The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! The issue that is currently being called the social question has been on the horizon of modern historical development for more than half a century, and humanity has had the opportunity to reflect on what is expressed in the social demands of the movement associated with this question. During this time, people have also taken measures, small, medium and large, conceived in terms of state, through which they have tried to satisfy these demands in the way they have best understood. But now, when this social question, which in comparison to what is now, was more present in the undercurrents of human life, has emerged in a completely new form as a result of the terrible war catastrophe of recent years, and now that this question has been brought up by many quite horrifying , one cannot, if one really wants to learn from them, raise the question of why everything that people have tried to do to understand this social question is inadequate. Does it not prove that in many respects people today have not only been taken by surprise by the shape of the facts, which most of them truly did not dream would come about one day, that they did not dream that these facts would have to bring everything that can be executed in the human soul to this social question, that they have to relearn and rethink in a certain sense?

One could already see, dearest ones present, during the war catastrophe, how the suppressed forces of this movement pushed their way to the surface of life. Many a person who, through their words or advice, could have contributed to the inhibition or promotion of what was pushing towards the terrible war catastrophe of 1914, felt moved to push towards this war because they believed that a military victory would save their country from the forces against which the social movement was directed. But such personalities have had to realize over the past few years that they have made their decisions under serious illusions, because they have not been able to somehow push back the social forces moving to the surface through what they have achieved. On the contrary, they have - one can say so, the facts teach it - fuelled the fire all the more. And again, during the catastrophe of the war – the other world-shaking powers have driven humanity into chaos, into a terrible misfortune; then, during the catastrophe, hope emerged here and there in wide circles that precisely from the ranks of the international proletariat and its leaders those people will arise who will bring order back into the chaos that had emerged.

From all this, it can be seen that it was precisely in the face of these war catastrophes that this social movement first took on its critical form. And now, after the catastrophe itself has entered into a crisis, what is now apparent? Dear attendees, facts do not show whether everything in the face of all this history, in the face of these facts, is gripped by a deep tragedy. People, both those who profess the modern socialist worldviews and those who oppose them, show everywhere that the thoughts they have formed, the conclusions they have reached, and the preparations they have made are nowhere equal to these facts. The facts are overwhelming people, so it can be said in view of the current world situation.

It is therefore justified to reflect on whether the ideas that have been cultivated over the course of many decades really did capture the true nature of the social question. Did they take the true character into account? Is it possible that something quite different from what was sought to be grasped in the ideas is present and at work in the depths of the soul of the proletariat? Whether perhaps in the depths of these proletarian souls there is something quite different from what the proletarian himself believes is at work and calling to him?

Now, it is precisely in the circles of today's socialist thinkers that one finds a true disdain for intellectual life. But anyone who has been able to follow the proletarian movement of the last decades with a certain insight into life must say to himself that this rejection of intellectual life, of intellectual culture, this contempt for intellectual culture on the part of the proletariat actually expresses something extraordinarily significant that points the way to at least one in the true form of the modern social movement. If one has understood in the course of the last time, not only from some theoretical or quite scholarly point of view to reflect on the proletariat, but if one has been able to live with the proletariat, then one could see that in this rejection of the intellectual life there is something much, much deeper than one usually believes. And one is pointed to what is actually contained in it when one examines a certain word, which one could hear over and over again from the mouths of proletarian people, for its true content. It is a word that stands out significantly from the modern proletarian movement: the word is class consciousness of the proletariat. The modern worker says that he has become class-conscious. And by this he means that his consciousness is no longer as it was in the old days, when, based on certain instincts, a person placed himself in a relationship of dependence on this or that other person in order to work for him, and also established his relationship with these employers more instinctively, more unconsciously. The modern worker knows himself to be class-conscious. This means that he acts in accordance with certain ideas that he has about his dignity as a human being, about his value as a human being, about his position as a human being in society. He uses these ideas to determine the relationship he wants to enter into with those from whom he takes his work. What he represents in the world, he expresses with these words “class-conscious”. And this class consciousness is then accompanied by a certain feeling, a certain sentiment. It is this that only when the worker draws the full consequences of this class consciousness, when he behaves in his social position as this class consciousness makes him behave in relation to his human duty, then he will first achieve that goal, that goal that must be in his mind in the true sense of the word: to become the person he can desire to be according to a just world order.

