energizes us humans. But if we look at the other side, the side of death, then we can clearly see, if we are willing to be just a little unprejudiced, how what we are as human beings is not taken up by nature, but is extinguished, as the flame of a candle is extinguished. Thus it appears to modern man as if he himself is given by nature through germ life and inheritance. But it must also appear to him that at the end of his life on earth, he cannot see himself in the continuity of nature, as if nature were not capable of absorbing his human essence, but only of destroying it. Therefore, the great riddle that was once the riddle of birth for people in older times, when they had a moral and a religious world view, has become the riddle of death for a later humanity and still for us today. The riddle of birth has become the riddle of immortality.

For in the time when people were able to look into the divine spiritual world in a discerning way, in a moral and religious sense, and were able to relate the supersensible world of man to the supersensible world, the question arose: How did man come down from the spiritual worlds in which he used to live to this earth? What was a natural event in the life of the germ at birth was seen only as the outward expression of this descent from the divine spiritual worlds into physical life on earth. Birth was the great mystery. What is man to accomplish here on earth? That was the question. Today man looks in the other direction, toward the side of death, when he wants to pose the great mystery of the true nature of his innermost human core.

And we can look at the same mystery from yet another side. Indeed, one can believe that the moral impulses of man arise from the natural instincts that are born of the blood, of the flesh, of the nervous system, of the whole human organization, through a certain perfection, and one can also derive certain religious feelings from the existence of such moral impulses. Thus, to a certain extent, we can deduce the origin of morality and religious feelings from the natural order of the senses.

But we need not speak of the retribution of moral or immoral acts. That leads too much into the egoistic realm. Yet we can say that whatever we accomplish morally – if we believe only in the all-encompassing sensual order of nature – would otherwise fade away powerless in the world. The question arises: The smallest manifestation of electrical force has its definite consequence in the universe – that is according to the view of natural science; what arises morally out of us should have no consequences in the universe?

In this respect, too, we look to the other end. We can, if necessary, see moral impulses as highly developed drives and instincts, but we cannot recognize the significance of moral impulses for the future from a purely naturalistic worldview.

A part of humanity today consciously faces these questions. And whoever consciously faces these questions must turn to that which is being discussed here as anthroposophical spiritual science. A large part of humanity unconsciously faces these questions, feeling more. We can no longer fully follow the old religious traditions that have been handed down to us, because we instinctively feel that they must have emerged from old insights. — They did not emerge from a belief that people are being talked into today! All religious beliefs have arisen from ancient knowledge, from such a connection of the supersensible in man with the supersensible of the world, as I have characterized it to you before. But we cannot go this old way again today. Humanity has since adopted other forms of development. Otherwise it would not have been able to go through that path, I would say that intermediate epoch, in which it gained the feeling of I-consciousness, the experience of freedom. It would not have been possible for it to live entirely in the physical human body if it had not been organized quite differently in this intermediate epoch than in those older times, when those who, through the use of body positions, mantrams and the world thoughts revealed to them, have brought tidings to mankind of the way in which the human soul, the human inner being, is connected with the supersensible world, how man is an ephemeral being only as a body, but as a soul, an imperishable being, an eternal entity.

If a person today were to attempt to seek the connection between the supersensible in his nature and the supersensible of the world in the same way as, let us say, the followers of Buddha, if he were to seek world-thoughts revealed in the inner Logos through special bodily postures, the singing of mantrams, and , in the inner Logos, sought to reveal world thoughts through special physical postures, the singing of mantrams and words of a similar nature, and if, through all this, he wanted to reach the supersensible, then as a modern man, who has developed his physical body in a completely different way than an older humanity, he would only be able to bring his physical body into disorder and not direct it upwards to the supersensible. The earlier human body, which could be permeated by exercises in the way I have described, did not yet have the firmness, the inner consistency, from which a strong earth-I-consciousness, a strong earth-freedom experience arises. The human organism has become more consistent. If a more exact physiology, such as that given by the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here, were recognized today, it would be known that in the newer human bodies the solid components, especially the salty ones, are more intensively developed than they were in the bodies of the ancient humans who could do such exercises for higher knowledge as I have described. Therefore, the modern human being must relate and connect his own supersensible with the supersensible of the world in a different way. The modern human being must seek the moral and religious in the world order in a different way than older times sought it.

The spiritual science of which I speak here therefore seeks to enter the supersensible world from two sides: firstly, from the side of thought, but secondly, from the side of will. From the side of thought, in that man experiences thought, which has indeed done him such tremendous service, especially in modern natural science in the observation and art of experimentation, not merely as a reflection of the external world, but learns to live with these thoughts in the quiet interior of the soul. In this way the modern man can develop a spiritual-scientific method, similar to the way in which the ancient man developed it through his mantrams, except that the mantrams were still something more sensual, while the modern man has something more spiritual in the mere development of thought.

I have described in detail in my books, for example in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, in the second part of my “Occult Science” and in other books, the long path one has to go through in order to arrive at a real spiritual science and thus to an understanding of the supersensible worlds. Here I would just like to briefly indicate the principle of how one can become a spiritual researcher today, quite appropriate for today's organization of humanity.

Not everyone needs to become a spiritual researcher, but individual people can become one. To a certain extent, however, everyone can at least become a reviewer of this spiritual research if they take on the exercises that I have presented in the books mentioned. But anyone who wants to become a spiritual researcher today no longer has to do so by chanting mantrams with the senses, but rather by purely supersensible exercise in thought.

Now, we have arrived at exact thinking today. When I look at the starry heavens in exact astronomy, we have achieved exact thinking in the physical and chemical realms. We are even striving for it today in biological research, in the study of living beings, and we feel particularly satisfied when we can explore the external sensory world in the way we are accustomed to orienting our thoughts when solving problems in mathematics. That is why the saying has been coined that only as much of real science of nature exists as mathematics is contained in natural science. And for this reason one speaks of exact natural science. Everything should be able to be surveyed in observation and experimentation in the same way that one surveys the problems when solving mathematical tasks. One speaks of exact science.

Exact clairvoyance, exact clairvoyance, is the subject of the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here. If today's scientist researches the world in an exact way, the one who becomes an anthroposophical spiritual scientist does something equally exact, only in a different field. He gradually discovers that there are hidden forces in the soul that are not applied in ordinary life and ordinary science. He gradually discovers that it is really the case that in the child, in the very young child, the spiritual and supersensible and the physical and sensual still interact unseparatedly, but that then the child, so to speak, pours into the external sensory world that which previously lived in him in a supersensible form, through walking upright, through speech, and through thinking. Everything that wells up in the blood in the very earliest period of a person's life, everything that vibrates entirely in the organs, pours outwards as the person orientates themselves in the external world; it pours outwards in speech and particularly in thought.

But we can take it back again. The oriental disciple of the oriental sage sought to achieve what may be called the connection of the supersensible in man with the supersensible of the world, preferably by turning back to language. We, the more recent ones, have to turn the thought itself inward. We have to be able to say to ourselves quite seriously: We have come a long way in observing the outer nature. We have the exact thoughts of the star shapes and star movements. We have the exact thoughts of the electrical, magnetic, and thermal effects, as well as the sound and light effects. We look out into the world, and these exact thoughts within us reflect this world. As spiritual researchers, we must be able to refrain from all thoughts that lead us outward to the stars, to electrical, magnetic and thermal phenomena. We must be able to turn the power of thought inward, just as the ancient sage turned his mantric speech inward and thereby allowed the Logos of the world to reveal itself to him. With the same strength as externally through our senses - which are physical organizations and come to our aid so that we do not need to apply our own strength, the strength of the soul - we must rise to make thinking so strong in meditation that our thoughts, although they are only developed inwardly, become as vivid as the sensations of the senses otherwise.

Think about how alive it all is, how intensely it affects you when you hear sounds, see colors, and feel sensations of warmth and cold rushing through your body. Think about how gray and abstract the thoughts you retain of these experiences of the outside world are in comparison. And meditation consists of the fact that these thoughts, which only connect to the outside world in a gray and abstract way, which dawn on us as a result of passively observing the senses, are so intensified inwardly, so intensified, that they become exactly like sensory impressions. This is how you rise to a new way of thinking. While the thinking that one has in ordinary life and in ordinary science is such that one feels passive in it, that these thoughts are actually powerless, are only images that reflect the external world, one can through meditation, one can live in the world of thought, as one lives in one's growth forces, as one lives in hunger and thirst, as one lives in inner physical well-being. That is the result of meditation. One must only learn one thing in order to inwardly enliven the world of thought in such a way: one must learn to inwardly weave lovingly in thought.

If you want to become a spiritual researcher, you must practise this with the same devotion as you must practise for years in a physics laboratory if you want to become a physicist, or as you must practise for years in an observatory if you want to become an astronomer. It is truly no easier to become a spiritual researcher than it is to become an astronomer or a physicist. Anyone who pays even a little attention to what the spiritual researcher says can verify what the spiritual researcher says. But just as not everyone should become an astronomer in order to include astronomical findings in their world view, not everyone needs to become a spiritual researcher just because spiritual research is to become an element of our civilization and cultural life. On the contrary, the relationship between people that can arise from this and must arise in the not too distant future if the decline is not to become ever stronger, that social coexistence between people that will become necessary and, one could say, is actually is already necessary today, will be substantially invigorated when that trust in turn enters into the social life of people, whereby one knows: anyone who speaks from the depths of his soul about the spiritual, supersensible worlds, because he has risen to them as a spiritual researcher, deserves trust.

Where souls can relate to each other intimately in this way, and where the intimacies of the supersensible world are shared in the supersensible being of the human being, those forces will live in such a social order that they alone will in turn strengthen our social life. Therefore it is completely unfounded and actually arises only from human egoism when someone says: I will not accept the findings of anthroposophical research into the supersensible until I see the things myself. Every human being is predisposed to accept the truth rather than the untruth. Not everyone can explore the supersensible world, just as not everyone can paint a picture. But just as everyone can absorb an artistically painted picture, so too, because the whole person, as a fully human being, is predisposed to the truth, everyone can recognize the truth of spiritual science, as it is meant here, not on the basis of blind faith but on the basis of inner experience. This spiritual science itself can only be attained by meditating and concentrating within the life of thinking itself, in this way progressing from ordinary abstract thinking to pictorial thinking, to such thinking that is inwardly alive. And in this thinking the thoughts of the world live. In this thinking the human being no longer feels as if he were shut up in his body; in this thinking he feels that he has taken the first step towards entering the supersensible world.

