The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My first words shall be to ask your forgiveness that I cannot speak to you in the language of this country. But as I lack practise I must needs formulate things in the language I can use. Any disadvantage this involves will be made good, I trust, in the translation to follow.

In the second place, allow me to say that I feel extra-ordinarily grateful to the distinguished committee which enables me to hold these lectures at this gathering in Oxford. I feel it an especial honour to be able to give these lectures here, in this venerable town. It was here, in this town, that I myself experienced the grandeur of ancient tradition, twenty years ago.

And now that I am about to speak of a method of education which in a sense may be called new, I should like to say: In our day novelty is sought by many simply qua novelty, but whoever strives for a new thing in any sphere of human culture must first win the right to do so by knowing how to respect what is old.

Here in Oxford I feel how the power of what lives in these old traditions inspires everything. And one who can feel this has perhaps the right also to speak of what is new. For a new thing, in order to maintain itself, must be rooted in the venerable past. Perhaps it is the tragedy and the great failing of our age that there is a constant demand for this new thing and that new thing, while so few people are inclined worthily to create the new from out of the old.

Therefore, I feel such deep thankfulness to Mrs. Mackenzie, the organiser of this conference, in particular, and to the whole committee who undertook to arrange the lectures here. I feel deep gratitude because this makes it possible to give expression to what, in a sense, is indeed a new thing in the environment of that revered antiquity which alone can sponsor it.

I am equally grateful for the very kind words of introduction which Principal Jacks spoke in this place yesterday.

And now I have already indicated, perhaps, the stand-point from which these lectures will be given: what will be said here concerning education and teaching is based on that spiritual-scientific knowledge which I have made it my life's work to develop.

This spiritual science was cultivated to begin with for its own sake; in recent years friends have come forward to carry it also into particular domains of practical life. Thus it was Emil Molt, of Stuttgart, who having acquaintance with the work in spiritual science going forward at the Goetheanum—(in Dornach, Switzerland)—wished to see it applied in the education of children at school. And this led to the founding of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart.

The pedagogy and didactic of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart was founded in that spiritual life which, I hold, must lead to a renewal of education in conformity with the spirit of our age: a renewal of education along the lines demanded by the spirit of the age, by the tasks and the stage of human development which belong to this epoch.

The education and curriculum in question is based entirely upon knowledge of man. A knowledge of man which spans man's whole being from his birth to his death. But a knowledge which aims at comprising all the super-sensible part of man's being between birth and death, all that bears lasting witness that man belongs to a super-sensible world.

In our age we have spiritual life of many kinds, but above all a spiritual life coming down to us from ancient times, a spiritual life handed down by tradition. Alongside of this spiritual life and in ever diminishing contact with it, we have the life that flows to us from the magnificent discoveries of modern natural science. In an age which includes the life-time of the great natural scientists, the leading spirits in natural science, we cannot, when speaking of spiritual life neglect the potent contribution to knowledge of man made by natural science itself.

Now this natural science can give us insight into the bodily nature of man, can give us insight into bodily, physio-logical functions during man's physical life. But this same natural science conducted as it is by experiment with external tools, by observation with external senses has not succeeded, for all its great progress, in reaching the essentially spiritual life of man. I do not say this in disparagement. It was the great task of natural science as systematised, for example, by such a personality as Huxley—it was the great service it rendered that for once it looked at nature with complete disregard of everything spiritual in the world.

Neither, therefore, can the knowledge of man we have in psychology and anthropology help us to a practical grasp of what is spiritual. We have, in our modern civilisation a life of the spirit, and the various religious denominations maintain and spread this life of the spirit. But this spiritual culture is not capable of giving answers to man's questions as to the nature of that eternity and immortality, the super-sensible life, to which he belongs. It cannot give us conviction. Conviction, when the isolation of our worldly life and worldly outlook makes us ask: “What is the eternal, super-sensible reality underlying the world of sense-perception?”

We may have beliefs as to what we were before birth in the womb of divine, super-sensible worlds. We may form beliefs as to what our souls will have to go through after passing the portal of death. And we may formulate such beliefs into a cult. This can warm our hearts and cheer our spirits. We can say to ourselves: “Man is a greater being in the whole universe than in this physical life between birth and death.” But what we achieve in this way remains a belief, it remains a thing we think and feel. It is becoming increasingly difficult to put in practice the great findings and tenets of natural science while still holding such spiritual beliefs. We know of the spirit, we no longer understand how to use the spirit, how to do anything with it, how to permeate our work and daily life with spirit.

What domain of life most calls for a dealing with the spirit? The domain of teaching and education. In education we must comprehend man as a whole; and man in his totality is body, soul and spirit. We must be able to deal with spirit if we would educate. In all ages it has been incumbent on man to take account of the spirit and work by its power: now above all, because we have made such advances in external science, this summons to work with the spirit is the most urgent. Hence the social question to-day is first and foremost a question of education. For to-day we may justly ask: What must we do to give rise to social organisation and social institutions less tragic than those of the present day, less full of menace? We can give ourselves no answer but this: First we must place into practical life, into the social community, men who are educated from out of the spirit, by means of a creative activity of the spirit.

The kind of knowledge we are describing pre-supposes a continuous doing in life, a dealing with life; hence it must seek out the spirituality within life and make this the basis of education throughout the differing life-epochs. For in a child the spirit is closer to the body than it is in the adult. We can see in a child how physical nature is formed plastically by the spirit. What precisely is the brain of a child when it is first born, according to our modern natural science? It is something like the clay which a sculptor takes up when he prepares a model. And now let us look at the brain of a seven year old child when we begin his primary education; it has become a wonderful work of art, but a work of art which must be worked upon further, worked upon right up to the end of school life. Hidden spiritual powers are working at the moulding of the human body. And we as educators are called upon to contribute to that work. Are called upon not only to observe the bodily nature, but—while we must never neglect the bodily nature—to observe in this bodily nature how the spirit is at work upon it. We are called upon to work with the unconscious spirit—to link ourselves not only with the natural, but with the divine ordering of the world.

When we confront education earnestly it is demanded of us not only to acknowledge God for the peace of our soul, but to will God's will, to act the intentions of God. To do this however, we need a spiritual basis for education. Of this spiritual basis for education I will speak to you in the following days.

We must feel when we observe child life how necessary it is to have a spiritual insight, a spiritual vision if we are adequately to follow what takes place in the child day by day, what takes place in his soul, in his spirit. We should consider how child life in its very earliest days and weeks differs totally from later childhood, let alone adulthood. We should call to mind what a large proportion of sleep a child needs in the early days of its life. And we must ask ourselves what takes place in that interchange between spirit and body when a child in early childhood needs nearly 22 hours sleep? The current attitude to such things, both in philosophy and practical life, is: Well it is not possible to see into the soul of a child, any more than one can see into the soul of an animal or of a plant; here we encounter limits of human knowledge.

The spiritual view which we are here representing does not say: Here are limits of human knowledge, of human cognition. It says: We must bring forth from the depths of human nature powers of cognition equal to observing man's complete nature, body, soul and spirit; just as we can observe the arrangement of the human eye or the human ear in physiology.

If in ordinary life we have not so far got this knowledge owing to our natural scientific education, we must set about building it up. Hence I shall have to speak to you of the development of a knowledge which can guarantee a genuine insight into the inner texture of child life. And devoted and unprejudiced observation of life itself goes far to bring about such an insight.

We look at a child. If our view is merely external we cannot actually find any definite points of development from birth on to about the twentieth year. We look upon everything as a continuous development.

It is not so for one who comes to the observation of child life equipped with the knowledge of which I shall have to speak in the next few days. Then the child is fundamentally a different being up to his seventh year or eighth year,—when the change of teeth sets in—from what he is later in life, from the change of teeth to about the fourteenth year, to puberty. And infinitely significant problems confront us when we endeavour to sink deep into the child's life and to ask. How does the soul and spirit work upon the child up to the change of teeth? How does the soul and spirit work upon the child when we have to educate and teach him in the elementary or primary school? How must we ourselves co-operate here with the soul and spirit?

We see for example how speech is developed instinctively during the first period of a child's life up to the change of teeth,—instinctively as far as the child is concerned, and instinctively as regards his surroundings. Nowadays we devote a good deal of thought to the question of how a child learns to speak (I will not go into the historical aspect of the origin of speech to-day.) But how does a child actually learn to speak? Has he some kind of instinct whereby he makes his own the sounds he hears about him? Or does he derive the impulse for speech from some other kind of connection with his surroundings? If, however, one looks more closely into the life of a child one can observe that all speech and all learning to speak rests upon the imitation of what the child observes in his surroundings by means of his senses—observes unconsciously. The whole life of the child up to his seventh year is a continuous imitation of what takes place in his environment. And the moment a child perceives something, whether it be a movement, or whether it be a sound, there arises in him the impulse of an inward gesture, to re-live what has been perceived with the whole intensity of his inner nature.

We only understand a child when we contemplate him as we should contemplate the eye or the ear of an older person. For the child is entirely sense-organ (i.e. a child up to the seventh year). His blood is driven through his body in a far livelier way than in later life. We can perceive by means of a fine physiology what the development of our sense-organs, for example the eye, depends on Blood preponderates in the process of development of the eye, in the very early years. Then, later, the nerve life in the senses preponderates more and more. For the development of the organism of the senses in man is a development from blood circulation to nerve activity. It is possible to acquire a delicate faculty for perceiving how the life of the blood gradually goes over into the life of the nerves.

And as it is with a single sense (e.g. the eye), so it is with the whole human being. The child needs so much sleep because it is entirely sense-organ. Because it could not otherwise endure the dazzle and noise of the outer world. Just as the eye must shut itself against the dazzling sunlight, so must this sense-organ: child—for the child is entirely sense-organ—shut itself off against the world, so must it sleep a great deal. For whenever it is confronted with the world, it has to observe, to hold inward converse. Every sound of speech arises from an inward gesture.

What I am now saying from out of a spiritual knowledge is—let me say—open to-day to scientific demonstration. There is a scientific discovery—and, forgive the personal allusion, but this discovery has dogged me all through my life and is just as old as I am myself, it was made in the year in which I was born. Now the discovery is to the effect that human speech depends on the left parietal con-volution of the brain. This is developed plastically in the brain. But the whole of this development takes place during childhood by means of these plastic forces of which I have spoken. And if we contemplate the whole connection which exists between the gestures of the right arm, and the right hand (which preponderate in normal children), we shall see how speech forms itself from out of gesture by imitation of the environment through an inner, secret connection between blood, nerves and the convolution of the brain: (of left-handed children and their relation to the generality of children I shall have something to say later; they form an exception, but they prove very well how what builds up the power of speech is bound up with every single gesture of the right arm and hand, even down to minutest details).

If we had a more delicate physiology than our physiology of to-day, we should be able to discover for each time of life, not only the passive but the active principle. Now the active principle is particularly lively in this great organ of sense, the child. Thus a child lives in its environment in the manner in which, in later years our eye dwells in its environment. Our eye is especially formed from out the general organisation of the head. It lies, that is, in a cavity apart, so that it can participate in the life of the outer world. In the same way the child participates in the life of the outer world, lives entirely within the external world—does not yet feel itself—but lives entirely in the outer world.

We develop nowadays a form of knowledge, called intellectual knowledge, which is entirely within us. It is the form of knowledge appropriate to our civilisation. We believe that we can comprehend the outer world, but the thoughts and the logic to which alone we grant cognitive value dwell within ourselves. And a child lives entirely outside of himself. Have we the right to believe that with our intellectual mode of knowledge we can ever participate in that experience of the outer world which the child has?—the child who is all sense-organ? This we cannot do. This we can only hope to achieve by a cognition which can go right out of itself, which can enter into the nature of all that lives and moves. Intuitional cognition is the only cognition which can do this. Not intellectual knowledge which leaves us within ourselves; which makes us ask of every idea: is it logical? No, but a knowledge by means of which the spirit penetrates into the depths of life itself—intuitional knowledge. We must consciously acquire an intuitional knowledge, then only shall we be practical enough to do with spirit what has to be accomplished with the child in his earliest years.

Now, as the child gradually accomplishes the changing of teeth, when in place of the inherited teeth there appear those which have been formed during the first period of life (1-7)—there comes about a change in the child's whole life. Now no longer is he entirely sense-organ, but he is given up to a more psychical element than that of the sense impressions. The child of primary school age now no longer absorbs what he observes in his surroundings, but rather that which lives in what he observes. The child enters upon the stage which must be based mainly on the principle of authority, the authority a child meets with in his educators or teachers. Do not let us deceive ourselves into thinking that a child between seven and fourteen, whom we are educating, does not adopt from us the judgments we give expression to. If we compel a child to listen to a judgment expressed in a certain phrase, we are giving him something which rightly belongs only to a later age. What the true nature of the child demands of us is to be able to believe in us, to have the instinctive feeling: ‘Here stands one beside me who tells me something. He can tell things because he is so connected with the whole world that he can tell. For me he is the mediator between myself and the whole universe. This is how the child confronts his teacher and educator—not of course outspokenly but instinctively. For the child the adult is the mediator between the divine world and himself in his helplessness. And only when the educator is conscious that he must be such an authority as a matter of course, that he must be such as the child can look up to in a perfectly natural way, can he be a true educator.

Hence we have found in the course of our Waldorf School teaching and our Waldorf School education that the question of education is principally a question of teachers. What must the teacher: be like in order to be a natural authority, the mediator between the divine order of the world and the child? Well, what has the child become? Between the 7^th and 14^th or 15^th year from being sense-organ the child has become all soul. Not spirit as yet—not such that he sets the highest value on logical connections, on intellect; this would cause inner ossification in his soul. It is far more significant for a child between seven and fourteen years to tell him about a thing in a kindly, loving way, than to demonstrate by proof. Kindly humour and geniality in a lesson have far more value than logic. For the child does not yet need logic. For the child does not yet need logic. The child needs us, needs our humanity.

Hence in the Waldorf School we set the greatest importance on the teachers of children from seven to fourteen years being able to give them what is appropriate to their age with artistic love and loving art. For it is fundamental to the education of which we are speaking that one should know the human being, that one should know what each age demands of us in respect of education and instruction. What is demanded by the first year? What is demanded up to the seventh year? What is required of the primary school period? The way of educating children up to the tenth year must be quite different, and different again must be the way we introduce them to human knowledge between 10 and 14. To have in our souls a lively image of the child's nature in every single year, nay, in every single week,—this constitutes the spiritual basis of education.

Thus we can say: As the child is an imitator, a ‘copy-cat’ in his early years, so, in his later years he becomes a follower, one who develops in his soul according to what he is able in his psychic environment to experience in soul. The sense organs have now become independent. The soul of the child has actually only just come into its own. We must now treat this soul with infinite tenderness. As teacher and educator we must come into continually more intimate contact with what is happening day by day in the child's soul.

In this introductory talk to-day I will indicate only one thing. There is, namely, for every child a critical point during the age of school attendance; roughly between the 9th and 11th year there is a critical moment, a moment which must not be over-looked by the teacher. In this age between the 9th and 11th year there comes for every child—if he is not abnormal—the moment when he says to himself: ‘How can I find my place within the world?’ One must not suppose that the question is put just as I have said it. The question arises in indefinite feelings, in unsatisfied feelings. The question shows itself in the child's having a longing for dependence on a grown-up person. Perhaps it will take the form of a great love and attachment felt for some grown-up person. But we must understand how rightly to observe what is happening in the child at this critical time. The child suddenly finds himself isolated. He seeks something to hold on to. Up till now he has accepted authority as a matter of course. Now he begins to ask: What is this authority? Our finding or not finding the right word to say at this moment will make an enormous difference to the whole of the child's later life.

It is enormously important that the physician observing a childish illness should say to himself: What is going on in the organism are processes of development which are not significant only for the child—if they do not go rightly in the child the man will suffer the effects when he is old. Similarly must we realise that the ideas, sensations or will impulses we give the child must not be formulated in stiff concepts which the child has only to heed and learn: the ideas, the impulses and sensations which we give the child must be alive as our limbs are alive. The child's hand is small. It must grow of its own accord, we may not constrain it. The ideas, the psychic development of the child are small and delicate, we must not confine them within hard limits as if we assumed that the child must retain them in thirty years' time when grown-up—in the same form as in childhood. We must so form the ideas we bring the child that they can grow. The Waldorf School does not aim at being a school, but a preparatory school; for every school should be a preparatory school to the great school of manhood, which is life itself. We must not learn at school for the sake of performance, but we must learn at school in order to be able to learn further from life. Such must be the basis of what may be called a spiritual physiological pedagogy and didactics. One must have a sense and feeling for bringing to the child living things that can continue with him into later life. For that which is fostered in a child often dwells in the depths of the child's soul imperceptibly. In later life it comes out. One can make use of an image—it is only by way of image, but it rests upon a truth: There are people who at a certain time of their lives have a beneficent influence upon their fellow men. They can—if I may use the expression—bestow blessing. There are such people,—they do not need to speak, they only need to be there with their personality which blesses. The whole course of a man's life is usually not observed, otherwise notice would be taken of the upbringing of such people—of people like this who later have the power of blessing; it may have been the conscious deed of some one person, or it may have been unconscious on the part of teacher and educator:—Such people have been brought up as children to learn reverence, to learn, in the most comprehensive meaning of the word, to pray—to look up to something;—and hence they could will down to something. If one has learned at first to look up, to honour, to be entirely surrounded by authority, then one has the possibility to bless, to work down, oneself to become an authority, an unquestioned authority.

These are the things which must not merely live as precepts in the teacher, but must pass into him, become part of his being—going from his head continuously into his arms. So that a man can do deeds with his spirit, not merely think thoughts. These things must come to life in the teacher. In the next few days I will show how this can come about in detail throughout each single year of school life between seven, and fourteen. But before all things I wanted to explain to-day how a certain manner of inner life, not merely an outlook on life but an inner attitude must form the basis of education.

Then, when the child has outgrown the stage of authority, when he has attained puberty and through this has physio-logically quite a different connection with the outer world than before, he also attains in soul and body (in his bodily life in its most comprehensive sense) a quite different relation-ship to the world than he had earlier. This is the time of the awakening of Spirit in Man. This now is the time when the human being seeks out the rational and logical aspect in all verbal expression. Only now can we hope to appeal with any success to the intellect in our education and instruction. It is immensely important that we do not consciously or unconsciously call upon the intellect prematurely, as people are so prone to do to-day.

And now let us ask ourselves: What is happening when we observe how the child takes on authority, everything that is to guide and lead his soul. For a child does not listen to us in order to check and prove what we say. Unconsciously the child takes up as an inspiration what works upon his soul, what, through his soul, builds and influences his body. And we can only rightly educate when we understand the wonderful, unconscious inspiration, which holds sway in the whole life of a child between seven and fourteen, when we can work into the continuous process of inspiration. To do this we' must acquire still another power of spiritual cognition, we must add to Intuition, Inspiration itself. And when we have led the child on its way as far as the 14th year we make a peculiar discovery. If we attempt to give the child things that we have conceived logically—we become wearisome to him. To begin with he will listen, when we thus formulate every-thing in a logical way; but if the young man or maiden must re-think our logic after us, he will gradually become weary. Also in this period we, as teachers need something besides pure logic. This can be seen from a general example.

Take a scientist such as Ernst Haeckel who lived entirely in external nature. He was himself tremendously interested in all his microscopic studies, in all he built up. If this is taught to pupils, they learn it but they cannot develop the same interest for it. We as teachers must develop something different from what the child has in himself. If the child is coming into the domain of logic at the age of puberty, we (in our turn) must develop imagery, imagination. If we ourselves can pour into picture form the subjects we have to give the children, if we can give them pictures, so that they receive images of the world and the work and meaning of the world, pictures which we create for them, as in a high form of art—then they will be held by what we have to tell them.

