The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees!

In our time, theosophy should deepen our entire cultural life on the spiritual side, so that through the theosophical cultural movement, humanity is once again pointed to the fact that everything in our physical, sensual life is based on the spiritual, the supersensible life.

All theosophical worldviews are based on two fundamental truths. The first fundamental truth is that our world, which is perceptible to our senses and our minds, is based on a supersensible, a spiritual one. And the other fundamental truth is that it is possible for man to penetrate into this supersensible, into this spiritual world.

In doing so, anyone who stands on the ground of this theosophical world view will very soon encounter resistance from some of our contemporaries and from those who claim that our science is beyond prejudice, that behind our physical world there is no superphysical, no supersensible world.

Others come and say: Of course, one may admit that there might be a supersensible, a superphysical world somewhere, but man's powers of knowledge, his faculties of perception, are in any case insufficient to reach such a world. The secret-scientific or theosophical world view should make man aware that although those powers of perception and abilities that make it possible for us to perceive the ordinary world around us do not lie in the supersensible world, the powers that lie dormant in every soul, when awakened, lead man into supersensible worlds. And if we want to clarify the whole relationship of man to the supersensible world in the sense of the theosophical world view, we do this best by means of a comparison, which shows that it is not fantasy and superstition when the theosophist speaks of distant spiritual worlds, but that these spiritual worlds are there, just as our world is there.

Let us assume that we could lead someone born blind into this room. He is surrounded by darkness and gloom, while you can see objects in light and color and shine. All that is around you is not there for the blind man. In the moment that we have the good fortune to operate on this blind man and give him the gift of sight, light and color and radiance emerge from the darkness. The whole world is now filled with new qualities and facts. And why? Because an organ of knowledge has been opened for him.

Just as a physical organ has been opened for this person, and a great experience is entering his soul, flooding it with a new world, so it is also possible that spiritual powers of knowledge and soul abilities, which lie dormant in every person, are awakened and that unknown worlds with spiritual facts and spiritual beings flow into the human soul. We cannot operate on everyone born blind, but these dormant abilities can be awakened in every human soul, enabling him to enter the [spiritual] worlds around him.

All that the spiritual, esoteric and theosophical spiritual current has to say to people today comes from such higher insights.

Now, our contemporaries who believe themselves to be on solid scientific ground will think that such a worldview will make us unworldly, will lead us away from the world, and will alienate people from the practical side of life.

Today we shall deal with a subject that is particularly suitable for showing how esoteric science or theosophy, based on its esoteric knowledge, is particularly suited to intervene directly in practical life; how it is precisely by revealing the forces and facts of the spiritual world that it becomes a useful means for people to work safely and appropriately in life.

We will follow a human life, a human course from birth to death, follow it from this theosophical or esoteric point of view, and see what practical aspects this theosophical school of thought can give us for such a view of life, which directly addresses the everyday, what is around us.

We do not want to talk about what Theosophy can bring in terms of knowledge for people, what extends beyond birth and death, not talk about repeated life on earth, not talk about the fact that Theosophy speaks of spiritual causes. We only want to look at the individual human life between birth and death with all the joy and pain, with all the expectations and hopes, with all the strength we need to lead this life as valuable as possible.

We see the human being enter life. But you all know that when a person enters life, they have already completed an important, essential part of their life, which is the part they go through as a human germ in the mother's body. There he is enveloped in a protective mother's shell, there he lives in this shell, and what does birth consist of other than in the fact that the human being, so to speak, sheds this protective mother's shell and steps out, so that his senses and his organism freely face the world and the elements?

Then, however, if we want to look at the effects of this external world on the human organs, we have to understand that the teaching of esoteric science does not only take this being as that which the external senses of human beings see, what the eyes perceive, what the hands can grasp, that for the theosophical view this is only part of the whole human being. When physical science takes this one part of the human being for the whole human being, it is not aware of the life that lies behind it in the superphysical.

In occult science, there is also talk of other garments, of a second garment; and you will immediately get an idea of what is meant by this second garment if we realize that spiritual science, like physical science, is based on facts, that [in the world of the supermundane life] the same substances are united by the same forces as outside in our seemingly inanimate environment.

There is a great difference between how these forces occur in a mineral and how they occur in human life or in any living life. This living life is the same forces that are out there in the inanimate world in the mineral kingdom, they are so intricately combined, so complicated, that this combination would immediately disintegrate if there were not a fighter against this disintegration of life in every moment of life. And this fighter is the second garment of the human being. We call it the etheric body or life body. And we say: every living being has such an etheric body, which prevents physical substances and forces from following their own laws between birth and death. Look at a crystal or another mineral. It has a form in which it presents itself to you. Through its chemical power it remains as it is.

A living being would never remain as it is through these forces. This is evident at the moment of death. Why then does the living being become a corpse according to its physical body? Why does it die? [Because at the moment of death the physical body has separated from the etheric body or life body.] Then the physical body follows its own substances and forces, its own laws, then it decays.

But spiritual science is well aware of the objections of physical science against the ether. However, this is not what we want to deal with today. We just want to sketch out how we have to consider the body according to the teaching of secret science.

We therefore have this second garment, which is a constant fighter against the disintegration of physical life. Then there is a third garment. This third garment is to be imagined as being in front of the soul. If you imagine a person standing before you and you ask yourself: Is there not something about this person that is much closer to them than a large part of their physical body and than their etheric body, they would admit: Within the skin of their physical body, they have something that is closer to them than their physical body and their etheric body. There is something even closer, especially if he is a naive person, if he is a primitive person who has not first convinced himself through scientific studies of what the inner man - his blood, his nerves, his muscles, everything that makes up a person - looks like, that is his urges, instincts, desires and passions. That is the body of sensations and perceptions, which flows up and down. This body of sensations and perceptions, the bearer of these cravings and passions, is the third garment of the human being, the astral body, as it is called for certain reasons in Theosophy.

This body is no longer shared by man with the plants. This body is shared only by the animals. The animals have just, like man, an astral body.

[But what makes man – the crowning glory of creation – stand out from animals is the fourth garment.] It is the sum of powers that command him to call himself an “I”. These abilities to call oneself an “I” mean more than many people consider.

This 'I' - or as one also says 'I am' - was, for example, called the 'unspeakable name of God' in Old Testament religions. Why? Because it was said that everything else in our environment, when it speaks or wants to speak to our soul, will speak to us in such a way that it speaks to our soul through the organs of the physical, etheric and astral bodies.

But that which flows through the world from divine beings does not need an organ to come to life in the soul. This announces itself to us indirectly in the soul. And when the soul says to itself, 'I am', and recognizes its own existence, at that moment it is rightly thought of as a drop or spark of divinity in the soul.

Some might object: Then you theosophists make a god out of man when [you claim] that the divine substances are contained in his ego. Anyone who makes such an objection could also say: If we take a drop from the sea and claim that this drop is of the same substance and essence as the sea water, then we claim that the drop is the sea. [Man's innermost self is divine in nature. It is a drop, a spark of the sea, of the divine, and therefore man also participates in the divine that flows through the world.] Just as the drop is part of the sea, so man is part of the divine.

These are the four garments. The physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the body in which the powers lie, whereby man can express his “I am”.

If man has even the slightest grasp of the facts of life, then he can understand the various facts of life in relation to these different garments of the being. He would soon see the difference between sleeping and waking. One would see that during sleep, only the physical and etheric bodies lie in bed. The astral body and the I are lifted out of the physical and etheric bodies, and because the astral body is the carrier of joy, pain, desire and suffering, of all perceptions and sensations, the experiences of the soul, when the astral body is lifted out, descend into unconsciousness. Why is that the case? Where then is this astral body, where then is this “I” in the night?

It would be illogical if any person were to say that man dies every night and is born again in the morning. [Only this can make it understandable, if one understands that the ego and the astral body submerge into the physical and etheric body in the morning, that the ego and the astral body use the hands, the eyes, the ears, the whole physical body with the brain, use the physical body as a tool to be able to do everything.]

The ego is the spiritual essence of man, which in the morning descends into physical life and which in the evening, when man falls asleep, goes into other worlds, into spiritual worlds.

This is an experience that every person has every day from the alternation of sleeping and waking. But in death there is a completely different experience. Then the physical body separates from the etheric body and the astral body and I, which remain together for a while in the next moment. And because the physical body separates from the etheric and astral bodies, because the fighter who was there from birth to death is no longer there, the physical body follows its own forces and laws and falls apart.

We had to learn this in order to understand the course of human life, because in spiritual science, only the physical human being is born at the moment of birth, the physical birth, when the human germ leaves the mother's body. What is initially exposed to the external elements is initially only the physical human body, because from a theosophical point of view, we are not just talking about one birth, but about several births, and this language of multiple births makes the course of a person's life fully understandable.

We speak first of a second birth of man, which occurs approximately around the seventh year, or rather when the human being changes teeth. For many people, speaking of a second birth seems very strange.

Just as the germ is in the mother's womb until physical birth, so is the human being's etheric or life body, the second garment of the body, enclosed by an etheric sheath, by the etheric mother, until the change of teeth, and only then is this etheric sheath gradually pushed aside.

At first this may seem like a gray theory, but it is not. Only those who know that physical life is born at the time of physical birth and that the etheric body is only present at the change of teeth, only then does this etheric body freely face the world, can unfold principles for the education of the child. Now we present what follows from this: as long as the human germ is in the mother's womb, it does not come into contact with external light or external influences. This would be impossible, otherwise the germ would be destroyed. They have to wait to influence the light until the eyes, until the person is born. Every materialistically thinking person can see that. But they do not know that it is just as bad for the spiritual person to allow influences to flow into the etheric body that should only flow in after the change of teeth, when the etheric body is exposed on all sides. This means nothing other than that we have to base our educational principles on this.

However, until the age of seven, when only the physical body is exposed to external conditions, particular attention must be paid to the development of the body in the growing person, because all the forms in which the physical body must take shape are developed by the year the teeth change. And whatever is not laid down in the body in terms of form, in coarse or fine form, is lost for the whole of human life. The human being grows and develops, but the forms that become larger are laid down in the finest form up to that point. Therefore, during this time, when one does not have an effect on the etheric body, everything must be done to make the forms as good as possible.

We can only mention a few aspects that will show how to do this. There is a word that comes before the soul like a magic word in development, for this time until the seventh year, that is, until the change of teeth, and this word is: “imitation.” There is nothing as important for the development of the physical body as imitation. Everything that affects a person only works through imitation. What the child sees in his environment affects him through the senses. And not only physical things, but everything that happens in the physical world, including the moral things that the child sees around him, also affect the forms until the teeth change.

Imagine a child who has seen only evil and wickedness for seven years. This has an effect on his physical body. It causes such forms in the brain that these forms will be particularly suitable for becoming a special instrument for immorality, and it is no longer possible to improve in education what one has neglected to teach the child through ignorance.

I will give you an example from which you will see that everything we show the child, everything we teach him as principles, is imitated by the child.

Let's take a very good boy - a really good boy - who embarrasses his parents by taking some money from the till one day. The thought arises in the parents' minds: How can it be that a boy we have raised in this way takes money from the till? The child has stolen, the parents think. No, they say from the theosophical point of view. It is precisely because he is a good boy that he has done this. But what have you done? Day after day you did it, every day you took money from the cash box, the boy saw it every day. He should do everything that his parents do, and that is right. Therefore, he also took money. The boy was not a thief, he did not want to use the money for himself at all, or use it, he gave it to another boy. He just showed himself to be particularly moral, especially in this act. You have to make it a principle to only do in the children's environment what the child could actually do. What it must not do must not happen in its environment.

This is also very important for the plastic development of the organs, and only spiritual science can provide the right principles for this.

You know that a muscle becomes more plastic when it is used correctly. At this age, everything must be shaped plastically. The colors that are in the environment – be it red, blue, green and so on – all have a certain deep meaning for the development of the internal organs, as far as the physical organs are concerned; and many mistakes are made here. Because, as you know, there are many people who talk about what have been called nervous children, children who have a very restless nature. They believe that green, blue and dark colors should be introduced into the environment to calm them down. Others have very calm children and they believe that they should be dressed in light, red and white clothes. The opposite is true, because it is not the colors that affect these children. It depends on how these colors affect the children's inner being. For example, if you see a red spot on a black background, you will soon see that green lingers. This means that while you are looking at red, the inner organism perceives green. And so, when a child is excited and you bring red into its environment, red will not affect the child as you think it will. And it is precisely this that the child needs until the second dentition, that is, until the seventh year. Therefore, you have to dress a child who is restless in red clothes, while conversely, when a child is very calm, too calm, lethargic, green, blue, dark colors are needed.

You have to listen to me carefully. It is very easy to make the following objection, which is made again and again. People then say to me: “You see, when I put a red umbrella on the lamp in the evening, it makes me feel agitated.” The answer I have to give to such a lady or gentleman is: “Yes, but you are not a child before the change of teeth either. Of course, one must not forget that, and should bear in mind that for further development, other conditions are also present.

As soon as the soul has left the etheric shell, it is a matter of finding the right occupation for the child, and there is much in life for which a materialistic approach is quite, quite wrong.

One could – although someone who is grounded in spiritual science should not do this – one could become sentimental when looking at the many mistakes and their effects that are made in these areas. One could cite many things from the youth and life of a person who has become a great materialist, who denies everything else because he believes that everything results from the combination of molecules and atoms. This is because this person did not receive the right toy in his childhood, the one that can present life to him. If, for example, you give a child a toy like this, where it can create a whole new picture by putting together stones, thereby combining them, then new forms are formed through this. Any toy that evokes imagination is the right toy. This toy creates the impulse for the child to develop. For example, give a healthy child a doll that you made out of an old handkerchief, with two plaits for legs, two plaits for hands and a few eyes drawn on with ink. In the long run, the healthy child will most likely enjoy such a doll more than a real doll with real hair and beautifully painted cheeks, because such a beautiful doll – which is nevertheless always hideous – does not activate the powers of creative imagination, whereas if you give the child a doll made out of a handkerchief, it will see that this is not a human form. Then the imagination must be allowed to work. Then the inner plastic forms are called upon to be formed, and must be formed. These forms lie fallow if you give the child a toy that does not allow it to use its imagination. If you are aware that, as with the change of teeth, the child has to shape itself plastically, then you will find a great deal of support for the whole of education in theosophy, all of which has a good, deep foundation. We can only mention a few points here, for example, in the feeding of children, how the child is to be “educated”.

It used to be thought that young children should be fed a lot of eggs. Now, the best principle for this age is to absolutely not exceed the necessary protein requirement, because an excess of protein causes the child to lose its food instincts and the ability to shape its forms. A child to whom you do not give much protein will only demand what is healthy for him, and that is what the child needs to develop plastically. What is in the protein is something that, through its power, makes the plastic form exceed itself, and in this way secure instincts are not developed. By overfeeding the child with protein, you kill the power.

This, then, is the care of the physical body, the body that is born first. Now, with the change of teeth, the etheric covering withdraws, and the physical body and etheric body are now there. Now is the time to work with all our might from the outside to develop the etheric body. We must therefore first realize what forces the life body is the carrier of. Today, we want to give special consideration to the spiritual. This body is also the carrier of everything, especially memory, and then it is the carrier of the worldly power of imagination. Everything that a person does not grasp with his dry intellect, but rather what he can grasp through the image. If one knows this, then one will realize that at the moment the etheric body is born, an education must take place that takes particular account of this. This is therefore the second birth.

[The third garment is now still surrounded by an outer shell, by a protection.] This protection, the astral shell, will also be withdrawn, repulsed, and stripped off later, but only around the fifteenth year, at the time of sexual maturity.

Then, in the fifteenth year, the third birth takes place, and everything that penetrates the astral body from the outside and sends out its effects without realizing that it is still enveloped, has the same effect as light would have on a germ while it is still in the mother's womb. Now, for the second period of human development, which runs between the change of teeth, i.e. the seventh year, and sexual maturity around the fifteenth year, there is again a certain path that we have to follow. Here, too, there is another magic word that is just as important as imitation for the first seven years, and the word for this second period of life is 'authority'.

There is nothing that could ever replace the tremendously beneficial influence of the right authority in this age of life in later life. Just as everything around us awakens us to imitation up to the age of seven, so between the ages of seven and fifteen, no intellectual judgments have any effect on the human being. No moral principles can influence this person. That is all a matter for the astral body, and that has not yet been born. But when we look at the embodiment, the ideal striving, and confront the child with a true authority, then the right forces are awakened in the soul, which could not otherwise be reached later. If only people knew how important and significant the right kind of authority is! This authority is something very important for the human being in his life between birth and death. And in this time between the change of teeth and sexual maturity, all teaching and education must be built upon it. It is not enough for us to only say good things to the child; we must influence it through authority. We must teach the child everything there is to know through pictures, because only when the child has absorbed the image for the various 'whys' of nature within itself will it be able to receive everything it has seen in concrete forms so far in abstract concepts of the mind when the astral body is born.

It is necessary for the child to know how everything relates to the soul. You have to teach it this in pictures. When you show the child the butterfly puppet and show how the puppet develops until the butterfly flies out, and you tell him that the immortal soul leaves the body just as the butterfly flies out of the puppet, how it goes to the other world. Now, in our time, one can object: But children don't believe that! Do you know why they don't believe it? Because the teachers, because the educators themselves do not believe it. Now the materialistically thinking person says: Now you demand not only that children believe it, but also that teachers believe it!

Theosophy wants to make it clear again how the soul continues to exist after it has left the physical body, just as it is the case with the chrysalis and the moth. Yes, we will be able to believe in it again, and that is the most beautiful achievement of theosophy, that we do not see these things as a mere intellectual exercise, but that we have truths again that can also be understood through feeling. When people understand this, then faith is also passed on to the child, and the more the child is supposed to grasp of it, and the more the child is taught about it, the better it is for the child to learn to understand it through imagination. It is quite a different matter whether a child has experienced the secrets of nature through feeling and thus comes to the abstract concept, than whether a child has to understand the dry concept beforehand, without feeling coming into it. And this feeling works best when the etheric body is developing – and that is why particular emphasis must be placed on this in education.

In our time, in many areas of Europe, there are views that one should not turn the child into a memory machine. It is said that the child must learn to think. They teach him that Ix1=1 very early on, and the child must learn many other things soon. But there is nothing worse than having to exert the pure powers of reason too early. First, a fund of knowledge must be available, then one can judge what one knows. Today, children are taught history without understanding it, because children cannot yet judge cause and effect. The child must first have a sufficient amount of thoughts, and when the child sees many things in his soul, he can compare. If you only know a little and you start judging, you cannot compare, and [then] man is stupid. You cannot do anything worse for development in this [section] of life, in which our memory should really be enriched, than not to pay close attention to the child's ability to compare, which enables him to judge better. This is not yet understood today, [and that has already led to bad things]. Young people today give their judgment on everything, and we have to experience that articles appear in newspapers written by young people whose astral body has only recently been born.

If one knew how the laws work, then one should know that the astral body is only really born at the time of sexual maturity – around this time – and before this time the child does not yet have the ability to judge. The time from the change of teeth to sexual maturity should have the magic words: 'authority', 'image' and 'memory'. We could mention many things here, but one thing is particularly important: as soon as the astral body is born, the development of the powers of the mind and the aesthetic disposition of the human being come into consideration. Just as during the first seven years the physical body was developed, from the seventh to the fifteenth year the etheric body was developed, so now the astral body comes into consideration. If we want to assess this correctly, we need to be clear about a great many things, because during this time a great many images are placed before the soul. During this time, the human being must have good role models and ideals to strive for. The magic word for this epoch of human development is “emulation”. One must give these people pictures of great men and women and make clear to them what these people have done in the development of the world. And what has been neglected during this time in order to educate the senses for the beautiful and artistic cannot be made up for later. With sexual maturity, what has been inherited from previous generations, from the family and so on, comes out with the person, so to speak.

Then, when a person has reached sexual maturity, when he has shed his astral shell, the qualities that he has brought with him from previous lives come to light. Their shadows had already been cast over the young child, but if we look at the essential, what emerges is what goes beyond death and birth: individuality.

At puberty, the astral covering is pushed back and the astral body is released. And now there come times for the person when other things are important. Now, consideration is given to education, to the power of judgment, to a person's sound judgment. But something else is even more important. That which the person has brought with them from their previous life comes to the fore in a special way, that they want to shape in this life between birth and death. During this time, the human being is not yet capable of observing the external world in an objective way. But that which enters the world is of a beautiful, ideal nature. [This nature also wants to come out, and here it is a matter of how this nature, insofar as it comes out as idealism, will face life as hope.] This hope and idealism reveal themselves in their true form between the ages of 14, 15 and 21 to 22. During this time, everything that wants to come out reveals itself, even if it contradicts reality. These are all memories from previous lives, with the new fresh powers of the astral body. Woe betide people whose ideals of hope are clouded during this time, whose expectations are dimmed, who are told that a large part of these things will later appear merely as spring hopes, that these are merely unattainable ideals and hopes. That is not the point. It does not matter whether the ideals can be achieved, but rather it is a matter of the forces that lie within them. These are the favorable life forces that, if well trained, make our astral body safe and secure for life. When we have these ideals, we make ourselves a strong third garment, and there is nothing worse than not taking care for this time, that idealism can develop, when one encounters this idealism with a Philistinism that wants to try to break the idealism.

Because it is only around the twentieth year that the actual self in man, which has been in its shell until now, is fully born. And with that, the human being enters the world in free communication, and has become a being that places itself in absolutely free communication with the outside world.

Only then is everything that was in him out. Now he has to educate himself by grinding down. This takes a long time. It continues like this until the thirty-fifth year. This is an important year in a person's life. This thirty-fifth year is considered a turning point by those who stand on the ground of theosophical spiritual science.

If we look at the average lifespan, we see that the thirty-fifth year marks the end of everything that was predisposed in the human being. Up to this point, he has acquired everything he could practise. Towards the end of the thirty-fifth year, when the time of apprenticeship and wandering is over, he begins to exercise his powers and abilities. But then the powers begin to decline again. From the age of thirty-five, the astral body, which until then had been in free contact with the outside world and in which everything that had been established was engraved, now begins to harden and regress. This lasts until the age of forty. This is an important epoch in the development of man, because this degeneration is one side of the matter - and the other side is much more important.

The moment the shell, the astral body, begins to recede, the moment the forces of the astral body are consumed, that is the moment the core in man, the eternal core, is emphasized. If a person is educated correctly, this core can develop all the more for the times after death. While the temporal disappears downwards, this eternal in man grows. This is very evident in the fortieth year, when, after the astral body, the etheric body also begins to disintegrate. Just as it happened first with the astral body, so it now happens with the etheric body, which has now begun to regress. We can see this clearly in many people who, around this time, remember a lot of what they experienced as a child. Especially from the seventh to the fourteenth year, while they have completely forgotten many things that they have experienced recently. These old memories come back when the etheric body recedes.

The last epoch is when the physical body declines. This is, by and large, when the physical organs, the entire bone system, deteriorates. We do not need to describe this physical deterioration, but we point it out so that you can see what can actually be said about this epoch of life.

Now all this is no longer generally known, but there were times, very long, long ago, when all this was known, when it was known, for example, that the thirty-fifth year is the midpoint of life, and that only after this time, when you are completely finished with yourself - and that is around the thirty-fifth year - that you are only then mature enough to give to others, to spend what you have in abundance. Only after the thirty-fifth year do you have an abundance. Until then, man has to take care of the development of his clothes. So until his thirtieth year, man has to deal with himself. When he no longer has to deal with himself – only after his thirty-fifth year, because then the bodies regress – then the forces that previously flowed into his physical body flow into his spiritual body, in order to have an effect on his environment. In the times when people had an inkling of these things, this thirty-fifth year was therefore considered so important. A person was only trusted with judgment after he had reached the age of thirty-five, when he had received all his powers. Only then, it was said, did a person become capable of judgment. Other people should listen to his judgment when he no longer has anything to do with himself; and then it was valid as long as the person had his astral body. When the etheric body begins to fade away, then his judgment is not only decisive to be listened to, but to be accepted as something that applies not only to him, but to the community in which he finds himself.

In ancient times, when this was understood, when it was known that the one who had entered this age no longer needed to add anything to his etheric body because it was already declining, in that age the person could give his judgment in the council of the community. In the times when people knew about this, when they knew life in this way, they organized their lives accordingly, and they said something wonderful in those times when they felt these things. They said: Only when a person has reached the age at which his physical body gradually decays, so that he no longer demands anything and his time fades away, only then can you listen to him, only then is his judgment exalted. You can accept his judgment. Such things have existed, and many were aware of them.

I will remind you of just one fact. Just read the beginning of Dante's 'Commedia'. Then read how he describes what he experienced, where he writes that the most powerful thing he experienced was in the middle of his life – that is when he was thirty-five. There he experienced this initiation, which could be called the 'initiation into the mysteries of existence'. And there is a secret training, an initiation into the secrets of existence in special schools, in mystery schools, under such conditions that a person is never declared mature enough to speak about the facts of secret science, a person who still has something to do with himself, who is not already on the descending line.

If you take all this together from the spiritual-scientific point of view, you will see that on the one hand you have a path along which the various bodies - the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body - develop, and a path along which these bodies regress, an ascending and a descending path. But it is on the latter, on which the eternal in man grows, on which the source decreases, and man then has to pass through the gate of death. Then the powers that have been mysteriously developing in the sheaths emerge. And the more a person strives to develop himself in his life, and the more he applies theosophical views in the practical world, the better he has understood the true spirit of them.

We have now seen that we have gained practical principles directly from these theosophical views, and yet there are many people who say: There are such strange people in the world who call themselves Theosophists, who claim such strange things about a world that [in addition] is supposed to still exist [which we cannot possibly know about]. A reasonable person considers all this to be fantasy. You can say all that, but we assume that such people rise up until they say: Now, when you meet and talk to a theosophist like that, they do have a reasonable judgment about other things. So let us listen to the matter for once, even if they tell us something that we cannot yet understand directly; perhaps there is something good in what these strange people claim, but we can try it.

You can make life itself the proof. You can prove through life what is right. All the talking and discussing is only partially very good, but it is not the right thing. With discussion, you can prove virtually anything you want. It is the same with remedies. The healer thinks that his remedy is the best. But someone else may come along and say that what he has is definitely better, that his remedy is the best there is. Then someone else may come along and say: none of it is worth anything, and he proves it too. You don't get anywhere with such discussions. You only get ahead by using the remedy. If this remedy helps, then it is proven that it is good. If it does not help, then it is not proven.

If Theosophy is to have any influence on our lives, then life must be the proof for such things. Let man dare to put life under the facts that Theosophy talks about. You will then see that man comes up higher, healthy in body and soul, that man will develop better. You will see that life is the proof of the correctness of what Theosophy has to give, and you may place your whole life under the sign of the views, the facts, and you will see that the whole of life will develop more beautifully. You will see that it is not necessary for our hopes and our efforts to wane for it. If we fail to prove the correctness of our views to you, then they were not correct for you. But we know that what we say is right. We feel and know that the temporal dies and that the eternal grows. We run counter to the moments when we are to pass through the gate of death.

Thus, Theosophy, spiritual science, gives us the means to intervene in our immediate, practical lives in a healthy way, and the lives that have been influenced by this will provide the best proof of its truth. People today need the influence of Theosophy in their everyday lives. And life becomes healthy and fresh and hopeful and capable of work when man knows everything that confronts him in the outer world through the strong powers of the spirit, on which everything is based. Then everything should be a reflection of spiritual facts. Then, in all truth, spirit encounters spirit in evolution, and when spirit ignites spirit in evolution, then this development truly progresses, upward to the salvation of all life, to the salvation of all existence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The delay in arriving yesterday prevented me from speaking to you, as was my wish, about what has been happening in the Anthroposophical Society since the Christmas Foundation Meeting at the Goetheanum. As the purpose and intentions of that Meeting will have become known to friends through the News Sheet, I propose to speak briefly about the most important points only and then to continue with more intimate studies concerning the significance of this Christmas Foundation Meeting for the Anthroposophical Society.

The Christmas Meeting was intended to be a fundamental renewal, a new foundation of the Anthroposophical Society. Up to the time of the Christmas Foundation Meeting I was always able to make a distinction between the Anthroposophical Movement and the Anthroposophical Society. The latter represented as it were the earthly projection of something that exists in the spiritual worlds in a certain stream of the spiritual life. What was taught here on the Earth and communicated as anthroposophical wisdom—this was the reflection of the stream flowing in spiritual worlds through the present phase of the evolution of mankind. The Anthroposophical Society was then a kind of ‘administrative organ’ for the anthroposophical knowledge flowing through the Anthroposophical Movement.

As time went on, this did not turn out satisfactorily for the true cultivation of Anthroposophy. It therefore became necessary that I myself—until then I had taught Anthroposophy without having any official connection with the Anthroposophical Society—should take over, together with the Dornach Executive, the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society as such. The Anthroposophical Movement and the Anthroposophical Society have thereby become one. Since the Christmas Foundation Meeting in Dornach, the opposite of what went before must be recognised: no distinction is to be made henceforward between Anthroposophical Movement and Anthroposophical Society, for they are now identical. And those who stand by my side as the Executive at the Goetheanum are to be regarded as a kind of esoteric Executive. Thus what comes about through this Executive may be characterised as ‘Anthroposophy in deed and practice,’ whereas formerly it could only be a matter of the administration of the anthroposophical teachings.

This means, however, that the whole Anthroposophical Society must gradually be placed upon a new basis—a basis which makes it possible for esotericism to stream through the Society—and the essence of the Anthroposophical Society in the future will be constituted by the due response and attitude on the part of those who desire to be Anthroposophists. This will have to be understood in the General Anthroposophical Society which henceforward will be an entirely open Society—so that, as was announced at Christmas, the Lecture-Courses too will be available for everyone, prefixed by the clauses laying down a kind of spiritual boundary-line.

The prosperity and fruitful development of the anthroposophical cause will depend upon a true understanding of the esoteric trend which, from now onwards, will be implicit in the Anthroposophical Movement. Care will be taken to ensure that the Anthroposophical Society is kept free from bureaucratic and formal administrative measures and that the sole basis everywhere is the human element to be cultivated within the Society. Naturally, the Executive at the Goetheanum will have much to administer: but the administration will not be the essential. The essential will be that the Executive at the Goetheanum will act in this or that matter out of its own initiative. And what the Executive does, what in many ways it has already begun to do—that will form the content of the Anthroposophical Society.