Now, esteemed attendees, we can examine how, in the course of more recent times, what is hidden in the words “class-conscious proletariat” has emerged. To do so, we must go further back in contemporary history. And indeed, it has often been pointed out that we must go back to a certain turning point in time to gain insight into this question. Again and again it has been emphasized that, if one wanted to reflect on the origin of the modern proletarian movement, one had to look at how modern technology has emerged on the horizon of humanity, how this modern technology has given rise to modern capitalism, and how technology and capitalism have destroyed the old crafts, how they have led the worker away from what were his own means of production to the extensive means of production of modern factories and modern technology. And from all that could be seen from the historical development, the idea was formed that modern technology and the modern capitalism associated with it actually produced the proletariat.

However, dear attendees, it is not important that one realizes: modern technology and modern capitalism have created the proletariat, so to speak; rather, what matters is what the proletarian himself has become at the machine, in technology, through his integration into the modern capitalist economic process. And when one poses a question to that effect, then something extraordinarily significant becomes apparent to those who understand the issues, to be considered in historical parallels. Then one involuntarily recalls another great movement in world history. One recalls the spread of Christianity from Asia, through Greece and Rome to the north – to that north where, at the time, while Christianity was spreading, barbarian hordes were moving against the south, with more elementary sentiments than the inhabitants of the south had. And a remarkable historical phenomenon occurred at that time: Christianity, which then proved to be a world movement, also took hold, in a certain way, among the people, among the highly educated people of Greece, among the people of the Roman Empire. The way in which it took hold in these areas of civilization at that time shows at the same time that it would not have become what it has become in world history if it had only been able to come to the Greeks and Romans. The Greeks and Romans had a highly developed intelligence, they had a highly developed wisdom; but at the same time, this intelligence, this wisdom, was, I would say, like a fruit that had overripened, in a certain process of decline. And precisely this highly developed intelligence, this highly developed spiritual life of the European south was less able to absorb the impulses of Christianity than the elementary minds of the barbarians advancing from the north; and in the unconsumed intelligence, in the unconsumed mental powers of these advancing peoples of the north, Christianity created the impulses by which it has become what its actual impact in world history shows.

At the same time, the first [history] of Christianity must be studied in the migration of peoples from north to south.

But it is also a mistake, dear attendees, to assume that the modern proletarian movement began with what it is actually still experiencing and will continue to experience for a long time. Only here we have to do with a migration of peoples that does not run in a horizontal line, so to speak, but consists of masses of people who previously merely allowed themselves to be led, striving upwards, striving towards the form of consciousness, the intelligence, the ability to make decisions that the leading classes have: one might say a migration of peoples running in a vertical line!

But this vertical migration was met with something quite different from what happened with Christianity. The highly developed Greeks and Romans could give the Christian religion that which struck home in the elemental, primitive hearts, in the northern barbarian hearts of the attacking population. And these latter needed that, longed for it in a certain respect, which the more highly developed Greeks and Romans brought them.

Christianity brought a special spiritual gift with a strong impact on the souls - that was what it brought to the primitive minds of the north. But what could the ruling classes do in the new mass migration, what could they offer the proletarian masses storming from below?

I am not saying, esteemed attendees – I ask that you take this explicitly into account – I am not saying: they could offer them modern science; but rather, I say: they could offer them the human orientation, the human way of thinking that is connected with this modern science. And the surging masses of proletarians were hungry for this mode of thinking, for this acceptance of the modern scientific way of thinking. Why were they hungry for it? They were hungry for it because they were people who had been torn out of their old life contexts.