The older man started from something more sensual, from the inwardly directed word. The newer man must start from something more spiritual, from the inwardly directed thought itself, and in this way he finds his connection with the supersensible world and can speak again of this supersensible world. For these are not empty words, which arise when one enters in this way through inwardly animated thinking into the supersensible world and, with the supersensible in one's own inner being, experiences this supersensible of the world. Just as we are surrounded by the many forms of plants and animals in the sensory world, and as we are surrounded by that which shines down to us from the stars, so too, in a sense, the sensory world fades before the spiritual vision that arises from pictorial thinking, and a spiritual world opens up. One no longer beholds merely the sun in its physical splendor, one beholds a sum of spiritual entities, of which the physical sun is the physical image. One penetrates through the physically appearing sun to the spiritual sun-being. And in like manner, one penetrates through the physically appearing moon to the spiritual moon-beings. One learns to recognize how these spiritual beings of the moon guide the human soul from the spiritual and soul worlds through birth here into earthly life, where it accepts the body from the mother and from the father. One learns to recognize how the spiritual being of the sun contains the forces that lead the human being out through death again, and one learns to recognize the path of the human soul out of the supersensible worlds.

This knowledge is, however, deepened by the fact that one does not train the will through physical positions, as the ancient Oriental did, but that one trains the will in a similar way to how one has trained the thought to achieve an exact clairvoyance, as I have described to you. It was also a training of the will when one suppressed external orientation, crossed one's legs and sat down on them in order to perceive other currents of the world through the human body in a different position of the human body and thus to gain a perception of the supersensible. Modern man cannot do this. His organism has become different. The modern man must go to the will itself. What the ancient Oriental developed, I would say through a more physical way, through bodily postures – he also turned the body to the east, to the west, to the south – all that would be considered charlatanry by the modern man. The modern person must take their will into their own hands. And you will find in “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in “Occult Science” a whole series of exercises for self-transcendence, self-education, and above all for the cultivation of the will. I will mention just a few.

For example, if a person – who is otherwise accustomed to following only external sensory processes from back to front [from the earlier to the later] – rearranges his thinking, for example, in the evening, presenting what he has experienced most recently, then what he experienced earlier in the day and so back to the morning, when he thus presents the order of nature in reverse before his soul, then he tears himself away from this natural order with his thinking, which otherwise adheres to the course of nature, which goes from the earlier to the later. He thinks in the opposite direction to the course of nature. In this way, the will, which lies in thinking, is strengthened. This is especially the case when you dwell on trivialities, on details. Imagine, for example, that I went up a staircase today; I do not imagine myself on the lowest step, but on the highest step, then go back, imagine the whole ascent as a descent, tear myself away from what was really an experience, imagine it the other way around. In this way I strengthen the will, which lies in thinking. I can also strengthen this will by, for instance, taking my self-education into my own hands, by saying to myself: I have this or that habit; I will change it - in three years I must have a quite different habit in regard to something. And so there are hundreds and thousands of exercises that are directly exercises of the will, that directly aim at a change of the will, so that the will breaks away from that which is imposed on it by mere physicality.

In this way, modern man undergoes something similar to what the ancient man went through with his bodily position. For the reasons mentioned, we cannot go back to these old exercises. But in this way, modern man comes more and more into a direct relationship between his own supersensible and the supersensible of the world.

What I mean by this can perhaps be made clear by means of a parable. For example, the human eye: what actually makes it our organ of sight? Well, you can see from cataracts, which are a hardening of the lens or vitreous body, how the eye can no longer serve to see when the material takes hold in the eye. Certain parts of the eye must be absolutely transparent if it is to serve the purpose of seeing. It must, so to speak, be selfless if it is to serve the human being. Thus, if we strengthen our will in the way I have just described, our body becomes a spiritual and mental sensory organ – if I may use the paradox; in certain moments of insight, our body is no longer permeated by drives, instincts, desires, which make our body opaque, in a mental way, of course, but also in our lives. In relation to desires, instincts and cravings, it becomes as pure as the transparent eye is in relation to the material. And just as one sees the world of colors through the transparent eye, so one comes through the body that has become free of desires and cravings - it is not always, but it can be attuned to it by the one who has trained himself to do so through the exercises in the books mentioned has trained himself to do so - to the appearance of the spiritual world, the supersensible world, to which one belongs as a supersensible entity of man, which one is indeed within oneself.

In this way we get to know the truly supersensible in man himself. Once we have seen how it is with the human being when he has made his body transparent in the way described, when he lives in the purely supersensible world, then we have solved the riddle of death by looking, because we have life without the body in our vision. We know how to live when we have passed through the gate of death and laid aside our body. One knows how it is to live in the world without the body. In this way one gets to know one's own human supersensible being. And by getting to know one's own human supersensible being, how it passes through the gate of death in a living, soul-like way, one learns to recognize it as something that can be taken up by a supersensible world, just as it was released by the supersensible world at the moment of conception. When, through the living thought that is attained in meditation, one gets to know the spiritual world of the sun behind the sun and the spiritual world of the moon behind the moon, that is, those spiritual entities that lead the human being into earthly existence and those that lead him out of earthly existence, then one gets to know the supersensible world. And then we know how our living soul after death is taken up by the living beings of the world, the living beings of the universe, the supersensible universe. Just as our body is taken up by the world of the senses and called to death, so the human soul is called to life in the eternal by those beings whom we see through in the supersensible world.

We then recognize the path that human civilization has taken in this way as one that gives us the strength to attach a morality and a religion to the natural order of the world in the present, again in an equally exact way, through the cultivation of the will, which like solving mathematical problems, is practised in exercises, in mental exercises as I have described them, which lead to exact clairvoyance. This is how we recognize the path that human civilization has taken in this way, as one that gives us the strength to join a morality, a religion, to the natural order of the world in the present, again in our nature, in an equally exact way, through the cultivation of the will,

This is what we need today. This course of human development is also indicated in a grandiose way in the position that a real knowledge of the spirit can give to the Mystery of Golgotha in human development.

How was it, let me just mention it in a few words, immediately after the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place on earth, with those people who were the first to profess this Mystery of Golgotha? They looked at what they had been told had happened at Golgotha. They looked at what Jesus of Nazareth had experienced and they sensed that the divine spiritual Christ Being had lived in Jesus of Nazareth as a human being.

They sensed that this divine spiritual Christ Being had descended to them on earth to bring them something that they needed very much on earth. What was it that caused these first Christians to accept the wisdom of the Mystery of Golgotha so unreservedly? The fact that remnants of those old views still existed, saying: Man has descended from supersensible worlds through birth into earthly existence. In ancient times, when man still clearly knew this from his instinctive observation and from what his initiates, his teachers, told him, people sensed that there was a spiritual guide in the spiritual worlds who guided them down to physical earthly existence. But they felt, because they knew, that they had come down to earth as spirits, that they would also pass through the gate of death. And death had nothing mysterious about it, no terror for early humanity, just as - do not misunderstand the comparison, it is not meant to belittle man - as the animal also feels no mystery or terror of death.

It was only in the course of time that man learned to feel death. Death only became a mystery when man no longer had the mystery of birth, when he no longer looked up into the spiritual and soul worlds from which he had descended, when in the development of mankind the disposition arose that saw everything that we have in the birth process as merely natural - that is when the mystery of death came upon man, that is when the actual terror of death came.

This was not cured by theoretical knowledge, but it was cured by the Mystery of Golgotha being played out on earth. And people knew from the remnants of ancient wisdom that the Christ, who had appeared on earth in the man Jesus of Nazareth, was the same Being that guided human souls down to this earth from spiritual worlds. And the first Christians knew that the Christ descended to earth to give people on earth that which would lead them beyond the riddle of death. Therefore, we see the connection that even Paul has between the riddle of death and what was accomplished at Golgotha. We see that Paul makes it clear to people that they can only think beyond death as human souls if they can look to the Risen One, that is, to Christ conquering death.

Now, from older wisdom, the first Christians were still able - feeling more than clearly recognizing - to grasp the Christ as the one who descended to earth. The more recent spiritual science of which I have spoken to you this evening teaches people to look into the supersensible worlds through exact clairvoyance. This anthroposophical spiritual research will, by leading man to see beyond his body, when this body has become transparent in the way described and man experiences the world in which he has to live when he has gate of death. It will again point not only to the man Jesus of Nazareth, but to the divine spiritual Christ, who descended from supersensible worlds and can permeate the supersensible in man himself. From this permeation, from this power that Christ unfolds in him, according to the words of St. Paul: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me,” the earthly human being can gain the impulse to pass through death with Christ as a living soul , so as not to enter blindly into those spiritual worlds, where — as I have described it — he is received by the sun being, but to enter this spiritual world seeing through the light that Christ brought to earth.

In this way, such an anthroposophical spiritual science can take up religious-Christian life. In this way, religious Christian life will in turn be deepened by anthroposophical spiritual science. The last few centuries have brought us the greatness of science, which we see developing slowly, but in such a way that we cannot see any moral world order in it. Indeed, nature reveals itself to us all the more faithfully the less we moralize into it. However, just as we cannot really surrender to what natural lawfulness is as to something divine, so we will, by applying the exact method that we have learned in mathematics and in natural science to thinking, elevate thinking to pictorialness, to exact clairvoyance. And by applying the exact method to our will, educating ourselves, doing the most beautiful deeds for our self-education, we will not arrive at an outwardly charlatan magic, but at an inward, idealistic magic, and thus again link the moral to the natural, to the religious.

And ultimately, what does this anthroposophy of which I speak want? It wants to fill the deep abyss that exists unconsciously, at least for modern man, for all people who somehow experience the world, between the natural amoral world order on the one hand and the religious moral order on the other, so that in the future, in his life, in that which nature, sensuality, gives him through his body, the strong supersensible, into which world morality, not only the morality of humanity, flows, into which not only the natural order, but the divine order flows.

And with the cosmic-moral impulses that become his individual ones, with the penetration of the awareness of God given to him by his spiritually sharpened gaze, man will find his way into the future and solve those important questions and riddles which can already be sensed today, if one does not sleep, but with full, alert impartiality, looks at the world around and at that which can live in the human heart as an urge, as a hope from the present into the future.

The spiritual science of Anthroposophy, which I had the honor of speaking about here in The Hague last Tuesday and yesterday evening, does not just pursue cognitive goals, nor just the goal of deepening our knowledge of the human being in scientific, moral, and religious terms. It also has practical goals. And it was requested that I speak this evening about one of these practical goals, about the goal of education.

Since this spiritual science strives above all to achieve a true knowledge of the whole, the complete human being - the human being in relation to his physical, his soul and his spiritual being - it can also impart knowledge of human nature in practical life, knowledge of human nature in relation to all ages. And for the art of education, knowledge of human nature in relation to the child itself is, of course, essential.

The question of education is essentially a question of the teacher. It is a question of the teacher in so far as it concerns whether the teacher, whether the educator, is able to solve the human riddle in practice with the child. Perhaps it is in this riddle of childhood that we most clearly perceive the meaning of that ancient saying, which is written like a motto over human knowledge: the saying that the solution to the riddle of the world lies within man himself.