So that in this third period of life we are directed to Imagination, as in the other two to Intuition and Inspiration. And we now have to seek for the spiritual basis which can make it possible for us as teachers to work from out of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition—which can make it possible not merely to think of spirit, but to act with spirit.

This is what I wished to say to you by way of introduction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To-day I have to add to what I said yesterday concerning old ways to spiritual knowledge yet a further example, namely the way of asceticism as practised in former ages, asceticism in the widest sense of the word. And here I shall be describing a way that is even less practicable in our own times than the way described yesterday. For in our time, in our civilisation, men's thoughts and customs are different from those of the days when men sought high spiritual knowledge by means of asceticism. Hence just as we must replace the way of Yoga to-day by something more purely spiritual and psychic, so must we replace the way of asceticism by a modern way. But we shall more easily apprehend the modern way into spiritual life if we train our ideas in grasping the way of asceticism.

Asceticism essentially is a matter of certain exercises. These exercises can extend to spiritual and psychic things, I wish, for the moment, to deal with the use made of these exercises for eliminating the human body in a special way, at certain times, from the sum of human experience. It is just by eliminating the body that experience of spiritual worlds is called up. These exercises consisted in training the body by means of pain and suffering, by mortification, until it was capable of enduring pain without causing too much disturbance to the mind; until the ascetic could bear physical suffering without his whole mind and soul being overwhelmed in the suffering. Mortification and enhanced en-durance were pursued because it was a matter of experience that as the physical was repressed so the spiritual nature emerged, got free and brought about immediate spiritual perception, direct experience.

Now it is a matter of experience—notwithstanding that these methods are not to be recommended today—it is yet a matter of experience that in whatever measure the physical body is suppressed in the same measure man is enabled to receive into himself psychic and spiritual being. It is simply a fact that spirit becomes perceptible when the activity of the physical is suppressed.

Let me make my meaning clear by an example: Suppose we observe the human eye. This human eye is there for the purpose of transmitting impressions of light to the human being. What is the sole means whereby the eye can make light perceptible to man? Imaginatively expressed: by wanting nothing for itself. The moment the eye wants something for itself—so to speak—the moment the organic activity, the vital activity of the eye loses its own vitality, (if some opacity or hardening of the lens or eyeball sets in)—namely, as soon as the eye departs from selflessness and becomes self-seeking, in that moment it ceases to be a servant of human nature. The eye must make no claim to be anything for its own sake. This is meant relatively of course, but things must be stated in a somewhat absolute manner when they have to be expressed. Life itself will make it relative. Thus we can say: The eye owes its transparency to light to the fact that it shuts itself off from the being of man, that it is selfless.

When we want to see into the spiritual world—this seeing is meant of course in a spiritual-psychic sense—then we must, as it were, make our whole organism into an eye. We must now make our whole organism transparent—not physically as in the case of the eye,—but spiritually. It must no longer be an obstacle to our intercourse with the world.

Certainly I do not mean to say that our physical organism as it stands to-day would become diseased—as the eye would be diseased—if it claimed life on its own account. For ordinary life our physical organism is quite right as it is, it is quite normal. It has to be opaque. In the lectures that follow we shall see how it is that our organism cannot be an “eye” in ordinary life, how it must be non-transparent. Our normal soul-life can repose in our organism just because it is non-transparent, and because we do not perpetually have the whole spiritual world of the universe about us when we gaze around. Thus, for ordinary life, it is right, it is normal for our organism to be non-transparent. But one can know nothing of the spiritual world by means of it,—just as one can know nothing of light by means of an eye that has cataract. And when the body is mortified by suffering and pain, and by self-conquests, it becomes trans-parent. And just as it is possible to perceive the world of light when the eye lets the light show through it—so it is possible for the whole organism to perceive the spiritual world surrounding it when we make the organism transparent in this way.

What I have just described is what took place in ancient times, the times which gave rise to those mighty religious visions which have come down to our age in tradition, not through the independent discovery of modern men; and it is this that led up to that bodily asceticism that I have been attempting to elucidate.

Nowadays we cannot imitate this asceticism. In earlier ages it was an accepted thing that if one sought enlightenment, if one wanted tidings of the super-sensible, the spiritual world, one should betake oneself to solitary men, to hermits—to such as had withdrawn from life. It was a universal belief that one could learn nothing from those who lived the ordinary life of the world; but that knowledge of spiritual worlds could only be won in solitude, and that one who sought such knowledge must become different from other men.

It would not be possible to think like this from our modern standpoint. Our tendency is to believe only in a man who can stand firmly on his feet, who can use his hands to help his fellow men, one who counts for something in life, who can work and trade and is at home in the world, That solitude which former ages regarded as the pre-requisite of higher knowledge has now no place in our view of life. If we are to believe in a man to-day he must be a man of action, one who enters into life, not one who retires from it. Hence it is impossible for us to acquire the state of mind of the ascetic in relation to knowledge, and we cannot learn of spiritual worlds in his way.

Now this makes it necessary for us to-day to win to clairvoyance by psychic-spiritual means without damaging our bodies' fitness by ascetic practices. And this we can do. And we can do it because through our century-old natural-scientific development we have acquired exact concepts, exact ideas. We can discipline our thinking by means of this natural-scientific development. What I am now describing is not something antagonistic to the intellect. Intellectuality must be at the basis of it all, there must be a foundation of clear thinking. But upon the basis of this intellectuality, of this clear thought, there must be built what can lead into the spiritual world.

To-day it is exceptionally easy to fulfil the demand that man shall think clearly. This is no slight on clear thinking. But in an age which comes several centuries after the work of Copernicus and of Galileo clear thinking is almost a matter of course.—The pity is that it is not yet a matter of course among the majority of people.—But in point of fact it is easy to have clear thought when this clear thought is attained at the expense of the fullness, of the rich content of thought. Empty thoughts can easily be clear. But the foundation of our whole future development must be clear thoughts which have fullness, clear thoughts rich in content.

Now, what the ascetic attained by mortification and suppression of the physical organism we can attain by taking in hand our own soul's development. By asking ourselves, for instance, at some definite stage of our life “What habits have I got? What characteristics? What faults? What sympathies and antipathies?” And when one has reviewed all this clearly in one's mind, one can try imagining—in the case of some very simple thing to start with—what one would be like if one were to evolve a different kind of sympathy or antipathy, a different content of soul.

These things do not come as a matter of course. It often takes years of inward work to do what otherwise life would do for us. If we look at ourselves honestly for once we shall concede: “What I am to-day I was not ten years ago.” The inner content of the soul, and the inner formation of the soul also, have become quite different. Now what has brought this about? Life itself. Unconsciously we have given ourselves up to life. We have plunged into the stream of life. And now: can we ourselves do what otherwise life does? Can we look ahead, for example, to what we shall be in ten years' time, and set' it before us as an aim, and proceed with iron will to bring it about? If we can compass all life within the confines of our own ego—that vast life which otherwise works on us,—if we can thus intensify in our own will [Literally—“in the will of our own ego.”] the power which is usually spread abroad like a sea of life,—if we can work at our own progress and make something out of ourselves:—then we shall achieve inwardly what the ascetic of old achieved by external means. [By Translator—It is interesting to read Kipling's “If” in the light of this knowledge.] He rendered the body weak so that will and cognition should arise out of the weakened body, and the body should be translucent to the spiritual world. We must make our will strong, and make strong our powers of thought, so that they may be stronger than the body, which goes on its own way; and thus we shall constrain the body to be transparent to the world of spirit. We do the precise opposite of the ascetics of old.

You see, I have treated of these things in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. And what is there described, which differs completely from the old ascetic way, has been confused by many people with asceticism, has been taken to be the old asceticism in a new form. But anyone who reads it carefully will see that it differs in every respect from the way of asceticism in the past. Now this new “asceticism” which does not require that we should withdraw from life and become hermits, but keeps us active in the world—this new way can only be achieved by looking away from the passing moment to Time itself.

One has to consider, for instance, what one will be like in ten years' time. And this means that one has to take into consideration the whole span of a man's life between birth and death. Man is prone to live in the moment. But here the aim is: To learn to live in time, within the whole span of life. Then the world of spirit will become visible to us. We do indeed see a spiritual world around us when our body has thus become transparent.

For instance, everything described in my book Occult Science, rests entirely on knowledge such as this I obtained when the body is as transparent to spirit as the eye is to light.

Now you will say: Yes, but we cannot require every teacher to attain such spiritual cognition before he can become an educator or instructor. But, as I said yesterday in the case of Yoga, let me repeat: This is not in the least necessary. For the body of the child itself is living witness of spiritual worlds and it is here that our higher knowledge can begin. And thus a teacher with right instinct can grow naturally into a spiritual treatment of the child. But our intellectual age has departed very much from such a spiritual treatment and treats everything rationally. So much so that we have reached the stage of saying: You must so educate as to make everything immediately comprehensible to the child at whatever stage he may be. Now this lends itself to triviality—no doubt an extremely convenient thing to those engaged in teaching. We get a lot done in a given time when we put as many things as possible before the child in a trivial and rudimentary form, addressed to its comprehension. But a man who thinks like this, on rational grounds, is not concerning himself with the whole course of man's life. He is not concerned with what becomes of the sensation I have aroused in the child when the child has grown into an older man or woman, or attained old age. He is not taking life into consideration; for instance, he is not considering the following: suppose it is evident knowledge to me that it is advisable for a child between the change of teeth and puberty to rely mainly on authority; and that for him to trust to an example he needs to have an example set: In that case I shall tell the child something that he must take on trust, for I am the mediator of the divine, spiritual world to the child. He believes me; and accepts what I say, although he does not yet understand it. So much of what we receive in childhood unconsciously we do not understand. If in childhood we could only accept what we understood we should receive little of value for our later life. And Jean Paul, the German poet and thinker, would never have said that more is learned in the first three years of life than in the three years at the university.

But just consider what it means when, say, in my thirty-fifth year some event or other brings about the feeling: “Something is swimming up into your mind. Long ago you heard this from your teacher. You were only nine or ten years old, may-be, at the time, and you did not understand it at all. Now it comes back. And now, in the light of your own life, it makes sense. You appreciate it.”

A man who in later life can thus fetch from the depths of his' memory what he now understands for the first time has within him a well-spring of life. A refreshing stream of power continually flows within him. Such a thing—this swimming up into the soul of what was once accepted on trust and is only now understood—such a thing as this can show us that to educate rightly we must not merely consider the immediate moment, but the whole of life. In all that we teach the child this must be kept in view.

Now I have just been told that exception was taken to the image used for showing the child how man partakes of immortality. I was not speaking of “eternity,” but of “immortality.” I said “The image of the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis is there to be seen.” This image was only taken to represent the sensation we can have of the soul leaving the physical body.

The image itself refutes this objection; it was expressly used to meet the objection that the emerging of the butterfly is not a right concept of immortality. In the logical sense, naturally, it is not a right concept. But we are considering what kind of concept we are to give the child, what image we are to place before his soul so as to avoid confronting him with logic prematurely. What is thus given in picture form to a child of eight or nine years, (for it was of children we were speaking, and not of introducing things in this way to a philosopher)—what is thus given can grow into the right concept of immortality.

Thus it all depends on the what (on what is given)—on having a living grasp of existence. It is this that is so terribly hard for our rationalistic age to grasp. It is surely obvious that the thing we tell the child is different from that into which it is transformed in later years—what would be the sense of calling a child unskilled, immature, “childish” (zappelig) if we were simply speaking of a grown man? An observer of life finds not only younger and more grown-up children, but childish and grown-up ideas and concepts. And to a true teacher or educator it is life we must look to, not adulthood.

It seems to me a good fate that not before 1919 did it fall to me to take on the direction of the Waldorf School—founded that year by Emil Molt in Stuttgart. I had been concerned with education professionally before that time; nevertheless, I should not have felt in a position to master so great an educational enterprise earlier to the extent that we can master it now, with the college of teachers of the Waldorf School—(master it, that is, relatively speaking—to a certain extent). And the reason is this: before that time I should not have dared to form a college of teachers consisting so largely of men and women with a knowledge of human nature—and therefore of child nature—as I was able to do that year. For, as I have already said, all true teaching, all true pedagogy must be based on knowledge of human nature. But before one can do this one must possess the means of penetrating into human nature in the proper way. Now,—if I may say so—the first perceptions of this entering into human nature came to me more than 35 years ago.

These were spiritual perceptions of the nature of man. Spiritual, I say, not intellectual. Now spiritual truths behave in a different manner from intellectual truths. What one perceives intellectually, what one has proved,—as it is called, one can also communicate to other men, for the matter is ready when the logic is ready. Spiritual truths are not ready when the logic is ready. It is in the nature of spiritual truths that they must be carried with a man on his way through life, they must be lived with before they can fully develop. Thus I should never have dared to utter to other men certain truths about the nature of man in the form in which they came to me more than 35 years ago. Not until a few years back, in my book “Von Seelen Ratzeln” (Riddles of the Soul) did I venture to speak of these things for the erst time. A period of thirty years lay between the first conception and the giving out of these things to the world. Why? Because it is necessary to contemplate such truths at different stages of one's life, they have to accompany one throughout different periods of life. The spiritual truths conceived when one was a young man of 23 or 24 are experienced quite differently when one is 35 or 36, or again at 45 or 46. And as a matter of fact it was not until I had passed my fiftieth year that I ventured to publish these outlines of a Knowledge of Man in a book. And only then could I tell these things to a college of teachers; and give them so the elements of education which every teacher must make his own and use with every single child.

Thus I may say: when my little booklet The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy appeared, I was speaking on education there as one who disagrees with much in modern education, who would like to see this or the other treated more fundamentally, and so on. But at the time this little book was written I should not have been able to undertake such a thing as directing the Waldorf School. For it was essential for such a task to have a college of teachers with a knowledge of man originating in a spiritual world. This knowledge of man is exceedingly hard to come by to-day; in comparison it is easy for us to study natural science. It is comparatively easy to come to see what the final member of organic evolution is. We begin with the simplest organism and see how it has evolved up to man. And man stands at the summit of evolution, the final member of organic development. But we know man only as the end product of organic development. We do not see into man himself. We do not look into his very being. Natural science has attained great perfection and we have every admiration for it and intend no disparagement—but when we have mastered this natural science we only know man as the highest animal, we do not know what man is in his essential nature. Yet our life is dominated by this same natural science. Now in order to educate we need a human science,—and a practical human science at that—a human science that applies to every individual child. And for this we need a, general human science.

To-day I will only indicate a few of the principles which became apparent to me more than thirty years ago, and which have been made the basis for the actual training of the staff of the Waldorf School. Now it must be borne in mind that in dealing with children of elementary school age (7-14) we have to do with the life of the soul in these children. In the next few days I shall have to speak also of quite little children. But, much though it grieves me, we have as yet no nursery school preliminary to the Waldorf School because we have not the money for it, and so we can only take children of 6 and 7 years old. But naturally the ideal thing is for children to receive education as early as possible.

When we receive them into the primary school, the elementary school, it is their souls that concern us;—that is to say their essentially physical education has been accomplished—or has failed of accomplishment—according to the lights of parents and educators. Thus we can say: The most essential part of physical education (which will, of course, be continuous as we shall see when I describe the particular phases of education), the most essential part belongs to the period ending with the change of teeth. From that time on it is the soul of the child we have to deal with, and we must conduct the development of his soul in a way that strengthens physical development.

And when the child has passed the age of puberty he enters upon the age in which we must no longer speak of him as a child—the age in which young ladies and gentlemen come into full possession of their own minds, their own spirits. Thus man progresses from what is of the body, by way of the soul, into the spiritual. But, as we shall see, we cannot teach what is of the spirit. It has to be freely absorbed from the world. Man can only learn of spiritual things from life.

Where we have children of primary school age we have to deal with the child's soul. Now soul manifests, roughly speaking, through thinking, feeling and willing. And if one can thoroughly understand the play of thinking, feeling and will—the soul's life—within man's whole nature, one has the basis for the whole of education.

To be sure the multiplication table is not the whole of mathematics, but we must learn the multiplication table before we can advance as far as the differential and integral calculus. In education the matter is somewhat different; it is not a wonderfully advanced science that I am now about to set forth, but the elements, the fundamentals. The advanced science here, however, cannot be built up as the differential and integral calculus is built up on elementary mathematics,—it must be founded on the practical use made of these elementary principles by the teachers and educators.

Now when people speak of the nature of the human soul to-day, in this materialistic age—if they allow the existence of the soul at all (and one even hears of a psychology, a science of the soul, devoid of soul), but if they allow the existence of the soul, they commonly say: The soul, now, is a thing experienced inwardly, psychically, and it is connected somehow—I will not enter into the philosophical aspect—with the body. Indeed, if one surveys the field of our exceptionally intelligent psychology one finds the life of the soul—thought, feeling and will—related, for the most part, to the human nervous system—in the broadest sense of the word. It is the nervous system which brings the soul to physical manifestation—which is the bodily foundation of the soul's life.

It is this that I realised 35 years ago to be wrong. For the only part of our soul life as adult human beings (and I expressly emphasize this, since we cannot consider the child until we understand the man), the only part of our soul life bound up with the nervous system is our thinking, our power of ideation. The nervous system is only connected with ideation.

Feeling is not directly bound up with the nervous system, but with what may be called the Rhythmic system in the human being: it is bound up with rhythm, the rhythm of breathing, the rhythm of blood circulation, in their marvellous relation-ship to one another. The ratio is only approximate, since it naturally varies with every individual, but practically speaking every adult human being has four times as many pulse beats as he has breaths. It is this inner interplay and relationship of pulse rhythm and breath rhythm, and its connection in turn with the more extended rhythmic life of the human being, that constitutes the rhythmic nature of man,—a second nature over against the head or nerve nature. The rhythmic system includes the rhythm we experience when we sleep and awaken. This is a rhythm which we often turn into non-rhythm nowadays—but it is a rhythm. And there are many other such rhythms in human life. Human life is not merely built up on the life of nerves, on the nervous system, it is also founded in this rhythmic life. And just as thinking and the power of thought is bound up with the nervous system, so the power of feeling is connected immediately with the rhythmic system.

It is not the case that feeling finds its direct expression in the nervous life; feeling finds its direct expression in the rhythmic system. Only when we begin to conceive of our rhythmic system, when we make concepts of our feelings, we then perceive our feelings as ideas by means of the nerves, just as we perceive light or colour outwardly. Thus the connection of feeling with the nerve life is an indirect one. Its direct connection is with the rhythmic life. And one simply cannot understand man unless one knows how man breathes, how breathing is related to blood-circulation, how this whole rhythm is apparent, for instance, in a child's quick flushing or paling; one must know all that is connected with the rhythmic life. And on the other hand one must know what processes accompany children's passions, children's feelings and the loves and affections of children. If one does not know what lives immediately in the rhythmic life, and how this is merely projected into the nerve life, to become idea (concept) one does not understand man. One does not understand man if one says: “The soul's nature is dependent on the nerve-nature”, for of the soul's nature it is only the life of thought, thinking, that is dependent on the nerves.

What I say here I say from out of direct observation such as can be made by spiritual perception. There are no proofs of the validity of this spiritual observation as there are proofs for the findings of intellectualistic thinking. But everyone who can entertain these views without prejudice can prove them retrospectively by normal human understanding, and, moreover, by what external science has to say on these matters.

I may add to what I have already said that a great part of the work I had to do 35 years ago, when I was engaged in verifying the original conception of this membering of man's nature which I am now expounding, was to find out from all domains of physiology, biology and other natural sciences whether these things could be verified externally. I would not expound these things to-day if I had not got this support. And it can be stated in general with certainty that much of what I am saying to-day can also be demonstrated scientifically by modern means.

