The Rudolf Steiner Archive

As you know, when the human being goes through the portal of death, he first lays aside his physical body; then he is in possession of what we call the ego. Besides this he has his astral body, and at the beginning, although only for a short time, the etheric body also. This brief period during which the human being still has an etheric body is devoted to a retrospective view of his last earth life, which appears before his soul like a panorama. This period ends when the etheric body is, one might say, pushed upward into cosmic space, just as the physical body is pushed downward towards the earth.

The human being is then left with his astral body. In this astral body we still find the after-effects of the etheric body, that is to say, all that this astral body has experienced by being linked in the last earth life with the etheric body, and also with the physical body. As you know, considerable time elapses before the astral body is also stripped off.

I have already drawn attention in our literature to the fact that one cannot simply speak sweepingly of dissolution of the etheric and the astral bodies, but that this dissolution is in reality a releasing into the cosmos of those forces which the human being has within himself. The etheric body bears within itself, as it were, the imprints of all that the human being has gone through in life. This is an aggregate of what I would call form structures. This aggregate of form structures, becoming ever more widely diffused, actually stamps itself upon the cosmos; what has thus happened in our life and what has imprinted itself upon the etheric body actually continues to work within the cosmos as forces. We commit to the cosmos the nature and mode of our behavior towards the etheric body. Our life is not without moment for the entire universe. It is precisely through the knowledge of anthroposophical spiritual science that the human being acquires a strong feeling of responsibility, because he is compelled to realize how that which he incorporates into his etheric body by means of his intellectual life, his feeling life, his will, that is, by means of his morality, is imparted to the whole cosmos. In the cosmos is contained, if I may put it that way, the conduct of those human beings who have lived in former times. That which through our conduct in life contributes to the configuration of the etheric body, detaches itself in a certain way only to be gathered up into the whole great universe. In reality we participate in the making of the world! And we must develop this sense of responsibility that makes us feel ourselves as participants in the creation of the world.

That which we continue to bear as our astral body must not be looked upon as something merely to be dispersed later on, merely to be dissolved in the cosmos. This is not the case. The astral body also imparts itself to the universe, though to be sure, to the spirit-soul part of the universe.

And when the ego has freed itself from this astral body, after the transition through the soul world has been accomplished, then what we have incorporated into our astral body is to be found outside in the universe,—only now the ego and the astral body take separate paths. The astral body, divided from the ego, now goes its own way, and in a similar manner the ego takes its own course. We cannot, however, speak of the destruction of the astral body; on the contrary, this astral body continues to evolve. Through its interrelationship with the universe, it continues to evolve simply as a result of our having implanted into it the effects of certain moral impulses; and with the form it has acquired as the result of these moral impulses, it imparts itself to the cosmos,—it inserts itself, so to speak, into the spirit-soul part of the universe with which it enters into reciprocal activity. Indeed one can even put it this way (although half figurative, it, nevertheless, corresponds to the facts): the astral body expands more and more, but it reaches a certain limit in this expansion; and when it can expand no further, it begins to contract. And the speed or slowness with which it expands or contracts depends essentially upon what has been incorporated into it in the course of life. One can thus say that the astral body imparts itself to the universe; if I may use the expression, it strikes against the outer limits of our spiritual-soul cosmos and is thrown back again.

The ego follows its path in a world very different from that of the astral body. As I expressed it in yesterday's lecture,¹ the ego develops a certain kind of inward craving. And it is chiefly this craving that makes the ego feel attracted to just this particular returning astral body, which however has now become something different. Indeed there takes place a kind of union between the metamorphosed, transformed astral body and the ego. It thus comes about that when the human being approaches the time for his return to earth, he acquires certain inclinations, I might say, in divers directions.

I have indicated how the astral body expands into the universe, then returns, and how the ego in a certain way finds it again. We can follow this up in the outer human form, if we look at the being of man in its totality.

For we must imagine that the human being, as he appears when he is born on earth, is really formed from two directions. I have described to you just now how the astral body expands into the universe and how it returns again; this astral body, so to speak, now meets the ego. Figuratively speaking, it approaches in the form of a hollow sphere,—a sort of hollow sphere that grows ever smaller and smaller. Thus it approaches the ego. It has kinship with the planetary system. The ego on its way between death and a new birth develops quite another kind of longing. Although it has a longing for the astral body, it develops an even greater longing for a certain spot on earth, for a certain people, a certain family. On the other hand there is a drawing together of what comes from without as the transformed astral body, and the ego after having completed the period between death and a new birth with its strong inclination toward the earthly realm, toward a people, a family, and so forth. If we look at the human being after birth with special reference to the outer surface of his body, we can see just what is subject to the forces of the metamorphosed astral body. What is organized from without, from the skin inwards, including the sense organs, is built for us from out of the cosmos. But what is brought forth organically through the ego's feeling itself linked with the earth, feeling itself drawn toward the earth, creates the organization from within outwards, which is counter to the other organization; it creates rather the bone-muscle organization, and so forth, the part which radiates from within, so to speak, against what radiates inward from the skin and the senses. So far as the outer periphery of our body is concerned, we are organized by the macrocosm, but what streams through our ego, what grows from within outward against the skin-sense formation, is organized by the earth.

Thus the human being is really born out of the universe. And his sojourn in the maternal body provides only the opportunity for these two forces, one a macrocosmic and the other an earthly force, to unite. But man is definitely a being who does not spring from one point alone, from the germ. He is rather the fusion of the extra-earthly forces, which are held together by his metamorphosed astral body, and that force which, bearing the influence of the earth, grows counter to these extra-earthly forces. What we call our mental faculty, our intellect, our power of forming mental pictures, is deeply akin and intimately connected with what comes to us from the cosmos. Our power of forming mental pictures points in fact to our previous earth life. We acquire this power of forming mental pictures by virtue of the fact that what we have woven into our astral body in our previous earth life has expanded into the cosmos, has come back again, and now chooses our head, so to speak, as its chief organ, our head which has been formed from without as a skin-sense organ. The rest of the skin-sense organization is, so to speak, only an appendage of the head. Our will organization, however, expresses itself in what is related to the earth forces, because the human ego on approaching birth feels attracted to a particular spot on earth. So we can say that when we are reborn, we receive our mind from the heavens; our will from the earth. Between the two lies feeling, which is given to us neither by heaven nor by earth, but is based on a kind of continuous swinging back and forth between earth and heaven, and which has its outward organ chiefly in the rhythmic system of man, the breathing system, the blood circulation, and so forth. It stands in the middle between the head organization proper, which is essentially the product of the macrocosm acting upon the great circuit of the former astral body, and our will organization, which comes to us from the earth. Between these two stands our rhythmic system, stands our feeling life, which can develop on the foundation of this rhythmic system and which, I might say, we also bring to outer visible expression between heaven and earth. Our head points more to our extra-earthly origin; our will is intimately related to what is ours from the earth. Between the two stands our feeling life and, from a physical point of view, our circulation, our breathing life.

No thorough and comprehensive view of man can be taken one-sidedly either from the soul aspect or from the physical aspect, for these two, the soul and the physical nature in such a total view, must interpenetrate one another.

Furthermore, because we are connected with the entire macrocosm, bearing within us just in our head organization something formed by the macrocosm, we can see that we are directed back to our past through our intellect; only, with our ordinary consciousness we do not discover how we are thus referred to our former earth lives.

In the ancient oriental striving for wisdom, the pupils of the initiates tried to establish a connection between their rhythmic life and their head life. For the epoch in which the ancient oriental wisdom flourished, it was natural to seek a higher stage of human development by making breathing a conscious process, and thereby also the process of circulation; breathing in accordance with definite rules raised the breathing process as well as the circulation to consciousness. The old Oriental could do that because his soul and spirit were not yet so intensely linked to the body as they are in the man of today. If, applying a sort of anachronism, anyone were simply to practice this old oriental method today, without attaining to higher knowledge, he would, more or less, ruin his human body; for it would be interfering too much with the health of the physical body, now that the human being is so much more intimately connected with his body than was once the case, for instance, at the time when the ancient Indian sought after wisdom.

But what did a student acquire by going through these exercises in ancient India? He made the breathing process into something conscious, that is, he inhaled consciously. Through these exercises he gradually acquired the possibility of following the process that takes place when the pressure of inhalation causes the brain fluid to oscillate toward the brain through the spinal canal, and to strike, as it were, against the brain. It is this impact of the brain fluid against the solid parts of the brain (this brain fluid, which rushes upward during inhalation, falling again during exhalation), it is this impact that causes mental pictures to arise. The production of mental pictures is something much more complicated than is imagined today, when everything is thought out materialistically. Today it is thought—or at least it was until recently, for today people are no longer interested in thinking in clear concepts—it is thought that some kind of evolution, some nerves underlie the forming of mental pictures. This is nonsense. The real fact is that there is actually a constant striking of the brain fluid against the nerve system taking place which starts off those processes underlying the forces of the nervous system. The ancient Indian student of wisdom raised this activity to consciousness. What did he learn by following this whole process consciously? He learned from it how the underlying processes which had formed his brain really point back to former earth lives. Through his present rhythmic system he experienced, so to speak, his former earth life; this past earth life became a certainty to him. For such a student of wisdom it was simply self-evident that he had had a previous earth life. He could perceive it, you understand, by raising his breathing process to consciousness. Today this must be accomplished in another way. It cannot be brought about today by meditation that arises from a special way of shaping the breathing process; for this method must not be used by the modern human being. Quite the contrary, meditation today should proceed from a quiet dwelling on mental pictures: thus it starts out from the opposite side, and thereby takes into consideration the fact that modern man is much more closely united with his physical body. But by dwelling quietly on a mental picture, we learn to know this nuance of the rhythmic system from the other side, from the spirit-soul side. We come to know the process from the other side; in such a way, however, that we do not penetrate deeper into our body, as did the ancient Indian,—indeed we must not do so, because we have already penetrated into it deeply enough; but by freeing ourselves from the corporeal nature, we trace out the whole cosmos in the realm of spirit and soul, and the cosmos teaches us how the former earth life is connected with this life.

You can see, my dear friends, the statements made in Anthroposophy are not abstract and fanatical, but are founded upon a penetrating knowledge of the human organization as seen from within; they are not based on an external examination of the organism as a corpse,—or, even if not as a corpse, still from without—but upon a knowledge of it coming from within, from intimate contact with both aspects, the reciprocal action between the rhythmic and nerve-sense systems on the one hand and on the other between the rhythmic and metabolic systems (for the rhythmic system also has an impact upon the metabolism). And by coming to know from the other side this interweaving of the rhythmic with the metabolic processes, we become certain that the germ of the next earth life lies buried within us, for the metabolism in its spiritual aspect contains the germ of the next earth life. Even though it is the lowest part of the human organism for this earth life, from the spiritual aspect it contains the germ of the next earth life. Thus we rise to a consideration of the human being as a whole.

You see, in this respect those people especially who are living within the realm of western civilization are often really like a blind man confronting color. Perhaps what I am about to say is far from the thoughts of many of you, but I should like to call your attention to the following: All that we conceive as mathematics, all that comes into play in linear or angular forms, in the vertical or the horizontal, as well as all that we measure, all that we conceive mathematically, we develop really out of our inner being; it is the foundation of our inner life. The moment we learn to perceive what underlies our inner being, we no longer speak in the Kantian fashion, simply pouring that which springs up within the inner being of man into some kind of unintelligible expression. Mathematics is said to be “knowledge a priori.” A priori! Now, that is a word for you, is it not? It means “there from the very beginning,” a priori. But if one learns to see inwardly, then one knows whence this curious mathematical knowledge springs. The astral body has gone through the mathematics of the whole universe, and all this has condensed again. We simply let that rise out of the soul which we have experienced in a former incarnation, which has then passed through the whole cosmos, only to emerge once more in the purity of mathematical-geometrical lines.

You thus see that in this a priori conception of the world is expressed analogous to the blind man's conception of color, Otherwise one would have to say that what is called in the Kantian sense “a priori” arises out of our former incarnations and appears in this incarnation in a metamorphosed form, after having gone through the entire macrocosm.

I have been speaking to you here, my dear friends, about the laws underlying the whole human being which reveal themselves when we consider life as it passes through repeated incarnations. Our modern age is very reluctant in giving heed to such things. That is why our present world conception remains external. I should like to make this clear to you by an illustration.

Let us assume that we are now examining—according to the prevailing method—a people belonging to a certain locality on earth. Now what do we do today as historians? We say: there lives the present generation; another preceded it; this generation was in turn preceded by one still further back. We thus go back to former centuries, back to the Middle Ages, and, I might say, we follow the blood streams down through the generations, follow all that is transmitted down through external heredity, and come to the conclusion that what lives in the present people can be traced back to the earlier phases of development of this people.

Thus is history regarded today. If a typical historian wishes to follow German, French, or English history as far back as possible, he does so by going back through the chain of ancestors according to their physically inheritable characteristics. What a present-day generation of a certain people manifests in life is supposed to be understood from what former generations of this people have experienced, that is, from what can be inherited physically; this is the way people talk. This is, however, nothing but materialistic thinking applied to history. For if you consider what anthroposophical spiritual science offers you, not as a mere theory, but as something to carry over into your view of life, then you must not be content to speculate upon the repetition of earth lives, to consider as something isolated the fact that your soul has gone through previous earth lives, and will go through others in the future, but you must also consider with this in mind what takes place all over the earth. For if we look at one or another generation living today, we can certainly trace it back to former generations through the blood—through external, physically inheritable characteristics; these former generations may have lived in the same part of the earth or, if we consider the streams of migrations, they may be traced back to ancestors who at an earlier age lived in another part of the earth; but in doing all this we remain entirely in the realm of the physical-material.

There is, however, more to it. In this present age we have before us a generation of people who, in regard to what concerns its physical bodily nature, descends from its ancestors; but the souls that dwell in the individual human beings need not at all be related to these ancestors. In fact the soul has not co-experienced with them on earth what has happened in the course of the many generations, and what outwardly represents the destiny of these ancestors; this the soul has experienced in the spirit-soul world during life between death and a new birth.

We look back upon our grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather. Well, we were then not yet born; our soul was still in the spiritual world. Our body has inherited from all of them, but our soul—nothing! It has lived in an entirely different world during all this time; in its own experiences it need have nothing to do with what our body has inherited from our forefathers. And if research into these things is made in the realm of the spirit, the results often appear paradoxical to outer observance. In general one must clearly realize that speculation or philosophizing on the true facts of life usually gives rise to absurdity. Spiritual perception alone reveals the truth. And a spiritual researcher is often himself astonished at his own results. Indeed he finds in the very surprise awakened by his results a sort of verification of them; for, if he found only what he had already anticipated in his thoughts, he might not feel so strong a confirmation. Just the fact that things are, for the most part, different from what one imagines, usually makes it possible to see that, by being devoted to true spiritual research, one is working not in a subjective, but in an objective realm.

From this source, you will see, something comes to light relating to the historical in humanity. I have pointed to it before, and what I have said will not in any sense be corrected here, but only amplified, for we are moving in a very complicated realm. We have said on an earlier occasion, and this is in a certain respect perfectly true, that we have for instance among the peoples of Europe numerous personalities who as souls previously lived in the south during the first Christian centuries, and now live more in the north—they are, to be sure, incarnated in Europe, but more in the north, This is entirely true, but it does not apply to the majority of the population. In regard to this, we must seek elsewhere in order to learn the actual facts. In the case of the majority, chiefly of the present western, but also of the middle, European peoples, and even part of the Russian population, spiritual scientific research leads us back to those times at which the conquistadors subdued the aborigines of America. These original Americans, these American Indians had strange inner soul qualities. As a rule we fail to do justice to such things, if we, egotistically boasting of our “higher culture,” regard all this as mere barbarism; we fail to do justice, if we do not take into account the entirely different characteristics of those people who were conquered and exterminated after the discovery of America; if we do not regard them as having special qualities of their own, but merely look down upon them from the bird's-eye view of a higher culture. These early inhabitants of America, the American Indians had, for instance, remarkable pantheistic feelings. They worshipped the “Great Spirit” who pervaded all being. Their souls were permeated by the belief in this all-pervading Great Spirit. Through all that was bound up with this belief in the feeling-life of these people, these souls were predestined to go through a relatively short existence between death and a new birth. But the relationship that had developed, on the one hand, between them and their whole environment, their native land, and on the other between them and the destiny they suffered in being exterminated was decisive for their life between death and a new birth. And from this it has happened that the majority—no matter how paradoxical it may sound, it is simply a fact—that the majority of the western, the middle, and even a part of the eastern Europeans (not all, but a great part of them) have souls that once dwelt in the bodies of the old American Indians, although they certainly descend from physical forbears in the Middle Ages as far as their blood is concerned. Although this may sound paradoxical, it is, nevertheless, true in regard to the majority of the European population. This feeling, once experienced for the Great Spirit, reacted with that which admittedly lies in the external historical development of lineal descent, and which we take up with the first feelings of love in childhood, especially when we practice this out of our inner being through imitation. What we thus take up is to a great extent something absorbed from without. It enters into reciprocal activity with what arises in the soul from former incarnations. And European life is not understood rightly if it is considered only one-sidedly from a point of view lacking in reality, that is, according to inherited characteristics. It can be understood only when we know whence come the souls who have united themselves with these inherited characteristics in order to bring about a reciprocal activity. And what has now become reality in European history was formed only as a result of this cooperation between what the souls are through their former earth lives and what they have received in this life through inheritance; also through education, but education in its broadest sense.

These peoples have been extensively intermingled with souls who lived in the south during the first centuries of Christianity and who then also reincarnated in this western and eastern Europe; but all that has taken place in social life, and especially what is taking place more and more now in these catastrophic days, hints at the fact that the reality of this European life is a complicated one. And the spiritual researcher finds that it is made especially complicated because the reincarnated American-Indian souls unite with what appears as inherited characteristics in the various nationalities.

We must contrast this with another European population, which we find in the first Christian centuries, at the time of the migrations of peoples—speaking in terms of outer history. I refer to that European population of the past which as barbarians absorbed Christianity as it advanced from the south, transforming it into something entirely different from what in the first centuries had developed as Christianity in the Greek and Roman world. These souls who belonged to the time of the migrations of the peoples and also those of the following centuries were so constituted that, in addition to their original tendencies, they showed themselves deeply impressed by Christianity as it made its way northward from the south. We must clearly realize that this population of Europe which absorbed Christianity at the time of the folk migrations brought to the surface very special qualities. There was in this people a notably strong tendency to form the physical organism in a way that made the ego-consciousness appear with a special vigor. And the ego-consciousness that thus manifested itself was united with the selflessness of Christianity. As a result the soul was shaped in a special manner. These then were souls who, so to speak, absorbed Christianity a few centuries after it had come into existence. Although the souls who have incarnated in the majority of the European population of today have learned about Christianity in an external way through education, as well as through what can be inherited as feelings, they had not in their former lives in America, as Indians, absorbed anything of Christianity. We can easily understand the relation of the present day European population to Christianity once we have discovered that these souls for the most part have experienced nothing of Christianity in their former incarnations; that Christianity with them is merely a matter of education, of a tradition handed down through generations,—a tradition perpetuated by education.

But there is yet another aspect: those souls who came to know Christianity in Europe, that is, in its early development, incarnated, as the present times approached, more toward the east, more toward Asia. So that in fact those souls who were once somewhat permeated with Christianity now swing in the other direction, and absorb what has remained in the Orient of the old oriental traditions and which has fallen there into decadence. The Japanese, if studied in a spiritual-scientific way, are often typical reincarnations of souls who once lived in Europe at the time of the migrations.

What is more, we can develop an understanding for prominent personalities if we know such facts. Try to understand the strange personality of Rabindranath Tagore from this point of view.‘ What was educated into him of Orientalism, especially of Indian tradition, comes to him through heredity. Thus what is given to him through heredity, through education, comes to him from outside. This is for the most part decadent, and for this reason has such an “artful” character. For in a certain way, what one hears from Rabindranath Tagore is formulated in an extremely “artful” fashion. But at the same time the European feels something in Tagore that glows warmly through all that is presented in such an artful manner. And that comes from the fact that this soul lived in a former incarnation among a people who had accepted Christianity.

You can see that it is no less abstract to observe the external world from a merely materialistic viewpoint than it is to develop some other unreal life conception. What do we know of present day humanity if we know only about its blood relationship, about its blood descent, if we are not able to take into consideration what the souls have brought with them from a former incarnation? This element, you can see, merges with the external elements of heredity and education into a single totality.

Those souls who dwelt in Middle Europe at the time of the folk migrations were predestined through the entire configuration of their souls, and, above all, through their inward permeation with Christianity, to remain longer than usual in the spirit world between death and a new birth, in order to experience this realm more intensely.

When the spiritual researcher investigates the present, he is led back to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, or shortly before or shortly after the event. In Asia, the population had absorbed nothing of this Mystery of Golgotha. Oriental wisdom, nevertheless, that wisdom which blossomed in the oriental character as a result of devotion, laid the foundation for whatever understanding was brought to Christianity in its earliest times. The Mystery of Golgotha stands there for us as a unique fact. When viewed from the various epochs, it can be understood in the most varied ways. The people of the first centuries of Greek and Roman development approached this Mystery by applying to it the wisdom coming to them from the Orient. From oriental wisdom they received the concepts through which they understood the incarnation of Christ in the man, Jesus of Nazareth.

The people, however, who lived in Asia before, at the time of, and even after the Mystery of Golgotha, were still endowed with a far more active creative force than can be found in the present-day Orient, although it had already at that time become somewhat tenuous. These people, who then dwelt in Asia, at least a large part of them, are incarnated today in the greater part of the American population. As a result of their specially developed oriental culture, just this part of humanity had to spend a long time in the life between death and a new birth; they are thus in reality old souls. They are being born in America in bodies in which, if I may say so, they do not feel very comfortable, and which they, therefore, prefer to consider more from the outside than from the inside. That is why we find in America today a special predilection for an external view of life. Thus the curious paradox reveals itself: those souls who lived in the Orient, who had not yet accepted Christianity, but who had a fine spiritual culture, live now in American bodies. A part of these, I should say, shows in an isolated phenomenon how these things really work. The Oriental had an inclination toward the spiritual in the world. As these souls appear again today in America, they develop a special predilection for the spiritual world, but this has now become abstract, has no more the inward, living quality. In times gone by, in previous incarnations, all experiences dealing with the spirit world were connected with a neglect of the physical world, with a disregard for things physical. Among the adherents of Christian Science this appears in a decadent form; the existence of matter is denied, they do not wish to look at matter. One feels that these people, in a certain way, continue to pay homage to the old, but once living spirituality, which has now become more deadened, more corpse-like, has now taken on a spiritually corpse-like form. But this applies only to a distinguishable few among the population. In general, one can see in the American point of view how the souls do not sit quite solidly within their bodies, how they consequently try to apprehend the body from without, how even the science of psychology in America takes on a character in which there is no true concept of the ego. Because the soul was once accustomed to feel itself in the super-earthly, this embodiment of the ego, as it now takes place in the west, is not carried out as it should be. From this it comes about that one thought is not properly linked to another. This then is called the “psychology of association.” In it the human being becomes a sort of plaything, tossed about by the thoughts as they associate with one another. And here, curiously enough, something crops up that could be expressed by a phrase often used disparagingly by certain people in referring to our doctrine of repeated earth lives; they speak of the “transmigration of the soul.” But we must not use the phrase: “transmigration of the soul” when referring to repeated earth lives, unless we do, indeed, intend to speak disparagingly. For in speaking of repeated earth lives, we are dealing with an evolution, with a development of the soul, not with what we are accused of teaching, But in another sense we can speak of soul-transmigrations, for in fact the souls who inhabit one part of the earth during a certain period, do not remain on the same spot on earth in the next epoch, but are at a different place. Hence we find the souls who were incarnated in the south during the first Christian centuries now incarnated in western, middle, and eastern Europe, more toward the north; but this population is now interspersed with other souls who were incarnated in American Indian bodies. Over in Asia we find the souls who lived in Europe at the time of the folk migrations, or even before and afterward; and in America are to be found those souls who lived in Asia at the very time the Mystery of Golgotha took place.

We are now undoubtedly facing an era in which people will develop a longing to penetrate full reality. Today there still exists a strong opposition to this penetration of full reality, not only in the theoretical realm, but also in the realm of outer life. Only consider how I have had to characterize again and again from the most various angles this illness of intellectualism, which has appeared in the last years. Often even in public lectures I have had to point in sharp terms to this deception of a large part of humanity by intellectualism. In this we also find something hinted at, but in an already quite abstract form, which has of course appeared gradually in social thinking as the outcome of materialism. Slowly in the course of the nineteenth century the principle of nationality arose, this emphasizing of the nationality, this wish to live only in the nationality. This represents the antithesis of the soul-spirit nature; for this soul-spirit nature does not trouble itself with nationality. Many of the souls who today live in Europe were formerly incarnated in America. The souls who today live chiefly in Japanese bodies should not point to their ancestors, as far as their souls are concerned, but to the time of the folk migrations in Europe. Yes, indeed, the Americans should not pride themselves on their forebears, their European blood ancestry. Rather they should point to the fact that they once lived in Asia at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and there went through a culture which was not yet permeated by Christianity; thus they are also those who accept Christianity through external tradition and external education. There is still a strong opposition from this quarter to a soul-spiritual conception of the world.

It is not only in science that we find materialism, but throughout all external civilization. And what politicians want to make of Europe today, this new map of Europe, is entirely created out of materialistic feeling, out of materialistic impulses. Humanity will only awaken, when it adds to these nationalistic impulses—which are materialistic, based solely on an observation of the external continuity of the generations—the social-historical consideration of life in its true reality. We shall then see the souls, as well, who live in present day bodies. These souls have only as an outer sheath what is transmitted through successive generations by means of physical heredity or what is handed down to them through tradition as spiritual culture and merely accepted as such through education.

In the depths of human souls, the longing is already prevalent to go beyond what a purely materialistic conception can provide. Of course, the results of true spiritual research, when compared with the customary thinking of today, often seem paradoxical. But anyone who wishes to look deeply into life, especially into present-day life, (which is indeed full of hardships) will see, for instance, that many a thing becomes understandable when he is willing to listen to what the spiritual researcher says out of his exact, conscientious research. People are accustomed to attach some value to what is communicated to them by astronomical observatories or the like. If somewhere an astronomical discovery has been made, people do not say they accept it upon authority. They are not conscious that they do indeed accept it upon authority—although in connection with sound human reasoning which considers that what is given out to the rest of the world by an observatory is not senseless; that things are organized in a sensible way, so that there is no reason for people to doubt the truth of what is communicated to them. The fabric of life is such that we need not say that we accept something merely on authority. But we should also think the same way when occasional spiritual researchers appear, as do occasional astronomers, and announce the results of their spiritual research; for we shall find these results verified everywhere in life if we are willing to apply sound common sense.

Anthroposophical spiritual science would certainly remain theoretical and abstract in reference to life, if it did not permeate each separate branch of human life. You must not imagine that history, for example, ought to be influenced by spiritual science in such a way that we now develop only—although somewhat more profoundly—the history of epochs, of generations or the like; that is not the intention. But spiritual research should be combined with the outer facts of the pragmatic or other view of history, and from this should spring a vision of the complete reality.

However great the longing may be in the unconscious depths of human life for such a vision of life, one corresponding with reality, there exists nonetheless just as strongly, and indeed in the more conscious part of human life, the opposition to our views. And in order to give the appearance of justification, these opponents of ours seek out all ways and means. They do not shrink from any sort of defamation. I showed you yesterday in an example how untruthfully these opponents proceed, how they simply lie, stating the objective untruth. [*Bern, December 13, 1920, public lecture: The Results of Spiritual Science and Their Relationships to Art and Religion. (In this lecture reference is made to the falsity of certain statements made by theologians in Basel concerning the plastic group at the Goetheanum.)] Quite apart from the fact that these are attacks on anthroposophical spiritual science—which does not concern us much—what human qualities are thus revealed to us!

All the more, my dear friends, must we draw strength from sources which, in spite of all this, give us a picture of the world needed by humanity at present, and which will need it even more in the near future, especially that part of it which is still in its prime today. It will no longer be able to live with the old picture of the world! We should draw strength from such a vision of the world as it broadens the historical outlook, and speaks of the origin of souls, not merely of the origin of bodies. And in addition, we should acquire the strength to stand up for Anthroposophy, wherever we can. Anthroposophy, my dear friends, will need people who stand up for it. What appears today as opposition to our work will not diminish and will not assume pleasanter forms in the future. On the contrary, this opposition will embrace worse and worse forms. Whoever is conscious of what Anthroposophy signifies will be able through this very awareness really to find the basis from which he, in his position in life, can work in an adequate way. For what is done through Anthroposophy is really not for any personal ends; it is done for the good of humanity. And we must not let ourselves be disheartened by the fact that our opponents are going to become stronger and stronger and ever more vicious—by the fact that already today many unsavory methods are employed. The meanness of our opponents will continue to increase. If, for this reason, we lose courage, we do not really understand what Anthroposophy means for the future development of mankind.

With these last words it was my wish to draw your attention to something which ought to be considered within our Movement. I have purposely connected these last words with the important study we have undertaken today concerning the progress of the souls through repeated earth lives, and the way our human organization is being built up from two directions, from the great universe and from the earth. What external science knows about these things is indeed very little. This external science has limited itself to the consideration of what is, after all, only the final picture of the really active forces—ectoderm, endoderm, and so forth—without knowing what macrocosmic significance the ectoderm has, what telluric significance the endoderm has, how these, again, are connected with mental image and will. Having no regard for these far-reaching interrelationships, a materialistic method of perception really considers only externalities, only facts which are external to the last degree. And the same applies in the historical field, where the eye is fixed on what, I might say, streams through the blood of the generations, and is to be observed through tradition in the course of the linear continuity of historical development in any territory you might name. Whereas the fact is that the full reality can be understood, if we ask ourselves not only what blood flows in a person's veins, but whence comes the soul which only uses this blood. We must strive after a total consideration of humanity, after a true vision of reality; for this is what is demanded by the world and will be demanded more and more. Anthroposophy is ready to give this.

This is what I wished to say to you today. Let us hope that we shall soon see each other again so that we can continue such studies, which can lead up to an understanding of the present and of the future, to an understanding of human nature and of the universe in so far as man is born out of it.