Many people are afraid that if a solution to the riddle of the world were pointed out, human knowledge would then have nothing more to do. But if one is of the opinion that man himself is the solution to all the countless secrets that the universe holds, so to speak, as the ultimate goal of this world development, then one knows that one has to seek the solution to the riddles of the world in man, but man himself, if one wants to get to know him, again requires immeasurable effort, immeasurable work, to gain insight into his nature.

If one is so inclined towards the human being in the world that an immortal is hidden in him, then one also comes to have the shy reverence for the child that one must have as a teacher and educator if one wants to approach this child in the right way.

Today, with regard to the knowledge of human nature, I will endeavor to refrain from the arguments that I have been making in recent days about the knowledge of the human spirit and the spirit of the world. I will try to express the spiritual-scientific content in the most popular terms possible, so that those of our honored listeners who were not present in the last few days can also follow the arguments.

The point is this: anyone who deepens their views on life through what can give them a real – not abstract – knowledge of the human soul and spirit sees, above all, major divisions in the life of the human being; they see that they have to structure the entire life of the human being into epochs. These epochs are not always regarded with the proper interest and deep insight that they deserve. But anyone who wants to have a truly human relationship with a child as an educator or teacher must have a thorough knowledge of these epochs.

We see such an epoch in the child's life coming to a close around the age of seven, when the child gets the second teeth. The person who is a judge of character regards these second teeth only as the external symbol of a significant change in the child's physical, mental and spiritual development. And anyone who is able to practise the art of education in a proper and professional manner will also see a change in the child's mental characteristics and spiritual abilities as the teeth change. Let us just consider the fact that a metabolic turnover also takes place in the human organism at a later age, that after eight or nine years we no longer have the same material composition, the same substances within us, that we had before. If we consider this, we must nevertheless say to ourselves: What happens in the seventh year during the change of teeth is a powerful development of strength that the organism does not repeat in later life and that is also not a one-off event or an event that occurs over a short period of time. Anyone who has an insight into the development of the human organism knows how everything is prepared in the most intimate metabolic processes during the first seven years of life, which then, so to speak, finds its conclusion, its end point, in the second teeth.

And with regard to the soul, we see how, for example, memory, but also imagination, works differently with these second teeth – above all in terms of its nature – than it did before. We see how memory previously developed to a high degree unconsciously, as if from the depths of the child's physical being, and how it later becomes more spiritual. These things must be delicately hinted at, for they hardly lend themselves to a rough approach.

But what is especially important for the educator above all is that the child in the first years of life, up to the change of teeth, is completely devoted to the outside world as an imitative being. The child's relationship to the outer world is based on the fact – I do not say this to express a paradox, but to describe something very real – that in the first seven years of life, almost in these seven years, the child is almost entirely a sensory organ, that it perceives the environment not only with its eyes and ears, but that its whole organism is given over to the environment, similar to the sensory organs in later life. And just as the images of external things and processes are prepared in the sense organs, which are then only mentally recreated within, so it is the case with the child's organism that the child, as an imitative being, wants to imitate inwardly everything it sees outside. It wants to give itself completely to the outside world. It wants to imitate within itself everything that presents itself outside. The child is a complete sensory organ. And if one were to look into a child's organism with the clairvoyant sense, with the exact clairvoyance of which I have spoken in recent days, one would perceive, for example, how taste, which for an adult is experienced on the tongue and palate, extends much further into the organism in a child. Thus, one does not err when one says: In the infant, for example, it is the case that he also experiences breast milk with his whole body according to the taste.

We must enter into such intimacies of the human physical life if we really want to gain the delicate knowledge necessary for the art of education.

And when we look at how the child is an imitator through and through, then we understand, I would say in every single aspect, how the child learns to speak. We can literally follow how the child is led to follow, step by step, through imitation, what is struck as a sound, and to make its own inner being similar to what is perceived externally. And we can look into all the details of the child and see everywhere how the child is completely a sensory organ, completely an imitator, completely devoted to the sensory world around it.

In this respect, we can understand the child in relation to certain things that should not be judged in the same way as in the older child or even in the adult. I will illustrate this with an example. A father once asked me - this really happened in real life -: “What should I do with my boy? He stole money from his mother.” I asked the father: How old is the child? The child was not yet six years old. I had to say to the father: He who really understands the child cannot speak of theft here; the child had – as it turned out in the conversation with the father – seen daily how the mother took money out of the drawer. The child is an imitator; it also took money because it saw her do it. The entire action is exhausted in imitation, because the child did not attach any importance to having some of the so-called stolen money himself. He bought sweets with it and even gave them to other children. Hundreds of such examples could be given.

The mental life of the child after the change of teeth presents itself differently. We see how the child begins to give itself not only to sensory impressions, but to live completely within these sensory impressions and to make itself inwardly similar to what it sees around it. The child now begins to listen to what is said to it in words. But what the child encounters in its environment is needed in such a way that it is carried by the human personality. Therefore, we may say: until the second dentition has changed, the child is an imitative being; from the second dentition onwards - and this essentially lasts until sexual maturity - it becomes a being that no longer imitates but follows what comes to it through the imaginations of the personalities around it. And the teacher and educator must above all ensure that what he says to the child actually becomes a norm and guiding principle for the child. With the change of teeth, the imitative life transitions into a life in which the child, through his natural sense of right and wrong, wants to follow self-evident authority.

All teaching and education in this second phase of life, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, must be geared towards this natural sense of authority. At this age, the child learns to recognize as true that which the beloved, authoritative personality presents as true. What is beautiful, what is good, is felt to be sympathetic by the child or followed in dependence, in authoritative dependence on the beloved educational personality. And if we want to teach a child something between the ages of seven and fourteen or fifteen that will be fruitful for the child throughout his or her life, then we must be able to clothe everything we teach the child during this time in this authoritative element.

My dear audience, anyone who, like me, was able to refer yesterday to his “Philosophy of Freedom”, written more than thirty years ago, will not assume that he wants to focus too much on the authoritarian principle. But anyone who loves freedom above all else, who sees in freedom the self-evident law of social life, must point out, based on a true understanding of the human being, that the period between the ages of seven and fourteen is the time when a child thrives solely by being able to draw strength and inspiration from a personality that it perceives as a self-evident authority. Thus we would like to say: in the first seven years of life – this is all approximate, more or less – the child is an imitative, intuitive creature; in the second seven years of life, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, the child is a being that listens to its human environment and naturally wants to be placed under an authority.

Anyone who, like the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here, follows the development of the human being in terms of body, soul and spirit, knows what an enormous significance it has for later life, and perhaps even for old age, if the human being was able to reverence, even if only in the form of a special education for a short time. For example, if one was able to hear about a personality highly revered in the family when one was eight or nine years old, and to really absorb some of that reverence through hearing about them. And then the day approaches when one is supposed to see them for the first time. That day when everything is clothed in shyness and reverence and one expectantly gets the door opened to see this personality for the first time. If one knows how such an experience works, when the soul, in relation to authority, is surrendered to the outer world, as in the first years of childhood the whole human being is surrendered as a sense being — then one knows what a benefit one does to the child during the sculptural age when one lets him experience a great deal of this shy reverence for the self-evident authority.

One must observe such things if one wants to become an educator or teacher out of knowledge of human nature. Then one will consider above all that the human being is not only a spatial organism, in which the individual limb of his body stands in spatial interaction with some other distant limb, but that the human being is also a temporal organism. Knowledge of human nature cannot be acquired without being oriented towards the human being as a time organism. If you take any limb of the right hand, it is in interaction with every other limb of this spatial organism in the human being through an inner overall organization. But if you look at what a person is first in childhood, then in later childhood, in the period of youth and maidenhood, in adulthood, in declining age, then in old age - then everything is intimately connected in time. And anyone who, as an educator and teacher, only looks at the child's present life, at the eight- to nine-year-old child, is not fully fulfilling their duty. Only those who know that what they do for the seven- to eight-year-old child continues to have an effect in the temporal organism, which is a unity - from the child, from the middle-aged person, from the elderly person - and that what that which is kindled in the soul during childhood continues to work, but becomes different, metamorphosed: only those who can form an idea of the way in which this changes, transforms, can educate in the true sense of the word.

I would like to give you an example. You see, it is considered so important that a child understand everything that is taught to him with his still-tender mind. This contradicts the principle of self-evident authority. But anyone who only wants to convey to the child what it can immediately grasp with its delicate mind does not consider the following example. It means a great deal if, in one's eighth or ninth year, one has accepted something as a matter of course and authority as true, beautiful, good, that an honored authority describes as beautiful, good, and true, and one has not yet fully understood it. In the thirty-fifth year, or perhaps even later, it comes up from the depths of the soul. One has become more mature in the meantime. Now one understands it, now one brings it up, now one illuminates it with mature life experience.

Something like this – when, at a later age, one understands out of maturity what one had previously accepted only out of love for authority, when one feels such a reminiscence coming up in later life and only now understands it – something like this signifies a flare-up of new life forces, an enormous principle in the soul, of which one is just not always fully aware.

In another way, I can make it even clearer what I actually mean by the principle that one should educate in such a way that what one brings up works for the whole of life. You know that there are people who enter into any environment where other people are and work like a blessing just by their presence. They do not need to exert themselves much in speaking, their words are breathed out, warmed through by something that has a blessing effect on other people. As a rule, these people will be of mature or advanced age, and will be able to exert such a blessing effect through their mere presence in a very special sense.

Those who study the human being not only in the present moment, but really throughout their entire life – which is a difficult study. In physiology, in the ordinary study of man, it is easier to study only the present moments or short periods of time. But those who whole human life, knows how such a blessing effect, which comes from later in life, is usually connected with the fact that the person in question was able to worship, to look, to look devoutly at another person as a child. And I would like to express it paradigmatically by saying that no one who has not learned to fold their hands as a child can effectively use them to bless in old age. Folded hands in children contain the spiritual seeds of hands that bless in old age. The human being is not only a spatial organism, but also a temporal one, and everything is connected in the temporal life, just as the individual limbs are connected in the spatial organism in interaction.

Anyone who fully understands this will also avoid teaching the child such concepts that cannot be changed in later life. It is so easy for the teacher or educator to be tempted to approach the child with the greatest possible certainty, to give him or her concepts and ideas with sharp contours. This would be just like putting the delicate hands of the child, which are still to grow and change, in brackets so that they cannot grow. Just as the child's physical organism must grow, so too must the forces of growth inherent in what the teacher, the educator, has taken into his soul. We can only bring this into the child if we also shape the education and teaching artistically during the compulsory school age.

By way of illustration, I would like to point out how we at the Waldorf School - which was founded a few years ago by Emil Molt in Stuttgart and which I run - incorporate this artistic principle into our teaching. I can only give you a brief sketch of it today.

For example, when teaching reading, we do not assume that we can directly teach the child what letters are. These letters are, after all, something quite alien to human nature. Just think of how, in earlier times, there was a pictographic writing, a pictographic writing that arose primarily from the fact that what had been perceived was imitated in the picture. In this way, writing was very close to what was perceived. Writing had something directly to do with the human being. In the course of the development of civilization, the forms of letters have become detached from the human being. There is no need to study history to such an extent that the old pictographic script is brought to life again in school. But it is good for the teacher to let their artistic imagination run free, to let the children draw and paint forms that reflect what the child feels, in which the child lives.