Now, in the third place, over against thinking and feeling, we have willing,—the life of will. And willing does not depend directly on the nervous system, willing is directly connected with human metabolism and with human movement.—Metabolism is very intimately connected with movement. You can regard all the metabolism which goes on in man, apart from movement proper, as his limb system. The ‘movement system’ and ‘metabolic system’ I hold to be the third member of the human organism. And with this the will is immediately bound up. Every will impulse in man is accompanied by a particular form of the metabolic process which has a different mode of operation from that of the nerve processes which accompany the activity of thinking. Naturally a man must have a healthy metabolism if he wants to think soundly. But thinking is bound up directly with an activity in the nervous system quite other than the metabolic activity; whereas man's willing is immediately bound up with his metabolism. And it is this dependence of the will on the metabolism that one must recognise.

Now when we conceive ideas about our own willing, when we think about the will, then the metabolic activity is projected into the nervous system. It is only mediately, indirectly, that the will works in the nervous system. What transpires in the nervous system in connection with the will is the faculty of apprehending our own will activity.

Thus, when we can penetrate the human being with our vision we discover the relationships between the psychic and the physical nature of man. The ACTIVITY OF THOUGHT in the soul manifests physically as NERVOUS ACTIVITY; the FEELING NATURE in the soul manifests physically as the rhythm of the BREATHING SYSTEM and the BLOOD SYSTEM, and this it does directly, not indirectly by the way of the nervous system, not through the nervous system. THE ACTIVITY OF WILL manifests in man's physical nature as a fine METABOLISM. It is essential to know the fine metabolic processes which accompany the exercise of the activity of the will, a form of combustion process in the human being.

Once one has acquired these concepts, of which I can here only indicate to you the general outline—they will become clear in the next few days in all their detail, when I show their application,—once you have these elementary principles, then your eyes will be opened also to everything which confronts you in child-nature. For things are not as yet in the same state in child nature. For instance the child is entirely Sense Organ, namely, entirely Head; as I have already explained the child is entirely SENSE ORGAN. (Note by Translator: i.e. a baby, or child under 7.)

It is of particular interest to see by means of a scientific spiritual observation how a child tastes in a different manner from an adult. An adult, who has brought taste into the sphere of consciousness; tastes with his tongue and decides what the taste is. A child—that is to say a baby in its earliest weeks—tastes with its whole body. The organ of taste is diffused throughout the organism. It tastes with its stomach, and it continues to taste when the nourishing juices have been taken up by the lymph vessels and transmitted to the whole organism. The child at its mother's breast is wholly permeated by taste. And here we can see how the child is—as it were—illuminated and transfused with taste, with something of a soul nature, (Note by Translator: i.e. the sensation of taste.) which later we do not have in our whole body, which later we have only in our head.

And thus we learn how to watch a tiny child, and how to watch an older child, knowing that one child will blush easily for one thing or another and another child will easily turn pale for this or that cause, one child is quick to get excited, or quick to move his limbs; one child has a firm tread, another will trip lightly, etc. Once we have these principles and can recognise the seat in the metabolic system of what comes to psychic expression as will, or in the rhythmic system of what comes to psychic expression as feeling, or in the nervous system of what manifests in the soul as thought, then we shall know how to observe a child, for we shall know whither to direct our gaze.

You all know that there are people who investigate certain things under the microscope. They see wonderful things under the microscope; but there are also people who have not learned how to look through a microscope; they look into it and no matter how they manipulate it they see nothing. First one must learn to see by learning how to manipulate the instrument through which one sees. When one has learned how to look through a microscope one will be able to see what is requisite. One sees nothing of man until one has learned to fix the gaze of one's soul, of one's spirit, upon what corresponds to thinking, to feeling and to willing. The aim was to develop in the staff of the Waldorf School a right orientation of vision. For the teachers must first of all know what goes on in the children, then they achieve the right state of mind—and only from a right attitude of mind can right education come.

It was necessary at the outset to give some account of the three-fold organisation of man so that the details of the actual educational measures and educational methods might be more readily comprehensible to you.

It might perhaps appear as if the art of education described in these lectures would lead away from practical life into some remote, purely spiritual region: as though this art of education laid too much stress on the purely spiritual domain. From what I have said so far in describing the spiritual foundation of the education, this might appear to be the case. But this is only in appearance. For in reality the art of education which arises from this philosophy has the most practical objects in view. Thus it should be realised that the main object of speaking of spiritual facts here is to answer the educational question: how can we best develop the physical organism in childhood and youth?

That a spiritual philosophy should consider firstly the development of the physical organism may seem to be a fundamental contradiction. The treatment of my theme in the next few days, however, will do more towards dispelling this contradiction than any abstract statements I could make at the outset. To-day, I would merely like to say that when one speaks on educational questions at the present day one finds oneself in a peculiar situation. For if one sees much that needs reforming in education, it is as much as to say that one is not satisfied with one's own education. One implies that one's own education has been exceedingly bad. And yet, as a product of this very bad education, of this education in which one finds so much to criticise—for other-wise why be a reformer?—one sets up to know the right way to educate! This is the first thing that involves a contradiction. The second thing is one which gives one a slight feeling of shame in face of the audience when speaking on education,—for one realises that one is speaking of what education ought to be and how it must be different from present day practice. So that it amounts to saying: you are all badly educated. And yet one is appealing to those who are badly educated to bring about a better education. One assumes that both the speaker and the audience know very well what good education should be in spite of the fact that they have been exceedingly badly educated.

Now this is a contradiction, but it is one which life itself presents us, and it can really only be solved by the view of education which is here being described. For one can perfectly well know what is the matter with education and in what respects it should be improved, just as one can know that a picture is well painted without possessing the faintest capacity for painting a picture oneself. You can consider yourself capable of appreciating the merits of a picture by Raphael without thinking yourself capable of painting a Raphael picture. In fact it would be a good thing to-day if people would think like this. But they are not content with merely knowing, where education is concerned, they claim straightaway to know how to educate; as though someone who is no painter and could not possibly become a painter, should set up to show how a badly painted picture should be painted well.

Now it is here contended that it is not enough to know what good education is but that one must have a grasp of the technique and detail of educational art, one must acquire practical skill. And for this, knowledge and understanding are necessary. Hence yesterday I tried to explain the elementary principles of guidance in this ability, and I will now continue this review.

It is easy to say man undergoes development during his lifetime, and that he develops in successive stages. But this is not enough. Yesterday we saw that man is a three-fold being: that his thinking is entirely bound up physically with the nerve-senses-system of his organism, his feeling is bound up with the rhythmic system, particularly the breathing and circulation system, and that his will is bound up with the system of movement and metabolism.

The development of these three systems in man is not alike. Throughout the different epochs of life they develop in different ways. During the first epoch which extends to the change of teeth—as I have repeatedly stated—the child is entirely sense organ, entirely head, and all its development proceeds from the nerve-senses system. The nerve-senses system permeates the whole organism; and all impressions of the outside world affect the whole organism, work right through it, just as, later in life, light acts upon the eye,

In other words, in an adult light comes to a standstill in the eye, and only sends the idea of itself, the concept of light, into the organism. In a child it is as if every little blood corpuscle were inwardly illumined, were transfused with light—to express it in a somewhat exaggerated and pictorial way. The child is as yet entirely exposed to those etheric essences, (effluvia), which in later life we arrest at the surface of our bodies, in the sense organs,—while we develop inwardly something of an entirely different nature. Thus a child is exposed to sense impressions in a far greater degree than is the adult.

Observe a concrete instance of this: take a person who has charge of the nurture of a very young child, perhaps a tiny baby; a person with his own world of inner experience. Let us suppose the person m charge of the child is a heavy hearted being, one to whom life has brought sorrow. In the mature man the physical consequences of the experiences he has been through will not be obvious, but will leave only faint traces. When we are sad our mouth is always a little dry. And when sadness becomes a habitual and continuous state, the sorrowful person goes about with dry mouth, with parched tongue, with a bitter taste in the mouth and even a chronic catarrh. In the adult these physical conditions are merely faint undertones of life.

The child who is growing up in the company of the adult is an imitator; he models himself entirely on the physiognomy of the adult, on what he perceives:—on the adult's sad manner of speaking, his sad feelings. For there is a subtle interplay betwixt child and adult, an interplay of imponderables. When we have an inner sadness and all its physical consequences, the child being an imitator, takes up these physical effects through inward gestures: through an inward mimicry he takes up the parched tongue, the bitter taste in the mouth; and this—as I pointed out yesterday—flows through the whole organism. He absorbs the paleness of the long sad face of the adult. The child cannot imitate the soul content of the sorrow, but it imitates the physical effects of the sorrow. And the result is that, since the spirit is still working into the child's whole organism, his whole organism will be permeated in such a manner as to build up his organs in accordance with the physical effects which he has taken up into himself. Thus the very condition of the child's organism will make a sad being of him. In later life he will have a particular aptitude for perceiving everything that is sad or sorrowful. Such is the fine and delicate knowledge that one must have in order to educate in a proper way.

This is the manner of a child's life up to the changing of the teeth. It is entirely given up to what its organism has absorbed from the adults around it. And the inner conflict taking place here is only perceptible to spiritual science; this struggle which goes on can only be described as the fight between inherited characteristics and adaptation to environment.

We are born with certain inherited characteristics.—This can be seen by anybody who has the opportunity of observing a child during its first weeks or years. Science has produced an extensive teaching on this subject.—But the child has more and more to adapt itself to the world. Little by little he must transform his inherited characteristics until he is not merely the bearer of a heredity from his parents and ancestors, but is open in his senses and soul and spirit to receive what goes on at large in his environment. Otherwise he would become an egotistic man, a man who only wants what accords with his inherited characteristics.

Now we have to educate men to be susceptible to all that goes on in the world: men who each time they see a new thing can bring their judgment and their feelings to meet this new thing. We must not educate men to be selfishly shut up within themselves, we must educate men to meet the world with a free and open mind, and to act in accordance with the demands of the world.

This attitude is the natural outcome of such a position as I described yesterday.

Thus we must observe in all its details the inner struggle which takes place during the child's early years between heredity and adaptation to environment. Try to study with the utmost human devotion the wonderful process that goes on where the first teeth are replaced by the second. The first teeth are an inherited thing. They seem almost unsuitable for the outer world. They are inherited. Gradually above each inherited tooth another tooth is formed. In the modelling of this tooth the form of the first tooth is made use of, but the form of the second tooth, which is permanent, is a thing adapted to the world.

I always refer to this process of the teeth as characteristic of this particular period of life, up to the seventh year. But it is only one symptom. For what takes place in the case of the teeth conspicuously, because the teeth are hard organs, is taking place throughout the organism. When we are born into the world we bear within us an inherited organism. In the course of the first seven years of our life we model a new organism over it. The whole process is physical. But while it is physical it is the deed of the spirit and soul within the child. And we who stand at the child's side must endeavour so to guide this soul and spirit that it goes with and not against the health of the organism. We must therefore know what spiritual and psychic processes have to take place for the child to be able to model a healthy organism in the stead of the inherited organism. We must know and do a spiritual thing in order to promote a physical thing.

And now, if we follow up what I said to you to-day in the introduction we come to something else. Suppose that as a teacher or educator we enter a classroom. Now we must never think that we are the most intelligent of human beings, men at the summit of human intelligence—that, indeed, would mean that we were very bad teachers. We really should think ourselves only comparatively intelligent. This is a sounder state of mind than the other. Now with this state of consciousness we enter the classroom. But as we go in we must say to ourselves: there may be among the children a very intelligent being, one who in later life will be far more intelligent than we. Now if we, who are only comparatively intelligent, should bring him up to be only as intelligent as ourselves, we should be making him a copy of ourselves. That would be quite wrong. For the right thing would be so to educate this very intelligent individual that he may grow up to be far more intelligent than we are ourselves or ever could be. Now this means that there is something in a man which we may not touch, something we must regard with sensitive reverence if we are to exercise the art of education rightly. And this is part of the answer to the question I asked.

Often, in earlier life, we know exceedingly well what we ought to do—only we cannot carry it out. We feel unequal to it. What it is that prevents us from doing what we ought to do is generally very obscure. It is always some condition of the physical organism,—for example, an imitated disposition to sadness such as I spoke of. The organism has incorporated this, it has become habitual. We want to do some-thing which does not suit an organism with a bent to sadness. Yet such is our organism. In us we have the effects of the parched tongue and bitter taste from our childhood, now we want to do something quite different and we feel difficulty.

If we realise the full import of this we shall say to our-selves: the main task of the teacher or educator is to bring up the body to be as healthy as it possibly can be; this means, to use every spiritual measure to ensure that in later life a man's body shall give the least possible hindrance to the will of his spirit. If we make this our purpose in school we can develop the powers which lead to an education for freedom.

The extent to which spiritual education works healthily upon the physical organism, and thus upon man as a whole, can be seen particularly well when the great range of facts provided by our magnificent modern natural science is brought together and co-ordinated in a manner only possible to spiritual science. It then becomes apparent how one can work in the spirit for the healing of man. To take a single instance. The English doctor, Dr. Clifford Albert, has said a very significant thing about the influence of grieving and sadness in human beings upon the development of their digestive organs, and—in particular—upon the kidneys. People who have a lot of trouble and grief in life show signs after a time of malformation of the kidneys, deformed kidneys. This has been very finely demonstrated by the physician Dr. Clifford Albert. That is a finding of natural science.

The important thing is that one should know how to use a scientific discovery like this in educational practice. One must know, as a teacher or educator, that if one lets the child imitate one's own sorrow and grief, then through one's sorrowful bearing one is damaging the child's digestive system to the utmost degree. In so far as we let our sorrow overflow into the child we damage its digestive system. You see, this is the tragedy of this materialistic age, that it discovers many physical facts,—if you take the external aspect, but it lacks the connections between them;—it is this very materialistic science which fails to perceive the significance of the physical and material. What spiritual science can do is to show, on all hands, how spirit and what is spiritual work within the physical realm. Then instead of yearning in dreamy mysticism for castles in the clouds, one will be able to follow up the spirit in all its details and singular workings. For one is a spiritual being only when one recognises spirit as that which creates, as that which everywhere works upon and shapes the material:—not when one worships some abstract spirit in the clouds like a mystic, and for the rest, holds matter to be merely the concern of the material world.

Hence it is actually a matter of coming to realise how in a young child, up to the seventh year, nerve-senses activity, rhythmic breathing and circulation activity, and the activity of movement and metabolism are everywhere interplaying:—only the nerve-senses activity predominates, it has the upper hand; and thus the nerve-senses activity in a child always affects his breathing. If a child has to look at a face that is furrowed with grief, this affects his senses to begin with; but it reacts upon the manner of his breathing, and hence in turn, upon his whole movement and metabolic system.

If we take a child after the change of teeth, that is after about the seventh year, we find the nerve-senses system no longer preponderating; this has now become more separate, more turned towards the outer world. In a child between the change of teeth and puberty it is the rhythmic system which preponderates, which has the upper hand. And it is most important that this should be borne in mind in the primary school. For in the primary school we have children between the change of teeth and puberty. Hence we must know here: the essential thing is to work with the child's rhythmic system, and everything which works upon some-thing other than the rhythmic system is wrong. But now what is it that works upon the rhythmic system? It is art that works upon the rhythmic system, everything that is conveyed in artistic form.

Consider how much everything to do with music is connected with the rhythmic system. Music is nothing else but rhythm carried over into the rhythmic system of the human being himself. The inner man himself becomes a lyre, the inner man becomes a violin. His whole rhythmic system reproduces what the violin has played, what has sounded from the piano. And as in the case of music, so it is also, in a finer, more delicate way, in the case of plastic art, and of painting. Colour harmonies and colour melodies also are reproduced and revived as inner rhythmic processes in the inner man. If our instruction is to be truly educational we must know that throughout this period everything that the child is taught must be conveyed in an artistic form. According to Waldorf School principles the first consideration in the elementary school period is to compose all lessons in a way that appeals to the child's rhythmic system.

How little this is regarded to-day can be seen from the number of excellent scientific observations which are continuously being accumulated and which sin directly against this appeal to the rhythmic system. Research is carried on in experimental psychology to find out how soon a child will tire in one activity or another; and the instruction must take account of this fatigue. This is all very fine, splendid, as long as one does not think spiritually. But if one thinks spiritually the matter appears in a very different light. The experiments can still be made. They are very good. Nothing is said here against the excellence of natural science. But one says: if the child shows a certain degree of fatigue in the period between its change of teeth and puberty, you have not been appealing, as you should do, to the rhythmic system, but to some other system. For throughout life the rhythmic system never tires. Throughout the whole of life the heart beats night and day. It is in his intellectual system and in his metabolic system that a man becomes tired. When we know that we have to appeal to his rhythmic system we know that what we have to do is to work artistically (Manuscript defective.); and the experiments on fatigue show where we have gone wrong, where we have paid too little attention to the rhythmic system. When we find a child has got overtired we must say to ourselves: How can you contrive to plan your lesson so that the child shall not get tired? It is not that one sets up to condemn the modern age and says: natural science is bad, we must oppose it. The spiritual man has no such intention. He says rather: we need the higher outlook because it is just this that makes it possible to apply the results of natural science to life.

If we now turn to the moral aspect, the question is how we can best get the child to develop moral impulses. And here we are dealing with the most important of all educational questions. Now we do not endow a child with moral impulses by giving him commands, by saying: you must do this, this has to be done, this is good,—by wanting to prove to him that a thing is good, and must be done. Or by saying: That is bad, that is wicked, you must not do that,—and by wanting to prove that a certain thing is bad. A child has not as yet the intellectual attitude of an adult towards good and evil, towards the whole world of morality,—he has to grow up to it. And this he will only do on reaching puberty, when the rhythmic system has accomplished its essential task and the intellectual powers are ripe for complete development. Then the human being may experience the satisfaction of forming moral judgment in contact with life itself. We must not engraft moral judgment onto the child. We must so lay the foundation for moral judgment that when the child awakens at puberty he can form his own moral judgment from observation of life.

The last way to attain this is to give finite commands to a child. We can achieve it however if we work by examples, or by presenting pictures to the child's imagination: for instance through biographies or descriptions of good men or bad men; or by inventing circumstances which present a picture, an imagination of goodness to the child's mind. For, since the rhythmic system is particularly active in the child during this period, pleasure and displeasure can arise in him, not judgment as to good and evil,—but sympathy with the good which the child beholds presented in an image,—or antipathy to the evil which he beholds so presented. It is not a case of appealing to the child's intellect, of saying ‘Thou shalt’ or ‘Thou shalt not,’ but of fostering aesthetic judgment, so that the child shall begin to take pleasure in goodness, shall feel sympathy when he sees goodness, and feel dislike and antipathy when he beholds evil. This is a very different thing from working on the intellect, by way of precepts formulated by the intellect. For the child will only be awake for such precepts when it is no longer our business to educate him, namely, when he is a man and learns from life itself. And we should not rob the child of the satis-faction of awakening to morality of his own accord. And we shall not do this if we give him the right preparation during the rhythmic period of his life; if we train him to take an aesthetic pleasure in goodness, an aesthetic dislike of evil; that is, if also here, we work through imagery.

Otherwise, when the child awakens after puberty he will feel an inward bondage, He will not perhaps realise this bondage consciously, but throughout his subsequent life he will lack the important experience: morality has awakened within me, moral judgment has developed. We cannot attain this inner satisfaction by means of abstract moral instruction, it must be rightly prepared by working in this manner for the child's morality.

Thus it is everywhere a case of ‘how’ a thing is done. And we can see this both in that part of life which is concerned with the external world and that part of life concerned with morality: both when we study the realm of nature in the best way, and when we know how best morals can be laid down in, the rhythmic system—in the system of breathing and blood circulation. If we know how to enter with the spirit into what is physical, and if we can come to observe how spirit weaves continuously in the physical, we shall be able to educate in the right way.

While a knowledge of man is sought in the erst instance for the art of education and instruction, yet in practice the effect of such a spiritual outlook on the teacher's or educator's state of mind is of the greatest importance. And what this is can best be shown in relation to the attitude of many of our contemporaries.