• 1. Bern, December 13, 1920; The Results of Spiritual Science and Their Relationships to Art and Religion

Today's deliberations will take as their starting point something that was already partially hinted at when I last had the opportunity to address you from this position. Today, we must once again consider the question that arises as a kind of conundrum of the times, but which is at the same time a profound riddle of humanity: How are the phenomena of nature, to which we are subject as physical subject to as physical beings, and the phenomena of the moral, ethical, and spiritual world, to which we must in some way profess to belong, because otherwise we cannot recognize our own human dignity? No matter how materialistic someone's outlook on knowledge may be, if he has even a rudimentary sense of human dignity, he will accept the difference between good and evil, between moral and immoral. And he will look up to the moral world, perhaps , if he is a materialist, reluctantly, but still in some way at least questioning, at least doubting, to the spiritual world, a spiritual world order that permeates the natural world to which we belong through our physical-sensual body. But if we consider what can emerge from the formation of our time to enlighten us about the nature of the world, we see that today human thinking, feeling and impulse are in profound conflict. This conflict cannot be resolved overnight, and it is not easy for modern man to find his way out of it. On the one hand, there is what science reports to him, which today has such tremendous success, that science, which rises from the contemplation of the external sensual world to justified or unjustified hypothetical views even about the beginning and end of the world, and on the other hand, there is the demand of the moral world. But how can the conflict between the two be resolved when, from the perspective of natural science, we learn that once upon a time there was a kind of cosmic fog; out of this cosmic fog the cosmos formed, our earth formed, initially in such a way that it was only a kind of mineral surge. Then gradually the plant and animal world emerged. Finally, man appeared. And if we then extend the same way of thinking, the same kind of lawfulness that we have envisaged, further to the becoming of the earth, we come to the conclusion that this earth will one day return to a kind of mineral surge, that the scene will no longer be able to support living beings, how, in other words, this scene will be a large cemetery that holds everything buried that was once alive, that was once ensouled and spiritualized. So there we are, between the mineralized world and yet again the mineralized world in the middle of it, having emerged from this mineralized world with all our organs, which actually represent only structures in which the substances that constitute the external world are interwoven more intricately than they are in the external world.

From what has emerged as a human being within this scientifically hypothetical world, the demand now arises to be moral, to be good, ideas and ideals arise in man, and the question must arise: What will become of the demands of the moral world, what will become of ideals, of ideas, when one day everything we understand scientifically, including man, will have fallen to the great final cemetery?

Of course, one can say that this is the extension of the scientific way of thinking to the hypothetical, and one does not actually need to go that far. But then one would have to at least raise the question: So where should one turn? Where can one gain any insight into the place of man in the universe, insofar as he is a moral being, a being who carries ideas and ideals within himself? This question would have to be raised if one did not admit to science the right to form hypotheses about the end of the earth and the beginning of the earth. But from all that is currently presented to man by recognized human science, which, after all, has been formed entirely out of natural science, no information can be given about man's place in the universe. I would like to explain what is emerging as a conflict in all human feeling in the present day and which is fundamentally intimately connected with all the forces of decline that are making themselves so terribly felt in our time by placing a man of the present day who has absorbed everything that is accepted as enlightenment, education and scientific knowledge in our time, in other words, a man who feels very clever in the present day. I will place him on one side and on the other side I will place a person from the Greek cultural community, a person who lived in the pre-Socratic period, still in the time from which so little has survived, such as individual sayings of the great philosophers Heraclitus, Anaxagoras and so on. I would like to place such an educated Greek next to the very clever people of the present. And not just a Greek in his present reincarnation, because if he were in a human body, he would probably also be a very clever person of the present, but I want to place him here as he was as a Greek. So in his embodiment as a Greek, I want to confront him with a very clever person of the present.

A person from that time would say: Yes, you modern people, you know nothing about humanity, because you also know nothing real about the world.

– “Why?” the clever person of the present would ask.

He would say: We have come to know a number of seventy elements, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and so on. We are, however, now at the point where it seems that all these elements can be traced back to one; but we are not yet at the point where we can trace them back to one. We recognize these seventy-two elements, which mix and unmix, combine and separate, and which actually make up everything that happens in the physical-sensual world. Everything you see is based on the connection and disconnection of these elements.

The ancient Greeks would say: It's all very well having seventy-something elements, but you certainly won't get to know the human being with all these elements. There can be no question of that, because the beginning of knowledge of man - the ancient Greek would say - must be made by not speaking of seventy-two or seventy-six elements, of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and so on, but the beginning of knowledge of man must be made by saying: Everything that surrounds us externally, sensually, consists of earth, water, air and fire.

Now the clever person of the present day would say: Yes, that was once, that was in childhood, when one did not yet know as much as we do today. Then one said: earth, water, air and fire, but we have outgrown these childish things. Then four elements were assumed; now we know that there are seventy-six elements. That was a very childish way of looking at things. We know that water is not an element. We know that air should not be spoken of as an element either. We know that heat, fire, is not a material at all. We are tremendously clever. You were just at a childish stage of world view.

Now perhaps the Greek might reply: I have already studied your seventy elements, and the way you look at them – and it is the way of looking at them that matters – is that, in our conceptualized world, these seventy elements belong to the earth, not to water, not to air, not to fire, but to the earth. It is nice of you that you can differentiate and specify this earth and also think of it in great variety, split into seventy-two or seventy-six elements, that is all nice; we were not yet ready to get to know these interesting details, but we have summarized all this under the expression “earth.” But what we understand by water, air and fire, you understand nothing about, and because you understand nothing about it, you cannot have any knowledge of human nature. For you see — as the Greek of this time would say — there are two kinds of people: firstly, the human being who walks around between birth and death, first as a child and then as an adult, and then the human being who lies there as a corpse for a few days and then is in the grave. We are only talking about the physical human being – the Greeks would say – and there is this twofold form: the human being who walks from birth to death, and then the human being whom one sees for a few days as a corpse and who then lies in the grave. And what you learn from your seventy-two or seventy-six elements that combine and release, that only refers to the human being who lies in the grave, to the human corpse. You can recognize with your chemistry and physics how things are in the human being as a human corpse, but you cannot recognize anything at all about the human being who walks around alive between birth and death. You have a science that only refers to the observation of a person after he has died. You understand nothing about the living human being. You have happily reduced your science to a science of the dead human being, not at all of the living human being. For if you want to have a science of the living human being, then you must first observe the comprehensive, universal weaving and living of that which we call “water”. We do not call the coarse liquid element that runs in the brook water, but we call water everything where cold and moisture interact in the world; we call that water — as the Greeks would say. And in that we want to form a living image of what is intermingled there of moisture and cold in all forms, then we are first of all led to imagine not with mere concepts, with mere ideas, with mere abstractions, but in images. And the Greek will now say: If you can perceive moisture with some sensation of cold, when that passes into other moist things, shaped by the moist element or revealing itself in another sensation of cold, then you get living, weaving images in moisture and cold. And one ascends to the comprehension of the plant world and begins to understand the interweaving of the watery and cold element in such a way that, now not in the gross material water, but in this weaving of cold and watery, the plant world arises in spring in images, how it tears itself from the ground, how it tears itself through the watery in itself from the cold, because the earth is dry and cold. And in the formation of the plant world through spring, summer and autumn, we see another weaving of the watery element, and we grow in the mighty imagination of this outer weaving and life of the watery element. But the whole plant world with its formations is in it.

And so the Greek says: It is not a sensual thing that matters to us, but what one has as a super-sensual thing; weaving cold and damp, that is what matters to us. And we perceive the weaving and life of the plant world in this liquid, watery element within it. If we get to know this, not through abstract concepts, but through these images, which themselves inspire us to be inwardly active, then we need only look back into ourselves and we perceive in what we can observe outside in spring, summer, autumn and winter, in the emerging plant world, in the overcoming of the cold by warmth, in all that takes place towards autumn and again towards winter, in all this we perceive something that we can then imagine as a miniature image. When a person falls asleep, something happens in him that is very similar to spring, and as he continues to sleep, something similar happens in him that is like the sprouting, sprouting summer life. And when the person wakes up again, it is like winter life. You see a miniature image of the outer life, insofar as this outer life produces the vegetative, in what the human etheric body is. The Greeks would have said: In your seventy-two or seventy-six elements you only get to know the human corpse. But this human corpse is permeated by something that can only be known in pictures, but in such pictures, which arise when one thinks of the vegetative, one thus interprets the watery element. There you learn to recognize what, from birth to death, as the etheric body, makes active what you learn through your quite a few seventy elements to be the element of death. And by not rising to the watery element, you also never get to know the human being as a living being.

But now something else begins. That is just earth, which represents the dead in man. The moment a person dies, his body is taken over by the earth, by the many seventy elements; the lawfulness of the earth, the lawfulness of the earth element, extends over him. Where is the lawfulness of the element that is the watery? This lawfulness is not on earth, this lawfulness is out there in the cosmos. And if you want to look for — as the Greek would say — who brings forth this surging of the cold and damp through spring, summer, autumn and winter, you have to look up into the cosmic element, first to the planets, then to the fixed stars, look up into the vastness of the cosmos. Your earthly element is only valid in relation to the human being when he lies in the grave; the human being who walks around here on earth is, in every single moment, insofar as he carries his etheric body within him, subject to the laws of the cosmos. These are the laws that come into effect from the weaving of the planets or from the forces of the fixed stars. And so essential for the Greeks in the time I have indicated was the watery element that they would have said: In what the watery element is that surrounds the earth, clouds it, or discharges itself in thunderstorms, insofar as this watery element is effective, the cosmos is effective in the earth with its forces. What takes place in the watery element has nothing to do with the earthly element or with earthly things in general. It is to be sought in the cosmos, and there man rises into the cosmic element, simply because he has within him an active etheric body, which the elements snatch from the fate, let us say, of chemistry, between birth and death.

But with that, one has actually not yet grasped the human being in truth. One has only grasped what permeates him as life forces, what makes him grow, what causes him to be able to digest, what accompanies him as life forces between birth and death. But a third one – and the ancient Greek philosophers I mentioned would also have pointed this out – asserts itself in the human being, which is certainly active the whole time between birth and death, but actually asserts itself in a very special, unique way, not like the usual life forces. These are the forces that lie in our rhythmic system, in our respiratory system, in our blood circulation system and so on, everything that is rhythm, rhythmic activity in us.

You will be able to sense a certain connection between your not merely physical life, but your being as a soul, and breathing, if you bring to mind the following, which every human being knows. You will have woken up at times with a particular fear. You emerge with the awareness of a sense of anxiety and you notice: there is something wrong with your breathing. Certainly, the connection between breathing and the life of the soul is a mysterious one; but it can at least be perceived when a person wakes up with nightmares and when he notices the irregularity of his breathing. There is a connection between the life of the soul, between all the surging feelings and emotions within us, the feelings of fear and anxiety, the feelings of joy and pleasure, and the rhythm of breathing and the rhythm of circulation. This rhythmic system is something other than the mere system of life. This rhythmic system has to do with our being as soul; it has a great deal to do with our life of soul and our soul nature. It is, after all, the air that we breathe that actually stimulates the entire rhythmic system, and in ancient times people still spoke of the element of air and its relationship to human beings, for example in the time when the mystery schools studied the rhythms that regulate human inner activity, but from which at the same time the meter of Homer, the hexameter, was derived. If you take the average normal breathing and circulation rhythm, you have the following: you take about eighteen breaths and four times as many heartbeats in one minute. The ratio of blood rhythm to breathing rhythm is four to one. Take the hexameter: long, short, short – long, short, short – long, short, short: three feet and the caesura is the fourth. The four beats that fall on the half of the breath; after the caesura: dactyl, dactyl, dactyl, again the caesura. The inner structure of the Homeric verse and, in general, the inner structure of the old verses is taken from the human rhythmic system. In the peculiar structure of the Homeric verse, we find the expression of the relationship between blood circulation and respiratory rhythm. By taking seriously the element of air that unites with man and then separates from man, one felt that one absorbs something into oneself that has to do with the regular experiences of the human soul. And by speaking of the air element, the Greek began to speak of the most beautiful and also the most ordinary aspects of the human soul, and he remembered that a human being takes 25,920 breaths in the course of a twenty-four-hour day, and that the sun goes around the entire vault of heaven once every 25,920 years with its vernal point. And he harmonized the rhythm of the world with the daily rhythm of the human being. He pointed out the connection between the soul of the world and the soul of man, and he said: With the life that flows between birth and death, which in its twenty-four-hour course presents us with a miniature picture of spring, summer, autumn and winter, of this aqueous lawfulness that spreads out for the cold and damp in space, and moisture in the universe, which is governed by the cosmic, in this relationship between the human etheric and the cosmic, which expresses itself in the seasons, which is expressed in the change of weather, which is regulated by the movements of the planets, in this relationship we have what expresses itself in the human etheric body. When we come to the rhythmic system, we have to turn to the air element. We have to turn to what, in ancient times, when it was better understood, gave rise to the formation of that soul element that came to light in verse construction, because people sensed the connection between the human soul and the soul of the world. One still comes into the spatial when one observes life. One must indeed ascend into the cosmic-spatial. But one comes out of space and perceives what is sent into it from time as rhythm into space, when we turn to the rhythmic system.

You see, in the rhythmic element, which is the air element, the Greeks still perceived something of what they said: the human soul is rooted in the world soul, and it is the world soul itself that lives in its rhythm and sends the miniature images of its rhythm into human life. Outside, the world soul causes the spring equinox to advance a little each year; in 25,920 years it moves around the entire solar orbit, and in 25,920 breaths a day, a person has a miniature image in his or her rhythm of an immensely long world rhythm. In twenty-four hours, the human being presents a rhythm within himself that is a reflection of a cosmic year lasting 25,920 years. Thus, the human being is rooted in the soul of the world, in that he is within the soul of the world with his soul, lives within it.

If we then ascend to the element of fire, we have not only the soul, but also the spiritual that permeates us with the ego; we also have that which finds its physical expression in the element of blood. Just as we perceive the relationship of the human soul to the soul of the world through the element of air, so we perceive the relationship of the human spirit, of the human ego, to the spirit of the world through the element of warmth or fire. In earlier times, man was led up into spiritual regions by hearing about those elements that today's quite clever man thinks have arisen from a childish way of thinking. On the contrary, we must find our way back to this way of thinking; only we must reach it fully consciously, not instinctively, as it was in those days. But if we first penetrate into the watery element, we experience the world itself as a great living thing, because we are immediately led into the cosmos with its sources of life. We experience the world as a living thing. When we enter the rhythmic element, we experience the world as ensouled, and when we then enter the element of warmth, we experience the world as spiritualized.

But you cannot get to know the watery element through our abstract concepts, through all the concepts that you can get today if you go through elementary school, through secondary school, through high school, through universities; with all these concepts, you do not gain anything with which you could grasp the watery element. This must be grasped with imagination; it reveals itself only in images. Then, in a certain respect, the ordinary abstract way of thinking must be transformed into a concrete way of thinking, into an artistic conception of the world. The modern philosopher will immediately object: it is impossible to grasp the world in pictures; it is impossible to grasp the world artistically. I am constructing a theory of knowledge; the laws of nature must be encompassed by logic. It must be possible to express everything one wants to understand about the world in abstract concepts and abstract laws. People can demand this and they can base such epistemologies, but when nature creates artistically, it cannot be captured by such epistemologies; then it must be grasped in images. We cannot dictate to nature how she should be understood; instead, we must listen to how she wants to be understood. And it can only be grasped in its watery element of the plant world through imagination, and it can only be grasped in its rhythmic life, out into the rhythms of the world, through inspiration, through the pursuit of rhythmic life, through living into the life of breathing.

If you have nightmares, then you are oppressed by the rhythm of the world, which comes over you so vehemently that you cannot bear it. But if, after going through certain exercises, you can now crawl into this air element yourself, can move with the rhythm yourself, then you enter into the world of inspiration, then you are outside your body, just as the air itself, which moves in, is outside your body. Then you move with the air into and out of the body. Then you move on to the concept of what man truly is, not what lies in the grave after his death and what today's science can grasp.

But at the same time, one must rise from abstract concepts, from mere logical images to imaginations, to inspirations and then to intuitions. Today, however, abstract life is being taken very far. It is spirited. One can think up the following so beautifully. I may have mentioned it here before, but it is important to point out such things again and again.

You travel past two places at a decent speed. A cannon is fired at one place, and a cannon is fired at a slightly later point in time at another place that you pass later. Then you hear the cannonade from the place where the shot is fired later, of course only after you have heard the bang from the first place. Now you can easily imagine the following: If you move faster and faster, you will finally move at the speed of sound. If you move as fast as sound travels, then when you pass the second location, you will be able to perceive the two bangs at the same time. And if you move even faster than sound, you will perceive the later bang first and the earlier one later, because you will have outrun it by moving faster than sound.

There is a lot of speculation like this today. You think to yourself: How do I hear two cannons being fired if I move faster than the sound? I fly away from the sound; then, right, I must also hear the one fired later earlier than the one fired earlier and which I have run away from! You see, you have the possibility of forming something quite logical, but it is not realistic. Because if you were to move as fast as sound, you would be sound yourself and you would make a sound yourself, you would merge into sound, you would merge with sound. It is impossible for someone who thinks realistically to engage in such speculations. But such speculations are being made today. They are called Einstein's theories. Einstein goes to America; the newspapers spread the word that he has had enormous success, but that he said in London that not a single person in America understood him. So then he had his success with all those who did not understand him. Perhaps. But in London it was a great folly to present these abstractions, which of course originated in a very abstract mind, as the greatest and most significant world event, and even the old Lord Haldane felt obliged to emphasize what actually happened there. Basically, nothing more has happened than that a human being has taken abstraction, the spirit of unreality, the study of concepts and ideas, to the extreme, concepts and ideas that are completely alien to reality and have even less in itself than the power of the kind of logic that relates to the dead man in the grave; because with Einstein's concepts, you can no longer even grasp the corpse, but only an extract of the corpse. But basically there is no corrective at all against what is spreading among humanity today. This corrective is only present in anthroposophical spiritual science, which in turn seeks to find the way to concepts that are in line with reality. And these concepts that are in line with reality lead us out into the worlds, for example, which still appear spatial as cosmic worlds. Here we have the world before us as one great living organism, more or less as Goethe spoke of this world in the powerful intuition of the prose hymn 'Nature'. But then, ascending from this world, we come to the soul of the world, to the rhythm of the world, to that which was once called the harmony of the spheres. One comes to the world rhythms when one cultivates it, when one transforms it into imaginations, into rhythms. This is where one has what I tried to present in my 'Occult Science in Outline', where the world rhythm is presented and from the world rhythm the formation of Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth time and the future Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan time. These things are the elaboration of world events from the world rhythm. But just look at the way these successive, unfolding world rhythms are spoken of! First, the human being belongs to these world rhythms. The human being does not arise out of some sort of swirling, out of a mineral or animal swirling, but the human being arises out of the spiritualized world as a whole, and as far as we find world, we also find the human being. But you find something else as well: when you approach the world where rhythms are mentioned, you cannot help but speak of divine spiritual beings when you speak of this world. Do you think it makes sense to speak of the world, as described in a modern physics or chemistry book, in terms of Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai? Of course it would be very out of place if one were to speak first of the special compounds of carbon, of the etheric compounds of carbon in chemistry, of alcohol and so on! If one were to list all these formulas with their carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and so on and then say: this is of angels, this is of archangels - that is of course not possible. But if one ascends to the region where one is compelled to allow the evolution of the earth to emerge from the evolution of Saturn, the sun and the moon, if one beholds this fabric that lives in the world, in the rhythms of the world, that plays into the human soul through the inner human rhythm, which one can follow into the verse, if one can at the same time point out how the verse is constructed in relation to the blood rhythm and the breathing rhythm; if one can ascend to these regions, where one describes Saturn, Sun, Moon and so on, then one is compelled to speak of beings of the spiritual hierarchies. One enters into a world in which real spiritual entities are, not merely into a world in which that hazy pantheism is to live, to which even today some who do not want to be materialists aspire and say: The world is spiritualized.

Well, the world is permeated by spirit, a spiritual element is spreading everywhere – it is roughly the same as when someone says: a lion; you claim that it has a larynx, with which it roars, and a gullet and trachea and lungs and stomach – that is not my concern, I will not talk about it, it is just completely “lionized”. — It is something like saying that someone is completely permeated, the philosophical posturing of the pantheists, who think that the nebulous spiritual is spread everywhere.

But if you really want to talk about the spiritual, you have to talk about individual spiritual beings. Then you have to know how, as soon as you ascend from the water element to the air element, you encounter the spiritual beings that are described in the hierarchies. As soon as one enters the element of fire, one comes to the highest hierarchy: thrones, cherubs, seraphs, and only then to the actual spiritual formation of the world, in which, however, the human being can no longer distinguish individual entities. But before one enters into what superficial pantheists might call the nebulous All-One, one passes through the world in which the individual concrete spiritual entities live. And in these concrete spiritual beings, one now recognizes what also lives in the nature that surrounds us. Because one comes to the fundamentals of the nature that surrounds us. Man cannot be in the nature that surrounds us and that we observe with our chemistry and physics. Man can only be in a nature in which there is also the watery, the airy, and the fiery element.

As soon as we enter the airy element, we have the beings that we describe as angels, archangels and so on. Here we enter into the concrete spiritual world being. We also enter a world that we can grasp both morally and physically. We just don't see it because today we cloud our view of the fact that real morality also emanates from the same world from which, for example, real meter emanates. The world in which the seventy-six elements are found is not, of course, the origin of morality; nor does it contain that which animates the human being. But the moment we enter the rhythmic element, we also enter the world of morality. And the task for the modern human being is to recognize the moral world as real again, to recognize that the same material or substance from which his astral body is formed is contained in moral ideas. The same substance from which our ego is formed is contained in religious ideas and in the religious idea.

We must again find the bridge between the observation of nature and the observation of the spiritual world, but not just the generally hazy spiritual world, but the spiritual world from which our moral intuitions come. I already wanted to point out this interplay between the world of perceptions and the world of intuitions in my Philosophy of Freedom, 1893. I wanted to show how the concrete moral intuitions are taken from a world that lies beyond the world of perceptions and are inserted into the world.

That, after all, is the great task of the present time: not to stop at the world that is actually applicable to man only when he is in the grave, but to ascend to the world that shows us man when he experiences the soul in the rhythm of the physical. But it is precisely in the rhythm of the physical that one learns to understand rhythm in its essence. Thus one learns to understand the cosmic rhythm, and one cannot understand the cosmic rhythm without understanding the sources, the origins of the moral world. Only then can such an understanding come to say: Yes, I have a natural science at present that can be applied to the human being as a corpse. — Of course, it must then come from the corpse of the world, taken from that in the world that perishes. It must relate to that part of the earth that will one day become the corpse of the earth. But in what we grasp in the rhythmic, what we pour out, for example, in verse, in pictures, in the spiritual in general, so that it comes to life as it lives in the rhythms, and what we intuitively grasp in our moral ideals, we create something that outlasts earthly death, just as the individual human soul outlasts human death. The earth will perish according to the laws of nature that we recognize today; according to these laws the earth will perish. And according to the laws that we recognize by approaching the spiritual world, and according to the laws that we recognize when we have moral intuitions, when we have truly religious intuitions, according to these laws the soul is formed, the human souls are formed, which will leave the earth when it decays into death and go to new future existences.

And so it is that today we have an officially recognized science: it teaches that which is dead, it teaches that after which the earth will one day perish in the great cosmic grave. And we need a spiritual science that seriously endeavors to fulfill the words of Christ Jesus: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” We need a spiritual science that seeks the real, the true content of these words of Christ, because these words are about rhythm, about morality, about the divine, about that which passes over to new levels of existence when the earth and the cosmos fall apart and become a corpse. And we must be aware that we must escape from a science that only speaks of death, and move on to a science that rises to the living and through the living to the soul and spirit.

Until the year 333, roughly until the first half of the fourth century A.D., there was actually still a mystery science; in fact, it was only in the sixth century that the last Greek sages were completely expelled. But what did this mystery science actually want? This mystery science wanted to help people overcome the great danger of physical life. And in those days it was still relatively easy to help people overcome the great danger of physical life because they still had something of a unifying power, of group souls. This group soul nature was still very strong until the 4th century AD. Only since the migration of peoples began and the group soul nature was broken by the special element that emanated from the Germanic peoples, has the situation changed. But these mysteries have only attracted individuals whom they have regarded as particularly select, and developed them in the mysteries to a particular spiritual level of education. But in so doing, they did not only do something for these individual initiates and initiates, but because group spirit prevailed, everything was done at the same time for the rest of the environment in which the teacher or otherwise initiate worked. Particularly when we go back to the older Egyptian times, there were a few initiates, but they were at the same time the intellectual leaders in all fields, the leaders of the entire Egyptian people, and because there was group soulfulness, their strength was transferred to the other people who were not initiated. So in those days one had only to initiate individuals.

What was actually intended by this initiation? It was intended that people should be made aware of the danger of becoming mortal in their souls. In Egypt, people had a different concept of immortality than they do today. Today, we actually think of immortality as something that is granted to us in any case, that we cannot lose. In the Samothracean mysteries, for example, it was taught: There are four Kabirs; three of them always kill the fourth. But actually, it was meant that man has a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an ego. The physical body is subject to death, and becomes a physical corpse. The etheric body is scattered in the cosmic, and the astral body also dissolves in a certain way, as I have described in my book Theosophy. If the I does not save its self-awareness by participating in the spiritual, then the three also kill the I and drag it down into mortality. In the mysteries, people sought to save human immortality. They did not imagine that they could acquire immortality through prayers; they did not imagine that they could only relate passively to immortality and the like, but they imagined that those who were initiated, through the special transformation of their soul, through their awakening, through the awakening of their ego, got over the danger of not grasping themselves in spirit and thereby having to go the way of their mortal body. And because individual initiates had this power to still be able to think beyond the mortal body, they were also able to communicate it to other people because there was a group soul spirit. Today there is no more group soul. Since the first third of the 15th century, this has been more and more prepared; today we are called upon to develop freedom as individual human beings. Today we are basically at the point where we face the opposite danger.

While people until the 4th century AD were faced with the danger of not being able to grasp themselves in the spiritual element, so to speak, so that they had to be awakened in this spiritual element, today, due to the special development of their physical body, due to the special development of matter, people are actually really thinkers, and they live terribly much in thoughts. Those people who believe that they live in reality are actually living more than ever in thoughts. Today people are terribly abstract, and they immediately fall for everything that is abstract because they have an inner affinity to the abstract. But these abstractions, these thoughts that are concocted, are not only wrongly interpreted when it is said that they depend on the brain; they really do depend on the brain, because the brain imitates the processes that take place in the spiritual world in a person before birth or before conception. The brain imitates what my soul did before it descended. Now, because this thinking, which is developed with particular perfection today, is mere brain thinking, materialism is right. It must be emphasized again and again: with regard to today's prevailing thinking, materialism is right, because it is a mere imitation of true, living thinking. And so man must come to grasp freedom in thinking and thereby save himself. That is, he must come not only to let his brain think but to take hold of his thinking in such a way that he becomes aware: he is a free being. That is why I placed great emphasis on pure thinking, on free thinking, which at the same time grasps itself as will, so that one thinks but actually wills, so that the volition and the thinking are a substantial grasping itself in pure freedom, as I presented it in my Philosophy of Freedom. It should show people: You are only free when you grasp that which is in you, your immortal self, through which you can save yourself, through which you can save yourself beyond the death of the four Kabirs.

However, one enters a ground that, I would like to say, consists of thin ice, which the modern man does not like to enter because he would prefer that some external worldly powers immortality guaranteed to him in some way, that he would not have to do anything to awaken in himself that which might otherwise fall asleep, that which might otherwise go through death by the human body going through death. And in modern humanity, as thinking becomes more and more similar to the physical processes of the brain, modern humanity is indeed not only facing the danger of no longer understanding anything about immortality, but modern humanity is facing the danger of losing immortality. That is the greatest ideal of Ahriman, to destroy the human being in his individuality, to no longer allow him to be individual, but to take the powers that he has, the power of thought, and to incorporate them into the earthly powers, so that once the earth becomes one great corpse, this corpse will be permeated by all the powers that man, through his logic, incorporates into the earth. So that there would be a great earth spider in which the seventy elements would live, completely pulverized, but interwoven like huge, tangled spiders, human thinking, according to the pattern of mere abstract thinking. That is the ideal that Ahriman would like to achieve: to destroy the individualities of man, to transform the earth from the power of human thought into a web of gigantic thought-spiders, but real spiders. That is the Ahrimanic goal, and it must be avoided by man now truly grasping the spiritual language: “Not I, but the Christ in me”, by the true I becoming alive in him, the immortal I that can understand the words: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away”. That wisdom cannot perish which is reality and which encompasses that reality by which, when the earth is a corpse, the whole being of man is propagated into a new existence. The New Jerusalem in the Apocalypse is meant to speak of such existence. But these things must be understood again. The greatest obstacle to such understanding is, of course, all the Einsteinerei and the like, all that which today, as the great, terrible addiction to abstraction, goes through the world, which is quite suitable for further developing the forces of decline; while for the benefit of humanity it can only be to make use of the forces of the rising, the real powers of body and soul and spirit. That is what I wanted to speak to you about today.

The times themselves speak clearly enough, demanding that we should apply to the conditions and activities of these times those feelings and modes of thinking which we have acquired from our studies of Spiritual Science. Not only do outward circumstances speak clearly, but our conceptions of Spiritual Science also justify us in a certain way, especially in what we have to say today. In many of our basic ways of looking at the world, we have started from one fundamental fact of human evolution, from the fact that this evolution is accomplished by successive stages of which the most important and most related to us began with the great Atlantean Catastrophe, namely this Post-Atlantean Epoch. Four periods of it have passed by, while we are now living in the Fifth Post-Atlantean Period. This period of development, which began in the 15th century of our Christian era, is the one which we can designate as the period of the Spiritual or Consciousness Soul. Other soul forces have been especially evolved in other periods of civilization. In our civilization which has followed the Greco-Latin civilization from the first half of the 15th century, humanity must gradually develop the Spiritual Soul. The preceding period, which commenced in the 8th century B.C. and finished in the 15th century A.D., was pre-eminently the period in which humanity developed the Intellectual or Mind Soul.

Now we need not give a full description of these cultural stages, but we will particularly look at what is a peculiarity of our age—this age which has comparatively few centuries behind it. Each age lasts on average about 2000 years. Therefore much remains to be done in this period of the Spiritual Soul. The task of humanity—of civilized humanity in this age of the Spiritual Soul—will be that of laying hold of the whole human being and making him entirely dependent on himself, of lifting into the full light of consciousness much of that which in earlier periods man felt instinctively and judged instinctively.

Many present difficulties and much that is chaotic around us in our era, become quite explicable when one knows that the task of our era is to raise that which is instinctive to the plane of consciousness. What is instinctive in us happens to a certain degree by itself, but to achieve a conscious result one must make an inward effort, above all, to begin to think truly with one's whole being. Man tries to avoid this, he does not willingly take a conscious part in the shaping of world conditions. Here is a point over which many are indeed deceived today. Men today think the following: Well, today we live in the period of the development of thought. People are proud of the fact that there is more thinking nowadays than in the past. But this is an illusion—one of the many illusions in which humanity lives today. This comprehension on which people pride themselves today is mainly instinctive. Only when the instinctive nature which has appeared in the evolution of humanity and which so proudly speaks of thought—only when this instinctive nature becomes instead an active element, when the intellect does not depend merely on the brain but springs from the whole man, when it is separated from rationalism and is lifted to the plane of Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition—only then will that gradually emerge which seeks to emerge in the Fifth Post-Atlantean Period, the period of the Spiritual Soul. That which meets man today and which is clearly indicated even in the worldly thought of the present epoch is something which one continuously needs to mention the appearance of the so-called Social Question.