Thereby a great many harmful tendencies that have arisen in the Society during recent years will be eliminated; difficulties will be in store for many Members, because all kinds of institutions, founded out of good-will, as the saying goes, did not prove equal to what they claimed to be and have really side-tracked the Anthroposophical Movement. Henceforward the Anthroposophical Movement will, in the human sense, be that which flows through the Anthroposophical Society.

The more deeply this is realised and understood the better it will be for the Anthroposophical Movement. And I am able to say the following.—Because that impulse prevailed among those who gathered at the Goetheanum at Christmas, it has been possible since then to introduce a quite different note into the Anthroposophical Movement. And to my deep satisfaction I have found heartfelt response to this in the different places I have so far been able to visit. It can be said that what was undertaken at Christmas was in a certain sense a hazard. For a certain eventuality existed: because the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society was now combined with the presentation of the spiritual teachings, those Powers in the spiritual world who lead the Anthroposophical Movement might have withdrawn their guiding hands. It may now be said that this did not happen, but that the contrary is true: these spiritual Powers are responding with an ever greater measure of grace, with even greater bounty, to what is streaming through the Anthroposophical Movement. In a certain sense a pledge has been made to the spiritual world. This pledge will be unswervingly fulfilled and it will be seen that in the future things will happen in accordance with it. And so not only in respect of the Anthroposophical Movement but also in respect of the Anthroposophical Society, responsibility is laid upon the Dornach Executive.

I have only spoken these few preliminary words in order to lead up to something that it is now possible to say and is of such a nature that it can become part of the content of the Anthroposophical Movement. I want to speak about something that has to do with the karma of the Anthroposophical Society itself.

When we think to-day of how the Anthroposophical Society exists in the world as the embodiment of the Anthroposophical Movement, we see a number of human beings coming together within the Anthroposophical Society. Any discerning person realises that there are also other human beings in the world—one finds them everywhere—whose karma predisposes them to come to the Anthroposophical Society but, to begin with, something holds them back, they do not immediately, and in the full sense, find their way into it—though eventually they will certainly do so, either in this or in the next incarnation. We must, however, bear the following in mind: Those human beings who through their karma come to the Anthroposophical Movement are predestined for this Movement.

Now everything that happens here in the physical world is foreshadowed in spiritual worlds. Nothing happens in the physical world that has not been prepared for spiritually, in the spiritual world. And this is the significant thing: What is coming to pass here on the Earth in the twentieth century as the gathering together of a number of human beings in the Anthroposophical Society, was prepared for during the first half of the nineteenth century when the souls of those human beings who are now in incarnation and are coming together in large numbers, were united in the spiritual realms before they descended into the physical world. In the spiritual worlds at that time a kind of cult or ritual was lived through by a number of souls who were working together—a cult which instigated those longings that have arisen in the souls of those who now, in their present incarnations, come to the Anthroposophical Society. And whoever has a gift for recognising such souls in their bodies, does indeed recognise them as having worked together with him in the first half of the nineteenth century, when, in the spiritual world, mighty, cosmic Imaginations were presented of what I will call the new Christianity. Up there—as in their bodies now—the souls were united in order to gather into themselves out of what I will call the Cosmic Substantiality and the Cosmic Forces, that which, in mighty pictures, was of cosmic significance. It was the prelude of what was to become anthroposophical teaching and practice here on the Earth. By far the majority of the Anthroposophists who now sit together with one another would be able, if they perceived this, to say: Yes, we know one another, we were together in spiritual worlds, and in a super-sensible cult we experienced mighty, cosmic Imaginations together!

All these souls had gathered together in the first half of the nineteenth century in order to prepare for what, on Earth, was to become the Anthroposophical Movement. In reality it was all a preparation for what I have often called the ‘stream of Michael,’ which appeared in the last third of the nineteenth century and is the most important of all spiritual intervention in the modern phase of human evolution. The Michael stream—to prepare the ways for Michael's earthly-heavenly working—such was the task of the souls who were together in the spiritual world.

These souls, however, were drawn together by experiences they had undergone through long, long ages—through centuries, nay, in many cases through thousands of years. And among them two main groups are to be distinguished. The one group experienced the form of Christianity which during the first centuries of the Christian era had spread in Southern Europe and also, to some extent, in Middle Europe. This Christianity continued to present to its believers a Christ conceived of as the mighty Divine Messenger who had come down from the Sun to the Earth in order thereafter to work among men. With greater or less understanding, Christ was thus pictured by the Christians of the first centuries as the mighty ‘Sun God.’

But throughout Christendom at this time the faculty of instinctive clairvoyance once possessed by men was fading away. Then they could no longer see in the Sun the great spiritual kingdom at whose centre the Christ once had His abode. The ancient clairvoyant perception of the descent of the Christ to the Earth became superseded by mere tradition—tradition that He had come down from the Sun to the Earth, uniting Himself with Jesus of Nazareth in the physical body. The majority of Christians now retained little more than the concept that once upon a time a Being had lived in Palestine—Christ Jesus—whose nature now began to be the subject of controversy. Had this Being been fully God? Or was He both God and Man and, if so, how was the Divinity related to the Humanity? These questions, with others arising from them, were the problems and the causes of strife in the Church Councils. Eventually the mass of the people had nothing left to them but the Decrees issued by Rome.

There were, however, among the Christians certain individuals who came more and more to be regarded as heretics. They still preserved as a living remembrance the tradition of the Christ as a Being of the Sun. To them, a Sun Being, by nature foreign to this Earth, was once incarnate. He descended to existence in this physical, material world. Until the seventh and eighth centuries these individuals found themselves placed in conditions which caused them to say: In what is now making its appearance in the guise of Christianity there is no longer any real understanding of the nature of the Christ! These “heretics” became, in effect, weary of Christianity. There were indeed such souls who in the early Christian centuries until the seventh and eighth centuries passed through the gate of death in a mood of weariness in regard to Christianity. Whether or not they had been in incarnation in the intervening period, the incarnation of importance for them was that which occurred in the early Christian centuries. Then, from the seventh and eighth centuries onwards, they were preparing in the spiritual world for that great and powerful action of which I told you when I said that in the first half of the nineteenth century a kind of cult took place in the super-sensible world. These individuals participated in this cult and they belong to the one group of souls who have found their way into the Anthroposophical Society.

The other group of souls had their last important incarnation in the latest pre-Christian—not the first Christian—centuries, and in the ancient Pagan Mysteries prior to Christianity they had still been able to gaze with clairvoyant vision into the spiritual world. They had learnt in these ancient Mysteries that the Christ would come down one day to the Earth. They did not live on Earth during the early centuries of Christianity but remained in the super-sensible worlds and only after the seventh century descended to incarnations of importance. These are souls who, as it were from the vantage-point of the super-sensible, witnessed the entry of the Christ into earthly culture and civilisation. They longed for Christianity. And at the same time they were resolute in a desire to work actively and vigorously to bring into the world a truly cosmic, truly spiritual form of Christianity.

These two groups united with the other souls in that super-sensible cult during the first half of the nineteenth century. It was like a great cosmic, spiritual festival, lasting for many decades as a spiritual happening in the world immediately bordering on the physical. There they were—the souls who then descended, having worked together in the super-sensible world to prepare for their next incarnation on the Earth, those who were weary of Christianity and those who were yearning for it. Towards the end of the nineteenth century they descended to incarnation and when they had arrived on Earth they were ready, having thus made preparation, to come into the Anthroposophical Society.

All this, as I have said, had been in course of preparation for many centuries. Here on the Earth, Christianity had developed in such a way that the Gospels had gradually come to be interpreted as if they spoke merely of some kind of abstract “heights” from which a Being—Jesus of Nazareth—came down to proclaim the Christ. Men had no longer any inkling of how the world of stars as the expression of the Spiritual is connected with the spiritual life; hence it was also impossible for them to understand what is signified by saying: Christ, as a divine Sun Hero, came down into Jesus in order that He might share the destiny of men. It is precisely those facts of most significance that escape the ordinary student of history. Above all, there is no understanding of those who are called “heretics.” Moreover, among the souls who came down to Earth as the twentieth century approached—the souls weary of Christianity and those longing for it—there is, for the most part, no self-recognition. The “heretic-souls” do not recognise themselves.

By the seventh and eighth centuries such traditions as had been kept alive by the heretics who had become weary of Christianity had largely disappeared. The knowledge was sustained in small circles only, where until the twelfth century—the middle of the Middle Ages—it was preserved and cultivated. These circles were composed of Teachers, divinely blessed Teachers, who still cultivated something of this ancient knowledge of spiritual Christianity, cosmological Christianity. There were some amongst them, too, who had directly received communications from the past and in them a kind of Inspiration arose; thus they were able to experience a reflection—whether strong or faint, a true image—of what in the first Christian centuries men had been able to behold under the influence of a mighty Inspiration of the descent of the Sun God leading to the Mystery of Golgotha.

And so two main streams were there. One, as we have seen, is the stream which derives directly from the heretical movements of the first Christian centuries. Those belonging to it were fired still by what had been alive in the Platonism of ancient Greece. So fired were they that when through the tidings emanating from ancient times their inner vision opened, they were always able, under the influence of a genuine, albeit faint Inspiration, to perceive the descent of the Christ to the Earth and to glimpse His work on the Earth. This was the Platonic stream.

For the other stream a different destiny was in store. To this stream belonged those souls above all who had their last important incarnation in the pre-Christian era and who had glimpsed Christianity as something ordained for the future. The task of this stream was to prepare the intellect for that epoch which had its beginning in the first half of the fifteenth century. This was to be the epoch when the human intellect would unfold—the epoch of the Spiritual Soul. It was prepared for by the Aristotelians, in contrast—but in harmonious contrast—to what the Platonists had accomplished. And those who propagated Aristotelian teachings until well into the twelfth century were souls who had passed through their last really important incarnation in ancient Pagan times, especially in the world of Greek culture. And then—in the middle of the Middle Ages, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—there came about that great and wonderful spiritual understanding, if I may call it so, between the Platonists and the Aristotelians. And among these Platonists and Aristotelians were the leaders of those who as the two groups of souls I have described, advanced the Anthroposophical Movement.

By the twelfth century a certain School had come into being—as it were through inner necessity—a School in which the afterglow of the old Platonic seership lit up once again. It was the great and illustrious School of Chartres. In this School were great teachers to whom the mysteries of early Christianity were still known and in whose hearts and souls this knowledge kindled a vision of the spiritual foundation of Christianity. In the School of Chartres in France, where stands the magnificent Cathedral, built with such profusion of detail, there was a concentration, a gathering-together, as it were, of knowledge that only shortly before had been widely scattered, though confined to the small circles of which I have spoken. One of the men with whom the School was able to forge a living link was Peter of Compostella. He was able, with inspired understanding, to bring the ancient spiritual Christianity to life again within his own heart and soul. A whole succession of wonderful figures were teachers in Chartres. Truly remarkable voices spoke of Christianity in the School of Chartres in this twelfth century. There, for example, we find Bernard of Chartres, Bernardus Sylvestris, John of Salisbury, but above all the great Alanus ab Insulis. Mighty teachers indeed! When they spoke in the School of Chartres it was as if Plato himself, interpreting Christianity, were working in person among them. They taught the spiritual content and substance of Christianity. The writings that have come down from them may seem full of abstractions to those who read them to-day. But that is due simply to the abstract trend that characterises modern thinking. The impulse of the Christ is implicit in all the descriptions of the spiritual world contained in the writings of these outstanding personalities. I will give you an idea of how Bernardus Sylvestris and Alanus ab Insulis, above all, taught their initiated pupils. Strange as it will seem to the modern mind, such revelations were indeed given at that time to the pupils of Chartres.

It was taught: New life will come to Christianity. Its spiritual content and essence will be understood once again when Kali Yuga, the Age of Darkness, has come to an end and the dawn of a new Age breaks. And with the year 1899 this has already come to pass for us who are living at the present time; this is the great and mighty change that was to come for humanity at the end of Kali Yuga, the mighty impulse given two decades previously through the advent of Michael. This was prophetically announced in the School of Chartres in the twelfth century, above all by Bernardus Sylvestris and Alanus ab Insulis. But these men did not teach in the Aristotelian way, they did not teach by way of the intellect. They gave their teachings entirely in the form of mighty, imaginative pictures—pictures whereby the spiritual content of Christianity became concretely real. But there were certain prophetic teachings; and I should like by means of a brief extract to give you an indication of one such teaching.

Alanus ab Insulis spoke to the following effect to a narrow circle of his initiated pupils:—‘As we contemplate the universe to-day, we still regard the Earth as the centre, we judge everything from the Earth, as the centre. If the terrestrial conception which enables us to unfold our pictures and our imaginations... if this conception alone were to fertilise the coming centuries, progress would not be possible for mankind. We must come to an understanding with the Aristotelians who bring to humanity the intellect which must then be spiritualised so that in the twentieth century it may shine forth in a new and spiritual form among men. We, in our time, regard the Earth as the centre of the Cosmos, we speak of the planets circling around the Earth, we describe the whole heaven of stars as it presents itself to physical eyes as if it revolved around the Earth. But there will come one who will say: Let us place the Sun at the spatial centre of the cosmic system! But when he who will thus place the Sun at the centre of the spatial universe has come, the picture of the world will become arid. Men will only calculate the courses of the planets, will merely indicate the positions of the heavenly bodies, speaking of them as gases, or burning, luminous, physical bodies; they will know the starry heavens only in terms of mathematical and mechanical laws. But this arid picture of the world that will become widespread in the coming times, has, after all, one thing—meagre, it is true, yet it has it none the less. ... We look at the universe from the Earth; he who will come will look at the universe from the standpoint of the Sun. He will be like one who indicates a “direction” only—the direction leading towards a path of majestic splendour, fraught with most wonderful happenings and peopled by glorious Beings. But he will give the direction through abstract concepts only.’ (Thereby the Copernican picture of the world was indicated, arid and abstract yet giving the direction...) ‘For,’ said Alanus ab Insulis, ‘everything we present through the Imaginations that come to us must pass away; it must pass away and the picture men now have of the world must become altogether abstract, hardly more than a pointer along a path strewn with wonderful memorials. For then, in the spiritual world, there will be One who will use this pointer—which for the purposes of world-renewal is nothing more than a means of directive—in order that, together with the prevailing intellectualism, he may then lay the foundations of the new spirituality ... there will be One who will have this pointer as his only tool. This One will be St. Michael! For Him the ground must be made free; he must sow the path with new seed. And to that end, nothing but lines must remain—mathematical lines!’

A kind of magic breathed through the School of Chartres when Alanus ab Insulis was giving such teachings to a few of his chosen pupils. It was as if the ether-world all around were set astir by the surging waves of this mighty Michael teaching.

And so a spiritual atmosphere was imparted to the world. It spread across Western Europe, down into Southern Italy, where there were many who were able to receive it into themselves. In their souls something arose like a mighty Inspiration, enabling them to gaze into the spiritual world.

But in the evolution of the world it is so that those who are initiated into the great secrets of existence—as to a certain degree were Alanus ab Insulis and Bernardus Sylvestris—such men know that it is only possible to achieve this or that particular aim to a limited extent. A man like Alanus ab Insulis said to himself: We, the Platonists, must go through the gate of death; for the present we can live only in the spiritual world. We must look down from the spiritual world, leaving the physical world to those others whose task it is to cultivate the intellect in the Aristotelian way. The time has come now for the cultivation of the intellect. Late in his life Alanus ab Insulis put on the habit of the Cistercian Order; he became a Cistercian. And in the Cistercian Order many of these Platonic teachings were contained. Those among the Cistercians who possessed the deeper knowledge said to themselves: Henceforward we can work only from the spiritual world; the field must be relinquished to the Aristotelians.

These Aristotelians were, for the most part, in the Order of the Dominicans. And so in the thirteenth century the leadership of the spiritual life in Europe passed over to them.

But a heritage remained from men such as Peter of Compostella, Alanus ab Insulis, Bernard of Chartres, John of Salisbury and that poet who from the School of Chartres wrote a remarkable poem on the Seven Liberal Arts. It took significant hold of the spiritual life of Europe. What had come into being in the School of Chartres was so potent that it found its way, for example, to the University of Orleans. There, in the second half of the twelfth century, a great deal penetrated in the form of teaching from what had streamed to the pupils of Chartres through mighty pictures and words—words as it were of silver—from the lips of Bernardus Sylvestris, of Alanus ab Insulis.

The spiritual atmosphere was so charged with this influence from Chartres that the following incident happened.—While a man, returning to Italy from his ambassadorial post in Spain, was hastening homeward, he received news of the overthrow of the Guelphs in Florence, and at the same time suffered a slight sunstroke. In this condition his etheric body loosened and gathered in what was still echoing through the ether from the School of Chartres. And through what was thus wafted to him in the ether, something like an Intuition came to him—an Intuition such as had come to many human beings in the early Christian centuries. First he saw outspread before him the earthly world as it surrounds mankind, ruled over, not by ‘laws of Nature,’ as the saying went in later times—but by the great handmaiden of the Divine Demiurgos, by Natura, who in the first Christian centuries was the successor of Proserpine. In those days men did not speak of abstract laws of Nature; to the gaze of the Initiates, Being was implicit in what worked in Nature as an all-embracing, divine Power. Proserpine, who divides her time between the upper and the lower worlds, was presented in the Greek Mysteries as the power ruling over Nature. Her successor in the early Christian centuries was the Goddess Natura.

While under the influence of the sunstroke and of what came to him from the School of Chartres, this personality had gazed into the weaving life of the Goddess Natura, and, allowing this Intuition to impress him still more deeply, he beheld the working of the Elements—Earth, Water, Air, Fire—as this was once revealed in the ancient Mysteries; he beheld the majestic weaving of the Elements. Then he beheld the mysteries of the soul of man, he beheld those seven Powers of whom it was known that they are the great celestial Instructors of the human race.—This was known in the early Christian centuries. In those times men did not speak, as they do to-day, of abstract teachings, where something is imparted by way of concepts and ideas. In the first Christian centuries men spoke of being instructed from the spiritual world by the Goddesses Dialectica, Rhetorica, Grammatica, Arithmetica, Geometria, Astrologia or Astronomia, and Musica. These Seven were not the abstract conceptions which they have become today; men gazed upon them, saw them before their eyes—I cannot say in bodily reality but as Beings of soul—and allowed themselves to be instructed by these heavenly figures. Later on they no longer appeared to men in the solitude of vision as the living Goddesses Dialectica, Rhetorica and the rest, but in abstract forms, in abstract, theoretic doctrines.

The personality of whom I am now speaking allowed all that I have related to work upon him. And he was led then into the planetary world, wherein the mysteries of the soul of man are unveiled. Then in the world of stars, having traversed the “Great Cosmic Ocean,” he was led by Ovid, who after he had passed through the gate of death had become the guide and leader of souls in the spiritual world. This personality, who was Brunetto Latini, became the teacher of Dante. What Dante learned from Brunetto Latini he then wrote down in his poem the Divina Commedia. And so that mighty poem is a last reflection of what lived on here and there as Platonism. It had flowed from the lips of Sylvestris at the School of Chartres in the twelfth century and was still taught by those who had been so inwardly fired by the old traditions that the secrets of Christianity rose up within them as Inspirations which they were then able to communicate to their pupils through the word.

The influence of Alanus ab Insulis, brought into the Cistercian Order, passed over to the Dominicans. Then to the Dominicans fell the paramount task: the cultivation of the intellect in the Aristotelian sense. But there was an intervening period: the School of Chartres had been at its prime in the twelfth century—and in the thirteenth century, in the Dominican Order, the intensive development of Aristotelian Scholasticism began. The great teachers in the School of Chartres had passed through the gate of death into the spiritual world and were together for a time with the Dominicans who were beginning to come down through birth and who, after they had descended, established Aristotelianism on the Earth. We must therefore think of an intervening period, when, as it were in a great heavenly Council, the last of the great teachers of Chartres after they had passed through the gate of death were together with those who, as Dominicans, were to cultivate Aristotelianism—were together with them before these latter souls came down to Earth. There, in the spiritual world, the great “heavenly contract” was made. Those who under the leadership of Alanus ab Insulis had arrived in the spiritual world said to the Aristotelians who were about to descend: It is not the time now for us to be on the Earth; for the present we must work from here, from the spiritual world. In the near future it will not be possible for us to incarnate on the Earth. It is now your task to cultivate the intellect in the dawning epoch of the Spiritual Soul.—

Then the great Schoolmen came down and carried out the agreement that had been reached between them and the last great Platonists of the School of Chartres. One, for example, who had been among the earliest to descend received a message through another who had remained with Alanus ab Insulis in the spiritual world for a longer time than he—that is to say, the younger man had remained longer with the spiritual Individuality who had borne the name ‘Alanus ab Insulis.’ The younger one who came down later worked together with the older man to whom he conveyed the message and thus within the Dominican Order began the preparation for the Age of Intellectualism. The one who had remained somewhat longer in the spiritual world with Alanus ab Insulis first put on the habit of the Cistercian Order, exchanging it only later for that of the Dominican. And so those who had once lived under the influence of what came into the world with Aristotle, were now working on the Earth, and up above, keeping watch, but in living connection with the Aristotelians working on the Earth, were the Platonists who had been in the School of Chartres. The spiritual world and the physical world went hand in hand. Through the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was as though Aristotelians and Platonists were stretching out their hands to one another. And then, as time went on, many of those who had come down in order to introduce Aristotelianism into Europe were in the spiritual world with the others once again.

But the further course of evolution was such that the former leaders in the School of Chartres, together with those who held the leading positions in the Dominican Order, placed themselves at the head of those who in the first half of the nineteenth century, in that mighty super-sensible cult enacted in the pictures already indicated, made preparation for the later anthroposophical stream. In the nature of things, the first to come down again were those who had worked more or less as Aristotelians; for under the influence of intellectualism the time for a new deepening of spirituality had not yet come. But there was an unbreakable agreement which still works on. In accordance with this agreement there must go forth from the Anthroposophical Movement something that must find its culmination before this century has run its course. For over the Anthroposophical Society a destiny hovers: many of those in the Anthroposophical Society to-day will have to come down again to the Earth before, and at the end of, the twentieth century, but united, then, with those who were either the actual leaders in the School of Chartres or were pupils at Chartres. And so, if civilisation is not to fall into utter decadence, before the end of the twentieth century the Platonists of Chartres and the Aristotelians who came later will have to be working together on the Earth.

In the future, the Anthroposophical Society must learn to understand, with full consciousness, something of its karma. For a great deal that is unable to come to birth—above all at the present time—is waiting in the womb of the spiritual evolution of mankind. Also, very many things to-day assume an entirely different form; but if one can discern the symptoms, the inner meaning of what is thus externalised becomes evident and the veils are drawn aside from much that continues to live spiritually through the centuries. At this point I may perhaps give a certain indication. Why, indeed, should it not be given, now that the esoteric impulse is to flow through the Anthroposophical Society?—I should like to speak of something that will show you how observation of surrounding circumstances opens up a vista into manifold connections.

When I myself, in preparing for the Anthroposophical Movement, was led along a particular path of destiny, this showed itself in a strange connection with the Cistercian Order, which is closely connected, in its turn, with Alanus ab Insulis. [Let me say here, for those who like to weave legends, that I, in respect of my own individuality, am in no way to be identified with Alanus ab Insulis. I only want to prevent legends arising from what I am putting before you in an esoteric way. The essential point is that these things stem from esoteric sources.] In an altogether remarkable way my destiny allowed me to discern through the external circumstances, such spiritual connections as I have now described. Perhaps some of you know the articles in the Goetheanum Weekly entitled, Mein Lebensgang (The Course of My Life). I have spoken there of how in my youth I was sent, not to a Gymnasium, but to a Real Schule, and only later acquired the classical education given in the Gymnasia. I can only regard this as a remarkable dispensation of my karma. For in the town where I spent my youth the Gymnasium was only a few steps away from the Real Schule and it was by a hair's breadth that I went, not to the Gymnasium but to the Real Schule. If, however, at that time I had gone to the Gymnasium in the town, I should have become a priest in the Cistercian Order. Of that there is no doubt whatever. For at this Gymnasium all the teachers were Cistercians. I was deeply attracted to all these priests, many of whom were extremely learned men. I read a great deal that they wrote and was profoundly stirred by it. I loved these priests and the only reason why I passed the Cistercian Order by was because I did not attend the Gymnasium. Karma led me elsewhere ... but for all that I did not escape the Cistercian Order. I have spoken of this too in my autobiography. I was always of a sociable disposition, and in my autobiography I have written of how, later on, in the house of Marie Eugenie della Grazie in Vienna, I came into contact with practically every theologian in the city. Nearly all of them were Cistercian priests. And in this way a vista opened out, inducing one to go back in time ... for me personally it came very naturally ... a vista leading through the stream of the Cistercian Order back to the School of Chartres. For Alanus ab Insulis had been a Cistercian. And strange to say, when, later on, I was writing my first Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation, I simply could not, for reasons of aesthetic necessity, do otherwise than clothe the female characters on the stage in a costume consisting of a long tunic and what is called a stole. If you picture such a garment—a yellowish-white tunic with a black stole and black girdle—there you have the robe of the Cistercian Order. I was thinking at the time only of aesthetic necessities, but this robe of the Cistercian Order came very naturally before me. There you have one indication of how connections unfold before those who are able to perceive the inner, spiritual significance of symptoms appearing in the external world.

A beginning was made at Christmas more and more to draw aside the veils from these inner connections. They must be brought to light, for mankind is waiting for knowledge of inner reality, having for centuries experienced only that of the outer, material world, and civilisation to-day is in a terrible position. Among the many indications still to be given, we shall, on the one side, have to speak of the work of the School of Chartres, of how Initiates in this School passed through the gate of death and encountered in the spiritual world those souls who later wore the robe of the Dominicans in order to spread Aristotelianism with its intellectuality and to prepare with vigour and energy the epoch of the Spiritual (or Consciousness) Soul. And so—let me put it in this way—in the Anthroposophical Society we have Aristotelianism working on, but in a spiritualised form, and awaiting its further spiritualisation. Then, at the end of the century many of those who are here to-day, will return, but they will be united, then, with those who were the teachers in the School of Chartres. The aim of the Anthroposophical Society is to unite the two elements. The one element is the Aristotelianism in the souls who were for the most part connected with the old Pagan wisdom, who were waiting for Christianity and who retained this longing until, as Dominicans, they were able through the activity of the intellect to promulgate Christianity. They will be united with souls who had actually experienced Christianity in the physical world and whose greatest teachers gathered together in the School of Chartres. Up to now, these teachers of Chartres have not incarnated, although in my contact with the Cistercian Order I was able again and again to come across incorporations of many of those who were in the School of Chartres. In the Cistercian Order one met many a personality who was not a reincarnation of a pupil of Chartres but in whose life there were periods when—for hours, for days—he was inspired by some such Individuality from the School of Chartres. It was a matter, in these cases, of incorporation, not incarnation. And wonderful things were written, of which one could only ask: who is the actual author? The author was not the monk who in the Cistercian Order at that time wore the yellowish-white robe with the black stole and girdle, but the real author was the personality who for hours, days or weeks had come down into the soul of one of these Cistercian Brothers. Much of this influence worked on in essays or writings little known in literature.—I myself once had a remarkable conversation with a Cistercian who was an extremely learned man. I have mentioned it, too, in The Course of My Life. We were going away from a gathering, and speaking about the Christ problem. I propounded my ideas which were the same, essentially, as those I give in my lectures. He became uneasy while I was speaking, and said: ‘We may possibly hit upon something of the kind; we shall not allow ourselves to think such things.’ He spoke in similar terms about other problems of Christology. But then we stopped for a short time—the moment stands most vividly before me—it was where the Schottenring and the Burgring meet in Vienna, on the one side the Hofburg and on the other the Hotel de France and the Votiv-Kirche ... we stopped for a minute or two and the man said: “I should like you to come with me. I will give you a book from my library in which something remarkable is said on the subject you have been speaking about.” I went with him and he gave me a book about the Druses. The whole circumstances of our conversation in connection with the perusal of this book led me to the knowledge that when, having started from Christology, I went on to speak of repeated earthly lives, this deeply learned man was, as it were, emptied mentally in a strange way, and when he came to himself again remembered only that he possessed a book about the Druses in which something was said about reincarnation. He knew about it only from this one book. He was a Hofrat (Councillor) at the University of Vienna and was so erudite that it was said of him: “Hofrat N. knows the whole world and three villages besides.” ... so great was his learning—but in his bodily existence he knew only that in a book about the Druses something was said about repeated earthly lives. This is an example of the difference between what men have in their subconsciousness and what flows as the spiritual world through their souls.—And then a noteworthy episode occurred. I was once giving a lecture in Vienna. The same person was there and after the lecture he made a remark which could only be interpreted in the sense that at this moment he had complete understanding of a certain man belonging to the present age and of the relation of this man to his earlier incarnation. And what the person said on that occasion about the connection between two earthly lives, was correct, was not false. But through his intellect he understood nothing; it simply came from his lips.

By this I want only to indicate how spiritual movements reach into the immediate present. But what to-day shines in as it were through many tiny windows must in the future become a unity through that connection between the leaders of the School of Chartres and the leading spirits of Scholasticism, when the spiritual revival whereby intellectualism itself is lifted to the Spirit, sets in at the end of the twentieth century. To make this possible, let human beings of the twentieth century not throw away their opportunities! But everything to-day depends upon free will, and whether the two allied groups will be able to descend for the re-spiritualisation of culture in the twentieth century—this depends very specially upon whether the Anthroposophical Society understands how to cultivate Anthroposophy with the right devotion.

So much for to-day.—We have heard of the connection of the anthroposophical stream with the deep mystery of the epoch which began with the manifestation of the Christ in the Mystery of Golgotha and has developed in the way I have described. More will be said in the second lecture.

Yesterday I spoke of the karma of the Anthroposophical Society. To-day I propose to speak of certain cognate matters, and in such a way that the present lecture will be comprehensible in itself.

Everything that will have to be achieved in the present epoch of evolution as a preparation for spiritual happenings in the near and more distant future, is connected with what, among anthroposophists, I have often called the Michael Event. And in connection with this Michael Event I want to speak to-day about something that concerns the Anthroposophical Movement.