Let us consider the crafts as they developed up to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, well into the late Middle Ages. We will see that the human being is close to what spurs him on to produce. He is close to what makes economic production possible for him. And from his occupation, not only does an external professional honor arise for him, but something arises that gives him the feeling: he is of value in human society, he stands in a certain way. Human dignity is inherent in this human society. The craft was worthy of the person who practiced it. The craft instilled something in the soul that carried that soul. Not so with those who were torn out of their life contexts and led into the desolate factory, placed at the machine and harnessed to capitalism, which is alien to the human being. These people received nothing from their surroundings. Everything flowing towards them from their work tools and their work environment was alien. What did they have to fall back on when they asked themselves: What am I as a human being in the world? What do I mean in human society? They were dependent on their inner being, on that which can arise loudly from the soul, which can say about the human being from the inner being: I mean in the world as a human being. — But it is quite natural that no answer could come from an inner intuition, from an inner enlightenment, to these people's questions about their human dignity, about their human worth. They looked around for what the ruling class could offer them. Just as the barbarian masses storming in from the north had earlier accepted Christianity, so the modern proletarian masses wanted to accept what spiritual life could be brought to them, what a certain world view could be brought to them by those leading classes who had such spiritual life, such a certain world view.

One must not mistake this, esteemed attendees. It has often been completely misunderstood that the modern working masses approached the leading classes with a certain, I would say unconscious, trust and demanded of them: Give us information from your knowledge, from the science to which you have brought it, about what man actually means in the world!

But what was this scientific way of thinking like? What was it like, this scientifically oriented way of thinking that educated the bourgeoisie at roughly the same time as modern technology and capitalism emerged? It was like this: of course everything that has happened is also, in a sense, an historical necessity. One can hypothetically say that what the bourgeoisie had to offer the proletariat in the way of intellectual life was scientifically oriented, and was precisely the achievement of the newly emerging science. But the leading classes had not understood how to incorporate into this scientific attitude the momentum of spiritual life that was inherent in the old worldviews.

One need only recall the momentum that lived in the old religious and artistic conceptions, in general worldviews. These conceptions were able to give man something that carried his soul, filled his soul completely, and was meant to show his soul how this soul was connected to a spiritual world that stood above mere nature.

The modern scientific way of thinking could not do that. That was precisely what people were — certainly it was necessary, but one can still characterize it like this: It was the case that the old worldviews, and their representatives in particular, even opposed what was being developed as a modern scientific attitude. They did not understand how to give this science something that would have been a soul-bearing element. And so this science became well suited to give man enlightenment about nature and about the way he himself stands in nature; but it was impossible for this science to tell man anything serious about the questions that arose in his deepest inner being: What am I as a human being?

So, one might say, the proletariat did indeed place its trust in the leading classes; but this trust, and this, even today, is not fully understood by the proletariat, one must say: this trust was betrayed. The proletariat believed it could find something in modern science that could become its creed, its religion, so to speak, and what did it find? There is another word that shines brightly on what lives and happens in the modern proletarian soul. There is the word that can be heard again and again in proletarian writings, in proletarian assemblies, the word that proletarian leaders always have on their tongues - there is the word “ideology”.

What does the proletariat mean when it speaks of ideology? It means that the entire intellectual life: science, art, religion, law, custom, morality, that all this is not something that contains an inner, spiritual reality above nature, but that all this is based only on ideas that are mere reflections, mere reflections of what is going on outside in material life. The intellectual life that the bourgeois class handed over to the proletariat was so paralyzed, so paralyzed that the proletarian class could only perceive it as an ideology, that it no longer sensed in it anything that bore the soul as reality, but only sensed in it only insubstantial, unreal mirror images of external material reality.

And what was this external material reality for the proletarian? Only the economic life in which he was involved, only the machine, the factory. Only this gave him the bleak capitalism in which he was socially placed. And so it showed itself that now, in this new mass migration from bottom to top, people also longed for spiritual nourishment, but that they were only offered a spiritual nourishment that gradually hollowed out their souls, that gradually made their souls desolate.

And what was the result of this? The result was that demands arose in the modern proletariat that could not be illuminated by the impulse of any spiritual life, and that had to assert themselves as mere instincts, so to speak. By perceiving the spiritual life, which it has inherited from the leading classes, as ideology, the proletariat must, on the one hand, reject this spiritual life, but on the other hand, it must also allow this spiritual life to work in such a way that it is deprived of the possibility it sought in this spiritual life of feeling through this life what it is as a human being, whereby it places itself in the whole scientific order.