Thus, at the Stuttgart Waldorf School, we do not start with learning to read or learning to write in the usual way, but rather artistically, with painting and drawing. We develop the forms of the letters out of this drawing, and in fact we always develop out of the artistic realm first. We also let the children work with paints, even though this is more difficult and must be developed out of the dirty. We begin with the artistic realm and develop writing out of it, and only then reading. And in this way an artistic quality should permeate the entire lesson.

This can happen right up to the point when the children learn arithmetic, if the teachers are there for it, those teachers who have become experts through a real deepening of their own soul treasures by absorbing the guiding forces of a real anthroposophical spiritual science into their minds, into their knowledge, into their feelings, into their will. Those who have assimilated spiritual science in this living way can work from the spirit to transform all teaching into an artistic activity. But when the teacher of this childhood stage becomes completely artistic in his dealings with the child, then he works not so much through what he knows, but through the nature of his personality. He works through his individuality. And the child receives through this in his mind something that has the power of growth in it, just as the physical organism has the power of growth in it. Later on, in one's thirties or forties, one is then in a position not only to think back, as if remembering, to the fixed concepts one was taught at school and which one should recall. No, these concepts have grown with one, have changed. This is how we must work as teachers; we must be able to treat the child as an educator.

In this way we exercise authority, but at the same time we work in the truest sense of the word for the freedom of the child; for we must always be clear in our own minds that we are true educators only when we can also guide in the right way those people who will one day be more capable than we are as teachers. It could well be that we find ourselves teaching in a school, let us say in a class with two geniuses. And if we as teachers are not geniuses ourselves, we must educate the children in such a way that we do not hinder the development of their genius. If we educate in the sense and spirit that I have just mentioned, that we artistically bring to the child with our personality what it needs, just as in earlier years it needed to imitate what it perceived through the senses, so now it needs that what we ourselves are as teachers, then we will be no more of an obstacle to the forces that may not even be in us than a mother carrying the germ of a child within her is an obstacle to genius if she is not a genius herself. We become custodians of the child's qualities and will not be tempted to impose on the child what we ourselves are. That is the worst educational principle, to want to make children into an image of ourselves. We will not be tempted to do so if we acquire knowledge of human nature in the sense of spiritual insight, and if the child is a mystery for us to solve at every stage of life.

My only regret is that we cannot yet have a kindergarten so that younger children too can be educated in these principles. We are not yet able to do so for financial reasons. But those who are teachers at the Stuttgart Waldorf School feel how what is revealed in the human physical organism as soul and spirit through the gaze, through the physiognomy, through the word, through everything possible, makes use of the body — which is by no means neglected in this education — how it has descended from divine spiritual heights and united with what has become of it from the father and mother in the hereditary current through conception or through birth. Anyone who approaches the child with the feeling that this child has descended from the spiritual world to you, and that you are to solve its riddle from day to day, from hour to hour, has in his mind the loving devotion to the child's development that is necessary to guide this child through all possible imponderables on its path through life. And it is such imponderables – that is, those things that cannot be grasped in a rough and ready way – that are often involved in education and teaching. It is truly not only that which a systematizing educational science wants to accept as prevailing between the educator and the child.

I would like to illustrate what I mean with another example. Let us assume that a teacher has the task of teaching a child in a childlike, simple way about the immortality of the human soul. This must be taught to the child, who is between the change of teeth and sexual maturity and is preferably attuned to receiving images – not yet abstract concepts – and who wants to accept everything on the basis of self-evident authority, precisely through an image.

Now this image can be presented to the child in two ways. You can say: I, the teacher, am terribly clever. The child is still terribly foolish. I have to teach it about the immortality of the soul. I will use an image. I will say to the child: look at the butterfly chrysalis, the butterfly will crawl out of it. It will crawl out as a visible being. Just as the butterfly crawls out of the chrysalis as a visible being, so your soul will separate from the physical body at death, as from a chrysalis, and fly away into the spiritual world.

Of course I am not saying that this is philosophical proof. It is certainly not that. But a view can be taught to the child in this way. I can do it – as I said – the way I have just described it. I say, I know all this well, because I am clever and the child is stupid. I teach it to the child. It is a foolish comparison, but the child should believe it.

Now, my esteemed audience, you will not achieve anything by approaching the child in this way, because the child may remember it, but what you are supposed to achieve, raising the soul's level, filling the soul with a life-giving content, you cannot do that in this way. But it can be done in another way, if you do not say to yourself: You are clever as a teacher, the child is foolish, but if you say to yourself - forgive me for speaking so paradoxically -: Perhaps the child is even much cleverer than you are in the subconscious depths of his soul. Perhaps you are the foolish one and the child is cleverer. In a sense this is true, because who knows how the still unformed internal organs, namely the brain, are shaped by the still unconscious soul, the dreaming soul of the child, how an immensely significant wisdom is formed in the earliest years of childhood. Anyone who has an appreciation for such things, who is not a crude philistine and cannot appreciate such things, still says to himself: All the wisdom we acquire in life, no matter how beautiful machines it may produce, is not as far advanced as the unconscious wisdom of the child.

Teachers who work in anthroposophical settings believe that the butterfly can emerge from the chrysalis, because they say to themselves: I am not making this comparison, nature itself is making this comparison. What happens at a higher level, the release of the immortal soul from the body, is modeled in nature by the deity itself in the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis. If I imbue what I hold in front of the child as an image with my own feelings, then I give the child what is right, I give it life force with it. Nothing that I do not myself believe in with all my might can have the right effect on the child. These are the imponderables that should be at work between the teacher and the child, the unspoken, that which lies only in the exchange of feelings, the supersensible in teaching. If that is not there, then, I would say, only the gross, not the imponderable, is at work, and then we do not give the human being what is right for the path of life.

I wanted to use these things to point out, above all, how an artistic element, I would like to say a pious mood towards the human being, belongs in education and teaching. This is particularly evident when we turn our attention to the religious and moral education that we want to give the child. And here anthroposophical spiritual science, which I have had the opportunity to speak about here in The Hague during the past few days, shows us how, precisely in relation to the religious and moral element present in the human being, this temporal organism has its great significance for the whole human being and his earthly life. If we can gain insight into the attitude of the very young child, who imitates everything, towards his whole external world, and if we can put ourselves in this child's place, then we cannot characterize it other than by saying that the child is completely given over to the external world; he loses himself to the external world. Just as the eye loses itself in the outer world of colors and light, so the child loses itself in the outer world. The inner world dawns only very gradually. Out of dreams that are still completely absorbed in the outer world, more definite ideas gradually emerge.

Now, my dear audience, when you have truly appreciated this mood in the child, do you know what it is? It is in truth the pious mood, it is in truth the religious mood, placed in the midst of the sense world. However strong a tomboy the child may be in other respects, in relation to its relationship to the sense world, in relation to its devotion to the sense world, the child is religiously minded. It wants to be itself wholly what it beholds in its surroundings. There is not yet any religion in which the child finds itself. But this mood, which is present in the child especially in the first years and gradually fades away until the change of teeth, this mood, which is no longer present when the self-evident sense of authority sets in with the change of teeth, reappears in a remarkable way later on for the insightful teacher.

When children reach primary school age between the ages of nine and ten, the truly insightful teacher and educator may be faced with their greatest challenge. For it is then that they will notice that most of the children entrusted to them approach them and have a particular need for them, that they do not always have explicit questions but often have unspoken ones, living only in their feelings. These questions can take on hundreds of thousands of forms. It is much less important to give the child a specific answer. Whether one gives one answer or another is not as important as the content of the answer. What is most important, however, is that you instill the right trust in the child with the right feeling, that you approach the child with the right feeling at just the right moment, which for children always occurs between the ages of nine and ten.

I can characterize this moment in the most diverse ways. When we teach the child, we notice that before this moment, which lies between the ages of nine and ten, he does not yet properly distinguish himself from his environment, does not properly experience himself as an ego - even if he has long been saying “I” to himself. In this moment of life, he really learns to distinguish himself from his environment. We can now no longer just influence the child with fairy tales and all kinds of lessons, in which we bring the outside world to life. We can now already draw attention to the fact that the child distinguishes himself from the outside world as “I”.

But something else of fundamental importance occurs, which is deeply connected with the moral development. This occurs: in the early days of that epoch of life in which the child is subject to authority, he takes this authoritative personality as it is. Between the ages of nine and ten – it does not even need to be conscious of this, it can happen deep within the feeling, in the subconscious, as it is called, but there it is – the child sees itself forced, through its development, to look through the authoritative personality at what this authoritative personality itself is based on. This authoritative personality says: This is true, this is good, this is beautiful. Now the child wants to feel and sense where this comes from in the authoritative personality, what the knowledge of the good, true and beautiful is, the will in the true, good and beautiful. This comes from the fact that what I would like to say in the depths of the soul has been retained during the change of teeth and even afterwards, which in early childhood was, if I may use the strange word, a sensual-pious surrender to the outside world, because that has disappeared there in the depths of the soul and now emerges spiritually as if from the depths of the human being. What was sensual in the infant until the change of teeth, what as sensual is the germ of all later religious feeling towards the world, that emerges soulfully between the ages of nine and ten, becomes a soul need.

Knowing this, and reckoning with the fact that, just as one lovingly tends the plant germ so that it becomes a plant, one now has before one, in soul form, that which was once prepared in the child in a sensually germinal way, and has to be cared for in soul form, gives one a special relationship with the child. And in this way one lays the religious germ in the child.

Then the educators will notice that in later life, towards the seventeenth or eighteenth year, what has emerged as a religious feeling in the soul, that then emerges spiritually, that it is absorbed into the will, so that the person builds up their religious ideals during this time.

You see, it is extremely important to understand these things at the fundamental level if we want to educate and teach in a meaningful, truthful and realistic way. After all, nature has taken care of the physical organism of the human being, otherwise we might not be sure whether - especially if the people concerned are modern futuristic painters - people might even think of putting their ear in the wrong place or something similar. Such things could well happen if nature had not provided for the whole corresponding organization of the human being. So we, as teachers and educators, must take care of the time organism. We must not try to cultivate the religious sense of the child's soul in any other way than in preparation for the moment between the ages of nine and ten. We must handle this time body of the child with care. We must say to ourselves: Whatever religious feelings and concepts you teach the child before that remains external to him; he accepts them on authority. But between the ages of nine and ten something awakens in him. If you perceive this and direct the feelings that then arise of their own accord out of the soul in the religious sense, you make the child into a religiously true human being. There is so little real psychology of the age today, otherwise people would know where the false religious feelings and sentiments that are present in social life today come from: because it is believed that anything can be developed in a person at any age, because it is not known what exactly needs to be brought out of the child's soul between the ages of nine and ten.