Every age has its shadow side, no doubt, and there is much in past ages we have no wish to revive; nevertheless anyone who can look upon the historical life of man with certain intuitive sense will perceive that in this our own age many men have very little inner joy, on the contrary they are beset by heavy doubts and questions as to destiny. This age has less capacity than any other for deriving answers to its problems from out of the universe, the world at large. Though I may be very unhappy in myself, and with good reason, yet there is always a possibility of finding something in the universe which can counterbalance my unhappiness. But modern man has not the strength to find consolation in a view of the universe when his personal situation makes him downcast. Why is this? Because in his education and development modern man has little opportunity to acquire a feeling of gratitude: gratitude namely that we should be alive at all as human beings within this universe. Rightly speaking all our feelings should take their rise from a fundamental feeling of gratitude that the cosmic world has given us birth and given us a place within itself. A philosophy which concludes with abstract observations and does not flow out in gratitude towards the universe is no complete philosophy. The final chapter of every philosophy, in its effect on human feeling at all events, should be gratitude towards the cosmic powers. This feeling is essential in a teacher and educator, and it should be instinctive in every person who has the nurture of a child entrusted to him. Therefore the first thing of importance to be striven for in spiritual knowledge is the acquiring of thankfulness that a child has been given into our keeping by the universe.

In this respect reverence for the child, reverence and thankfulness, are not to be sundered. There is only one attitude towards a child which can give us the right impulse in education and nurture and that is the religious attitude, neither more nor less. We feel religious in regard to many things. A flower in the meadow can make us feel religious when we can take it as the creation of the divine spiritual order of the world. In face of lightning lashes in the clouds we feel religious if we see them in relation to the divine spiritual order of the world. And above all we must feel religious towards the child, for it comes to us from the depths of the universe as the highest manifestation of the nature of the universe, a bringer of tidings as to what the world is. In this mood lies one of the most important impulses of educational technique. Educational technique is of a different nature from the technique devoted to un-spiritual things. Educational technique essentially involves a religious moral impulse in the teacher or educator.

Now you will perhaps say: nowadays, although people are so terribly objective in regard to many things—things possibly of less vital importance—nowadays we shall yet find some who will think it a tragic thing that they should have a religious feeling for a child who may turn out to be a ne'er-do-well. But why must I regard it as a tragedy to have a child who turns out a ne'er-do-well?—To-day, as we said before, there are many parents, even in this terribly objective age, who will own that their children are ne'er-do-wells whereas this was not the case in former times; then every child was good in its parents' eyes. At all events this was a better attitude than the modern one.—Nevertheless we do get a feeling of tragedy if we receive as a gift from spiritual worlds, and as a manifestation of the highest, a difficult child. But we must live through this feeling of tragedy. For this very feeling of tragedy will help us over the rocks and crags of education. If we can feel thankfulness even for a naughty child, and feel the tragedy of it, and can rouse ourselves to overcome this feeling of tragedy we shall then be in a position to feel a right gratitude to the divine world; for we must learn to perceive how what is bad can also be a divine thing,—though this is a very complicated matter. Gratitude must permeate teachers and educators of children throughout the period up to the change of teeth, it must be their fundamental mood.

Then we come to that part of a child's development which is based principally on the rhythmic system, in which, as we have seen, we must work artistically in education. This we shall never achieve unless we can join to the religious attitude we have towards the child a love of our educational activity; we must saturate our educational practice with love. Between the Change of Teeth and Puberty nothing that is not born of Love for the Educational Deed itself has any effect on the child. We must say to ourselves with regard to the child: clever a teacher or educator may be, the child reveals to us in his life infinitely significant spiritual and divine things. But we, on our part, must surround with love the spiritual deed we do for the child in education. Hence there must be no pedagogy and didactics of a purely intellectual kind, but only such guidance as can help the teacher to carry out his education with loving enthusiasm.

In the Waldorf School what a teacher is is far more important than any technical ability he may have acquired in an intellectual way. The important thing is that the teacher should not only be able to love the child but to love the method he uses, to love his whole procedure. Only to love the children does not suffice for a teacher. To love teaching, to love educating, and love it with objectivity—this constitutes the spiritual foundation of spiritual, moral and physical education. And if we can acquire this right love for education, for teaching, we shall be able so to develop the child up to the age of puberty that by that time we can really hand him over to freedom, to the free use of his own intelligence.

If we have received the child in religious reverence, if we have educated him in love up to the time of puberty, then our proper course after this will be to leave the youth's spirit free, and to hold intercourse with him on terms of equality. We aim,—that is not to touch the spirit but to let it be awakened. When the child reaches puberty we shall best attain our aim of giving the child over to free use of his intellectual and spiritual powers if we respect the spirit and say to ourselves: you can remove hindrances from the spirit, physical hindrances and also, up to a point, hindrances of the soul. What the spirit has to learn it learns because you have removed the impediments. If we remove impediments the spirit will develop in contact with life itself even in very early youth. Our rightful place as educators is to be removers of hindrances.

Hence we must see to it that we do not make the children into copies of ourselves, that we do not seek forcibly and tyrannically to perpetuate what was in ourselves in those who in the natural course of things develop beyond us. Each child in every age brings something new into the world from divine regions, and it is our task as educators to remove bodily and psychical obstacles out of its way; to remove hindrances so that his spirit may enter in full freedom into life. These then must be regarded as the three golden rules of the art of education, rules which must imbue the teacher's whole attitude and all the impulse of his work. The golden rules which must be embraced by the teacher's whole being, not held as theory, are: reverent gratitude to the world in the person of the child which we contemplate every day, for the child presents a problem set us by divine worlds: Thankfulness to the universe. Love for what we have to do with the child. Respect for the freedom of the child—a freedom we must not endanger; for it is to this freedom we educate the child, that he may stand in freedom in the world at our side.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The importance for the educator of knowing man as a whole is seen particularly clearly when we observe the development of boys and girls between their eleventh and twelfth years. Usually only what we might call the grosser changes are observed, the grosser metamorphoses of human nature, and we have no eye for the finer changes. Hence we believe we can benefit the child simply by thinking: what bodily movements should the child make to become physically strong P But if we want to make the child's body strong, capable and free from cramping repressions we must reach the body during childhood by way of the soul and spirit.

Between the 11th and 12th year a very great change takes place in the human being. The rhythmic system—breathing system and system of blood circulation—is dominant between the change of teeth and puberty. When the child is nearly ten years old the beat and rhythm of the blood circulation and breathing system begin to develop and pass into the muscular system. The muscles become saturate with blood and the blood pulses through the muscles in intimate response to man's inner nature—to his own heart. So that between his 9th and 11th years the human being builds up his own rhythmic system in the way which corresponds to its inner disposition. When the 11th or 12th year is reached, then what is within the rhythmic system and muscular system passes over into the bone system, into the whole skeleton. Up to the 11th year the bone system is entirely embedded in the muscular system. It conforms to the muscular system. Between the 11th and 12th years the skeleton adapts itself to the outer world. A mechanic and dynamic which is independent of the human being passes into the skeleton. We must accustom ourselves to treating the skeleton as though it were an entirely objective thing, not concerned with man.

If you observe children under eleven years old you will see that all their movements still come out of their inner being. If you observe children of over 12 years old you will see from the way they step how they are trying to find their balance, how they are inwardly adapting themselves to the leverage and balance, to the mechanical nature of the skeletal system. This means: Between the 11th and 12th year the soul and spirit nature reaches as far as the bone-.system. Before this the soul and spirit nature is much more inward. And only now that he has taken hold on that remotest part of his humanity, the bone-system, does man's adaptation to the outer world become complete. Only now is man a true child of the world, only now must he live with the mechanic and dynamic of the world, only now does he experience what is called Causality in life. Before his 11th year a human being has in reality no understanding of cause and effect. He hears the words used. We think he under-stands them. But he does not, because he is controlling his bone system from out of his muscular system. Later, after the 12th year, the bone system, which is adjusting itself to the outer world, dominates the muscular system, and through it, influences spirit and soul. And in consequence man now gets an understanding of cause and effect based on inner experience,—an understanding of force, and of his own experience of the perpendicular, the horizontal, etc.

For this reason, you see, when we teach the child mineralogy, physics, chemistry, mechanics before his 11th year in too intellectual a way we harm his development, for he cannot as yet have a corresponding experience of the mechanical and dynamical within his whole being. Neither, before his 11th year can he inwardly participate in thy causal connections in history.

Now this enlightens us as to how we should treat the soul in children, before the bone system has awakened. While the child still dwells in his muscular system, through the intermediary of his blood system, he can inwardly experience biography; he can always participate when we bring before him some definite historical picture which can please or displease him, and with which he can feel sympathy or antipathy. Or when we give him a picture of the earth in the manner I described yesterday. He can grasp in picture everything that belongs to the plant kingdom, because his muscular system is plastic, is inwardly mobile. Or if we show him what I said of the animal kingdom, and how it dwells in man—the child can go along with it because his muscular system is soft. But if before his 11th year we teach the child the principle of the lever or of the steam engine he can experience nothing of it inwardly because as yet he has no dynamic or mechanic in his own body, in his physical nature. When we begin physics, mechanics and dynamics at the right time with the child, namely about his 11th or 12th year, what we present to him in thought goes into his head and it is met by what comes from his inner being,—the experience the child has of his own bone-system. And what we say to the child unites with the impulse and experience which comes from the child's body. Thus there arises, not an abstract, intellectual understanding, but a psychic understanding, an understanding in the soul. And it is this we must aim at.

But what of the teacher who has to make this endeavour? What must he be like? Suppose for example, a teacher knows from his anatomy and physiology that “the muscle is in that place, the bones here; the nerve cells look like this”:—it is all very fine, put it is intellectual; all this leaves the child out of account, the child is, as it were, impermeable to our vision. The child is like black coal, untransparent. We know what muscles and nerves are there; we know all that. But we do not know how the circulation system plays into the blood system, into the bone-system. To know that, our conception of the build of a human being, of man's inner configuration must be that of an artist. And the teacher must be in a position to experience the child artistically, to see him as an artist would. Everything within the child must be inwardly mobile to him.

Now, the philosopher will come and say: “Well, if a thing is to be known it must be logical.” Quite right, but logical after the manner of a work of art, which can be an inner artistic representation of the world we have before us. We must accept such an inward artistic conceiving—we must not dogmatise: The world shall only be conceived logically. All the teacher's ideas and feelings must be go mobile that he can realise: If I give the child ideas of dynamics and mechanics before his 11th year they clog his brain, they congest, and make the brain hard, so that it develops migraine in the latter years of youth, and later still will harden;—if I give the child separate historical pictures or stories before his 11th year, if I give him pictures of the plant kingdom which shows the plants in connection with the country-side where they grow, these ideas go into his brain, but they go in by way of the rest of his nervous system into his whole body. They unite with the whole body, with the soft muscular system. I build up lovingly what is at work within the child. The teacher now sees into the child, what to one who only knows anatomy and physiology is opaque black coal now becomes transparent. The teacher sees everything, sees what goes on in the rows of children facing him at their desks, what goes on in the single child. He does not need to cogitate and have recourse to some didactic rule or other, the child himself shows him what needs to be done with it. The child leans back in his chair when something has been done which is unsuitable to him; he becomes inattentive. When you do something right for the child he becomes lively.

Nevertheless one will sometimes have great trouble in controlling the children's liveliness. You will succeed in controlling it if you possess a thing not sufficiently appreciated in this connection, namely humour. The teacher must bring humour into the class room as he enters the door. Some-times children can be very naughty. A teacher in the Waldorf School found a class of older children, children over 12 years old, suddenly become inattentive to the lesson and begin writing to one another under their desks. Now a teacher without humour might get cross at this, mightn't he? There would be a great scene. But what did our Waldorf School teacher do? He went along with the children, and explained to them the nature of—the postal service. And the children saw that he understood them. He entered right into this matter of their mutual correspondence. They felt slightly ashamed, and order was restored.

The fact is, no art of any kind can be mastered without humour, especially the art of dealing with human beings. This means that part of the art of education is the elimination of ill-humour and crossness from the teachers, and the development of friendliness and a love full of humour and fantasy for the children, so that the children may not see portrayed in their teacher the very thing he is forbidding them to be. On no account must it happen in a class that when a child breaks out in anger the teacher says: I will beat this anger out of you! That is a most terrible thing! And he seizes the inkpot and hurls it to the ground where it smashes. This is not a way to remove anger from a child. Only when you show the child that his anger is a mere object, that for you it hardly exists, it is a thing to be treated with humour, then only will you be acting educationally.

Up till now I have been describing how the human being is to be understood in general by the teacher or educator. But man is not only something in general. And even if we can enter into the human being in such detail that the very activity of the muscular system before the 11th year is transparent to us, and that of the bone system after the 11th year, there will yet remain something else—a thing of extraordinary vitality where education is an art—namely the human individuality. Every child is a different being, and what I have hitherto described only constitutes the very first step in the artistic comprehension and knowledge of the child.

We must be able to enter more and more into what is personal and individual. We are helped provisionally by the fact that the children we have to educate are differentiated according to temperaments. A true understanding of temperaments has, from the very first, held a most important place in the education I am here describing, the education practised at the Waldorf School.

Let us take to begin with the melancholic child; a particular human type. What is he like? He appears externally a quiet, withdrawn child. But these outward characteristics are not much help to us. We only begin to comprehend the child with a disposition to melancholy when we realise that the melancholic child is most powerfully affected by its purely bodily, physical nature; when we know that the melancholy is due to an intense depositing of salt in the organism. This causes the child of melancholic temperament to feel weighed down in his physical organism. For a melancholic child to raise a leg or an arm is quite a different matter than for another child. There are hindrances, impediments to this raising of the leg or arm. A feeling of weight opposes the intention of the soul. Thus it gradually comes about that the child of melancholic disposition turns inward and does not take to the outside world with any pleasure, because his body obtrudes upon his attention, because he is so much concerned with his own body. We only gain the right approach to a melancholic child when we know how his soul which would soar, and his spirit which would range are burdened by bodily deposits continuously secreted by the glands, which permeate his other bodily movements and encumber his body. We can only help him when we rightly understand this encroaching heaviness of the body which takes the attention prisoner.

It is often said: Well, a melancholic child broods inwardly, he is quiet and moves little. And so one purposely urges him to take in lively ideas. One seeks to heal a thing by its opposite. One's treatment of the melancholic is to try and enliven him by telling him all sorts of amusing things. This is a completely false method. We can never reach the melancholic child in this way.

We must be able, through our sympathy and sympathetic comprehension of his bodily gravity, to approach the child m the mood which is his own. Thus we must give him, not lively and, comical ideas, but serious ideas like those which he produces himself. We must give him many things which are in harmony with the tone of his own weighted organism.

Further, in an education such as this, we must have patience; the effect is not seen from one day to the next, but it takes years. And the way it works is that when the child is given from outside what he has within himself he arouses in himself healing powers of resistance. If we bring him something quite alien, if we bring comic things to a serious child—he will remain indifferent to the comic things. But if we confront him outwardly with his own sorrow and trouble and care he perceives from this outward meeting what he has in himself. And this calls out the inner action, the opposite. And we heal pedagogically by following in modern form the ancient golden rule: Not only can like be known by like, like can be treated and healed by like.

Now when we consider the child of a more phlegmatic temperament we must realise: this child of more phlegmatic temperament dwells less in his physical body and more in what I have called, in my descriptions here, the etheric body, a more volatile body. He dwells in his etheric body. It may seem a strange thing to say about the phlegmatic child that he dwells in his etheric body, but so it is. The etheric body prevents the processes of man's organic functions, his digestion, and growth, from coming into his head. It is not in the power of the phlegmatic child to get ideas of what is going on in his body. His head becomes inactive. His body becomes ever more and more active by virtue of the volatile element which tends to scatter his functions abroad in the world. A phlegmatic child is entirely given up to the world. He is absorbed into the world. He lives very little in himself hence he meets what we try to do with him with a certain indifference. We cannot reach the child because immediate access to him must be through the' senses. The principle senses are in the head. The phlegmatic child can make little use of his head. The rest of his organism functions through interplay with the outer world.

Once again, as in the case of the melancholic child, we can only reach the phlegmatic child when we can turn ourselves into phlegmatics of some sort at his side, when we can transpose ourselves, as artists, into his phlegmatic mood. Then the child has at his side what he is in himself, and in good time what he has beside him seems too boring. Even the phlegmatic finds it too boring to have a phlegmatic for a teacher at his side! And if we have patience we shall presently see how something lights up in the phlegmatic child if we give him ideas steeped in phlegma, and tell him phlegmatically of indifferent events.

Now the sanguine child is particularly difficult to handle. The sanguine child is one in whom the activity of the rhythmic system predominates in a marked degree. The rhythmic system, which is the dominant factor between the change of teeth and puberty, exercises too great a dominion over the sanguine child. Hence the sanguine child always wants to hasten from impression to impression. His blood circulation is hampered if the impressions do not change quickly. He feels inwardly cramped if impressions do not quickly pass and give way to others. So we can say: The sanguine child feels an inner constriction when he has to attend long to anything; he feels he cannot dwell on it, he turns away to quite other thoughts. It is hard to hold him.

Once more the treatment of the sanguine child is similar to that of the others: one must not try to heal the sanguine child by forcing him to dwell a long time on one impression, one must do the opposite. Meet the sanguine nature, change impressions vigorously and see to it that the child has to take in impression after impression in rapid succession. Once again, a reaction will be called into play. And this cannot fail to take the form of antipathy to the hurrying impressions, for the system of circulation here dominates entirely. With the result that the child himself is slowed down.

The choleric child has to be treated in yet a different way. The characteristic of the choleric child is that he is a stage behind the normal in his development. This may seem strange. Let us take an illustration. A normal child of 8 or 9 of any type moves his limbs quickly or slowly in response to outer impressions. But compare the 8 or 9-year old child with a child of 3 or 4 years. The 3- or 4-year old child still trips and dances through life, he controls his movements far less. He still retains something of the baby within him. A baby does not control its movements at all, it kicks—its mental powers are not developed. But if tiny babies all had a vigorous mental development you would find them all to be cholerics. Kicking babies—and the healthier they are the more they kick—kicking babies are all choleric. A choleric child comes from a body made restless by choler.

Now the choleric child still retains something of the rompings and ragings of a tiny baby. Hence the baby lives on in the choleric child of 8 or 9, the choleric boy or girl. This is the reason the child is choleric and we must treat the child by trying gradually to subdue the “baby” within him.

In the doing of this, humour is essential. For when we confront a real choleric of 8, 9, 10 years or even older, we shall affect nothing with him by admonition. But if I get him to re-tell me a story I have told him, which requires a show of great choler and much pantomime, so that he feels the baby in himself, this will have [For further descriptions of the alternation between sympathy and antipathy in children and its place in education see Steiner's educational writings passim.] the effect little by little of calming this “tiny baby.” He adapts it to the stage of his own mind. And when I act the choleric towards the choleric child—naturally, of course, with humour and complete self-control—the choleric child at my side will grow calmer. When the teacher begins to dance—but please do not misunderstand me—the raging of the child near him gradually subsides. But one must avoid having either a red face or a long face when dealing with a choleric child, one must enter into this inner raging by means of artistic sensibility. You will see the child will become quieter and quieter. This utterly subdues the inner raging.

But there must be nothing artificial in all this. If there is anything forced or inartistic in what the teacher gives the child it will have no result. The teacher must indeed have artist's blood in him so that what he enacts in front of the child shall have verisimilitude and can be accepted unquestioningly; otherwise it is a false thing in the teacher, and that must not be. The teacher's relation to the child must be absolutely true and genuine.