With these suggestions, dear attendees, I believe I have touched on the one link in the modern proletarian, in the modern social movement. In any case, more than one would believe, this movement is a spiritual movement, but not one in which the spiritual has had a beneficial effect. The trust in the intellectual life of the leading classes has become mistrust. And in the facts, which today stand so horribly for many, one experiences the consequences of this mistrust. Yes, the way things play out on the surface, how they live out in the human imagination, that is sometimes not the essential, not the decisive thing; in this respect, man often misunderstands himself. What stirs below [in the true depths] of the soul is what matters. And however little the modern proletarian admits it, in the depths of his soul he yearns for something that can carry this soul. And if he believes he finds it in the current scientific attitude, with his ideas and his thoughts, then his unconscious feeling tells him that he must be dissatisfied with his whole situation, because this modern scientific attitude only shows him, so to speak, the vanity of man.

In this respect, there is a huge difference, an enormous difference between what still permeates the consciousness of the leading classes and what permeates the consciousness of the proletarian.

Dear attendees, you have to experience these things as they happen in the striving proletariat itself. If I may interject something personal here: I remember very clearly a scene with all its details, which I experienced in this area, among others, when I stood at the lectern at the same time as Rosa Luxemburg, who recently died so tragically. It was precisely in this scene that the deep gulf became apparent to me, which exists and must widen more and more between the leading classes and the storming proletariat. As a member of the ruling class, you could be well convinced of what modern science teaches about man, you could theoretically be a free thinker, you could even theoretically be an atheist, but in terms of what lived in the feelings, you were part of a life context and wanted to remain in it , even if one was a natural scientist like Vogt or a scientific-psychological researcher like Büchner, for example, wanted to remain in it, despite all theoretical-scientific conviction, in what was a life context that was truly not determined by modern science, but by old world view impulses. In this respect, science seemed theoretically convincing, but there was no sense of entitlement in the soul to be completely hollowed out by this science. The modern proletarian is different. I remember exactly the words that Rosa Luxemburg spoke about science and the workers at the time, how she made it clear to the workers that the newer scientific way of thinking had finally enlightened man in a true way, how man now knows that he does not have his origin close to angels or any spiritual beings, but that he has his origin in the fact that he once moved indecently while climbing trees, and other such things. “Of such origin,” she said, ”to such origin man goes back, and whoever considers this must admit to himself what an enormous prejudice there is in all the differences in rank, in all the differences in class, within human society. From such an explanation of man as man, from such a placing of man in the natural order, not in a spiritual world order, something quite different followed for the proletarian than for the member of the bourgeois class. That gave the modern proletarian his soul's imprint. That made him what he actually is.

Do not tell us, esteemed attendees, how many proletarians there are who occupy themselves with such things. How far removed from the proletarian question of bread and that of status is what touches on such questions of world view! If you say this, then you only testify to how little you know about the reality of the proletarian movement. No matter how uneducated the individual proletarian may be in the eyes of the ruling class, no matter how little he may have heard of the things I have just mentioned – within the proletarian class he is so organized that a thousand threads lead from the perhaps few people who know, a thousand threads lead from such things to him. And the most radical actions and measures that today frighten the leading circles, which come from the proletariat, are really connected with the intellectual direction and intellectual character that the proletariat has acquired.

Thus the proletarian question is, in one of its aspects, more than one might think, a spiritual question. But it is not only a spiritual question. It is, in the second place, what one might call a legal question. For something else happened at the same time that modern technology and modern capitalism were developing. There was a certain orientation of human interests towards state life.

What happened there is also often misunderstood today. History, as it is taught, is actually just a kind of fable convenue. People today imagine that the state was more or less as it is today throughout the whole of history. But that is not the case. What is important in state life today has actually only emerged in the last four centuries. It has emerged because the ruling class in the state was able to see something that served their interests. The state has emerged as an instrument for the ruling classes to realize what they call their rights. And the consequence of this was that the ruling, the leading classes in the state sought to realize what they called their rights. One can trace it historically, how property rights, how other rights have gradually emerged through the fact that more and more the leading classes of humanity linked their interests with state life.