In speaking of a happening such as this Michael Event, it must always be remembered that the world develops by stages. When we study the evolution of the world with the faculties which man's earthly life between birth and death enables him to possess to-day, we see humanity evolving on the Earth, we see ancient peoples arising from still earlier peoples; we see that from the background of very ancient Oriental civilisations, from the Indian, the Chinese, the Arabian and the Chaldean-Egyptian peoples, the Greeks and the Romans gradually emerge; then we come to the Middle Ages and finally to our own age—our modern age with all its aberrations but also with its great technical achievements. Yet not only is there this external development of the peoples but as it were behind it, evolution is also taking place. We can perceive evolution being passed through not only by mankind but also by spiritual Beings who are connected in certain ways with the evolution of humanity. In their ranks are those Beings called the Angeloi—the Angels in Christian terminology. They are directly connected with the individual human being. They lead, or guide him in so far as he needs guidance, from one earthly life to another and are his Guardians, his Protectors, whenever and wherever he needs their protection. Therefore, super-sensible though they be and imperceptible to earthly sight, the Angeloi are directly connected with mankind's evolution.

In the next immediately adjacent spiritual realm, the Beings whom we call the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi, the Archangels, unfold their activity. The Archangeloi have to do with much that also plays a part in the evolution of humanity. They have to do, not with the individual human being, but with groups of human beings. Thus, as I have said in many anthroposophical lectures, the evolution of the peoples is under the rulership of Archangelic Beings. But it is also the case that certain epochs in Earth-evolution receive their essential impulses from individual Archangeloi. For example, during the three centuries preceding the last third of the nineteenth century, namely during the nineteenth, eighteenth, seventeenth centuries and part of the sixteenth, we must think of the civilised world as being essentially under the dominion of the Archangel known to Christians capable of speaking of these things, as Gabriel. This period was therefore the Age of Gabriel.

This particular Gabriel Age is of great significance for the whole evolution of mankind in modern times, for the following reason. Since the Mystery of Golgotha took place it has been possible for men on the Earth to have this realisation: Through the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ, the sublime Being of the Sun, has come down to the Earth. He has descended from the Sun to the Earth, entering into the body of Jesus and uniting Himself with Earth's destiny. But although the Christ Being has remained united with the Earth, it has not been possible through the succeeding rulerships of Archangeloi from the time of the Mystery of Golgotha until that of the dominion of Gabriel, for the Christ Impulse itself actually to lay hold of the inner physical and etheric forces of mankind. This became possible for the first time under the Gabriel impulse which began to work about three hundred years before the last third of the nineteenth century. Thus, in reality, it is only since that time that by way of the forces of heredity themselves the Christ Impulse has been able to penetrate humanity inwardly. As yet this has not been achieved.

Gabriel rules over the whole realm of the physical forces of heredity within humanity. He is the super-sensible Spirit who is connected essentially with the sequence of the generations, who is—if I may put it so—the great Guardian Spirit of the mothers who bring children into the world. Gabriel has to do with births, with the embryonic development of the human being. The forces of Gabriel work in the spiritual processes underlying the physical process of propagation. And so it is only since this recent Gabriel rulership that the physical propagation of mankind on Earth has come into connection in the real sense with the Christ Impulse.

From the end of the eighteen-seventies, the rulership of Michael begins. It is a rulership altogether different in character from that of Gabriel. Whereas the rulership of the Archangel in the three preceding centuries comes to expression in spiritual impulses working in the physical, Michael is the Archangel who in his rulership has paramountly to do with the powers of the intelligence in mankind, with everything, therefore, that concerns the intellectual, the spiritual evolution and culture of mankind. In any study of the earthly circumstances of humanity it is extremely important to realise that the Gabriel rulership which in the spiritual sphere has an effect upon what is most deeply physical, is always followed by the regency of Michael, who has to do with the spiritual element in culture. The Archangel Gabriel, therefore, is the Divine Guardian of the process of physical propagation. The Spirit who has to do with the development of the sciences, of the arts, of the cultural element of the epoch, is the Archangel known in Christianity as Michael. Over those civilisations which are predominant in every epoch, seven successive Archangel-rulerships take place. Six other such rulerships have therefore preceded the present rulership of Michael. And if, beginning with Gabriel, we go backwards through these rulerships, we come to an epoch when Michael again held sway. Every such rulership, therefore, is always the repetition of earlier, identical rulerships, and the evolution of the Archangels themselves takes place through this cyclic progress. After a period of about two thousand years, the same Archangel always assumes the rulership again within the predominating civilisation.

But these periods of rulership, each of which lasts for a little over three hundred years, are essentially different from one another. The difference is not always as great as it is between the Michael rulership and the Gabriel rulership, but the rulerships are, nevertheless, essentially different. And here we can say: Each reign of Gabriel is preparatory to an age when the peoples become more widely separated from one another and more differentiated. In the age following his dominion the nationalistic tendency also becomes accentuated. So, if you ask yourself why it is that such strong nationalistic feeling is asserting itself to-day under the rulership of Michael, which has now begun, the answer is that preparation took place spiritually a long time ago; the influence worked on and then began to decline, but the after-effects—often worse than the event itself—continue. It is only by degrees that the impulse of Michael can make its way into what is, to a great extent, a legacy from the past reign of Gabriel. But always when an age of Michael dawns, a longing begins to arise in mankind to overcome racial distinctions and to spread through all the peoples living on the Earth the highest and most spiritual form of culture produced by that particular age. Michael's rulership is always characterised by the growth of cosmopolitanism, by the spread of a spiritual impulse among peoples who are ready to receive it, no matter what language they speak. Of the seven Archangels who send their impulses into the evolution of humanity, Michael is always the one who gives the cosmopolitan impulse—and at the same time the impulse for the spreading of whatever is of most intrinsic value in a particular epoch.

If we turn now to past times in the evolution of humanity, asking ourselves in what period the previous Michael Age occurred, we come to the epoch which culminated in those cosmopolitan deeds springing from the impulse of the lofty spiritual culture of Greece, whose fruits were carried over to Asia through the campaigns of Alexander. There, developing from the foundations of the ancient culture, we see the urge to take the spiritual culture of Greece—the little land of Greece—over to the Oriental peoples, to Egypt; there is an urge to spread a cosmopolitan impulse in this way among all the peoples able to receive it. This cosmopolitan impulse, this urge of the earlier Age of Michael, to spread over the world all that the Greek culture had achieved for humanity, was of the very greatest possible significance. The crowning triumph of that Age was represented, in a certain sense, by the city of Alexandria in its prime, standing yonder in North Africa.

These things came to pass in the preceding Age of Michael. Thereafter the other six Archangels assume in time their dominions. And in the last third of the nineteenth century, at the end of the seventies, a new Michael Age begins. But never yet in the whole of earthly evolution has the difference between two Ages of Michael been as great as that between the Michael Age at the time of Alexander and the one in which we have been living since the end of the seventies of the last century. For between these two reigns of Michael falls the Event which gives Earth-evolution its true meaning: the Mystery of Golgotha.

Let us now consider what it is that Michael has to administer in the spiritual Cosmos. It is Michael's task to administer a power that is essentially spiritual, reaching its zenith in man's faculty of intellectual understanding. Michael is not the Spirit who, if I may put it so, cultivates intellectuality per se; the spirituality he bestows strives to bring enlightenment to mankind in the form of ideas, of thoughts—but ideas and thoughts that grasp the spiritual. His wish is that man shall be a free being, but one who discerns in his concepts, in his thoughts, what comes to him as revelation from the spiritual worlds.

And now think of the Michael Age at the time of Alexander. As I have so often said, human beings in our day are extremely clever—that is to say, they form concepts, they have ideas; they are intellectual, possessing as it were a self-made intellectuality. People were clever, too, in the days of Alexander. Only if in those times they had been asked: Whence do you derive your concepts, your ideas?—they would not have said: We have produced them out of ourselves. ... No, they received into themselves the spiritual revelations, and together with these revelations, the ideas. They did not regard the ideas as something which man evolves out of himself, but as something revealed to him in his spiritual nature. The task of Michael at that time was to administer this heavenly Intellectuality—in contrast to earthly Intellectuality. Michael was the greatest of the Archangels who have their abode on the Sun. He was the Spirit who sent down from thence to the Earth not only the Sun's physical-etheric rays but, within them, the inspired Intellectuality. And in those past days men knew: the power of Intelligence on Earth is a gift of the Heavens, of the Sun; it is sent down from the Sun. And the one who actually sends the spiritual Intellectuality down to the Earth, is Michael. In the ancient Sun Mysteries this wonderful Initiation-teaching was given: Michael dwells on the Sun; there he administers the Cosmic Intelligence. This Cosmic Intelligence, inspired into human beings, is a gift of Michael.

Then came the epoch when man was to be made ready to unfold intellect out of his own, individual force of soul; he was not merely to receive the Cosmic Intelligence through revelation but to evolve Intelligence out of his inner forces. Preparation for this was made by Aristotelianism—that remarkable philosophy which arose in the twilight period of Greek culture and was the impulse underlying the campaigns of Alexander the Great in Africa and Asia.

By means of Aristotelianism, earthly Intelligence emerged as though from the shell of the Cosmic Intelligence. And from what came to be known as Aristotelian Logic there arose that intellectual framework on which the thinking of all subsequent centuries was based; it conditioned human intelligence.

And now you must conceive that through this single deed the Michael Impulses culminated: the earthly-human Intelligence was established, while, as a result of the campaigns of Alexander, the culture of Greece was imprinted upon those peoples who at that time were ready to receive the cosmopolitan impulse.

The epoch of Michael was followed by that of Oriphiel. The Archangel Oriphiel assumed dominion. The Mystery of Golgotha took place. At the beginning of the Christian era, those human souls who had been conscious of the leadership of the Archangel Michael in Alexander's time and had participated in the deeds of which I have just spoken, were gathered around Michael in the realm of the Sun. Michael had relinquished his dominion for the time being to Oriphiel, and in the realm of the Sun, together with those human souls who were to be his servants, Michael witnessed the departure of Christ from the Sun.

This, too, is something of which we must be mindful.—Those human souls who are connected with the Anthroposophical Movement may say to themselves: We were united with Michael in the realm of the Sun. Christ, who hitherto had sent His Impulses towards the Earth from the Sun, departed from the Sun in order to unite Himself with earthly evolution!—Try to picture to yourselves this stupendous cosmic event that took place in realms beyond the Earth: it lies within the mighty vista open to those human souls who at that time were gathered around Michael as servants of the Angeloi, after his rulership on Earth had ended. In the realm of the Sun they witnessed the departure of the Christ from the Sun. “He is departing!” ... such was their great and overwhelming experience when He left in order to unite His destiny with the destiny of earthly humanity.

Truly it is not only on the Earth but in the life between death and rebirth that the souls of human beings receive the impulse for the paths they take. Above all was it so in the case of those who had lived through the time of Alexander. A great and mighty impulse went forth from that moment in cosmic history when these souls witnessed the departure of Christ from the Sun. They saw clearly: the Cosmic Intelligence is passing over gradually from the Cosmos to the Earth! And Michael, together with those around him saw that all the Intelligence once streaming through the Cosmos was now sinking down, stage by stage, upon the Earth.

Michael and those who belonged to him—no matter whether they were in the spiritual world or incarnate for a brief earthly life—were able to visualise the rays of the Intelligence arriving, in the eighth century of the Christian era, in the earthly realm itself. And they knew that down upon the Earth the Intelligence would unfold and develop further. Now, on the Earth, the appearance of the first ‘self-made’ thinkers could be observed. Hitherto, great human beings who were ‘thinkers’ had received their thoughts by way of Inspiration; the thoughts had been inspired into them. Only now, from the eighth century A.D. were there those who could be called ‘self-made’ thinkers—those who produced their own thoughts out of themselves. And within the Archangelic host in the realm of the Sun, the mighty proclamation rang forth from Michael: The power belonging to my kingdom and under my administration in this realm is here no longer; it streams downwards to the Earth and must there surge onwards!

From the eighth century onwards this was the spectacle of the Earth as witnessed from the Sun. And within it was the great mystery: The forces which are pre-eminently the forces of Michael have descended from the Heavens and are now upon the Earth. This was the profound secret which was known to Initiates in Schools such as those I spoke of yesterday, for example, the renowned School of Chartres. In earlier times, when men wished to discover the true nature of Intelligence they had been obliged, in the Mystery Centres, to look upwards to the Sun. Now the Intelligence was upon the Earth, though not as yet very clearly perceptible. But gradually there was recognition that human beings were now evolving who possessed an individual intelligence of their own. One of those in European civilisation in whom the first sparks of personal thinking were alight was Johannes Scotus Erigena. I have often spoken of him. But there had been a few others, even before him, whose thoughts were not merely inspired, who no longer received revelations, but who could be called self-made thinkers. And now this individual thinking became more and more widespread.

There was a possibility in Earth-evolution of making this self-produced thinking serve a particular end. Consider what it represented: it was in actuality the sum-total of those impulses from Michael's realm in the Heavens which had found their way to the Earth. And for the time being Michael was called upon to allow the Intelligence to unfold without his participation. Not until the year 1879 was he to re-assume his rulership. In the meantime, the Intelligence developed in such a way that at the first stages he could not have exercised his dominion. His influences could not be exerted over men who were unfolding their own, individual thoughts. His time had not yet come.

This profound secret of the descent of the pan-Intelligence in the evolution of humanity was known in a few Mystery Centres over in the East. And so, within these particular Oriental Mysteries, a few chosen pupils could be initiated into this secret by certain deeply spiritual, highly developed men. Through dispensations of a nature which it is difficult for the earthly intellect to comprehend, the illustrious Court of which I have spoken at the Goetheanum and in other places, came into touch with this secret of which certain Oriental Mysteries were fully cognisant. In the eighth and at the beginning of the ninth century, under the leadership of Haroun al Raschid, this Court wielded great power over in Asia. Haroun al Raschid was a product of Arabian culture, a culture tinged with Mohammedanism. The secret of which I have spoken found its way to some of Haroun al Raschid's initiated Counsellors—or to those who possessed at least a certain degree of knowledge—and the brilliance of his Court was due to the fact that it had come in touch with this secret. At this Court were concentrated all the treasures of wisdom, of art, of the truths of religious life to be found in the East—coloured, of course, by Mohammedanism. In the days when, in Europe, at the Court of Charlemagne who was a contemporary of Haroun al Raschid, men were occupied in collating the first rudiments of grammar and everything was still in a state of semi-barbarism, there flourished in Baghdad that brilliant centre of Oriental, Western Asiatic spiritual life. Haroun al Raschid gathered around him men who were conversant with the great traditions of the Oriental Mysteries. And he had by his side one particular Counsellor who had been an Initiate in earlier times and whose spiritual driving forces were still influenced by the previous incarnations. He was the organiser of all that was cultivated at the Court of Haroun al Raschid in the domains of geometry, chemistry, physics, music, architecture, and the other arts—above all, a distinguished art of poetry. In this renowned and scintillating assembly of sages, it was felt, more or less consciously: the earthly Intelligence that has come down from the Heavens upon the Earth must be placed in the service of Mohammedan spiritual life!

And now consider this: from the time of Mohammed, from the time of the early Caliphs onwards, Arabian culture was carried from Asia across North Africa into Europe, where it spread as the result of warlike campaigns. But in the wake of those who by means of these campaigns spread Arabism as far even as Spain—France was affected by it and, spiritually, the whole of Western Europe—there also came outstanding personalities. The wars waged by the Frankish kings against the Moors, against Arabism, are known to all of you ... but that is the external aspect, that is what happens in external history ... much more important is it to know how the spiritual streams flow on perpetually within the evolution of mankind.

Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor passed through the gate of death. But after their life between death and rebirth they continued to pursue their earthly aims in remarkable ways. It was their aim to introduce Arabian modes of thinking into the European world with the help of the rudiments of the Intelligence now spreading in Europe. And so after Haroun al Raschid had passed through the gate of death, while his soul was traversing spiritual, starry worlds, we see his gaze directed unswervingly from Baghdad across Asia Minor, to Greece, Rome, Spain, France and then northwards to England. Throughout this life between death and rebirth his attention was directed to the South and West of Europe. And then Haroun al Raschid appeared again in a new incarnation—becoming Lord Bacon of Verulam. Bacon himself is the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid who in the intervening time between death and rebirth had worked as I have just described.

But the other, the one who had been his wise Counsellor, chose a different direction—from Baghdad across the Black Sea, through Russia and then into Middle Europe. The two individualities took different paths and directions. Haroun al Raschid passed to his next earthly goal as Lord Bacon of Verulam; the wise Counsellor during his life between death and a new birth did not divert his gaze from the sphere where influences from the East can be increasingly potent, and he appeared again as Amos Comenius (Komenski), the great educational reformer and author of “Pan-Sophia.” And from the interworking of these two individualities who had once been together at the Court in Baghdad there subsequently arose in Europe something which unfolded—more or less at a distance from Christianity—in the form of Arabism derived from influences of that past time when the Intelligence had first fallen away from Michael on the Sun.

What came outwardly and physically to expression in wars was, as we know, repelled by the Frankish kings and the other European peoples. We see how the Arabian campaigns which with such a powerful initial impetus were responsible for the spread of Mohammedan culture, were broken and brought to a halt in the West; we see Mohammedanism disappearing from the West of Europe. Nevertheless, divested of the outer forms it had assumed and the external culture it had founded, this later Arabism became modern natural science, and also became the basis of what Amos Comenius achieved for the world in the domain of pedagogy. And in this way the earthly Intelligence, ‘garrisoned’ as it were by Arabism, continued to spread right on into the seventeenth century.

Here we have indicated something that lies as sub-strata of the soil into which we to-day have to sow the seeds of Anthroposophy. We must ponder deeply over the inner and spiritual reality behind these things.

In Europe, while this stream was flowing over from Asia as the spiritual continuation of that Illustrious Court of Baghdad, Christianity was also developing and spreading. But the spread of Aristotelianism in Europe was fraught with great difficulties. The natural science of Aristotle had been carried to Asia by the mighty deeds of Alexander and the impulses flowing from Hellenistic spiritual life, but here it had been seized upon by Arabism. In Europe, within the expanding Christian culture, Aristotelianism was at first known in a diluted form only. Then, in the manner which I have already indicated, Aristotelianism joined hands with Platonism—Platonism, which was based directly upon the ancient teachings of the Greek Mysteries.

But at the very outset, Aristotelianism spread in Europe by slow degrees while Platonism took the lead and prompted the establishment of schools, one of the most important being the School of Chartres. At Chartres, the scholars of whom I spoke yesterday—Bernard Sylvestris, Bernard of Chartres, John of Salisbury and, foremost among them all, Alanus ab Insulis—were all working in the twelfth century. In this School men spoke very differently from those whose teachings were merely an echo of Arabism. The teachings given in the School of Chartres were pure and genuine Christianity, illumined by the ancient Mystery-wisdom still remaining within reach of men. And then something of immense significance took place. The leading teachers of Chartres, who with their Platonism had penetrated deeply into the secrets of Christianity and who had no part in Arabism, went through the gate of death. Then there took place, for a brief period at the beginning of the thirteenth century, a great ‘heavenly conference.’ And when the most outstanding of the teachers—foremost among them Alanus ab Insulis—had passed through death and were in the spiritual world, they united in a momentous cosmic deed with those who at that time were with them but who were destined in the very near future to come into earthly existence for the purpose of cultivating Aristotelianism in a new way. Among those preparing to descend were individualities who had participated with deep intensity of soul in the working of the Michael Impulse during the time of Alexander. And at the turn of the twelfth century we may picture, for it is in keeping with the truth, a gathering-together of souls who had just arrived in the spiritual world from places of Christian Initiation—of which the School of Chartres was one—and souls who were on the point of descending to the Earth. In the spiritual realms, these latter souls had preserved, not Platonism, but Aristotelianism, the inner impulse of the Intelligence deriving from the Michael Age in ancient times. Now, in the spiritual world, the souls gathered together ... among them, too, were souls who could say: We were with Michael and together with him we witnessed the Intelligence streaming down from the Heavens upon the Earth; we were united with him too in the mighty cosmopolitan Deed enacted in earlier times when the Intelligence was still administered from the Cosmos, when he was still the ruler and administrator of the Intelligence.

And now, for the time being, the teachers of Chartres handed over to the Aristotelians the administration and ordering of the affairs of the spiritual life on Earth. Those who were now to descend and were by nature fitted to direct the earthly, personal Intelligence, took over the guidance of spiritual life on Earth from the Platonists, who could work truly only when the Intelligence was being administered “from the Heavens.”

It was into the Dominican Order above all that those individualities in whose souls the Michael Impulse was still echoing on from the previous Age of Michael, found their way. And from the Dominican Order issued that Scholasticism which wrestled through many a bitter but glorious battle to master the true nature and operation of the Intelligence within the human mind. Deeply rooted in the souls of those founders of Dominican Scholasticism in the thirteenth century was this great question: What is taking place in the domain of Michael?

There were men, later on known as Nominalists, who said: Concepts and ideas are merely names, they have no reality. The Nominalists were under an Ahrimanic influence, for their real aim was to banish Michael's dominion from the Earth. In asserting that ideas are only names and have no reality, their actual aim was to prevent Michael's dominion from prevailing on Earth. And at that time the Ahrimanic spirits whispered to those who would lend their ear: The Cosmic Intelligence has fallen away from Michael and is here, on the Earth: we will not allow Michael to resume his rulership over the Intelligence! ... But in that heavenly conference—and precisely here lies its significance—Platonists and Aristotelians together formed a plan for the furtherance of the Michael Impulses.—In opposition to the Nominalists were the Realists of the Dominican Order who maintained: Ideas and thoughts are spiritual realities contained within the phenomena of the world, they are not merely nominal.

If one understands these things, one is often reminded of them in a really remarkable way. During my last years in Vienna, one of my acquaintances among other ordained priests was Vincenz Knauer, the author of the work, Hauptprobleme der Philosophie, which I have often recommended to Anthroposophists. In the nineteenth century he was still involved in this conflict between Nominalism and Realism. He was trying to make it clear that Nominalism is fallacious and he had chosen a very apt example to illustrate his arguments. It is also given in his books. But I remember with deep satisfaction a certain occasion when I was walking with him along the Wahringstrasse in Vienna. We were speaking about Nominalism and Realism. With all his self-controlled enthusiasm which had something remarkable about it, something of the quality of genuine philosophy in contrast to the philosophy of others who had more or less lost this quality—Knauer said on that occasion: I always make it clear to my students that the Ideas made manifest in the things of the world have reality—and I tell them to think of a lamb and a wolf. The Nominalists would say: A lamb is muscle, bone, matter; a wolf is muscle, bone, matter. What receives objective existence in lamb-flesh as the form, the idea of the lamb—that is only a name. “Lamb” is a name there and not, as idea, a reality. Similarly, as idea, “wolf” is not anything real but only a name. But—Knauer went on—it is easy to refute the Nominalists for one need only say to them: Give a wolf nothing but lamb's flesh to eat for a time and no other food whatever. If the idea “lamb” contains no reality, is only a name, and if the lamb is nothing but matter, the wolf would gradually become a lamb. But it does not do so! On the contrary, it goes on being the reality “wolf.” In what stands there before us as the lamb, the idea “lamb” has, as it were, gathered the matter and brought it into the form. Similarly with the wolf: the idea “wolf” has gathered the matter and cast it into the form.

This was the fundamental issue in the conflict between the Nominalists and the Realists: the reality of what is apprehensible only by the intellect.

Thus we see that it was the task of the Dominicans to work in advance, at the right time, for the next Michael rulership. And whereas in accordance with the decisions of that heavenly conference at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Platonists—the teachers of Chartres, for example—remained in the spiritual world and had no incarnations of significance, the Aristotelians were to work at that time for the cultivation of the Intelligence, on Earth. And from Scholasticism—which only much later, in the modern age, was distorted, caricatured and made Ahrimanic by Rome—from Scholasticism there has proceeded all intellectual striving in so far as it has kept free from the influence of Arabism.

So at that time when these two streams of spiritual life are to be perceived in Middle and Western Europe: on the one side, the stream with which Bacon and Amos Comenius were connected; on the other side, the stream of Scholasticism that was and is Christian Aristotelianism takes its place in the evolution of civilisation in order to prepare, as was its task, for the new Age of Michael. When, during the rulership of the preceding Archangels, the Schoolmen looked up into the spiritual realms they said to themselves: Michael is yonder in the heights; his rulership must be awaited. But some preparation must be made for the time when he once again becomes the Regent of all that which, through the dispensation of cosmic evolution, fell away from him in the Cosmos. This time must be prepared for! ... And so a stream began to flow which, though diverted into a false channel through Ultramontanism, continued and carried with it the impulse of preparation proceeding from the thirteenth century.

It was a stream, therefore, whose source is Aristotelian and whose influence worked directly on the ordering of the Intelligence that was now in the earthly realm. With this stream is connected that of which I spoke yesterday, saying that one who had remained a little longer with Alanus ab Insulis in the spiritual world, came down as a Dominican and brought a message from Alanus ab Insulis to an older Dominican who had descended to the Earth before him.

An intense will was present in the spiritual life of Europe to take strong hold of the thoughts. And in realms above the Earth these happenings led, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to a great, far-reaching Act in the spiritual world where that which later on was to become Anthroposophy on the Earth was cast into mighty Imaginations. In the first half of the nineteenth century, and even for a short period at the end of the eighteenth, those who had been Platonists under the teachers of Chartres, who were now living between death and rebirth, and those who had established Aristotelianism on Earth and who had long ago passed through the gate of death—all of them were united in the heavenly realms in a great super-earthly Cult or Ritual. Through this Act all that in the twentieth century was to be spiritually established as the new Christianity after the beginning of the new Michael Age in the last third of the nineteenth century—all this was cast into mighty Imaginations.

Many drops trickled through to the Earth. Up above, in the spiritual world, in mighty, cosmic Imaginations, preparation was made for that creation of the Intelligence—an entirely spiritual creation—which was then to come forth as Anthroposophy. What trickled through made a very definite impression upon Goethe, coming to him in the form, as it were, of little reflected miniatures. The mighty pictures up above were not within Goethe's ken; he elaborated these little miniature pictures in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Truly, it opens up a wonderful vista! The streams I have described flow on in such a way that they lead to those mighty Imaginations which take shape in the spiritual world under the guidance of Alanus ab Insulis and the others. Drops trickle through, and at the turn of the eighteenth century Goethe is inspired to write his Fairy Tale. It was, we might say, a first presentation of what had been cast in mighty Imaginations in the spiritual world at the beginning of the nineteenth, indeed by the end of the eighteenth century. In view of this great super-sensible Cult during the first half of the nineteenth century, it will not surprise you that my first Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation—which in a certain respect aimed at giving dramatic form to what had thus been enacted at the beginning of the nineteenth century—became alike in outer structure to what Goethe portrayed in his Fairy Tale. For having lived in the super-earthly realms in Imaginative form, Anthroposophy was to come down to the Earth. Something came to pass in the super-earthly realms at that time. Numbers of souls who in many different epochs had been connected with Christianity came together with souls who had received its influences less directly. There were those who had lived on Earth in the Age when the Mystery of Golgotha took place and also those who had lived on Earth before it. The two groups of souls united in order that in regions beyond the Earth, Anthroposophy might be prepared. The individualities who, as I said, were around Alanus ab Insulis, and those who within the Dominican stream had established Aristotelianism in Europe, were united, too, with Brunetto Latini, the great teacher of Dante. And in this host of souls there were very many of those who, having again descended to the Earth, are now coming together in the Anthroposophical Society. Those who feel the urge to-day to unite with one another in the Anthroposophical Society were together in super-sensible regions at the beginning of the nineteenth century in order to participate in that mighty Imaginative Cult of which I have spoken.

This too is connected with the karma of the Anthroposophical Movement. It is something that one discovers, not from any rationalistic observation of this Anthroposophical Movement in its external, earthly form only, but from observation of the threads that lead upwards into the spiritual realms. Then one perceives how this Anthroposophical Movement descends. At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries it is, in very truth, the “heavenly” Anthroposophical Movement. What Goethe transformed into little miniature images in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily were drops that had trickled through. But it was to come down in the real sense in the last third of the nineteenth century, since when Michael has been striving—but now moving downwards from the Sun to the Earth—to take hold of the earthly Intelligence of men.

We know that since the Mystery of Golgotha Christ has been united with the Earth—with humanity on Earth. But, to begin with, He was not outwardly comprehended by human beings. We have seen also that in the age of Alexander the last phase of the rulership of Michael over the Cosmic Intelligence was taking place. By the eighth century A.D., the Cosmic Intelligence had descended to the Earth. In accordance with the agreements reached with the Platonists, those who were connected with Michael undertook to prepare this earthly Intelligence in Scholastic Realism in such a way that Michael would again be able to unite with it when, in the onward flow of civilisation, he would assume his rulership at the end of the seventies of the nineteenth century.

What matters now is that the Anthroposophical Society shall take up this, its inner task—this task which is: not to contest Michael's rulership of human thinking! Here there can be no question of fatalism. Here it can only be said that men must work together with the Gods. Michael inspires men with his own being in order that there may appear on the Earth a spirituality consonant with the personal Intelligence of men, in order that men can be thinkers—and at the same time truly spiritual. For this and this alone is what Michael's dominion means. This is what must be wrestled for in the Anthroposophical Movement. And then those who are working to-day for the Anthroposophical Movement will appear again on Earth at the end of the twentieth century and will be united with the great teachers of Chartres. For according to the agreement reached in that heavenly conference at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Aristotelians and the Platonists were to appear together, working for the ever-growing prosperity of the Anthroposophical Movement in the twentieth century, in order that at the end of this century, with Platonists and Aristotelians in unison, Anthroposophy may reach a certain culmination in earthly civilisation. If it is possible to work in this way, in the way predestined by Michael, then Europe and modern civilisation will emerge from decline. But verily in no other way than this! The leading of civilisation out of decline is bound up with an understanding of Michael.

I have now led you towards an understanding of the Michael Mystery reigning over the thinking and the spiritual strivings of mankind. This means—as you can realise—that through Anthroposophy something must be introduced into the spiritual evolution of the Earth, for all kinds of demonic, Ahrimanic powers are taking possession of men. The Ahrimanic powers in many a human body were exultant in their confidence that it would no longer be possible for Michael to take over his rulership of the Cosmic Intelligence which had fallen down to the Earth. And this exultation was particularly strong in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Ahriman already believed: Michael will not again recover his Cosmic Intelligence which made its way from the heavens to the Earth. And this exultation was particularly strong in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Ahriman already believed that Michael would not again recover his Cosmic Intelligence which made its way from the Heavens to the Earth. Verily, great and mighty issues are at stake! For this reason it is not to be wondered at that those who stand in the midst of this battle have to go through many extraordinary experiences.