Now when we enter into the temperaments in this manner it helps us also to keep a class in order, even quite a large one. The Waldorf teacher studies the temperaments of the children confided to him. He knows: I have melancholies, phlegmatics, sanguines and cholerics. He places the melancholies together, unobtrusively, without its being noticed of course. He knows he has them in this corner. Now he places the cholerics together, he knows he has them in that corner; similarly with the sanguinis and the phlegmatics. By means of this social treatment those of like temperament rub each other's corners off reciprocally. For example the melancholic becomes cheerful when he sits among melancholies. As for the cholerics, they heal each other thoroughly, for it is the very best thing to let the cholerics work off their choler upon one another. If bruises are received, mutually it has an exceedingly sobering effect. So that by a right social treatment the—shall we say—hidden relationship between man and man can be brought into a healthy solution.

And if we have enough sense of humour to send out a boy when he is overwrought and in a rage—into the garden, and see to it that he climbs trees and scrambles about until he is colossally tired,—when he comes in again he will have worked off his choleric temper on himself and in company with nature. When he has worked off what is in him by overcoming obstacles, he will come back to us, after a little while, calmed down.

Now the point is, you see, to come by way of the temperaments into ever closer and closer touch with the individuality of the child, his personality. To-day many people say you must educate individually. Yes, but first you must discover the individual. First you must know man; next you must know the melancholic—Actually the melancholic is never a pure melancholic, the temperaments are always mixed. One temperament is dominant—But only when you rightly understand the temperament can you find your way to the individuality.

Now this shows you indeed that the art of education is a thing that must be learned intimately. People to-day do not start criticising a clock—at least I have not heard it—they do not set up to criticise the works of a clock. Why? Because they do not understand it, they do not know the inner working of a clock. Thus you seldom hear criticism of the working of a clock in ordinary conversation. But criticism of education—you hear it on all hands. And frequently it is as though people were to talk of the works of a clock of which they haven't the slightest inkling. But people do not believe that education must be intimately learned, and that it is not enough to say in the abstract: we must educate the individuality. We must erst be able to find the individuality by going intimately through a knowledge of man and a knowledge of the different dispositions and temperaments. Then gradually we shall draw near to what is entirely individual in man. And this must become a principle of life, particularly for the artist teacher or educator.

Everything depends upon the contact between teacher and child being permeated by an artistic element. This will bring it about that much that a teacher has to do at any moment with an individual child comes to him intuitively, almost instinctively. Let us take a concrete illustration for the sake of clarity. Suppose we find difficulty in educating a certain child because all the images we bring to him, the impressions we seek to arouse, the ideas we would impart, set up so strong a circulation in his head system and cause such a disturbance to his nervous system that what we give him cannot escape from the head into the rest of his organism. The physical organism of his head becomes in a way partially melancholic. The child finds it difficult to lead over what he sees, feels or otherwise experiences, from his head to the rest of his organism. What is learned gets stuck, as it were, in the head. It cannot penetrate down into the rest of the organism. An artist in educating will instinctively keep such a thing in view in all his specifically artistic work with the child. If I have such a child I shall use colours and paint with him in quite a different way than with other children. Because it is of such importance, special attention is given to the element of colour in the Waldorf School from the very beginning. I have already explained the principle of the painting; but within' the painting lesson one can treat each child individually. We have an opportunity of working individually with the child because he has to do everything himself.

Now suppose I have by me such a child as I described. I am taking the painting lesson. If there is the right artistic contact between teacher and child—under my guidance this child will produce quite a different painting from another child.

I will draw you roughly on the black-board what should come on the paper painted on by the child whose ideas are stuck in his head. Something of this sort should arise:

Here a spot of this colour (yellow), then further on a spot of some such colour as this (orange), for we have to keep in mind the harmony of colours. Next comes a transition (violet), the transition may be further differentiated, and in order to make an outer limit the whole may be enclosed with blue. This is what we shall get on the paper of a child whose ideas are congested in his head.

Now suppose I have another child whose ideas, far from sticking in his head, sift through his head as through a sieve; where everything goes into the body, and the child grasps nothing because his head is like a sieve—it has holes, it lets things through. It sifts everything down. One must be able to feel that in the case of this child the circulation system of the other part of the organism wants to suck everything into itself.

Then instinctively, intuitively, it will occur to one to get the child to do something quite different. In the case of such a child you will get something of this sort on the painting paper; You will observe how much less the colours go into curves, or rounded forms; rather you will find the colours tend to be drawn out, painting is approximating to drawing, we get loops which are proper to drawing. You will also notice that the colours are not much differentiated; here (in the first drawing) they are strongly differentiated: here in this one they are very little differentiated.

If one carries this out with real colours—and not with the nauseating substance of chalk, which cannot give an idea of the whole thing—then through the experience of pure colour in the one case, and of more formed colour in the other, one will be able to work back upon the characteristics of the child which I described.

Similarly when you go into the gymnasium with a boy or girl whose ideas stick in his head and will not come out of it, your aim will be different from that with which yon would go into it with a child whose head is like a sieve, who lets everything through into the rest of his body and into the circulation of the rest of his body. You take both kinds of children into the gymnasium with you. You get the one kind,—whose heads are like a sieve, where everything falls through—to alternate their gymnastic exercises with recitation or singing. The other gymnastic—group—those whose ideas are stuck fast in their heads—should be got to do their movements as far as possible in silence. Thus you make a bridge between bodily training and psychic characteristics from out the very nature of the child himself. A child which has stockish ideas must be got to do gymnastics differently from the child whose ideas go through his head like a sieve.

Such a thing as this shows how enormously important it is to compose the education as a whole. It is a horrible thing when first the teacher instructs the children in class and then they are sent off to the gymnasium—and the gymnastic teacher knows nothing of what has gone on in class and follows his own scheme in the gymnastic lesson. The gymnastic lesson must follow absolutely and entirely upon what one has experienced with the children in class. So that actually in the Waldorf School the endeavour has been as far as possible to entrust to one teacher even supplementary lessons in the lower classes, and certainly everything which concerns the general development of the human being.

This makes very great demands upon the staff, especially where art teaching is concerned; it demands, also, the most willing and loving devotion. But in no other way can we attain a wholesome, healing human development.

Now, in the following lectures I shall show you on the one hand certain plastic, painted figures made in the studio at Dornach, so as to acquaint you better with Eurhythmy—that art of movement which is so intimately connected with the whole of man. The figures bring out the colours and forms of eurhythmy and something of its inner nature. On the other hand I shall speak tomorrow upon the painting and other artistic work done by the younger and older children in the Waldorf School.

When we speak of organisation to-day we commonly imply that something is to be organised, to be arranged. But in speaking of the organisation of the Waldorf School I do not and cannot mean it in this sense, for really one can only organise something which has a mechanical nature. One can organise the arrangements in a factory where the parts are bound into a whole by the ideas which one has put into it. The whole exists and one must accept it as an organism. It must be studied. One must learn to know its arrangements as an organism, as an organisation.

A school such as the Waldorf School is an organism in this sense, as a matter of course,—but it cannot be organised, as I said before in the sense of making a program laying down in paragraphs how the school shall be run: Sections: 1, 2, 3, etc. As I said, I am fully convinced—and I speak without irony—that in these days if five or twelve people sit down together they can work out an ideal school plan, not to be improved upon, people are so intelligent and clever nowadays: Paragraphs 1, 2, etc., up to 12 and so on; the only question which arises is: can it be carried out in practice? And it would very soon be apparent that one can make charming programs, but actually when one founds a school one has to deal with a finished organism.

This school, then, comprises a staff of teachers; and they are not moulded out of wax. Your section 1 or section 5 would perhaps lay down: the teacher shall be such and such. But the staff is not composed of something to be moulded like wax, one has to seek out each single teacher and take him with the faculties which he has. Above all it is necessary to understand what these faculties are. One must know to start with, whether he is a good elementary teacher or a good teacher for higher classes. It is as necessary to under-stand the individual teacher as it is, in the human organism, to understand the nose or the ear if one is to accomplish something. It is not a question of having theoretical principles and rules, but of meeting reality as it comes. If teachers could be kneaded out of wax then one could make programs. But this cannot be done. Thus the first reality to reckon with is the college of teachers. And this one must know intimately. Thus it is the fundamental principle of the organisation of the Waldorf School that, since I am the director and spiritual adviser to the Waldorf School, I must know the college of teachers intimately, in all its single members, I must know each single individuality.

The second thing is the children, and here at the start we were faced with certain practical difficulties in the Waldorf School. For the Waldorf School was founded in Stuttgart by Emil Molt from the midst of the emotions and impulses of the years 1918 and 1919, after the end of the war. It was founded, in the first place as a social act. One saw that there was not much to be done with adults as far as social life was concerned; they came to an understanding for a few weeks in middle Europe after the end of the war. After that, they fell back on the views of their respective classes. So the idea arose of doing something for the next generation. And since it happened that Emil Molt was an industrialist in Stuttgart, we had no need to go from house to house canvassing for children, we received the children of the workers in his factory. Thus, at the beginning, the children we received from Molt's factory, about 150 of them, were essentially proletarian children. These 150 children were supplemented by almost all the anthroposophical children in Stuttgart and the neighbourhood; so that we had something like 200 children to work with at the beginning.

This situation brought it about that the school was practically speaking a school for all classes (Einheitschule). For we had a foundation of proletarian children, and the anthroposophical children were mostly not proletarian, but of every status from the lowest to the highest. Thus any distinctions of class or status were ruled out in the Waldorf School by its very social composition. And the aim through-out has been, and will continue to be, solely to take account of what is universally human. In, the Waldorf School what is considered is the educational principles and no difference is made in their application between a child of the proletariat and a child of the ex-Kaiser—supposing it to have sought entry into the school. Only pedagogic and didactic principles count, and will continue to count. Thus from the very first, the Waldorf School was conceived as a general school.

But this naturally involved certain difficulties, for the proletarian child brings different habits with him into the school from those of children of other status. And these contrasts actually turned—out to be exceedingly beneficial, apart from a few small matters which could be got over with a little trouble. What these things were you can easily imagine; they are mostly concerned with habits of life, and often it is not easy to rid the children of all they bring with them into the school. Although even this can be achieved if one sets about it with good will. Nevertheless, many children of the so-called upper classes, unaccustomed to having this or that upon them, would sometimes carry home the unpleasant thing, whereupon unpleasant comments would be made by their parents.

Well, as I said, here on the other hand were the children. These were what I might call the tiny difficulties. A greater difficulty arose from the fact that the ideal of the Waldorf School was to educate purely in accordance with knowledge of man, to give the child week by week, what the child's own nature demanded.

In the first instance we arranged the Waldorf School as an elementary school of 8 classes, so that we had in it children from 6 or 7 to 14 or 15 years old. Now these children came to us at the beginning from all kinds of different schools. They came with previous attainments of the most varied kinds; certainly not always such as we should have considered suitable for a child of 8 or 11 years old. So that during the first year we could not count on being able to carry out our ideal of education; nor could we proceed according to plan: 1, 2, etc., but we had to proceed in accordance with the individualities of the children we had in each particular class. Nevertheless this would only have been a minor difficulty. The greater difficulty is this, that no method of education however ideal it is must tear a man out of his connections in life. The human being is not an abstract thing to be put through an education and finished with, a human being is the child of particular parents. He has grown up as the product of the social order. And after his education he must enter this social order again. You see, if you wanted to educate a child strictly in accordance with an idea, when he was 14 or 15 he would no doubt be very ideal, but he would not find his place in modern life, he would be quite at sea. Thus it was not merely a question of carrying out an ideal, nor is it so now in the Waldorf School. The point is so to educate the child that he remains in touch with present-day life, with the social order of to-day. And here there is no sense in saying: the present social order is bad. Whether it be good or bad, we simply have to live in it. And this is the point, we have to live in it and hence we must not simply withdraw the children from it. Thus I was faced with the exceedingly difficult task of carrying out an educational idea on the one hand while on the other hand keeping fully in touch with present-day life.

Naturally the education officers regarded what was done in other schools as a kind of ideal. It is true they always said: one cannot attain the ideal, one can only do one's best under the circumstances. Life demands this or that of us. But one finds in actual practice when one has dealings with them that they regard all existing arrangements set up either by state authorities or other authorities as exceptionally good, and look upon an institution such as the Waldorf School as a kind of crank hobby, a vagary, something made by a person a little touched in the head.

Well you know, one can often let a crank school like this carry on and just see what comes of it. And in any case it has to be reckoned with. So I endeavoured to come to terms with them through the following compromise. In a memorandum, I asked to he allowed three years grace to try out my ‘vagary,’ the children at the end of that time, to be sufficiently advanced to be able to enter ordinary schools. Thus I worked out a memorandum showing how the children when they had been taken to the end of the third elementary class, namely in their 9th year, should have accomplished a certain stage, and should be capable of entering the 4th class in another school. But during the intermediate time, I said, I wanted absolute freedom to give the children week by week, what was requisite according to a knowledge of man. And then I requested to have freedom once more from the 9th to the 12th year. At the end of the 12th year the children should have again reached a stage such as would enable them to enter an ordinary school; and the same thing once again on their leaving school. Similarly with regard to the children,—I mean, of course, the young ladies and gentlemen—who would be leaving school to enter college, a university or any other school for higher education: from the time of puberty to the time for entering college there should be complete freedom: but by that time they should be far enough advanced to be able to pass into any college or university—for naturally it will be a long time before the Free High School at Dornach will be recognised as giving a qualification for passing out into life.

This arrangement to run parallel with the organisation of ordinary schools was an endeavour to accord our own intentions and convictions with things as they are, to make a certain harmony. For there is nothing unpractical about the Waldorf School, on the contrary, on every point this ‘vagary’ aims at realising things which have a practical application to life.

Hence also, there is no question of constructing the school on the lines of some bad invention—then indeed it would be a construction, not an organisation,—but it is truly a case of studying week by week the organism that is there. Then an observer of human nature—and this includes child nature—will actually light upon the most concrete educational measures from month to month. As a doctor does not say at the very first examination everything that must be done for his patient, but needs to keep him under observation because the human being is an organism, so much the more in such an organism as a school must one make a continuous study. For it can very well happen that owing to the nature of the staff and children in 1920—say—one will proceed in a manner quite different from one's procedure with the staff and children one has in 1924. For it may be that the staff has increased and so quite changed, and the children will certainly be quite different. In face of this situation the neatest possible sections 1 to 12 would be of no use. Experience gained day by day in the classroom is the only thing that counts.

Thus the heart of the Waldorf School, if I speak of its organisation, is the teachers' staff meeting. These staff meetings are held periodically, and when I can be in Stuttgart they are held under my guidance, but in other circumstances they are held at frequent intervals. Here, before the assembled staff, every teacher throughout the school will discuss the experiences he has in his class in all detail. Thus these constant staff meetings tend to make the school into an organism in the same way as the human body is an organism by virtue of its heart. Now what matters in these staff meetings is not so much the principles but the readiness of all teachers to live together in goodwill, and the abstention from any form of rivalry. And it matters supremely that a suggestion made to another teacher only proves helpful when one has the right love for every single child. And by this I do not mean the kind of love which is often spoken about, but the love which belongs to an artistic teacher.

Now this love has a different nuance from ordinary love. Neither is it the same as the sympathy one can feel for a sick man, as a man, though this is a love of humanity. But in order to treat a sick man one must also be able—and here please do not misunderstand me—one must also be able to love the illness. One must be able to speak of a beautiful illness. Naturally for the patient it is very bad, but for him who has to treat it it is a beautiful illness. It can even in certain circumstances be a magnificent illness. It may be very bad indeed for the patient but for the man whose task it is to enter into it and to treat it lovingly it can be a magnificent illness. Similarly, a boy who is a thorough ne'er-do-well (a ‘Strick’ as we say in German) by his very roguery, his way of being bad, of being a ne'er-do-well can be sometimes so extraordinarily interesting, that one can love him extraordinarily. For instance, we have in the Waldorf School a very interesting case, a very abnormal boy. He has been at the Waldorf School from the beginning, he came straight into the erst class. His characteristic was that he would run at a teacher as soon as he had turned his back, and give him a bang. The teacher treated this rascal with extraordinary love and extraordinary interest. He fondled him, led him back to his place, gave no sign of having noticed that he had been banged from behind. One can only treat this child by taking into consideration his whole heredity and environment. One has to know the parental milieu in which he has grown up, and one must know his pathology. Then, in spite of his rascality one can effect something with him, especially if one can love this form of rascality. There is something lovable about a person who is quite exceptionally rascally.

A teacher has to look upon these things in a different way from the average person. Thus it is very important for him to develop this special love I have spoken of. Then in the staff meeting one can say something to the point. For nothing helps one so much in dealing with normal children as to have observed abnormal children.

You see healthy children are comparatively hard to study for in them every characteristic is toned down. One does not so easily see how it stands with a certain characteristic and what relation it has to others. In an abnormal child, where one character complex predominates one very soon finds the, way to treat this particular character complex, even if it involves a pathological treatment. And this experience can be applied to normal children.

Such then, is the organisation; and such as it is it has brought credit to the Waldorf School in so far as the number of children has rapidly increased; whereas we began the school with about 200 children we now have nearly 700. And these children are of all classes, so that the Waldorf School is now organised as a general school [‘Einbeitschule.’] in the best sense of the word. For most of the classes, particularly in the lower classes, we have had to arrange parallel classes because we received too many children for a single class; thus we have a first class A, and a first class B and so on. This has made, naturally, increasingly great demands on the Waldorf School. For where the whole organisation is to be conceived from out of what life presents, every new child modifies its nature; and the organism with this new member requires a fresh handling and a further study of man.

The arrangement in the Waldorf School is that the main lesson shall take place in the morning. The main lesson begins in winter at 8 or 8:15, in summer a little earlier. The special characteristic of this main lesson is that it does away with the ordinary kind of time table. We have no time table in the ordinary sense of the word, but one subject is taken throughout this erst two hour period in the morning—with a break in it for younger children,—and this subject is carried on for a space of four or six weeks and brought to a certain stage. After that, another subject is taken. For children of higher classes, children of 11, 12, or 13 years old what it comes to is that instead of having: 8 – 9 Religion, 9 – 10 Natural History, from 10 – 11 Arithmetic,—that is, instead of being thrown from one thing to another,—they have for example, in October four weeks of Arithmetic, then three weeks of Natural History, etc.

It might be objected that the children may forget what they learn because a comprehensive subject taken in this way is hard to memorise. This objection must be met by economy in instruction and by the excellence of the teachers. The subjects are recapitulated only in the last weeks of the school year so as to gather up, as it were, all the year's work. In this manner, the child grows right into a subject.

The language lesson, which, with us, is a conversation lesson, forms an exception to this arrangement. For we begin the teaching of languages, as far as we can,—that is English and French—in the youngest classes of the school; and a child learns to speak in the languages concerned from the very beginning. As far as possible, also, the child learns the language without the meaning being translated into his own language. (Translator's Note: i.e. direct method). Thus the word in the foreign language is attached to the object, not to the word in the German language. So that the child learns to know the table anew in some foreign language,—he does not learn the foreign word as a translation of the German word Tisch. Thus he learns to enter right into a language other than his mother tongue; and this becomes especially evident with the younger children. It is our practice moreover to avoid giving the younger children any abstract, theoretical grammar. Not until a child is between 9 and 10 years old can he understand grammar—namely, when he reaches an important turning point of which I shall be speaking when. I deal with the boys and girls of the Waldorf School.

This language teaching mostly takes place between 10 and 12 in the morning. This is the time in which we teach what lies outside the main lesson—which is always held in the first part of the morning. (The Waldorf School began at 8 a.m.) Thus any form of religion teaching is taken at this time. And I shall be speaking further of this teaching of religion, as well as about moral teaching and discipline, when I deal with the theme ‘the boys and girls of the Waldorf School.’ But I want for the moment to emphasise the fact that the afternoon periods are all used for singing, music and eurhythmy lessons. This is so that the child may as far as possible participate with his whole being in all the education and instruction he receives.