But he who has earnestly studied our anthroposophically oriented Spiritual Science will easily perceive that the essential impulse in the shaping of the social order (whether belonging to the State or not) must come from that which human beings can develop out of themselves, as it is this which regulates the relationship between people. Everything which the human being develops out of himself naturally corresponds to certain impulses which are ultimately found in our soul and spirit life. If one looks at the matter this way, one is able to ask: Must attention not then be directed above all to the social impulses or to the social instincts, movements or forces emerging in human nature? We can, if you like, call these social impulses, social drives; but we must keep in mind that they should not only be thought of as mere unconscious instincts since when we speak of social instincts today, we must take into account that we live in the age of the Consciousness Soul and that these drives seek to press up into consciousness.

Now, if these things are to count for us, then we must find social impulses which seek to become reality. But in so doing we must recognize the terrible one-sidedness of our age, which should not of course be deplored, but which should be looked at calmly because it has to be overcome. Man has such a great inclination in our day to look at things one-sidedly. But a pendulum cannot swing from the central point out to one side without also swinging back to the other. Just as little as a pendulum can swing to one side only, can social impulses of men be expressed by only one side. This is because the social impulses are quite naturally opposed by anti-social impulses in the human being. Precisely because one finds social impulses or drives in human nature, one also finds the opposite. This fact must above all be considered.

The social leaders and agitators, for example, live in the illusion that they need only spread certain ideas or need only appeal to a class of man who is willing and disposed (provided ideas are there) to help forward the social impulse. It is an illusion to act in this way, for in so doing one forgets that if social forces are working, then anti-social forces are also present. What we must be able to do today is to look these things straight in the face without illusion. It is only from the viewpoint of Spiritual Science that they can be looked at straightly without illusion. One is tempted to say that people are sleeping through the most important thing of all in life when they do not begin to look at life from the viewpoint of Spiritual Science.

We must ask ourselves: What is the relation between people with regard to social and anti-social forces? We need to see that the relationship between people is fundamentally a complicated matter. When one person meets another, I would say we must look into the situation radically. Meetings of course point to differences which vary according to specific circumstances; but we must fix our eyes on the common characteristics, we must clearly see the common elements in the meeting, in the confrontation between one person and another. We must ask ourselves: What really happens then, not merely in that which presents itself to the senses, but in the total situation, when one person stands opposite another, when one person meets another? Nothing less than that a certain force works from one person to the other. The meeting of one with another leads to the working of a certain force between them. We cannot confront another person in life with indifference, not even in mere thoughts and feelings, even though we may be separated from them by distance. If we have any kind of relation to other people, or any communication with them, then a force flows between us creating a bond. It is this fact which lies at the basis of social life and which, when broadened, is really the foundation for the social structure of humanity.

One sees this phenomenon most clearly when one thinks of the direct interchange between two people. The impression which one person makes on the other has the effect of lulling the other to sleep. Thus we frequently find in social life that one person gets lulled to sleepiness by the other with whom he has interchange. As a physicist might say: a “latent tendency” is always there for one man to lull another to sleep in social relationships.

Why is this so? Well, we must see that this rests on a very important arrangement of man's total being. It rests on the fact that what we call social impulses, fundamentally speaking are only present in people of our present day consciousness during sleep. You are, in so far as you have not yet attained clairvoyance, really only penetrated by social forces when you are asleep, and only that which continues to work out of sleeping into waking conditions works into ordinary waking consciousness as a social impulse. When you know this, you do not need to be surprised when your social being seeks to lull you to sleep in your relationship with others. In the relationship between people the social impulse ought to develop. Yet it can only develop during sleep. Therefore in the relationship between people a tendency is shown for one person to dull the consciousness of the other so that a social relation may be established between them. This striking fact is evident to one who studies the realities of life. Above all things, our interchange with one another leads to dulling the consciousness of one another, in the interests of a social impulse between people. Of course you cannot go about continually asleep in life. Yet the tendency to establish social impulses consists in, and expresses itself by, an inclination to sleep. That of which I speak goes on subconsciously of course, but it nevertheless actually penetrates our life continuously. Thus there exists a permanent disposition to fall asleep precisely for the building up of the social structure of humanity.

On the other hand, something else is also working. A perpetual struggle and opposition to falling asleep in social relationships is also present. If you meet a person you are continuously standing in a conflict situation in the following way: Because you meet him, the tendency to sleep always develops in you so that you may experience your relationship to him in sleep. But, at the same time, there is aroused in you the counter-force to keep yourself awake. This always happens in the meeting between people—a tendency to fall asleep, a tendency to keep awake. In this situation a tendency to keep awake has an anti-social character, the assertion of one's individuality, of one's personality, in opposition to the social structure of society. Simply because we are human beings, our soul-life swings to and fro between the social and the antisocial. And that which lives in us as these two forces, which may be observed between people communicating, can from an occult perspective be seen to govern our life. When we meet social arrangements and structures in society, even if these arrangements seem far-fetched from the seemingly wise consciousness of the present, they are still a manifestation of this pendulum between social and anti-social forces. The national economist may reflect upon what credit, capital and interest are. Yet even these things which make for regularity in social transactions are only outward swings of the pendulum between social and anti-social forces. The person who seeks to find healing remedies for these times must intelligently and scientifically connect with these facts. For how is it that social demands arise in our time? Well, we live in the age of the Spiritual or Consciousness Soul in which man must become independent. But on what does this depend? It depends on people's ability during our Fifth Post-Atlantean Period to become self-assertive, to not allow themselves to be put to sleep. It is the anti-social forces which require development in this time, for consciousness to be present. It would not be possible for mankind in the present to accomplish its task if just these anti-social forces did not become ever more powerful; they are indeed the pillars on which personal independence rests. At present, humanity has no idea how much more powerful anti-social impulses must become, right on until the 30th century. For men to progress properly, anti-social forces must develop

In earlier periods the development of the anti-social forces was not the spiritual bread of humanity's evolution. There was therefore no need to establish a counter-force. Indeed none was set. In our day, when a person on his own account, for his individual self, must evolve antisocial forces, which are evolving because man is now subjected to this evolution against which nothing will prevail, there must also come about that with which man resists them: a social structure which will balance this anti-social evolutionary tendency. The anti-social forces must work inwardly so that human beings may reach the height of their development. Outwardly, in social life, structures must work so that people do not totally lose their outer connections in life. Hence the social demands of the present. They can in a certain sense be seen as the demand for a justified outer balance to the inward, essentially anti-social evolutionary tendency of humanity in the Fifth Post-Atlantean Epoch.

From this you can see that nothing is accomplished by seeing things in a one-sided way. As men live nowadays, certain words (I will not say ideas or feelings), certain words have certain values. The word “anti-social” arouses a degree of antipathy. It is considered as something evil. Very well; we perhaps need not trouble ourselves whether it is considered good or bad, since it is quite necessary. Be it good or bad, it is connected with the necessary tendencies of evolution in our time. It is simply sheer nonsense to say that the anti-social impulses must be resisted, for they cannot be resisted. One must grasp the essential inner development of mankind in our time, understand the evolutionary tendency. It is not a matter of finding prescriptions for resisting the anti-social forces; but of so shaping, of so arranging the social order, the structure, the organization of that which lies outside of the individual, that a counter-balance is present to that which works as anti-social force within human beings. Therefore it is vital for our time that the individual achieves independence, but that social forms provide a balance to this independence. Otherwise neither the individual nor society can develop properly.

In earlier periods there were tribes and classes. Our age strives against this. Our age is no longer able to divide people into classes but must consider them in their totality and create social structures which take this totality into account. I said yesterday in my public lecture that slavery could exist in the Greco-Latin Period; one was the master, the other the slave. Then men were divided. Today we have as a remnant just that which disturbs the working-man so much, namely that his power to work is sold; in this way something belonging to him is organized from outside. This must go; it is only possible to organize socially what does not integrally belong to the human being, such as his position or the function to which he is appointed, in short, something which is not an inner part of the individual. All this which we acknowledge with regard to the necessary development of social democracy is really so, and must be so understood.

Just as no man can claim to do arithmetic if he has never learned his multiplication tables, so too he cannot claim to discuss social reforms and the like when he has never learned those things which we have just explained: namely, that socialism and anti-socialism exist quite concretely in the way described. People in some of the most important positions in society, when they begin talking about present social demands, often appear to those who know, as individuals who wish to begin building a bridge over a rushing stream without having the most elementary knowledge of mechanics. They may well be able to put up a bridge, but it will collapse at the first opportunity. It seems with social leaders or with those who look after social institutions, that their plans will be shown to be impossible; for the things of reality demand that we work with them, and not against them. It is therefore tremendously important that those things which form the backbone of our anthroposophical thought and consciousness should one day be taken seriously.

One of the impulses which ensoul us in the sphere of our anthroposophical movement is that we, in a sense, carry into the whole of man's life that which most people apply only to youth. We sit on the “school-bench” of life long after we have become grey. This is one of the differences between us and others, who believe that at the age of 25, or sometimes 26, when they have finished lazying about with their education, that they are ready for the rest of life—at most there may still be some amusing additions to one's education.

But when we approach the very nerve of Spiritual Science, we feel that the human being really must continue to learn throughout his whole life if he wishes to tackle the tasks of life. It is vital that we should be permeated with this feeling. If we do not get rid of the belief that people can master everything with the faculties they have developed up to their 20th or 25th year, that then one only has to meet in Parliament or some other forum to decide all affairs—as long as we do not get rid of this view, we shall never be able to establish healthy conditions in the social structure of mankind.

The study of the reciprocal relation between the social and the anti-social is extremely significant for our time. Just this anti-social tendency is of the utmost importance to understand because it must make itself felt and must be developed in us. This anti-social spirit can only be held in balance by the social. But the social must be nursed, must be consciously cared for. And in our day this becomes truly more and more difficult because the anti-social forces are really in accord with our natural development.

The social element is essential; it must be cherished. We shall see that in this Fifth Post-Atlantean Period there is a tendency to take no notice of the social in merely acting naturally. Rather it must be acquired consciously in working with one's soul forces, while formerly it was felt instinctively in man. What is necessary and must be actively acquired is the interest of man in man. This is indeed the backbone of all social life.

It almost sounds paradoxical to say today that no clear conception of the so-called difficult ideas of economics can be gained if the interest of one for another does not increase, if people do not begin to compare the illusions which have sway in social life with present realities. One who really thinks about it recognizes the fact that simply by being a member of society one is in a complicated relation to others. Imagine that you have a $5 note in your pocket, and you make use of this $5 note by going shopping one morning, and you spend the full $5. What does it mean that you go out with a $5 note in your pocket? The $5 note is really an illusion—it is worth nothing in reality (even if it is metal money. At this point I do not want to discuss the theories of the Metalists and the Nominalists with regard to money; but even if it is metal money, it is still an illusion and of no real worth). Money is namely only a ‘go-between’. And only because in our day a certain social order exists, an order belonging purely to the State, therefore this $5 note which you have spent in the morning for different items is nothing else than an equivalent for so many days of labour of so many men. A number of men must have completed so many days of work, so much human labour must have flowed into the social order—must have crystallized itself into merchandise—in order for the apparent worth of the bank note to have any real value, but only at the command of the social order. The bank note only gives you the power to call into your service so much labour, or to put it another way, to command its worth in work. You can picture it in your mind: There I have a bank note, which assigns to me, according to my social position, the power over so many men. If you now see these workmen selling their labour hour by hour, as the equivalent value of that which you have in your purse as the $5 note, then you begin to get a picture of the real facts.

Our relationships have become so complicated that we no longer pay attention to these things, especially if they do not concern us closely. I have an example which easily clarifies this. In the more difficult considerations of economics, in the areas of capital and interest and credit, things are quite complicated; so that even university professors and political economists, whose position should mean possession of adequate insight, really have no knowledge. Thus you can see that it is necessary to look at things correctly in these areas. Of course we cannot immediately take in hand the reform of the national economy, which has been forced into such a helpless condition by what is nowadays taught as political economy. But we can at least ask with respect to national education and other such matters: What must be done so that social life and forms are consciously established in opposition to anti-social forces? What is really required? I said that it would be difficult in our time for people to develop sufficient interest in each other. You do not have sufficient interest if you think that you can buy yourself something with a $5 note and do not remember the fact that this brings about a social relationship with certain other human beings and their labour-power. You only have an adequate interest when in your picture you are able to substitute for each apparent transaction (such as the exchange of goods for a $5 note) the real transaction which is linked with it.

Now, I would say that the mere egoistic, soul-stirring talk of loving our fellow-men and acting upon this love at the first opportunity, that this does not constitute social life. This sort of love is, for the most part, terribly egoistic. Many a man is supported by what he has first gained through robbing his fellow-men in a truly patriarchal fashion, in order to create for himself an object for his self-love, so that he can then feel nice and warm with the thought, “You are doing this, you are doing that” One does not easily discover that a large part of the so-called love of doing good is a masked self-love. Therefore, the main consideration is not merely to think of what lies nearest to hand, thereby enhancing our self-love, but to feel it our duty to look carefully at the many-sided social structures in which we are placed. We must at first lay the foundations for such understanding. Yet few today are disposed to do so.

I would like to discuss one question from the viewpoint of general education, namely: How can we consciously establish social impulses to balance those anti-social forces which are developing naturally within us? How can we cultivate the social element, this interest of man in man, so that it springs up in us—going ever further and deeper, and leaving us no rest? How can we enkindle this interest which has disappeared so pitiably in our age, the age of the Spiritual Soul? In our age true chasms have already been created between people. Men have no idea about the manner in which they pass one another by without in the least comprehending each other. The desire to understand the other in all his or her uniqueness is very weak today. On the one hand, we have the cry for social union; and on the other, the ever-increasing spread of purely anti-social principles. The blindness of people toward each other can be seen in the many clubs and societies which people form. They do not provide any opportunity for people to get to know one another. It is possible for men to meet one another for years and not to know each other better at the end than they did at the beginning. The precise need of the future is that the social shall be brought to meet the antisocial in a systematic way. For this there are various inner soul methods. One is that we frequently attempt to look back over our present incarnation to survey what has happened to us in this life through our relations with others. If we are honest in this, most of us will say: Nowadays we generally regard the entrance of many people into our life in such a way that we see ourselves, our own personalities, as the center of the review. What have we gained from this or that person who has come into our life? This is our natural way of feeling. It is exactly this which we must try to combat. We should try in our souls to think of others, such as teachers, friends, those who have helped us and also those who have injured us (to whom we often owe more than to those who, from a certain point of view, have been of use to us). We should try to allow these pictures to pass before our souls as vividly as possible in order to see what each has done.

We shall see, if we proceed in this way, that by degrees we learn to forget ourselves, that in reality we find that almost everything which forms part of us could not be there at all unless this or that person had affected our lives, helping us on or teaching us something. When we look back on the years in the more distant past to people with whom we are no longer in contact and about whom it is easier to be objective, then we shall see how the soul-substance of our life has been created by the people and circumstances of the past. Our gaze then extends over a multitude of people whom we have known in the course of time. If we try to develop a sense of the debt we owe to this or that person—if we try to see ourselves in the mirror of those who have influenced us in the course of time, and who have been associated with us—then we shall be able to experience the opening-up of a new sense in our souls, a sense which enables us to gain a picture of the people whom we meet even in the present, with whom we stand face to face today. This is because we have practiced developing an objective picture of our indebtedness to people in the past. It is tremendously important that the impulse should awaken in us, not merely to feel sympathy or antipathy towards the people we meet, not merely to hate or love something connected with the person, but to awaken a true picture of the other in us, free from love or hate.

Perhaps you will not feel that what I am saying now is extremely important—but it is. For this ability to picture the other in oneself without love or hate, to allow the other individual to appear again within our soul, this is a faculty which is decreasing week by week in the evolution of humanity. It is something which men are, by degrees, completely losing. They pass one another by without arousing any interest in each other. Yet this ability to develop an imaginative faculty for the other is something that must enter into pedagogy and the education of children. For we can really develop this imaginative faculty in us if, instead of striving after the immediate sensations of life as is often done today, we are not afraid to look back quietly in our soul and see our relationships to other human beings. Then we shall be in a position to relate ourselves imaginatively to those whom we meet in the present. In this way we awaken the social instinct in us against the anti-social which quite unconsciously and of necessity continues to develop. This is one side of the picture.

The other is something that can be linked up with this review of our relations to others. It is when we try to become more and more objective about ourselves. Here we must also go back to our earlier years. Then we can directly, so to speak, go to the facts themselves. Suppose you are 30 or 40 years of age. You think, “How was it with me when I was ten years old? I will imagine myself entirely into the situation of that time. I will picture myself as another boy or girl of ten years old. I will try to forget that I was that; I will really take pains to objectify myself.” This objectifying of oneself, this freeing of oneself in the present from one's own past, this shelling-out of the Ego from its experiences, must be specially striven for in our present time. For the present has the tendency towards linking up the Ego more and more with its experiences.

Nowadays man wants to be instinctively that which his experiences make him. For this reason it is so very difficult to acquire the activity which Spiritual Science gives. The spirit must make a fresh effort each time. According to true occult science, nothing can be done by comfortably remaining in one's position. One forgets things and must always be cultivating them afresh. This is just as it should be because fresh efforts need to continually be made. He who has already made some progress in the realm of Spiritual Science attempts the most elementary things every day; others are ashamed to pay attention to the basics. For Spiritual Science, nothing should depend on remembering, but on man's immediate experience in the present. It is therefore a question of training ourselves in this faculty—through making ourselves objective—that we picture this boy or girl as if he or she were a stranger at an earlier time in our lives; of bestirring ourselves more and more, of getting free of events, and of being less haunted at 30 by the impulses of a 10 year old. Detachment from the past does not mean denial of the past. We gain it in another way again, and that is what is so important. On the one hand, we cultivate the social instinct and impulses in us by looking back upon those who have been connected with us in the past and regarding our souls as the products of these persons. In this way we acquire the imagination for meeting people in the present. On the other hand, through objectifying ourselves we gain possibilities of developing imagination directly. This objectifying of our earlier years is fruitful insofar as it does not work in us unconsciously. Think for a moment: If the 10 year old child works on unconsciously in you, then you are the 30 or 40 year old augmented by the 10 year old. It is just the same with the 11, the 12 year old child and so on. Egoism has tremendous power, but its power is lessened when you separate the earlier years from yourself and when you make them objective. This is the important point on which we must fix our attention.

The following pre-condition for social activity must be made clear to those people who raise social claims in unreasonable and illusory fashion: Understanding about how man can develop himself as a socially creative being must first be present in this period, when anti-social forces are growing ever stronger as part of human evolution.

What will then have been achieved? You will discover the whole meaning of what I have now explained if you consider the following: In 1848 there appeared a social document which continues to work into the present day in radical socialism, and in Bolshevism. It was the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx, which contains ideas which rule the thoughts and feelings of many working men. Karl Marx was able to dominate the labour world for the simple reason that he wrote and said what the working man thinks and understands, as a working man. This Communist Manifesto the contents of which I do not need to explain to you, appeared in 1848. It was the first document, the first seed in what has now borne fruit, after the recent destruction of opposing movements. This document contains one slogan, one sentence which you will often find quoted today by most socialist writers: “Workers of the world, unite!” It is a sentence which has run through many socialist groups. What does it express? It expresses the most unnatural thing that could possibly be thought today. It expresses an impulse for socializing, for uniting a certain mass of people. On what is this uniting, this union, to be built? Upon its opposite, upon the hatred of all those who are not members of the working class. This associating, this banding together of people is to be brought about through splitting up and separating mankind into classes. You must ponder this, you must think about the reality of this principle which is a genuine illusion, if I can use this expression, and which has been adopted in Russia, now in Germany and the Austrian countries, and which will eat its way further and further into the world. It is so unnatural precisely because, on the one hand, it shows the necessity of socializing, but on the other it builds this socialization out of the anti-social instinct of class hatred, and class opposition.

However, these things need to be considered from a higher perspective, otherwise we shall not get very far; above all, we shall not be able to participate in the healthy development of mankind in the present. Nowadays Spiritual Science is the only means of seeing things truly in their totality; it is the only means for understanding our time. Just as one is adverse to entering into the spirit and soul foundations of man's physical constitution, so one also avoids, out of fear and lack of courage, studying those things in social life which can only be understood out of the Spirit. People are afraid, cover their eyes and put their heads in the sand like ostriches when they are confronted by real and important things. Of what does human interchange in fact consist? As we have seen, it consists of one person trying to put the other to sleep, while the other tries to resist and stay awake. This is the archetypal phenomenon of social science in Goethe's sense. This archetypal phenomenon points to something which mere material thinking cannot grasp; it points to that which can only be understood when one knows that in human life one is not only asleep during sleep—when we slumber along for hours, oblivious to the world—but the same applies to daily waking life, where the same forces which lead to sleep and wakefulness also play into the social and anti-social forces of man. All thinking about social forms can bear no fruit if we do not make the effort to take these things into account.

With this in mind, we must not be blind to the events taking place in the world, but must carefully watch what is coming to pass. What, for example, does the socialist of today think? He thinks that he can invent socialist slogans and call to men from all countries—“Workers of the world, unite!” and by so doing, establish a sort of international Paradise.

This indeed is one of the greatest and most fatal illusions. People are not abstract, but concrete. Fundamentally, the human being is individual. I have tried to make this clear in my Philosophy of Freedom, in contrast to the relativism of Neo-Kantianism and socialism. Men are also different according to their groupings over the world. We will discuss one of these differences so that we may see that it is not possible to simply say:—“You begin in the West, and carry out a certain social system, then you go to the East and then home again, as if taking a world tour.” But the attitude of taking a world journey lives in those who wish to spread socialism over the whole earth. They look upon the earth as a globe on which they, by starting in the West, can eventually arrive in the East. But people on the earth are different—and exactly in this difference dwells an impulse which is the motive force of progress.

You can see how, in this way, provision is made for the Consciousness Soul through birth and heredity. This actually comes to expression in the English-speaking people of today. They are organized for the Consciousness Soul through their blood, their birthright, and their inherited faculties. Because the English-speaking peoples have been especially prepared for the cultivation of the Consciousness Soul they are, in a way, representatives of the fifth Post-Atlantean period. People are thus differentiated according to where they live and how they are constituted.

The Eastern peoples must effect and represent the true development of humanity in another way. Beginning with the Russian people, and passing on to the people of the Asiatic countries—one finds an opposition, a revolt against the instinctive elements natural to the evolution of the Consciousness Soul. The people of the East wish to save the soul treasure of intellectuality of the present age for the future. They do not want it to be mixed with experience, but wish to liberate and preserve it for the next period. During this period, a true union can take place between the human being and the evolved Spirit Self. Thus, if the characteristic force of our present period is in the West, and can indeed be best cultivated as a quality among the English-speaking peoples, the people of the east, out of their national inheritance, seek to prevent the coming-to-pass in their souls of that which is most characteristic of the present period—so that it may develop in them as a germ for the following period, which begins with the 30th century. From this we can see the fact that certain laws prevail in human life, and in human evolution. In the realm of nature people are not surprised that they cannot burn ice, that a regular law underlies this phenomenon. But with the social structures of humanity, people fancy that the same social form, based on the same social principles, can, for example, be made to work in Russia, as in England, Scotland, or America. This is impossible, for the whole world is organized by underlying principles so that one cannot simply create identical forms at will all over the globe. This is a point which we must not forget.

In the Central European countries there is a middle condition of affairs. There, it is as if one were in a balanced condition, between the extremes of the East and the West. Looked at in this way, we see the Earth population divided into three parts. You cannot say: “Workers of the world, unite!” For the workers are of three sorts, are three varieties of people. Let us look at the people of the West again. We find a special disposition, a special mission for all who speak English by nature (single cases may be different)—a disposition for the cultivation of the Consciousness Soul. This disposition expresses itself in not detaching from the soul its characteristic quality of intelligence, but connecting this intelligence naturally, instinctively, with events in the world. To naturally, even instinctively, place oneself in the life of the world as a consciousness soul individual is the task of the English-speaking people. The expanse and greatness of the British Empire rests on this quality. Indeed herein lies the original phenomenon behind the expansion of the British Empire—that which is hidden in the impulses of its people exactly coincided with the inner impulses of the age. In my lectures on the European folk souls, you will find what is essential in this matter. Much is contained in this series of lectures which were given long before the war, but which provide material for judging this war-catastrophe objectively.¹

Now, the very capacities connected with the evolution of the Consciousness Soul give the English-speaking peoples a special genius for political life. One can study how the political art of dividing society and creating social structure has spread from England to those countries where things have remained backward, where the remnants of the fourth Post-Atlantean period have remained. This influence has spread even to the division of Hungarian society, to this Turanian member of the European peoples. It is only from the English heritage that a foundation for the political thinking of the fifth Post-Atlantean period can come. The English are specially suited to the realm of politics. It is of no use to pronounce a judgment on these things, the necessities of the case alone do so. One may feel sympathy or the opposite—that is a private affair. Objective necessity determines the affairs of the world. It is important that these objective necessities shall be clearly placed before us at this time.

Goethe, in his Legend of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, has treated the forces of the human soul as three members, or forces; Power, Appearance, and Knowledge or Wisdom—or, as the Bronze King, the Silver King and the Golden King. Many remarkable things are spoken of in this legend, regarding the governing relationships which are being prepared for the present and which will live into the future. We can point out that what Goethe symbolizes by the Bronze king, the force of Power, is that which spreads over the world through the English-speaking peoples. This is necessary because the culture of the Consciousness Soul coincides with the special qualities of the British and American peoples.

In the Central European countries, which are now in such a state of chaos, there is an unmistakable equilibrium between the Leaning of the intellect toward the Consciousness Soul, and the desire to be free from it; there, sometimes one prevails, sometimes the other. None of the Central European nations is really suited for political life. When they desire to be political, they are disposed to lose contact with reality. Whereas the political thinking of the Anglo-American nations is firmly anchored in the soul, in the Central European countries, it is not, for the second soul force dominates—Semblance and Appearance. However, the people of the Central European countries manifest an intellectuality of special brilliance. Compare anything that the English-speaking people have to say about the nature of thinking—and you will find the thoughts strongly linked to solid earth-realities. But if you take the brilliant feats of the German mind—you will find that they are more an aesthetic shaping of thoughts, even if the aesthetic shaping has a logical form. It is especially noticeable how one thought leads to another so that thoughts of value appear in dialectical form, shaped by an aesthetic will. If one wishes to apply this to solid earth-realities—if one wishes by this means to become a politician—then one easily becomes untrue; one easily falls into a so-called dreamy idealism which seeks to establish united kingdoms, with decade-long calls for unity—but in the end sets up a mighty State by force. Never before has there been such a contrast in political life as the one between the dream of unity in 1848 and that which was really established in 1871.² There you see the swing of the pendulum, the shift from that which really strives for aesthetic form, which can become untrue, an illusion, a dreamy picture when one wishes to apply it to politics. Here, there is simply no disposition for politics. When the Central European people become politicians they either dream or they lie. I should add that these things must not be discussed with sympathy or antipathy in order to accuse or to acquit. Rather, they must be said, because on the one hand they correspond with a need, and on the other with a tragedy. These are things that we must heed.

And if we then look to the East, things are quite different again. We have seen that the German, if he wants to be political, falls into a dreamy idealism or, at its worst, into untruth. The Russian on the other hand becomes ill or actually suffers a death if he desires to be political. This may seem strange, yet a Russian person has a constitution which creates a disposition towards disease, towards death, with intensive political involvement. The Russian Folk Soul has absolutely no affinity with that quality in the English and American Folk Soul which creates a political capacity. But because of this, the East has the task of carrying the intellect separated from its natural connection with the world of sense experience into the future age of the Spirit-Self.

One must therefore know how different abilities are spread among the people of the earth. This becomes visible in many areas. You have, for example, heard about the super-sensible experience called “The Meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold”. There are marked differences in this meeting with the Guardian. Where this meeting, this initiation, is effected entirely independent of nationality, then it is objective and complete. But when this initiation occurs through special groups or societies connected with a particular people or nation, then it is one-sided. The English-speaking peoples are those who, when not guided by higher spiritual leaders but by their own Folk Soul, are especially suited for bringing to the Threshold those spiritual beings who surround and accompany us in this world of Ahrimanic spirits, and whom we take with us when we approach the super-sensible world, if they have developed a certain liking for us. They then lead us primarily to an experience of the power of sickness and death. You will therefore hear it said by the greater number of Anglo-Americans initiated into the super-sensible Mysteries, that the first more important event in their cognition of the super-sensible world is the encounter with those powers expressing sickness and death. They learn to know this as an external, outward experience.

If you turn to the Central European people what will you find, when those who are being initiated are not taken out of their nation and raised to universal humanity, but when the Folk Spirit co-operates with them? Then the first important experience which comes to our notice is a conflict between those spiritual beings who belong to higher worlds, to the other side of the Threshold, and certain other beings who are here in the physical world, on this side of the Threshold but who are invisible to ordinary consciousness. The Central Europeans will first become aware of this conflict. The experience of this conflict makes itself felt to the genuine seeker after truth in the Central European countries as a being penetrated with the powers of doubt. One becomes acquainted with all the powers of “many-sidedness”. In Western countries, there is a stronger inclination to be satisfied with exact truth; whereas in the Central European countries there is a tendency to immediately see the other side of the question. There, in the searching for truth, one trembles in the balance. Everything has two sides. One is regarded as a Philistine in Central Europe if one ventures a one-sided opinion. But this causes tragic suffering when nearing the Threshold. We must pay attention to this struggle which takes place at the Threshold, between spirits which belong only to the spirit world, and those belonging to the world of sense—this struggle which conditions all that calls forth doubt in man, this vacillation with regard to the truth. It is this experience of doubt which creates the European need to be trained in the truth—in philosophy—so as not to fall prey so easily to the generally recognized impulses of truth in society.

When you turn to the Eastern countries—and the Folk Soul acts as sponsor at the initiation—then one primarily experiences the spirits that work upon human egotism. One sees all that gives rise to human selfishness. The Westerner who approaches the Threshold does not see this. Instead, he sees the spirits that permeate the world and humanity with sickness and death in the broadest sense, as injurious, destructive and degrading for humanity. The Neophyte of the East, however, sees all that comes forward to tempt man as selfishness. Therefore, the ideal which proceeds from Western initiation is making men healthy and keeping them healthy, and giving mankind the possibility of healthy development. In the East, on the other hand, there springs up, as instinctive knowledge in connection to a religious orientation toward initiation, a feeling of one's own insignificance when faced with the sublime powers of the spiritual world. The man of the East, when meeting the spiritual world, is shown how selfishness may be cured, and egotism destroyed because of its dangers. This is even expressed in the external character of people from the East. Much of the Eastern character which is inexplicable to people from the West arises precisely from what is expressed at the Threshold of the spiritual world.