Stranger things have been said about the Anthroposophical Movement than about any other spiritual Movement. The curious statements made indicate in themselves that with its spirituality and its connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, it is beyond the comprehension even of some of the most enlightened minds of the present day.—Does anyone ever tell you that he has seen a man who is black and white at the same time? I hardly think you would regard him as sane if he said such a thing to you. But to-day people are quite capable of writing in a similar strain about the Anthroposophical Movement. In his book, The Great Secret [Le Grand Secret. Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1921. The passages concerned have been translated from the German version of Maeterlinck's book from which Dr. Steiner was quoting. The original French of these passages will be found on page 182 of the present volume.], Maurice Maeterlinck, for example, taking me to be the pillar of the Anthroposophical Movement, applies in regard to myself a kind of logic entirely similar to that used by someone who claims to have seen a man who is black and white, a European and a Moor at the same time. Now a man can be one of the two, but certainly not both simultaneously! Yet Maeterlinck says: “What we read in the Vedas, says Rudolf Steiner, one of the most erudite and also one of the most confusing among contemporary occultists ...” If somebody were to say he had seen a man who was a European and a Moor at the same time, he would be considered crazy; but Maeterlinck uses the words “erudite” and “confusing” in juxtaposition. He also says: “Rudolf Steiner who, when he does not lose himself in visions—plausible, perhaps, but incapable of verification—of the prehistoric ages, and in astral jargon concerning life on other planets, is a clear and shrewd thinker who has thrown remarkable light on the meaning of this judgement” (he is referring to Osirification) “and of the identification of the soul with God.” In other words, therefore: when Rudolf Steiner is not talking about Anthroposophy, he is a clear and shrewd thinker. Maeterlinck allows himself to say this—and other remarkable things too, for example the following: “Steiner has applied his intuitive methods, which amount to a kind of transcendental psychometry, in order to reconstruct the history of the Atlanteans and to reveal to us what takes place on the sun, the moon and in other worlds. He describes the successive transformations of the entities which become men, and he does so with such assurance that we ask ourselves, having followed him with interest through the introductions which denote an extremely well-balanced, logical and comprehensive mind, if he has suddenly gone mad or if we are dealing with a hoaxer or with a genuine seer.” ... Now just think what this means.—Maeterlinck states that when I write books, the introductions are admittedly the product of an “extremely well-balanced, logical and comprehensive mind.” But when he reads on he does not know whether I have suddenly gone mad or whether I am a hoaxer or a genuine seer. Well, after all I have not written only books! It is always my custom to write an introduction to each book first. Very well, then ... I write a book. Maeterlinck reads the introduction and I seem to him to have an “extremely well-balanced, logical and comprehensive mind.” Then he reads on, and I turn into someone who makes him say: I don't know whether Rudolf Steiner has suddenly gone mad or whether he is a hoaxer or a seer. Then it happens again ... I write a second book: when he reads the introduction Maeterlinck again accepts me as having an “extremely well-balanced, logical and comprehensive mind.” Then he reads the further contents and again does not know whether I am a lunatic or a hoaxer or a seer. And so it goes on ... But suppose everybody were to say: when I read your books you seem, at the beginning, to be very clever, balanced and logical, but then you suddenly go mad! People who are logical when they begin to write and then as they write on suddenly become crazy, must indeed be extraordinary creatures! In the next book they switch round, are logical at the beginning and later on again lunatics! There seems to be a rhythmical sequence ... well, after all there are rhythms in the world!

Such examples indicate how the most enlightened minds of the present age receive what must be established as the Michael Epoch in the world and what has to be done in order that the Cosmic Intelligence which in accordance with the World-Order fell away from Michael in the eighth century A.D., may again be found within earthly humanity. The whole Michael tradition must be renewed. Michael with his feet upon the Dragon—it is right to contemplate this picture which portrays Michael the Warrior, defending the Cosmic Spirit against the Ahrimanic Powers under his feet.

This battle, more than any other, is laid in the human heart. There, within the hearts of men, it is and has been waged since the last third of the nineteenth century. Decisive indeed will be what human hearts do with this Michael Impulse in the world in the course of the twentieth century. And in the course of the twentieth century, when the first century after the end of Kaliyuga has elapsed, humanity will either stand at the grave of all civilisation—or at the beginning of that Age when in the souls of men who in their hearts ally Intelligence with Spirituality, Michael's battle will be fought out to victory.

The rulership of Michael in its cosmic, spiritual aspect shows us, as you will have gathered from what I have already told you, that he occupies a special position among those spiritual Beings whom we call the Archangeloi. And precisely because of its bearing upon the central theme of these lectures, we shall appreciate the significance of the fact that in the centuries preceding the founding of Christianity, Michael sent his impulses—his ‘cosmopolitan’ impulses—from the Sun to the Earth. As time went on, these cosmopolitan impulses disappeared: the Cosmic Intelligence fell away from Michael and by the eighth century A.D. had arrived on Earth. In earthly evolution we then find men whose thoughts were produced out of themselves, who are, as it were, ‘self-made’ thinkers. This personal, self-engendered thinking was then cultivated in preparation for the next reign of Michael. As we have seen, the wise Masters of the School of Chartres worked in unison towards this end with those souls who had been connected with the previous reign of Michael and who were predestined to develop the once cosmic but now earthly Intelligence. They were predestined to carry their work on into the nineteenth century when—at first in the spiritual world—it became possible, through the Imaginative Cult I have described to you, to prepare for what the Anthroposophical Movement was intended to achieve.

Since the last third of the nineteenth century we have been living in the initial stage of the new reign of Michael; throughout this time, and above all in our own day, preparation has to be made for what must come to pass in the twentieth century. For before the end of this present century a considerable number of human beings who have unfolded real understanding of Anthroposophy will have passed through a briefer period between death and rebirth than is usual and will again be united on the Earth under the leadership of those who were the Masters of Chartres and with those who have remained in direct connection with the sovereignty of Michael. This will take place in order that under the spiritual guidance of these two groups of beings the final, hallowed impulse may be given for the development of the spiritual life on Earth.

Anthroposophy can only be of real significance for those who want to ally themselves with it, when with a certain inner, reverent fervour they become conscious that they may indeed have their place within a sphere of happenings like those described yesterday. This realisation will not only kindle inner enthusiasm but also be a source of strength, giving us the knowledge that it is our task to be the continuers of what was once alive in the ancient Mysteries.

But this consciousness must be, and indeed can be, deepened in every direction. For in the light of what was said yesterday, we look back to the time when, united with a host of super-earthly Beings in the spiritual realm of the Sun, Michael sent down upon Earth those impulses and signs which inspired the deeds of Alexander on the one side and the Aristotelian philosophy on the other. Out of these impulses arose the last phase of the inspired Intelligence on Earth. Then, together with human souls who on his behalf carried out this work on Earth, together with his spiritual hosts and the hosts of human souls around these leading spirits, Michael witnessed the Mystery of Golgotha from his abode on the Sun. Truly our souls may be stirred by picturing that moment when Michael, together with a host of Angeloi, Archangeloi and human souls, witnessed the Christ departing from the Sun in order to enter the bodily sheaths of a man and, through what He could experience in a human body on Earth, to unite Himself with the further evolution of humanity. But for Michael himself this was at the same time the sign that henceforward he must allow the heavenly Intelligence, hitherto in his keeping, to stream down like holy rain upon the Earth, to fall away gradually from the Sun. And when the ninth century of the Christian era had come, those around Michael perceived: The content of what had been guarded hitherto under Michael, is now down below, upon the Earth.

What mattered now was that in complete harmony with the sovereignty of Michael there should arise all that came into the world through the Masters of Chartres and also through certain chosen souls in the Order of the Dominicans. In short, there came about the phase of evolution which from the beginning of the fifteenth century inaugurated the epoch of the Consciousness Soul—it is the phase of evolution in which we ourselves are living. Approximately in the first third of the preceding epoch, that is to say during the first third of the epoch of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, as an outcome of Alexandrianism, the super-earthly Intelligence had spread in Asia, Africa and parts of Europe. Following upon this, came the time when Michael, the foremost Archangel-Spirit of the Sun, knew that the Cosmic Intelligence was passing away from this realm, away from his administration: the conditions were now established for the development of the Intelligence on the Earth. A further phase of development on Earth began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the Christian era, when Gabriel became the administrator—as I explained in my previous lecture—while Michael was free from his earlier obligations in the Cosmos.

Michael was now in an unusual position. In other circumstances, when an Archangelos is not himself the ruling Spirit in the affairs of Earth, he lets his impulses pour, nevertheless, into what the other Archangeloi are bringing to pass. The impulses from all the seven consecutive Archangelic rulerships flow in continually—it is simply that one rulership predominates in a particular age. When, for example, in earlier epochs of evolution, Gabriel was the leading Spirit, it was paramountly those impulses of which he was the actual ruler that flowed into earthly evolution; but the other Archangeloi were also at work. Now, however, when Gabriel was exercising his dominion, Michael was in the unusual position of being unable to participate from the Sun in the affairs of the Earth. Truly it is a strange position for a ruling Archangelos to perceive that the activity he has been wielding through long ages has, for the time being, come to an end. And so it was that Michael said to those who belonged to him: For the time during which we cannot send impulses to the Earth (it is the period which ended about the year 1879) we must set about a special task, a task within the realm of the Sun. It was to be possible for those souls who have been led by their karma into the Anthroposophical Movement, to behold in the realm of the Sun the deeds performed by Michael and his hosts while Gabriel was holding sway upon the Earth.

This was detached from the otherwise regular sequence of deeds taking place between gods and men. The souls connected with Michael—the leading souls of Alexander's time, the leading Dominicans with those of less eminence who had gathered around them, and a large number of aspiring human souls in association with the leading spirits—these souls felt torn away from the age-long connection with the spiritual world. There, in super-sensible worlds, those human souls predestined to become Anthroposophists experienced something never previously experienced by human souls between death and rebirth in the super-earthly realm. In earlier times during the period between death and a new birth, the karma for the future earthly existence had been elaborated by human souls in connection with leading spiritual Beings. But no karma had ever previously been elaborated in the same way as was the karma of those predestined to become Anthroposophists. Never before in the realm of the Sun between death and rebirth had there been accomplished such work as was possible under the leadership of Michael when, as was now the case, he was free of the concerns of the Earth.

Something came to pass in the super-sensible worlds. It was something that lies implanted deep down in the hearts of the majority of Anthroposophists to-day, although in the unconscious, wrapt in sleep or dream. And the Anthroposophist speaks truly when he says to himself: Within my heart there lies a secret although I am yet unconscious of it. It is a secret mystery wherein are reflected the deeds of Michael in realms beyond the Earth when, before my present incarnation, I was serving him. In the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Michael, being free of his wonted tasks, was enabled to work in a special way, and I was working under him.

Michael gathered his hosts, he gathered from the realms of the Angeloi and the Archangeloi the super-sensible Beings who belonged to him, but he gathered, too, human souls who in one way or another had been connected with him. And thus there arose a kind of School—a great and ever-widening super-sensible School. In the same way that a kind of heavenly Conference had taken place at the beginning of the thirteenth century between those who worked together as Platonists and Aristotelians, a super-sensible tuition now took place, from the fifteenth into the eighteenth centuries, under the direct leadership of Michael—a super-sensible schooling in which the great Teacher, ordained by cosmic decree, was Michael himself. Thus, before the super-sensible cult that took its course during the first half of the nineteenth century in mighty Imaginations, as I have told you, numbers of human souls had already received a super-sensible schooling whose results they now carry subconsciously within them. These results come to expression in the urge felt by such people to come to Anthroposophy. The urge that brings them to Anthroposophy is indeed the outcome of this schooling. And it can truly be said: At the end of the fifteenth century, Michael gathered his hosts of gods and of human souls in the realm of the Sun and gave them teaching which extended over long periods of time. This teaching was to somewhat the following effect.—

Since the human race has peopled the Earth in human form, Mysteries have existed upon the Earth: Sun Mysteries, Mercury Mysteries, Venus Mysteries, Mars Mysteries, Jupiter Mysteries, Saturn Mysteries. Into these Mysteries the gods poured their secrets; in these Mysteries men were initiated when they were fit for Initiation. Thus it has been possible for the human being on the Earth to know what proceeds on Saturn, on Jupiter, on Mars and so forth, to know, too, how happenings in these spheres work into the evolution of mankind on Earth. Always there have been Initiates who, in the Mysteries, communed with the Gods. With an old, instinctive clairvoyance, these Initiates received the impulses coming to them in the Mysteries. But even meagre traditions (thus spoke Michael to those who belonged to him) even meagre traditions of this have almost vanished from the Earth. The impulses can no longer stream into the Earth. It is only in the lowest-lying region—that of physical procreation—it is there and there alone that Gabriel still has the power to let the Moon-influences flow into the evolution of humanity. The ancient traditions have almost disappeared from the Earth and therewith the possibility to nurture and cultivate the impulses streaming into the subconscious life and into the differently constituted bodily natures of men. We, however, turn our gaze back to all that once was brought in the Mysteries as a gift of the Heavens to men; we survey this wonderful tableau. And also we look downwards across the flow of the ages. And there we find the places of the Mysteries, we see how the heavenly wisdom streamed into these Mysteries, how men were initiated, how from our hallowed realm in the Sun the Cosmic Intelligence poured down to men in such a way that the great Teachers of humanity received truly spiritual ideas, thoughts, concepts. These ideas and thoughts were inspired into them from our hallowed realm in the Sun. These inspirations have vanished from the Earth. We see them only when we look back into epochs of antiquity ... stage by stage we see them disappearing from earthly evolution during the time of Alexander and its aftermath—and down there below we see the Intelligence that has now become earthly, spreading gradually among men. But the vista has remained with us. We yet behold the secrets that were once divulged to the Initiates of the Mysteries. Let us bring this fully into our consciousness! Let us bring it to the consciousness of those spiritual Beings who are around me, those Beings who never appear in earthly bodies but have their existence only in an etheric form. But let us bring it, too, to those souls who have often lived on Earth in physical bodies, those who are actually there now, and who belong to the Michael community—let us bring it to the consciousness of these human souls. We will image forth the great Initiation-teaching which once streamed down in the ancient fashion, through the Mysteries, to the Earth. We will present this to the souls of those who in their life of Intelligence were linked with Michael.—

And then—if I may use an earthly, and in such a context an almost trivial expression—then the ancient Initiation-Wisdom was “worked through.” In a great and comprehensive heavenly School, Michael taught the contents of what he was now no longer able to administer himself. It was an overwhelming deed—something that in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth centuries and on into the eighteenth, caused such profound disquiet and alarm to the Ahrimanic demons on Earth that a remarkable thing happened. Between heavenly deeds and earthly deeds at this time polaric contrast was established. In the heights, in the spiritual world, there was this sublime School, gathering together the old Initiate-Wisdom in a new form, calling up into the Intelligence-filled consciousness, into the Consciousness Soul of predestined human beings between death and rebirth, what in earlier times had been man's treasury of wisdom in the Intellectual Soul, the Sentient Soul, and so forth. In inner words, seeming stern in many respects when they were uttered, Michael placed before those who belonged to him the picture of cosmic relationships, the anthroposophical relationships. These souls received teaching which unveiled the secrets of worlds. Below, on the Earth, the Ahrimanic spirits were at work.—And here it is necessary to point without reserve to a secret. Outwardly regarded it will seem unacceptable in face of modern culture, but it is nevertheless a divine secret and one of which Anthroposophists must be cognisant in order to be able to lead civilisation in the right way to the end of the twentieth century.

While Michael above was teaching his hosts, there was founded in the realm lying immediately below the surface of the Earth, a kind of sub-earthly, Ahrimanic school. The Michael School was in the super-earthly world; in the region beneath our feet—for the spiritual is actively at work in the sub-earthly region also—the opposing Ahrimanic school was founded. And in that particular period, when no impulses were streaming down from Michael bringing heavenly inspiration to the Intelligence, when the Intelligence on the Earth was, for the time being, left to itself, the Ahrimanic hosts strove all the harder to send their impulses up from below into the development of the Intelligence in mankind. It is a truly overwhelming picture. The Earth's surface—Michael above, teaching his hosts, revealing to them in mighty, cosmic language the ancient Initiate-Wisdom, and below, the Ahrimanic school in the sub-strata of the Earth. Upon the Earth, the Intelligence that has fallen from the Heavens is unfolding. For the time being, Michael holds his School in heavenly isolation from the earthly world—no impulses stream down from above—and there below are the Ahrimanic powers, sending up their impulses with all the greater strength.

There have always been souls incarnated on the Earth who were aware of this sinister situation. Anyone conversant with the spiritual history of this epoch, especially the spiritual history of Europe, will everywhere find evidence of the fact that there were individuals here and there—often quite simple men—who had an inkling of this sinister situation: abandonment of humanity by the Michael rulership, and impulses rising from below like demonic vapours, striving to conquer the Intelligence.

It is remarkable how closely the revelations of wisdom are bound up with the human being, if all that springs from such revelations is to be beneficial. This is the secret which must here be touched upon.—A human being whose task it is to proclaim the Michael wisdom feels that in a certain respect he is following the right course when he tries to put into words, when he wrestles to find the terminology to express, what is, in very truth, the wisdom of Michael. Such a one feels, too, that he is further justified when with his own hand he writes down this wisdom; for then the flow of the spiritual is directly connected with him and streams, as it were, into the forms of what he is writing, into what he is doing. Thus he willingly communicates this wisdom to others in the form of reading material when it is written down by him in his own hand. But when through mechanical means, through the medium of the printed book, he sees his work duplicated, he has a feeling of uneasiness. This has to be endured, for the method is in keeping with our age. Nevertheless, the feeling of uneasiness is never absent from one who stands within the life of the Spirit together with what he has to proclaim.

In connection with the lecture yesterday, somebody has asked me whether, as Swedenborg has hinted, the letter (Buchstabe) is not, after all, the ‘last outflow’ of the spiritual life. That indeed is so! It is the last outflow of the spiritual life so long as it flows through a man in a continuous stream from the Spirit. But when it is fixed by mechanical means as it were from the other pole, when it comes before the eyes of men as printed letters, it becomes an Ahrimanic spiritual power. For, strange to say, it is that Ahrimanic school which worked in opposition to the School of Michael in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—it is that Ahrimanic school which brought the art of printing, with all its consequences, to Europe. Printing can be the soil from which demonic powers, well adapted to combat the rulership of Michael, may spring.

An Anthroposophist must be able to perceive the significance and meaning of realities in life; he must recognise that printing is a spiritual power but precisely that spiritual power which Ahriman has placed in opposition to Michael. Therefore to those who in his School at that time were being taught by him, Michael constantly gave this warning: When you descend again to the Earth in order to give effect to what has here been prepared, gather men around you, make known the essentials by word of mouth, and do not regard the ‘literary’ effects produced in the world through the printed book as of foremost importance.—Hence the more intimate method of working from man to man is more truly in accord with Michael's way. If, instead of working merely through books, we meet together with one another, letting the impulses flow into us in the sphere of the human and the personal, and only then using the books as aids to memory, shall we be able to inaugurate the stream that—imponderably at first—is destined to flow through the Anthroposophical Society. It is inevitable that we should make use of books for we must also become masters of this art of Ahriman's—otherwise we should be delivered into his hands. We must be able to reckon truly with the Ahrimanic spirit of the times, otherwise tremendous power would be given to him. Thus it is not a matter of merely ousting the printed book but of bringing it into relationship with what works in a directly human way. So it would not be right, as a result of what I have just put before you, to say: ‘Away with all the anthroposophical books!’ Thereby we should be delivering up the art of printing to the most powerful enemies of the Michael wisdom; we should be making it impossible for our anthroposophical work to thrive, as thrive it must, until the end of the century is reached. What we must do is to ennoble the art of printing through our reverence for the Michael wisdom. For what is it that by way of the art of printing Ahriman is intent upon achieving in opposition to Michael? Ahriman is intent upon conquest of the Intelligence. There is evidence of it everywhere to-day. Conquest of the Intelligence, which asserts itself wherever conditions are favourable. And when do we find the Ahrimanic spirits most potent in their attacks against the coming age of Michael? We find them at those times when a diminution or lowering of the consciousness takes place in human beings. These Ahrimanic spirits then take possession of human consciousness, they entrench themselves within it. For instance, in the year 1914, many individuals in a lowered state of consciousness became entangled in events which led to the outbreak of the terrible World War. And within the lowered consciousness of such men the hosts of Ahriman promoted the World War—promoted it by way of human beings. The real causes of that War will never be brought to light by documents contained in archives. No, one must rather look deeply into history and perceive that there, at some particular point, stood an influential personality, at this point another, and there again another—and these men were in a lowered state of consciousness. That was the opportunity for Ahriman to take possession of them. And if you want to realise how easy it is in our age for men to be possessed by Ahriman, you need think only of this example.

What happened, when, with the printed volumes they had brought with them, the Europeans arrived in North America in times when Indians were still to be found in the eastern part of the land? When the Indians saw these volumes with their strange characters of script they took the letters to be little demons. They had the right perception for these things. They were terribly frightened when they looked at all these little demonic entities—a, b, and the rest, as they appear in print. For these letters, reproduced in such a different way, do contain something that fascinates, something that casts a spell over the modern mind; and only the good outlook of Michael, with eyes open to the human element in the proclamation of wisdom, can lead men beyond the danger of this lure. But evil things may happen in this domain.

At this point let me say the following.—There are certain secrets connected with the vision of world-existence which cannot be penetrated before a somewhat advanced age in life. Each particular period of life enables one who possesses Initiation-science to behold the individual secrets of existence. Thus between the twenty-first and forty-second years of life—not before—such a man is able to gaze into the Sun-existence; between the forty-second and forty-ninth years into the Mars secrets; between the forty-ninth and fifty-sixth years into the Jupiter secrets. But to behold the secrets of worlds in their interconnections, one must have passed the age of sixty-three.¹ Therefore before I myself was in this position, I should not have been able to speak of certain things of which I now speak without any reserve. Before the vision can penetrate into anything related to the Michael Mysteries, to the influences working from the spiritual realm of the Sun, one must look upwards from the Earth through the Saturn existence into the secrets of worlds. One must be able to experience, to live within that twilight of the spiritual world which proceeds from the ruler of Saturn, from Oriphiel, who was the leading Archangelos at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and who will again assume the leadership when the Michael Age has run its course.

To such vision, however, shattering, overwhelming truths connected with the present age are revealed. As we have seen, the art of printing spread over the Earth through the Ahrimanic school working in opposition to the School of Michael, and because of this, ‘authorship’ on a wide scale has arisen on the Earth. Who, then, were ‘authors’ in earlier times, before printing was in existence? They were men whose writings could be known only in the narrowest circles, in circles, moreover, that were properly prepared. Into how many hands did a book find its way before printing was in use? Think of the following, and you will be able to judge how things were. A kind of substitute for the later art of printing was already in existence in ancient Chinese civilisation and had reached a high level of perfection. A kind of printing art had been established there—also in an Age when Michael was ruling above; and when below there was an Ahrimanic anti-rulership. But nothing very much came of it. In those times the power of Ahriman was not yet so powerful and he was still unable to make really effective attempts to wrest from Michael the rulership of the Intelligence. The attempt was renewed in the time of Alexander but then again was unsuccessful.

Ahriman's influence in the printing art of the modern age, however, has assumed deep significance. Authorship has, so to speak, been popularised. And something has become possible, something that is as great in a wonderful, brilliant, dazzling way as, on the other hand, the necessity is great to receive it in absolute equableness of soul and to estimate it according to its true significance. First attempts have been made, attempts which from Michael's realm may be characterised by saying: Ahriman has appeared as an author. For Michael and his circle, this is a deeply significant happening to-day. Ahriman as an author! Not only have men been possessed by him as I indicated in the case of the outbreak of the War, but in that he manifested on Earth through human souls, he himself appeared as an author. That he is a most brilliant author need be no cause for astonishment; for Ahriman is a mighty, all-embracing spirit. True, he is not by nature fitted to promote the evolution of mankind on the Earth according to the intentions of the good gods; he opposes it. Nevertheless in his own sphere he is not only a thoroughly useful but a beneficent power—for beings who on one level of world-happenings are benefactors are exceedingly harmful on another. It need not be assumed, therefore, that in characterising the works of Ahriman they must come in for unqualified rebuke. Provided one is conscious of what they are, one can even admire them. But the Ahrimanic character must be recognised!

Michael teaches how recognition can be made to-day if men are willing to listen to him. For the Michael schooling has worked on and still to-day it is possible for men to draw near it. Then it teaches how Ahriman himself as an author has made attempts—first attempts of a deeply shattering, deeply tragic character—working, of course, through a human being. Nietzsche's Anti-Christ, his Ecce Homo, his autobiography, and the annotations in The Will to Power—those most brilliant chapters of modern authorship with their often devilish content—Ahriman was their writer, exercising his sovereignty over that which in letters on the Earth can be made subject to his dominion through the art of printing! Ahriman has already begun to appear as an author and his work will continue. On Earth in the future alertness will be necessary in order that not all the productions of authorship shall be deemed of the same calibre. Works written by men will appear, but some individuals at least must be aware that a Being is training himself to become one of the most brilliant authors in the immediate future: that Being is Ahriman! Human hands will write the works, but Ahriman will be the author. As once the Evangelists of old were inspired by super-sensible Beings and wrote down their works through this inspiration, so will the works of Ahriman be penned by men.

The further history of the evolution of humanity will present itself in two aspects. Endeavours must be made to propagate in the earthly realm—to the greatest extent possible—what was once taught by Michael in super-sensible Schools to souls predestined to receive it; endeavours must be made in the Anthroposophical Society to be reverently mindful of this knowledge and to impart it to those who will be incarnated in the coming times, until the end of the century has arrived. And then, many of those who for the first time are learning of these things to-day will come down to the Earth again. The time will be short. But meanwhile on Earth much that has been written by Ahriman will appear.

One task of Anthroposophists is this: steadfastly to cultivate the Michael Wisdom, to bring courageous hearts to this Michael Wisdom, and to realise that the first penetration of the earthly Intelligence by the spiritual sword of Michael consists in this sword being wielded by those into whose hearts the Michael wisdom has found its way. And so the picture of Michael in a new form may inspire each single Anthroposophist—Michael standing there within the hearts of men, beneath his feet the production of Ahrimanic authorship. Such a picture need not be painted in that external form in which during the time of the Dominicans the image was often fixed—above, the Dominican Schoolmen with their books, below, crushed under their feet, the heathen wisdom as represented by Averröes, Avicenna and the rest. Wherever it was a matter of portraying the battle waged by Christian Scholasticism against heathendom, these pictures are to be found. But in the spirit there must be this other picture: Devotion to Michael as he enters into the world, laying hold of the Intelligence upon Earth; and—in order that one may not be bedazzled—alertness with regard to the brilliant work of Ahriman as an author through the whole of the twentieth century. Ahriman will write his works in the strangest places—but they will be there indeed—and he is preparing pupils for his purposes. Even in our day, much in the subconscious is being schooled in such a way that souls will be able to incarnate again quickly and become instruments for Ahriman as an author. He will write in all domains: in philosophy, in poetry, in the sphere of the drama and the epic; in medicine, law, sociology. Ahriman will write in all these domains!

This will be the situation into which mankind will be led when the end of the century is reached. And those who are still young to-day will witness many samples of how Ahriman appears as an author. In every sphere watchfulness will be needed—and reverent enthusiasm for the Michael Wisdom.

If we can permeate ourselves with these things, if we can feel ourselves standing within the spiritual life in the sense of the indications here given, then, my dear friends, we shall place ourselves as true Anthroposophists into the civilisation of the present time. Then, maybe, we shall realise more and more deeply that a new Impulse is going out from the Christmas Foundation at the Goetheanum, that in truth only now are there being presented to the Anthroposophical Society things whereby this Society can see itself as it were in a great cosmic mirror—in which the individual, too, together with the karma which leads him into the Anthroposophical Society, can see himself reflected.

That is what I wanted to lay on your hearts in these lectures. For it is to hearts that the words are chiefly spoken. The hearts of men must become the helpers of Michael in the conquering of the Intelligence that has fallen to the Earth. Just as once the old Serpent was destined to be crushed by Michael, so must the Intelligence that has now become the Serpent be conquered by Michael, be spiritualised by Michael. And whenever the Serpent appears in its unspiritualised state, made Ahrimanic, it must be recognised through the vigilance, the alertness which belongs to the anthroposophical spirit and is developed through the Michael-like tenor of soul.

• 1. See True and False Paths in Spiritual Investigations. Lecture 6. (Rudolf Steiner Press.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this course of lectures I want in the first place to speak about the way in which the art of education can be furthered and enriched by an understanding of man. I shall therefore approach the subject in the way I indicated in my introductory lecture, when I tried to show how anthroposophy can be a practical help in gaining a true knowledge of man, not merely a knowledge of the child, but a knowledge of the whole human being. I showed how anthroposophy, just because it has an all-embracing knowledge of the whole human being—that is to say a knowledge of the whole of human life from birth to death, in so far as this takes place on earth—how just because of this it can point out in a right way what is essential for the education and instruction of the child.

It is very easy to think that a child can be educated and taught if one observes only what takes place in childhood and youth; but this is not enough. On the contrary, just as with the plant, if you introduce some substance into the growing shoot its effect will be shown in the blossom or the fruit, so it is with human life. The effect of what is implanted into the child in his earliest years, or is drawn out of him during those years, will sometimes appear in the latest years of life; and often it is not realised that, when at about the age of 50 someone develops an illness or infirmity, the cause lies in a wrong education or a wrong method of teaching in the 7th or 8th year. What one usually does today is to study the child—even if this is done in a less external way than I described yesterday—in order to discover how best to help him. This is not enough. So today I should like to lay certain foundations, on the basis of which I shall proceed to show how the whole of human life can be observed by means of spiritual science.

I said yesterday that man should be observed as a being consisting of body, soul and spirit, and in yesterday's public lecture I gave some indication of how it is the super-sensible in man, the higher man within man, that is enduring, that continues from birth until death, while the substances of the external physical body are always changing. It is therefore essential to learn to know human life in such a way that one perceives what is taking place on earth as a development of the pre-earthly life. We have not only those soul qualities within us that had their beginning at birth or at conception, but we bear within us pre-earthly qualities of soul, indeed, we bear within us the results of past earthly lives. All this lives and works and weaves within us, and during earthly life we have to prepare what will then pass through the gate of death and live again after death beyond the earth, in the world of soul and spirit. We must therefore understand how the super-earthly works into earthly life, for it is also present between birth and death. It works, only in a hidden way, in what is of a bodily nature, and one does not understand the body if one has no understanding of the spiritual forces active within it.