The instruction and education can appeal the better to the child's whole nature because it is conceived as a whole in the heart of the teachers' meetings, as I have described. This is particularly noticeable when the education passes over from the more psychic domain into that of physical and practical life. And particular attention is paid in the Waldorf School to this transition into physical and practical life.

Thus we endeavour that the children shall learn to use their hands more and more. Taking as a start, the handling little children do in their toys and games, we develop this into more artistic crafts but still such as come naturally from a child.

This is the sort of thing we produce (Tr. Note: showing toys etc.) this is about the standard reached by the 6th school year. Many of these things belong properly to junior classes, but as I said, we have to make compromises and shall only be able to reach our ideal later on—and then what a child of 11 or 12 now does, a child of 9 will be able to do. The characteristic of this practical work is that it is both spontaneous and artistic. The child works with a will on something of his own choosing, not at a set task. This leads on to handwork or woodwork classes in which the child has to carve and make all kinds of objects of his own planning. And one discovers how much children can bring forth where their education is founded in real life. I will give an example. We get the children to carve things which shall be artistic as well as useful. In this for instance: (Tr. Note: holding up a carved wooden bowl) one can put things. We get the children to carve forms like this so that they may acquire feeling for form and shape sprung from themselves; so that the children shall make something which derives its form from their own will and pleasure. And this brings out a very remarkable thing.

Suppose we have taken human anatomy at some period with this class, a thing which is particularly important for this class in the school (VI). We have explained the forms of the bones, of the skeletal system, to the children, also the external form of the body and the functions of the human organism. And since the teaching has been given in an artistic form, in the manner I have described, the children have been alive to it and have really taken it in. It has reached as far as their will, not merely to the thoughts in their heads. And then, when they come to do things like this (Carved bowl) one sees that it lives on in their hands. The forms will be very different according to what we may have been teaching. It comes out in these forms. From the children's plastic work one can tell what was done in the morning hours from 8 – 10, because the instruction given permeates the whole being.

This is achieved only when one really takes notice of the way things go on in nature. May I say a very heretical thing: people are very fond of giving children dolls, especially a ‘lovely’ doll. They do not see that children really don't want it. They wave it away, but it is pressed upon them. Lovely dolls, all painted! It is much better to give children a handkerchief, or, if that can't be spared, some piece of stuff; tie it together, make the head here, paint in the nose, two eyes etc.—healthy children far prefer to play with these than with ‘lovely’ dolls, because here is something left over for their fantasy; whereas the most magnificent doll, with red cheeks etc., leaves nothing over for the fantasy to do. The fine doll brings inner desolation to the child. (Tr. Dr. Steiner demonstrated what he was saying with his own pocket handkerchief.)

Now, in what way can we draw out of a child the things he makes? Well, when children of our VI^th class in the school come to produce things from their own feeling for form, they look like this,—as you can see from this small specimen we have brought with us. (Wooden doll.) The things are just as they grow from the individual fantasy of any child.

It is very necessary, however, to get the children to see as soon as possible that they want to think of life as innately mobile not innately rigid. Hence, when one is getting the child to create toys,—which for him are serious things, to be taken in earnest,—one must see to it that the things have mobility. You see a thing like this—to my mind a most remarkable fellow—(carved bear)—children do entirely themselves, they also put these strings on it without any outside suggestion,—so that this chap can wag his tongue when pulled: so (bear with attached strings). Or children bring their own fantasy into play: they make a cat, not just a nice cat, but as it strikes them: humped, without more ado and very well carried out.

I hold it to be particularly valuable for children to have to do, even in their toys, with things that move,—not merely with what is at rest, but with things which involve manipulation. Hence children make things which give them enormous joy in the making. They do not only make realistic things, but invent little fellows like these gnomes and suchlike things (Showing toys).

They also discover how to make more complicated things like this; they are not told that this is a thing that can be made, only the child is led on until he comes to make a lively fellow like this of his own accord. (Movable raven. ‘Temperaments Vogel’)—now you can see he looks very depressed and sad.

(The head and tail of the temperament bird can be moved up or down. Dr. Steiner had them both up at first, and then turned them both down.)

And when a child achieves a thing like this (a yellow owl with movable wings) he has wonderful satisfaction. These things are done by children of 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14 years old. So far only these older ones have done it, but we intend to introduce it gradually into the younger classes, where of course the forms will be simpler.

Now we have further handwork lessons in addition to this handicraft teaching. And here it should be borne in mind that throughout the Waldorf School boys and girls are taught together in all subjects. Right up to the highest class boys and girls are together for all lessons. (durcheinandersitzen: i.e.=sit side by side, or beside each other.) So that actually, with slight variations of course (and as we build up the higher classes there will naturally have to be differentiation)—but on the whole the boys actually learn to do the same things as the girls. And it is remarkable how gladly little boys will knit and crochet and girls do work that is usually only given to boys. This has a social result also: Mutual understanding between the sexes, a thing of the very first importance to-day. For we are still very unsocial and full of prejudice in this matter. So that it is very good when one has results such as I will now proceed to show.

In Dornach we had a small school of this kind. Now in the name of Swiss freedom it has been forbidden, and the best we can do is to undertake the instruction of more advanced young ladies and gentlemen; for Swiss freedom lays it down that no free schools shall exist in competition with state schools.—Well, of course, such a thing is not a purely pedagogical question.—But in Dornach we tried for a time to run a small school of this nature, and in it boys and girls did their work together. This is a boy's work; it was done in Dornach by a little American boy of about nine years old. (Tea cosy; Kaffee Warmer.) This is the work of a boy not a girl. And in the Waldorf School, as I have said, boys and girls work side by side in the handwork lessons. All kinds of things are made in handwork. And the boys and girls work together quite peaceably. In these two pieces of work, for instance, you will not be able to decide without looking to the detail what difference is to be seen between boys' and girls' work. (Two little cloths).

Now in the top classes which, at the present stage of our growth, contain boys and girls of 16 and 17, we pass on to the teaching of spinning and weaving as an introduction to practical life for the children, so that they may make a con-tact with real life; and here in this one sphere we find a striking difference: the boys do not want to spin like the girls, they want to assist the girls. The girls spin and the boys want to fetch and carry, like attendant knights. This is the only difference we have found so far, that in the spinning lesson the boys want to serve the girls. But apart from this we have found that the boys do every kind of handwork.

You will observe that the aim is to build up the hand-work and needlework lesson in connection with what is learned in the painting lesson. And in the painting lesson the children are not taught to draw (with a brush) or make patterns (‘Sticken’). But they learn to deal freely and spontaneously with the element of colour itself. Thus it is immensely important that children should come to a right experience of colour. If you use the little blocks of colour of the ordinary paint box and let the child dip his brush in them and on the palette and so paint, he will learn nothing. It is necessary that children should learn to live with colour, they must not paint from a palette or block, but from a jar or mug with liquid colour in it, colour dissolved in water. Then a child will come to feel how one colour goes with another, he will feel the inner harmony of colours, he will experience them inwardly. And even if this is difficult and inconvenient—sometimes after the painting lesson the class-room does not look its best, some children are clumsy, others not amenable in the matter of tidiness—even if this, way does give more trouble, yet enormous progress can be made when children get a direct relation to colour in this way, and learn to paint from the living nature of colour itself, not by trying to copy something in a naturalistic way. Then colour mass and colour form come seemingly of their own accord upon the paper. Thus to begin with, both at the Waldorf School and at Dornach, what the children paint is their experience of colour. It is a matter of putting one colour beside another colour, or of enclosing one colour within other colours. In this way the child enters right into colour, and little by little, of his own accord he comes to produce form from out of colour. As you see here, the form arises without any drawing intervening, from out of the colour. (showing paintings by Dornach children). This is done by the some-what more advanced children in Dornach, but the little children are taught on the same principle in the Waldorf School Here, for instance, we have paintings representative of the painting teaching in the Waldorf School which shows the attempt to express colour experience. Here, what is attempted, is not to paint some thing, but to paint experience of colour. The painting of something can come much later on. If the painting of something is begun too soon a sense for living reality is lost and gives place to a sense for what is dead.

If you proceed in this way, when you come to the treatment of any particular object in the world it will be far livelier than it would be without such a foundation. You see children who have previously learned to live in the element of colour, can make the island of Sicily, for instance, look like this, (coloured map) and we get a map. In this way, artistic work is related to the geography teaching.

When the children have acquired a feeling for colour harmony in this way they come on to making useful objects of different kinds. This is not first drawn, but the child has acquired a feeling for colour, and so later he can paint or shape such a thing as this book cover, or folio. The important thing is to arouse in the child a real feeling for life. And colour and form have the power to lead right into life.

Now sometimes you find a terrible thing done: the teacher will let a child make a neckband, and a waist band and a dress hem, and all three will have on them the very same pattern. You see this sometimes. Naturally it is the most horrible thing in the world to an artistic instinct. The child must be taught very early that a band designed for the neck has a tendency to open downwards, it has a downward direction; that a girdle or waistband tends in both directions, (i.e. both upwards and downwards); and that the hem of the dress at the bottom must show an upward tendency away from the bottom. Hence one must not perpetrate the atrocity of teaching the child simply to make an artistic pattern of one kind on a band, but the child must learn how the band should look according to whether it is in one position or another on a person.

In the same way, one should know when making a book cover, that when one looks at a book, and opens it so, there is a difference between the top and the bottom. It is necessary that the child should grow into this feeling for space, this feeling for form. This penetrates right into his limbs. This is a teaching that works far more strongly into the physical organism, than any work in the abstract. Thus the treatment of colour gives rise to the making of all kinds of useful objects; and in the making of these the child really comes to feel colour against colour and form next to form, and that the whole has a certain purpose and therefore I make it like this.

These things in all detail are essential to the vitality of the work. The lesson must be a preparation for life. Now among these exhibits you will find all sorts of interesting things. Here, for instance, is something done by a very little girl, comparatively speaking.

I cannot show you everything in the course of this lecture, but I would like to draw your attention to the many charming objects we have brought with us from the Waldorf School. You will find here two song books composed by Herr Baumann which will show you the kind of songs and music we use in the Waldorf School. Here are various things produced by one of the girls—since owing to the customs we could not bring a great deal with us—in addition to our natural selves. But all these things are carried out plasticly, are modelled, as is shown here. You see the children have charming ideas: (apes); they capture the life in things; these are all carved in wood. (Showing illustrations of wood-carving by children of the Waldorf School reproduced by one of the girls.)

You see here (maps) how fully children enter into life when the principle from which they start is full of life. You can see this very well in the case of these maps: first they have an experience of colour and this is an experience of the soul. A colour experience gives them a soul experience. Here you see Greece experienced in soul. When the child is at home in the element of colour, he grows to feel in geography: I must paint the island of Crete, the island of Candia in a particular colour, and I must paint the coast of Asia Minor so, and the Peleponesus so. The child learns to speak through colour, and thus a map can actually be a production from the innermost depths of the soul.

Think what an experience of the earth the child will have when this is how he has seen it inwardly, when this is how he has painted Candia or Crete or the Peleponesus or Northern Greece; when he has had the feelings which go with such colours as these; then Greece itself can come alive in his soul the child can awaken Greece anew from his own soul. In this way the living reality of the world becomes part of a man's being. And when you later confront the children with the dry reality of everyday life they will meet it in quite a different way, because they have had an artistic, living experience of the elements of colour in their simple paintings, and have learned to use its language.

From the things I have already said it may perhaps be clear to you what all education and teaching in the Waldorf School is designed to bring about. It aims at bringing up children to be human beings strong and sound in body, free in soul and lucid in spirit. Physical health and strength, freedom of soul and clarity of spirit are things mankind will require in the future more than anything else, particularly in social life. But in order to educate and teach in this way it is necessary for the teacher to get a thorough mastery of those things I have attempted to describe.

The teacher must have a complete vision of the child organism; and it must be a vision of the organism enabling him to judge physical health. For only one who is truly a judge of physical health and can bring it into harmony with the soul can say to himself: with this child this must be done, and with that child the other.

It is an accepted opinion to-day that a doctor should have access to schools. The system of school doctors is developing widely. But, just as it not good when the different branches of instruction, the different subjects, are given to different teachers who make no contact with one another, neither is it good to place the charge of physical health in the hands of a person who is not a member of the staff, not a member of the college of teachers. The situation presents a certain difficulty, of which the following incident will give you an example.

On an occasion when we were showing visitors over the Waldorf School there was a gentleman who, in his official capacity, was an inspector of schools. I was speaking of the physical health and the physical organism of the children and what one could observe in it, and I told him about one child who has a certain disorder of the heart, and another with some other disability etc. and then the man exclaimed in astonishment: Yes, but your teachers would have to have medical knowledge for this to be of any use in the school.

Well, yes, if it is truly a necessity for healthy education that teachers should have a certain degree of medical know-ledge, why then they must have it, they must attain it. Life cannot be twisted to suit the idiosyncrasies of men, we must frame our arrangements in accordance with the demands of life. Just as we must learn something before we can do something in other spheres, so must we learn something before we can do something in education.

Thus, for instance, it is necessary for a teacher to see precisely all that is happening when a child plays, a little child. Play involves a whole complex of activities of soul: joy, sometimes also pain, sympathy, antipathy; and particularly curiosity and the desire for knowledge. A child wants to investigate the objects he plays with and see what they are made of. And when observing this free activity of the child's soul—an activity unconstrained as yet into any form of work—when observing this entirely spontaneous expression, we must look to the shades of feeling and notice whether it satisfies or does not satisfy. For if we guide the child's play so as to content him we improve his health, for we are promoting an activity which is in direct touch with his digestive system. And whether or not a man will be subject in old age to obstruction in his blood circulation and digestive system depends upon how his play is guided in childhood. There is a fine, a delicate connection between the way a child plays and the growth and development of its physical organism.

One should not say: the physical organism is a thing of little account; I am an idealist and cannot concern myself with such a low thing as the physical organism. This physical organism has been put into the world by the divine spiritual powers of the world, it is a divine creation, and we must realise that we, as educators, are called upon to co-operate in this spiritual creation. I would rather express my meaning by a concrete example than in abstract sentences.

Suppose children show an extreme form, a pathological form of what we call the melancholic disposition; or suppose you get an extreme form, a pathological form of the sanguine temperament. The teacher must know, then, where the border-line comes between what is simply physical and what is pathological. If he observes that a melancholic child is tending to become pathological,—and this is far more often the case than one would think,—he must get into touch with the child's parents and learn from them what diet the child as been having. He will then discover a connection between this diet and the child's pathological melancholy. He will probably find,—to give a concrete instance, though there might be other causes,—he will probably find that the child has been getting too little sugar in the food he is given at home. Owing to lack of sugar in the food he gets, the working of his liver is not regulated properly. For the peculiarity of the melancholic child is that a certain substance i.e. starch, (German: Starke) is formed in the liver indeed, but not formed in the right measure. This substance is also to be found in plants. All human beings form starch in the liver but it is different from plant starch—it is an animal starch which in the liver immediately becomes transformed into sugar. This transformation of animal starch into sugar is a very important part of the activity of the liver. Now, m the melancholic child this is out of order, and one must advise the mother to put more sugar into the child's food; in this way one can regulate the glycogenic activity of the liver,—as it is called. And you will see what an extraordinary effect this purely hygienic measure will have.

Now, in the sanguine child you will find precisely the opposite: most likely he is being gorged with sugar; he is given too many sweets, he is given too much sugar in his food. If he has been made voracious of sugar precisely the opposite activity will come about. The liver is an infinitely important organ, and it is an organ which resembles a sense-organ much more closely than one would imagine. For, the purpose of the liver is to perceive the whole human being from within, to comprehend him. The liver is vital to the whole human being. Hence its organisation differs from that of other organs. In other organs a certain quantum of arterial blood comes in and a certain quantum of venous blood goes out. The liver has an extra arrangement. A special vein enters the liver and supplies the liver with extra venous blood. This has the effect of making the liver into a kind of world of its own, a world apart in the human being. [Literally “Aussenwelt,”—outer world.] And it is this that enables man to perceive himself by means of the liver, to perceive, that is, what affects his organism. The liver is an extraordinarily fine barometer for sensing the kind of relation the human being has to the outer world. You will effect an extraordinary improvement in the case of a pathologically sanguine child—a flighty child, one who flits nervously from thing to thing—you will get a remarkable improvement if you advise his mother to diminish somewhat the amount of sugar she gives him.

Thus, if you are a real teacher, through what you do, not in school, but at other times, you can give the child such guidance as shall make him truly healthy, strong and active in all his physical functions. And you will notice what enormous importance this has for the development of the whole human being.

Some of the most impressive experiences we have had with the children of the Waldorf School have been with those of fifteen or sixteen years old. We began the Waldorf School with eight classes, the elementary classes, but we have added on, class by class, a ninth, tenth and now an eleventh class. These upper classes,—which are of course advanced classes, not elementary classes,—contain the children of 15 and 16 years old. And we have with these very special difficulties. Some of these difficulties are of a psychical and moral nature. I will speak of these later. But even in the physical respect one finds that man's nature tends continuously to become pathological and has to be shielded from this condition.

Among girls, in certain circumstances, you will find a slight tendency to chlorosis, to anaemia, in the whole developing organism. The blood in the girl's organism becomes poor; she becomes pale, anaemic. This is due to the fact that during these 14th, 15th and 16th years the spiritual nature is separated out from the total organism; and this spiritual nature, which formerly worked within the whole being, regulated the blood. Now the blood is left to itself. Therefore it must be rightly prepared so that its own power may accomplish this larger task. Girls are apt, then, to become pale, anaemic: and one must know that this anaemia comes about when one has failed to arouse a girl's interest in the things one has been teaching or telling her. Where attention and interest are kept alive the whole physical organism participates in the activity which is engaging the inmost self of the human being, and then anaemia does not arise in the same way.

With boys the case is opposite. The boys get a kind of neuritis, a condition in which there is too much blood in the brain. Hence during these years the brain behaves as though it were congested with blood. (Blutuberfullt.) In girls we find a lack of blood in the body: in boys a superabundance, particularly in the head,—a superabundance of white blood, which is a wrong form of venous and arterial blood. This is because the boys have been given too many sensations, they have been overstimulated, and have had to hurry from sensation to sensation without pause or proper rest. And you will see that even the troublesome behaviour and difficulties among 14, 15 and 16 year old children are characteristic of this state and are connected with the whole physical development.

When one can view the nature of man in this way, not despising what is physical and bodily, one can do a great deal for the children's health as a teacher or educator. It must be a fundamental principle that spirituality is false the moment it leads away from the material to some castle in the clouds. If one has come to despising the body, and to saying: O the body is a low thing, it must be suppressed, flouted: one will most certainly not acquire the power to educate men soundly. For, you see, you may leave the physical body out of account, and perhaps you may attain to a high state of abstraction in your spiritual nature, but it will be like a balloon in the air, flying off. A spirituality not bound to what is physical in life can give nothing to social evolution on the earth: and before one can wing one's way into the Heavens one must be prepared for the Heavens. This preparation has to take place on earth.

When men seek entry into Heaven and must pass the examination of death, it is seldom, in these materialistic days, that we find they have given a spiritual nurture to this human physical organism,—this highest creation of divine, spiritual beings upon earth.

I will speak of the psychic moral aspect in the next section, and on Eurhythmy in the section following.

If there is a great deal to do in the physical sphere apart from the educational measures taken in the school itself, the same is true for the domain of the soul, the psychic domain, and for that of the spirit. The important thing is to get the human being even while at school to be finding a right entry into life. Once more I will illustrate the aim of the Waldorf School by concrete examples rather than abstract statements.