So we can see the differences in human qualities when we look at the inner development, the inner shaping of the psycho-spiritual development of humanity. It is important to keep this clearly in mind. In certain occult circles of the English-speaking people who were under the guardianship of the Folk Spirits, prophetic sayings could be found during the second half of the 19th century which referred to the things we have been discussing, things which are happening today. Think of what could have happened if the people of Europe, with the exception of those speaking English, had not stopped up their ears and blindfolded their eyes, so that their attention was directed from the truth of these things. I will tell you of a formula which was frequently repeated during the second half of the 19th century. The following was said:—“The State must be abolished in Russia, so that the Russian people may develop, for in Russia social experiments must be carried out, which could never be done in Western countries”. This might seem unsympathetic to non-English ears, but it contains a high degree of wisdom and insight. And he who can connect himself with these things so that he can believe in their efficacy as impulses in whose realization he can take part, this person is truly of the present age.³ Those who do not see the reality of these forces set themselves against the time.

These matters must be clearly understood. It was, of course, the inevitable lot of Central and Eastern Europe to block their ears and blindfold their eyes to occult facts; to give no heed to them, to work on lines of mysticism, abstract teaching, and abstract intellectualism. But we are now in a time when this must cease. Pessimism and despair must not be created by such contemplations as these. Rather force, courage, and the will to help is needed. In this sense we should always remember that we do not work against, but rather with the issues of our time—out of the spiritual scientific impulse of the Anthroposophical Movement. Let us see to it that we do not sleep away our opportunities. Spiritual Science can lead us to the conscious cultivation of social faculties. It can, for example, show us the forces at work in the human being when he is free from the body, what he is experiencing between going to sleep and awaking. But more importantly it can give us a direction in conscious waking life for developing social capacities. We of course cultivate the powers most necessary for our age when we are consciously thinking about those things which can only forcefully penetrate into our soul during waking hours. We could not develop, we would be powerless, if we only had to evolve during sleep. It is for our waking life that the following is therefore important.

Two powers are working in the present. One is the power which since the Mystery of Golgotha has worked in different metamorphoses through the ensuing periods of earth evolution as the Christ Impulse. We have often said that just in our age a reappearance of the Etheric Christ will take place. This reappearance of the Christ is indeed not far off. That He is coming again is no cause for pessimism, nor should it give rise to a nebulous longing and a desire for soul-warming, self-seeking, theosophical theories. The Christ Impulse has various forms, but in His present form He wishes to help humanity realize that spiritual wisdom now being revealed by the spiritual world. This wisdom wants to be realized and the Christ Impulse will be a help in this realization. It is on this realization that all depends. At this critical moment humanity is faced with a momentous decision. On the one side stands the Christ Being, calling us of our own free will to do what we have been speaking about today, to consciously and freely receive the social impulses which can heal and help humanity. Freely, to receive them. Therefore, we do not unite ourselves on those levels where hatred forms a foundation for love as in the cry, “Workers of the world, unite!” But we unite by striving to realize the Christ Impulse, by doing those things which are the will of Christ for this age.

Opposed to this will stands the adversary who is called in the Bible “the unrighteous Prince of this World”. He makes his presence known in various ways. One of these ways is to take those forces which allow us as free beings to serve that which we have been talking about today, to take this force of free will and to place it at the service of the physical. This adversary, the Prince of this world, has various instruments; for example, hunger and social chaos. By this means, through external compulsion, and physical measures, the force of free will is subverted to the service of apparent necessity. See how humanity today shows that it will not of its own free will turn to a truly social life, and to a recognition of true progress for mankind. It wishes to be compelled. And yet, this compulsion has not even led people to make the basic distinction between the Spirit of the super-sensible world, the Christ Spirit and the adversary, the unrighteous Prince of this world. Look at this situation and see if this does not explain why in so many places today men oppose and struggle against the acceptance of any true spiritual teaching, against true spiritual deeds, and against Spiritual Science. They are possessed by the unrighteous Prince of this world.

Now think for a moment; think how you of your own free will turn to spiritual life; think humbly of yourselves, but also earnestly and strongly as the missionaries of the Christ-Spirit today, who have to combat the unrighteous Prince of this world, who lays hold of all those who unconsciously allow themselves to use forces out of the future to realize their own aims. If you think of yourselves in this light there is no room for pessimism—indeed it leaves you no time for a pessimistic view of the world. It will of course not shut your eyes and ears to that which has happened, sometimes in a terrible manner—and which is tragic to behold in its true form. But you will preeminently keep the following before your souls—“I am, in any case, called to look at everything without illusion; I must be neither pessimistic nor optimistic, so that forces may awaken in my soul which give me the power to aid the free development of the human being, to contribute to human progress in the place and situation where I am”. Even if the faults and tragedies of the age are very visible to Spiritual Science this should not be an incitement to pessimism or optimism, but rather a call to an inner awakening so that independent work and the cultivation of right thinking will result. For above all things, adequate insight is necessary. If only a sufficient number of people today were motivated to say, “We absolutely must have a better understanding of things”; then everything else would follow. It is just in regard to social questions that there is a need to consciously strive for insight and understanding. The development of the will activity is planned for, it is coming. If we in daily life would only wish to educate ourselves about social issues, and develop new social ideas, then (according to an occult law), each of us would be able to take another human being along. Each one of us can therefore work for two if we have the will. We could achieve much if we had an earnest desire to acquire insight at once. The rest would follow. It is not so bad that not many people can do much about the situation of society today, but it is incredibly sad if people cannot at least make up their minds to become acquainted with the social laws of Spiritual Science. The rest would follow if serious study would take place.

This is what I have desired to communicate to you today regarding the importance of knowing and recognizing certain things about the social situation of the present, and how such a recognition can lead to a life impulse for the future. I hope we will again have the opportunity of speaking together about the more intimate aspects of Spiritual Science.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner The Mission of Folk-Souls. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1970.
• 2. The reference is to the distinction between the dreams of the German revolution of 1848 and the creation of the German Empire of 1871 by the Prussian State.
• 3. Here and in other references to Russia in this lecture, Rudolf Steiner appears to be referring to the political attitudes and behaviour of Germany and Austria toward Russia during the time of the Russian revolution when the actions of the central powers certainly strengthened the hands of the Bolsheviks against more moderate social democratic forces.

As human beings, we can only know the deeper mysteries of the soul if we consider the totality of a person's experience. This totality of a person's experience is divided into the time during which the person is on the earth, the time between waking up and falling asleep, that is, the ordinary waking state during the day, and the time between falling asleep and waking up, the life that a person spends in a dark state of consciousness, from which the waves of dream life initially arise for the ordinary consciousness.

It is now a matter of really considering this state of transition between sleeping and waking from the most diverse points of view from which it can be observed. If we start from the usual way of looking at life, we can say: In the dream state there is a transition from waking to sleeping. And if we examine the course of dream life, we must make a significant distinction between the content of the images, so to speak, the content of the ideas in the dream, and the course of the dreaming. I have often pointed this out as well.

We can dream this or that according to the content. But we must also see what the inner course of the dream is. Let us say that it unfolds with a certain drama, that we initially have a kind of state of tension in the dream, which becomes ever greater or ever stronger and stronger, and that then a certain resolution comes, or even that such a resolution does not arise in the end, but that the tension gives rise to waking. We must distinguish this dramatic process from the actual content of the dream.

Let us say, for example, we dreamt that we are going on a journey. We come to a mountain cave. We enter the mountain cave. It becomes more and more eerie and eerie for us because it gets darker and darker. Finally, we are overcome by a real state of fear, and then, although we know we have to go on, we come up against some obstacle. The state of fear grows and grows. We see how tension builds up. But the content, the content of the dream, is something quite different. For example, we can also dream the following: We see something approaching in the distance that threatens us. It comes closer and closer, and the individual details become clearer and clearer, and with that our anxiety grows, finally discharging in a mighty state of fear. In terms of the drama of the dream, the same is present in both cases: that which builds up internally as tension. The images in which the dream is clothed according to our imagination are somewhat different.

Now, if we go further, we will often find that, at least for most of our dream life, the imaginative nature of dreaming is in some way taken from our experiences during our earthly existence. Of course, some things may have been transformed, some things may appear in a very disguised form, but in some way or other we will still be able to understand how the conditions on earth that we have experienced come into the dream as images.

What actually takes place during such dreams, let us say, when we dream while waking? Well, during the time from falling asleep to waking up, we are, with our soul-spiritual part – we also call it the astral body and the I - outside of our physical body and the etheric body. We dwell with our ego and our astral body in this world, in which, at first, we cannot perceive as our consciousness is in our earthly existence, because the astral body and the ego in which we are are somewhat indefinite and its organs of perception are not developed. But that is not to say that something is not constantly happening in what is outside the physical body during sleep. In fact, between falling asleep and waking up, a richer life takes place in the astral body and in the I than during waking hours. We just cannot become aware of it. And what we experience in dreams as states of tension, as states of discharge, as fear, perhaps also as anger, rage and so on – all this can play into the dream, clothe it in the most diverse images, and this goes on with us from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up.

In these extra-bodily states, we live in a world whose movements we participate in, just as we participate in the processes of the physical external world through our senses during the waking hours. When we now return to our physical body with our soul-spiritual, that is, with the astral body and the I, when we wake up, we take hold of the organs of our physical body. We sink into these organs. In this moment we are again able to perceive an external world, the external world of the nature kingdoms, minerals, plants, animals, the physical human being. We permeate these organs, which organize the physical body, with our soul. Thus we are in relationship to this external world.

If we do not immediately submerge ourselves completely in our physical body, but if we penetrate the etheric body for a moment before we take hold of the whole physical body, then the forces that form the images of the 'dream' come to us from this etheric body. These images are carried by the forces of the etheric body. They are reminiscences of life, memories of life.

When we dream as we fall asleep, it may be that we leave our physical body and, due to some abnormality, do not immediately leave the etheric body as well. Then, before we enter into a state of complete unconsciousness, we live in the images of the etheric body. But the surging of the astral body and the ego, which takes place during the state between falling asleep and waking up, is already beginning. So we have to strictly separate the images contained in the dream and the dynamic, the flow of energy of the dream, the drama of the dream. We must keep the two strictly separate. And when we are able, through soul exercises, to carry out this separation in practice, as I have just described to you in theory, when one is able to make one's astral body and one's ego so strong through exercises that one does not passively into the etheric body and then into the physical body, but if you learn to make use of the general cosmic ether outside of the body, then you can perceive things that you would otherwise not be able to perceive.

The ether that is secreted and forms our etheric body is, after all, only a part of the general cosmic ether. Ether is everywhere. Some time before our birth, we separate some of the general ether to form our etheric body, which we then carry within us between birth and death. The general cosmic ether remains imperceptible. It only becomes perceptible when we are able to strengthen our astral body and our ego to such an extent that we can hold them outside our physical body, even when we are not sleeping, but we do not merely receive the kinds of dream impressions that we have when falling asleep and otherwise for the ordinary consciousness, but we can perceive in the external etheric. Then the following is present:

The physical world is spread out around us. At first, it is of no concern to us. It remains available to us when we do the right exercises, just as memories remain available. We can survey it; we do not step out of it like a hallucinator, but at first it is of no concern to us. We have strengthened our astral body and our ego. We perceive what takes place in the etheric world, not in the physical world. And what now takes place in the etheric world, that is, what is now perceptible to us, is actually nothing other than what you find, of course only partially, at least in terms of nature, in my book “Occult Science”.

Seen in this light, one sees with the strengthened astral body and I, which now, instead of using the eyes and ears to perceive physically outside the body, perceive ethereally. This ethereal quality presents itself in such images, which can then be described in the same way as I have described in my “Occult Science”.

I would therefore like to say: If one is able to bring the astral body and the I into the body-free state, as they are otherwise every night in sleep, but if one has strengthened them through exercises so that one perceives in the cosmic ether, then one initially has the world in imaginations, in pictures, before oneself. What one otherwise sees only as a small part of the physical world is so expanded that one can depict the existence of Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, and so on, in addition to the earthly existence. This is the first thing that can be perceived from the supersensible world.

But now everything that can become the content of the imaginative world lies in this. We are already emerging from the world of ether when, through what I have described as empty consciousness, we no longer merely live in imaginations that arise, but when we learn to dispel the imaginations in turn, when we are able to both, let us say, receive an imagination in the soul and also to let it fall.

This results in a state of mind that can be controlled completely at will, a state of mind in which one lives in the image, then suppresses the image, and lives in the image again, suppressing the image. This is the state of inspired experience of the world. But here one experiences a world that is not completely foreign to man either. He experiences it every night in dreamless sleep. He is just not able to grasp with his consciousness what is going on in it. In this world, one does not just perceive images, but as the images flood in, flood out, arise, pass away, as it becomes still even in the flooding image, and in the flooding-out image a kind of inner so that the world also becomes manifold in relation to our perceptions, we perceive in this inspired world, if I may say so, the actions and deeds of real spiritual beings. In the description I have given in Occult Science, these deeds of spiritual beings are already implied, although essentially the pictures of the evolution of the world are given there. But attention is drawn to the beings of the higher hierarchies, angels, archangels and so on, which appear in this surge of the world, of arising and passing imaginations. I would like to say that on the waves that one experiences in inspired life, those beings who are the beings of the higher hierarchies weave at the same time.

Now one realizes how one's own existence, but that part of existence that only actually becomes free in the time between falling asleep and waking up during physical life on earth, how this essential part of the human being is integrated into a world of supersensible entities. Indeed, between falling asleep and waking up, we are indeed members of this world. As souls, we move among beings.

In imaginative consciousness, it is the case that one really only has an idea of what these beings do. I would like to say that the first stage of supersensible consciousness presents itself in such a way that these beings, so to speak, sketch out their images for us. These are the imaginations. Then one comes to the point where one is not only confronted with images, but images arise and flood in, and in this arising and flooding the deeds of the beings take place. But we ourselves are now in this world of spiritual events. When consciousness breaks through, we are in a state in which we are as free from the body as we otherwise are for ordinary consciousness in dreamless sleep; we actually belong to such a world in which spiritual deeds occur. This world, in which spiritual deeds take place, and in which we ourselves are interwoven, makes clear to us that from which we come out when we hurry towards birth on earth to begin another earthly existence after having lived for some time in the spiritual-soul world.

In fact, the onset of earthly existence at birth is the extinction of this world. Man returns to this world every time he falls asleep, but the inner activity of the astral and the ego within him has become so weak in the course of life between death and a new birth that he is compelled to have the deepest desire, the deepest longing, that something will come to his aid, for he would have to die in the spiritual idleness when birth approaches again and something would not come to his aid.

Let us assume, then, that man has developed from death through spiritual events. At first, his consciousness is very much alive, even reminiscent of earthly consciousness in the early days. Then he rises more and more, as his consciousness takes part in spiritual deeds. But this consciousness later weakens. When the time for an earthly birth approaches again, the person comes into a state as a spiritual being that can only be compared, if we want to characterize it by something that exists on earth, to someone who begins to suffer from amnesia, who thus, so to speak, grabs for his memories and cannot find them. So when earthly life approaches again, the person reaches for reality, for being filled with reality. For at this moment his emotional and volitional life is strong, but the perceptions are dull and he has no inner content. He reaches, as it were, for the perceptions, which become duller and duller, while the will becomes more and more powerful. And this desire now drives him to earthly embodiment, to an earthly organism that is given to him through the current of inheritance. He can now use this as a tool, it gives him the opportunity to think again, although now only about a physical external world, but it does allow the development of the life of imagination, which has become dull. It is through this desire to be able to think again that man enters into physical embodiment on earth. And there he passes through the state of sleep, in which he slowly develops to be able to live again as a spiritual being when he passes through the gate of death, and to begin the cycle anew.

What one experiences now, by rising in the body-free state to this perception of the world, which presents itself in inspiration, that is the whole secret of how man lives in a supersensible world between death and a new birth: how this supersensible world really is.

Some of it, how man in turn comes to an earthly embodiment, I have indeed described in the Vienna cycle of 1914, “Inner Being of Man and Life between Death and Rebirth”. If one rises even further, then what is actually not known in the ordinary consciousness of man arises. In the waking state, we have three distinctly different states of soul: thinking, feeling, and willing. We also have three such states in sleep. But usually only two are distinguished, the one where sleep is so thin, I would say, that we can dream, the lightest sleep, and the dreamless sleep. But very few people know that if you can compare the light sleep of dreaming with the thinking of waking, and the dreamless sleep with the feeling of waking, then there is still a deep sleep. This difference between the middle state of sleep and that deep sleep, which can then be compared with the will of the waking state, is simply overlooked. But this state of deep sleep also exists.

Some people will certainly notice a certain difference, at least when waking up. It does happen that a person goes through nights in which they only experience the two sleep states, dream sleep and dreamless sleep, but not the deeper sleep, which is clearly different from the mere dreamless sleep. When waking up, I said, some people will already notice when they sometimes emerge from sleep, by feeling quite as if they are new, that they are already rising from deeper regions of being than is usually the case. It is necessary to indicate this difference, which, as I said, is not taken into account in ordinary consciousness. It is like this: When we are in a state of dream sleep, then we actually live in a world - we are, after all, outside our physical and our etheric bodies - which can certainly be compared to that world which otherwise takes place invisibly in the earth's environment, where the flowers of the plants unfold, interacting with the sunlight. This weaving and living of the flowering plants escapes ordinary consciousness. But it is into this world that man first plunges. It is, after all, the world that is nearest to the ordinary world of the day. It is everywhere, and by plunging into this world, he lives in the dream sleep.

The deeper, dreamless sleep is the one in which man submerges himself in a world that would be around us in the interior of plants. We are completely in such a world when we sleep dreamlessly, as we would be if we could creep as ghosts into the interior of plants.

But when we are in that deeper sleep, which is a third state of sleep, then we are completely immersed in the mineral kingdom. Then the mineral processes - the earlier alchemy called them the salination processes - also take place most strongly in the human organism. Then, in a sense, the human being is not only given over to the plant kingdom, but also to the mineral kingdom.

For those who can consciously enter this world, in which the human being is otherwise in this deepest state of sleep, it really becomes clear what lives inside the minerals. And when the human being lives in a world like that inside the minerals, it is as if he is now looking at a mineral from the inside, whereas he otherwise always looks at it from the outside. You will understand that this is what I wanted to say in a certain description of the spirit world in my Theosophy. You will find this reversal in this description of the spirit world. And by living into this reversal, man lives into that world in which he can take part not only in the deeds of the higher hierarchies, but in the beings of the higher hierarchies, where he can get to know the beings of the higher hierarchies in the same way as he perceives the soul qualities of people in the physical world. There we are no longer in the inspired world, there we are in the world of intuition. There we not only devote ourselves to the actions, the spiritual actions of the spiritual entities, but to the essence of these entities themselves.

But then we are also in the world in which karma becomes a reality for us. Every time a person enters this third state of sleep, if he were suddenly able to become conscious, he would perceive his karma. He would perceive how past earthly lives play a part in the present earthly life. Man experiences his karma in deep sleep, and he also carries the results of this experience into the physical body. But the physical body is not suited to perceive something like that. It has no organs for that at first. Just as he develops eyes to see outwardly and ears to hear outwardly, so he would have to develop organs of perception inwardly.

These inward organs of perception, however, would kill him if he developed them, if he had to look inward physically, because the human organism cannot live if it sends the forces that lead to the formation of sensory organs inward. If he were to send them inward, he would be able to see his karma with physical organs, so to speak. One can only see it with spiritual organs, precisely in intuitive recognition.

But we see from this that during his life on earth, man lives both in the forces that form his environment in the time between death and a new birth, which work in him in order to then incorporate him into a physical earthly body, and in the world in which his destiny unfolds from life to life. This fate is veiled from our ordinary consciousness because, if a person were to perceive his fate unprepared, he would enter into a very special state.

If a person could perceive his destiny without practising for it – it may not happen, but I will hypothetically assume it – then the desire would immediately arise in him from this perceptibility to develop organs that perceive inwardly, so to speak. He would want to develop eyes and ears that see and hear inwardly. But this would mean forces for his organism. He would not only wake up as he does now, but he would bring with him from his sleep the strength to rebuild his organism inwards. That is, he would kill his organism.

The human organism is designed in such a way that the soul and spirit, the astral body and the I, can only submerge in the etheric body for a moment; then they must immediately submerge in the physical body, after dream images have arisen from submerging in the etheric body. But even there, the etheric body must give what the images are about. A person cannot take in what he otherwise experiences outside. Then he must delve into his physical body, which he must leave as it is, to which he must devote himself, having decided to use it when he descended from the spiritual-soul world, precisely in order to make use of a physical body and its organs. That which lies beyond the threshold, which is imperceptible but is still experienced, is in a sense a reflection of what we go through between death and a new birth.

Only through such a contemplation does the image of the complete human being emerge. And at the same time it emerges that man, as he is in physical life on earth, is so weak spiritually that he would drift through the world in a dull sleep, if I may say so, without perceiving anything at all, if he did not use his physical body to perceive. Between birth and death, man can actually only be seen to live in a dull state and to only inwardly enlighten himself when he makes use of the body. This is the relative justification of materialism, which is quite relatively justified for life on earth, because that which is actually spiritual-soul remains dull for life on earth.

Now we can ask: Is there perhaps a way to look even more sharply at what lives as spiritual-soul and participates in the world as I have described it to you, participates in a world of flowing images, dying away and dying up again, dying up and dying away again, but into which — as you know from my description in Occult Science — there also mingles what can be compared to taste perceptions and so on in the physical world. In this world, man lives from falling asleep to waking up. From this world, he can also become aware of how his karma lies, what his destiny is, how it unfolds from one earth life to the next, when his consciousness is strengthened.

But how one can see more precisely into this world can be seen when one first looks at those beings who, in earthly life, essentially have the astral body, not a distinct ego in earthly life. These are the animals. These animals also have sleeping and waking. If we now look at sleeping in animals, the following emerges. So let us take a sleeping animal. The astral body moves out. This astral body, by moving out of the animal, is immediately absorbed into a world that then presents itself to the senses as this floating world of approaching and disappearing imaginations, of colorations. Then again, when waking up, it withdraws into the animal. But if we observe more closely, this flooding life of imagination with the tints does move in the earthly air while the animal sleeps. From the moment the animal wakes up, the soul moves on the waves of the breathing process, through the respiratory organs in the broadest sense, back into the animal body again. Then it stimulates the senses so that they take part in this life. But when it awakens, it is essentially a flooding in of the soul, whereby skin breathing must of course be taken into account, but one has the exit through the breathing processes, and then the entrance again through the respiratory organs. Once this has been seen, one begins to understand how the astral body unites with the animal in its embryonic life when the animal first comes into being. It unites in such a way that one might say: it is the reverse of the process by which the astral body goes outwards on the waves of breathing. It goes inwards and first builds itself plastically within the body.

If you bear in mind that the animal actually takes its form from its respiratory organs, you will learn a great deal about the formations of the animal. Look at animals and how they are the result of their respiratory organs in the broader sense. But it is only the way in which the soul of the animals lives in them. Compare, say, a proboscis animal with any animal whose head organs are more mouth-shaped than proboscis-shaped. The rest of the animal's form is shaped accordingly, and the way the animal can breathe is decisive for its form. The soul lives on the waves of the air-like substance taken in by the animal.

When we look at a human being, something else comes into play. Even if a child cannot yet speak, it has the ability to speak. Its respiratory organs are already prepared for this. They are different from the respiratory organs of an animal. These respiratory organs enable the air to enter in such a way that not only an astral body but also an ego can envelop the human being and take possession of him.

Anyone who sees through this, however, comes to know the truth: the animal is formed by its respiratory organs in the broadest sense to its shape, but the human being is formed by breathing, modified into speech, into words, to his shape. In man the word becomes flesh in the most literal sense, his form is a result of the word. I have already described how human souls move between the beings of the supersensible worlds. Between death and a new birth, between falling asleep and waking up, human souls belong to the same worlds as the higher spiritual beings. When we observe human souls, we find that they move in a way that can then be transferred to the waves of the air. The same thing that a person unfolds when he speaks, this kind of air movement that he unfolds when he speaks, is also unfolded in his inhalation, which shapes him when it enters him. In a sense, one can see human souls in this way, floating on the waves of air. This is because the I does not merely grasp the air. In the case of an animal, the astral body is there, it grasps the air and grasps the air with its states of warmth. The human astral body takes hold of the air and is able to move on the waves of the air, but it also takes hold of the warmth, the warmth ether. As the I streams through the world on the waves of the warmth ether, it colors breathing, becomes speech from the inside out, human form from the outside in. If we grasp the concrete reality of speech life, we learn to recognize in the speech life, in the cosmic formation of words, what enters the human being as formative, what works plastically, especially in the embryo and then in the child, in that the human being gives himself his form through inner forces, working plastically. And this connection between the word and the human form is something that can be spoken of as something absolutely real, because it can be seen in the way I have described it to you now.

One can also note the following. When you fall asleep, your astral body moves on the waves of the air and remains within the airspace; your ego goes into the indefinite, so to speak, disappears into the warmth of the outside world. The soul is already able to live in the warmth of the ether and the air during the time when a person is between falling asleep and waking up. And so we have the physical body of the human being, which actually belongs entirely to the earth, the etheric body of man, which belongs to the watery, liquid element of the earth, which has a special relationship to it, the astral body, which belongs to the airy element, and the I, which belongs to the warm element, the fire element. And this is what can be perceived when the word of the world enters the human being and brings together the forces of air and warmth, connecting them with the forces of water and earth. All of this interplay of forces is then unfolded by the inner soul when the human being descends from the spiritual and soul world to an earthly existence.

These things can, of course, only be seen inwardly, but they can really be seen inwardly. And one would like to say: It is indeed difficult because today's language is actually formed entirely for materialism and for a materialistic world view, to express oneself in the words of the present languages, but by succeeding more and more in what is seen there, to clothe it in words in such a way that clear thoughts can settle into the human soul, it will become comprehensible to everyone what can be said about the higher worlds through the science of initiation. It is indeed the case that these things can only be found through supersensible research, but supersensible research is not necessary to understand these things.

I have often compared it to saying that you can judge a picture aesthetically without being a painter yourself. In the same way, one can also judge spiritual science, anthroposophy, without being a researcher oneself, although today, to a certain extent, anyone can become one through the instructions in “How to Know Higher Worlds” and so on, so that one can already come to the point of checking the results of spiritual scientific research. But the real value for life is not gained from the content of spiritual truths by researching the facts, but by understanding them, by absorbing them.

Those who truly absorb the ideas clothed in true spiritual research can be said to have the ability to absorb these things within themselves, even if they only have ordinary common sense, just as those who have not learned the chemical composition of sugar also have a taste for it. What one should get from sugar is independent of whether one knows its chemical composition or not. It is the same with supersensible truths. What one should get from them is through their being clothed in the world of ideas, that is how one takes them in. The other is something that has to be done to attain them, but it is of as little help as if I were to say to a child: I will not give you sugar, but I will give you instructions so that you can understand the chemical composition of sugar. The child would not be satisfied. Nor can people be satisfied with mere research into the spiritual worlds; rather, the spiritual results must be translated into formulable ideas. For it is only through these that our soul nature can be so enlivened that a real meaning of life arises from the results of anthroposophy.

When a person takes in what is given through anthroposophy – to begin with, they can take in, let us say, what is described in imagination – they are already doing their common sense a great service, because their personality becomes freer, more independent within. In this way they acquire something that will be very useful for the present and the near future. People today are really quite, quite dependent on uncontrollable ideas and so on that they absorb.

I just want to remind you how the people who attend political or other meetings today are actually just a flock of sheep that fall for the slogans thrown at them by the speakers and then follow them. In this respect, humanity today is terribly dependent. It is also dependent in that it simply absorbs what has been set. As a result, people gradually come to the point where they can no longer think in reality at all, but only seemingly think, because their thinking can no longer, I might say, be seen in the spiritual light. One experiences strange things.

For example, after a eurythmy performance in Berlin, a witty critic recently said: First they presented serious pieces and then humorous pieces. You can see that eurythmy is impossible just from the fact that the humorous pieces are performed with the same movements as the serious pieces.

Now it had first been explained that eurythmy is a visible language, so it really does matter to grasp the content that the eurythmy gives as language. What would be the consequence of what such a witty critic says? The consequence would be that he would have to say: If, for example, a declaimer uses ordinary spoken language, then he must not present serious poems with the same sounds that he uses for comic poems, for example in the German language. In this he would find just as much contradiction as if the same movements occurred in visible speech for comic and serious, for reputable poems. So it is absolute nonsense. People read this, but do not even realize that these are no longer thoughts at all, but that it is just a rolling out of brain processes that are reflected as thoughts but are no longer thoughts; it is the most absolute folly. This shows how people have lost their inner activity. Real life in thoughts must come precisely from people living in the imaginative life and pursuing what comes from the imaginative life with common sense. This makes a person more active, he becomes a personality again in the fullest sense of the word.

But it is of particular importance to engage with what is revealed from the inspired consciousness. If one follows with one's common sense what is described as inspiration, then gradually — as I have already indicated in various ways in other contexts — what is true and false is transformed into healthy and unhealthy judgment. One has the feeling that something that is untrue is morbid. With what is true, one has the feeling: it is something healthy. The logic of truth and falsehood actually only has a meaning for the physical world. As soon as we enter into the spiritual world, we perceive what is true as something healthy and what is false, an error, as something morbid.

But by acquiring a sense of healthy and unhealthy judgment through the study of the truths of inspiration, we prepare the way to understand the Christ event. For the Christ event entered the world because the evolution of humanity was in danger of becoming diseased. From the Christ-event, from the Mystery of Golgotha, there proceeds the power that man may turn again to the Truth, to healing. Through the inspired truths, we really do acquire the possibility of gaining a sense of religious truths again, especially the truths of Christianity. We learn to understand again why the being of Christ was celebrated as a savior, as one who truly heals, has healed and continues to heal humanity. The word really originated in this context. Because at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha the old clairvoyant abilities were still there, which then faded away in the fourth century after the Mystery of Golgotha, and only existed in concept, that is why people at that time still understood what the Mystery of Golgotha meant.

Today we must first struggle to come to this realization. Christ lived in the world until the Mystery of Golgotha, which we contemplate in dream sleep, so that the Christ was perceptible to every person in dream sleep before the Mystery of Golgotha. But no human being was allowed to think – this was something that was made absolutely clear to people in the mystery schools – that the being that lives in Christ could be reached with earthly thoughts, that it could also be found in the waking state. This only became possible through the Mystery of Golgotha, through Christ's death. Since that time He may be remembered as an entity belonging to earthly life itself. A real conception of the God who has come out of the land of dreams into the physical land was created.

This is a real process: the God who has come to know that which the gods otherwise do not know, who has learned to die, who has incorporated the fact of dying into himself, that is the Christ, the God who enters into the world where there is birth and death, the descent of the God into human nature. God becomes man. This is precisely the formula in which what the Christ has become can be expressed: for the earth, the archetype of humanity; for the earth, that through which humanity acquires meaning. And if the other had taken place, if at the same time that God became man, a human being had also felt the urge to become God, that is, to no longer die, to no longer be subject to the laws of earthly life, then, while God became the most perfect human being by descending, he would naturally have become the most miserable God. This polar opposite you have! It is not without reason that, alongside the Christ who ascends to Golgotha, stands Ahasver, the man who becomes God, but a bungling God who loses the possibility of dying, who now walks the world but cannot die, the God who remains on the physical plane but develops on the physical plane the same peculiarities that were actually only allowed to be developed in the realm of dreams.