Let us now proceed to study further what I have just indicated. We can do so by taking concrete examples. An approach to the knowledge of man is contained in anthroposophical literature, for instance in my book Theosophy, in An Outline Of Occult Science or in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. Let us start from what can lead to a real, concrete knowledge of man by taking as a foundation what anthroposophy has to say in general about man and the world. There are two examples which I should like to put before you, two personalities who are certainly well known to you all. I choose them because for many years I made an intensive study of both of them. I am taking two men of genius; later on we shall come down to less gifted personalities. We shall then see that anthroposophy does not only speak in a general, abstract way, but is able to penetrate deeply into real human beings and is able to get to know them in such a way that knowledge of man is shown to be something which has reality in practical life. In choosing these two examples, Goethe and Schiller, and so making an indirect approach, I hope to show how a knowledge of man is acquired under the influence of Spiritual Science.

Let us look at Goethe and Schiller from an outward point of view, as they appeared during the course of their lives, but let us in each case study the whole personality. In Goethe we have an individuality who entered life in a remarkable way. He was born black, or rather dark blue. This shows how extraordinarily difficult it was for his soul-spiritual being to enter into physical incarnation. But once this had taken place, once Goethe had overcome the resistance of this physical body, he was entirely within it. On the one hand it is hard to imagine a more healthy nature than Goethe had as a boy. He was amazingly healthy. He was so healthy that his teachers found him quite difficult; but children who give no trouble are seldom those who enjoy the best health in later life. On the other hand, children who are rather a nuisance to their teachers are those who accomplish more in later life because they have more active, energetic natures. The understanding teacher will therefore be quite glad when the children keep a sharp eye on him. Goethe from his earliest childhood was very much inclined to do this, even in the literal sense of the word. He peeped at the fingers of someone playing the piano and then named one finger “Thumbkin,” another “Pointerkin,” and so on. But it was not only in this sense that he kept a sharp eye on his teachers. Even in his boyhood he was bright and wide-awake; and this at times gave them trouble. Later on in Leipzig Goethe went through a severe illness, but here we must bear in mind that certain hard experiences and some sowing of wild oats were necessary in order to bring about a lowering of his health to the point at which he could be attacked by the illness which he suffered at Leipzig. After this illness we see that Goethe throughout this whole life is a man of robust health, but one who possesses at the same time an extraordinary sensitivity. He reacts strongly to impressions of all kinds, but does not allow them to take hold of him and enter deeply into his organism. He does not suffer from heart trouble when he is deeply moved by some experience, but he feels any such experience intensely; and this sensitivity of soul goes with him throughout life. He suffers, but his suffering does not find expression in physical illness. This shows that his bodily health was exceptionally sound. Moreover, Goethe felt called upon to exercise restraint in his way of looking at things. He did not sink into a sort of hazy mysticism and say, as is so often said: “O, it is not a question of paying heed to the external physical form; that is of small importance. We must turn our gaze to what is spiritual!” On the contrary, to a man with Goethe's healthy outlook the spiritual and the physical are one. And he alone can understand such a personality who is able to behold the spiritual through the image of the physical.

Goethe was tall when he sat, and short when he stood. When he stood you could see that he had short legs. [The German has the word Sitzgrösse for this condition.] This is an especially important characteristic for the observer who is able to regard man as a whole. Why had Goethe short legs? Short legs are the cause of a certain kind of walk. Goethe took short steps because the upper part of his body was heavy—heavy and long—and he placed his foot firmly on the ground. As teachers we must observe such things, so that we can study them in the children. Why is it that a person has short legs and a particularly big upper part of the body? It is the outward sign that such a person is able to bring to harmonious expression in the present earth life what he experienced in a previous life on earth. In this respect also Goethe was extraordinarily harmonious, for right into extreme old age he was able to develop everything that lay in his karma. Indeed he lived to be so old because he was able to bring to fruition the potential gifts with which karma had endowed him. After Goethe had left the physical body, this body was still so beautiful that all who saw him in death were fulfilled with wonder. One has the impression that Goethe had experienced to the full his karmic potentialities; now nothing more is left, and he must begin afresh when again he enters into an earthly body under completely new conditions. All this is expressed in the particular formation of such a body as Goethe's, for the cause of what man brings with him as predisposition from an earlier incarnation is revealed for the most part in the formation of the head. Now Goethe from his youth up had a wonderfully beautiful Apollo head, from which only harmonious forces streamed down into his physical body. This body, however, burdened by the weight of its upper part and with too short legs was the cause of his special kind of walk which lasted throughout his life. The whole man was a wonderfully harmonious expression of karmic predisposition and karmic fulfilment. Every detail of Goethe's life illustrates this.

Such a personality, standing so harmoniously in life and becoming so old, must inevitably have outstanding experiences in his middle years. Goethe was born in 1749 and he died in 1832, so he lived to be 83 years old. He reached middle age, therefore, at about his 41st year in 1790. If we take these years between 1790 and 1800 we have the middle decade of his life. In this decade, before 1800, Goethe did indeed experience the most important events of his life. Before this time he was not able to bring his philosophical and scientific ideas, important as they were, to any very definite formulation. The Metamorphosis of the Plants was first published in 1790; everything connected with it belongs to this decade 1790-1800. In 1790 Goethe was so far from completing his Faust that he brought it out as a Fragment; he had no idea then that he would ever finish it. It was in this decade that under the influence of his friendship with Schiller he conceived the bold idea of continuing his Faust. The great scenes, the Prologue in Heaven among others, belong to this period. So in Goethe we have to do with an exceptionally harmonious life; with a life moreover that runs its quiet course, undisturbed by inner conflict, devoted freely and contemplatively to the outer world.

As a contrast let us look at the life of Schiller. From the outset Schiller is placed into a situation in life which shows a continual disharmony between his life of soul and spirit and his physical body. His head completely lacks the harmonious formation which we find in Goethe. He is even ugly, ugly in a way that does not hide his gifts, but nevertheless ugly. In spite of this a strong personality is shown in the way he holds himself, and this comes to expression in his features also, particularly in the formation of the nose. Schiller is not long-bodied; he has long legs. On the other hand everything that lies between the head and the limbs, in the region of the circulation and breathing is in his case definitely sick, poorly developed from birth, and he suffers throughout his life from cramps. To begin with there are long periods between the attacks, but later they become almost incessant. They become indeed so severe that he is unable to accept any invitation to a meal; but has to make it a condition—as for instance on one occasion when coming to Berlin—that he is invited for the whole day, so that he may be able to choose a time free from such pains. The cause of all this is an imperfect development of the circulatory and breathing systems.

The question therefore arises: What lies karmically, coming from a previous earthly life, in the case of a man who has to suffer in this way from cramping pains? Such pains, when they gain a hold in human life, point quite directly to a man's karma. If, with a sense of earnest scientific responsibility, one attempts to investigate these cramp phenomena from the standpoint of spiritual science, one always finds a definite karmic cause underlying them, the results of deeds, thoughts and feelings coming from an earlier life on earth. Now we have the man before us, and one of two things can happen. Either everything goes as harmoniously as with Goethe, so that one says to oneself: Here we have to do with Karma; here everything appears as the result of Karma. Or the opposite can also happen. Through special conditions which arise when a man descends out of the spiritual world into the physical, he comes into a situation in which he is not able fully to work through the burden of his karma.

Man comes down from the spiritual world with definite karmic predispositions; he bears these within him. Let us assume that A in the diagram represents a place, a definite point of time in the life of a man when he should be able in some way to realise, to fulfil his karma, but for some reason this does not happen. Then the fulfilment of his karma is interrupted and a certain time must pass when, as it were, his karma makes a pause; it has to be postponed until the next life on earth. And so it goes on. Again, at B there comes a place when he should be able to fulfil something of his karma; but once more he has to pause and again postpone this part of his karma until his next incarnation. Now when someone is obliged to interrupt his karma in this way pains of a cramping nature always make their appearance in the course of life. Such a person is unable fully to fashion and shape into his life what he always bears within him. Here we have something which shows the true character of spiritual science. It does not indulge in fantasy, neither does it talk in vague, general terms about the four members of man's being; physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. On the contrary, it penetrates into real life, and is able to point out where the real spiritual causes lie for certain external occurrences. It knows how man represents himself in outer life. This knowledge is what true spiritual science must be able to achieve.

I was now faced with the question: In a life such as Schiller's, how does karma work as the shaper of the whole of life if, as in his case, conditions are such that karma cannot properly operate, so that he has to make continual efforts to achieve what he has the will to achieve? For Goethe it was really comparatively easy to complete his great works. For Schiller the act of creation is always very difficult. He has, as it were, to attack his karma, and the way in which he goes to the attack will only show its results in the following earthly life. So one day I had to put to myself the following question: What is the connection between such a life as Schiller's and the more general conditions of life? If one sets about answering such a question in a superficial way nothing of any significance emerges, even with the help of the investigations of spiritual science. Here one may not spin a web of fantasy; one must observe. Nevertheless if one approaches straight away the first object that presents itself for observation, one will somehow go off on a side track. So I considered the question in the following way: How does a life take its course when karmic hindrances or other pre-earthly conditions are present?

I then proceeded to study certain individuals in whom something of this kind had already happened, and I will now give such an example. I could give many similar examples, but I will take one which I can describe quite exactly. I had an acquaintance, a personality whom I knew very well indeed in his present earthly life. I was able to establish that there were no hindrances in his life connected with the fulfilment of karma, but there were hindrances resulting from what had taken place in his existence between death and a new birth, that is in his super-sensible life between the last earthly life and the one in which I learned to know him. So in this case there were not, as with Schiller, hindrances preventing the fulfilment of karma, but hindrances in the way of bringing down into the physical body what he had experienced between death and a new birth in the super-sensible world. In observing this man one could see that he had experienced much of real significance between death and a new birth, but was not able to give expression to this in life. He had entered into karmic relationships with other people and had incarnated at a time when it was not possible fully to realise on earth what he had, as it were, piled up as the content of his inner soul experience between death and conception. And what were the physical manifestations which appeared as the result of his not being able to realise what had been present in him in the super-sensible world? These showed themselves through the fact that this personality was a stutterer; he had an impediment in his speech. And if one now takes a further step and investigates the causes at work in the soul which result in speech disturbances, then one always finds that there is some hindrance preventing what was experienced between death and a new birth in the super-sensible world from being brought down through the body into the physical world. Now the question arises: How do matters stand in the case of such a personality who has very much in him brought about through his previous karma, but who has it all stored up in the existence between death and a new birth and, because he cannot bring it down becomes a stutterer? What sort of things are bound up with such a personality in his life here on earth?

Again and again one could say to oneself: This man has in him many great qualities that he has gained in pre-earthly life, but he cannot bring them down to earth. He was quite able to bring down what can be developed in the formation of the physical body up to the time of the change of teeth; he could even develop extremely well what takes place between the change of teeth and puberty. He then became a personality with outstanding literary and artistic ability, for he was able to form and fashion what can be developed between puberty and the 30th year of life. Now, however, there arose a deep concern in one versed in a true knowledge of man, a concern which may be expressed in the following question: How will it be with this personality when he enters his thirties and should then develop to an ever increasing degree the spiritual or consciousness soul in addition to the intellectual or mind soul? Anyone who has knowledge of these things feels the deepest concern in such a case, for he cannot think that the consciousness soul—which needs for its unfolding everything that arises in the head, perfect and complete—will be able to come to its full development. For with this personality the fact that he stuttered showed that not everything in the region of his head was in proper order. Now apart from stuttering this man was as sound as a bell, except that in addition to the stutter, (which showed that not everything was in order in the head system) he suffered from a squint. This again was a sign that he had not been able to bring down into the present earthly life all that he had absorbed in the super-sensible life between death and a new birth. Now one day this man came to me and said: “I have made up my mind to be operated on for my squint.” I was not in a position to do more than say, “If I were you, I should not have it done.” I did all I could to dissuade him. I did not at that time see the whole situation as clearly as I do today, for what I am telling you happened more than 20 years ago. But I was greatly concerned about this operation. Well, he did not follow my advice and the operation took place. Now note what happened. Very soon after the operation, which was extremely successful, as such operations often are, he came to me in jubilant mood and said, “Now I shall not squint any more.” He was just a little vain, as many distinguished people often are. But I was very troubled; and only a few days later the man died, having just completed his 30th year. The doctors diagnosed typhoid, but it was not typhoid, he died of meningitis.

There is no need for the spiritual investigator to become heartless when he considers such a life; on the contrary his human sympathy is deepened thereby. But at the same time he sees through life and comprehends it in its manifold aspects and relationships. He perceives that what was experienced spiritually between death and a new birth cannot be brought down into the present life and that this comes to expression in physical defects. Unless the right kind of education can intervene, which was not possible in this case, life cannot be extended beyond certain definite limits. Please do not believe that I am asserting that anybody who squints must die at 30. Negative instances are never intended and it may well be that something else enters karmically into life which enables the person in question to live to a ripe old age. But in the case we are considering there was cause for anxiety because of the demands made on the head, which resulted in squinting and stuttering, and the question arose: How can a man with an organisation of this kind live beyond the 35th year? It is at this point of time that one must look back on a person's karma, and then you will see immediately that it in no way followed that because somebody had a squint he must die at 30. For if we take a man who has so prepared himself in pre-earthly life that he has been able to absorb a great deal between death and a new birth, but is unable to bring down what he has received into physical life, and if we consider every aspect of his karma, we find that this particular personality might quite well have lived beyond the 35th year; but then, besides all other conditions, he would have had to bear within him the impulse leading to a spiritual conception of man and of the world. For this man had a natural disposition for spiritual things which one rarely meets; but in spite of this, because strong spiritual impulses inherent in him from previous earth lives were too one-sided, he could not approach the spiritual.

I assure you that I am in a position to speak about such a matter. I was very friendly with this man and was therefore well aware of the deep cleft that existed between my own conception of the world and his. From the intellectual standpoint we could understand one another very well; we could be on excellent terms in other ways, but it was not possible to speak to him about the things of the spirit. Thus because with his 35th year it would have been necessary for him to find his way to a spiritual life, if his potential gifts up to this age were to be realised on earth, and because he was not able to come to a spiritual life, he died when he did. It is of course perfectly possible to stutter and have a squint and yet continue one's life as an ordinary mortal. There is no need to be afraid of things which must be stated at times if one wishes to describe realities, and not waste one's breath in mere phrases. Moreover from this example you can see how observation, sharpened by spiritual insight, enables one to look deeply into human life.

And now let us return to Schiller. When we consider the life of Schiller two things strike us above all others, for they are quite remarkable. There exists an unfinished drama by Schiller, a mere sketch, called the Malteser. We see from the concept underlying this sketch that if Schiller had wished to complete this drama, he could only have done so as an initiate, as one who had experienced initiation. It could not have been done otherwise. Up to a certain degree at least he possessed the inner qualities necessary for initiation, but owing to other conditions of his karma these qualities could not get through; they were suppressed, cramped. There was a cramping of his soul life too which can be seen in the sketch of the Malteser. There are long powerful sentences which never manage to get to the full stop. What is in him cannot find its way out. Now it is interesting to observe that with Goethe, too, we have such unfinished sketches, but we see that in his case, whenever he left something unfinished, he did so because he was too easy-going to carry it further. He could have finished it. Only in extreme old age, when a certain condition of sclerosis had set in would this have been impossible for him. With Schiller however we have another picture. An iron will is present in him when he makes the effort to develop the Malteser but he cannot do it. He only gets as far as a slight sketch. For this drama, seen in its reality, contains what, since the time of the Crusades, has been preserved in the way of all kinds of occultism, mysticism, and initiation science. And Schiller sets to work on such a drama, for the completion of which he would have had to bear within him the experience of initiation. Truly a life's destiny which is deeply moving for one who is able to see behind these things and look into the real being of this man. And from the time it became known that Schiller had in mind to write a drama such as the Malteser there was a tremendous increase in the opposition to him in Germany. He was feared. People were afraid that in his drama he might betray all kinds of occult secrets.

The second work about which I wish to speak is the following. Schiller is unable to finish the Malteser; he cannot get on with it. He lets some time go by and writes all manner of things which are certainly worthy of admiration, but which can also be admired by so-called philistines. If he could have completed the Malteser, it would have been a drama calling for the attention of men with the most powerful and vigorous minds. But he had to put it aside.

After a while he gets a new impulse which inspires his later work. He cannot think any more about the Malteser, but he begins to compose his Demetrius. This portrays a remarkable problem of destiny, the story of the false Demetrius who takes the place of another man. All the conflicting destinies which enter into the story as though emerging out of the most hidden causes, all the human emotions thereby aroused, would have had to be brought into this drama, if it were to be completed. Schiller sets to work on it with feverish activity. It became generally known—and people were still more afraid that things would be brought into the open which it was to their interest to keep hidden from the rest of mankind for some time yet.

And now certain things take place in the life of Schiller which, for anyone who understands them, cannot be accounted for on the grounds of a normal illness. We have a remarkable picture of this illness of Schiller's. Something tremendous happens—tremendous not only in regard to its greatness, but in regard to its shattering force. Schiller is taken ill while writing his Demetrius. On his sick bed in raging fever he continually repeats almost the whole of Demetrius. It seems as though some alien power is at work in Schiller, expressing itself through his body. There is of course no ground for accusing anyone. But, in spite of everything that has been written in this connection, one cannot do otherwise than come to the conclusion, from the whole picture of the illness, that in some way or another, even if in a quite occult way, something contributed to the rapid termination of Schiller's illness in his death. That people had some suspicion of this may be gathered from the fact that

Goethe, who could do nothing, but suspected much, dared not participate personally in any way during the last days of Schiller's life, not even after his death, although he felt this deeply. He dared not venture to make known the thoughts he bore within him.

With these remarks I only want to point out that for anyone able to see through such things Schiller was undoubtedly pre-destined to create works of a high spiritual order, but on account of inner and outer causes, inner and outer karmic reasons, it was all held back, dammed up, as it were, within him. I venture to say that for the spiritual investigator there is nothing of greater interest than to set himself the problem of studying what Schiller achieved in the last ten years of his life, from the Aesthetic Letters onwards, and then to follow the course of his life after death. A deep penetration into Schiller's soul after death reveals manifold inspirations coming to him from the spiritual world. Here we have the reason why Schiller had to die in his middle forties. His condition of cramp and his whole build, especially the ugly formation of his head, made it impossible for him to bring down into the physical body the content of his soul and spirit, deeply rooted as this was in spiritual existence.

When we bear such things in mind we must admit that the study of human life is deepened if we make use of what anthroposophy can give. We learn to look right into human life. In bringing these examples before you my sole purpose was to show how through anthroposophy one learns to contemplate the life of human beings. But let us now look at the matter as a whole. Can we not deepen our feeling and understanding for everything that is human simply by looking at a single human life in the way that we have done? If at a certain definite moment of life one can say to oneself: Thus it was with Schiller, thus with Goethe; thus it was with another young man—as I have told you—then, will not something be stirred in our souls which will teach us to look upon every child in a deeper way? Will not every human life become a sacred riddle to us? Shall we not learn to contemplate every human life, every human being, with much greater, much more inward attention? And can we not, just because a knowledge of man has been inscribed in this way into our souls, deepen within us a love of mankind? Can we not with this human love, deepened by a study of man which gives such profundity to the most inward, sacred riddle of life—can we not, with this love, enter rightly upon the task of education when life itself has become so sacred to us? Will not the teacher's task be transformed from mere ideological phrases or dream-like mysticism into a truly priestly calling ready for its task when Divine Grace sends human beings down into earthly life?

Everything depends on the development of such feelings. The essential thing about anthroposophy is not mere theoretical teaching, so that we know that man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego; that there is a law of karma, of reincarnation and so on. People can be very clever, they can know everything; but they are not anthroposophists in the true sense of the word when they only know these things in an ordinary way, as they might know the content of a cookery book. What matters is that the life of human souls is quickened and deepened by the anthroposophical world conception and that one then learns to work and act out of a soul-life thus deepened and quickened.

This then is the first task to be undertaken in furthering an education based on anthroposophy. From the outset one should work in such a way that teachers and educators may become in the deepest sense “knowers of men,” so that out of their own conviction, as a result of observing human beings in the right way, they approach the child with the love born out of this kind of thinking. It follows therefore that in a training course for teachers wishing to work in an anthroposophical sense the first approach is not to say: you should do it like this or like that, you should employ this or that educational knack, but the first thing is to awaken a true educational sense born out of a knowledge of man. If one has been successful in bringing this to the point of awakening in the teacher a real love of education then one can say that he is now ready to begin his work as an educator.

In education based on a knowledge of man, such for instance as the Waldorf School education, the first thing to be considered is not the imparting of rules, not the giving advice as to how one should educate, but the first thing is to hold Training Courses for Teachers in such a way that one finds the hearts of the teachers and so deepens these hearts that love for the child grows out of them. It is quite natural that every teacher believes that he can, as it were, impose this love on himself, but such an imposed human love can achieve nothing. Much good will may be behind it, but it can achieve nothing. The only human love which can achieve something is that which arises out of a deepened observation of individual cases.

If someone really wishes to develop an understanding of the essential principles of education based on a knowledge of man—whether he has already acquired a knowledge of spiritual science or whether, as can also happen, he has an instinctive understanding of these things—he will observe the child in such a way that he is faced with this question: What is the main trend of a child's development up to the time of the change of teeth? An intimate study of man will show that up to the change of teeth the child is a completely different being from what he becomes later on. A tremendous inner transformation takes place at this time, and there is another tremendous transformation at puberty. Just think what the change of teeth signifies for the growing child. It is only the outer sign for deep changes which are taking place in the whole human being, changes which occur only once, for only once do we get our second teeth, not every seven years. With the change of teeth the formative process taking place in the teeth comes to an end. From now on we have to keep our teeth for the rest of our lives. The most we can do is to have them stopped, or replaced by false ones, for we get no others out of our organism. Why is this? It is because with the change of teeth the organisation of the head is brought to a certain conclusion. If we are aware of this, if in each single case we ask ourselves: What actually is it that is brought to a conclusion with the change of teeth?—we are led, just at this point, to a comprehension of the whole human organisation, body, soul and spirit. And if—with our gaze deepened by a love gained through a knowledge of man such as I have described—we observe the child up to the change of teeth, we shall see that during these years he learns to walk, to speak and to think. These are the three most outstanding faculties to be developed up to the change of teeth.

Walking entails more than just learning to walk. Walking is only one manifestation of what is actually taking place, for it involves learning to adapt oneself to the world through acquiring a sense of balance. Walking is only the crudest expression of this process. Before learning to walk the child is not exposed to the necessity of finding his equilibrium in the world: now he learns to do this. How does it come about? It comes about through the fact that man is born with a head which requires a quite definite position in regard to the forces of balance. The secret of the human head is shown very clearly in the physical body. You must bear in mind that an average human brain weighs between 1,200 and 1,500 grammes. Now if such a weight as this were to press on the delicate veins which lie at the base of the brain they would be crushed immediately. This is prevented by the fact that this heavy brain floats in the cerebral fluid that fills our head. You will doubtless remember from your studies in physics that when a body floats in a fluid it loses as much of its weight as the weight of the fluid it displaces. If you apply this to the brain you will discover that our brain presses on its base with a weight of about 20 grammes only; the rest of the weight is lost in the cerebral fluid. Thus at birth man's brain has to be so placed that its weight can be brought into proper proportion in regard to the displaced cerebral fluid. This adjustment is made when we raise ourselves from the crawling to the upright posture. The position of the head must now be brought into relationship with the rest of the organism. Walking and using the hands make it necessary for the head to be brought into a definite position. Man's sense of balance proceeds from the head.

Let us go further. At birth man's head is relatively highly organised, for up to a point it is already formed in the embryo, although it is not fully developed until the change of teeth. What however is first established during the time up to the change of teeth, what then receives its special outer organisation, is the rhythmic system of man. If people would only observe physical physiological processes more closely they would see how important the establishing of the circulatory and breathing systems is for the first seven years. They would recognise how here above all great damage can be done if the bodily life of the child does not develop in the right way. One must therefore reckon with the fact that in these first years of life something is at work which is only now establishing its own laws in the circulatory and breathing systems. The child feels unconsciously how his life forces are working in his circulation and breathing. And just as a physical organ, the brain, must bring about a state of balance, so must the soul in the first years of life play its part in the development of the breathing and circulatory systems. The physical body must be active in bringing about a state of balance proceeding from the head. The soul, in that it is rightly organised for this purpose, must be active in the changes that take place in the circulation and breathing. And just as the upright carriage and learning to use the hands and arms are connected with what comes to expression in the brain, so the way in which speech develops in man is connected with the systems of circulation and breathing. Through learning to speak man establishes a relationship with his circulation and breathing, just as he establishes a relationship between walking and grasping and the forces of the head by learning to hold the latter in such a way that the brain loses the right amount of weight. If you train yourself to perceive these relationships and then you meet someone with a clear, high-pitched voice particularly well-suited to the recitation of hymns or odes, or even to declamatory moral harangues, you may be sure that this is connected with special conditions of the circulatory system. Or again if you meet someone with a rough, harsh voice, with a voice like the beating together of sheets of brass and tin, you may be sure that this too is connected with the breathing or circulatory systems. But there is more to it than this. When one learns to listen to a child's voice, whether it be harmonious and pleasant, or harsh and discordant, and when one knows that this is connected with movements of the lungs and the circulation of the blood, movements inwardly vibrating through the whole man, right into the fingers and toes, then one knows that what is expressed through speech is imbued with qualities of soul. And now something in the nature of a higher man, so to say, makes its appearance, something which finds its expression in this picture relating speech with the physical processes of circulation and breathing. Taking our start from this point it is possible to look up and see into the pre-natal life of man which is subject to those conditions which we have made our own between death and a new birth. What a man has experienced in pre-earthly conditions plays in here, and so we learn that if we are to comprehend the being of man by means of true human understanding and knowledge we must train our ear to a spiritual hearing and listen to the voices of children. We can then know how to help a child whose strident voice betrays the fact that there is some kind of obstruction in his karma and we can do something to free him from such karmic hindrances.

From all this we can see what is necessary for education. It is nothing less than a knowledge of man; not merely the sort of knowledge that says: “This is a gifted personality, this is a good fellow, this is a bad one,” but the kind of knowledge that follows up what lies in the human being, follows up for instance what is spiritually present in speech and traces this right down into the physical body, so that one is not faced with an abstract spirituality but with a spirituality which comes to expression in the physical image of man. Then, as a teacher, you can set to work in such a way that you take into consideration both spirit and body and are thus able to help the physical provide a right foundation for the spirit. And further, if you observe a child from behind and see that he has short legs, so that the upper part of the body is too heavy a burden and his tread is consequently also heavy, you will know, if you have acquired the right way of looking at these things, that here the former earthly life is speaking, here karma is speaking. Or, for instance if you observe someone who walks in the same way as the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who always walked with his heels well down first, and even when he spoke did so in such a way that the words came out, as it were “heels first,” then you will see in such a man another expression of karma.

In this way we learn to recognise karma in the child through observation based on spiritual science. This is something of the greatest importance which we must look into and understand. Our one and only help as teachers is that we learn to observe human beings, to observe the bodies of the children, the souls of the children and the spirits of the children. In this way a knowledge of man must make itself felt in the sphere of education, but it must be a knowledge which is deepened in soul and spirit.

With this lecture I wanted to call up a picture, to give an idea of what we are trying to achieve in education, and what can arise in the way of practical educational results from what many people consider to be highly unpractical, what they look upon as being merely fantastic day-dreaming.

You will have gathered from the remarks I have made during the last two days that there is a fundamental change in the inner constitution of the human being at every single stage of his life. Today, certainly, modern psychologists and physiologists also take this into account. They too reckon with these changes which take place in the course of life, firstly up to the change of teeth, then up to puberty, and again from puberty into the twenties. But these differences are more profound than can be discovered by means of the methods of observation customary today, which do not reach far enough, however excellent they may be. We must take a further step and examine these differences from aspects demanded by spiritual science. You will hear many things that are already familiar to you, but you must now enter more deeply into them. Even when the child enters this world from the embryo condition, that is, to take an external characteristic, when he adapts himself to the outer process of breathing, even then, physiologically speaking, he is not yet received directly by the outer world, for he takes the natural nourishment of the mother's milk. He is not nourished as yet by what comes from the outer world, but by what comes from the same source as the child himself. Now today people study the substances they meet with in the world more or less according to their external, chemical, physical properties only and do not consider the finer attributes which they possess through their spiritual content. Nowadays everything is considered in this way. Such methods are not to be condemned; on the contrary they should be recognised as justified. Nevertheless because the time came when man was concerned only with the outer aspects of things, aspects which could not be so regarded in earlier civilisations, he has now reached a point of extreme externalisation. If I may make a comparison, things are observed today in some such way as this. We say: I look upon death, upon dying; plants die, animals die, human beings die. But surely the question arises as to whether dying, the passing away of the various forms of life with which we come in contact, is in all three kinds of living beings the same process, or whether this only appears outwardly to be so. We can make use of the following comparisons: If I have a knife there is a real difference whether I cut my food with it, or whether I use it for shaving. In each case it is a knife, but the properties of “knife” must be further differentiated. Such differentiation is in many cases not made today. No differentiation is made between the dying of a plant, an animal or a man.

We meet the same thing in other domains too. There are people who in a certain way want to be philosophers of nature, and because they aim at being idealistic, even spiritual, they assert that plants may well have a soul; and they try to discover in an external way those characteristics of plants which seem to indicate that they have certain soul qualities. They make a study of those plants which, when they are approached by insects, tend to open their petals. The insect is caught, for it is attracted by the scent of what is in the plant. Such a plant is the Venus Flytrap. It closes its petals with a snap and the insect is trapped. This is considered to be a sort of soul quality in the plant. Well, but I know something else which works in the same way. It is to be found in all sorts of places. The mouse, when it comes near, feels attracted by the smell of a dainty morsel; it begins to nibble, and—hey presto! snap goes the mousetrap. If one were to make use of the same thought process as in the case of a plant, one might say: the mousetrap has a soul.

This kind of thinking, however, although quite legitimate under certain conditions never leads to conclusions of any depth, but remains more or less on the surface. If we wish to gain a true knowledge of man we must penetrate into the very depths of human nature. It must be possible for us to look in a completely unprejudiced way at things which appear paradoxical vis-à-vis external methods of observation. Moreover it is very necessary to take into consideration everything which, taken together, makes up the entire human organisation.