It is found necessary at the end of a school year to take stock of the work done by a child during the year. This is generally called: a report on the child's progress and attainment in the different subjects in respect of the work set. In many countries the parents or guardians are informed whether the child has come up to standard and how—by means of figures: 1, 2, 3, 4; each number means that a child has reached a certain proficiency in a given subject. Some-times, when you are not quite sure whether 3 or 4 expresses the correct degree of attainment, you write 3 ½, and some teachers, making a fine art of calculation, have even put down 3 ¼. And I must own that I have never been able to acquire this art of expressing human faculties by such numbers.

The reports in the Waldorf School are produced in another manner. Where the body of teachers, the college of teachers, is such a unity that every child in the school is known to some extent by every teacher, it becomes possible to give an account of the child which relates to his whole nature. Thus the report we make on a child at the end of the school year resembles a little biography, it is like an apercus of the experiences one has had with the child during the year, both in school and out.

In this way the child and his parents, or guardians, have a mirror image of what the child is like at this age. And we have found at the Waldorf School that one can put quite severe censure into this mirror-like report and children accept it contentedly. Now we also write something else in the report. We combine the past with the future. We know the child, and know whether he is deficient in will, in feeling or in thought, we know whether this emotion or the other predominates in him. And in the light of this knowledge, for every single child in the Waldorf School we make a little verse, or saying. This we inscribe in his report. It is meant as a guiding line for the whole of the next year at school. The child learns this verse by heart and bears it in mind. And the verse works upon the child's will, or upon his emotions or mental peculiarities, modifying and balancing them.

Thus the report is not merely an intellectual expression of what the child has done, but it is a power in itself and continues to work until the child receives a new report. And one must indeed come to know the individuality of a child very accurately—as you will realise—if one is to give him a report of such a potent nature year by year.

You can also see from this that our task in the Waldorf School is not the founding of a school which requires exceptional external arrangements. What we hold to be of value is the pedagogy and teaching which can be introduced into any school. (We appreciate the influence of external conditions upon the education in any school). We are not revolutionaries who simply say: town schools are no use, all schools must be in the country, and such-like; we say, rather: the conditions of life produce this or that situation; we take the conditions as they are, and in every kind of school we work for the welfare of man through a pedagogy and didactics which take the given surroundings into account. Thus, working along these lines, we find we are largely able to dispense with the system of “staying put,”—the custom of keeping back a child a second year in the same class so as to make him brighter.

We have been blamed at the Waldorf School for having children in the upper classes whom the authorities think should have been kept back. We find it exceedingly difficult, if only on humane grounds, to leave children behind because our teachers are so attached to their children that many tears would be shed if this had to be done. The truth is that an inner relationship arises between children and teacher, and this is the actual cause of our being able to avoid this unhappy custom, this “staying put.” But apart from this there is no sense in this keeping of children back. For, suppose we keep back a boy or girl in a previous class: the boy or girl may be so constituted that his mind unfolds in his 11th year, we shall then be putting the child in the class for 11 year-old children one year too late. This is much more harmful than that the teacher should at some time have extra trouble with this child because it has less grasp of the subjects and must yet be taken on with the others into the next class.

The special class (Hilfsklasse) is only for the most backward children of all. We have only one special class into which we have to take the weak, or backward children of all the other classes. We have not had enough money for a number of “helping” classes; but this one class has an exceptionally gifted teacher, Dr. Schubert. As for him, well, when the question of founding a special class arose, one could say with axiomatic certainty: You are the one to take this special class. He has a special gift for it. He is able to make something of the pathological conditions of the children. He handles each child quite individually, so much so that he is happiest when he has the children sitting around a table with him, instead of in separate benches. The backward children, those who have a feebleness of mind, or some other deficiency, receive a treatment here which enables them after a while to rejoin their classes.

Naturally this is a matter of time; but we only transfer children to this class on rare occasions; and whenever I attempt to transfer a child from a class into this supplementary class, finding it necessary, I have first of all to fight the matter out with the teacher of the class who does not want to give the child up. And often it is a wonderful thing to see the deep relationship which has grown up between individual teachers and individual children. This means that the education and teaching truly reach the children's inner life.

You see it is all a question of developing a method, for we are realistic, we are not nebulous mystics; so that, although we have had to make compromises with ordinary life, our method yet makes it possible really to bring out a child's individual disposition;—at least we have had many good results in these first few years.

Since, under present conditions, we have had to make compromises, it has not been possible to give religious instruction to many of the children. But we can give the children a moral training. We start, in the teaching of morality, from the feeling of gratitude. Gratitude is a definite moral experience in relation to our fellow men. Sentiments and notions which do not spring from gratitude will lead at most to abstract precepts as regards morality. But everything can come from gratitude. Thus, from gratitude we develop the capacity for love and the feeling for duty. And in this way morality leads on to religion. But outer circumstances have prevented our figuring among those who would take the kingdom of heaven by storm,—thus we have given over the instruction in Catholicism into the hands of the Catholic community. And they send to us in the school a priest of their own faith. Thus the Catholic children are taught by the Catholic priest and the Evangelical (protestant) children by the evangelical pastor. The Waldorf School is not a school for a philosophy of life, but a method of education. It was found, however, that a certain number of children were non-conformist and would get no religious instruction under this arrangement. But, as a result of the spirit which came into the Waldorf School, certain parents who would otherwise not have sent their children to any religion lesson requested us to carry the teaching of morality on into the sphere of religion. It thus became necessary for us to give a special religious instruction from the standpoint of Anthroposophy. We do not even in these Anthroposophical religion lessons teach Anthroposophy, rather we endeavour to find those symbols and parables in nature which lead towards religion. And we endeavour to bring the Gospel to the children in the manner in which it must be comprehended by a spiritual understanding of religion, etc. If anyone thinks the Waldorf School is a school for Anthroposophy it shows he has no understanding either of Waldorf School pedagogy or of Anthroposophy.

As regards Anthroposophy, how is it commonly under-stood? When people talk of Anthroposophy they think it means something sectarian, because at most they have looked up the meaning of the word in the dictionary. To proceed in this way with regard to Anthroposophy is as if on hearing the words: ‘Max Muller of Oxford,’ a man were to say to himself: ‘What sort of a man can he have been? A miller who bought corn and carted the corn to his mill and ground it into flour and delivered it to the baker.’ A person giving such an account of what the name of Miller conveyed to him would not say much to the point about Max Muller, would he? But the way people talk of Anthroposophy is just like this, it is just like this way of talking about Max Muller, for they spin their opinion of Anthroposophy out of the literal meaning of the word. And they take it to be some kind of backwoods' sect; whereas it is merely that everything must have some name.

Anthroposophy grows truly out of all the sciences, and out of life and it was in no need of a name. But since in this terrestrial world men must have names for things, since a thing must have some name, it is called Anthroposophy. But just as you cannot deduce the scholar from the name Max Muller, neither can you conclude that because we give Anthroposophical religious instruction in the school, Anthroposophy is introduced in the way the other religious instruction is introduced from outside,—as though it were a competing sect.

No, indeed, I mean no offence in saying this, but others have taken us to task about it. The Anthroposophical instruction in religion is increasing: more and snore children come to it. And some children, even, have run away from the other religious instruction and come over to the Anthroposophical religion lessons. Thus it is quite understandable that people should say: What bad people these Anthroposophists are! They lead the children astray so that they abandon the catholic and evangelical (protestant) religion lessons and want to have their religious instruction there. We do all we can to restrain the children from coming, because it is extraordinarily difficult for us to find religion teachers in our own sphere. But, in spite of the fact that we have never arranged for this instruction except in response to requests from parents and the unconscious requests of the children themselves,—to my great distress, I might almost say:—the demand for this Anthroposophical religious instruction increases more and more. And now thanks to this Anthroposophical religious instruction the school has a wholly Christian character.

You can feel from the whole mood and being of the Waldorf School how a Christian character pervades all the teaching, how religion is alive there;—and this in spite of the fact that we never set out to proselytise in the Waldorf School or to connect it with any church movement or congregational sect. I have again and again to repeat: the Waldorf School principle is not a principle which founds a school to promote a particular philosophy of life,—it founds a school to embody certain educational methods. Its aims are to be achieved by methodical means, by a method based on knowledge of man. And its aim is to make of children human beings sound in body, free in soul, clear in spirit.

Let me now say a few words on the significance of Eurhythmy teaching and the educational value of eurhythmy for the child. In illustration of what I have to say I should like to use these figures made in the Dornach studio. They are artistic representations of the real content of eurhythmy. The immediate object of these figures is to help in the appreciation of artistic eurhythmy. But I shall be able to make use of them to explain some things in educational eurhythmy. Now, eurhythmy is essentially a visible speech, it is not miming, not pantomime, neither is it an art of dance. When a person sings or speaks he produces activity and movement in certain organs; this same movement which is inherent m the larynx and other speech organs is capable of being continued and manifested throughout the human being. In the speech organs the movements are arrested and repressed. For instance, an activity of the larynx which would issue in this movement (A)—where the wings of the larynx open outward—is submerged in status nascendi and transformed into a movement into which the meaning of speech can be put,—and into a movement which can pass out into the air and be heard. Here you have the original movement of A (ah), the inner, and essentially human movement—as we might call it—

This is the movement which comes from the whole man when he breaks forth in A (ah). Thus there goes to every utterance in speech and song a movement which is arrested in status nascendi. But it seeks issue in forms of movement made by the whole human being. These are the forms of utterance in movements, and they can be discovered.

Just as there are different forms of the larynx and other organs for A (ah), I (ee), L, M, so are there also corresponding movements and forms of movement. These forms of movement are therefore those expressions of will which otherwise are provided in the expressions of thought and will of speech and song. The thought element, the abstract part of thought in speech is here removed and all that is to be expressed is transposed into the movement. Hence eurhythmy is an art of movement, in every sense of the word. Just as you can hear the A so can you see it, just as you can hear the I so can you see it.

In these figures the form of the wood is intended to express the movement. The figures are made on a three colour principle. The fundamental colour here is the one which expresses the form of the movement. But just as feeling pervades the tones of speech, so feeling enters into the movement. We do not merely speak a sound, we colour it by feeling. We can also do this in eurhythmy. In this way a strong unconscious momentum plays into the eurhythmy. If the performer, the eurhythmist, can bring this feeling into his movements in an artistic way the onlookers will be affected by it as they watch the movements.

It should be borne in mind, moreover, that the veil which is worn serves to enhance the expression of feeling, it accompanies and moves to the feeling. This was brought out in the performance over there (Tr: e.g. at Keble College). And you see here (Tr: i.e. in the figures) the second colour—which comes mainly on the veils—represents the feeling nuance in the movement. Thus you have a first, fundamental colour expressing the movement itself, a second colour over it mainly falling on the veil, which expresses the nuance of feeling. But the eurhythmy performer must have the inner power to impart the feeling to his movement: just as it makes a difference whether I say to a person: Come to me (commandingly), or: Come to me (in friendly request). This is the nuance of feeling, gradation of feeling. What I say is different if I say: Come to me! (1) or: Come to me (2). In the same way this second colour, here expressed as blue on a foundation of green, which then continues over into the veil (Tr.: where it can show as pure blue),—this represents the feeling nuance in the language of eurhythmy.

And the third thing that is brought out is character, a strong element of will. This can only be introduced into eurhythmy when the performer is able to experience his own movements as he makes them and express them strongly in himself. The way a performer holds his head as he does eurhythmy makes a great difference to his appearance. Whether, for instance, he keeps the muscles on the left of the head taut, and those on the right slack—as is expressed here by means of the third colour. (Showing figure) You see here the muscles on the left of the head are somewhat tense, those on the right relaxed. You will observe how the third colour always indicates this here. Here you see the left side is contracted, and down over the mouth here; here (in another figure) the forehead is contracted, the muscles of the forehead are contracted. This, you see, sets the tone of the whole inner character,—this that rays out from this slight contracting: for this slight contraction sends rays throughout the organism. Thus the art of eurhythmy is really composed of the movement, expressed in the fundamental colour; of the feeling nuance, expressed by the second colour, and of this element of will;—indeed the element of the whole art is will, but will is here emphasised in a special way.

Where the object is to exhibit the features of eurhythmy those parts only of the human being are selected which are characteristic of eurhythmy. If we had figures here with beautifully painted noses and eyes and beautiful mouths, they might be charming paintings; but for eurhythmy that is not the point; what you see painted, modelled or carved here is solely what belongs to the art of eurhythmy in the human being doing eurhythmy.

A human being performing eurhythmy has no need to make a special face. That does not matter. Naturally, it goes without saying, a normal and sound eurhythmist would not make a disagreeable face when making a kindly movement, but this would be the same in speaking. No art of facial expression independent of eurhythmic expression is aimed at: For instance, a performer can make the A movement by turning the axels of his eyes outwards. That is allowable, that is eurhythmic. But it would not do if someone were to make special oeilades (“Kinkerlitchen,” we call them) as is done in miming; these oeilades, which are often in special demand in miming, would here be a grimace. In eurhythmy everything must be eurhythmic.

Thus we have here a form of art which shows only that part of man which is eurhythmy, all else is left out; and thus we get an artistic impression. For each art can only express what it has to express through its own particular medium. A statue cannot be made to speak; thus you must bring out the expression of soul you want through the shaping of the mouth and the whole face. Thus it would have been no good in this case, either, to have painted human beings naturalistically; what had to be painted was an expression of the immediately eurhythmic.

Naturally, when I speak of veils this does not mean that one can change the veil with every letter; but one comes to find, by trying out different feeling nuances for a poem, and entering into the mood of the poem,—that a whole poem has an A mood, or a B mood. Then one can carry out the whole poem rightly in one veil. The same holds good of the colour. Here for every letter I have put the veil form, colour, etc. which go together. There must be a certain fundamental key in a poem. This tone is given by the colour of the veil, and in general by the whole colour combination; and this has to be retained throughout the poem,—otherwise the ladies would have to be continually changing veils, constantly throwing off the veils, putting on other dresses,—and things would be even more complicated than they are already and people would say they understood even less But actually if one once has the fundamental key one can maintain it throughout the whole poem, making the changes from one letter to another, from one syllable to another from one mood to another by means of the movements.

Now since my aim to-day is a pedagogic one, I have here set out these figures in the order in which children learn the sounds. And the first sound the children learn, when they are quite young, is the sound A. And they continue in this order, approximately,—for naturally where children are concerned many digressions occur,—but on the whole the children get to know the vowels in this order: A, E, I, 0, U, the normal order. And then, when the children have to practice the visible speech of eurhythmy, when they come to do it in this same order, it is for them like a resurrection of what they felt when they first learned the sounds of speech as little children,—a resurrection, a rebirth at another stage. In this language of eurhythmy the child experiences what he had experienced earlier. It affirms the power of the word in the child through the medium of the whole being.

Then the children learn the consonants in this order: M.B.P.D.T.L.N;—there should also be an NG here, as in sing, it has not yet been made—; then F.H.G.S.R. R, that mysterious letter, which properly has three forms in human speech, is the last one for children to do perfectly. There is a lip R, a palatal R, and an R spoken right at the back (Tr: a gutteral R).

Thus, what the child learns in speech in a part of his organism, in his speaking or singing organism, can be carried over into the whole being and developed into a visible speech.

If there should be a sufficient interest for this expressive art we could make more figures; for instance Joy, Sorrow, Antipathy, Sympathy and other things which are all part of eurhythmy, not the grammar only, but rhetoric, too, comes into its own in eurhythmy. We could make figures for all these. Then people would see how this spiritual-psychic activity, which not only influences the functions of man's physical body but develops both his spiritual-psychic and his organic bodily nature, has a very definite value both in education and as an art.

As to these eurhythmy figures, they also serve in the study of eurhythmy as a help to the student's memory—for do not suppose that eurhythmy is so easy that it can be learned in a few hours,—eurhythmy must be thoroughly studied; these figures then are useful to students for practising eurhythmy and for going more deeply into their art. You can see there is a very great deal in the forms themselves, though they are quite simply carved and painted.

I wished to-day to speak of the art of eurhythmy in so far as it forms part of the educational principle of the Waldorf School.

I alluded yesterday to what takes place when the boys and girls one is educating come to be 14 or 15 years old and reach puberty. At this stage, a teacher who takes his responsibilities seriously will encounter many difficulties. And these difficulties are particularly apparent in a school or college where the education is derived from the nature of man. Now it is out of the question to overcome these difficulties by extraneous discipline. If they are repressed now they will only re-appear later in life in all manner of disguises. It is far better to look them squarely in the face as an intrinsic part of human nature and to deal with them. In a school like the Waldorf School where boys and girls are educated together and are constantly in each others company such difficulties occur very frequently.

We have already referred to the difference between boys and girls which begins to appear about the 10th year. At this age girls begin to grow more vigorously and, particularly, to shoot up in height. Boys growth is delayed until round about puberty. After that, the boys catch up with the girls. For one who observes the one interplay between spirit, soul and body from the standpoint of a true human knowledge, this is of great significance. For growing, the overcoming of the earth's gravity by growth, engages the fundamental being of man, his essential manhood, whereas it is not essentially a concern of the human being whether a certain organic phenomenon appears at one stage or another of his life. For, actually, certain cosmic, extra-human influences which work in upon the human being from the external world affect the female organism more intensely between the 10th and 12th year than they do the male organ-ism. In a certain sense the female organism between the 10th and 12th year partakes even bodily of the super-sensible world.

Please realise the importance of this: between the 10th and 12th year, or the 13th and 14th, the female organism qua organism begins to dwell in a spiritual element. It becomes permeated by spirit at this period. And this affects the processes of the blood in girls in a very special way. During these years the blood circulation is, as it were, in contact with the whole universe. It must take its time from the whole world, from the universe, and be regulated by it. And experiments carried out to find the relationship between the rhythm of pulse and breath between 10 and 12 years, even if done with external instruments, would find the results among girls other than among boys.

The boy of 13 or 14 begins to show a nature hitherto unrevealed, and he also begins to grow more than the girls do. He grows in all directions. He makes up for the delay in his growing. At the same time his relationship to the outer world is quite other than it was in the earlier periods of his life. And so in boys it is the nervous system which is now affected, rather than the circulation of the blood. Thus, it can easily happen that the boy's nervous system gets overstrained if the instruction at school is not given him in the right way. For in these years, the form and content of language, or of the languages he has learned, have an enormous influence upon him. The ideas of men enshrined in language, or in foreign languages, press upon the boy, beset him as it were, while his body grows more delicate. And so at this age the whole world drones and surges within a boy—the world, that is, of this earthly environment.

Thus: in girls a year or two sooner is implanted some-thing of the surrounding universe; in boys earthly environment is implanted through the medium of language. This is apparent externally in the boy's change of voice. And indirectly, in connection with this transformation in the voice enormously important things take place in the boy's whole organism. In the female organism, this rounding off of the voice is very slight. On the other hand in connection with the quickened growing, there has been a preparation in the organism, which is, as it were, a flowing into the maiden of supernal worlds. The recent advances of materialistic science of the world come into their own on a spiritual view.

You see when people hear that a spiritual outlook or spiritual values are upheld somewhere, they are apt to say: O yes, those are queer cranks who scorn the earth and all material things. And then comes the natural scientist and cites the marvellous advances of purely material science in recent centuries. And so people believe that anyone who advocates a thing so alien to the world—not that I mean that Anthroposophy is alien to the world—but that the world is alien to Anthroposophy—but when a strange thing like Anthroposophy appears, people think it is not concerned with material things, or with practical life. But it is precisely Anthroposophy which takes up the latest discoveries of the natural sciences, takes them up with immense love and saturates them with the knowledge that can be got from the spiritual world. So that it is precisely among those who support spiritual philosophy that there exists a true appreciation of materialism, a proper appreciation of materialism. The spiritualist can afford to be a materialist. But the pure materialist loses knowledge of matter when he loses the spirit, all he can observe is the outer appearance of matter. It is just the materialist who loses all insight into material happenings. I call attention to this as it seems to me of great significance.