It is a tremendous, spiritual thing that is presented to our souls: that the God has been given the man who has become God, but, as is to be expected, in a way that makes him miserable. The man who has become God also maintains within the evolution of the earth the principle that the Godhead should not descend to the physical plane: Judaism, the Old Testament world view.

Here we already have a mystery. Those who know these things know that Ahasver is a real entity and the Ahasver legends are based on real impressions of perceptions of Ahasver, which have occurred here and there, for Ahasver exists and is the custodian of Judaism after the Mystery of Golgotha has occurred. He is the man who has become God. We must be quite clear that we can only arrive at a complete knowledge of history by including the spiritual.

On the one hand, we look at the incarnation of God in the event of Golgotha; we look at the incarnation of man in Ahasverus. And the initiate can know that Ahasuerus is really wandering. Of course, he cannot be seen as a human being. After all, he has become a god. But he wanders around. He is present in earthly existence. And real historical representations, which grasp the full reality, make it necessary to look at what also passes as a spiritual reality through the historical becoming of human development.

Of course, many things only exist in images. It is only important to know that these images correspond to realities. It is foolish to say that one should not express oneself in such images. After all, we always express ourselves in images when we speak. Take the Sanskrit word 'Manas'. Whoever understands 'Manas' has before him in sound the picturesque image of the bowl that carries the moon and the sun, because when one pronounced 'Manas' in primeval Sanskrit, one felt the human being in his will-nature as the bowl that was then carried by the thinking being. All words can also be traced back to images, only they are more elementary, simple images. What is expressed through words is not contained in them. When there are more complicated entities that cannot be expressed in words, then images have to be formed. When we speak of Ahasver and the legends of Ahasver, as we otherwise speak of images, these are only more complicated forms of expression that point to the spiritual side.

Anyone who rails against mythology in this sense should also rail against the fact that humans have developed a language through which they want to express a content. He should order them to become mute, because the next step after forbidding them to develop a mythology would be to forbid people to speak. For it is the very same process of visualization in ordinary language as in the higher visualization, when one posits something like the Ahasver, who goes through the evolution of the world as a being, but precisely as a spirit being, and continually prevents man from returning to the spiritual world in the way that is in his evolution, through the Christ, back to the spiritual world from which he went out when he lost atavistic clairvoyance.

That is what I wanted to say today, on the one hand to point out man's true place in the spiritual world, through a correct characterization of the state of sleep and dreams, and on the other hand to point out that spiritual beings live in history that only make the full course of history understandable.

New Education and the Whole Human Being

Here in Bern, I have spoken to you often about anthroposophy in general. And it is a special pleasure to be able now to speak to you in the spirit of anthroposophy about education—the sphere of life that must lie closest to the human heart. We must develop an art of education that can lead us out of the social chaos into which we have fallen during the last few years and decades. Our chances of overcoming this chaos are very slight. In fact, one is tempted to say that there is no escaping this chaos unless we find a way to bring spirituality into human souls through education, so that human beings may find a way to progress and to further the evolution of civilization out of the spirit itself.

We feel confident that this is the right way to proceed, because in our hearts we know that the world is created in spirit and arises from spirit. Therefore, human creation will be fruitful only when it springs from the fountainhead of spirit itself. To achieve such fruitful creation from spirit, however, people must also be educated and taught in the spirit. I believe that anthroposophy in fact has much to say about the nature of education and teaching, therefore, it gives me great satisfaction that I can present these lectures here.

There are many all over the world who feel that a new impetus of some kind is needed in education and teaching. It is true that the nineteenth century was full of progressive ideas and much was done to further schooling and education. However, a recent tendency of our civilization has been that individuals are seldom brought into touch with their own humanity. For many centuries we have been able to record the most wonderful progress in the realm of natural science and in its resulting technology.

We have also seen that a certain worldview has gradually crystallized out of that scientific progress. The world as a whole—which includes the human being—seems to be viewed exclusively in terms of what the senses tell us about natural phenomena, and what the intellect, which is related to the brain, tells us about the realm of the senses. Nevertheless, all of our recently acquired knowledge about the natural world does not, in fact, lead us to the human being; this is not clearly recognized today. Although many people feel this to be the situation, they are unprepared to acknowledge that—regardless of all that the modern age has provided us in terms of information about the natural world—we are still no closer to understanding the human being.

This impossibility is most likely to be felt when we attempt to understand the growing human being, the child. We sense a barrier between the teacher and the child. Anthroposophy, which is based on a real and comprehensive understanding of the human being, would hear this heartfelt appeal coming from all sides—not by establishing theories on education, but by showing men and women as teachers how to enter the school’s practical life. Anthroposophic education is really the practical life of the school, and our lectures should provide practical details about how to deal with the various details of teaching.

Something else must come first, however; for if we were to begin by speaking of practical details in this way, then the spirit that gives birth to all this could not reveal itself. Therefore, you must kindly permit me to speak today of this spirit of anthroposophic education as a kind of introduction. What we have to say about it will be based on a comprehensive, truly penetrating knowledge of the human being—the active force of anthroposophy in education.

A penetrating knowledge of the human being—what does this mean to us? If a growing human being, a child, stands before us, it is not enough, as I have said, to make certain rules for teaching and educating this child, merely conforming to rules as one would when dealing with a technical problem. This will not lead to good teaching. We must bring an inner fire and enthusiasm to our work; we must have impulses that are not transmitted intellectually from teacher to child according to certain rules, but ones that pass intimately from teacher to child. An educator’s whole being must be at work, not just the thinking person; the person who feels and the person who wills must also play their roles.

Recently, the thinking and worldview of natural science have taken hold of people more deeply and closer to the marrow than they like to think. Even those not specifically trained as scientists think, feel, and act scientifically. This is not acceptable for teachers, since scientific thinking provides an understanding of only one member of the whole human being—the physical body, or body of the senses. But this is only one member of the entire human being, and anthroposophy shows us that when we have genuine knowledge of the human being, we see that the human being possesses three clearly distinguished members—physical body, soul, and spirit.

We see the whole human being only when we have enough wisdom and knowledge to recognize the soul’s true nature as clearly as we recognize the physical body. We must also be able to recognize the human spirit as an individual being. Nevertheless, the connections among the body, soul, and spirit in the child are not the same as in the adult; and it is precisely a loosening of the connection with the physical body that allows us to observe the soul and spirit of the child as the greatest wonder of knowledge and practical life in human existence.

The First Stage of Childhood

Let’s look for a moment at the tiny child and see how that child is born into the world. Here we see a genuinely magical process at work. We see how spirit, springing from the innermost being of the little child, flows into undefined features, chaotic movements, and every action, which seem still disjointed and disconnected. Order and form come into the child’s eyes, facial expressions and physical movements, and the child’s features become increasingly expressive. In the eyes and other features, the spirit manifests, working from within to the surface, and the soul—which permeates the entire body—manifests.

When we look at these things with a serious, unbiased attitude, we see how they come about by observing the growing child; in this way we may gaze reverently into the wonders and enigmas of cosmic and human existence. As we watch in this way while the child develops, we learn to distinguish three clearly differentiated stages. The only reason such stages are not generally distinguished is because such discernment depends on deep, intimate knowledge; and people today, with their crude scientific concepts, are not going to trouble themselves by acquiring this kind of intimate knowledge.

Soul and Spirit Build the “Second” Human Being

The first significant change in a child’s life occurs around the seventh year when the second teeth appear. The outer physical process of the change of teeth is itself very interesting. First we have the baby teeth, then the others force their way through as the first are pushed out. A superficial look at this process will see no farther than the actual change of teeth. But when we look into it more deeply (through means I will describe later in these lectures) we discover that this transformation can be observed throughout the child’s body, though more delicately than the actual change of teeth. The change of teeth is the most physical and basic expression of a subtle process that in fact occurs throughout the body.

What really happens? Anyone can see how the human organism develops. We cut our nails, our hair, and we find that our skin flakes off. This demonstrates how physical substance is cast off from the surface as it is constantly pushed out from within. This pushing from within—which we observe in the change of teeth—is present throughout the whole human body. More exacting knowledge shows us that indeed the child gradually forced out the body received through inheritance; it was cast out. The first teeth are forced out, and likewise the child’s whole initial body is forced out.

At the change of teeth, a child stands before us with a body that—in contrast to the body at birth—is entirely formed anew. The body from birth has been cast out as are the first teeth, and a new body is formed. What is the nature of this more intimate process? The child’s first body was inherited. It is the result of a collaboration between the father and mother, so to speak, and it is formed from the earthly physical conditions. But, just what is this physical body? It is the model that the Earth provides to the person as a model for true development as a human being. The soul and spirit aspect of a human being descends from a realm of soul and spirit where it lived prior to conception and birth. Before we became earthly beings in a physical body, we were all beings of soul and spirit in a soul and spirit realm. What we are given by our parents through inherited physical substance unites in embryonic life with what descends from a higher realm as pure spirit and soul. Spirit and soul take hold of the physical body, whose origin is in the stream of inheritance. This physical body becomes its model, and on this model an entirely new human organism is formed, while the inherited organism is forced out.

Thus, when we consider a child between birth and the change of teeth we can say that the physical body’s existence is due to physical inheritance alone. But, two other forces then combine to work on this physical body. First is the force of those elements the human being brought with it to Earth; the second is assimilated from the matter and substance of the Earth itself. By the time the teeth change, the human being has fashioned a second body modeled after the inherited body, and that second body is the product of the human soul and spirit.

Having arrived at such conclusions by observing the human being more intimately, one will naturally be aware of objections that may be raised; such objections are obvious. One is bound to ask: Can’t you see that a likeness to the parents often appears after the change of teeth—that, therefore, a person is still subject to the laws of inheritance, even after the change of teeth? One could raise a number of similar objections.

Let’s consider just this one: We have a model that comes from the stream of inheritance. On this model the spirit and soul develop the second human being. But when something is built from a model we don’t expect to find a complete dissimilarity to the model; thus, it should be clear that the human spirit and soul use the model’s existence to build up the second human organism in its likeness.

Nevertheless, when you can perceive and recognize what really occurs, you discover something. Certain children come into their second organism between nine and eleven, and this second body is almost identical to the initial, inherited organism. With other children, one may notice a dissimilarity between the second organism and the first, and it is clear that something very different is working its way from the center of their being. In truth, we see every variation between these two extremes. While the human spirit and soul aspect is developing the second organism, it tries most of all to conform to the being it brings with it from the realm of spirit and soul.

A conflict thus arises between what is intended to built as the second organism and what the first organism received through inheritance. Depending on whether thy have had a stronger or weaker spiritual and soul existence (in the following lectures we shall see why this is), human beings can either give their second organism an individual form that is strongly impregnated with soul forces, or, if they descend from the spiritual world with weaker forces, stay as closely as possible to the model.

Consider what we must deal with to educate children during the first period of life between birth and the change of teeth. We are inspired with great reverence when we see how divine spiritual forces work down from supersensible realms! We witness them working daily and weekly, from month to month and year to year, during the first phases of children’s lives, and we see how such work carries them through to forming a second individual body. In education we participate in this work of spirit and soul; for human physical existence, we continue what divine spiritual forces began. We participate in divine labor.

The Child as a Sense Organ

These matters require more than strictly intellectual understanding; one’s whole being must comprehend them. Indeed, when we are brought face to face with the creative forces of the world, we may sense the magnitude of our task in education, especially during the early years. But I would like to point out to you that the way spirit and soul enter the work of creating a second human organism shows us that, in the child, the formation of the body, the activity of the soul, and the creation of the spirit are a unity. Whatever happens while forming a new organism and pushing out the old involves a unity of spirit, soul, and body.

Consequently, children reveal themselves very differently than do adults. We may observe this clearly in individual instances. As adults, when we eat something sweet, it is the tongue and palate that perceive its sweetness; a little later, the experience of sweetness ceases when the sweet substance has gone into another part of the body. As adults, we do not follow it farther with our taste. This is very different for a child, in whom taste permeates the whole organism; children do not taste only with the tongue and palate but with the whole organism. The sweetness is drawn throughout the organism. In fact, the whole child is a sensory organ.

In essence, what is a sensory organ? Let’s consider the human eye. Colors make an impression on the eye. If we properly consider what is involved in human seeing, one has to say that will and perception are one in the human eye. The surface is involved—the periphery of the human being. During the first years of life, however, between birth and the change of teeth, such activity permeates the whole organism, though in a delicate way. The child’s whole organism views itself as one all-inclusive sense organ. This is why all impressions from the environment affect children very differently than they would an adult. An expression of the soul element in the human being—the element of human morality—is occurring in the environment, and this can be seen with the eye.

The Effects of the Teacher’s Temperament on Children

Subconsciously—even unconsciously—children have a delicate and intimate capacity for perceiving what is expressed in every movement and act of those around them. If a choleric person expresses fury in the presence of a child and allows the child to see this in the unconscious way I described, then, believe me, we are very mistaken to believe that the child sees only the outer activity. Children have a clear impression of what is contained within these moral acts, even when it is an unconscious impression. Sense impressions of the eye are also unconscious. Impressions that are not strictly sensory impressions, but expressions of the moral and soul life, flow into a child exactly the way colors flow into the eye, because the child’s organism is a sense organ.

This organism, however, has such a delicate structure that every impression permeates all of it. The first impression a child receives from any moral manifestation is a soul impression. For a child, however, the soul always works down into the bodily nature. Whether it be fear or joy and delight that a child experiences in the environment, all this passes—not crudely but in a subtle and delicate way—into the processes of growth, circulation, and digestion. Children who live in constant terror of what may come their way as expressions of fury and anger from a choleric person, experience something in the soul that immediately penetrates the breathing, the circulation of the blood, and even the digestive activities. This is tremendously significant. In childhood we cannot speak only of physical education, because soul education also means educating the body; everything in the soul element is metamorphosed into the body—it becomes body.

We will realize the significance of this only when, through genuine knowledge of the human being, we do more than merely look at children and imprint certain educational maxims on them, and instead consider all of human earthly life. This is more difficult than merely observing children. We may record observations regarding memory, thinking powers, sensory functions of the eye, ear, and so on, but such records are made for the moment or, at most, for a short while. But this has not helped us in any way toward true knowledge of the human being as such.

When we look at a plant, something is already contained there in the seed that takes root and, after a long time, will appear as blossom and fruit. Similarly, in children before the change of teeth, when the bodily nature is susceptible to the soul’s influences, there are seeds of happiness and unhappiness, health and sickness, which will affect all of life until death. As teachers and educators, whatever we allow to flow into children during their first phase of life will work down into the blood, breathing, and digestion; it is like a seed that may come to fruition only in the form of health or sickness when they are forty or fifty years old. It is in fact true that the way educators act toward the little child creates the predispositions for happiness or unhappiness, sickness or health.

This is particularly noticeable when we observe in detail the effects of teachers on the children, based on actual life events. These phenomena may be observed just as well as the phenomena of botany or physics in laboratories, but we seldom see this. Let us consider individual examples. Let us consider, for instance, the teacher’s relationship to a child in school. Consider the teacher’s temperament. We may know that, due to temperament, a choleric teacher may be energetic, but also quick-tempered and easily angered. A melancholic teacher may be the kind of person who withdraws into the self—an introvert who is self-occupied and avoids the world. A sanguine teacher may be quick to receive outer impressions, flitting from one impression to the next. Or, we may find a phlegmatic person who allows things to slide, someone indifferent to everything, who remains unaffected by outer impressions, generally gliding over things.

Let’s imagine for the moment that a teachers’ training college did nothing to moderate these temperaments and prepare teachers to function well in the school life—that these temperaments were allowed full and total expression with no restraint. The choleric temperament—let us imagine that, before the change of teeth, a child is exposed to a choleric temperament. If a teacher or educator lets loose with a temperament of this kind, it permanently affects the child’s soul, leaving its mark on the circulatory system and all that constitutes the inner rhythmic life. Such effects do not initially penetrate very deeply; really, they are only there in seed, but this seed grows and grows, as all seeds do. It sometimes happens that, at forty or fifty years of age, circulatory disorders of the rhythmic system appear as a direct result of a teacher’s unrestrained choleric temperament. Indeed, we do not educate children only for childhood, but for their whole earthly existence and even, as we shall see later, for the time beyond.

Or, let’s imagine a melancholic giving rein to that particular temperament—someone who was not motivated during teacher training to harmonize it and find an appropriate way to channel it into working with children. Such teachers succumb to their own melancholy in their interactions with children. But by living, feeling, and thinking such inner melancholy, such a person continually withholds from children exactly what should flow from teacher to child—that is, warmth. This warmth, which is so often missing in education, acts first as a warmth of soul, and then passes into the body, primarily into the digestive system. This quickens the seed of certain tendencies that appear later in life as all kinds of disorders and blood diseases.

Or consider the phlegmatic, a person who is indifferent to interactions with the child. A very peculiar relationship arises between them—not exactly a coldness, but an extremely watery element is active in the soul realm between the child and such a teacher. The foundation is not strong enough for the proper interplay of soul between teacher and child. The child is insufficiently aroused to inner activity. If you observe someone who developed under the influence of a phlegmatic person, and if you follow the course of that person’s life into later years, you will often notice a tendency to brain weakness, poor circulation in the brain, or a dulling of brain activity.

And now let us look at the effects of sanguine people on the child—those who allow their sanguine nature to get out of hand. Such an individual responds strongly to every impression, but impressions pass quickly. There is a kind of inner life, but the person’s own nature is taken right out into the surroundings. Children cannot keep up with such a teacher, who rushes from one impression to the next, and fails to stimulate the child properly. In order to arouse sufficient inner activity in a child, the teacher must lovingly hold that child to one impression for a certain period of time. If we observe a child who has grown up under the influence of an uncontrolled sanguine nature, we see in later life that there is a certain lack of vital force—an adult life that lacks strength and content.

Thus, if we have the ability to see it (and education depends on a capacity for subtle perception), we recognize various types of people in their fortieth or fiftieth year of life, and we are able to say whether a person has been influenced by the temperament of an educator who was melancholic, phlegmatic, choleric, or sanguine.

The Lasting Effects of a Teacher’s Actions

I mention these things in introducing my lectures, not to give instructions on how to work out these things for training teachers, but to show you how actions meant to affect the child’s soul life do not just remain in the soul, but go all the way into the physical nature. To educate the soul life of children means to educate them for their whole earthly life, even in their bodily nature.

Anthroposophy is often criticized for wanting to speak of spirit as well as soul. There are many today who become very critical and antagonistic whenever they even hear the word spirit, and anthroposophy is easily assumed to be a kind of fantasy. Anthroposophists are accused of reducing the reality of the sense world to a kind of vague abstraction, and those who speak rationally of spiritual things should naturally be unconcerned with such abstraction.

In fact, what anthroposophy attempts in education is to apply the correct principles for bodily education, since we understand that precisely during the first stage of life, the entire physical nature of a child is influenced by soul impulses. Anyone who consciously tries to discover how all physical activity is based fundamentally on soul and spirit can still choose to be a materialist when working on child development between birth and the change of teeth. The way matter works in a child is contained in a unity of soul and spirit. No one can understand matter in a child unless soul and spirit are considered valid. Indeed, soul and spirit are revealed in the outer appearance of matter.

The ability to educate necessitates a sense of responsibility. The considerations I have presented to you strongly arouse one’s sense of responsibility as a matter of heartfelt concern. If you take up educational work knowing what affects the young child and that it will continue through all of life as happiness or unhappiness, sickness or health, such knowledge may initially seem like a burden on the soul; but it will also spur you on to develop forces and capacities and above all, as a teacher, a mental attitude that is strong enough to sow “seeds” of soul in the young child that will blossom only later in life, even in old age.

This knowledge of the human being is what anthroposophy presents as the basis for an art of education. It is not merely knowledge of what we find in a human being in a single stage of life—for example, in childhood; it springs from contemplating all of human earthly life. What, in fact, is a human life on Earth? When we view a person before us at any given moment, we may speak of seeing an organism, since each detail is in harmony with the formation of the whole.

To gain insight into the inner connections of size or form in the individual members of the human organism—how they fit together, how they harmonize to form both a unity and a multiplicity—let us look, for example, at the little finger. Although I am only looking at the little finger, I also get some idea of the shape of the earlobe, since the earlobe’s form has a certain connection with the form of the little finger, and so on. Both the smallest and the largest members of the human organism receive their shape from the whole, and they are also related in form to every other member. Consequently, we cannot understand, for example, an organ in the head unless we see it in relation and in harmony with an organ in the leg or foot. This also applies to the spatial organism—the organism spread out in space.

Besides having a spatial organism, however, the human being has also a time organism. We have seen that within the space organism, the earlobe receives its form from the body as a whole, as well as from the form of, say, the little finger or knee; but the time organism must also be considered. The configuration of a person’s soul in the fiftieth year—the person’s physical health or sickness, cheerfulness or depression, clarity or dullness of mind—is most intimately connected with what was present there in the tenth, seventh, or fourth year of life. Just as the members of a spatial organism have a certain relationship to one another, so do the members of a time organism separated from one another by time.

From one perspective, it may be asserted that when we are five years old, everything within us is already in harmony with what we will be at forty. Of course, a trivial objection may be raised that one might die young, but it doesn’t apply, since other considerations enter in. Additionally, as a spatial organism, a human being is also organized in time. And if you ever find a finger lying around somewhere, it would have to have been very recently dislodged to look like a finger at all—very soon, it would no longer be a finger. A limb separated from the organism soon shrivels and ceases to be a human limb. A finger separated from the human organism is not a finger at all—it could never live apart from the body, but becomes nothing, and since it cannot exist on its own, it is not real. A finger is real only while united with the whole physical body between birth and death.

Such considerations make it clear that in all our teaching, we must consider the time organism. Imagine what would happen to the space organism if it were treated the way people often treat their time-organism. Let say, for example, that we put some substance into a man’s stomach, and it destroys his head. Imagine, however, that we examined only the stomach and never looked at what happened to this substance once it dispersed into the organism, where it eventually reached the head. To understand the human organism, we must be able to examine the process that the substance goes through in the human stomach and also see what it means for the head. In passing from the stomach to the head the substance must continually alter and change; it must be flexible.

In the time organism, we continually sin against children. We teach them to have clear, sharp ideas and become dissatisfied if their ideas are flexible and not sharply defined. Our goal is to teach children in such a way that they retain in their mind what we teach them, so they can tell us just what we told them. We are often especially gratified when a child can reproduce exactly what we taught several years later. But that’s like having a pair of shoes made for a child of three and expecting them to fit when the child is ten years old. In reality, our task is to give children living, flexible ideas that can grow in the soul just as the outer physical limbs grow with the body. It is much less trouble to give a child definitions of various things to memorize and retain, but that is like expecting the shoes of a three-year- old to fit a child of ten.

We ourselves must take part in the inner activities of children’s souls, and we must consider it a joy to give them something inwardly flexible and elastic. Just as their physical limbs grow, so can their ideas, feelings, impulses, and soon they themselves are able to make something new out of what we gave them. This cannot happen unless we cultivate inner joy in ourselves toward growth and change. We have no use for pedantry or sharply defined ideas of life. We can use only active, life forming forces—forces of growth and increase. Teachers who have a feeling for this growing, creative life have already found their relationship to the children because they contain life within themselves, and such life can then pass on to the children who demand it of them. This is what we need most of all. Much that is dead in our pedagogy and educational systems must be transformed into life. What we need, therefore, is a knowledge of the human being that doesn’t say only that a human being is like this or like that. We need knowledge of the human being that affects the whole human being, just as physical nourishment affects the blood. Blood circulates in human beings, and we need human knowledge that gives blood to our souls also; it would not only make us sensible, clever, and intelligent, but also enthusiastic and inwardly flexible, able to enkindle love in us. This would be an art of education that springs from true knowledge of the human being, borne by love.

These have been the introductory remarks I wanted to present about the essential ideas that an art of education must get from anthroposophy. In future lectures we will see how the spirit of anthroposophic education can be realized in the practical details of school.

The Goal of Waldorf Education

You have seen that education must be based on a more intimate knowledge of the human being than is found in natural science, although it is generally assumed that all knowledge must be grounded in natural science. As we have seen, however, natural science cannot come even close to the reality of the human being, and it doesn’t help to base our knowledge on it.

The world is permeated by spirit, and true knowledge of the world must be permeated by spirit as well. Anthroposophy can give us spiritual knowledge of the world, and, with it, spiritual knowledge of the human being, and this alone leads to a true art of education. But don’t make the mistake (which is easy to do) that those who consider themselves anthroposophists want to establish “anthroposophic” schools that teach anthroposophy as a worldview in the place of other contemporary worldviews, regardless of whether such views are inspired more by intellect or feeling. It is important to understand and reiterate that this is not at all our intention. What we are examining is mainly concerned with matters of method and the practice of teaching. Men and women who adhere to anthroposophy feel—and rightly so—that the knowledge of the human being it provides can establish some truly practical principles for the way we treat children.

At the Waldorf school in Stuttgart we have been able to pursue an art of education based on anthroposophy for many years; and we have always made it clear to the rest of the world that anthroposophy as such was never taught there. Roman Catholic children receive religious instruction from a priest and Protestant children from a Protestant pastor. Only those children whose parents specifically request it receive religion lessons involving a freer religious instruction based on anthroposophy. Thus, our own anthroposophic worldview as such really has no place in the school work itself.

Moreover, I would like to point out that the true aim and object of anthroposophic education is not to establish as many anthroposophic schools as possible. Naturally, some model schools are needed, where the methods are practiced in detail. There is a need crying out in our time for such schools. Our goal, however, is to enable every teacher to bring the fruits of anthroposophy to their work, no matter where they may be teaching or the nature of the subject matter. There is no intention of using anthroposophic pedagogy to start revolutions, even silent ones, in established institutions. Our task, instead, is to point to a way of teaching that springs from our anthroposophic knowledge of humankind.

Understanding the Human Being

As you know, we need to gain a more intimate observation of human beings than is customary today. In fact, there are some areas where people are learning a very exact kind of observation, especially in regard to visual observation—for example, using a telescope to observe the stars, for surveying, and in many other realms of knowledge. It arises from a sense for exact, mathematical observation. Because of the scientific mindset that has ruled for the past three centuries, nowhere in contemporary civilization do we find the kind of intimate observation that sees the fine and delicate changes in the human soul or body organization. Consequently, people have little to say about the important changes that have occurred in the child’s whole physical organization, such as those that happen at the change of the teeth, at puberty, and again after the twentieth year. And so, transitions that have great significance in terms of education—such as the period between the change of teeth and puberty—are simply ignored.

These changes are mentioned, it is true, but only as they affect the actual physical body of the child or are expressed in the soul’s more superficial dependence on the physical body. This would require much more delicate observations. Anthroposophy begins by viewing the world as an expression of spiritual forces, which is seldom acknowledged today; it provides exercises that train a person’s soul to acquire direct insight into the spirit world. There are some whose destiny has not yet brought them to the point of seeing the spiritual facts for themselves, but anthroposophy has such power that merely beginning such exercises in itself helps people to learn a much more delicate and intimate observation of the human being. After all, you must remember that our soul and spirit is the part of us that, as we have seen, descends from a pre-earthly existence and unites with the inherited physical body. And spiritual research depends on this higher, supersensible part of us; we have supersensible eyes and ears—soul organs such as the eyes and ears of our physical body—so that we can arrive at certain perceptions independently of the body.

Cosmic and Human Cycles

Each night while asleep, a person is unconsciously in a condition that is similar to what is needed for spiritual investigation. When falling asleep, the human soul and spirit leave the physical body, and re-enter it when the person awakes. While awake, people use their eyes and ears and move their limbs, and the forces for this come from the spirit and soul aspects of the human being. Genuine knowledge of nature—which doesn’t exist yet—would also show that while awake, people’s physical actions are controlled by soul and spirit, and that sleep is only an interruption of this activity. Here again, the difference is too subtle to be perceived by modern scientific methods—upon which today’s education is based, even when directed toward the earliest years of childhood. A sleeping person is completely surrendered to the activities of the organism to which plant and mineral are also subject.

Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science, on the other hand, strive for precision and accuracy, and it would not be true, of course, to say that while asleep a person is a plant. In a human being, mineral and plant substances have been raised to the level of animal and human. The human organization is not like that of a plant, since a plant has no muscles and nerves, and the human of course has both muscles and nerves, even while asleep. The important thing, however, is very simple; the vegetative function of the plant has nothing to do with nerves and muscles, but it is different for a human being. Activity in a person is related to muscles and nerves, and thus transcends the physical; even human sleep activity is not merely vegetative. (In a certain sense this applies also to animals, but we cannot address this matter now.) Although we find the same impulses in the plant as in the sleeping human being, nevertheless something different happens in a sleeping person.

It may help us to form an idea of this process if we think of it this way: when we are awake, the soul and spirit are integrated with the human organism. The soul and spirit, in turn, have a certain similarity to the cosmos, the whole universe—but keep in mind that it is only a similarity. And careful observation of plant development will show us that in spring, when the snow has melted, we see plants spring out of the earth and unfold their being. Until now, plant growth was controlled by the Sun forces within the Earth, or the stored sunshine of the previous year.

In spring the plants are released, so to speak, by these earthly Sun forces and, as they shoot out of the soil, they are received by the outer sunlight and guided through the summer until the seeds become ripe. Plant growth is again given over to the Earth. Throughout the summer, the Sun’s forces gradually descend into the Earth to be stored there; thus, the Earth is always permeated by these accumulated sun forces. We need only remember that millions of years ago Sun forces shone on the plants, which then became coal within the Earth; thus, sunlight is in reality now being burned in our stoves. Likewise—though for a much shorter time—the Sun’s forces are preserved in the Earth from summer to summer. Throughout the winter, plants absorb the Sun’s forces found in the earth, and during summer, the Sun pours its rays upon them right from the cosmos. So there really is a rhythm in the life of plants—earthly sun-forces, cosmic sun-forces, earthly sun-forces, cosmic sun forces, and so on. Plant life swings from one to the other as a pendulum on a clock.

Now let us turn to the human being. When I fall asleep I leave behind in my body everything of a mineral and plant nature, though, as we have seen, the plant nature in the human being—in contrast to an actual plant—is organized so that spirit and soul can dwell within it. What is left behind in sleep is thus wholly surrendered to its own plant-like activity. It begins to blossom and sprout, and when we go to sleep it is really springtime within us. When we awaken, the plant forces are driven back, and it becomes autumn within us. As soul and spirit arise on awakening, autumn enters us.

Viewing things externally, it is often said that waking is like spring and sleeping like autumn. This is not true, however. Genuine spiritual insight into human nature shows us that during the first moments of sleep, spring life sprouts and blossoms in us, and when we awaken autumn sinks into us like the setting Sun. While awake, when we are using all our faculties of soul, it is winter within us. Again we see a rhythm, as in plantlife. In plant growth we distinguish between earthly activity and the Sun’s activity. In the human being, we find essentially the same activity imitating the plant; falling asleep—summer activity, awakening—winter activity, and around again to summer activity, winter activity; but here it takes place in only twenty-four hours. Human beings have condensed a yearly rhythm into a day and a night.