If we organize the entire curriculum in such a way that by the age of twelve the child has absorbed so much from the natural sciences – entirely in keeping with primary school education and teaching – that he has an overview of some physical and botanical concepts and so on, not in a scientific but in a thoroughly childlike sense, then at this age, around the age of twelve, we can look at the child and the child treated accordingly – that conflict that arises when, on the one hand, we look up to the divine governance of the world, to which the child can be guided between the ages of nine and ten, and that contrast that arises when we only take note of the external – not moral, not divine-spiritual – unfolding of forces in the natural phenomena that manifest themselves before us. These natural phenomena present themselves to us without appearing to be permeated by moral principles, without our directly perceiving the divine in them.

This is what brought modern people into the conflict in the first place, which on the one hand directs the mind to the religious sources of existence, and on the other hand to knowledge of nature. Around the age of twelve, our knowledge of human nature tells us that we can gently address these conflicts in the maturing child, but that we are also in a position - because the soul-religious feelings are still so strong, so fresh, so full of life, so youthful, as they can only be in a twelve-year-old child, then to be able to guide the child in the right way, so that in later life he does not need to see nature itself as divinized, but can find the harmony between nature and the divine-spiritual essence of the world.

It is important that one allows this conflict to arise around the twelfth year, again taking into account the right development of the temporal organism in man, because it can be most effectively bridged by the forces that are present in the human soul at that time.

In turn, for anyone who is able to observe social life today in truth — not lovelessly, but with a genuine psychology — the art of education offers the insight that many people cannot overcome the conflict mentioned because they were not led into this conflict at the right age and helped to overcome it.

The main thing is that the teacher and educator know about the life of the human being in general, so that when they encounter an individual child or young person, they can recognize what is right at the right time and know how to orient themselves at the right time.

Religious experience also lies within the human being itself. We cannot graft it into him; we have to extract it from the soul. But just as we cannot eat with our nose, but have to eat with our mouths, so we have to know that we cannot teach the religious to a person at any age, but only at the appropriate age. This is something we learn primarily through a true knowledge of the spirit: to bring the right thing to the child at the right age. Then the child takes that which is appropriate to his abilities.

And when we look at this child development and know how everything between the change of teeth and sexual maturity is geared to the personal relationship between teacher and child, and how there must be something thoroughly artistic in this personal relationship , then we will also see that for the child it must initially be a kind of pleasure and displeasure, sympathy and antipathy, which in turn develops out of imponderables in the face of self-evident authority.

The teacher either talks to the child in stories, in parables – there are hundreds of possible ways – about what he finds morally good and what he finds morally evil. If he is really able to develop an artistic education, then the artistic element between the educator and the child works in such a way that the child, precisely through this inclination towards the self-evident authority, learns to look with sympathy to good and antipathy to evil, and that between about seven and fourteen years of age a moral sense develops in the child out of pleasure and displeasure.

It is completely wrong to try to get the child to obey rules during these years. We either enslave the child or make it malicious, stubborn, and rebellious against the rules. It does not understand why it should follow the commandments. But it can like or dislike what the self-evident authority finds right or wrong, good or evil, and it can learn to follow it with sympathy or antipathy. And this sympathy and antipathy becomes the self-evident content of the soul.

What develops in a scholastic way during this period of life, what has been established in the child's moral sense between the ages of seven and fourteen in the manner indicated, only comes to the fore in the seventeenth or eighteenth year as a volitional impulse, provided that the personality is present later on who, through his own enthusiasm for moral ideals, for beautiful human ideals, shines forth for the young person as a later guide in life - as a volitional impulse only appears in the seventeenth or eighteenth year.

Just as the plant germ is not yet the plant, but the plant germ must first come into being for the plant to arise, so too must the moral will in a healthy way be able to become the ripe fruit of the moral person in the sixteenth or seventeenth year, with all its strength, if the moral feeling has developed between the seventh and fourteenth year, in the process of clinging to the self-evident authority.

And what is the safest way for us to develop this moral sense? If we direct all instruction, all education, in such a way that the child learns to develop a feeling above all else. If possible, the education of even the very young child, long before the change of teeth, can take care of this if we direct this child in such a way that it learns to develop feelings of gratitude towards everything it receives in life. The feeling of gratitude is underestimated today. This feeling of gratitude connects people with the world and allows people to recognize themselves as a part of the world. If a child is guided in such a way that it can develop a clear feeling of gratitude for the smallest of things, then the child does not shut itself away in selfishness, but becomes altruistic and connects with its surroundings. Then one arrives at directing the lessons in such a way, even at school age, that the child gradually receives its physical existence, its soul existence, its spiritual existence, so to speak, in gratitude from the powers of the world, from the physical, from the soul and from the spiritual powers of the world, and that this feeling of gratitude spreads into a feeling of gratitude towards the world from whose bosom one has sprung.

Thus can the feeling of gratitude towards parents, educators, towards all the environment, be transferred into the great feeling of gratitude towards the divine rulers of the world.

This feeling of gratitude must be there before any knowledge that a person can ever acquire. Any knowledge, no matter how logically justified, that does not at the same time lead to the feeling of gratitude towards the world, is detrimental to a person's development, and in a sense maims them mentally and spiritually.

This is shown by spiritual science, which I have had the honor of representing here these days: that every, even the highest, even the most exact knowledge, can lead to feelings, but above all to feelings of gratitude. And if you have planted the feeling of gratitude in the child, then you will see that you have planted the soil for moral education. For if one has cultivated this feeling of gratitude and this feeling of gratitude proves to be compatible with all knowledge, then the child's feeling easily becomes one of love, as one must have it for all other people, and ultimately for all creatures in the world. One will be able to develop love most surely out of the feeling of gratitude.

And in particular, one will be able – again from that point in time, which lies between the ninth and tenth year of life – to gradually transform authority into an authority imbued with love. The teacher's whole behavior must be organized in such a way that this authority, which at first, I would say, is neutral in the face of love, becomes a matter of course, a matter of obedience, a free obedience when the child is nine or ten years old, so that the child follows in love the self-evident authority, in a love that it already awakens in itself, in a love that it already understands.

If one has developed feelings of gratitude and love in the right way in one's soul, then later on one is also able to bring the moral sense of the child or young person to the point where the person now life really sees that which is the very basis of his human dignity to the highest degree: he sees that which elevates him above the mere sensual world, above the mere physical world, which lifts him up to a truly spiritual existence.

In these days I have tried to describe the spiritual world from a supersensible knowledge in certain respects. The spiritual researcher can acquire knowledge of this spiritual world. But with our moral inner life, we also stand in a spiritual way in our ordinary life at all times when we feel the moral with the necessary strength and the necessary purity. But we achieve this if we teach the child a very definite knowledge of human nature. And we should not dismiss any child from the school that is the general school of life, the general elementary school, without a certain knowledge of human nature. We should dismiss the child only when we have imbued it to a certain degree – and it is only possible to this degree – with the motto: “Know thyself”.

Of course, this “know thyself” can be brought to an ever higher level through all possible science and wisdom. But to a certain extent, every elementary school should teach the child to fulfill the “know thyself”. To a certain extent, the human being should recognize himself as body, soul and spirit. But this knowledge of the human being, as it follows from real knowledge of the spirit, establishes a true connection between good and between human beings.

Why does today's recognized science not go as far as to recognize this connection? Because it does not fully recognize the human being. But just as one would not be a complete human being if one lacked blood circulation in some organ - the organ would have to atrophy - so one learns, when one really looks at the whole human being in terms of body, soul and spirit, to recognize that good is what makes a human being human in the first place, and that evil is something that comes from the human being remaining incomplete.

A child who has been guided through life with gratitude and love ultimately comes to understand that a person is only complete when they see themselves as the embodiment of the divine order of the world, of good in the world, in their earthly existence. If one has based moral education on gratitude and thus overcome selfishness in a healthy way – not through mystical-moral declamation or sentimentality – if one has transformed gratitude into love in a healthy, non-sentimental way, then in the end one will be able to young person who loves the world to the realization that the person who is not good as a whole person in body, soul and spirit is just as crippled in the spiritual as someone who is crippled in having one leg missing. One learns to recognize the good in the imagination, in the etheric knowledge of the spirit as the complete human being.

And so, just as if you were to find a diagram of the nervous or circulatory system, a fleeting glance at which resembles a shadow of the human being itself, so too, when you form an image of the good through intuitive knowledge, this is the model for the whole human being.

But here moral education unites with religious education. For only now does it make sense that God is the source of good and man is the image, the likeness of God. Here, religious and moral education will lead to man feeling - and incorporating this feeling into his will - that he is only a true man as a moral man, that if he does not want the moral, he is not a real complete man. If you educate a person in such a way that he can honestly feel that he is being robbed of his humanity if he does not become a good, moral person, then you will give him the right religious and moral education.

Do not say that one can easily speak of these things, but that they must remain an ideal because the outside world can never be perfect. Of course the outside world cannot be perfect. He who speaks out of the spirit of spiritual science knows that quite certainly and quite exactly. But what can permeate us as an attitude, in that we teach or educate, what can give us enthusiasm in every moment and with this enthusiasm brings us to be understood by the childlike soul, that we find the way to the childlike will, that lies nevertheless in what I have just hinted at - in a true knowledge of human nature, which culminates in the sentence: The truly complete human being is only the morally good human being, and the religious impulses permeate the morally good human being.

Thus all education can be brought to a climax in moral and religious education. But here too we must realize that the human being carries within him a time organism, and that in order to educate the child we must, in a spirit of spiritual insight, learn to observe this time organism hour by hour, week by week, year by year. We must lovingly enter into the details.

I have thus indicated to you how guidelines can be obtained from a spiritual knowledge for a part of practical life, for education. I am not just describing something that exists in gray theory. I have already indicated to you that those educational principles which I could only sketch out very briefly have been applied for years at the Stuttgart Waldorf School, that from the outset what I have suggested here for religious education permeates the entire curriculum, a curriculum that is based on the pre-service training of the Stuttgart Waldorf School teachers. And I may add that now, looking back over the first years of the school's development, we can say, even if everything remains imperfect in the outer life, that it is possible to make these principles practical principles so that they reveal themselves in the unfolding of the child's life.

And so these impulses of religious and moral education also show themselves, just as the fruitfulness of the impulses of physical education shows itself on the other side, guided from the spiritual and soul side, for example in the application of the art of eurythmy in school. I mention this only because it has been shown how children naturally find their way into this eurythmic art, just as they find their way into speaking the sounds at an earlier age, and to show you that those who want to see religious and moral education practised in such a way, as discussed today, do not want to neglect physical education at all. On the contrary, anyone who looks at the life of the child with such reverence and spiritual activity does not neglect physical education either, because he knows that the spiritual and soul-like is expressed in the body down to the individual blood vessels and that anyone who neglects it is, so to speak, pushing the spirit back from the sensory world into which it wants to manifest itself.