In man we have, to begin with, the actual physical organism which he has in common with all earthly beings and particularly with the mineral kingdom. In man, however, we have clearly to distinguish between his physical organism and his etheric organism. The latter he has in common only with the plant world, not with the minerals. But a being endowed only with an etheric organism could never experience feeling, never attain to an inner consciousness. For this again man has his astral organism, which he has in common with the animal world. It might appear that this is an external organisation, but in the course of these lectures we shall see how inward it can be. In addition to this man still has his ego-organisation, which is not to be found in the animal world and which he alone possesses among earthly beings. What we are here considering is in no sense merely an external, intellectual pattern; moreover, in speaking, for instance, of an etheric or life-body, this has no connection whatever with what an outmoded natural science once called “life-force,” “vital-force” and so on. On the contrary, it is the result of observation. If, for instance, we study the child up to the age of the change of teeth, we see that his development is primarily dependent on his physical organism. The physical organism must gradually adapt itself to the outer world, but this cannot take place all at once, not even if considered in the crudest physical sense. This physical body, just because it contains what the human being has brought with him out of the spiritual world in which he lived in pre-earthly existence, cannot forthwith assimilate the substances of the outer world, but must receive them specially prepared in the mother's milk. The child must, so to say, remain closely connected with what is of like nature with himself. He must only gradually grow into the outer world. And the conclusion of this process of the physical organism growing into the outer world is indicated by the appearance of the second teeth at about the seventh year. At approximately this age the child's physical organism completes the process of growing into the world.

During this time, however, in which the organisation is chiefly concerned with the shaping and fashioning of the bony system, the child is only interested in certain things in the outer world, not in everything. He is only interested in what we might call gesture, everything that is related to movement. Now you must take into account that at first the child's consciousness is dream-like, shadowy; to begin with his perceptions are quite undefined, and only gradually do they light up and gain clarity. But fundamentally speaking the fact remains that during the time between birth and the change of teeth the child's perception adheres to everything in the nature of gesture and movement and does so to such an extent, that in the very moment when he perceives a movement he feels an inner urge to imitate it. There exists a quite definite law of development in the nature of the human being which I should like to characterise in the following way.

While the human being is growing into the physical, earthly world, his inner nature is developing in such a way that this development proceeds in the first place out of gesture, out of differentiation of movement. In the inner nature of the organism speech develops out of movement in all its aspects, and thought develops out of speech. This deeply significant law underlies all human development. Everything which makes its appearance in sound, in speech, is the result of gesture, mediated through the inner nature of the human organism.

If you turn your attention to the way in which a child not only learns to speak, but also learns to walk, to place one foot after the other, you can observe how one child treads more strongly on the back part of the foot, on the heel, and another walks more on the toes. You can observe children who in learning to walk tend to bring their legs well forward; with others you will see that they are more inclined to hold back, as it were, between two steps. It is extraordinarily interesting to watch a child learning to walk. You must learn to observe this. But it is more interesting still, although much less attention is paid to it, to see how a child learns to grasp something, how he learns to move his hands. There are children who, when they want something, move their hands in such a way that even the fingers are brought into movement. Others keep their fingers still, and stretch out their hands to take hold without moving the fingers. There are children who stretch out their hand and arm, while keeping the upper part of the body motionless; there are others who immediately let the upper part of the body follow the movement of arm and hand. I once knew a child who, when he was very small and his high-chair was placed at a little distance from the table on which stood some dish he wished to get at, proceeded to “row” himself towards it; his whole body was then in movement. He could make no movements at all without moving his whole body.

This is the first thing to look out for in a child; for how a child moves reveals the most inward urge of life, the primal life impulse. At the same time there appears in the child's movement the tendency to adapt himself to others, to carry out some movement in the same way as his father, mother or other member of the family. The principle of imitation comes to light in gesture, in movement. For gesture is what appears first of all in human evolution, and in the special constitution of the physical, soul and spiritual organism of man gesture is inwardly transformed; it is transformed into speech. Those who are able to observe this know without any doubt that a child who speaks as though the sentences were hacked out of him is one who sets his heels down first; while a child who speaks in such a way that the sentences run one into the other tends to trip on his toes. A child who takes hold of things more lightly with his fingers has the tendency to emphasise the vowel element, while a child who is inclined to stress the consonants will bring his whole arm to his aid when grasping something. We receive a very definite impression of a child's potentialities from his manner of speaking. And to understand the world, to understand the world through the medium of the senses, through the medium of thought, this too is developed out of speech. Thought does not produce speech, but speech thought. So it is in the cultural development of humanity as a whole; human beings have first spoken, then thought. So it is also with the child; first out of movement he learns to speak, to articulate only then does thinking come forth from speech. We must therefore look upon this sequence as being something of importance: gesture, speech, thought, or the process of thinking.

All this is especially characteristic in the first epoch of the child's life, up to the change of teeth. When little by little the child grows into the world during the first, second, third and fourth years of life, he does so through gesture; everything is dependent on gesture. Indeed, I would say that speaking and thinking take place for the most part unconsciously; both develop naturally out of gesture, even the first gesture. Therefore speaking approximately we can say: From the first to the seventh year gesture predominates in the life of the child, but gesture in the widest sense of the word, gesture which in the child lives in imitation. As educators we must keep this firmly in mind for actually up to the change of teeth the child only takes in what comes to him as gesture, he shuts himself off from everything else. If we say to the child: Do it like this, do it like that, he really does not hear, he does not take any notice. It is only when we stand in front of him and show him how to do it that he is able to copy us. For the child works according to the way I myself am moving my fingers, or he looks at something just as I am looking at it, not according to what I tell him. He imitates everything. This is the secret of the development of the child up to the change of teeth. He lives entirely in imitation, entirely in the imitation of what in the widest possible sense comes to meet him from outside as gesture. This accounts for the surprises we get when faced with the education of very young children. A father came to me once and said, “What shall I do? Something really dreadful has happened. My boy has been stealing.” I said, “Let us first find out whether he really steals. What has he done?” The father told me that the boy had taken money out of the cupboard, had bought sweets with it and shared them with the other boys. I said “Presumably that is the cupboard out of which the boy has often seen his mother taking money, before going shopping; he is quite naturally imitating her.” And this proved to be the case. So I said further, “But that is not stealing; that lies as a natural principle of development in the boy up to the change of teeth. He imitates what he sees; he must do so.” In the presence of a child therefore we should avoid doing anything which he should not imitate. This is how we educate him. If we say: You should not do this or that, it does not influence the child in the slightest degree up to the change of teeth. It could at most have some effect if one were to clothe the words in a gesture, by saying: Now look, you have just done something that I would never do!—for this is in a way a disguised gesture.

It comes to this: with our whole manhood we should fully understand how up to the change of teeth the child is an imitating being. During this time there is actually an inner connection between the child and his environment, between all that is going on around him. Later on this is lost. For however strange and paradoxical it may sound to people today, who are quite unable to think correctly about the spirit, but think always in abstractions, it is nevertheless true that the whole relationship of the child to gesture and movement in his surroundings has an innate religious character. Through his physical body the child is given over to everything in the nature of gesture; he cannot do otherwise than yield himself up to it. What we do later with our soul, and still later with our spirit, in that we yield ourselves up to the divine, even to the external world, as again spiritualised, this the child does with his physical body when he brings it into movement. He is completely immersed in religion, both with his good and his bad qualities. What remains with us as soul and spirit in later life, this the child has also in his physical organism. If therefore the child lives in close proximity with a surly, “bearish” father, liable to fall into rages, someone who is often irritable and angry, expressing uncontrolled emotions in the presence of the child, while the inner causes of such emotions are not as yet understood by the child, nevertheless what he sees, he experiences as something not moral. The child perceives simultaneously, albeit unconsciously, the moral aspects of these outbreaks, so that he has not only the outer picture of the gesture, but also absorbs its moral significance. If I make an angry gesture, this passes over into the blood organisation of the child, and if these gestures recur frequently they find expression in his blood circulation. The child's physical body is organised according to the way in which I behave in his presence, according to the kind of gestures I make. Moreover if I fail in loving understanding when the child is present, if, without considering him I do something which is only suitable at a later age, and am not constantly on the watch when he is near me, then it can happen that the child enters lovingly into something which is unfitted for his tender years, but belongs to another age, and his physical body will in that case be organised accordingly. Whoever studies the whole course of a man's life from birth to death, bearing in mind the requirements of which I have spoken, will see that a child who has been exposed to things suitable only to grown-up people and who imitates these things will in his later years, from the age of about 50, suffer from sclerosis. One must be able to examine such phenomena in all their ramifications. Illnesses that appear in later life are often only the result of educational errors made in the very earliest years of childhood.

This is why an education which is really based on a knowledge of man must study the human being as a whole from birth until death. To be able to look at man as a whole is the very essence of anthroposophical knowledge. Then too one discovers how very strong the connection is between the child and his environment. I would go as far as to say that the soul of the child goes right out into his surroundings, experiences these surroundings intimately, and indeed has a much stronger relationship to them than at a later period of life. In this respect the child is still very close to the animal, only he experiences things in a more spiritual way, in a way more permeated with soul. The animal's experiences are coarser and cruder, but the animal too is related to its environment. The reason why many phenomena of recent times remain unexplained is because people are not able to enter into all the details involved. There is, for instance, the case of the “calculating horses” which has made such a stir recently, where horses have carried out simple arithmetical operations through stamping with their hooves. I have not seen the famous Elberfelder horses, but I have seen the horse belonging to Herr von Osten. This horse did quite nice little sums. For instance Herr von Osten asked: How much is 5 + 7? And he began to count, beginning with 1, and when he got to 12 the horse stamped with its foot. It could add up, subtract and so on. Now there was a young professor who studied this problem and wrote a book about it which is extremely interesting. In this book he expounds the view that the horse sees certain little gestures made by Herr von Osten, who always stands close to the horse. His opinion is that when Herr von Osten counts 7 + 5 up to 12 and the horse stamps when the number 12 is reached, this is because Herr von Osten makes a very slight gesture when he comes to 12 and the horse, noticing this, duly stamps his foot. He believes that it can all be traced back to something visible. But now he puts a question to himself: “Why,” he says, “can you not see this gesture which Herr von Osten makes so skilfully that the horse sees it and stamps at the number 12?” The young professor goes on to say that these gestures are so slight that he as a human being cannot see them. From this the conclusion might be drawn that a horse sees more than a professor! But this did not convince me at all, for I saw this wonder of an intelligent horse, the clever Hans, standing by Herr von Osten in his long coat. And I saw too that in his right-hand pocket he had lumps of sugar, and while he was carrying out his experiments with the horse he always handed it one lump after another, so that feeling was aroused in the horse associating sweet things with Herr von Osten. In this way a sort of love was established between Herr von Osten and the horse. And only when this is present, only when the inner being of the horse is, as it were, merged into the inner being of Herr von Osten through the stream of sweetness that flows between them, only then can the horse “calculate,” for it really receives something—not through gesture, but through what Herr von Osten is thinking. He thinks: 5 + 7 = 12, and by means of suggestion the horse takes up this thought and even has a distinct impression of it. One can actually see this. The horse and his master are in a certain way merged in feeling one into the other: they impart something to one another reciprocally when they are united through the medium of sweetness. So the animal still has this finer relationship to its environment, and this can be stimulated from outside, as, in this case, by means of sugar.

In a delicate way a similar relationship to the outer world is still present in children also. It lives in the child and should be reckoned with. Education in the kindergarten should therefore never depend on anything other than the principle of imitation. The teacher must sit down with the children and just do what she wishes them to do, so that the child has only to copy. All education and instruction before the change of teeth must be based on this principle.

After the change of teeth all this becomes quite different. The soul life of the child is now completely changed. No longer does he perceive merely the single gestures, but now he sees the way in which these gestures accord with one another. For instance, whereas previously he only had a feeling for a definite line, now he has a feeling for co-ordination, for symmetry. The feeling is awakened for what is co-ordinated or uncoordinated, and in his soul the child acquires the possibility of perceiving what is formative. As soon as this perception is awakened there appears simultaneously an interest in speech. During the first seven years of life there is an interest in gesture, in everything connected with movement; in the years between seven and fourteen there is an interest in everything connected with the pictorial form, and speech is pre-eminently pictorial and formative. After the change of teeth the child's interest passes over from gesture to speech, and in the lower school years from seven to fourteen we can work most advantageously through everything that lies in speech, above all through the moral element underlying speech. For just as the child before this age has a religious attitude towards the gesture which meets him in the surrounding world, so now he relates himself in a moral sense—his religious feeling being gradually refined into a soul experience—to everything which approaches him through speech.

So now, in this period of his life, one must work upon the child through speech. But whatever is to work upon him in this way must do so by means of an unquestioned authority. When I want to convey to the child some picture expressed through speech, I must do so with the assurance of authority. I must be the unquestioned authority for the child when through speech I want to conjure up before him some picture. Just as we must actually show the little child what we want him to do, so we must be the human pattern for the child between the change of teeth and puberty. In other words, there is no point whatever in giving reasons to a child of this age, in trying to make him see why we should do something or not do it, just because there are well-founded reasons for or against it. This passes over the child's head. It is important to understand this. In exactly the same way as in the earliest years of life the child only observes the gesture, so between the change of teeth and puberty he only observes what I, as a human being, am in relation to himself. At this age the child must, for instance, learn about what is moral in such a way that he regards as good what the naturally accepted authority of the teacher, by means of speech, designates as good; he must regard as bad what this authority designates as bad. The child must learn: What my teacher, as my authority, does is good, what he does not do is bad. Relatively speaking then, the child feels: When my teacher says something is good, then it is good; and if he says something is bad, then it is bad. You will not attribute to me, seeing that 30 years ago I wrote my Philosophy of Freedom a point of view which upholds the principle of authority as the one and only means of salvation. But through the very fact of knowing the true nature of freedom one also knows that between the change of teeth and puberty the child needs to be faced with an unquestioned authority. This lies in the nature of man. Everything is doomed to failure in education which disregards this relationship of the child to the unquestioned authority of the personality of the teacher and educator. The child must be guided in everything which he should do or not do, think or not think, feel or not feel, by what flows to him, by way of speech, from his teacher and educator. At this age therefore there is no sense in wanting to approach him through the intellect. During this time everything must be directed towards the life of feeling, for feeling is receptive to anything in the nature of pictures and the child of this age is so constituted that he lives in the world of pictures, of images, and has the feeling of welding separate details into a harmonious whole. This is why, for instance, what is moral cannot be brought to the child by way of precept, by saying: You should do this, you should not do that. It simply doesn't work. What does work is when the child, through the way in which one speaks to him, can feel inwardly in his soul a liking for what is good, a dislike of what is bad. Between the change of teeth and puberty the child is an aesthete and we must therefore take care that he experiences pleasure in the good and displeasure in what is bad. This is the best way for him to develop a sense of morality.

We must also be sincere, inwardly sincere in the imagery we use in our work with the child. This entails being permeated to the depths of our being by everything we do. This is not the case if, when standing before the child we immediately experience a slight sense of superiority: I am so clever—the child is so stupid. Such an attitude ruins all education; it also destroys in the child the feeling for authority. Well then, how shall I transform into a pictorial image something that I want to impart to the child? In order to make this clear I have chosen the following example as an illustration.

We cannot speak to the child about the immortality of the soul in the same way as to a grown-up person; but we must nevertheless convey to him some understanding of it. We must however do so in a pictorial way. We must build up the following picture and to do this may well take the whole lesson.

We can explain to the child what a butterfly's chrysalis is, and then speak in some such words as these: “Well, later on the finished butterfly flies out of the chrysalis. It was inside all the time only it was not yet visible, it was not yet ready to fly away, but it was already there inside.” Now we can go further and tell him that in a similar way the human body contains the soul, only it is not visible. At death the soul flies out of the body; the only difference between man and butterfly is that the butterfly is visible and the human soul is invisible. In this way we can speak to the child about the immortality of the soul so that he receives a true picture of immortality and one suited to his age. But in the presence of the child we must on no account have the feeling: I am clever, I am a philosopher and by no means of thought can I convince myself of the truth of immortality; the child is naive, is stupid, and so for him I will build up the picture of the butterfly creeping out of the chrysalis. If one thinks in this way one establishes no contact with the child, and then he gets nothing whatever from what he is told. There is only one possibility. We must ourselves believe in the picture, we must not want to be cleverer than the child; we must stand in the presence of the child as full of belief as he is. How can this be done? An anthroposophist, a student of spiritual science knows that the emergence of the butterfly from the chrysalis is actually a picture of the immortality of the human soul placed into the world by the gods. He can never think otherwise than that the gods inscribed into the world this picture of the emerging butterfly as an image of the immortality of the human soul. In all the lower stages of the process he sees the higher processes which have become abstract. If I do not get the idea that the child is stupid and I am clever, but if I stand before the child conscious that this actually is so in the world and that I am leading him to believe in something which I too believe with all my heart, then there arises an imponderable relationship between us, and the child makes real progress in his education. Then moral imponderabilia continually enters into our educational relationship. And this is the crux of the matter.

When we are quite clear about this we shall, out of the whole nexus of our studies, come to see how we can find the right approach to an instruction which is truly educational, an education which really instructs. Let us take an example. How must the child learn to read and write? There is actually a great deal more misery connected with this than one usually imagines, though human intellectualism is far too crude to perceive it. One recognises that learning to read and write is a necessity, so it follows that the child must at all costs be drilled into learning reading and writing. But just consider what this means for a child! When they are grown-up, people have no inclination to put themselves in the child's place, to imagine what he undergoes when he learns to read and write. In our civilisation today we have letters, a, b, c and so on; they are there before us in certain definite forms. Now the child has the sound a (ah, as in father). When does he use it? This sound is for him the expression of an inner soul experience. He uses this sound when he is faced with something which calls up in him a feeling of wonder, of astonishment. This sound he understands. It is bound up with human nature. Or he has the sound e (eh, as in they). When does he use this? He uses it when he wants to show he has the feeling: “Something has come up against me; I have experienced something which encroaches on my own nature.” If somebody gives me a blow, I say e (eh).¹ It is the same with the consonants. Every sound corresponds to some expression of life; the consonants imitate an outer, external world, the vowels express what is experienced inwardly in the soul. The study of language, philology, is today only approaching the first elements of such things.

Learned scholars, who devote themselves to research into language, have given much thought to what, in the course of human evolution, may have been the origin of speech. There are two theories. The one represents the view that speech may have arisen out of soul experiences in much the same way as this takes place in the animal, albeit in its most primitive form—“moo-moo” being the expression of what the cow feels inwardly, and “bow-wow” what is experienced by the dog. And so, in a more complicated way, what in man becomes articulated speech arises out of this urge to give expression to inner feelings and experiences. In somewhat humorous vein this is called the “bow-wow theory.” The other point of view proceeds from the supposition that in the sounds of speech man imitates what takes place in the outer world. It is possible to imitate the sound of a bell, what is taking place inside the bell: “ding-dong—ding-dong.” Here there is the attempt to imitate what takes place in the outer world. This is the basis for the theory that in speech everything may be traced back to external sounds, external event. It is the “ding-dong theory.” So we have these two theories in opposition to one another. It is not in any way my intention to make fun of this, for as a matter of fact, both are correct: the “bow-wow” theory is right for the vowel element in speech, the “ding-dong” theory for the consonantal element. In transposing gestures into sounds we learn by means of the consonants to imitate inwardly outer processes; and in the vowels we give form to inner experiences of the soul. In speech the inner and the outer unite. Human nature, itself homogeneous, understands how to bring this about.

We receive the child into the primary school. Through his inner organisation he has become a being able to speak. Now, suddenly he is expected to experience—I say experience deliberately weighing my words, not recognise, experience—a connection between astonishment, wonder, (ah) and the demonic sign a. This is something completely foreign to him. He is supposed to learn something which he feels to be utterly remote, and to relate this to the sound “ah.” This is something outside the sphere of a young child's comprehension. He feels it as a veritable torture if at the very outset we confront him with the forms of the letters in use today.

We can, however, remember something else. The letters which we have today were not always there. Let us look back to those ancient peoples who had a picture writing. They used pictures to give tangible form to what was uttered, and these pictures certainly had something to do with what they were intended to express. They did not have letters such as we use, but pictures which were related to their meaning. Up to a certain point the same could be said of cuneiform writing. These were times when people still had a human relationship to things, even when these were fixed into a definite form. Today we no longer have this, but with the child we must go back to it again. We must of course not do so in such a way that we study the cultural history of ancient peoples and fall back on the forms which were once used in picture writing; but we must bring all our educational fantasy into play as teachers in order to create the kind of pictures we need. Fantasy, imagination [The German phantasie is often more equivalent to the English imagination than to fantasy. In this lecture the latter is probably more appropriate.] we must certainly have, for without it we cannot be teachers or educators. And so it is always necessary to refer to the importance of enthusiasm, of inspiration, when dealing with some characteristic feature of anthroposophy. It never gives me any pleasure, for instance, when I go into a class in our Waldorf School and notice that a teacher is tired and is teaching out of a certain mood of weariness. That is something one must never do. One simply cannot be tired, one can only be filled with enthusiasm. When teaching, one must be absolutely on the spot with one's whole being. It is quite wrong to be tired when teaching; tiredness must be kept for some other occasion. The essential thing for a teacher is that he learns to give full play to his fantasy. What does this mean? To begin with I call up in the child's mind something that he has seen at the market, or some other place, a fish for example. I next get him to draw a fish, and for this I even allow him to use colours, so that he paints as he draws and draws as he paints. This being achieved I then let him say the word “Fish,” not speaking the word quickly, but separating the sounds, “f-i-ssh.” Then I lead him on so that he says only the beginning of the word fish (f...) and gradually I transfer the shape of the fish into a sign that is somewhat fish like, while at the same time getting the child to say f ... And there we have it, the letter “f!”

Or I let the child say Wave (W-a-v-e) showing him at the same time what a wave is (see sketch). Once again I let him paint this and get him to say the beginning of the word—w—and then I change the picture of a wave into the letter w.

Continuing to work in the same way I allow the written characters gradually to emerge from the painting-drawing and drawing-painting, as indeed they actually arose in the first place. I do not bring the child into a stage of civilisation with which as yet he has nothing in common, but I guide him in such a way that he is never torn away from his relationship to the outer world. In order to do this there is no necessity to study the history of culture—albeit the writing in use today has arisen out of picture-writing—one must only give free play to one's fantasy, for then one brings the child to the point at which he is able to form writing out of this drawing and painting.

Now we must not think of this only as an ingenious and clever new method. We must value the fact that the child unites himself inwardly with something that is new to him when his soul activity is constantly stimulated. He does not “grow into it” when he is pushed, so that he is always coming into an unfamiliar relationship with his environment. The whole point is that we are working on the inner being of the child.

What is usually done today? It is perhaps already somewhat out-of-date, but not so long ago people gave little girls “beautiful” dolls, with real hair, dolls that could shut their eyes when one laid them down, dolls with pretty faces and so on. Civilisation calls them beautiful, but they are nevertheless hideous, because they are inartistic. What sort of dolls are these? They are the sort which cannot activate the child's fantasy. Now let us do something different. Tie a handkerchief so that you have a figure with arms and legs; then make eyes with blobs of ink and perhaps a mouth with red ink as well; now the child must develop his fantasy if he is to imagine this as having the human shape. Such a thing works with tremendous living force on the child, because it offers him the possibility of using his fantasy. Naturally one must do this first oneself. But the possibility must be provided for the child, and this must be done at the age when everything is play. It is for this reason that all those things which do not stimulate fantasy in the child are so damaging when given as toys. As I said, today these beautiful dolls are somewhat out-dated, for now we give children monkeys or bears. To be sure, neither do these toys give any opportunity for the unfolding of a fantasy having any relationship to the human being. Let us suppose that a child runs up to us and we give him a bear to cuddle. Things like this show clearly how far our civilisation is from being able to penetrate into the depths of human nature. But it is quite remarkable how children in a perfectly natural, artistic way are able to form imaginatively a picture of this inner side of human nature.

In the Waldorf School we have made a transition from the ordinary methods of teaching to what may be termed a teaching through art, and this quite apart from the fact that in no circumstances do we begin by teaching the children to write, but we let them paint as they draw, and draw as they paint. Perhaps we might even say that we let them splash about, which involves the possibly tiresome job of cleaning up the classroom afterwards. I shall also speak tomorrow about how to lead over from writing to reading, but, quite apart from this painting and drawing, we guide the child as far as possible into the realm of the artistic by letting him practise modelling in his own little way, but without suggesting that he should make anything beyond what he himself wants to fashion out of his own inner being. The results are quite remarkable. I will mention one example which shows how something very wonderful takes place in the case of rather older children.

At a comparatively early age, that is to say, for children between ten and eleven years old, we take as a subject in our curriculum the “Study of Man.” At this age the children learn to know how the bones are formed and built up, how they support each other, and so on. They learn this in an artistic way, not intellectually. After a few such lessons the child has acquired some perception of the structure of the human bones, the dynamic of the bones and their interdependence. Then we go over to the craft-room, where the children model plastic forms and we observe what they are making. We see that they have learned something from these lessons about the bones. Not that the child imitates the forms of the bones, but from the way in which he now models his forms we perceive the outer expression of an inner mobility of soul. Before this he has already got so far as to be able to make little receptacles of various kinds; children discover how to make bowls and similar things quite by themselves, but what they make out of the spontaneity of childhood before they have received such lessons is quite different from what they model afterwards, provided they have really experienced what was intended. In order to achieve this result, however, these lessons on the “Knowledge of Man” must be given in such a way that their content enters right into the whole human being. Today this is difficult.

Anyone who has paid as many visits to studios as I have and seen how people paint and model and carve, knows very well that today hardly any sculptor works without a model; he must have a human form in front of him if he wishes to model it.

This would have had no sense for a Greek artist. He had of course learned to know the human form in the public games, but he really experienced it inwardly. He knew out of his own inner feeling—and this feeling he embodied without the aid of a model—he knew the difference between an arm when it is stretched out or when, in addition, the forefinger is also extended, and this feeling he embodied in his sculpture. Today, however, when physiology is taught in the usual way, models or drawings of the bones are placed side by side, the muscles are described one after another and no impression is given of their reciprocal relationship. With us, when the children see a vertebra belonging to the spinal column, they know how similar it is to the skull-bone, and they get a feeling for the metamorphosis of the bones. In this way they enter livingly right into the different human forms and so feel the urge to express it artistically. Such an experience enters right into life; it does not remain external.

My earnest wish, and also my duty as leader of the Waldorf School, is to make sure that wherever possible everything of a fixed nature in the way of science, everything set down in books in a rigid scientific form should be excluded from class teaching. Not that I do not value science; no one could value science more highly. Such studies can be indulged in outside the school, if so desired; but I should be really furious if I were to see a teacher standing in front of a class with a book in his or her hand. In teaching everything must come from within. This must be self-understood. How is botany taught today for instance? We have botany books; these are based on a scientific outlook, but they do not belong to the classroom where there are children between the change of teeth and puberty. The perception of what a teacher needs in the way of literature must be allowed to grow gradually out of the living educational principles I shall be speaking about here.

So we are really concerned with the teacher's attitude of mind, whether in soul, spirit and body he is able to relate himself to the world. If he has this living relationship he can do much with the children between the change of teeth and puberty, for he is then their natural and accepted authority. The main thing is that one should enter into and experience things in a living way and carry over into life all that one has thus experienced. This is the great and fundamental principle which must form the basis of education today. Then the connection with the class will be there of itself, together with the imponderable mood and feeling that must necessarily go with it.

Answers to a Question

Question: There are grown-up people who seem to have remained at the imitative stage of childhood. Why is this?

Dr. Steiner: It is possible at every stage of human development for someone to remain in a stationary condition. If we describe the different stages of development, adding to today's survey the embryonic stage, and continuing to the change of teeth, and on to puberty, we cover those epochs in which a fully developed human life can be formed. Now quite a short time ago the general trend of anthroposophical development brought it about that lectures could be held on curative education, with special reference to definite cases of children who had either remained backward or whose development was in some respect abnormal. We then took the further step of allowing certain cases to be seen which were being treated at Dr. Wegmann's Clinical-Therapeutic Institute. Among these cases there was one of a child of nearly a year old, about the normal size for a child of this age, but who in the formation of his physical body had remained approximately at the stage of seven or eight months embryo. If you were to draw the child in outline with only an indication of the limbs, which are somewhat more developed, but showing exactly the form of the head, as it actually is in the case of this little boy, then, looking cursorily at the drawing, you would not have the faintest idea that it is a boy of nearly a year old. You would think it an embryo, because this boy has in many respects kept after his birth the embryonic structure.

Every stage of life, including the embryonic, can be carried over into a later stage; for the different phases of development as they follow one after the other, are such that each new phase is a metamorphosis of the old, with something new added. If you will only take quite exactly what I have already said in regard to the natural religious devotion of the child to his surroundings up to the change of teeth, you will see that this changes later into the life of soul, and you have, as a second attribute the aesthetic, artistic stage. Now it happens with very many children that the first stage is carried into the second, and the latter then remains poorly developed. But this can go still further: the first stage of physical embodiment can be carried over into each of the others, so that what was present as the original stage appears in all the later stages. And, for a superficial observation of life, it need not be so very obvious that an earlier stage has remained on into a later one, unless such a condition shows itself particularly late in life. Certain it is however that earlier stages are carried over into later ones.

Let us take the same thing in a lower kingdom of nature. The fully grown, fully developed plant usually has root, stalk, with it cotyledon leaves, followed by the later green leaves. These are then concentrated in the calyx, the petals, the stamen, the pistil and so on. There are however plants which do not develop as far as the blossom, but remain behind at the stage of herbs and other plants where the green leaves remain stationary, and the fruit is merely rudimentary. How far, for instance, the fern has remained behind the buttercup! With the plant this does not lead to abnormality. Man however is a species for himself. He is a complete natural order. And it can happen that someone remains his whole life long an imitative being, or one who stands in need of authority. For in life we have not only to do with people who remain at the imitative stage, but also with those who in regard to their essential characteristics remain at the stage that is fully developed between the change of teeth and puberty. As a matter of fact there are very many such people, and with them this stage continues into later life. They cannot progress much farther, and what should be developed in later years can only do so to a limited extent. They remain always at the stage where they look for the support of authority. If there were no such people, neither would there be the tendency, so rife today, to form sects and such things, for sectarian associations are based on the fact that their adherents are not required to think; they leave the thinking to others and follow their leaders. In certain spheres of life, however, most people remain at the stage of authority. For instance, when it is a question of forming a judgment about something of a scientific nature people do not take the trouble to look into it themselves, but they ask: Where is the expert who must know about this, the specialist who is a lecturer at one of the universities? There you have the principle of authority. Again in the case of people who are ill the principle of authority is carried to extremes, even though here it may be justifiable. And in legal matters, for instance, nobody today will think of forming an independent judgment, but will seek the advice of a solicitor because he has the requisite knowledge. Here the standpoint is that of an eight or nine year old child. And it may well be that this solicitor himself is not much older. When a question is put to him he takes down a lawbook or portfolio and there again you have an authority. So it is actually the case that each stage of life can enter into a later one.