These rhythms are similar but not identical, because for a human being the life of the soul and spirit does not have the same duration as the life of spirit in the realm of nature. A year is only a day in the life of the spirits who pervade the cosmos and permeate the whole course of the year, just as the soul and spirit of human beings direct the course of their day.

As we consider this, we arrive at this hypothesis. (I must warn you, by the way, that what I am about to say may seem very strange to you, but I present it as a hypothesis to demonstrate more clearly what I mean. Let us suppose that a woman falls asleep, and within her is what I have described as summer activity. Let us suppose that she continues to sleep without waking up. What will happen then? The plant element within her—the element not of soul and spirit—would eventually become the rhythm of the plant realm. It would go from a daily rhythm to an annual rhythm. Of course, such a rhythm does not exist in the human being. Thus, if the physical body were to go on sleeping as described, the person would be unable to tolerate the resulting yearly rhythm and would die; if the human body were all plant activity, it would be organized differently. The physical body would separate from the soul and spirit, assume a yearly cycle, and take on purely vegetative qualities. When we view physical death, which leads to the body’s destruction, we see that by being born out of the cosmos, the human being passed from a grand cycle to a small cycle. If a human body is on its own and cannot animate the spirit and soul in itself, it is destroyed, since it cannot immediately find its place in the cosmic rhythm.

Therefore, we see that if we can develop a more delicate faculty for observation, we can gain true insight into the essence of human existence. This is why I said that those who have entered the path of spiritual knowledge, though they may not yet have attained spiritual vision for themselves, will nevertheless feel forces stirring within that lead to spiritual insight. And these are the very forces that act as messengers and mediators of all the spirits at work in the cosmos. Spirit is active in the cosmos where we find the beings who guide the life cycle of the year. This is a new realm to us, but when we observe a human being we can see the presence of soul and spirit in all human life, and here we are on familiar ground. For this reason, it is always easier to exercise a fine faculty of perception in regard to the human soul and spiritual qualities than it is to perceive spirit activity itself in the world.

When we think in ordinary life it is as if thinking, or forming mental images, continually escaped us. When we bump into something or feel something with our fingers—a piece of silk or velvet, for example—we immediately perceive that we have encountered that object, and we can feel its shape by touching its surface. Then we know that as human beings, we have connected with our environment. When we think, however, we do not seem to touch objects around us in this way. Once we have thought about something and made it our own, we can say that we have “apprehended,” or “grasped” it (begreifen). What do we mean by this? If external objects are alien to us—which is generally true for our thinking—then we do not say we have grasped them. If, for example, a piece of chalk is lying there, and I am standing here moving my hand as one does when speaking, one does not say, “I have grasped the chalk.” But if I actually take hold of the chalk with my hand, then I can say, “I have grasped it.”

In earlier times, people had a better understanding of what thinking really was, and out of such knowledge, words and expressions flowed into the language that expressed the real thing much better than our modern abstractionists realize. If we have had a mental picture of something, we say we have grasped it. This means we have come into contact with the object—we have “seized” it. Today we no longer realize that we can have intimate contact with objects in our environment through the very expressions in our thinking life. For example, there is a word in our language today that conceals its own meaning in a very hypocritical way. We say “concept” [Begriff in German, from begreifen]. I have a concept. The word conceive (to hold or gather) is contained within it [greifen, to grasp, or seize]. I have something that I have grasped, or gathered into myself. We have only the word now; the life has gone out of its meaning.

Examples such as these from everyday life demonstrate the aim and purpose of the exercises described as anthroposophic methods of research in my book How to Know Higher Worlds, and in the latter half of An Outline of Esoteric Science, and in other works. Consider the exercises in mental imagery. Certain thoughts are held in the mind so that concentration on these thoughts may strengthen the soul life. These exercises are based neither on superstition nor merely on fantasy, but on clear thinking and deliberation as exact as that used for mathematics. They lead human beings to develop a capacity for thought in a much more vital and active way than that found in the abstract thinking of people today.

Thinking and the Etheric Body

People today are truly dominated by abstraction. When they work all day with their arms and legs, they feel the need to sleep off their fatigue, because they recognize that their real being has been actively moving arms and legs. What they fail to understand, however, is that when we think, our being is just as active. People cannot see that when they think their being actively flows out and takes hold of the objects of their thinking; this is because they do not perceive the lowest supersensible member of the human being, the etheric body, living within the physical body, just as the physical body lives within the external world.

The etheric body can in fact be perceived at the moment when—by practicing the exercises I referred to—a person develops the eye of the soul and the ear of the spirit. One can then see how thinking, which is primarily an activity of the etheric body, is really a spiritual “grasping,” or spiritual touching, of the objects around us. Once we have condensed and concentrated our thoughts by means of the exercises mentioned, we experience spirit in such a way that we no longer have the abstract feeling, which is so prevalent today, that objects are far from us. We get a true sense of them that arises from practiced, concentrated thinking. Thinking too will then bring fatigue, and especially after using our powers of thought we will want to have our sleep.

The presence of materialistic ideas is not the worst product of this age of materialism in which we live; educators must also consider another aspect. As educators, we may feel somewhat indifferent to the amount of fatigue caused by people’s activities; eventually, people return to their senses, and things even out. But the worst thing for an educator is to watch a child go through years of schooling and receive for the soul only nourishment that bears the stamp of natural science—that is, of material things. Of course, this does not apply only to school science classes; all education today, even in the lowest grades, is based on scientific thinking. This is absorbed by children, it grows up with them, and it penetrates the whole physical organization so that in later years it appears as insomnia.

What is the cause of the sleeplessness of our materialistic time? It is due to the fact that if we think only in a materialistic way, the activity of thought—this “grasping” or “handling” of our environment through thought—does not allow the corresponding organs of the etheric body to become tired since it has become too abstract. Here, only the physical body becomes tired; we fall asleep—the physical body falls asleep—but the etheric becomes nervous and restless and cannot sleep. It draws the soul and spirit back into it, and this condition will necessarily develop gradually into an epidemic of insomnia. This is already happening today. Only by considering such matters can we understand what this materialistic time signifies. It is bad enough that people think materialistic, theoretical thoughts; but in itself this is not really that serious. It is even worse that we experience the effects of materialism in our moral life and in our economic life. And the worst thing is that through materialism, all of childhood is ruined to the point that people can no longer come to terms with moral or spiritual impulses at all.

These things must be known by everyone who recognizes the need to transform our teaching and education. The transitions we have mentioned, such as those that occur at the change of teeth and at puberty, can be understood only through intimate observation of the human being. We must learn to see how a person is inwardly active, so that people experience their etheric just as they feel their physical body; they must recognize that when they think about any object, they are really doing in the etheric what is otherwise done in the physical human body. If I want to know what an object is like, I feel it, I contact it, and thus gain a knowledge of its surface. This also applies to my etheric body. I “feel” etherically and supersensibly the object I want to “grasp,” what I wish to conceptualize. The etheric body is just as active as the physical body, and correct knowledge of human development can come only from this knowledge and consciousness of the etheric body’s activity.

The Child’s Imitative Nature

If we can activate our thinking in this way and, with this inwardly active thinking, watch a very young child, we see how every action performed in that child’s environment and every look that expresses some moral impulse (for the moral quality of a look contains something that passes into the child as an imponderable force) flows right into the child and continues to work in the breathing and the circulation of the blood. The clearest and most concrete statement we can come to regarding a child is this: “A child is an imitative being through and through.” The way a child breathes or digests in the more delicate and intimate processes of breathing or digesting reflects the actions of those around the child.

Children are completely surrendered to their environment. In adults the only parallel to such devotion is found in religion as expressed through the human soul and spirit. Religion is expressed in spiritual surrender to the universe. The religious life unfolds properly when, with our own spirit, we go beyond ourselves and surrender to a spiritual worldview—we should flow out into a divine worldview. Adult religious life depends on emancipating soul and spirit from the physical body, when a person’s soul and spirit are given up to the divine spirit of the world. Children give up their whole being to the environment. In adults, the activities of breathing, digestion, and circulation are within them, cut off from the external world. In children, however, all such activities are still surrendered to their environment, and they are therefore religious by nature. This is the essential feature of a child’s life between birth and the change of teeth; the whole being is permeated with a natural religious element, so to speak, and even the physical body maintains a religious mood.

But children are not surrounded only by beneficial forces that inspire religious devotion in later life. There are also spiritual forces that are harmful, which come from people around children and from other spiritual forces in the world. In this way, this natural religious element in a child’s physical body may also be exposed to evil in the environment—children can encounter evil forces. And when I say that even a small child’s physical body has a religious quality, I do not mean that children cannot be little demons! Many children are little demons, because they have been open to evil spiritual forces around them.

Our task is to overcome and drive out such forces by applying methods appropriate to our time. As long as a child is an imitative religious being, admonitions do no good. Words can be listened to only when the soul is emancipated to some extent, when its attention can be self-directed. Disapproving words cannot help us deal with a small child. But what we ourselves do in the presence of the child does help, because when a child sees this it flows right in and becomes sense perception. Our actions, however, must contain a moral quality.

If, for example, a man who is color-blind looks at a colored surface, he may see only gray. An adult looks at another person’s actions also in this way, seeing only the speed and flow of the gestures. We see the physical qualities but no longer see the moral qualities of the person’s actions. A child, on the other hand, sees the moral element, even if only unconsciously, and we must make sure that while in the presence of children, we not only never act in a way that should not be imitated, but never think thoughts that should not enter their souls. Such education of the thoughts is most important for the first seven years of life, and we must not allow ourselves to think any impure, ugly, or angry thoughts when in the company of little children. You may say, “But I can think what I like without altering my outer actions in the least; so the child sees nothing and cannot be influenced by what cannot be seen.” Here it is interesting to consider those very peculiar and rather stupid shows given at one time, with so-called thinking horses—horses that could count, and other animals performing tricks demonstrating “intelligence.” These things were interesting, though not in the way that most people believed.

I once saw the Elberfeld horses. (I want to speak only of my own observation). I saw the horse belonging to Mr. von Osten, and I could see how he gave answers to his master. Von Osten gave him arithmatic problems to do—not very complicated, it is true, but difficult enough for a horse. The horse had to add and subtract and would give the correct answers by stamping his hoof. Now you can look at this either from the perspective of a modern scientist—for example, the professor who wrote a whole fat book on the horse—or you can view it from an anthroposophic standpoint. The professor began by repudiating all non-professional opinions on the matter. (Please do not think that I intend to say anything against natural science, because I am well aware of its value.) In the end, the professor concluded that the horse was able to perceive very delicate movements made by the man—a slight twitch of an eyelid, the most delicate vibrations of certain muscles, and so on. From this, the horse eventually learned what answers corresponded to certain vibrations, and could give the required number of stamps with his hoof. This hypothesis is very clever and intelligent. He then arrives at the inevitable question of whether these things have actually been observed. He asks this question himself, since people are indeed learning to be very conscientious in their research. He answers it, however, by saying that the human senses are not organized in such a way that they perceive such fine delicate movements and vibrations, but a horse can see them. In fact, all he proves is that a horse can see more in a person than a professor can.

But for me, there was something else important—the horse could give the correct answers only when Mr. von Osten stood beside him and spoke. While he talked he kept taking lumps of sugar and placing them in the horse’s mouth. The horse was permeated by a taste of sweetness all the time. This is the important thing; the horse felt suffused with sweetness. In such a condition, even a horse can experience things that would otherwise not be possible. In fact, I would put it this way: Mr. von Osten himself constantly lived in the “sweetened horse,” the etheric horse that had permeated the physical horse. His thoughts were alive and diffused there, just as they were in his own body; his thoughts lived on in the horse. It was not because a horse has a finer perception than a professor, but because it is not yet as highly organized and thus more susceptible to external influences while its physical body continually absorbs the sweetness.

Indeed, there are such influences that pass from person to person, aroused by things almost—if not wholly—imperceptible to contemporary human beings. Such things occur in the interactions between humankind and animals, and they also occur very much when the soul and spirit are not yet free of the body—that is, during early childhood. Small children can actually perceive the morality behind every look and gesture of those around them, even though this may be no longer possible for those who are older. It is therefore of the greatest importance that we never allow ourselves to think ugly thoughts around children; not only does this live on in their souls, but works right down into the physical body.

There is no question that much is being accomplished these days in many medical or other dissertations, and they reflect the current state of scientific knowledge. But a time will come when there will be something very new in this area. Let me give you a specific example to demonstrate what I mean. A time will come when a person may write a doctoral thesis showing that a disease, perhaps during the forty-eighth year of a person’s life, can be traced back to certain evil thoughts in the environment of that person as a child of four or five. This way of thinking can bring us to a genuine understanding of human beings and the capacity for seeing the totality of human life.

We thus have to learn gradually that it is not so much a question of inventing from our own abstract thoughts all kinds of things for little children to do, such as using rods and so on. Children do not spontaneously do things like that. Their own soul forces must be aroused, and then they will imitate what the adults do. A little girl plays with a doll because she sees her mother nursing the baby. Whatever we see in adults is present in children as their tendency to imitate. This tendency must be considered in educating children up to the seventh year.

We must bear in mind, however, that what we educate is subject to change in the child’s organism; in children everything is done in a more living and animated way than in adults, because children are still a unity of body, soul, and spirit. In adults, the body has been freed from the soul and spirit, and the soul and spirit from the body. Body, soul, and spirit exist side by side as individual entities; in the child they are still firmly united. This unity even penetrates the thinking.

We can see these things very clearly through an example. A small child is often given a so-called “beautiful” doll—a painted creature with glass eyes, made to look exactly like a human being. These little horrors are made to open and shut their eyes and do all sorts of other things. These are then presented to children as “beautiful” dolls. Even from an artistic perspective they are hideous; but I will not enlarge on that now. But consider what really happens to a child who is presented with a doll of this kind, a doll that can open its eyes and so on. At first the child will love it because it is a novelty, but that does not last.

Now, compare that with what happens to a child if I just take a piece of rag and make a doll out of that. Tie it together for a head, make two dots for eyes, and perhaps a big nose, and there you have it. Give that to a child and the rest of that doll will be filled out by the child through imagination in soul and spirit, which are so closely connected with the body. Then, every time that child plays with the doll, there is an inner awakening that remains inwardly active and alive. By making such experiments yourself, you will see what a difference there is between giving a child playthings that leave as much as possible to the power of imagination and giving finished toys that leave nothing for the child’s own inner activity. Handwork for small children should only indicate, leaving much for the child’s own imagination to do. Working in set forms that can easily be left as they are does not awaken any inner activity in the child, because the imagination cannot get past what is open to the senses.

Physical and Psychical Effects

This shows us what kind of teachers and educators we should be if we really want to approach children in the right way. We need an art of teaching based on a knowledge of human beings—knowledge of the child. This art of education will arise when we find a doctor’s thesis that works with a case of diabetes at the age of forty by tracing it back to the harmful effects of the wrong kind of play in the third or fourth year. People will see then what we mean by saying that the human being consists of body, soul, and spirit, and that in the child, body, soul, and spirit are still a unity. The spirit and soul later become freed of the body, and a trinity is formed. In the adult, body, soul, and spirit are pushed apart, as it were, and only the body retains what was absorbed by the individual during early development as the seed of later life.

Now this is the strange thing: when an experience affects the soul, its consequences are soon visible, even when the experience was unconscious; physical consequences, however, take seven or eight times longer to manifest. If you educate a child of three or four so that you present what will influence the soul’s life, then the effect of this will appear in the eighth year; and people are usually careful to avoid doing anything with a child of four or five that may affect the soul life in an unhealthy way during the eighth or ninth year. Effects on the physical body take much longer to manifest, because the physical body must free itself of the soul and spirit. Therefore, something that influences the soul life at four or five may come to fruition in the physical body when that person is seven or eight times as old—for example, in the thirty-fifth year. Thus, a person may develop an illness during the late thirties or early forties caused by ill influences that affected that soul while at play as a child of three or four.

If you wish to understand the whole human being, you must also realize that the freeing of the body from soul and spirit in the adult, as opposed to a child’s unity of body, soul, and spirit, is not merely abstract theory, but a matter of very specific knowledge, for we are speaking of very different calendars. The time that the body requires to work something out is increasingly lengthened compared to the time needed by the soul. The physical body works more slowly, and harmful influences manifest much later there than in the soul.

Thus, we often see that when we transgress against a little child in the very early years, many things turn out wrong in the teenager’s soul-life. This can be corrected, however. It is not very difficult to find ways of helping even seemingly unmanageable children during their teens. They may even become very good and respectable, if somewhat boring, citizens later on. This is not very serious. But the body develops more and more slowly as life goes on, and in the end, long after all the soul difficulties of early youth have been overcome, the physical effects will gradually emerge, and in later life the person will have to contend with arthritis or some other illness.

Real, experiential knowledge of the human being is of the greatest importance. Truly concrete knowledge of the human being, with the power of seeing right into the person, is the only possible basis for a true art of education—an art of education whereby persons may find their place in life and, subject to the laws of their own destinies, fully develop all their powers. Education should never work against a person’s destiny, but should help people achieve the fullest possible development of their own predispositions. Often today, people’s education lags far behind the talents and tendencies that destiny implanted in them. We must keep pace with these forces to the extent that the human beings in our care can attain all that their destinies will allow—the fullest clarity of thought, the most loving deepening of feeling, and the greatest possible energy and capacity of will.

This can be done only through an art of education and teaching based on a real knowledge of the human being. We will speak more of this in the next lectures.

In the preceding lectures I have repeatedly spoken of how important it is that teachers turn their attention in particular toward the drastic changes, or metamorphoses, that occur during a child’s life—for example, the change of teeth and puberty. We have not fully developed our observation of such changes, because we are used to noticing only the more obvious outer expressions of human nature according to so-called natural laws. What concerns the teacher, however, arises in reality from the innermost center of a child’s being, and what a teacher can do for the child affects a child’s very inner nature. Consequently, we must pay particular attention to the fact that, for example, at this significant change of teeth, the soul itself goes through a transformation.

Memory Prior to the Change of Teeth

Let us examine a single aspect of this soul-life—the memory, or capacity for remembering. A child’s memory is very different before and after the change of teeth. The transitions and developments in human life occur slowly and gradually, so to speak of the change of teeth as a single fixed event in time is only approximate. Nevertheless, this point in time manifests in the middle of the child’s development, and we must consider very intensively what takes place at that time.

When we observe a very young child, we find that the capacity to remember has the quality of a soul habit. When a child recalls something during that first period of life until the change of teeth, such remembering is a kind of habit or skill. We might say that when, as a child, I acquire a certain accomplishment—let us say, writing—it arises largely from a certain suppleness of my physical constitution, a suppleness that I have gradually acquired. When you watch a small child taking hold something, you have found a good illustration of the concept of habit. A child gradually discovers how to move the limbs this way or that way, and this becomes habit and skill. Out of a child’s imitative actions, the soul develops skillfulness, which permeates the child’s finer and more delicate organizations. A child will imitate something one day, then do the same thing again the next day and the next; this activity is performed outwardly, but also—and importantly—within the innermost parts of the physical body. This forms the basis for memory in the early years.

After the change of teeth, the memory is very different, because by then, as I have said, spirit and soul are freed from the body, and picture content can arise that relates to what was experienced in the soul—a formation of images unrelated to bodily nature. Every time we meet the same thing or process, whether due to something outer or inner, the same picture is recalled. The small child does not yet produce these inward pictures. No image emerges for that child when remembering something. When an older child has a thought or idea about some past experience, it arises again as a remembered thought, a thought “made inward.” Prior to the age of seven, children live in their habits, which are not inwardly visualized in this way. This is significant for all of human life after the change of teeth.

When we observe human development through the kind of inner vision I have mentioned—with the soul’s eyes and ears—we will see that human beings do not consist of only a physical body that can be seen with the eyes and touched with the hands. There are also supersensible members of this being. I have already pointed out the first so-called supersensible human being living within the physical body—the etheric human being. There is also a third member of human nature. Do not be put off by names; after all, we do need to have some terminology. This third member is the astral body, which develops the capacity of feeling.

Plants have an etheric body; animals have an astral body in common with humans, and they have feeling and sensation. The human being, who exists uniquely as the crown of earthly creation, has yet a fourth member—the I-being. These four members are entirely different from one another, but since they interact with one another they are not generally distinguished by ordinary observation; the ordinary observer never goes far enough to recognize the manifestations of human nature in the etheric body, the astral body, or I-being. We cannot really aspire to teach and educate, however, without knowing these things. One hesitates to say this, because it may be regarded as fantastic and absurd within the broader arena of modern society. It is nevertheless the truth, and an unbiased knowledge of the human being will not disagree.

The way that the human being works through the etheric body, astral body, and I-being is unique and is significant for educators. As you know, we are used to learning about the physical body by observing it—living or dead—and by using the intellect connected with the brain to elucidate what we have thus perceived with the senses. This type of observation alone, however, will never reveal anything of the higher members of human nature. They are inaccessible to methods of observation based only on sense-perception and intellectual activity. If we think only in terms of natural laws, we will never understand the etheric body, for example. Therefore, new methods should be introduced into colleges and universities. Observation through the senses and working in the intellect of the brain enable us to observe only the physical body. A very different training is needed to enable a person to perceive, for example, how the etheric body manifests in the human being. This is really necessary, not just for teachers of every subject, but even more so for doctors.

The Etheric Body and the Art of Sculpting

First, we should learn to sculpt and work with clay, as a sculptor works, modeling forms from within outward, creating forms out of their own inner principles, and guided by the unfolding of our own human nature. The form of a muscle or bone can never be comprehended by the methods of contemporary anatomy and physiology. Only a genuine sense of form reveals the true forms of the human body. But when we say such things we will immediately be considered somewhat crazy. But Copernicus was considered a bit mad in his time; even as late as 1828 some leaders of the Church considered Copernican theories insane and denied the faithful any belief in them!

Now let’s look at the physical body; it is heavy with mass and subject to the laws of gravity. The etheric body is not subject to gravity—on the contrary, it is always trying to get away. Its tendency is to disperse and scatter into far cosmic spaces. This is in fact what happens right after death. Our first experience after death is the dispersal of the etheric body. The dead physical body follows the laws of Earth when lowered into the grave; or when cremated, it burns according to physical laws just like any other physical body. This is not true of the etheric body, which works away from Earth, just as the physical body strives toward Earth. The etheric body, however, does not necessarily extend equally in all directions, nor does it strive away from Earth in a uniform way. Now we arrive at something that might seem very strange to you; but it can in fact be perceived by the kind of observation I have mentioned.

When you look up into the heavens, you see that the stars are clustered into definite groups, and that these groups are all different from one another. Those groups of stars attract the etheric human body, drawing it out into the far spaces. Let’s imagine someone here in the center.

The different groups of stars are drawing out the etheric body in varying degrees; there is a much stronger attraction from one group of stars than from another, thus the etheric body is not drawn out equally on all sides but to varying degrees in the different directions of space. Consequently, the etheric body is not spherical, but, through this dispersion of the etheric, certain definite forms may arise in the human being through the cosmic forces that work down from the stars. These forms remain in us as long as we live on Earth and have an etheric body within us.

If, for example, we take the upper part of the thigh, we see that both the form of the muscle and the form of the bone are shaped by influences from the stars. We need to discover how these very different forms can arise from different directions of cosmic space. We must try to model these varying forms in clay, and we will find that, in one particular form, cosmic forces act to produce length; in another the form is rounded off more quickly. Examples of the latter are the round bones, and the former are the more tubular bones.

Like sculptors, therefore, we must develop a feeling for the world—the kind of feeling that, in ancient humankind, was present as a kind of instinctive consciousness. It was clearly expressed in the Eastern cultures of prehistory, thousands of years before our era; but we still find it in Greek culture. Just consider how contemporary, materialistic artists are often baffled by the forms of the Greek sculptors. They are baffled, because they believe the Greeks worked from models, which they examined from all sides. But the Greeks still had a feeling that the human being is born from the cosmos, and that the cosmos itself forms the human being. When the Greeks created their Venus de Milo (which causes contemporary sculptors to despair), they took what flowed from the cosmos; and although this could reveal itself only imperfectly in any earthly work, they tried to express it in the human form they were creating as much as possible. The point is that, if you really attempt to mold the human form according to nature, you cannot possibly do it by slavishly following a model, which is the contemporary studio method. One must be able to turn to the great “cosmic sculptor,” who forms the human being from a feeling for space, which a person can also acquire.

This then is the first thing we must develop. People think they can gauge the human form by drawing a line going through vertically, another through the outstretched arms and another front to back; there you have the three dimensions. But in doing this, they are slaves to the three dimensions of space, and this is pure abstraction. If you draw even a single line through a person in the right way, you can see that it is subject to manifold forces of attraction—this way or that, in every direction of space. This “space” of geometry, about which Kant produced such unhappy definitions and spun out such abstract theories—this space itself is in fact an organism, producing varied forces in all directions.

Human beings are likely to develop only the grosser physical senses, and do not inwardly unfold this fine delicate feeling for space experienced in all directions. If we could only allow this feeling for space to take over, the true image of the human being would arise. Out of an active inner feeling, you will see the plastic form of the human being emerge. If we develop a feeling for handling soft clay, we have the proper conditions for understanding the etheric body, just as the activity of human intellect connected with the brain provides the appropriate conditions for understanding the physical body.

We must first create a new method of acquiring knowledge—a kind of plastic perception together with an inner plastic activity. Without this, knowledge stops short at the physical body, since we can know the etheric body only through images, not through ideas. We can really understand these etheric images only when we are able to reshape them ourselves in some way, in imitation of the cosmic shaping.

The Astral Body in Relation to Music

Now we can move on to the next member of the human being. Where do things stand today in regard to this? On the one hand, in modern life the advocates of natural science have become the authorities on the human being; on the other hand we find isolated, eccentric anthroposophists, who insist that there are also etheric and astral bodies, and when they describe the etheric and astral bodies, people try to understand those descriptions with the kind of thinking applied to understanding the physical body, which doesn’t work. True, the astral body expresses itself in the physical body, and its physical expression can be comprehended according to the laws of natural science.

However, the astral body itself, in its true inner being and function, cannot be understood by those laws. It can be understood only by understanding music—not just externally, but inwardly. Such understanding existed in the ancient East and still existed in a modified form in Greek culture. In modern times it has disappeared altogether. Just as the etheric body acts through cosmic shaping, the astral body acts through cosmic music, or cosmic melodies. The only earthly thing about the astral body is the beat, or musical measure. Rhythm and melody come directly from the cosmos, and the astral body consists of rhythm and melody.

It does no good to approach the astral body with what we understand as the laws of natural science. We must approach it with what we have acquired as an inner understanding of music. For example, you will find that when the interval of a third is played, it can be felt and experienced within our inner nature. You may have a major and minor third, and this division of the scale can arouse considerable variations in the feeling life of a person; this interval is still something inward in us. When we come to the fifth interval, we experience it at the surface, on our boundary; in hearing the fifth, it is as though we were only just inside ourselves. We feel the sixth and seventh intervals to be finding their way outside us. With the fifth we are passing beyond ourselves; and as we enter the sixth and the seventh, we experience them as external, whereas the third is completely internal. This is the work of the astral body—the musician in every human being—which echoes the music of the cosmos. All this is at work in the human being and finds expression in the physical human form. If we can really get close to such a thought in trying to comprehend the world, it can be an astonishing experience for us.

You see, we are speaking now of something that can be studied very objectively—something that flows from the astral body into the human form. In this case, it is not something that arises from cosmic shaping, but from the musical impulse streaming into the human being through the astral body. Again, we must begin with an understanding of music, just as a sculptural understanding is necessary in understanding the etheric body’s activities. If you take the part of the human being that goes from the shoulder blades to the arms, that is the work of the tonic, the keynote, living in the human being. In the upper arm, we find the interval of the second. (You can experience all this in eurythmy.) And in the lower arm the third—major and minor. When you come to the third, you find two bones in the lower arm, and so on, right down into the fingers.

This may sound like mere words and phrases, but through genuine observation of the human being, based on spiritual science, we can see these things with the same precision that a mathematician uses in approaching mathematical problems. We cannot arrive at this through any kind of mystical nonsense: it must be investigated with precision. In order that students of medicine and education really comprehend these things, their college training must be based on an inner understanding of music. Such understanding, permeated with clear, conscious thinking, leads back to the musical understanding of the ancient East, even before Greek culture began. Eastern architecture can be understood only when we understand it as religious perception descended into form.

Just as music is expressed only though the phenomenon of time, architecture is expressed in space. The human astral and etheric bodies must be understood in the same contrasting way. We can never explain the life of feeling and passion with natural laws and so-called psychological methods. We can understand it only when we consider the human being as a whole in terms of music. A time will come when psychologists will not describe a diseased condition of the soul life as they do today, but will speak of it in terms of music, as one would speak, for example, of a piano that is out of tune.

Please do not think that anthroposophy is unaware of how difficult it is to present such a view in our time. I understand very well that many people will consider what I have presented as pure fantasy, if not somewhat crazy. But, unfortunately, a socalled “reasonable” way of thinking can never portray the human being in actuality. We must develop a new and expanded rationality for these matters. In this connection, it is extraordinary how people view anthroposophy today. They cannot imagine that anything exists that transcends their powers of comprehension, but that those same powers can in fact eventually reach.

Recently, I read a very interesting book by Maeterlinck translated into German. There was a chapter about me, and it ended in an extraordinary and very amusing way. He says: “If you read Steiner’s books you will find that the early chapters are logically correct, intelligently thought-out and presented in a perfectly scientific form. But as you read on, you get the impression that the author has gone mad.” Maeterlinck, of course, has a perfect right to his opinions. Why should he not have the impression that the writer was a clever man when he wrote the first part of the book, but went mad when he wrote the later part? But simply consider the actual situation. Maeterlinck believes that in the first chapters of these books the author was clever, but in the last chapters he had gone mad. So we get the extraordinary fact that this man writes several books, one after the other. Consequently, in each of these books the first few chapters make him seem very smart, but in later chapters he seems mad, then clever again, then mad, and so on. You see how ridiculous it is when one has such a false picture. When writers—otherwise deservedly famous—write in such a way, people fail to notice what nonsense it is. This shows how hard it is, even for such an enlightened person as Maeterlinck, to reach reality. On the firm basis of anthroposophy we have to speak of a reality that is considered unreal today.

I-being and the Genius of Language

Now we come to the I-being. Just as the astral body can be investigated through music, the true nature of the I-being can be studied through the word. It may be assumed that everyone, even doctors and teachers, accepts today’s form of language as a finished product. If this is their standpoint, they can never understand the inner structure of language. This can be understood only when you consider language, not as the product of our modern mechanism, but as the result of the genius of language, working vitally and spiritually. You can do this when you attempt to understand the way a word is formed.