Above all, the child is a unity of body, soul and spirit, and only those who understand how to educate and teach the child in this totality as a unit, based on genuine observation of human beings, are true teachers and educators.

This is what we are striving for at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart and what has already been practically proven to a certain extent in relation to what I have tried to show you today as just one side of education. But what must always be said with regard to this area and other areas of life – and it is obvious to turn our gaze to the whole of social life, which is stuck in so many dead ends today, it is obvious from the point of view of education – is this: social conditions today can only experience the desirable improvement if we place people in social life in the right way, not just by improving external institutions. When all this is considered, the importance of a true, realistic art of education becomes clear; and it is this kind of realistic art of education that Waldorf school education, Waldorf school didactics, wants to introduce into the world as a prime example of an art of education.

It has already experienced a great deal of success, and anyone who is enthusiastic about a realistic art of education based on spiritual science naturally wants it to be widely adopted. For it is built, I would say, on an archetypal truth. Education is also something that must be seen as part of the social life of human beings. For this social life is not only the coexistence of people of the same age, it is the coexistence of young and old. And finally, part of social life is the coexistence of the teacher, the educator, with the child. Only when the teacher sees the whole human being in the child and can, in a prophetic, clairvoyant way, see what depends on each individual educational and teaching activity that he undertakes in terms of happiness and destiny for the whole of life, will he educate in the right way. Because all life, and therefore also the life of education and teaching that takes place between people, must be based on the principle that Everything that happens between people only happens right when the whole person can always give themselves to the whole person in right love.

But this must also be true in the whole field of education. Therefore, in the future, the art of teaching will be based on a secure and realistic foundation when the teacher is able to bring his best humanity to the best humanity in the child, when the relationship between teacher and child develops in the most beautiful sense of the free relationship between human beings, but also in the relationship given in the necessity of the world.

Author's note ¹ Prague, April 4, 1924

I would like to speak of a kind of education and teaching that strives to develop the whole human being, body, soul and spirit, in an equal way. Such an education can only be achieved if the educator is aware of how the physical is formed out of the soul and spiritual during development. For one can only contribute to the formation of a being if one understands the laws of this formation.

Anthroposophy leads to such knowledge of the human being. It does not look at the physical one-sidedly, as it happens in the scientific world view. It rises to a spiritual vision and thereby looks at every age of the human being at the way in which the spirit works on the body of the human being and how the soul lives in the body.

In the face of such a view, clearly distinct epochs arise in the growing human being.

The first epoch runs from birth to the change of teeth, around the seventh year. The appearance of the second teeth is not just a localized process in the human organism. When the first teeth fall out and the second teeth appear, something is happening in the whole organism. Until then, the soul and spirit participate intensively in the formation of the body. During this period of human development, body, soul and spirit are still highly unified.

The whole human being is therefore like a comprehensive sensory organ. What later is concentrated only in the sensory organization, still works in the whole human being at this time. The human being is therefore completely devoted to the activities of the environment, just like a sensory organ. In the most pronounced sense, he is an imitative being. His will reacts reflexively to everything that happens around him.

Therefore, the only way to educate a child at this age is for the educator to behave in such a way that the child can imitate everything they do. This must be taken in the broadest sense. There are imponderables at work between the child and their educator. The child is not only influenced by what it perceives with its external senses in its environment, but it also senses the attitudes, characters, and good and bad intentions of other people from their behavior. Therefore, as an educator, one should cultivate purity of life in the child's environment, right down to one's thoughts and feelings, so that the child can become what one is oneself.

But one should also be aware that one's behavior has an effect not only on the soul but also on the body. What the child absorbs and allows to flow reflexively into his will continues to vibrate in the organization of his body. A teacher with a violent temper can cause the child's physical organization to become brittle, so that in later life it is easily influenced by pathogenic influences. How one educates in this direction will become apparent in later life in the state of health of the person.

The anthroposophical art of education does not focus on the spiritual and soul aspects of education because it wants to develop only these, but because it knows that it can only develop the physical properly if it develops the spiritual, which works on the body, in the right way.

A complete metamorphosis takes place in the child when the teeth change. What was previously absorbed in the physical organization and working in it becomes an independent soul being and the physical is more left to its own forces.

Therefore, when dealing with the soul of the age at which the child is to be educated and taught in a scholastic way, one has to bear in mind that one is dealing with forces that were previously the malleable forces in the body. One only works in an educational and teaching way if one keeps this in mind. The child at this age does not yet absorb with an abstract mind; it wants to experience images, as it has worked with images up to this period of life. This is only achieved if the educator and teacher relate to the child in an artistic way through the soul. They cannot assume that the child already understands what they are communicating. He should work in such a way that the child is immersed in love in the images that he unfolds in an artistic way. He should be the self-evident authority for the child. The child cannot yet absorb what is true, good and beautiful because it understands it, but something must be true, good and beautiful for the child because the beloved teacher or educator presents it as such in front of the child.

Everything in teaching and education must be brought out in a pictorial way. All teaching must be artistically designed. You cannot start with reading and not with the letterforms, which in their present form are foreign to the inner experience of the human being. One must begin with a kind of painting drawing. The child must paint and draw forms that are similar to certain processes and things, like the signs in the pictographic writing of prehistoric peoples. First there must be a picture, which the child fixes from the things and processes of the world. Then one should proceed from the picture to the letter forms, just as pictographic writing developed into abstract sign writing.

Only when the child has progressed from painting to drawing to writing in this way should one move on to reading. This is because only one part of the human being is activated in this process: the ability to comprehend that is tied to the organization of the head. In painting, drawing and writing, a more comprehensive part of the human organization is also involved. This is how you educate the whole person, not just one side of the brain.

All education should be based on the same attitude until the second decisive point in the child's development. This lies in the onset of sexual maturity. Here, too, not only a local part of the human organism undergoes a metamorphosis, but the human being as a whole. It is only at this point that the relationship between the human being and his environment unfolds, which is revealed in the more abstract conceptualization. Only from this point on should one count on the adolescent to grasp things intellectually and freely. Before that, everything should be presented in a pictorial form, and in grasping it, one should count on the child's love of pictures.

Such an education has the whole of human life in mind, not just childhood. It is quite a different matter to occupy the child in a pictorial way, so that what it has absorbed is only later understood, than to develop only the intellectual system one-sidedly at an early stage in so-called visual instruction, which is not true visual instruction because it has no artistic element. What is laid down in childhood only comes to expression in later life. A child who has gone through the pictorial stage at the appropriate age will become a person who can still be fresh and fit for life in old age; a child who is taught in a one-sided way to understand what is often thought to be appropriate for childhood will become a person who ages prematurely and is susceptible to disease-causing living conditions.

• 1. On April 4, 1924, Rudolf Steiner gave a lecture in Prague with this title. The author's note presented here is apparently a text written for press representatives to make it easier for them to report on the lecture. Rudolf Steiner prefaced it with the following note: “This is only an outline of what I will say; the spiritual researcher cannot actually do such things; in a lecture, he draws from the spirit, not from memory, and is therefore misled when his lecture is to be written down verbatim. Please excuse this.”

Ladies and gentlemen! From Herr Molt’s words, you will have inferred out of what spirit he took the initiative to found this Waldorf School. You will also have gathered from his words that its founding springs, not from any mundane intention, but from a call that resounds very clearly from the evolution of humanity in our times in particular. And yet, so little of this call is heard. Humanity’s evolution resounds with much that can be encompassed within the framework of rebuilding society, of giving social form to humanity’s lot. Thus there is something in this call, above all else, that must not be disregarded: the issue of education. We can rest assured that the only people who hear this call for social restructuring correctly amid the chaos of what our present time demands of us will be those who pursue its consequences all the way to the issue of education. But we will certainly be on the wrong track if we hear this social call in a way that makes us want to call a halt to all our social striving when faced with the issue of education, preferring to fashion the facilities of our educational system on the basis of social principles, whatever they may be, that have not also sprung from a renewal of the source of education.

For me, ladies and gentlemen, it has been a sacred obligation to take up what lay in our friend Herr Molt’s intentions in founding the Waldorf School, and to do so in a way that enabled this school to be fashioned out of what we believe to have won from spiritual science in our present times. This school is really intended to be integrated into what the evolution of humanity requires of us at present and in the near future. Actually, in the end, everything that flows into the educational system from such requirements constitutes a threefold sacred obligation.

Of what use would be all of the human community’s feeling, understanding, and working if these could not condense into the sacred responsibility taken on by teachers in their specific social communities when they embark on the ultimate community service with children, with people who are growing up and in the becoming? In the end, everything we are capable of knowing about human beings and about the world only really becomes fruitful when we can convey it in a living way to those who will fashion society when we ourselves can no longer contribute our physical work.

Everything we can accomplish artistically only achieves its highest good when we let it flow into the greatest of all art forms, the art in which we are given, not a dead medium such as sound or color, but living human beings, incomplete and imperfect, whom we are to transform to some extent, through art and education, into accomplished human beings.

And is it not ultimately a very holy and religious obligation to cultivate and educate the divine spiritual element that manifests anew in every human being who is born? Is this educational service not a religious service in the highest sense of the word? Is it not so that all the holiest stirrings of humanity, which we dedicate to religious feeling, must come together in our service at the altar when we attempt to cultivate the divine spiritual aspect of the human being whose potentials are revealed in the growing child?

Science that comes alive!
Art that comes alive!
Religion that comes alive!
In the end, that is what education is.

If we understand teaching and child-rearing in this sense, we will not be inclined to carelessly criticize what is imposed from the other side as the principles, goals, and foundations of the art of education. However, it does seem to me that no proper insight into what our modern culture demands of the art of education is possible unless we are aware of the great need for a complete spiritual renewal in our times, unless we can really work our way through to understanding that in future, something must flow into what we do as teachers and educators that is quite different from what can thrive in the sphere of what is now known as “scientific education.” Nowadays, after all, future teachers, people who will have a formative influence on human beings, are introduced to the attitudes and way of thinking of contemporary science. Now, it has never occurred to me to denigrate contemporary science. I am full of regard for all the triumphs it has achieved, and will continue to achieve for the sake of humanity’s evolution, through a scientific viewpoint and method that are based on understanding nature. But for that very reason, it seems to me, what comes from the contemporary scientific and intellectual attitude cannot be fruitfully applied to the art of education. Its greatness does not lie in dealing with human beings or in insight into the human heart and mind. Great technical advances are possible as a result of what springs from our contemporary intellectual attitude, and on that same basis it is also possible to develop the basic convictions of a free humanity in the context of society. However, it is not possible—grotesque as this may still sound to the majority of people today—to take a scientific viewpoint that has gradually come to the conclusion that the human heart is a pump and the human body a mechanical device, to use the feelings and sensations that proceed from this science to inspire us to become artistic educators of growing human beings. It is impossible to develop the living art of education out of what makes our times so great in mastering dead technology.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is where a new spirit must enter the evolution of humanity—the spirit we seek through our spiritual science, the spirit that leads us away from seeing the living human being as a carrier of implements that pump and suck, as a mechanism that can only be understood according to the methods of natural science. Into this intellectual attitude of humanity must come the conviction that spirit is alive in all natural existence, and that we are capable of recognizing this spirit. This is why, in the course that preceded this Waldorf venture, in the course intended for teachers, we attempted to found an anthropology or science of education that will develop into an art of education and a study of humanity that will once again raise what is alive in the human being from the dead. The dead—and this is the secret of our dying contemporary culture—is what makes people knowing, what gives them insight when they take it up as natural law. However, it also weakens the feeling that is the source of teachers’ inspiration and enthusiasm, and it weakens the will. It does not grant human beings a harmonious place within society as a whole. We are looking for a science that is not mere science, that is itself life and feeling. When such a science streams into the human soul as knowledge, it will immediately develop the power to be active as love and to stream forth as effective, working will, as work that has been steeped in soul warmth, and especially as work that applies to the living, to the growing human being. We need a new scientific attitude. Above all, we need a new spirit for the entire art of education.