The Anthroposophical Society should really only consist of people who are outgrowing authority, who do not recognise any such principle but only true insight. This is so little understood by people outside the Society that they are continually saying: “Anthroposophy is based on authority.” In reality the precise opposite is the case; the principle of authority must be outgrown through the kind of understanding and discernment which is fostered in anthroposophy. The important thing is that one should grasp every scrap of insight one can lay hold of in order to pass through the different stages of life.

• 1. In English we tend to prefix an aspirate to the vowel, saying “Ha” when something astonishes us, or “Heh” when something impinges on us, e.g. “Heh, stop it!”

Arising out of yesterday's lecture a further question has been put to me in connection with our subject and I should like to deal with it here. The question is this: “With reference to the law of imitation in a child's movements I regard as important an explanation of the following fact. My grandfather died when my father was between eighteen months and two years old. When he was about forty-five my father visited one of my grandfather's friends who was astonished at the similarity of all my father's movements and gestures with those of my grandfather. What was the cause of this, seeing that owing to my grandfather's early death there could hardly be any question of imitation!”

So a man died when his son was between eighteen months and two years old and long afterwards, when the latter was in his 45th year, he heard from this friend, who was in a position to know, that as late as his 45th year he still imitated, or rather had the same gestures as his father.

Of course we are dealing here with matters of such a nature that it is scarcely possible to do more than give certain guiding lines, omitting detailed explanations. Unfortunately our courses of lectures are short, and the theme, if it were to be gone into fully, would need many lectures and ample time, six months for instance, or even a whole year. Very many questions are therefore likely to arise, and it may well be possible to answer these if they are brought forward. I must however point out that owing to the limited time at our disposal a certain lack of clarity will inevitably arise and this could only be cleared up if it were possible to enter fully into every detail. With reference to the question which has been put I should like to interpolate the following remarks.

If we take the first epoch of a child's life, that is, the time between birth and the change of teeth, the organisation of the child is working and developing in such a way that those predispositions are incorporated into the organism which I described yesterday as consisting of walking, which includes the general orientation of the human being, of speaking and thirdly of thinking.

Now this is how things follow one another. Between the first and seventh year of life the child is so organised that he is mainly concerned with gesture; between approximately the seventh and fourteenth year he is concerned with speech, as I explained yesterday; and, again speaking approximately, between his fourteenth and twenty-first year he is so organised that he is mainly concerned with thinking. What thus makes its appearance in the course of twenty-one years is however already taking shape as predisposition in the first period of life, between birth and the change of teeth. In so far as the assimilation of gesture is concerned, and this includes walking freely in space without need of support, so that the arms and also the muscles of the face can move in an expressive way—in other words a general orientation, finding a living relationship with gesture and movement—all this is developed mainly in the first third of these years, that is to say in the first 2⅓ years. The main development of the child during this time lies in the unfolding and building up of gesture. The gestures then continue to develop, but in addition something more intimate and inward is now impressed into the speech organism. Although the child has already uttered a few words nevertheless the experience of speech as predisposition takes place after 2⅓ years. The actual experience and feeling for speech is fully developed between the seventh and fourteenth year, but as predisposition it is there between 2⅓ and 4⅔ years old. Naturally all this must be taken as an average. From then on the child develops the faculty of experiencing inwardly the first beginnings of thought. What unfolds and blossoms later, between the 14th and 21st year is already developing germinally between 4⅔ and 7 years old. The forming of gestures continues of course throughout these years, but other faculties enter in. We see therefore that in the main we have to place the time for the unfolding and forming of gestures right back to the first 2½ years. What is gained during this time lies deepest. This is only natural, for we can well imagine how fundamentally the principle of imitation works in the very first years of life.

If you take all this together you will no longer find anything astonishing in what gave rise to the question that has been put here. The grandfather died when the father was between 1½ and 2 years old. Now this is precisely the time in which the forming of gesture is working most deeply. If the grandfather died then, the gestures the child imitated from him made by far the deepest impression. That is in no way altered by what may have been imitated later from other people. So just this particular case is extraordinarily significant when we consider it in detail.

We tried yesterday to explain how in the second period of life, between the change of teeth and puberty, the child in the course of his development experiences everything that finds its expression through speech, in which the self-understood authority of the teacher and educator must play its part. The intercourse between teacher and child must be of such a kind that it works in a pictorial, imaginative way. And I pointed out how at this age one cannot approach the child with moral precepts but can only work effectively on his moral nature by awakening in him such feelings as can be awakened by pictures: so that the child receives pictures described by his teacher and educator, who is also his model. These work in such a way that what is good pleases him and what is bad gives him a feeling of distaste. Therefore at this preparatory or elementary school age morality must be instilled in pictorial form by way of the feelings.

I explained further how writing must be brought to the child in a pictorial way and I showed how the forms of the letters must be developed out of the drawing-painting and the painting-drawing. Of all the arts this must be cultivated first, for it leads the child into civilisation. Everything which introduces the child at the very outset into the forms of the letters, which are completely strange to him, is quite wrong from an educational point of view; for the finished forms of the letters used in our present day civilisation work on the child like little demons.

Now in an education built up on a knowledge of man, learning to write must precede learning to read. If you want to come near to a child of this age, immediately after the change of teeth, you must as far as possible approach the whole being of the child. The child when occupied in writing does at least bring the whole of the upper part of the body into activity; there is an inner mobility which is quite different from when only the head is kept busy learning the forms of the letters. The emancipated, independent faculties of the head can only be made use of at a later age. For this reason we can make a transition by allowing the child also to read what he has written. In this way an impression is made on him.

By carrying out our teaching in this way at the Waldorf School it transpired that our children learn to read somewhat later than others; they even learn to write the letters a little later than children in other schools. It is necessary however, before forming a judgment in regard to this to be able really to enter into the nature of man with understanding. With the limited perception and feeling for a knowledge of man usual at the present day, people do not notice at all how detrimental it is for the general development of the human being if, as a child, he learns too early things so remote from him as reading and writing. Certainly nobody will experience any deficiency in his capacity to read and write, whose proficiency in these arts is attained somewhat later than others; on the other hand everyone who learns to read and write too early will suffer in this very respect. An education based on a knowledge of man must from the very beginning, proceed out of this ability to read human evolution and by understanding the conditions of life help the child in furthering the development of his own nature. This is the one and only way to a really health-giving education.

To gain deeper insight we must enter somewhat into the being of man. In man we have in the first place his physical body which is most intensively developed in the first epoch of life. In the second epoch the higher, finer body, the etheric body, develops predominantly. Now it is a matter of great importance that in this study of man we should proceed in a truly scientific way, and we must conjure up the same courage as is shown today in other branches of science. A substance showing a definite degree of warmth, can be brought into a condition in which that warmth, hitherto bound up with substance, becomes freed. It is liberated and then becomes “free” warmth. In the case of mineral substances we have the courage to speak scientifically when we say that there is “bound” warmth and “free” warmth. We must acquire the same courage when we study the world as a whole. If we have this courage then the following reveals itself to us in regard to man.

We can ask: Where are the forces of the etheric body in the first epoch of life? During this time they are bound up with the physical body and are active in its nourishment and growth. In this first epoch the child is different from what he becomes later. The entire forces of the etheric body are at first bound up with the physical body. At the end of the first epoch they are freed to some extent, just as warmth becomes free from the substances with which it was formerly bound up. What takes place now? Only a part of the etheric body is working after the change of teeth in the forces of growth and nourishment; the freed part becomes the bearer of the more intensive development of the memory, of qualities of soul. We must learn to speak of a soul that is “bound” during the first seven years of life and of a soul that has become free after the 7th year. For it is so. What we use as forces of the soul in the second seven years of life is imperceptibly bound up with the physical body during the first seven years; this is why nothing of a psychic nature becomes body free. A knowledge of how the soul works in the first seven years of life must be gained from observation of the body. And only after the change of teeth can any direct approach be made to what is purely of a soul nature.

This is a way of looking at things which leads directly from the physical to the psychological. Just think of the many different approaches to psychology today. They are based on speculation pure and simple. People think things over and discover that on the one hand we have the soul and on the other hand the body. Now the following question arises: Does the body work on the soul as its original cause, or is it the other way round? If they get no further either way, they discover something so extraordinarily grotesque as psychophysical parallelism, the idea of which is that both manifestations run parallel, side by side. In this way no explanation is given for the interaction of one with the other, but one speaks only of parallelism. This is a sign that nothing is known about these things out of experience. Out of experience one would have to say: In the first seven years of a child's life one perceives the soul working in the body. How it works must be learned through observation, not through mere speculation. Anthroposophy as a means of knowledge rejects all speculation and proceeds everywhere from experience, but of course from physical and spiritual experience.

So in the second period of life, in the time between the change of teeth and puberty the etheric body of man is our chief concern in education. Both teacher and child need above all those forces which are working in the etheric body, for these release the feeling life of the child, not yet judgment and thought. Deeply embedded in the nature of the child between the change of teeth and puberty is the third member of the human being, the astral body, which is the bearer of all feeling life and sensation. During this second period of life the astral body is still deeply embedded in the etheric body. Therefore, because the etheric body is now relatively free, we have the task to develop it in such a way that it can follow its own tendencies, helped and not hindered by education. When can it be so helped? This can happen when in the widest possible sense we teach and educate the child by means of pictures, when we build up imaginatively and pictorially everything that we wish him to absorb. For the etheric body is the body of formative forces; it models the wonderful forms of the organs, heart, lungs, liver and so on. The physical body which we inherit acts only as a model; after the first seven years, after the change of teeth, it is laid aside, and the second physical body is fashioned by the etheric body. This is why at this age we must educate in a way that is adapted to the plastic formative forces of the etheric body.

Now, just as we teach the child by means of pictures, just as, among other things, he learns to write by a kind of painting-drawing—and we cannot introduce the child too early to what is artistic, for our entire teaching must be permeated with artistic feeling—so must we also bear the following in mind. Just as the etheric body is inseparably associated with what is formative and pictorial, so the astral body, which underlies the life of feeling and sensation, tends in its organisation towards the musical nature of man. To what then must we look when we observe the child? Because the astral body between the change of teeth and puberty is still embedded in the physical and etheric bodies every child whose soul life is healthy is inwardly deeply musical. Every healthy child is inwardly deeply musical. We have only to call up this musicality by making use of the child's natural liveliness and sense of movement. Artistic teaching therefore must, from the very beginning of school life, make use both of the plastic and pictorial arts and also of the art of music. Nothing abstract must be allowed to dominate; it is the artistic approach which is all-important, and out of what is artistic the child must be led to a comprehension of the world.

But now we must proceed in such a way that the child learns gradually to find his own orientation in the world. I have already said that it is most repugnant to me if I see scientific text books brought into school and the teaching carried out along those lines. For today in our scientific work, which I fully recognise, we have deviated in many respects from a conception of the world which is in accordance with nature. We will now ask ourselves the following question, bearing in mind that in the course of discussion other things may have to be added. At about what age can one begin to teach children about the plant world?

This must be done neither too late nor too early. We must be aware that a very important stage in a child's development is reached between the 9th and 10th year. Those who see with the eye of a teacher observe this in every child. There comes a time in which the child, although he does not usually express it in words, nevertheless shows in his whole behaviour that he has a question, or a number of questions, which betray an inner crisis in his life. This is an exceptionally delicate experience in the child and an exceptionally delicate sense for these things is necessary if one is to perceive it. But it is there and it must be observed. At this age the child learns quite instinctively to differentiate himself from the outer world. Up to this time the “I” and the outer world interpenetrate each other, and it is therefore possible to tell the child stories about animals, plants and stones in which they all behave as though they were human beings. Indeed this is the best approach, for we should appeal to the child's pictorial, imaginative sense, and this we do if we speak about the kingdoms of nature in this way. Between the 9th and 10th year however the child learns to say “I” in full consciousness. He learns this earlier of course, but now he does so consciously. These years, therefore, when the consciousness of the child is no longer merged with the outer world, but when he learns to differentiate himself from it, are the time when we can begin, without immediately renouncing the pictorial element, to lead the child to an understanding of the plant world, but to an understanding imbued with feeling.

Today we are accustomed to look at one plant alongside of another, we know their names and so on; we do this as though the single plant was there for itself. But when we study the plant in this way, it is just as if you were to pull out a hair, and forgetting that it was on your head examine it for itself, in the belief that you can know something about its nature and life-conditions without considering it as growing out of your head. The hair only has meaning when it is growing on the head; it cannot be studied for itself. It is the same with the plant. One cannot pull it up and study it separately, but one must consider the whole earth as an organism to which the plants belong. This is actually what it is. The plants belong to the entire growth of the earth, in the same way as the hairs belong to our head. Plants can never be studied in an isolated way, but only in connection with the whole nature of the earth. The earth and the world of plants belong together.

Let us suppose that you have a herbaceous plant, an annual, which is growing out of the root, shooting up into stalk, leaves and flowers, and developing the fruit which is sown again in the following year. Then you have the earth underneath, in which the plant is growing. But now, think of a tree. The tree lives longer, it is not an annual. It develops around itself the mineralised bark which is of such a nature that pieces of it can be broken off. What is this in reality? The process is as follows: If you were to pile up around a plant the surrounding earth with its inherent forces, if you were more or less to cover it with earth, then you would bring this about in an external, mechanical way, through human activity. Nature however does the same thing by wrapping the tree round with the bark; only in this case it is not completely earth. In the bark there is a kind of hill of earth, the earth heaps itself up. We can see the earth flourishing and growing when we see the growing tree. This is why what surrounds the root of the plant must most certainly be reckoned as belonging to it. We must regard the soil as belonging to the plant.

Anyone who has trained himself to observe such things and happens to travel in a district where he notices many plants with yellow flowers will at once look to see what kind of soil it is. In such a case, where specifically many yellow flowers are to be seen, one is likely to find, for instance, a soil which is somewhat red in colour. You will never be able to think about the plant without taking into consideration the earth in which it grows. Both belong together. And one should lose no time in accustoming oneself to this; as otherwise one destroys in oneself a sense for realities.

A deep impression was made on me recently, when at the request of certain farmers, I gave an agricultural course, at the end of which a farmer said: Today everybody knows that our vegetables are dying out, are becoming decadent and this with alarming rapidity. Why is this? It is because people no longer understand, as they understood in bygone days, as the peasants understood, that earth and plants are bound together and must be so considered. If we want to foster the well-being of our vegetables so that they flourish again we must understand how to treat them in the right way, in other words, we must give them the right kind of manure. We must give the earth the possibility of living rightly in the environment of the plant roots. Today, after the failure of agricultural methods of development, we need a new impulse in agriculture based on Spiritual Science. This will enable us to make use of manure in such a way that the growth of plants does not degenerate. Anyone as old as I am can say: I know how potatoes looked 50 years ago in Europe—and how they look today! Today we have not only the decline of the West in regard to its cultural life, but this decline penetrates deeply also into the kingdoms of nature, for example, in regard to agriculture.

It really amounts to this, that the sense for the connection between the plant and its environment should not be destroyed, that on school outings and similar occasions die plants should not be uprooted and put into specimen containers and then brought into the classroom in the belief that thereby something has been achieved. For the uprooted plant can never exist just for itself. Today people indulge in totally unreal ideas. For instance they look upon a piece of chalk and a flower as having reality in the same sense. But what nonsense this is! The mineral can exist for itself, it can really do this. So the plant also (they say) should have an independent existence;

but it cannot, it ceases to be when it is uprooted from the ground. It only has earthly existence when it is attached to something other than itself, and that other only has existence in so far as it is part of the whole earth. We must study things as they are in their totality, not tear them out of it.

Almost all our knowledge based on observation teems with unrealities of this kind. This is why Nature Study has become completely abstract, although this is partly justified, as with the theory of relativity. Anyone, however, who can think in a realistic way cannot allow abstract concepts to run on and on, but notices when they cease to have any relationship with what is real. This is something he finds painful. Naturally you can follow the laws of acoustics and say: When I make a sound, the transmission of this sound has a definite speed. When I hear a sound anywhere, at any particular place, I can calculate the exact time its transmission will take. If now I move, no matter at what speed, in the direction the sound is travelling, I shall hear it later. Should my speed exceed the speed of the sound I shall not hear it at all; but if I move towards the sound I shall hear it earlier. The theory of relativity has its definite justification. According to this, however, we can also come to the following conclusion: If I now move towards the sound more quickly than the sound travels, I shall finally go beyond it, so that I shall hear the sound before it is made! This is obvious to anyone able to think realistically. Such a person also knows that logically it is absolutely correct, wonderfully thought out, to say that a clock (to take the famous comparison of Einstein) thrown with the speed of light into universal space and returning from thence, will not have changed in any respect. This can be wonderfully thought out. But for a realistic thinker the question must necessarily arise: What will the clock look like on its return? for he does not separate his thinking from reality, he remains always in the sphere of reality.

This is the essential characteristic of Spiritual Science. It never demands a merely logical approach, but one in accordance with reality. That is why people today, who carry abstractions even to the splitting of hairs, reproach us anthroposophists with being abstract, just because our way of thinking seeks everywhere the absolute reality, never losing the connection with reality, although here certainly the spiritual reality has to be included and understood. This is why it is possible to perceive so clearly how unnatural it is to connect plant study with specimens in a container.

It is therefore important when introducing the child to plant study that we consider the actual face of the earth and deal with the soil and plant growth as a whole, so that the child will never think of the plant as something detached and separate. This can be unpleasant for the teacher, for now he cannot take the usual botany books into class with him, have a quick glance at them during the lesson and behave as though he knew it all perfectly. I have already said that today there are no suitable botany text-books. But this sort of teaching takes on another aspect when one knows the effect of the imponderable and when one considers that in the child the subconscious works still more strongly than in older people. This subconscious is terribly clever and anyone able to perceive the spiritual life of the child knows that when a class is seated facing the teacher and he walks up and down with his notes and wants to impart the content of these notes to the children, they always form a judgment and think; Well, why should I know that? He doesn't even know it himself! This disturbs the lesson tremendously, for these feelings rise up out of the subconscious and nothing can be expected of a class which is taught by someone with notes in his hand.

We must always look into the spiritual side of things. This is particularly necessary when developing the art of education, for by doing so we can create in the child a feeling of standing firmly and safely in the world. For (in lessons on the plant) he gradually grasps the idea that the earth is an organism. And this it actually is and when it begins to become lifeless we must help it by making the right use of manure. For instance, it is not true that the water contained in the air is the same as that in the earth below. The water below has a certain vitality; the water above loses this vitality and only regains it when it descends. All these things are real, absolutely real. If we do not grasp them we do not unite ourselves with the world in a real way. This then is what I wished to say in regard to the teaching about the world of plants.

Now we come to the animal world and we cannot consider the animals as belonging to the earth in the same way. This is apparent from the mere fact that the animals can move about; in this respect they are independent. But when we compare the animals with man we find something very characteristic in their formation. This has always been indicated in an older, instinctive science, the after-effects of which still remained in the first third of the 19th century. When however a modern man with his way of looking at things reads the opinions expressed by those philosophers of nature who, following old traditions, still regarded the animal world in its relation to the human world, these strike him as being utterly foolish. I know that people have hardly been able to contain their laughter when in a study circle, during the reading from the nature philosopher, Oken, the following sentence occurred: “The human tongue is a cuttlefish.” Whatever could he have meant? Of course in actual fact this statement of Oken's can no longer be regarded as correct, but it contains an underlying principle which must be taken into account. When we observe the different animal forms, from the smallest protozoa up to the fully developed apes, we find that every animal form represents some part of the human being, a human organ, or an organic system, which is developed in a one-sided way. You need only look at these things quite crudely. Imagine that the human forehead were to recede enormously that the jaw were to jut right out, that the eyes were to look upwards instead of forwards, that the teeth and their whole nexus were also to be formed in a completely one-sided way. By imagining such an exaggerated, one-sided development you could get a picture of a great variety of mammals. By leaving out this or that in the human form you can change it into the form of an ox, a sheep and so on. And when you take the inner organs, for instance those which are connected with reproduction, you come into the region of the lower animals. The human being is a synthesis, a putting together of the single animal forms, which becomes softer, gentler, when they are united. The human being is made up of all the animal forms moulded into one harmonious structure. Thus when I trace back to their original forms all that in man is merged together I find the whole animal world. Man is a contraction of the whole animal world.

This way of looking at things places us with our soul life once more in a right relationship to the animal world. This has been forgotten, but it is nevertheless true; and as it belongs fundamentally to the principles of evolution it must again be brought to life. And, after having shown the child how the plant belongs to the earth, we must, in so far as it is possible today, proceed at about the nth year to a consideration of the animal world; and we must do this in such a way that we realise that in its various forms the animal world belongs, strictly speaking, to man himself. Think how the young human being will then stand in his relation to animal and plant. The plants go to the earth, become one with the earth; the animals become one with him! This gives the basis for a true relationship to the world; it places man in a real relationship to the world. This can always be brought to the child in connection with the teaching matter. And if this is done artistically, if we approach the subject in a living way, so that it corresponds with what the child in his inner being is able to grasp, then we give him living forces with which to establish a relationship to life. Otherwise we may easily destroy this relationship. But we must look deeply into the whole human being.

What really is the etheric body? Well, if it were possible to lift it out of the physical body and so impregnate it that its form were to become visible—then there would be no greater work of art than this. For the human etheric body through its own nature and through what man creates within it, is at one and the same time both work of art and artist. And when we introduce the formative element into the child's artistic work, when we let him model in the free way I described yesterday, we bring to him something that is deeply related to the etheric body. This enables the child to take hold of his own inner being and thereby place himself as man in a right relationship to the world.

By introducing the child to music we form the astral body. But when we put two things together, when we lead what is plastic over into movement, and when we form movements that are plastic, then we have eurythmy, which follows exactly the relationship of the child's etheric body to his astral body. And so now the child learns eurythmy, speech revealing itself in articulated gestures, just as he learned to speak quite naturally in his earlier years. A healthy child will find no difficulty in learning eurythmy, for in eurythmy he simply expresses his own being, he has the impulses to make his own being a reality. This is why, in addition to gymnastics, eurythmy is incorporated into the curriculum as an obligatory subject from the first school years right up into the highest classes.

So you see, eurythmy has arisen out of the whole human being, physical body, etheric body and astral body; it can only be studied by means of an anthroposophical knowledge of man. Gymnastics today are directed physiologically in a one-sided way towards the physical body; and because physiology cannot do otherwise, certain principles based on life-giving processes are introduced. By means of gymnastics, however, we do not educate the complete human being, but only part of him. By saying this nothing is implied against gymnastics, only in these days their importance is over-estimated. Therefore in education today eurythmy should stand side by side with gymnastics. I would not go as far as a famous physiologist did, who once happened to be in the audience when I was speaking about eurythmy. On that occasion I said that as a means of education gymnastics are over-rated at the present time, and that a form of gymnastics calling on the forces of soul and spirit, such as is practised in eurythmy side by side with the study of eurythmy as an art, must be introduced in addition to gymnastics as usually understood. At the end of my lecture the famous physiologist came up to me and said: Do you say that gymnastics may have their justification as a means of education because physiologists say so? I, as a physiologist, must say that gymnastics as a means of education are nothing less than barbarism! You would certainly be very astonished if I were to tell you the name of this physiologist. At the present time such things are already apparent to people who have some right to speak; and we must be careful not to advocate certain things in a fanatical way without a full knowledge of what is involved. To stand up fanatically for certain things is utterly out of place in connection with the art of education, because here we are dealing with the manifold aspects of life.

When we approach the other subjects which children have to be taught and do so from the various points of view which have here been considered, we come first to the years during which the child can only take in the pictorial through his life of feeling. History and geography, for instance, must be taught in this way. History must be described pictorially; we must paint and model with our words. This develops the child's mind. For during the first two stages of the second main epoch of life there is one thing above all to which the child has no relationship and this is what may be termed the concept of causation. Before the 7th year the child should most certainly not go to school. [i.e. to school as distinguished from a kindergarten.] If we take the time from 7 to 9⅓ years old we have the first subdivision of the second main epoch; from 9⅓ to 11⅔ years old we have the second stage and from 11⅔ until approximately the age of 14 we have the third stage. During the first stage of this second main epoch the child is so organised that he responds immediately to what is pictorial. At this age therefore we must speak as one does in fairy-tales, for everything must still be undifferentiated from the child's own nature. The plants must speak with one another, the minerals must speak with one another; the plants must kiss one another, they must have father and mother, and so on. At about 9⅓ years old the time has come which I have already characterised, when the ego begins to differentiate itself from the outer world. Then we can make a more realistic approach in our teaching about plants and animals. Always, however, in the first years of life history must be treated in fairy-tale, mythical mood. In the second subdivision of this longer epoch, that is to say, from 9⅓ until 11⅔ years old, we must speak pictorially. And only when the child approaches the age of 12 can one introduce him to the concept of causation, only then can one lead over to abstract concepts, whereby cause and effect can be allowed to enter in. Before this time the child is as inaccessible to cause and effect as anyone colour blind is to colours; and as an educator one often has absolutely no idea how unnecessary it is to speak to the child about cause and effect. It is only after the age of 12 that we can speak to him about things which today are taken for granted when looked at from a scientific point of view.

This makes it essential to wait until about the 12th year before dealing with anything that has to do with the lifeless, for this involves entering into the concept of causation. And in the teaching of history we must also wait until about this age before passing over from a pictorial presentation to one which deals with cause and effect, where the causes underlying historical events have to be sought. Before this we should only concern ourselves with what can be brought to the child as having life, soul-imbued life.

People are really very strange. For instance, in the course of cultural development a concept has arisen which goes by the name of animism. It is maintained that when a child knocks himself against a table he imagines the table to be alive and hits it. He dreams a soul into the table, and it is thought that primitive people did the same. The idea is prevalent that something very complicated takes place in the soul of the child. He is supposed to think that the table is alive, ensouled, and this is why he hits it when he bumps up against it. This is a fantastic notion. On the contrary those who study the history of culture are the ones who do actually “ensoul” something, for they “ensoul” this imaginative capacity into the child. But the soul qualities of the child are far more deeply embedded in the physical body than they are later, when they are emancipated and can work freely. When the child bumps against a table a reflex action is set up without his imagining that the table is alive. It is purely a reflex movement of will, for the child does not yet differentiate himself from the outer world. This differentiation first makes its appearance at about the 12th year when a healthy child can grasp the concept of causation. But when this concept is brought to the child too early, especially if it is done by means of crude external methods, really terrible conditions are set up in the child's development. It is all very well to say that one should take pains to make everything perfectly clear to a child. Calculating machines already exist in which little balls are pushed here and there in order to make the operations of arithmetic externally obvious. The next thing we may expect is that those of the same frame of mind will make moral concepts externally visible by means of some kind of machine in which by pushing something about one will be able to see good and evil in the same way as with the calculating machines one can see that 5 plus 7 equals 12. There are, however, undoubtedly spheres of life in which things cannot be made externally apparent and which are taken up and absorbed by the child in ways that are not at all obvious; and we greatly err if we try to make them so. Hence it is quite wrong to do as is often attempted in educational books and make externally apparent what by its very nature cannot be so treated. In this respect people often fall into really frightful trivialities.

In the years between the change of teeth and puberty we are not only concerned with the demonstrably obvious, for when we take the whole of human life into consideration the following becomes clear. At the age of 8 I take in some concept, I do not yet understand it fully; indeed I do not understand it at all as far as its abstract content is concerned. I am not yet so constituted as to make this possible. Why then do I take in the concept at all? I do so because it is my teacher who is speaking, because the authority of my teacher is self-understood and this works upon me. But today we are not supposed to do this; the child is to be shown what is visual and obvious. Now let us take a child who is taught everything in this way. In such a case what a child experiences does not grow with his growth, for by these methods he is treated as a being who does not grow. But we should not awaken in the child ideas which cannot grow with him, for then we should be doing the same thing as if we were to have a pair of shoes made for a three-year-old child and expect him to wear them when he is 12. Everything in the human being grows, including his power of comprehension; and so the concepts must grow with him. We must therefore see to it that we bring living concepts to the child, but this we can only do if there is a living relationship to the authority of the teacher. It is not achieved if the teacher is an abstract pedant who stands in front of the child and presents him with concepts which are as yet totally foreign to him. Picture two children. One has been taught in such a way that he takes in concepts and at the age of 45 he still gives things the same explanation that he learned when he was 8 years old. The concept has not grown with the child; he paid careful attention to it all, and at 45 can still explain it in the same way. Now let us take a second child who has been educated in a living way. Here we shall find that just as he no longer wears the same size shoes as he did when he was 8 years old, so at a later age he no longer carries around with him the same concepts that he learned when he was 8. On the contrary; these concepts have expanded and have become something quite different. All this reacts on the physical body. And if we look at these two people in regard to their physical fitness we find that the first man has sclerosis at the age of 45, while the second has remained mobile and is not sclerotic. How great do you think the differences are which come to light between human beings? In a certain place in Europe there were once two professors of philosophy. One was famous for his Greek philosophy; the other was an old Hegelian, an adherent of the school of Hegel, where people were still accustomed to take in living concepts, even after the age of 20. Both were lecturers at the same university. At the age of 70 the first decided to exercise his right to retire on a pension, he felt unable to continue. The second, the Hegelian professor, was 91 and said: “I cannot understand why that young fellow is settling down to retirement already.” But the conceptual life of this second professor had retained its mobility. People criticised him for this very reason and accused him of being inconsistent. The other man was consistent, but he suffered from sclerosis!