There is untold wisdom in words, way beyond human understanding. All human characteristics are expressed in the way various cultures form their words, and the peculiarities of any nation may be recognized in their language. For example, consider the German word Kopf (“head”). This was originally connected with the rounded form of the head, which you also find in the word Kohl (“cabbage”), and in the expression Kohlkopf (“head of cabbage”). This particular word arises from a feeling for the form of the head. You see, here the I has a very different concept of the head from what we find in testa, for example, the word for “head” in the Romance languages, which comes from testifying, or “to bear witness.” Consequently, in these two instances, the feelings from which the words are formed come from very different sources.

If you understand language in this inward way, then you will see how the I-organization works. There are some districts where lightning is not called Blitz but Himmlitzer. This is because the people there do not think of the single flashes of lightning so much as the snakelike form. People who say Blitz picture the single flash and those who say Himmlitzer picture the zig-zag form. This then is how humans really live in language as far as their I is concerned, although in the current civilization, they have lost connection with their language, which has consequently become something abstract. I do not mean to say that if you have this understanding of language you will already have attained inward clairvoyant consciousness, whereby you will be able to behold beings like the human I. But you will be on the way to such a perception if you accompany your speaking with inner understanding.

Thus, education in medical and teacher training colleges should be advanced as indicated, so that the students’ training may arouse in them an inner feeling for space, an inner relationship to music, and an inner understanding of language. Now you may argue that the lecture halls are already becoming empty and, ultimately, teacher training colleges will be just as empty if we establish what we’ve been speaking of. Where would all this lead to? Medical training keeps getting longer and longer. If we continue with our current methods, people will be sixty by the time they are qualified!

The situation we are speaking of is not due in any way to inner necessity but is related to the fact that inner conditions are not being fulfilled. If we fail to go from abstractions to plastic and musical concepts and to an understanding of the cosmic word—if we stop short at abstract ideas—our horizon will be endless; we will continue on and on and never come to a boundary, to a point where we can survey the whole. The understanding that will come from understanding sculpting and music will make human beings more rational—and, believe me, their training will actually be accelerated rather than delayed. Consequently, this inner course of development will be the correct method of training educators, and not only teachers, but those others who have so much to contribute to educational work—the doctors.

The Therapeutic Nature of Teaching

Given what I spoke of in the introductory lectures concerning the relationship between educational methods and the physical health of children, it should be clear to you that real education cannot be developed without considering medicine. Teachers should be able to assess various conditions of health or disease among their children. Otherwise, a situation will arise that is already being felt—that is, a need for doctors in the schools. The doctor is brought in from outside, which is the worst possible method we could adopt. How do such doctors stand in relation to the children? They do not know the children, nor do they know, for example, what mistakes the teachers have made with them, and so on. The only way is to cultivate an art of education that contains so much therapy that the teacher can continually see whether the methods are having a good or bad influence on the children’s health. Reform is not accomplished by bringing doctors into the schools from outside, no matter how necessary this may seem to be. In any case, the kind of training doctors get these days does not prepare them for what they must do when they are sent into the schools.

In aiming at an art of education we must provide a training based on knowledge of the human being. I hesitate to say these things because they are so difficult to comprehend. But it is an error to believe that the ideas of natural science can give us full understanding of the human being, and an awareness of that error is vital to the progress of the art of education. Only when we view children from this perspective do we see, for example, the radical and far-reaching changes that occur with the coming of the second teeth, when the memory becomes a pictorial memory, no longer related to the physical body but to the etheric body. In actuality, what is it that causes the second teeth? It is the fact that, until this time, the etheric is almost completely connected with the physical body; and when the first teeth are forced out, something separates from the physical body. If this were not the case, we would get new teeth every seven years. (Since people’s teeth decay so quickly nowadays, this might seem to be a good thing, and dentists would have to find another job!) When the etheric body is separated, what formerly worked in the physical body now works in the soul realm.

If you can perceive these things and can examine the children’s mouths without their knowledge, you will see for yourself that this is true. It is always better when children do not know they are being observed. Experimental psychology so often fails because children are aware of what is being done.

You can examine a child’s second teeth and find that they have been formed by the etheric body into a modeled image of the memory; and the shape of the teeth created by the etheric will indicate how the memory of the child will develop. Except for slight alterations in position here or there, you cannot physically change the second teeth once they are through—unless you are able to go so far as, for example, the dentist Professor Romer. He has written a book on dentistry—a new art of medicine based on anthroposophic principles—where he speaks of certain changes that can be effected even after the second teeth are established. But this need not concern us further.

When the etheric body is loosened and exists on its own after the change of teeth, the building of memory leaves the physical realm and remains almost entirely in the element of soul; indeed, this fact can put teachers on the right track. Before this change, the soul and spirit formed a unity with the physical and etheric. After this, the physical—previously acting in conjunction with the soul—is expressed as the second teeth, and what collaborated with the physical in this process separates and manifests as an increased power to form ideas and as the formation and reliability of memory.

Once you have acquired such insight into human nature, you will discover much that will help in your teaching. You must permeate yourselves with this spiritual knowledge of the human being and enliven it in yourselves; your observations of children will then inspire you with ideas and methods for teaching, and this inner inspiration and enthusiasm will penetrate your practical work. The rules established in introductory texts on education produce only abstract activity in the soul. But what arises from anthroposophic knowledge penetrates the will and the efforts of teachers; it becomes the impulse for everything done in the classroom.

A living knowledge of the human being brings life and order to the soul of a teacher. But if teachers study only teaching methods that arise from natural science, they may get some clever ideas of what to do with the children, but they will be unable to carry them out. A teacher’s skill and practical handling of children must arise from the living spirit within, and this is where purely scientific ideas have no place. If teachers can acquire a true knowledge of the human being, they will become aware of how, when the etheric body is freed at the change of teeth, the child has an inner urge to receive everything in the form of images. The child’s own inner being wants to become “image.” During the first stage of life, impressions lack this picture-forming tendency; they are transformed instead into habits and skills in the child; memory itself is habit and skill.

Children want to imitate, through the movement of the limbs, everything they see happening around them; they have no desire to form any inner images. But after the change of teeth, you will notice how children come to know things very differently. Now they want to experience pictures arising in the soul; consequently, teachers must bring everything into a pictorial element in their lessons. Creating images is the most important thing for teachers to understand.

Teaching Writing and Reading

When we begin to view the facts, however, we are immediately faced with certain contradictions. Children must learn to read and write, and when they come to school we assume they will first learn to read, and after that they will learn to write in connection with their reading. Let’s consider, however, the reality of letters—what it means when we take a pen to paper and try to express through writing what is in the mind. What is the relationship between the printed letters of today and the original picture-language of ancient times? How were we taught these things? We show children a capital A and a lowercase a, but what in the world do these letters have to do with the sound “ah”? There is no relationship at all between the form of the letter A and the sound “ah.”

When the art of writing arose, things were different. In certain areas, pictorial signs were used, and a kind of pictorial painting was employed. Later, this was standardized; but originally those drawings copied the process and feeling of the sounds; thus, what appeared on paper was, to some extent, a reproduction of what lived in the soul. Modern characters, however, are alien to a small child’s nature, and it is little wonder that when certain early peoples first saw printed letters, it had a peculiar effect on them. When the people of Europe came among the Native Americans and showed them how they expressed their thoughts on paper, the Native Americans were alarmed and considered it the work of the devil; they were afraid of the little demons lurking behind those written letters. They immediately concluded that the Europeans engaged in black magic, since people have a habit of attributing to black magic whatever they cannot understand.

But what is the truth of the matter? We know that when we utter the sound “ah,” we express wonder and admiration. Now, it is very natural to try to reproduce this sound with the whole body and express it in a gesture of the arms. If you copy this gesture (stretching the arms obliquely above the head) you get the capital A. When you teach writing, you can, for example, begin with a feeling of wonder, and proceed with the children to some kind of painting and drawing, and in this way you can bring their inner and outer experiences into that painting and drawing.

Consider another example. I tell a girl to think of a fish and ask her to paint it (awkward though this may be). It must be done in a particular way, not simply as she might prefer, but with the head of the fish in front, like this, and the rest of the fish here. The child paints the fish, and thus, through a kind of painting and drawing, she produces a written character. You then tell her to pronounce the word fish—“fish.” Now take away the ish, and from fish you have arrived at her first written letter, f.

In this way a child will come to understand how pictorial writing arose, and how it developed into contemporary writing. The forms were copied, but the pictures were abandoned. This is how drawing the various sounds arose. You do not need to make a special study of how such things evolved. This is not really necessary for teachers, since they can develop them out of their own intuition and power to think. Have a boy, for example, paint the upper lip of a mouth, and then pronounce the word mouth. Leave out the outh, and you get the m. In this way you can relate all the written characters to some reality, and the child will constantly develop a living, inner activity.

Thus, you should teach the children writing first, and let today’s abstract letters arise from tangible reality; when a child learns to write in this way, the whole being is engaged in the process. Whereas, if you begin with reading, then only the head organization participates in an abstract way. In writing, the hand must participate as well, and in this way the whole human being is aroused to activity. When you begin with writing—writing developed through the formation of images and drawing forms—your teaching will approach the child’s whole being. Then you can move on to teaching reading; and what was developed out of the child’s whole being through drawing can be understood by the head. This method of teaching writing and reading will naturally take longer, but it will have a far healthier effect on the whole earthly life from birth to death. These things can be done when the practical work of the school flows out of a real spiritual knowledge of the human being. Such knowledge can, through its own inner force, become the teaching method in our schools. The desires of those who earnestly seek a new art of education live in this; but its essence can be truly found only when we are unafraid to look for a full knowledge of the human being in body, soul, and spirit.

Moral Development after the Change of Teeth

We have been speaking of ways to teach reading and writing according to the needs of the soul and spirit of children. If you can inwardly understand the relationship of soul and spirit to the physical body at the change of teeth, you not only see the truth of what has been said, but you will be also able to work it out in practical details. Until the change of teeth, a human being lives entirely in the senses. A child surrenders entirely to the environment and is thus by nature a religious being.

At the change of teeth, however, the senses, which the permeate a small child’s whole being, now come to the surface; they disengage from the rest of the organism and go their separate ways, so to speak. This means that the soul and spirit are freed from the physical body and the child can inwardly develop as an individual. Soul and spirit become independent, but you must bear in mind that the soul and spirit do not really become intellectual until puberty, because the intellect does not assume its natural place in a child’s development before then.

Before that time, a child lacks the forces to meet an appeal to the intellect. Between the change of teeth and puberty, the forces of comprehension and the whole activity of soul have a pictorial quality. It is a kind of aesthetic comprehension that may be characterized in this way: until the change of teeth children want to imitate what happens around them, what is done in front of them. Their motor systems are exerted in such a way—both in general and individually—that they enter an inner, loving relationship with all that surrounds them.

This alters at the change of teeth, when the child no longer goes by what is seen, but by what is revealed in the feelings and soul mood of the educator or teacher. The young child’s soul before the change of teeth is not yet guided by the authority of a teacher. Naturally, such transitions are gradual rather than sudden; but, typically, a small child pays little attention to the subject or meaning of what is said; a child lives much more in the sound of words—in the whole way the speech is formulated. Closer observation shows that when you simply lay down the law and say to a child, “You must not do this,” it makes very little impression. But when, with its own conviction, as it were, your mouth says, “Do this,” or another time, “Don’t do that,” there should be a noticeable difference in how these words are spoken. The child will notice the difference between saying “You should not do that” with a certain intonation, and “That’s right, you may do that.” The intonation reveals the activity of speech, which acts as a guide for the very young child.

Children are unconcerned with the meaning of words and, indeed, with any manifestation of the world around them, until after the change of teeth. Even then, it is not yet the intellectual aspect that concerns them, but an element of feeling. They take it in as one takes anything from acknowledged authority. Before puberty, a child cannot intellectually determine right and wrong. People may speculate about these things as much as they like, but direct observation shows what I have said to be true. This is why all moral concepts brought before a child must be pictorial in nature.

The subject being taught and moral training can thus be interwoven. If, for example, you are presenting examples of history—not in a stilted, pedantic way, with all kinds of moral maxims, but with simple feelings of like and dislike—you can show that what is moral is pleasing to you, and what is not moral is displeasing. Thus, during the time between the change of teeth and puberty, a child can acquire sympathy for what is good and antipathy toward what is bad. We do not begin by giving children commands, because commands will not have the desired effect. It may be possible to enslave children with commands, but we can never foster the moral life in this way, which instead must spring from the depths of the soul. We can do this only when, quite apart from commanding or forbidding, we are able to arouse a fine feeling for good and bad in the child—a feeling for beautiful and ugly and for true and false.

The teacher respected by the child as an authority should personify what is good, true, and beautiful. A child brought up on precepts can never become fully human, formed and developed from the whole of the child’s inner nature. Precepts consider only the development of the head. We can foster the development of the heart—indeed, the whole person—if we can arouse the feeling at that age that something is true, beautiful, or good, because the revered teacher thinks it to be true, beautiful, or good. In a person, in an actual human being, a child will look for manifestations of truth, beauty, and goodness. When the picture of truth, beauty, and goodness comes from the individuality of the educator, it affects the child with the most amazing intensity. The whole being of the child is exerted to find an inner echo of what the teacher says or otherwise makes perceptible. This is most important, therefore, in the educational methods we use for children between seven and fourteen.

Of course, there are obvious objections to such a statement; the idea of “object-lessons,” or teaching based on sense-perception, is so misunderstood these days that people believe they should give children only what they can understand, and since we live in an era of the intellect, such understanding is intellectual. It is not yet understood that it is possible to understand things with soul forces other than those of the intellect—and recommendations for so-called “object-lessons” can drive one nearly to despair.

It is a terrible mindset that wants to pin the teacher down to the children’s level of understanding all the time. If you really set up the principle of giving children only “what they can understand,” one cannot gain a concept of what it means for a child of six or seven to have accepted something based on the unquestioned authority of a teacher. Because the teacher thought something was true or beautiful, the child accepted it, and it will accompany that child throughout life. It grows with the child as the child grows. And at thirty or forty years of age—after more mature experiences—that individual may again find what was accepted at eight or nine based on the authority of a beloved teacher. It springs back into the adult’s life again, and now it can be understood because of adult experiences.

There is a most wonderful life-giving power, when things already contained within a person’s soul emerge and unite with the essence of what was acquired in the meantime. Such lifegiving forces can be born in the person only when what was accepted by the child on the authority of the teacher arises in the soul, through the maturity of subsequent experience. If memories are connected only with the intellect, then a child is robbed of life-giving forces. In these matters we must come to perceive the human being in a much more intimate way than is usual today.

Beginning with the Whole in Mathematics

It is essential that we make sure the child is not driven to a one-sided intellectuality. This will nevertheless be the situation if our teaching is permeated with intellectual thought. What I am saying here applies to everything children should be taught between the change of teeth and puberty. It is most important that mathematics, for example, should not be intellectualized; even in mathematics, we should begin with what is real.

Now imagine that I have ten beans here in front of me. This pile of \(10\) beans is the reality—it is a whole—but I can divide it into smaller groups. If I began by saying, “\(3+3+4\) beans \(= 10\) beans,” then I am starting with a thought instead of an actuality. Let’s do it the other way around and say, “Here are \(10\) beans. I move them around, and now they are divided into groups—\(3\) here, \(3\) again here, and another group of \(4\) that, together, make up the whole.”

When I begin this way with the total actually in front of me, and then go on to the numbers to be added together, I am sticking with reality; I proceed from the whole, which is constant, to its parts. The parts can be grouped in various ways—for example, \(10 = 2+2+3+3\)—but the whole is constant and invariable, and this is the greater reality. Thus, I must teach children to add by proceeding from the whole to the parts. Genuine knowledge of the human being shows us that, at this age, a child will have nothing to do with abstractions, such as addenda, but wants everything concrete; and this requires a reversal of the usual method of teaching mathematics. In teaching addition, we have to proceed from the whole to the parts, showing that it can be divided in various ways. This is the best method to help us awaken forces of observation in children, and it is truly in keeping with their nature. This applies also to the other rules of mathematics. If you say, “What must we take away from \(5\) in order to leave \(2\)?” you will arouse much more interest in children than if you say, “Take \(3\) from \(5\).” And the first question is also much closer to real life. These things happen in real life, and in your teaching methods you can awaken a sense of reality in children at this age.

A sense for reality is sorely lacking in our time, and this is because (though not always acknowledged) something is considered true when it can be observed and is logical. But logic alone cannot establish truth, because truth can arise only when something is not only logical but accords with reality. We hear some very strange ideas about this nowadays. For example, Einstein’s theory of relativity—which is brilliant and, from certain points of view, significant—presents ideas that, if one has a sense for reality at all, leave one feeling torn and disintegrated. You may recall his watch that travels out into space with the speed of light supposedly unchanged. But you only need to imagine what it would be like when it returned—completely pulverized, to say the least!

Something is placed before you that can be well-reasoned and very logical; the theory of relativity is as logical as can be, but in many of its applications, it does not accord with reality. Such things make a deep impression on people today, because we no longer have a fine feeling for reality. When we consider the needs of children during this second period of life it is most important to give them realities rather than abstractions. This is the only way we can prepare them properly for later life—not just in thinking, but in the forces of feeling and will. We must first recognize the true nature of the child before we can correctly tackle education, whether at school or at home.

The Natural Religious Feeling in Children

Before we become earthly beings, as I have told you before, we are beings of soul and spirit living in a world of soul and spirit. We come to earth and as beings of soul and spirit and unite with the physical and etheric seed; this physical, etheric seed arises partly through the activity of the soul and spirit itself, and partly through the stream of inheritance that passes through the generations, and finally, through the father and mother, approaches the human being who wishes to incarnate in a physical body. If we consider this soul and spirit descending to Earth, we cannot help but view it with reverence and awe. The unfolding of the child’s being must fill us as teachers with feelings of reverence—indeed, we could speak of priestly feelings; because, the way soul and spirit are unveiled in the child really does constitute a revelation of that soul and spirit within the physical and etheric realm.

This mood of soul allows us to see the child as a being sent down to Earth by the Gods to incarnate in a physical body. It arouses within us the proper attitude of mind for our work in the school. But we learn to perceive only through true observation of what gradually manifests prior to the change of teeth—by observing the building of a child’s body, the ordering of chaotic movements, the “ensouling” of gestures, and so on. We can see in all this, springing from the center of a child’s being, the effects of the human being’s experiences in the divine spiritual realm before coming to Earth.

Only on the basis of this knowledge can we correctly understand what expresses itself in the life and activities of children under seven. They simply continue in their earthly life a tendency of soul that was the most essential aspect of life before birth. In the spiritual realm, a human being surrenders completely to the spirit all around, lives outside itself, though more individually than on Earth. The human being wants to continue this tendency toward devotion in earthly life—wants to continue in the body the activity of pre-earthly life in the spiritual worlds. This is why the whole life of a small child is naturally religious.

Imagery after the Age of Seven

It is very different when we come to the change of teeth. Now, with their individuality, but on the model delivered by its inheritance, children make their own bodies. At this age, a child acquires for the first time a body formed from the individuality. Human beings come to Earth with a remembered tendency; this then develops into a more pictorial and plastic memory. Therefore, what is produced from the impulses of former earthly lives causes life between the change of teeth and puberty to seem familiar. It is very important for us to realize that a child’s experience at this age is like recognizing an acquaintance on the street.

This experience—lowered one level into the subconscious—is what happens in the physical and moral nature of a child at this age. The child experiences what is being learned as old and familiar. The more we can appeal to that feeling, recognizing that we are giving the child old and familiar knowledge, the more pictorial and imaginative we can make our teaching, and the better we will teach, because that individual saw these things as images in the spiritual life and knows that his or her own being rests within those images; they can be understood because they are already well known. The child has not yet developed any clearly defined or individual sympathies and antipathies, but has a general feeling of sympathy or antipathy toward what is found on the Earth, just as I might feel sympathy if I meet a friend or antipathy if I meet someone who once struck me on the head. If we keep in mind that these general feelings are there, and if we work on this hypothesis, our teaching will be on the right track.

The Individual after Puberty

Then a child reaches puberty, and an important change occurs. The more general feelings of sympathy and antipathy give way to individualized feelings. Each thing has or lacks value in the child’s eyes, but differently now. This is because at puberty, a human being’s true destiny begins to be felt. Before this time, children had more general feelings about life, viewing it as an old acquaintance. Now, having attained sexual maturity, a child feels that the individual experiences that arise are related to destiny. Only when a person views life in terms of destiny does it become one’s own individual life in the proper way. Therefore, what we experienced before must be recalled a second time in order to connect it with one’s destiny.

Before fourteen, everything must be based on the teacher’s authority, but if it is to become a part of a child’s destiny it must be presented again after fourteen, to be experienced in an individual way. This must in no way be ignored. With regard to moral concepts, we must bring the child before puberty to have a liking for the good and such a dislike for evil. Then, during the next period of life, things that were developed in sympathy and antipathy appear again in the soul, and the growing individual will make what was loved into precepts for the self, and what was repugnant, the person must now avoid. This is freedom, but as human beings we can find it only if, before we come to “Do this” and “Don’t do that,” we feel attracted to the good and repelled by the bad. A child must learn morality through feeling.

With regard to religion, we must be clear that young children are naturally religious. At the change of teeth, when the soul and spirit become more free of the body, this close relationship with nature falls away, and thus what was formerly natural religion must be lifted to a religion of the soul. Only after puberty does religious understanding arise, and then, once the spirit has become free, what was formerly expressed in imitation of the father or mother must be surrendered to the invisible, supersensible forces. Thus, what has always been present in the child as a seed gradually develops in a concrete way. Nothing is grafted onto the child; it arises from the child’s own being.

True Reform in Education

Here is an extraordinary fact you can verify for yourselves; with all relatively rational people—and nearly everyone is rational these days (and I mean that seriously)—you find that people have been educated only to be rational, only to work with their heads, and no more. To educate the whole person is not as easy. You only have to read what very sensible people have written about education, and you repeatedly encounter this sort of statement: “Nothing should be presented to a child from outside; but what is already there should be developed.” You can read that everywhere, but how is it done? That is the question. It is not a matter of establishing principles. Programmatic principles are easy to come by, but what matters is to live in reality. This is what we must aim for, but we will find ourselves nearly overwhelmed by the difficulties and dangers in our path.

Thirty, forty, or a hundred people can sit down together today and draft treatises on the best methods for teaching and education and other recommendations, and I am convinced that in most cases they do it very cleverly. I am not being ironic—our materialistic culture has reached its zenith. Everywhere societies are being established and principles elaborated. In themselves, these are splendid, but they accomplish nothing. That is why the Waldorf school came into being in such a way that there were no set principles or systems—only children and teachers. We have to consider not only the individuality of every single child, but the individuality of every single teacher as well. We must know our teachers. It is easy to draft rules and principles that tell teachers what to do and not do. But what matters is the capacities of individual teachers, and the development of their capacities; they do not need educational precepts, but a knowledge of the human being that takes them into life itself and considers whole persons in a living way. You see, our job must always be development, but we must know where to look for what we wish to develop. We must link religious feeling—and later, religious thinking—with imitation during the first stage of childhood, and moral judgment during the second.

It is most important to bear in mind the pictorial element in the period between the change of teeth and puberty. Artistic presentation is essential in teaching and education. Painting, music, and perhaps modeling as well, must all find their proper place in education in order to satisfy the inherent longings of children.

Children’s Relationship to the Earth

In other subjects we must also work according to these needs, not according to the demands of our materialistic age. Our materialistic age has fine things to tell us—for example, about how to distinguish one plant from another—but during this second stage, the teacher must know, above all, that the scientific method of classification and descriptions of individual plants does not belong in the education of children of this age. You must ask yourself whether a plant is, in effect, a reality. Can you understand a plant in isolation? This is impossible. Suppose you found a hair; you would not try to determine how this hair could have formed all by itself. It must have been pulled out or fallen out of someone’s head. You can think of it as a reality only in relation to the whole organism. The hair is nothing on its own and cannot be understood that way. It is a sin against one’s sense of reality to describe a hair in isolation, and it is just as much a sin against our sense of reality to describe a plant as an isolated unit.

It may seem fantastic, but plants are in fact the “hair” of the living Earth. Just as you can understand what a hair is really like only when you consider how it grows out of the head—actually out of the whole organism—so in teaching about nature you must show the children how the Earth exists in a most intimate relationship to the world of plants. You must begin with the soil and, in this way, evoke an image of Earth as a living being. Just as people have hair on their head, the Earth as a living being has the plants on it. You should never consider the plants apart from the soil. You must never show the children a plucked flower as something real, since it has no reality of its own. A plant can no more exist without the soil than a hair can exist without the human organism. The essential thing in your teaching is to arouse the feeling in the child that this is so.

When children have the feeling that the Earth has some formation or another, and from this arises one or another blossom in the plant—when in fact they really experience the Earth as a living organism—they will gain the proper and true relationship to the human being and to the whole great Earth spread out before them. One would never arrive at this view by considering the plants in isolation from the Earth.

Children will be capable of acquiring the right view (which I have characterized in a somewhat abstract way) at about ten years of age. This may be seen through intimately observing what develops in a child. But up to this age, our teaching about plants—springing as they do from the living body of the Earth—must be in the form of an image. We should clothe it in fairy tales, in pictures, and in legends. Only after the tenth year, when the child begins to feel like an independent personality, can we speak of plants individually. Before then, a child does not discriminate between the self and the environment. The I is not completely separated from the surrounding world. So we must speak of plants as though they were little human beings or little angels, we must make them feel and act like human beings, and we must do the same thing with the animals. Only later in school life do we speak of them objectively as separate units.

You must not pass too abruptly from one thing to another, however; for the true reality of the living Earth from which the plants spring has another side to show us—the animal realm. Animals are typically studied by placing one beside the other, dividing them into classes and species according to their similarities. At best, one speaks of the more perfect as having developed from the less perfected, and so on. In this way, however, we fail to bring the human being into any relationship with the environment. When you study animal forms without preconceptions, it soon becomes clear that there are essential differences in the nature of, for example, a lion and a cow.

When you observe a cow you find in her a one-sided development of what in human beings is the digestive system. The cow is completely a system of digestion, and all the other organs act as appendages more or less. This is why it is so interesting to watch a cow chewing the cud; she lies on the meadow and digests her food with great enthusiasm, such bodily enthusiasm. She is all digestion. Just watch her and you will see how the substances pass over from her stomach to the other parts of her body. You can see from her sense of ease and comfort, from the whole soul quality of the cow, how all this comes about.

Now look at the lion. Do you not feel that, if your own heart were not prevented by your intellect from pressing too heavily into the limbs, your own heart would be as warm as that of the lion? The lion is a one-sided development of the human breast quality; the lion’s other organs are merely appendages. Or consider birds. We can see that a bird is really entirely head. Everything else about a bird is stunted; it is all head. I have chosen these particularly striking examples, but you can discover that every animal embodies some aspect of humankind in a onesided way.

In the human being everything is brought into harmony; each organ is developed so that it is modulated and harmonized by the other organs. For animals, however, each species embodies one of these human qualities in a specialized way. What would the human nose be like if it were not held in check by the rest of the organization? You can find certain animals with highly developed noses. What would the human mouth become if it were free and were not subdued by the other organs? So you find in all animal forms a one-sided development of some part of the human being.

In ancient times, humankind had an instinctive knowledge of these things, but that has been forgotten in our materialistic era. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, echoes of such knowledge could still be found, but now we must come to it anew. Schelling, for example, based himself on an old tradition in his sense that an animal form lives in every human organ, and he made a rather extraordinary statement: What, he asked, is the human tongue? The human tongue is a “cuttlefish.” The cuttlefish found in the sea is a tongue developed in a one-sided way. In this statement there is something that can really bring us knowledge of our relationship to the animal world spread out before us.

It is really true that—once you have detached this from the abstract form in which I have presented it to you, when you have grasped it inwardly and transformed it into a picture—it will link in a wonderful way to fables and stories about animals. If you have previously told children stories in which animals act like humans, now you can divide the human being into the entire animal kingdom. In this way you can move beautifully from one to the other.

Thus, we get two kinds of feeling in children. One is aroused by the plant world and wanders over the fields and meadows gazing at the plants. The child muses: “Below me is the living Earth, living its life in the plant realm, which gives me such delight. I am looking at something beyond myself that belongs to the Earth.” Just as a child gets a deep, inner feeling that the plant world belongs to the Earth—as indeed it does—so also the child deeply feels the true relationship between the human and the animal world—the human being built up by a harmonization of the whole animal kingdom spread out over the Earth.

Thus, in natural history children see their own relationship to the world, and the connection between the living Earth and what springs forth from it. Poetic feelings are awakened, imaginative feelings that were slumbering in the child. In this way, a child is truly led through the feelings to find a place in the universe, and the subject of natural history at this age can be something that leads the child to moral experiences.

It is really true that education cannot consist of external rules and techniques, but must arise from a true knowledge of the human being; this will lead to experiencing oneself as a part of the world. And this experience of belonging to the world is what must be brought to children by educators.

Three Divisions in the Middle Period of Childhood

When we consider the time from the change of teeth to puberty (this important period really sets the standard for our education as a whole), we see that it is divided again into smaller stages. During the first of these, up to the ninth year, children are not in a position to distinguish clearly between self and the outside world; even in the feeling life, the experience of the world as distinguished from I-being is unclear. People today do not generally regard these things correctly. They may observe that a child bumps into the corner of a table and then immediately strikes the table. People then say, “This child thinks the table is alive, and because of this, the child hits it in return.” People speak in terms of “animism” as they do in relation to cultural history, but in reality this is not the situation.

If you look into the child’s soul you can see that the table is not seen as alive; not even living things are considered to be alive as they will be later on. But, just as children see their arms and hands as members of their own being, they view what occurs beyond the self as a continuation of their own being. Children do not yet distinguish between self and world. Consequently, during this stage—the first third of the time between change of teeth and puberty—we must bring everything to the child through fairy tales and legends so that, in everything children see, they will find something that is not separate, but a continuation of their own being.

From a developmental standpoint, the transition from the ninth to the tenth year is vitally important for children, though the precise moment varies from child to child, sometimes earlier, sometimes later. You will notice that around this time, children grow somewhat restless; they come to the teacher with questioning eyes, and these things require that you have a fine feeling. Children will ask things that startle you, very different from anything they had asked before. Children find themselves in a strange situation inwardly. Now it is not a question of giving them all sorts of admonitions in a pedantic and stilted way; it is our task, above all, to feel our way into their own being.

At this stage, something appears in the subconscious being of a child. It is not, of course, anything that the child could express consciously, but we may characterize it in this way: until this time, children unquestioningly accepted as truth, goodness, and beauty whatever the authority, or revered teacher, presented as true, good, and beautiful. They were completely devoted to the one who was their authority. But at this point between the ninth and tenth year something comes over children—in the feelings, not in thinking, since they do not yet intellectualize things. Something comes over them, and it awakens in the soul as a kind of faint, dreamlike question: How does the teacher know this? Where does it come from? Is my teacher really the world? Until now, my teacher was the world, but now there is a question: Does not the world go beyond the teacher?