Ladies and gentlemen, if we think about contemporary education and its needs, we will not be too quick to criticize what has been undertaken with the best of intentions on the basis of all kinds of worthwhile impulses, both in the present and in the recent past. What beautiful impulses underlay the efforts to move the educational system out of the chaos and deadening aspects of city life to the country, to rural boarding schools! We must acknowledge all the good will that was expended in this direction. However, ladies and gentlemen, if the living spirit that makes the human being comprehensible to human beings, that shows people how to deal with the growing human being, does not enter these rural boarding schools, then what was dead in the cities remains dead in the country.

People are now considering how to draft a constitution for a school so that the teachers” authority would no longer work in a deadening way. However, if they are unable to inject the real living spirit that makes human beings human into these newly structured schools, then in spite of all their socio-educational theories these educational establishments will remain something dead, something that cannot lead the present generation into the future in the right way.

The conviction that the call resounding from humanity’s evolution demands a new spirit for our present age, and that we must carry this spirit into the school system first and foremost, is what underlies the efforts of this Waldorf School, which is intended to be a model along these lines. An effort has been made to listen to what is subconsciously present in the demands of the best of those who have attempted to work for healing and regeneration of the art of education in the recent past. In this context I had to think of explanations given by Theodor Vogt, a student of Herbart’s and a prolific thinker, and by his successor Rein, professor of education at Jena.¹ Their thoughts seem to me to spring from a deeper feeling for what is lacking in our educational system at present. Vogt and Rein suspected, although they did not clearly say it, that in order to really be able to educate, it would be desirable to know how children actually develop in the early years between infancy and the time they enter school around the seventh year of life, and above all how they develop during the primary school years, from their sixth or seventh year of life up to the time in their fourteenth or fifteenth year that impacts so heavily on the growing person’s entire development. Insightful instructors of education ask whether we can also understand the kinds of forces at work in human nature, which presents us with a different intellectual, emotional, and bodily face, if not every month, then at least every year. As long as we have no real science of history, so these educators say, we will also not be able to know how an individual human being develops, because the individual human being presents in concentrated form what humanity as a whole has gone through in the course of its historical development.

People like the ones I mentioned felt that modern science is basically a failure when it comes to saying anything about the great laws that prevail throughout history, or to grasping what wells up out of the great all-encompassing laws of human evolution for us at the present moment. We would be attempting to do something very foolish if we tried to understand individual human beings on the basis of the composition of the nutrients they take in from their first breath until their last. However, this is basically what we are trying to do in the case of history, in understanding humanity’s entire evolution. In the case of an individual, we must understand how a physiological process such as the change of teeth intervenes in development, for example. We must know all the mysterious things that are going on in the body as a result of a completely new physiology that is not yet available to modern science. But we must also know what is accompanying this transformation on an emotional level. We must know about the metamorphoses of human nature. In the case of an individual, we will at least not deny, although we may be powerless to fully recognize the fact, that a person experiences metamorphoses or transformations on the basis of his or her inmost being. We do not admit to this with regard to the historical development of humanity as a whole. The same methods are applied to antiquity, the Middle Ages, and recent times. We do not accept that great leaps have taken place in humanity’s historical evolution. Looking back over historical developments, we find the last leap in the fifteenth century. Humanity’s ways of feeling, conceptualizing, and willing, as they have developed in more recent times and as we know them now, have only taken on this subtle character among civilized humanity since the fifteenth century. How this civilized humanity differs from that of the tenth or eighth century is similar to how a twelve-year-old child differs from a child who has not yet reached his or her seventh year. And what happened by way of transformation in the fifteenth century proceeded from the innermost nature of humanity, just as the change of teeth as a lawful development proceeds from the innermost nature of the individual. And everything we are living with now in the twentieth century—our striving for individuality, the striving for new social forms, the striving to develop the personality—is only a consequence of what the inner forces of history have brought up since the time in question.

We can understand how individuals attempt to take their place in the present only if we understand the course that humanity’s development has taken, as described above. People like Vogt and Rein who have given a lot of thought to education and who have also been involved practically in such things know that the powerlessness of our modern art of education is a result of the powerlessness of modern historical insight. Just as it is impossible to educate human beings with a science for which the heart has become a pump, it is also impossible to find one’s place as a teacher in a system of education based on a historical understanding that does not draw on the living spirit of humanity or recognize the metamorphoses that have taken place between the Middle Ages and modern times. We are still involved with the consequences of what began there.

Regardless of the fact that we tend to make fun of prophecy in this day and age, it must be said that in a certain respect teachers must be prophets. After all, they are dealing with what is meant to live in the generation to come, not in the present.

From the insightful vantage point of real, true historical happenings, ladies and gentlemen, such things often look somewhat different than they do to modern observers of humanity. In many respects, these observers often have a very superficial grasp of what is meant to come to life in the science and art of education. Today the question is being debated of whether people should be educated more in line with what fosters human nature itself—that is, whether a more humanistic education is preferable—or whether they should be provided with an education that prepares them for their future careers and to fit into the context of the state, and so on. For those who attempt an insight into the depths of such things, discussions of this sort are verbal dialectics that take place on the surface. Why is that? Those with insight into the generation to come get a clear feeling that individuals, in what they work at, think, and feel, and in what they strive toward for the future as adults, emanate from the womb of history. Careers and state context and the places people can make for themselves—all this originated in these people themselves. It is not something external that is superimposed on them. We cannot ask whether we should have the individual being or the outer career more in view when we educate people, because if seen rightly, these are one and the same thing!

If we can develop a living understanding of the careers and people that are out there, then we can also develop an understanding of what previous generations that are still alive and at work today brought up out of the womb of humanity into the present time.

Separating education toward a career and education toward being an individual is not sufficient when we want to work as teachers and educators. There needs to be something living in us that is not outwardly visible, neither in a career nor in the context of the state nor anywhere else in the outer world. What must be alive in us is what the generations to come will bring to life’s outer level. What must live in us is a prophetic merging with the future evolution of humanity. The educational and artistic feeling, thinking and willing of a faculty stands and falls with this merging. A living theory and methodology of education for the present must strive to have flow into the faculty what can be known about the growing human being. This is like a soul and spiritual life-blood that becomes art without first having been knowledge. What is to enter the childlike heart, mind, and intellect can proceed only from this living methodology.

I cannot present our educational principles in detail today. I only wanted to point out how the art of education as it is meant to be in the present and future is to take its place in a living spiritual grasp of the entire nature of the world and of humanity.

We talk a lot today about the social forms of humanity’s future. Why is it always so difficult to take steps to bring this future about? It is difficult because in our times, antisocial drives and instincts are present in the evolution of humanity and work against social striving.

When we look back at patriarchal times, to a time when humanity led a more instinctive life than is the case in our civilization, we may have many reasons to be proud of the accomplishments of the present. However, the impulses of earlier times were more social than ours; we are now governed by antisocial impulses. These antisocial impulses, however, must be eliminated from the art of education above all else. More precise observers will note how our educational system has gradually developed into an antisocial system. However, the only art of education that can be fruitful is one in which the teacher’s effect on the child results from a commonality of feeling from the very moment they enter the classroom. The child’s soul and the teacher’s soul must become one through a mysterious and subconscious bond that passes from the teacher’s spirit to the child’s. This gives the school its social character. For this to happen, the teacher must be able to put him or herself in the child’s position.

What do we often do nowadays? We make an effort to formulate our thoughts in ways that will enable us to explain something to the children. Perhaps we say to them, “Look, here is a chrysalis. A butterfly is going to come out of it.” We may show the children the butterfly and the chrysalis and may also demonstrate how the one develops out of the other. Perhaps we then go on to say, “Your immortal souls are at rest in your bodies just as the butterfly is at rest in the chrysalis. And just as the butterfly leaves the chrysalis one day, so too your immortal souls will one day leave your bodies when you go through the gate of death.” We have thought of an image from nature that we use in order to make something clear to the children, but we know that we have only used a comparison, and that we ourselves have a different way of understanding the whole thing. We have made an effort to straighten something out for the children. However, according to a mysterious law, we cannot really accomplish anything in the lesson if we straighten things out in this way. It is really only possible to convey to the children what we ourselves believe in the depths of our souls. Only when we have wrestled our way through to the feeling that the image of the butterfly and chrysalis is no mere cooked-up comparison, but one presented to us by divine spiritual nature itself, only when we can believe in the truth of the image in the way that the children are meant to believe it, only in that instant are we able to convey living spirit to them.