There exists a complete unity in the child between the spiritual and the bodily, and we can only deal rightly with him when we take this into consideration. Today people who do not share the views of materialists say that materialism is a bad thing. Why? Many will say that it is bad because it understands nothing of the spiritual. This, however, is not the worst, for little by little people will become aware of this lack, and as a result of the urge to get the better of it they will come to the spiritual. The worst thing about materialism is that it understands nothing of matter! Look into it yourselves and see what has become of the knowledge of the living forces of man in lung, liver and so on under the influences of materialism. Nothing is known about how these things work. A portion is removed from the lung, the liver and so forth and this is prepared and examined, but by means of present-day scientific methods nothing is learned of the spirit working actively in the human organs. Such knowledge can only be gained through spiritual science. The material reveals its nature only when studied from the aspect of spiritual science. Materialism has fallen sick, and the cause of this sickness is above all because the materialist understands nothing of matter. He wants to limit himself to what is material but he cannot penetrate to any knowledge of what is material in a real sense. In saying this I do not mean the “thought-out” material, where so and so many atoms are supposed to dance around a central nucleus: for things of this kind are not difficult to construct. In the earlier days of the Theosophical Society there were theosophists who constructed a whole system based on atoms and molecules; but it was all just thought out. What we have to do now is to approach reality once again. And if one actually does this one has a feeling of discomfort when one is supposed to grasp some concept which is entirely devoid of reality. One experiences pain when, for instance, someone propounds a theory such as this: Fundamentally it is one and the same thing whether I drive my car to a town, or whether the car stands still and the town comes to me. Certainly things of this kind are justified when looked at from a certain point of view. But drawn out to the extent that occurs today among those who hold completely abstract opinions, they impoverish the entire life of the human soul. And anyone who has a sense for such things experiences great pain in regard to much of what people think today, which works so destructively on teaching methods. For instance, I see the tendencies of certain methods applied already to little children in the kindergarten, who are given ordinary cut-out letters and then learn to pick them out of a heap and put them together to form words. By occupying the child in this way at such an early age we are bringing him something to which as yet he has absolutely no relationship. When this happens to him the effect is the same as if in real thinking one were to say: I was once a man who still had muscles, skin and so on; now I am merely a skeleton. So it is today under the influence of this propensity for abstractions in the spiritual life of mankind: one sees oneself suddenly as a skeleton. With such an outlook, however, which is the bare skeleton of reality, we cannot approach the child in education.

Because of this I wanted to show today how everything depends on the teacher approaching life in a true and living way.

At this point of our educational studies I want to interpolate some remarks referring to the arrangements which were made in the Waldorf School in order to facilitate and put into practice those principles about which I have already spoken and shall have more to say in the coming lectures.

The Waldorf School in Stuttgart was inaugurated in the year 1919 on the initiative of Emil Molt, [Director of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory.] with the purpose of carrying out the principles of anthroposophical education. This purpose could be realised through the fact that the direction and leadership of the school was entrusted to me. Therefore when I describe how this school is organised it can at the same time serve as an example for the practical realisation of those fundamental educational principles which we have been dealing with here.

I should like to make clear first of all that the soul of all the instruction and education in the Waldorf School is the Teachers' Conference. These conferences are held regularly by the college of teachers and I attend them whenever I can manage to be in Stuttgart. They are concerned not only with external matters of school organisation, with the drawing up of the timetable, with the formation of classes and so on, but they deal in a penetrative, far-reaching way with everything on which the life and soul of the school depends. Things are arranged in such a way as to further the aim of the school, that is to say, to base the teaching and education on a knowledge of man. It means of course that this knowledge must be applied to every individual child. Time must be devoted to the observation, the psychological observation of each child. This is essential and must be reckoned with in actual, concrete detail when building up the whole educational plan. In the teachers' conferences the individual child is spoken about in such a way that the teachers try to grasp the nature of the human being as such in its special relationship to the child in question. You can well imagine that we have to deal with all grades and types of children with their varying childish talents and qualities of soul. We are confronted with pretty well every kind of child, from the one whom we must class as being psychologically and physically very poorly endowed to the one—and let us hope life will confirm this—who is gifted to the point of genius.

If we want to observe children in their real being we must acquire a psychological faculty of perception. This kind of perception not only includes a cruder form of observing the capacities of individual children, but above all the ability to appraise these capacities rightly. You need only consider the following: One can have a child in the class who appears to be extraordinarily gifted in learning to read and write, or seems to be very gifted in learning arithmetic or languages. But to hold fast to one's opinion and say: This child is gifted, for he can learn languages, arithmetic and so on quite easily—this betokens a psychological superficiality. In childhood, say at about 7, 8 or 9 years old the ease with which a child learns can be a sign that later on he will develop genius; but it can equally well be a sign that sooner or later he will become neurotic, or in some way turn into a sick man. When one has gained insight into the human being and knows that this human being consists not only of the physical body which is perceptible to the eye, but also bears within him the etheric body which is the source of growth and the forces of nourishment, the cause whereby the child grows bigger; when one considers further that man also has an astral body within him, the laws of which have nothing whatever to do with what is being physically established but on the contrary work destructively on the physical, and destroy it in order to make room for the spiritual; and furthermore when one considers that there is still the ego-organisation which is bound up with the human being, so that one has the three organisations—etheric body, astral body, ego-organisation and must pay heed to these as well as to the perceptible physical body—then one can form an idea of how complicated such a human being is, and how each of these members of the human being can be the cause of a talent, or lack of talent in any particular sphere, or can show a deceptive talent which is transient and pathological. One must develop insight as to whether the talent is of such a kind as to have healthy tendencies, or whether it tends towards the unhealthy.

If as teacher and educator, one represents with the necessary love, devotion and selflessness the knowledge of man of which we have been speaking here in these lectures, then something very definite ensues. In living together with the children one becomes—do not misunderstand the word, it is not used in a bragging sense—one becomes ever wiser and wiser. One discovers for oneself how to appraise some particular capacity or achievement of the child. One learns to enter in a living way into the nature of the child and to do so comparatively quickly.

I know that many people will say: If you assert that the human being, in addition to his physical body, consists of super-sensible members, etheric body, astral body and ego-organisation, it follows that only someone who is clairvoyant and able to perceive these super-sensible members of human nature can be a teacher. But this is not the case. Everything perceived through imagination, inspiration and intuition, as described in my books, can be examined and assessed by observing the physical organisation of the child, because it comes to expression everywhere in this physical organisation.

It is therefore perfectly possible for a teacher or educator who carries out his profession in a truly loving way and bases his teaching on a comprehensive knowledge of man, to speak in the following way about some special case: Here the physical body shows signs of hardening, of stiffening, so that the child is unable to develop the faculties which, spiritually, are potentially present, because the physical body is a hindrance. Or, to take another case, it is possible that someone might say: In this particular child, who is about 7 or 8 years old, certain attributes are making their appearance. The child surprises us in that he is able to learn this or that very early; but one can observe that the physical body is too soft, it has a tendency which later on may cause it to run to fat. If the physical body is too soft, if, so to say, the fluid element has an excess of weight in relation to the solid element, then this particular tendency causes the soul and spirit to make themselves felt too soon, and then we have a precocious child. In such a case, during the further development of the physical body, this precocity is pushed back again, so that under certain conditions everything may well be changed and the child become for the whole of life, not only an average person, but one even below average. In short, we must reckon with the fact that what external observation reveals in the child must be estimated rightly by means of inner perceptiveness, so that actually nothing whatever is said if one merely speaks about faculties or lack of faculties.

What I am now saying can also be borne out by studying the biographies of the most varied types of human being. In following the course of the spiritual development of mankind it would be possible to cite many a distinguished personality who in later life achieved great things, but who was regarded as a child as being almost completely ungifted and at school had been, so to say, one of the duffers. In this connection one comes across the most remarkable examples. For instance there is a poet who at the age of 18, 19 and even 20 was held to be so ungifted by all those who were concerned with his education that they advised him, for this very reason, not to attempt studying at a higher level. He did not, however, allow himself to be put off, but continued his studies, and it was not so long afterwards that he was appointed inspector of the very same schools that it had not been thought advisable for him to attend as a young man. There was also an Austrian poet, Robert Hamerling, who studied with the purpose of becoming a teacher in a secondary school (Gymnasium). In the examination he obtained excellent marks for Greek and Latin; on the other hand he did not pass muster for the teaching of the German language, because his essays were considered to be quite inadequate. Nevertheless he became a famous poet! We have found it necessary to separate a number of children from the others, either more or less permanently or for a short time, because they are mentally backward and through their lack of comprehension, through their inability to understand, they are a cause of disturbance. These children are put together into a special class for those who are of limited capacity. This class is led by the man who has spoken to you here, Dr. Schubert, whose very special qualities make him a born leader of such a class. This task calls indeed for special gifts. It needs above all the gift of being able to penetrate into those qualities of soul which are, as it were, imprisoned in the physical and have difficulty in freeing themselves. Little by little they must be liberated. Here we come again to what borders on physical illness, where the psychologically abnormal impinges on what is physically out of order. It is quite possible to shift this borderland, it is in no way rigid or fixed. Indeed it is certainly helpful if one can look behind every so-called psychological abnormality and perceive what is not healthy in the physical organism of the person in question. For in the true sense of the word there are no mental illnesses; they are brought about through the fact that the physical does not release the spiritual.

In Germany today [just after the First World War.] we have also to reckon with the situation that nearly all school children are not only undernourished, but have suffered for years from the effects of under-nourishment. Here therefore we are concerned with the fact that through observing the soul-spiritual and the physical-corporeal we can be led to a comprehension of their essential unity. People find it very difficult to understand that this is essential in education. There was an occasion when a man, who otherwise was possessed of considerable understanding and was directly engaged in matters pertaining to schools, visited the Waldorf School. I myself took him around for days on end. He showed great interest in everything. But after I had told him all I could about one child or another—for we spoke mostly about the children, not about abstract educational principles, our education being based on a knowledge of man—he finally said: “Well and good, but then all teachers would have to be doctors.” I replied: “That is not necessary; but they should certainly have some medical knowledge, as much as a teacher needs to know for his educational work.”

For where shall we be if it is said that for some reason or another, provision cannot be made for it, or the teachers cannot learn it? Provision simply must be made for what is required and the teachers must learn what is necessary. This is the only possible standpoint. The so-called normal capacities which man develops, which are present in every human being, are best studied by observing pathological conditions. And if one has learned to know a sick organism from various points of view, then the foundation is laid for understanding a soul endowed with genius. It is not as though I were taking the standpoint of a Lombroso [Italian criminologist.] or someone holding similar views; this is not the case. I do not assert that genius is always a condition of sickness, but one does actually learn to know the soul-spiritual in learning to know the sick body of a child. In studying the difficulties experienced by soul and spirit in coming to outer manifestation in a sick body, one can learn to understand how the soul seizes hold of the organism when it has something special to express.

So education comes up against not only slight pathological conditions, such as are present in children of limited capacity, but it meets what is pathological in the widest sense of the word. This is why we have also introduced medical treatment for the children in our school. We do not, however, have a doctor who only practises medicine and is quite outside the sphere of education, but our school doctor, Dr. Kolisko, is at the same time the teacher of a class. He stands completely within the school as a teacher, he is acquainted with all the children and is therefore in a position to know the particular angle from which may come any pathological symptom appearing in the child. This is altogether different from what is possible for the school doctor who visits the school on certain formal occasions and judges the state of a child's health on what is necessarily a very cursory observation. Quite apart from this, however, in the teachers' conferences no hard and fast line is drawn between the soul-spiritual and physical-corporeal when considering the case of any particular child. The natural consequence of this is that the teacher has gradually to acquire insight into the whole human being, so that he is just as interested in every detail connected with physical health and sickness as he is in what is mentally sound or abnormal.

This is what we try to achieve in the school. Each teacher should have the deepest interest in, and pay the greatest attention to the whole human being. It follows from this that our teachers are not specialists in the ordinary sense of the word. For in effect the point is not so much whether the history teacher is more or less master of his subject, but whether by and large he is the kind of personality who is able to work upon the children in the way that has been described, and whether he has an awareness of how the child is developing under his care.

I myself was obliged to teach from my 15th year onwards, simply in order to live. I had to give private lessons and so gained direct experience in the practice of education and teaching. For instance, when I was a very young man, only 21, I undertook the education of a family of four boys. I became resident in the family, and at that time one of the boys was 11 years old and he was clearly hydrocephalic. He had most peculiar habits. He disliked eating at table, and would leave the dining room and go into the kitchen where there were the bins for refuse and scraps. There he would eat not only potato peelings but also all the other mess thrown there. At 11 years old he still knew practically nothing. An attempt had been made, on the basis of earlier instruction which he had received, to let him sit for the entrance examination to a primary school, in the hope that he could be received into one of the classes. But when he handed in the results of the examination there was nothing but an exercise book with one large hole where he had rubbed something out. He had achieved nothing else whatever and he was already 11 years old. The parents were distressed. They belonged to the more cultured upper-middle class, and everybody said: The boy is abnormal. Naturally when such things are said about a child people feel a prejudice against him. The general opinion was that he must learn a trade, for he was capable of nothing else. I came into the family, but nobody really understood me when I stated what I was prepared to do. I said: If I am given complete responsibility for the boy I can promise nothing except that I will try to draw out of the boy what is in him. Nobody understood this except the mother, with her instinctive perception, and the excellent family doctor. It was the same doctor who later on, together with Dr. Freud, founded psycho-analysis. When, however, at a later stage it became decadent, he severed his connection with it. It was possible to talk with this man and our conversation led to the decision that I should be entrusted with the boy's education and training.

In eighteen months his head had become noticeably smaller and the boy was now sufficiently advanced to enter a secondary school (Gymnasium). I accompanied him further during his school career for he needed extra help, but nevertheless after eighteen months he was accepted as a pupil in a secondary school. To be sure, his education had to be carried on in such a way that there were times when I needed hours in order to prepare what I wanted the boy to learn in a quarter of an hour. It was essential to exercise the greatest economy when teaching him and never to spend more time on whatever it might be than was absolutely necessary. It was also a question of arranging the day's timetable with great exactitude: so much time must be given to music, so much to gymnastics, so much to going for walks and so on. If this is done, I said to myself, if the boy is educated in this way, then it will be possible to draw out of him what is latent within him. Now there were times when things went quite badly with my efforts in this direction. The boy became pale. With the exception of his mother and the family doctor people said with one accord: That fellow is ruining the boy's health!—To this I replied: Naturally I cannot continue with his education if there is any interference. Things must be allowed to go on according to our agreement. And they went on.

The boy went through secondary school, continued his studies and became a doctor. The only reason for his early death was that when he was called up and served as a doctor during the world war he caught an infection and died of the effects of the ensuing illness. But he carried out the duties of his medical profession in an admirable way. I only bring forward this example in order to show how necessary it is in education to see things all round, as a whole. It also shows how under certain definite educational treatment it is possible in the long run to reduce week by week a hydrocephalic condition.

Now you will say: Certainly, something of this kind can happen when it is a case of private tuition. But it can equally well happen with comparatively large classes. For anyone who enters lovingly into what is put forward here as the knowledge of man will quickly acquire the possibility of observing each individual child with the attention that is necessary; and this he will be able to do even in a class where there are many pupils. It is just here however that the psychological perception of the kind which I have described is necessary, but this perception is not so easily acquired if one goes through the world as a single individual and has absolutely no interest in other people. I can truly say that I am aware of what I owe to the fact that I really never found any human being uninteresting. Even as a child no human being was ever uninteresting to me. And I know that I should never have been able to educate that boy if I had not actually found all human beings interesting.

It is this width of interest which permeates the teachers' conferences at the Waldorf School and gives them atmosphere, so that—if I may so express myself—a psychological mood prevails throughout and these teachers' conferences then really become a school based on the study of a deep psychology. It is interesting to see how from year to year the “college of teachers” as a whole is able to deepen its faculty for psychological perception. In addition to all that I have already described, the following must also be stated when one comes to consider the individual classes. We do not go in for statistics in the ordinary sense of the word, but for us the classes are living beings also, not only the individual pupils. One can take some particular class and study it for itself, and it is extraordinarily interesting to observe what imponderable forces then come to light. When one studies such a class, and when the teachers of the different classes discuss in college meeting the special characteristics of each class, it is interesting for instance to discover that a class having in it more girls than boys—for ours is a co-educational school—is a completely different being from a class where there are more boys than girls; and a class consisting of an equal number of boys and girls is again a completely different being. All this is extremely interesting, not only on account of the talk which takes place among the children, nor of the little love affairs which always occur in the higher classes. Here one must acquire the right kind of observation in order to take notice of it when this is necessary and otherwise not to see it. Quite apart from this however is the fact that the imponderable “being” composed of the different masculine and feminine individuals gives the class a quite definite spiritual structure. In this way one learns to know the individuality of the different classes. And if, as with us in the Waldorf School, there are parallel classes, it is possible when necessary—it is very seldom necessary—to make some alteration in the division of the classes. Studies such as these, in connection with the classes, form ever and again the content of the teachers' conferences. Thus the content of these conferences does not consist only of the administration of the school, but provides a living continuation of education in the school itself, so that the teachers are always learning. In this way the conferences are the soul of the whole school. One learns to estimate trivialities rightly, to give due weight to what has real importance, and so on. Then there will not be an outcry when here or there a child commits some small misdemeanour; but there will be an awareness when something happens which might endanger the further development of the school. So the total picture of our Waldorf School which has only come about in the course of the years, is an interesting one. By and large our children, when they reach the higher classes, are more able to grasp what a child has to learn at school than those from other schools; on the other hand, as I have described, in the lower classes they remain somewhat behind in reading and writing because we use different methods which are extended over several years. Between the ages of 13 and 15, however, the children begin to outstrip the pupils of other schools owing, among other things, to a certain ease with which they are able to enter into things and to a certain aptness of comprehension.

Now a great difficulty arises. It is a remarkable fact that where there is a light, shadows are thrown by objects; where there is a weak light there are weak shadows, where there is a strong light there are strong shadows. Likewise in regard to certain qualities of soul, the following may be observed. If insufficient care is taken by the teachers to establish contact with their pupils in every possible way, so that they are models on which the children base their own behaviour, then, conversely, as the result of a want of contact it can easily happen that deviations from moral conduct make their appearance. About this we must have no illusions whatever. It is so. This is why so much depends upon a complete “growing together” of the individualities of the teachers and the individualities of the pupils, so that the strong inner attachment felt by the children for the teachers on the one side may be reciprocally experienced by the teachers on the other, thus assuring the further development of both.

These things need to be studied in an inner, human, loving way, otherwise one will meet with surprises. But the nature of the method is such that it tends to draw out everything that lies potentially in the human being. At times this is exemplified in a somewhat strange fashion. There is a German poet who knew that he had been badly brought up and badly taught, so that very many of his innate qualities—he was always complaining about this—could not come to expression. This was because his body had already become stiff and hardened, owing to the fact that in his youth no care had been taken to develop his individuality. Then one day he went to a phrenologist. Do not imagine that I am standing up for phrenology or that I rate it particularly highly; it has however some significance when practised intuitively. The phrenologist felt his head and told him all kinds of nice things, for these were of course to be found; but at one spot of the skull he stopped suddenly, became red and did not trust himself to say a word. The poet then said: “Come now, speak out, that is the predisposition to theft in me. It seems therefore that if I had been better educated at school this tendency to theft might have had very serious consequences.”

If we wish to educate we must have plenty of elbow room. This however is not provided for in a school which is run on ordinary lines according to the dreadful timetable: 8 to 9 religion, 9 to 10 gymnastics, 10 to 11 history, 11 to 12 arithmetic. What comes later blots out what has been given earlier, and as, in spite of this, one has to get results, a teacher is well-nigh driven to despair. This is why in the Waldorf School we have what may be termed teaching periods. The child comes into a class. Every day during Main Lesson, which continues for the best part of the morning, from 8 to 10 or from 8 to 11, with short breaks for recreation, he is taught one subject. This is given by one teacher, even in the higher classes. The subject is not changed hour by hour, but is continued for as long as may be necessary for the teacher to get through what he wishes to take with the class. In arithmetic, for instance, such a period might last 4 weeks. Every day then, from 8 to 10 the subject in question is carried further and what is given one day is linked on to what was taught the previous day. No later lesson blots out the one given earlier; concentration is possible. Then, after about 4 weeks, when the arithmetic period has been taken far enough and is brought to a conclusion, a history period may follow, and this again, according to the length of time required, will be continued for another 4 or 5 weeks. And so it goes on. Our point of view is the very opposite to what is called the system of the specialist teacher. You might for instance when visiting the Waldorf School find our Dr. Baravalle taking a class for descriptive geometry. The pupils sit facing him with their drawing boards in front of them. He lets them draw and his manner is that of the most exemplary specialist teacher of geometry. Now coming into another school and looking at its list of professors and teachers you will find appended to one name or another: Diploma in Geometry or Mathematics or whatever it may be. I have known very many teachers, specialists in mathematics for instance, who boasted of the fact that when they took part in a school outing they were quite unable to tell the children the names of the plants.—But morning school is not yet over and here you will see Dr. Baravalle walking up and down between the desks and giving an English lesson. And out of the whole manner and method of his teaching you will see that he is speaking about all kinds of things and there is no means of knowing in which subject he is a specialist. Some of you may think geography is his special subject, or geometry or something else. The essential substance and content of one's teaching material can undoubtedly be acquired very quickly if one has the gift of entering right into the sphere of cognition, of experiencing knowledge within the soul. So we have no timetable. Naturally there is nothing pedantic about this. In our Waldorf School the Main Lesson is given in periods; other lessons must of course be fitted into a timetable, but these follow on after the Main Lesson.

Then we think it very important that the children should be taught two foreign languages from the time they first come to school when they are still quite small. We take French and English. It must be admitted that in our school this can be a perfect misery, because so many pupils have joined the school since its foundation. For instance pupils came to us who should really be taken into Class 6. In this class however, there are children who have already made considerable progress in languages. Now these new children should join them, but they have to be put into Class 5 simply because they haven't the foggiest notion of languages. We have continually to reckon with the difficulties.

Another thing we try to arrange is that whenever possible the most fundamental lessons are given in the morning, so that physical training—gymnastics, eurythmy and so on—is kept for the afternoon. This however is no hard and fast arrangement, for as we cannot afford an endless number of teachers not everything can be fitted in as ideally as we would wish, but only as well as circumstances permit. You will not misunderstand me if I say that with ideals no beginning can be made. Do not say that anthroposophy is not idealistic. We know how to value ideals, but nothing can be begun with ideals. They can be beautifully described, one can say: This is how it ought to be. One can even flatter oneself that one is striving in this direction. But in reality we have to cope with a quite definite, concrete school made up of 800 children whom we know and with between 40 and 50 teachers whom we must also know. But what is the use (you may ask) of a college of teachers when no member of it corresponds to the ideal? The essential thing is that we reckon with what is there. Then we proceed in accordance with reality. If we want to carry out something practically we must take reality into account. This then is what I would say in regard to period teaching.

Owing to our free approach to teaching, and this must certainly be apparent from what I am describing to you, it naturally comes about that the children do not always sit as still as mice. But you should see how the whole moral atmosphere and inner constitution of a class depends on the one who has it in charge, and here again it is the imponderable that counts. In this connection I must say that in the Waldorf School there are also teachers who prove to be inadequate in certain respects. I will not describe them, but it can well happen that on entering a class one is aware that it is “out of tune.” A quarter of the class is lying under the benches, a quarter is on top of them and the rest are continually running out of the room and knocking on the door from outside. We must not let these things baffle us. The situation can be put right again if one knows how to get on with the children. They should be allowed to satisfy their urge for movement; one should not fall back on punishment but set about putting these things right in another way. We are not at all in favour of issuing commands; on the contrary with us everything must be allowed to develop by itself. Through this very fact however there also develops by itself what I have described as something lying within the teachers as their life. Certainly the children sometimes make a frightful noise, but this is only a sign of their vitality. They can also be very active and lively in doing what they should, provided the teacher knows how to arouse their interest. We must of course make use of the good qualities of the so-called good child, so that he learns something, and with a rascal we must even make use of his rascally qualities, so that he too makes progress. We do not get anywhere if we are only able to develop the good qualities. We must from time to time develop the so-called rascally qualities, only we must of course be able to turn them in the right direction. Very often these so-called rascally qualities are precisely those which signify strength in the grown-up human being; they are qualities which, rightly handled, can culminate in what is most excellent in the grown up man or woman.

And so ever and again one has to determine whether a child gives little trouble because he is good, or because he is ill. It is very easy, if one considers one's own convenience, to be just as pleased with the sick child who sits still and does not make himself heard, as with the good child, because he does not call for much attention. But if one looks with real penetration into human nature one often finds that one has to devote much more attention to such a child than to a so-called rascal. Here too it is a question of psychological insight and psychological treatment, the latter naturally from the soul-spiritual point of view.

There is another thing to be considered. In the Waldorf School practically all the teaching takes place in the school itself. The burden of homework is lifted, for the children are given very little to do at home. Because of this, because all the work is done together with the teachers, the children's attitude is a quite remarkable one. In the Waldorf School something very characteristic comes about, as the following example will show: There was an occasion when certain pupils had misbehaved. A teacher who was not yet fully permeated with the Waldorf School education felt it necessary to punish these children and he did so in an intellectualistic way. He said: “You must stay in after school and do some arithmetic.” The children were quite unable to understand that doing arithmetic could be regarded as a punishment, for this was something which gave them the greatest pleasure. And the whole class—this is something which actually happened—asked: “May we stay in too?” And this was intended as a punishment! You see, the whole attitude of mind changes completely, and it should never happen that a child feels that he is being punished when he has to do something which he actually does with devotion, with satisfaction and joy. Our teachers discover all sorts of ways of getting rid of wrong behaviour. Once it so happened that our Dr. Stein, who is particularly inventive in this respect, noticed that during his lesson in a higher class the children were writing letters and passing them round. Now what did he do in order to put the matter right? He began to speak about the postal service, explaining it in some detail and in such a way that the writing of letters gradually ceased. The description of the postal service, the history of the origin of correspondence had apparently nothing to do with the misdemeanour noticed by the teacher and nevertheless it had something to do with it. You see, if one does not ask in a rationalistic way: “What shall I do” but is able to take advantage of a sudden idea because one knows instinctively how to deal with any situation in class, the consequences are often good; for in this way much more can be achieved towards the correction of the pupils than by resorting to punishment.

It must above all be clear to every member of the class that the teacher himself truly lives in accordance with his precepts. It must never come about that a choleric boy who makes a mess of his exercise hooks, seizes his neighbour by the ears and tweaks his hair, is shouted at by the teacher: “How dare you lose your temper, how dare you behave in such a way! Boy, if you ever repeat such a performance I will hurl the inkpot at your head!” This is certainly radically described, but something of the kind may well happen if a teacher does not realise that he himself must be an example in the school of what he expects of the pupils. What one is has far more importance than having principles and a lot of knowledge. What kind of a person one is, that is the point. If a candidate in the examination for teachers, in which he is supposed to show that he is well-fitted for his calling, is only tested in what he knows,—well, what he knows in the examination room is precisely what later on he will have to look up again in his text books. But this can be done without the need of sitting for an examination. But in actual fact no one should enter a school who has not the individuality of a teacher, in body, soul and spirit. Because this is so I can say that in carrying out my task of choosing the teachers comprising the College of Teachers at the Waldorf School, I certainly do not regard it as an obstacle if someone has obtained his teacher's diploma, but in certain respects I look more closely at one who has passed his examination than at another who through his purely human attitude shows me that his individuality is that of a true teacher. It is always a matter of concern when someone has passed examinations; he can undoubtedly still be an extremely clever man, but this must be in spite of having passed examinations.

It is remarkable how Karma works, for the Waldorf School, which is intended to stand as a concrete example of this special education based on the knowledge of man, was actually only possible in Württemberg, nowhere else, because just at the time when we were preparing to open the school a very old school regulation was still in force. If at that time people had been taken hold of by the enlightened ideas which later came forth from the constitutional body of the Weimar National Assembly (Nationalversammlung) with which we have constantly to contend, because it wishes to demolish our lower classes, we should never have been able to create the Waldorf School. It will certainly become ever rarer and rarer for teachers to be judged according to their human individualities and not according to their qualifications. It will become even rarer in the lower classes to be able to do this or that; for the world works—how can one put it—towards “freedom” and “human dignity.” This “human dignity” is however furthered in a strange manner by the help of the time-table and general arrangement of lessons. In the capital city of a country there is a Ministry of Education. In this Ministry it is known what is taught in each school and class by means of regulations which apportion exactly how the subjects are to be divided up. The consequence is that in some out-of-the-way place there is a school. If information is required as to what exactly is being taught for instance on 21st July, 1924 at 9.30 a.m. in the 5th class of this Primary School it has only to be looked up in the corresponding records of the Ministry and one can say precisely what is being taught in the school in question.—With us, on the contrary, you have two parallel classes, 5A and 5B. You go perhaps into both classes, one after the other and are astonished to find that in the one parallel class something completely different is going on from what is happening in the other. There is no similarity. Classes 5A and 5B are entrusted entirely to the individuality of the class teacher; each can do what corresponds to his own individuality, and he does it. In spite of the fact that in the teachers' conferences there is absolute agreement on essential matters, there is no obligation for the one class to be taught in just the same way as the parallel class; for what we seek to achieve must be achieved in the most varied ways. It is never a question of external regulations. So you will find with the little children in Class 1 that a teacher may do something of this kind [Dr Steiner made movements with his hands.] in order to help the children to find their way into drawing with paintbrush and paint: you come into the class and see the children making all kinds of movements with their hands which will then be led over to mastering the use of brush or pencil. Or you come into the other class and there you see the children dancing around in order that the same skill may be drawn out of the movement of the legs. Each teacher does what he deems to be best suited to the individualities of the children and his own individuality. In this way life is brought into the class and already forms the basis of what makes the children feel that they really belong to their teachers.

Naturally, in spite of that old school regulation, in Württemberg, too, there is school inspection; but in regard to this we have come off quite well. The inspectors' attitude showed the greatest possible insight and they agreed to everything when they saw how and why it was done. But such occasions also give rise to quite special happenings. For example, the inspectors came into a class where the teacher usually experienced great difficulty in maintaining discipline. Time and again she had to break into her teaching and not without considerable trouble re-establish order. Well, the inspectors from the Ministry came into her class and the teacher was highly astonished at the perfect behaviour of the children. They were model pupils, so much so that on the following day she felt bound to allude to it and said: “Children, how good you were yesterday!” Thereupon the whole class exclaimed: “But of course, Fräulein Doktor, we will never let you down!” Something quite imponderable develops in the pupils when the teachers try to put into practice what I have stated at the conclusion of all these lectures. If children are taught and educated in such a way that life is livingly carried over into their lives, then out of such teaching life-forces develop which continue to grow and prosper.