And you see, when you have the attitude of a Waldorf teacher towards the children you look in quite a different way upon a child who has reached puberty—a child who has just passed through that stage of development which includes the organic changes I have alluded to—you look upon this child in quite a different way from that of a person who knows nothing of all this, who knows nothing of it, that is, from the spiritual point of view.

A boy of 14 or 15 years old echoes in his being the world around him. That is to say: words and their significant content are taken up unconsciously into his nervous system, and they echo and sound on-in his nerves. The boy does not know what to do with himself. Something has come into him which begins to feel foreign to him now that he is 14 or 15. He comes to be puzzled by himself, he feels irresponsible. And one who understands human nature knows well that at no time and to no person, not even to a philosopher, does this two legged being of the Earth called Anthropos seem so great a riddle as he does to a fifteen year old boy. For at this age all the powers of the human soul are beset by mystery. For now the will, the thing most remote from normal consciousness, makes an assault upon the nervous system of the 15 or 16 year old boy.

With girls it is different. But when we aim, as we should aim, at equal treatment for both sexes, at an equal recognition,—a thing which must come in the future—it is all the more important to have clearly in view the distinction between them. So, now, whereas for the boy his own self becomes a problem, he is perplexed by himself,—for girls at this time the problem is the world about them. The girl has taken up into herself something not of the earth. Her whole nature is developing unconsciously within her. And a girl of 14 or 15 is a being who faces the world in amazement, finding it full of problems; above all, a being who seeks in the world ideals to live by. Thus many things in the outer world become enigmatic to a girl at this age.

To a boy the inner world presents many enigmas. To a girl it is the outer world.

One must realise, one must come to feel, that one now has to deal with quite new children—not the same children as before. And this change in each child comes, in some cases, remarkably quickly,—so that a teacher not alive to the transformation going on in the children in his charge may fail to perceive that he is suddenly confronting a new person.

You see, one of the most essential things in the training of the Waldorf School teachers themselves is receptivity to the changes in human nature. And this the teachers have acquired relatively quickly for reasons which I shall explain. A Waldorf teacher—if I may express myself paradoxically—a Waldorf teacher has to be prepared to find a thing completely different tomorrow from what it was yesterday. This is the real secret of his training. For instance: one usually thinks in the evening: tomorrow the sun will rise and things will be the same as they are to-day. Now,—to use a somewhat drastic mode of expression which brings out my meaning—the Waldorf teacher must be prepared for the sun not to rise one day. For only when one views human nature afresh like this, without prejudice from the past, is it possible to apprehend growth and development in human beings. We may repose in the assurance that things out there in the universe will be somewhat conservative. But when it is a case of that transition in human nature from the early years of childhood into the 14th, 15th and 16th year, why then, ladies and gentlemen, the sun that rose earlier often does not rise. Here, in this microcosm, Man, in this Anthropos, so great a change has come about that we face an entirely new situation. As though nature upon some day should confront us with a world of darkness, a world in which our eyes were of no use.

Openness, a readiness to receive new wisdom daily, a disposition which can subdue past knowledge to a latent feeling which leaves the mind clear for what is new,—this it is that keeps a man healthy, fresh and active. And it is this open heart for the changes in life, for its unexpected and continuous freshness, which must form the essential mood and nature of a Waldorf teacher.

How the relationship between boys and girls of this age and their teachers is significantly affected by this change can be seen from an episode which occurred last year in the Waldorf School. One day when I was back once again at the Waldorf School for the purpose of directing the teaching and education—a thing I can only do intermittently—a girl of the top class came to me between lessons, in—what I might call—a mood of suppressed aggression. She was very moved, but she said to me with prodigious inner determination: ‘Can we speak to you to-day—it is very urgent—may the whole class speak to you to-day? (i.e. the top class). But we only want to do it if you wish it.’ You see, she had constituted herself leader of the class and wished to speak to me in the presence of the whole class. What was the reason? The reason was that the boys and girls had come to feel for their part that they were not in touch with the teachers; they found it hard to get in touch with the teachers, to make a right contact with them.

This had not arisen from any grudge against the teachers. For among the children of the Waldorf School there is no grudge against the teachers. On the contrary, even in the short time of the School's existence, the children have come to love their teachers. But these children of the top class, these boys and girls of 15 and 16 now had a terrible fear that owing to the new relationship which had come about between pupils and teachers they might lose this love, this love might diminish. They had a most extraordinary fear of this. And in this case I did not do what perhaps would have been done in past times if children had blurted out this sort of thing,—namely snub them and put them in their places—but I went out to meet them and talked to them. And I spoke to the children—but at this age of course one should call them young ladies and gentlemen, as I said before—I spoke to them in such a way that they could realise I was prepared then and there to discuss the question with them, and together with them come to a conclusion. We will talk to one another without restraint and arrive at some decision together when we see what the matter is:

And then, what came out was what I have just described: a great anxiety lest they should be unable to love the teachers in the same way as before. For an enormous wonder, a great curiosity concerning certain things in the world had entered into the children. And since Waldorf School pedagogy is evolved day by day every occurrence must be carefully studied and educational measures are founded upon living experience.

Now the children said a great deal that was rather remote from the issue, but it seemed immensely important to themselves, and they felt it deeply. Then I said a good many things to them, don't you know, of how one finds this or that in life as time goes on, to which the children eagerly assented. And all that was necessary was to arrange a slight shifting of teachers for the following school year. At the outset of the next school year, I allotted the teaching of languages to a different teacher; I changed the teachers round. What is more, we realised in the college of teachers that this was the method we should use throughout the school, to come to decisions from out of a working in common. But in order to stomach this new position—this meeting with young ladies and gentlemen of this age on equal terms, where one was formerly an authority—in order to be equal to this situation it is essential to have what the Waldorf teachers have—an open outlook on the world, to be a man of the world. We call it in German: to have a Weltanschauung, (a philosophy). Not merely to have taken a training in teaching method, but to have one's own answers to questions as to the fate of humanity, the significance of historical epochs, the meaning of present day life, etc. And these questions must not buzz in one's head, but must be borne in one's heart, then one will have a heartfelt experience of them in company with the children. For in the course of the last four or five hundred years of western civilisation we have entered deeply into intellectualism; this however is unnoticed by the majority of men. But intellectualism is a thing suited naturally only to men of advanced years. The child is naturally averse to intellectualism. And yet all our modern thinking is tinged with intellectualism. The only people who are not intellectual so far are the people over there in Asia and in Russia as far as Moscow (i.e. Asiatic Russia). But west of Moscow as far as America, intellectualism is universal. We are not aware of it, but in so far as we belong to the so-called cultured classes we think a kind of mental language that is incomprehensible to children. And this accounts for the gulf there is nowadays between grown-up people and children. This gulf must be bridged by teachers such as the Waldorf school teachers. (literally: this chasm must be filled up).

And it can only be bridged when one can see deeply into human nature. Allow me therefore, to tell you something of a physiological nature which is not usually taken into account, since it can only be rightly appreciated when it confronts one as a fact of spiritual science, a fact of spiritual knowledge. Now people think that it is a great accomplishment when a thing is put in the form of a concept, when there is an idea, a notion of a thing. But only people who judge everything according to their heads believe this. Truths are often terribly paradoxical. For if we enter into the unconscious, into the heart nature, the feeling nature of man, we find that all concepts, all ideas are bound up for every man—even for a philosopher—with a slight feeling of antipathy; there is something distasteful, disgusting, in the formulating of ideas: whether one is conscious of it or not, there is always something distasteful. Hence it is so enormously important to know that one must not accentuate this hidden unconscious disgust in children by surfeiting them with concepts and ideas. Now you see it comes from the fact that when a man has been thinking, when he has thought hard the inside of his brain presents a curious formation—unfortunately I can only give you results in this account, it would take many lectures to demonstrate it to you physiologically; I can now only give the facts. Now the brain is permeated throughout by deposits, compounds of phosphorus lie all about the brain. These have been deposited during the process of thought. Particularly if one is thinking oneself, thinking one's own thoughts, the brain becomes filled with unreason—forgive the word—full of deposited products such as phosphoric acid compounds; they litter the brain and be-slime it. These excretions, these deposits are only removed from the organism when a man sleeps or rests.

Thus, corresponding to the process of thought is not a process of growth or a process of digestion, but a catabolic process, a breaking down of substances. And when I follow a train of thought with some-one of a certain degree of maturity, i.e. over 14, 15, or 16 years old, together with him I am setting up a catabolic process, a depositing of substance. It brings about the breaking down of substance. And in this separation, this eliminating of substance, he experiences his humanity. (Tr. Note: i.e. it provides a basis for self-consciousness).

Now if, on the other hand, I simply dictate ideas to him, if I give him finite concepts which have been formulated dogmatically I put him into a peculiar state. For these finite concepts can get no hold in human nature, they jostle and press upon one another and can find no entry into the brain, but they beat up against the brain and thus cause it to use up over again in its nerve activity the old deposited substances which lie about.

The effect brought about by all finite intellectual concepts is to compel a man to use over again the cast-off substances which lie about within him; and this gives the human being a feeling of slight disgust, which remains unconscious but which influences his whole disposition so much the more. You see, unless one knows these things, one cannot appreciate their importance. And people do not realise that thinking is a breaking down of substance (ein Absondern), and that thinking in mere ideas forces man to use once again what he has thrown off, to knead up over again all his cast-off phosphoric acid salts.

Now this is of enormous importance in its application to moral education: if we give the child definite precepts in conceptual form, we oblige him to come to morality in the form of ideas, and then antipathy arises; man's inner organism sets itself against abstract moral precepts or commandments, it opposes them. But I can encourage the child to form his own moral sentiments direct from life, from feeling, from example and subsequently lead him on to the breaking down, to the catabolic stage, and get him to formulate moral principles as a free autonomous being. In this case I am helping him to an activity which benefits his entire being. Thus, if I give a child moral precepts I make morality distasteful, disgusting, to him, and this fact plays an important part in modern social life. You have no idea how much disgust human beings have felt for some of the most beautiful, the noblest, the mast majestic of man's moral impulses because they have been presented to them in the form of precepts, in the form of intellectual ideas.

Now the Waldorf teacher comes to learn such things as this through spiritual science. It is indeed this that gives him insight into these material processes. Let me repeat: materialism takes its true place in life only when looked at from the spiritual standpoint. For this gives insight of what is really going on in man. Only through adopting the spiritual standpoint can one become a truly practical educator in the physical sphere.

But such a thing is only possible when the teacher or educator has himself a philosophy of life; when his own view of the world makes him feel the deep significance of the problem of the universe and of man's fate.

And here again I must say an abstract thing, but in reality it is a very concrete thing. It is only apparently abstract. You see, man confronts the riddle of the universe, and he seeks a solution to this riddle. But people suppose nowadays that the solution of the riddle could be put down in some book, stated and expressed in some form of ideas. Remember, however, that there are people—and I have met some of them—who have an extreme horror of such a solution of the riddle of the universe. For they say: if it should really happen that a solution of the riddle of life were discovered and written down in a book, what in Heaven's name are other people who come after them to do? It would be most terribly boring. All contributions to the solution of the world riddle are there to hand, they only require to be learned. And people think this would be colossally boring. I don't altogether blame them; the world really would be a boring place if someone wrote a book containing the answer to the riddle of the universe once and for all, and we could read the book, and then—why then what indeed would remain for us to do in the world?

Now you see there must be something in existence which, when we have the key to it, the so-called solution, calls for further effort on our part, calls upon us to go on and to work on. The riddle of the universe should not be stated as a thing to be solved and done with: the solution of it should give one power to make a new start. And if world problems are rightly understood this comes about. The world presents many problems to us. So many, that we cannot at once even perceive them all By problems I do not only mean those things for which there are abstract answers, but questions as to what we shall do, as to the behaviour of our will and feelings, as to all the many details of life. When I say the world sets us many problems, I mean such questions as these. What then is the real answer to these many problems? The real answer is none other than: man himself. The world is full of riddles and man confronts them. He is a synthesis, a summary, and from man comes to us the answer to the riddle of the universe.

But we do not know man as he should be known. We must begin at the beginning. Man is an answer that takes us back to the beginning. And we must learn to know this answer to our problem, Man, this Oedipus. And this drives us to experience anew the mystery of our own selves. Every new man is a fresh problem to be worked at.

If one desires to be a Waldorf teacher, which means to work from a true philosophy of life, this mysterious relationship between man and the world must have become second nature; (literal translation: it must become an unconscious wisdom of the feelings.) Certainly people take alarm to-day if one says: the Waldorf teachers start from Anthroposophy: this gives them their vision. For how if this Anthroposophy should be very imperfect? That may be. Produce other philosophies then, which you think are better. But a philosophy is a necessity to one who has to deal with human beings as an artist. And this is what teaching involves.

How far the anthroposophical attitude to things contains something helpful alike to education and teaching will be the subject of the third part of my lecture to-day.

When I look back over these nine lectures, I find much to criticise, much that is imperfect, but the most regrettable thing about them is that I should have given them at all in the form in which I have given them. I would far rather not have had to give these lectures—paradoxical as this may sound. That I should have had to give them is in keeping with the spirit of the time, far too much so, for it seems to me that there is an incredible amount of talk about the nature of education and teaching in our age, far too rich; people seem, driven far too much to discuss the question: how shall we educate, how shall we teach? And when one has to enter into these questions oneself, even though it is from a different stand-point, one realises how much too much of it there is.

But why is it there is so much talk today about education and teaching? Almost every little town you come to announces lectures on how to educate, how to teach. Now how does it come about that there is so much discussion of this subject, so many conferences and talks everywhere? If we look back to earlier ages of human history we shall not find people talking nearly so much about education. Edu-cation was a thing people did naively, by instinct, and they knew what they were about.

Now I have said that a truly healthy education, a healthy instruction, must be based on a knowledge of man, and that the staff of the Waldorf School has to acquire this knowledge of man in the way I have shown, and it may well be asked: did the men of earlier ages then possess a knowledge of man so infinitely greater than ours? Strange as it may seem, the answer is: yes. Certainly men of former ages were not so enlightened in the domain of natural science as we are; but earlier men knew more about man in their own way than we do. I mentioned before in these lectures that man has gradually come to be regarded by us as a final product. We contemplate all the other creatures in the world and say: they have evolved up to man, the final product; and here we stop and we say extraordinarily little about man himself. Our physiology even tries to find explanations of man in the experiments done upon animals. We have lost the ability to give man a position in the world as a thing in himself. To a large extent we have lost the being of man.

Now anthroposophy seeks to give mankind once more that knowledge of the world which shall not exclude man himself, which shall not regard him at most as the latest of the organisms. But a knowledge of the world where what one knows about the world truly gives a power to see into the real nature of man, to know him in soul, in body and in spirit. Further, that one shall be able to know what the spirit actually does in man; that one shall know: the intellectual form of the spirit breaks down substances, in the way I described. Now our present way of considering history does not attain this. It makes a halt on reaching man and classifies him with the animals. It formulates a biology, and connects this with physiology; but there is no grasp of what man is. As a result, men act to-day a great deal out of instinct; but as an object of knowledge, of science, there man is not favoured.

The teacher requires a science which will enable him to love man once more—because he can first love his own knowledge. There is much wisdom behind the fact that formerly men did not speak simply of acquiring knowledge, but they spoke of philosophia, of a love of knowledge. Anthroposophy would bring it about that mankind should once more have knowledge which can lead to knowledge of man.

Now, when one knows the human being, when all know-ledge and science centres in man, then one can find the answer to educational questions in every part of one's philosophy. The discoveries and the knowledge required, even about children, are to be found on all hands. And it is this that we need. It is because our ordinary science can tell us nothing about education or instruction that we make extra institutions and have to talk so much about education and teaching. Such lectures as these will only have achieved their object when they shall have become superfluous, namely, when there shall no longer be any necessity to treat this as a special theme, when we shall once again possess a philosophy, a knowledge of the world in which education is implicit so that a teacher having this knowledge is also possessed of the art of education, and can exercise it spontaneously, instinctively. Our need to talk so much about education shows how little impulse for education is contained in the rest of our knowledge.

We need a complete change of direction.

This is the real reason why the Waldorf Teachers do not cultivate a definite and separate pedagogy and didactic, but cultivate a philosophy of life which by teaching them knowledge of man makes it possible for them to have spontaneous impulses for education, to be naive once more in education. And this explains why, in speaking of a Waldorf Teacher one must speak of man as a whole.

This also precludes there being anything fanatical about Waldorf School education. Fanaticism—which is so rife among men—is here ruled out. Fanaticism is the worst thing in the world, particularly in education,—a fanaticism which makes a man press on in one direction and push ahead regardless of anything but his one aim, reduced to precise slogans.

But if one looks at the world, without prejudice one will concede: views and opinions are but views and opinions. If I have a tree here and photograph it, I have one view of it; the view from here has a definite form; but the view is different from here, and again different from over there; so that you might think it was not the same tree if you only had the pictures to go by. In the same way there are points of view in the world, there are outlooks. Each one only regards one aspect of things. If you know that things must be looked upon from the most manifold standpoints you avoid fanaticism and dwell in many-sidedness, in a universality.

Ladies and Gentlemen, if one realises that what people say in the world is for the most part not wrong, only one-sided: that one needs to take the other view into consideration, that all that is necessary is to see the other side also—then one will find goodness everywhere. Hence it is so strange when one is talking of Waldorf education and A. comes and says: Yes, we do this already, but B. does it all wrong. And then B. comes and says: We do this, but A. does it badly. Now a Waldorf teacher would say A. has his good points and R. has his good points; and we seek to use what can be found universally. That is why one hears so often: Waldorf School pedagogy says the same things that we say ourselves. But this is not so, rather we say things which others afterwards can assent to because we know that a fanatical pursuit of one definite line works the utmost damage. And it is essential for the Waldorf teacher to be free from any kind of fanaticism, and confront purely the reality of the growing child.

True, many people may say: there is an Anthroposophical movement, we have met many fanatics in it. But if they look into things more closely they will find: the aim of Anthroposophy is to make knowledge universal and to spiritualise it. That it is called Anthroposophy is a matter of indifference, as I have explained. Actually, it has no other object but the making universal once more what has become one-sided. If, nevertheless, people have found fanaticism, dogmatism, a swearing by definite precepts, within the Anthroposophical movement, this has come in from outside, it is not inherent in the movement; for much is caned into the movement which does not accord with its nature and being. Therefore when it is said that there is also a sect of some kind behind the Waldorf School principles, where people indulge all kinds of crazes, one should study the matter properly and find out the facts and what it is the Waldorf School lives by. Then one will see that Anthroposophy can indeed give life to education and teaching, and that, far from pursuing anything preposterous or falsely idealistic it seeks only to realise the human ideal in living human beings.

And with this indication that the life that speaks through the Waldorf teacher is derived from this source I will bring these lectures to a close. And let me add that although I said that I regretted that these lectures had had to be given—nevertheless it has been a great, joy to me to give them and I thank the honourable audience for the attention and interest they have accorded them.

This course of nine lectures was given by Doctor Rudolf Steiner at Mansfield College, Oxford, in August, 1922, three years after the foundation of the Waldorf School. It is the first of the three courses of lectures on education given by Rudolf Steiner for an English audience.

Mrs. Millicent Mackenzie, at that time professor of Education at University College, Cardiff, was an active member of the committee who promoted the conference and she took the chair throughout these lectures. Principal L. P. Jacks, then head of Manchester College, gave an address of welcome to Dr. Steiner at the opening of the conference. Mr. H. A. L. Fisher, then Minister of Education (to whose message Dr. Steiner refers in Lecture II) had signified his intention to be present.

The colloquial style has been retained in translation since, although Steiner would no doubt have revised the MS. for publication, it seems less presumptuous to leave in what he might have left out than to risk leaving out what he might have left in.

D.H.