It is never permissible for us to merely give lip service to something, although this plays such a great role in cultural development today. We must speak and be able to work out of the spirit of truth. This is possible only when we are connected, deeply and intimately connected, to everything human. Even if we are already white-haired, we must be able to unite with what growing human beings are in accordance with their essential nature. We must have an inner understanding of the growing human being. Can we still do that today? No, we cannot, or we would not sit ourselves down in laboratories and practice experimental psychology in order to work out the rules by which human understanding and human memory work. If teachers see these superficial methods and procedures as the essential thing in learning to understand the human being, they kill off their living intuitive connection and relationship to human beings. I know that educational experiments and experimental psychology are useful to teachers in a certain way. However, I also know that these are only symptoms of what they are supposed to be most useful for, and I know that we have lost the direct soul-route from person to person and are looking for it again through outer observation in laboratories. We have become inwardly estranged from what is human and are looking for it in outer ways. However, if we want to be real teachers and educators, we must be reunited with the human aspect. We must foster the whole person within us, and then this whole person will be related to what we have to develop in the child in educational and artistic ways. What we as educators gain from experimental study and observation, which are often promoted as the basis of the science of education nowadays, is comparable to the effort of trying to understand how we eat and drink on the basis of the study of nutrition and its applications to the human being. We do not need a science of how one eats and drinks, we need a healthily developed sense of taste and healthy organs, and then we will eat and drink properly. Nor do we need a theory of education based on experimental psychology. What we as educators need is an awakening of our living human nature, which will experience in itself the whole of the child to which it makes a spiritual connection.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, we want to create this Waldorf School on the basis of a new spirit. You will also have noticed what this school is nof meant to become. In any case, it is not meant to become a school to promote a particular philosophy. Anyone who says that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is founding the Waldorf School, and that it is now going to inject its philosophy into this school, will not be speaking the truth. I am stating this now, on the opening day. We are not interested in imposing our “dogmas,” our principles, or the content of our world-view on young people. We are not trying to bring about a dogmatic form of education. We are striving to turn what we have been able to learn from spiritual science into a living act of education. We are striving to include in our instructional methods a way of dealing with individual souls that can originate in a living spiritual science. Dead science can give rise only to knowledge; living spiritual science will give rise to instructional methodology and practical applications in the soul-spiritual sense. We strive to teach, to be able to educate. With regard to all this, we are fundamentally aware of the responsibility our dear friend Herr Molt spoke of earlier. We have pledged that the various religious denominations will be able to provide religious instruction in the school and to introduce the principles of their world-views, and we will honor this promise. It remains to be seen whether the art form we want to introduce provisorily and in a modest way will encounter as little interference from them as the world-views which they introduce will encounter from us.² We know that before humankind can acquire a correct insight into issues involving world-views and their interrelationships, people must understand that an art of education in the pedagogical and methodological sense can result from a spiritual world-view. Thus, we are not going to found a school on the basis of a particular world-view. What we are attempting to create in the Waldorf School is a school based on the art of education.

To you parents of the first children to be sent to this school, let me say that you are pioneering not only a personal human intention, but also a cultural challenge of our times, and that you will be able to grasp in the right way what is now meant to happen with regard to the Waldorf School only if you feel yourselves to be pioneers of this sort.

It is too soon to speak to the children in words as rational as those I spoke to their parents, but we will promise these children that what we are conveying to their parents in words will come to them in the form of actions—actions that will help them find their place in life so that they will be a match for the difficult challenges facing the generations to come. These challenges will be difficult, and what we today, especially in Central Europe, are experiencing as a time of great troubles is only the beginning of greater troubles to come. But just as the greatest things for human beings have always emerged from pain and suffering, so too a true, reality-based human art of education will emerge from these troubles. By seeking the source and foundation of our school system in the whole human being, by trying to build it up on the basis of the whole human being, we want to insert the social issue of education into the overall social issue of our times.

Comprehensive school! That is what our times are saying. And the art of teaching that draws its ability from the whole human being, as has been indicated here, will appear only in a comprehensive school. If humanity is to be able to live in social justice in the future, then people must first educate their children in a socially appropriate way. Through the Waldorf School, we hope to make a small contribution toward bringing this about.

In spite of the best will, we may be able to accomplish only a portion of what we set out to do, but we hope that the strength of the effort may not be exhausted in our feeble attempts, and that it will find successors. For we are convinced that although a feeble attempt may fail due to opposition and lack of understanding, the central core of this effort will find successors. When a real social art of education finds its way into the consciousness of all of humanity, which is what carries the faculty and the group of children to be educated, then the school will be incorporated into our overall life in society in the right way.

May the Waldorf School make a small contribution toward this great goal.

• 1. Theodor Vogt, 1835-1906. Wilhelm Rein, 1847-1929, author of Pädagogik im Grundriss [An Outline of Pedagogy].
• 2. Unlike in the U.S., in Germany it is even now quite standard for state-supported schools to make space available in the school and time in the school week for religious instruction, with teachers supplied by the churches.

Dear children! Several weeks ago, when we all came to this school for the first time, I visited you more often. Then there were a few weeks when I had to be quite far away from here, but each morning when I got up and went to work, I wondered, “What are my dear Waldorf children and their teachers doing now?” This thought came to me often during the day. And now, in the festive Christmas season, I have had the privilege of being able to visit you again. I went into all your classes and asked many of you, “Do you love your teachers?” [“Yes!” shout the children.] And you see, you answered me warmly, just like that. And then I said to you, “That is an especially nice Christmas gift for me!”

And it is a nice Christmas gift for me. You see, dear children, I have to think about how you have been spending your days since Herr Molt gave us the gift of this Waldorf School. After resting from evening until morning in the divine spirit that watches over your souls from the time you go to sleep until the time you wake up, and after you have washed and dressed and gotten all ready, you come up here to this beautiful schoolhouse. And I believe that many of you, maybe even all of you, look forward to everything that will be here for you in this beautiful schoolhouse. [“Yes!” shout the children.]

Dear children, you have reason to look forward to it. You see, while I was away from you I thought of you often, and in my thoughts I wondered, “What are my dear Waldorf children doing?” And I also said to myself, “They will be doing just fine, because they have nice capable teachers, and these nice capable teachers approach them with real love and are working very hard so that something good will come of the children.” And then I had to think of how you look forward to coming up here and of the love you show for your teachers. These teachers have to work long and hard to be able to teach you all the good and beautiful things that will make good and capable people out of you.

And you know, my dear children, I was especially pleased when I was in the classes and some children would come in playing the part of Ruprecht¹ or of little angels, and they sang and talked about the child Jesus, about the holy Christ Child. It was beautiful and grand that you could speak about the Christ with such love, and that you could listen with such love.

And do you know where your teachers get all the strength and ability they need so that they can teach you to grow up to be good and capable people? They get it from the Christ, whom we think about at Christmas. We think about how He came into the world to bring joy to all people, and you gave some beautiful presentations about Him today.

You see, my dear children, there are beings on earth that are not like human beings—for example, the animals around us—and we might often think that we should envy these animals. You can look up and see the birds flying, and perhaps then you might say, “Oh, if only we could fly, too! Then we would be able to soar into the air.” We human beings cannot fly like the birds because we have no wings. However, dear children, we can fly into the element of the spiritual, and we have two wings to fly there. The wing on the left is called “hard work,” and the other wing on the right is called “paying attention.” We cannot see them, but these two wings—hard work and paying attention—make it possible for us to fly into life and become people who are really ready for life. If we work hard and pay attention as children, and if we have teachers that are as good and capable as yours, then what makes us fit for life will come to us, and on the wings of hard work and paying attention we will be able to fly into life, where the love of our teachers carries us.

You know, you can sometimes think that there are things that are more fun than learning. But that is not really true; there is no greater joy than learning. You see, when you enjoy something that lets you be inattentive and does not make you work hard, then the joy is over immediately. You enjoy it, and then the joy is gone. But when you enjoy what you can learn, when you are flying on the wings of hard work and paying attention, then, my dear children, something stays behind in your souls. (Later on you will know what the soul is.) Something stays in your soul, and you can enjoy that over and over again. When we have learned something good and proper, it comes back again and again; we enjoy it again and again with a joy that never stops. But the other fun things, the ones that come only from inattentiveness and laziness, they come to an end.

You see, because many of you—all of you, I would like to believe—want to work hard and pay attention to what your nice teachers are giving you, I was so glad to see your love for your teachers streaming out of your eyes when I saw you again. And so that you do not forget it, I would like to ask you again, “Don't you all sincerely love your teachers?” [“Yes, we do!” shout the children.] Now, that is what you should always say. That is what you should always feel, and then the spirit whose earthly life and birth we remember at Christmas time, the Christ spirit, will take joy in you.

Now, my dear children, when you have felt your teachers’ love all day long up here, then you can go home again and tell your parents about what you have learned, and your parents will be glad and say to themselves, “Well, our children are going to grow up to be good and capable people.”

Make sure to write that in your souls, for now is a good time to do that. When we think of the great festival that reminds us that the Christ entered our world to bring comfort and joy to all human beings who turn their hearts and souls toward Him, then we can also inscribe in our souls the intention to become good human beings. Because the power of Christ is helping you, you will become what you write in your souls today, what you seriously intend to become. And when I come again and see that you have made even more progress, when I come again and see that you can once again show me that you have taken love for your teachers into your hearts and kept it there, then I will again be very glad. My warmest Christmas wish for you today is that this love will grow ever more perfect in you, and that you may continue to unfold the left wing of the human soul, which is hard work, and the right wing, which is paying attention.

And now that I have spoken to the children, let me still say a few words to those who have accompanied them here. What I just said to the children flows from a deeply satisfied heart, because I really have received the most beautiful Christmas greeting from them. When I came into the school, what wafted toward me was something I would like to call the good spirit of this school. It was the really good spirit, the good and unifying spirit, that brings teachers and children together here.

You see, in these days a Christmas mood was resting on all the serious teaching that was taking place, and it was deeply satisfying to perceive this Christmas mood, into which the revelation of Christ speaks, if I may put it like that, in all the corridors and especially in the classrooms. This was no mere supplement to the regular lessons. You could feel that our faculty managed to warm and enlighten everything that was being presented to the children’s souls and hearts and understanding with the real, true spirit of Christ. Here, in accordance with the wishes of the divine spirit, we do not speak the name of Christ after every sentence—for “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain!”—but it is nonetheless true that this spirit of Christ is with us in all our individual subjects and in every teaching activity. This is something that can readily be felt, especially at this time of year. Perhaps you too have been able to feel it in what came to meet you out of this Christmas assembly.

And finally, to conclude my Christmas greeting, I would like to appeal to the children whom you have sent here. I hope their progress pleases you.

Children, when you enter these rooms with the other boys and girls, recall that you are meant to love each other warmly, to love each and every other one. If love prevails among you, you will thrive under the care of your teachers, and your parents at home will have no concerns and will have loving thoughts of how you are spending your time here.

There is something we may say today, ladies and gentlemen, which should resound, as the spirit of this school, from every word and glance the children bring home to you who have sent them here, as an echo of what is meant to permeate all of our human journeying on earth since the mystery of Golgotha took place, to permeate all human work and activity, and especially all activity in which the spirit has work to do. May the words that ring in our souls today weave through everything that human beings do out of self-understanding, weave like a warming breath of air or beam of sunlight:

The revelation of the divine from heavenly heights,
And peace to human beings on earth who are of good will!²

Our great ideal is to cultivate this good will in the children of the Waldorf School. Our concern must be to find the governance of the spirit of the world in our work, in everything we do. May the Christmas message, “The revelation of the spirit of God from the heavenly heights, and peace to human beings on earth who are of good will,” trickle down into all the work of the Waldorf School as well. May the school’s working strength be governed by brotherly love and by the peace that inspires and supports all work! That, dear ladies and gentlemen, is my Christmas greeting to you today.

• 1. Ruprecht: in the European tradition, the Moorish helper of St. Nicholas, who carries a black sack and administers symbolic punishments to children who have been bad during the past year.
• 2. A free rendering of the angels’ words to the shepherds (Luke 2:14).