Up to this point, the teacher’s soul was transparent, and the child saw through it into the world; but now this adult has become increasingly opaque, and the child asks, out of the feelings, what justifies one thing or another. The teacher’s whole bearing must then very tactfully find what is right for the child. It is not a matter of figuring out ahead of time what to say, but of knowing how to adapt to the situation with inner tact. If right at this moment one can find the appropriate thing for the child through an inner, imperceptible sympathy, it will have an immense significance for that child’s whole life right up to the time of death. If a child at this stage of inner life can say of the teacher, “This person’s words arise from the secrets and mysteries of the world,” this will be of great value to the child. This is an essential aspect of our teaching method.

Cause and Effect and Education as a Healing Art

At this point in life, children experience the difference between the world and the I-being. Now you can progress from teaching about plants, as I described yesterday, to teaching about animals. If you do this as I described it, you will make the correct approach to a child’s feeling for the world. Only in the third period—beginning between the middle of the eleventh year and toward the twelfth—will a child acquire any understanding for what we might call a “feeling of causality.” Prior to the twelfth year, you can speak to children as cleverly as you like about cause and effect, but you will find them blind to causality at that age. Just as the term color-blind is coined from color, we may coin the term cause-blind. Connections between cause and effect are not formed in the human being before the twelfth year. Therefore, it is only at this age that we can begin to teach children what they need to know about the physical, mineral realm, which of course involves physics and chemistry, thus going beyond a purely pictorial presentation. Before that age, not only would it be useless but would in fact be harmful.

This also shows us how to approach history lessons. Initially, history should be presented in terms of individual figures through a kind of “painting” of the soul, if I may call it that. Until a child’s twelfth year, you should give the children only living pictures. Anything else would harden their being—it would bring about a kind of sclerosis of the soul. If before the eleventh year you speak to children of the way one epoch prepared another through certain impulses and so on, you create in them a sclerosis of the soul. People who have an eye for such things often see old men and women who learned about cause and effect in history much too early. This can even go into the physical body at this age through the same principles I have described. Physical sclerosis in old people can be traced back to, among other causes, the fact that they were taught too much about causality as children.

We must notice such connections and understand them. They constitute a demand of our civilization and lead us back to what could at one time be found through an instinctive knowledge of human nature—a knowledge that we can no longer use in these times of conscious thought. If we go back to earlier eras, however, even only as far as the early Greek times, we find that the words educator and healer were very closely related to each other, because people knew that when human beings enter this earthly life they have not yet reached their full height; they are beings who have yet to be brought to their highest potential.

This is why the idea of the Fall has such validity—that souls really enter earthly existence as subhuman beings. If they were not subhuman, we not need to educate them any more than we must educate a spider so that later on it can make a web. Human beings must be educated because they must be brought into their full humanity. And if you have the proper idea of how we must lead a person in body, soul, and spirit to become truly human, you will see that this must be done according to the same principles that bring an abnormal human being back to the right path. In the same way, ordinary education has the task of healing a person whose humanity has been injured. Only when we recognize again the natural and spiritual relationship between these two activities will we be able to fructify our education properly through an ethical physiology.

It is extraordinary to think how recently—and how thoroughly—these ideas have been lost. For example, Herder’s Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1791) describes with real inner devotion how illness can teach one to observe the inner human being. When people become ill, it is an attack on their normal course of being, and the way an illness manifests and how it leaves a person demonstrate the laws of human nature. Herder is delighted to discover that through instances of mental as well as of physical illness, he can learn about the inner structure of the human being. He is still clearly aware of the relationship between medicine and pedagogy. It is not so long ago, then, when the old principle still applied—the principle that when a human being enters the world, it is really due to illness caused by sin, and we must heal, or educate, that individual. Admittedly, this is expressed somewhat in the extreme, but there is real truth at its basis. This must be recognized as a demand of contemporary civilization, so that the widespread practice of creating abstractions, which has even penetrated education, will end, and so that we can truly move away from the things I have seen practiced.

Recently, I had to show a man round the Waldorf school, a man who had an important position in the world of education. We discussed the specifics of several pupils, and then this man summarized what he had observed in a somewhat strange way. He said, “If this is what we need to do, then teachers should study medicine.” I replied that such an absolute judgment was unjustified. If it becomes necessary to bring a certain amount of medical knowledge to education, then we must do it. But it is impossible to rely on old traditions and decide that one thing or another must apply. It will happen; it will become a requirement of society that “cultural medicine” and “cultural pedagogy” be brought closer together so they become mutually more beneficial. In many ways, everything that is currently needed is troublesome and awkward, but even life itself has become increasingly troublesome, and the cure will also be a troublesome matter.

In any case, teaching about minerals should, in practice, begin only between the eleventh and twelfth year, and history should also be treated only pictorially before then. During the eleventh or twelfth year, you can begin to consider cause and effect by connecting the various historical eras, and thus present children with a comprehensive survey. You will be able to observe the correctness of this method in this way: If you present causality in describing historical processes too soon, you will find that children do not listen; but if you do it at the proper time, they meet you with inner joy and eager participation.

Indeed, it is impossible to teach anything at all without a child’s inner cooperation. In all education, we must bear in mind how a child will enter life at puberty. Of course, there are also those young ladies and gentlemen who continue their education, and in the Waldorf school we have a university standard, with twelve classes that take them on to their eighteenth or nineteenth year or even farther. But even with these children, we must recognize that after puberty they really do go out into life, and our relationship to those students must be very different from what it was before. We must make every effort to educate in such a way that the intellect, which awakens at puberty, can then find nourishment in the child’s own nature.

If during the early school years children have stored up an inner treasury of riches through imitation, through a feeling for authority, and from the pictorial nature of the teaching, then at puberty those inner riches can be transformed into intellectual activity. From that point on, the individual will be faced with the task of thinking what was willed and felt previously. And we must take the very greatest care that this intellectual thinking does not manifest too early; for a human being can experience freedom only when, rather than being poured in by teachers, the intellect can awaken from within on its own. It must not awaken in an impoverished soul, however. If there is nothing present in a person’s inner being that was acquired through imitation and imagery—something that can rise into thinking from deep in the soul—then, as thinking develops at puberty, that individual will be unable to find the inner resources to progress; thinking would reach only into an emptiness. Such a person will find no anchorage in life; and at the very time when a person should really have found a certain inner sense of security, there will be a tendency to chase trivialities. During these awkward years, adolescents will imitate many things that seem pleasant (usually they are not exactly what would please their elders, who have a more utilitarian perspective); they imitate these things now, because they were not allowed to imitate in an appropriate and living way as younger children. Consequently, we see many young people after puberty wandering around looking for security in one thing or another, thus numbing their experience of inner freedom.

Educating for All of Life and Beyond

In every stage of life we must make sure that we do not educate only for that stage, but educate for all of a person’s earthly life—and, in fact, beyond. People can arrive most beautifully at an understanding of their own immortal human being; after puberty, they can experience for themselves how what poured into their soul as images through imitation is now freed from the soul and rises into spirit. People can feel how it continues to work, from time into eternity, passing through birth and death. It is exactly this welling up of what was instilled in the human soul through the proper education that provides an inner experience of immortality; primarily, it is life experience itself that shows us we had existence before coming down into the physical world. And what the child takes in as picture and imitates through religious feeling, unites with what that child was before descending into the physical realm; thus an inner experience of the kernel of immortality arises.

I use the word immortality, which is in current use; but even though people still believe in it, it is really only half of the question. When we speak of immortality today, we do so out of a certain self-centeredness; it is true, of course, because it represents the fact that we do not perish at death, but that our life continues. But we fail to mention the other side—the “unborn.” In ancient times, those who possessed an instinctive spiritual knowledge still recognized the two sides of eternity—the undying and the unborn. We will understand eternity only when we are able to understand both of these concepts. Eternity will be experienced when children are properly educated. Here again we are confronted by something where materialism should not be considered theoretically.

As I have already shown you, it is bad enough that all kinds of monists go around spreading various materialistic theories. But that is not in any sense the worst. The least harmful is what people only think; the worst is what flows into life to become life itself. And since the art of education has also fallen into the clutches of materialistic thinking, children are unable to experience the things I have mentioned—the experience of time passing into eternity. In this way, they lose their relationship to the eternal aspect of their own being. You can preach as much materialism as you like to those who have been correctly educated, and it will not affect them greatly. They will reply, “I have the sense that I am immortal, and unfortunately this is something that you and your proofs have overlooked.”

It is always a matter of comprehending life itself, and not merely the thoughts. Furthermore, this may seem contradictory, but an indication and a symptom of the materialism of our present age is the very fact that people today are so eager for theories and world philosophies based on ideas and concepts. If we really perceive spirit, we never leave matter. If you pursue your study of anthroposophy, you will see how it makes its way into psychology and physiology, how it speaks of material things and processes in every detail. Anthroposophic physiology addresses the activity of the liver, the spleen, or the lung very differently from today’s abstract physiology.

Abstract physiology thinks it sees the facts, but it really views facts in the same way a man might who, for example, finds a magnet. He does not know what it is, nor what forces are concealed within it, but he finds the magnet while with a woman who knows what a magnet is. He says to himself, “I’ll take this home; it will make a good horseshoe.” The woman says, “You can’t use that as a horseshoe; that is a magnet.” But the man only laughs.

Similarly, a natural scientist laughs when one speaks of the spiritual basis of the liver, spleen, or heart—if one says that spirit in fact lives within those organs. But people who laugh at such things can never deeply enter the reality of material substance. The most harmful aspect of materialism is not that it fails to understand spirit. That will be corrected eventually. The worst thing about materialism is that it is completely ignorant of matter and its activity, because it fails to find spirit in matter.

There was never a time when people knew less about matter than they do now; for you cannot find material substance in the human being without a knowledge of spirit. Consequently, I would say that the error of materialism in education is demonstrated in life when people have no feeling or inner experience of their own eternal nature. If a person has been educated in the right way—that is, if the principles of the education have been read from human nature itself—death will be experienced as an event in life and not merely its end. In this way, one learns that in the relationship between teacher and child (and later between the teacher and the young man or woman) there are not only external things at work; even in the very small child, as I have already told you, intangible forces are at work—things we can neither see nor weigh and measure.

Punishment in the Classroom

We must bear this in mind when we consider punishment as a means of education. (A question was raised in regard to this.) We cannot simply ask ourselves whether or not we should punish. How can we possibly deal with all the mischievous things children do if we completely eliminate punishment? The question of whether to punish or not is really an individual matter. Various methods can be used with some children, whereas others may respond only to punishment. The manner of punishment, however, really depends on the teacher’s temperament.

We must remember that we are not dealing with carved wooden figures but with human beings. Teachers must consider their own nature, as well as the nature of the children. The important thing is not so much what we do, but how—that the only effective punishment is inflicted by a teacher with complete inner calm and deliberation. If a punishment arises from anger, it will be completely ineffective. Here, of course, a teacher can accomplish a great deal through self-development. Otherwise, something like this may happen: A girl makes a mess, and the boy next to her gets upset with her. The teacher then begins to scold the boy, saying, “You should not get angry like that! The child replies, “But grown-up people get angry when unpleasant things happen to them.” Then the teacher says, “If you get angry I’ll throw something at you!”

If you punish in anger this way, you may get a scene like this: a teacher comes into a classroom of fairly young children who are playing. She says, “What an awful commotion you are all making! What are you doing? Why are you shouting and making so much noise?” Finally one child gets up enough courage to say, “You are the only one shouting.” Now, in terms of punishment or admonition, everything depends on the soul mood of the one punishing or admonishing. Whenever a child has done something very naughty, you can even take the precaution of ignoring it for the time being; you could sleep on it and take it up again the next day. At least in this way you may find the necessary inner calm, and however you decide to deal with that child, your admonition or your punishment will be far more effective than anything you do while angry. This method may have its drawbacks as well, but you must always weigh one thing against another and not become too one-sided.

“Reading” the Child

You can see that in this method of teaching and education, based as it is on anthroposophic principles, each particular age of the child must be read, as it were. We must see more in a human being than present scientific thinking wants to see. Of course, such scientific thinking has contributed to wonderful progress, but in terms of human beings, it is as though they had something written in front of them and began to describe the letters of that writing. It is certainly useful and beautiful to have the letters described, but that is not the point; we must read. We do not need to describe the organs and how the soul works in them, which is the modern method, but we must have the capacity to read the human being. Such “reading” for a teacher may be understood by imagining that you have a book in your hand, and, no matter how interesting it may be, if you cannot read it but only look at the printed letters, it will not arouse you very strongly to any inner activity. If, for example, someone has a very interesting novel, but can only describe the letters, then nothing will happen within that person. So it is with the art of education—nothing happens in a person who merely describes the individual organs or the various aspects of the human soul. Educators who can read will find in every child a “book of the soul.”

Children can become reading material of the soul for their teachers, even in very large classes. If this happens, a teacher will sense when, before the ninth or tenth year, children do not differentiate between the world and their own I-being; they will sense how, before this time, children are unable, out of themselves, to write anything in the way of a composition. At most, they will be able to retell something they have heard in fairy tales or legends. Only when children are nine or ten can you gradually begin to present images and thoughts that they can in turn write about from their own free feelings and ideas. The inner thought structure needed by a child before being able to write an essay is not yet present before the twelfth year; they should not be encouraged to write essays before then. (I am speaking of this, because someone asked about it.) If they do this too soon, they will begin to suffer not from “sclerosis” of the soul in this case, but from “rickets” of the soul. Later in life, such a child will become inwardly weak and ineffective.

Only when our study of the human being can lead us to an a unique knowledge of each child will we be able to educate them in the appropriate way; the correct education must enable children to take their place socially in the everyday world. Indeed, children belong to this world, and must enter more and more deeply into it as long as they live on Earth; and after death they will be able to live on properly in the spiritual realm. This experience is indeed a real condition for life in the world beyond the gate of death.

The Capacity to Meet Other Human Beings

Human beings become hardened when they cannot discover how to meet other people in a truly human way; they harden themselves for the life that will face them after death. People have lost the capacity for meeting one another in a human way, and this is yet another dark side to the picture of our time. Nowhere do we find people who can enter with loving feeling into another human being. This is clearly evident due to the amount of talk about social demands these days. Why is this?

The obvious basis of social life—the power to truly feel and experience with another person—has been sadly lost. Whenever demands are urgently presented in any given age, those very demands show us what is missing in that time, because whatever people lack, they demand. Real social life is missing, and this is why the social ideal is so vehemently discussed in our current era. But education for social life is hardly touched, although many enlightened people speak of it. It has retreated increasingly into the background, and in many respects, human beings meet and pass each other without any understanding of one another.

It is indeed a grievous feature of present-day life that when one human being meets another, there is no mutual understanding. You can find clubs and societies with one or another common aim, where people have worked together for years, but they really do not know each other at all. People know nothing about the inner life of those they work with, because they lack a living interest, a living devotion, a living sympathy in relation to the other. But such living interest, devotion, and sympathy will be present if, at the right age, we permeate every area of teaching and education with the principle of imitation and, in its proper place, the principle of authority. This social feeling and understanding for others depends, in a most intimate way, on whether or not we have any sense of what in our world participates in the spiritual realm.

There was a time when human beings knew very little about the Earth; the tools they used were simple and primitive, and the way they represented natural objects in art was sometimes very talented but remarkably undeveloped. We now live in an age when we use complicated tools to master nature, and the most minute details are painstakingly copied, for example, in our works of art. But what we lack today is the power to enter the spirit of nature, the spirit of the cosmos, and the universe as a grand whole. That power must be reclaimed.

Above all, in the astronomical realm we have lost sight of our relationship to the universe. If you look at a plant, you can see how it takes root in the ground—how it arises from a seed, unfolds its first leaves and stem, more leaves and a blossom, and how it then gathers itself together again in the fruit. Goethe described it this way: In the plant you see how it draws out into space, rotates, and then contracts. Goethe was unable to go far enough. He described this expansion and contraction of the plant, but could not come to the point of knowing why this happens. It happens because the plant is exposed to the forces of the Moon and Sun. Whenever the Sun’s forces are active, the plant expands and opens its leaves; when Moon forces act on it, plant life contracts—it develops the stem and then the seed, where the whole plant life is drawn together in a single point. Thus, when we consider this expansion and contraction as Goethe has shown it to us, we see in it the alternation of Sun and Moon forces, and we are led out into the distant spaces of the cosmos. When we can see how the stars are at work in the plant, we do not remain bound and limited.

These Sun and Moon forces that influence plants act in a more complicated way on the human being, and this leads us to think that the human being is not just a citizen of Earth, but of the cosmos as well. We know that when we eat—for example, cabbage or venison—or drink something, whatever relates to life pursues its own course within us. We nevertheless know about such things, because can perceive them. But we have no knowledge of how we are connected with the starry worlds in our soul and spirit—how the forces of contraction live in the sphere of the Moon, the forces of expansion in that of the Sun; we do not know that these forces maintain the balance more or less perfectly in a human being—that melancholic tendencies have their roots in the Moon realm, sanguine tendencies of soul in the Sun, and balance and harmony are brought about by cosmic activity.

A detailed discussion of this in no way diminishes our concept of freedom, nor does it lead to preposterous ideas of any kind. This can all be examined with the same precision used in mathematics. But mathematics, though true, remains abstract. The knowledge of Sun and Moon that I mentioned leads us to see how we receive spiritual nourishment from what flows from the whole galaxy of stars; it becomes a strength within us, a driving force. If we can unite in this way with the spirit of the universe, we will become whole human beings, and the urge will no longer arise to bypass others without understanding, but as true human beings we will find the true human being in others. The more we describe only matter and apply those descriptions to human beings, the more we freeze the life of the soul; but if we can ally ourselves with the spirit, we can serve our fellow human beings with true warmth of heart. Thus, an education that seeks and finds the spirit in the person will lay the foundations for human love, human sympathy, and human service in the proper sense of the word.

In an organism, everything is at the same time a beginning and an end; this is also true of the whole life of the spirit. You can never know the world without practicing a knowledge of the human being—without looking into the self. For the human being is a mirror of the world; all the secrets of the universe are contained in the human being. The fixed stars work in the human being, the moving planets work in the human being, and all the elements of nature work there as well. To understand the human being—to see true being there—is also to find a place in the world in the right way.

Consequently, education must be permeated by a kind of golden rule that quickens all the teacher’s work with the children, something that gives life to that work, just as, in a physical sense, the blood gives life to the physical organism. So out of a worldview permeated with spirit, the lifeblood of the soul must enter the soul of the teacher. Then the soul’s lifeblood will set its imprint on all the methods and practice of the teaching effort and save them from becoming abstract principles. Something will thus live in the educator, which I would like to characterize through these concluding words, as a kind of education for life itself:

To spend oneself in matter
is to grind down souls.
To find oneself in the spirit
is to unite human beings.
To see oneself in all humanity
is to construct worlds.

First public performance in Bern at the Kursaal Schänzli. The program was the same as that of the performance in Zurich on October 31, 1919, see p.194.

Dear attendees, Among the endeavors in the field of spiritual science, as outwardly represented by the Goetheanum, which is being built as a Free University for Spiritual Science in Dornach near Basel, there are also scientific and artistic endeavors in a wide variety of fields. Among the artistic endeavors, I would say that the endeavor that I call eurythmic art endeavor occupies a very specific place. This eurythmic art endeavor can very easily be confused with all kinds of neighboring arts, but actually should not be confused with them. We know very well that everything that appears today as spatial movement arts, dance arts or the like is sometimes so highly developed that what we are able to offer here would not want to compete with it. But here we are dealing with something quite different: it is a completely new artistic endeavour. And because we do not really have more to offer at present than a beginning, which certainly wants to be perfected but is still just a beginning, I would like to say a few words about the test that we want to offer you today – for the first time in this city – of our eurythmic art. Everything that we present as the eurythmic art has been thought out and worked out from the Goethean worldview and the Goethean spirit of art. It is self-evident that every art must work for immediate perception and aesthetic impression through itself, and that every interpretation, every explanation, every theoretical discussion is superfluous when it comes to art. This also applies to the art of eurythmy, of course. But because it is an art that is in its infancy, it will be necessary to say something about the sources from which this new art movement draws.

And here I may – not in order to present a theoretical discussion, but to make understandable the form of expression in which eurythmy appears – I may recall a few simple facts from Goethe's world view, namely from Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, from that theory of metamorphosis , which, despite being quite old, is still not fully appreciated, as it will be when we try to replace the science of the dead, the inanimate, which is all we really have, with a science of the living.

What is presented as the basic principle of Goethe's metamorphosis theory looks very simple and primitive today. Goethe thought that the whole plant - even if it were a complicated tree - is nothing more than an upturned single leaf, in all its complexity. And in turn, the leaf in its simplicity is an upturned whole plant. If one sees spiritually, as Goethe put it, or in terms of ideas, if one sees sensually and supernaturally, as he also said, then one sees in a single leaf a whole plant, in the whole plant only one more intricately endowed leaf - and in turn in every organ of any living being only the transformation of every other organ.

What Goethe thought about the form of living things can also be thought about the activity of living things. And if we apply this to the activity of the most highly developed living being, the human being, and to that which is a particular expression of human perfection – language and the speech organs – then we arrive at what we call the eurythmic arts.

When we listen to a person speaking, we first turn our attention from the sense of hearing to the audible. But while a person is speaking, the larynx and its neighboring organs are in mysterious motion. One could even depict it physically by saying: While I am speaking here, the air is in a perpetual motion, which is only an impression of the motion of the larynx and its neighboring organs. In our ordinary lives, we pay attention to what we hear, not to the movements that are only an imprint of the movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs. In our ordinary lives, we pay attention to what we hear, not to the movements that are only an imprint of the movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs, but to what we hear. But if one has the gift of supersensible vision, of seeing the invisible movements that underlie the audible, then one can project the movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs, which do not come to external manifestation, onto the human being as a whole. And in a sense, each limb of the human being can be moved in such a way that the movement is an imprint of the movement patterns that the larynx and its neighboring organs undergo when any sounds come to be revealed in speech.

If one then penetrates that which one lets one's limbs perform in terms of movement, just as artistically as it is penetrated in poetic language or song, that which the larynx accomplishes - in terms of rhythm, meter and so on - then an artistic instrument of the very first order arises in the moving human being himself.

And so what you are seeing this evening, dear audience, I would say the whole human being as a larynx moving, visible language, performed the linguistic sounds in motion by the whole person. This brings out of the human being that which is contained in his or her deeper nature.

We do justice to an artistic view such as Goethe's by creating such a new form of art from within the human being itself. Goethe says so beautifully, in expressing his view of art: When nature begins to reveal her secrets to someone, that person feels the greatest yearning for her most worthy interpreter: art. And the human being is indeed an imprint of the whole universe; he has the deepest secrets within him. If you try to get them out of him through special artistic design, by making the whole human being the expression of the moving larynx, just as the whole plant is a perfect, a complicated expression of the individual leaf, then the secrets of the world are expressed that would otherwise remain hidden.

But this also brings art closer to the real penetration of the secrets of the world, as it is in Goethe's sense when he says: Art is based on mysterious natural laws, on the essence of things, insofar as it allows us to represent this essence of things in tangible or visible forms. So that what the individual person presents on the stage is language that has become visible.

But in language, especially in artistic language and in song, in the musical, everything that our soul experiences as warmth, everything that our soul experiences as joy and suffering, is also effective. What the poet brings into language by shaping it into rhyme and rhythm can all be expressed in the spatial-movement art of eurythmy. We find that people initially work together in groups, expressing warmth of soul, joy and love. But what moves in the individual person is only a translation of the individual parts of the larynx movements into movements of the whole person.

In this way an art comes into being that is imitative, I might say, but endowed with its own inner laws, the inner laws of music itself. Just as in music it is not tone painting that is the actual artistry, so in the eurythmic art it is never mimicry, pantomime, the mere facial expression that is artistic. If you see pantomime, mimicry or mime in the so-called 'humorous' part of the performance, it is only because of the imperfection of our eurythmic art. This will gradually disappear. It is not that we are seeking some momentary connection between a movement, a gesture, and what passes in the soul, but rather, all this is inwardly lawful. And in the moving gesture, as in the moving tones, lies the connection, the lawful connection of the musical, in the succession of tones.

What is presented on stage through eurythmy is accompanied, on the one hand, by music, which is just another form of expression for the same thing that is expressed through the art of eurythmy, and on the other hand, by recitation and declamation. But here attention must be drawn to the fact that the art of recitation will in turn have to return to its old, good channels if it is to accompany eurythmy, which reveals the same thing as poetry but in a different form. For it must be emphasized that the art of recitation is in many cases decadent in the present day. We need only remember that today the most perfect art of recitation is considered to be that which emphasizes the prosaic, the literal content of the poem, I would say the novellistic, not the truly artistic aspect.

But what is in the background as rhythm, as the musicality of language, is the main thing in art, not the literal content. I need only remind you that Goethe, for example, rehearsed his “Iphigenia”, which is a dramatic poem, with a baton. This shows that it is the lawful progression that is important, not the emphasis of the prose content. Schiller did not have the literal content of the best of his poems in his mind at first, but rather something melodious, a kind of melody. And it was only by developing this that he found the literal content. It is the shaping of the content of the language that matters. We must go back to this with today's recitation and the art of declamation. For with today's art of recitation and declamation, it will not be possible to accompany what is to be expressed in the art of eurythmy. - So we will try to present to you on the one hand on stage a certain musical or poetic side, which will, however, be accompanied by the art of recitation and declamation, as it could be described here.

With these words I wanted to characterize the underlying sources. What is presented must make an impact through the aesthetic impression itself. For only that which leads not in some easy way but into the secrets of the existence of the world, without this leading to ideas or external concepts, is art.

If one attempts to approach human beings and their deeper secrets with such art, one fulfills what Goethe meant when he said, “When man is placed on the summit of nature, he beholds himself as a whole nature, but one that is in itself the source of all phenomena.” To repeat what he said, because everything we do want to do is supposed to be Goetheanism. —, one attains precisely all that he means when he says: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he sees himself again as a whole nature, which in turn has to produce a summit. To do this, he improves himself by permeating himself with all perfections and virtues, invoking choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally elevating himself to the production of a work of art. He will be all the more uplifted when producing the work of art if he makes his own organism, with its inner possibilities of movement, into an instrument. This is the one side, the actual artistic side, that is most important to us in our eurythmy.

But we are also concerned with the pedagogical side, and we are convinced that what we call the pedagogical side of eurythmy will gradually find its way into schools when people begin to see the value of such things. What is presented today as gymnastics is more or less something that is significant in the physiological realm for outer physicality, outer corporeality. What is presented here as the art of movement is the human being's lived and spiritualized movement, and it will be able to stand alongside pedagogical gymnastics in the same way as it will be able to stand alongside other fully-fledged art forms. I would ask you to be lenient in this regard.

We are the strictest judges of ourselves, but we know very well that this eurythmic art is developing. And we ourselves will continue to develop it - if not through us, then through others, when our contemporaries turn their attention to this eurythmic art out of a certain culturally progressive interest. However much it is still in its infancy today, we believe, dear attendees, that it is so capable of perfection that it will one day be able to establish itself as a fully-fledged art alongside other fully-fledged arts. From this point of view, I ask you to take today's presentation with indulgence.

[After the break, for the second part of the public eurythmy performance]

Dear attendees!

We will now attempt to perform two short scenes from the second part of Goethe's “Faust”. In these representations of the second part of Goethe's “Faust” – we have already tried a whole series of these in other places – it has become clear to us how eurythmy can serve in the presentation of such dramatic creations as those in the second part of “Faust”. I believe that the esteemed audience will be aware of the major obstacles that arise when the second part of “Faust” is to be staged. Perhaps one recalls various attempts at staging this second part of “Faust” using a wide range of directorial skills. One need only think of the charming direction and staging by Wilbrandt or the mystery play staging by Devrient with Lassen's music and numerous other stagings, and one will always find that these performances do not bring out anything of what is in Goethe's “Faust”.

Nevertheless, one should still have the feeling that this poetry expresses precisely that which reveals itself as so powerful in the whole rich development of Goethe's life. - After all, one is dealing here with all phases of human artistry, from the age of youth to the highest maturity of old age. And anyone who is not prejudiced in any way will follow the development of this rich Goethean artistic life with great inner satisfaction.

Of course, even during his lifetime, Goethe had to experience some things that annoyed him, one might say. The first part of Faust, which is certainly easier to understand than the second part, in which Goethe, in his own words, has hidden much - much of what he has recognized and experienced through a rich life - the first part of Faust found a large audience even in Goethe's time. And Goethe himself thought that with his Iphigenia, his Tasso and later, as he believed, with his Natural Daughter, he had come far beyond the art form that he had carried out in the first part of Faust. Because in the second part, which was only published after Goethe's death, he certainly reached a very special level. But what annoyed him during his lifetime was that people kept saying: Yes, Goethe has grown old. In his “Tasso”, you no longer see the same bubbling youthful energy that is expressed in his youthful works – and so on. He became annoyed about it. And he would certainly have thought many a thing if he had been able to live to see that not only the common philistine, but, as they also say, higher daughters, higher philistines, were upset about the fact that the second part of “Faust” would only represent a decline in Goethe's art. For example, the Swabian Vischer, the so-called V-Vischer, not only felt compelled to write a large number

of treatises on the failed second part of “Faust”, he even tried to write something better, to write a second part of “Faust”. He also became ill afterwards. He repeatedly emphasized that the second part of Goethe's “Faust” was a cobbled-together, glued-together work of old age.

As I said, Goethe took artistic revenge, and not only on the second part of “Faust” but also on many other works that were still incomplete. One can say that he took revenge quite severely. There is a beautiful quatrain in his estate. He wrote it down precisely with such things in mind. It reads:

They praise my Faust,
And what else

— he means the “Faust” of the first part, which was finished.

They praise my Faust,
and what else
In my writings roars
in their favor.

The old Mick and Mack,
that is very pleased;
The pack of ragamuffins thinks:
They would no longer be!

Goethe would undoubtedly have said the same if he had been able to experience what great aesthetes like V-Vischer have said about the second part of his “Faust”. There is a great deal in the second part of 'Faust' where Goethe rises to truly transcendental, spiritual experiences of the human soul. And precisely those scenes in which Goethe has so much of what only he could experience in his rich life, that was presented to us in such a way that it can be extracted from the poem with the help of the art of eurythmy.

And so this evening we would also like to give you a small sample – the scene around 'midnight' – where the four forces that gnaw at human life appear before 'Faust': want, need, worry, guilt, and where 'Faust' experiences everything that one can feel, live and learn in the face of these four forces, which here call themselves worry, need and so on. What Goethe has put into the poem through the way it is presented is revealed precisely through this moving language, through this silent language, expressive language, through the possibilities of movement of the whole human being; it comes out precisely through this.

So perhaps a performance of this kind, where eurythmy is used, can be seen as a kind of experiment. What is human and everyday is, of course, presented in the ordinary sense; but what rises into the supersensible world should be presented with the help of eurythmy. In this way, something like this can be considered an experiment, and we believe that by using eurythmy to help us present something that cannot be presented by any kind of stage direction, we are able to present something in a narrower field that could not otherwise have been brought out.