But the worker was called to the machine, was put into the factory, was harnessed into soulless capitalism. For him, one right remained unrealized in the realization of rights in modern state life. And this unrealized right was one of the strongest impulses of the modern social movement. This unrealized right arose from the fact that the corresponding right did not arise because the worker was completely placed in mere economic life, in mere external economic existence, in that which only expresses itself in the production, circulation and consumption of goods. And within this economic existence, it turned out that an important factor in the production of goods, even in the modern technical sense, was human labor! What has become of this human labor? This human labor itself became a commodity. Others, who had objective commodities, offered them on the commodities market; the commodities were bought, are bought. The worker has nothing to sell but his labor. And this labor power took on the character of a commodity. Just like other commodities, it was subject to the law of supply and demand. The modern proletarian learned this, and it penetrated deep into his soul: the awareness that it is indeed degrading to know that a part of yourself is a commodity within the human social order.

What this impulse means can be understood, honored attendees, when you have seen time and again how it struck the hearts of the proletarians. For example, what flowed into their souls from Marxism and similar socialist beliefs, where it was made clear to them that their labor power had become an ordinary commodity through the modern capitalist mode of production. The proletarian understood this from his own life. But in him the social question is expressed in its true form in a second point, in a second link. Admittedly, the modern proletarian believes that it is quite understandable that modern economic life has turned his labor power into a commodity, and he even believes that the further development of this economic life will in turn take away the character of the commodity from his labor power. But this belief is vain. This belief is only on the surface of consciousness. In the depths of his soul, the proletarian feels something else. In the depths of his soul, he feels that this labor question is nothing more than a continuation of what is expressed within humanity on the way from slavery through serfdom to the modern proletariat, which has to market its labor power.

In other times, you could buy the whole person as a slave. Then the time when you could buy less of the person, but still a good deal of him within economic life, is during serfdom. In more recent times, within the capitalist economic system, you can only buy the labor force, but the whole person has to go along when you buy his labor. The whole person thereby comes into a dependency on the one who gives him the work that he perceives as degrading. And one can only show understanding for this matter if one realizes that in this question about human labor, we are now dealing with a legal issue.

I said earlier that the worker has been neglected. His labor law has not been realized in modern state life. He was thrown into economic life, and it was out of economic life that the relationship between his labor and the other factors of human society was shaped.

More and more, the urge took hold in the unconscious to break out of this economic life, to break out and carry oneself into another realm where the question of labor is not a mere economic question, where it becomes a legal question. This is actually inherent in the question of labor: the transformation of labor from an economic factor into a legal factor. This is the true form of the second classification of the social question.

The third area can be seen in its true form by looking at economic life itself. This economic life is humanly marred by the fact that not only do goods separate from people circulate in it, but also human labor power is remunerated in it like a commodity. As a result, in modern economic life there is not only objective commodity that is subject to exchange, there are people who are separated from the rest of humanity because they have to be determined in their entire will, in all their soul impulses, by this economic life. To tear it away from the human being, to place it on its foundation, to place it on the foundation on which it then has a mere commodity-circulation character: that is the third area of the social question in its true form.

And so you see that the social question actually has three core issues, and can be broken down into three parts: the first part is a spiritual question, the second part is a legal question, and the third part is an economic question. These three parts of social life, these three core issues must be taken into account if one is to gain any kind of insight into the modern social movement.

This attitude can only arise if we consider the following. Our time is already in a serious crisis of human development. And something of this crisis is evident in the following: social life - of course there was social life in the past as well. But people placed themselves in this social life in such a way that they took certain thoughts for granted, which brought them into a relationship from person to person. This is now beginning to change. It actually began to change a long time ago. The necessity arises that a feeling arises in each individual human being of how he or she stands within the entire social organism. And it will become necessary for something of this feeling to be incorporated into our education, into our school system.

People find it very difficult to adapt their way of thinking to such things. Nevertheless, people will have to learn to feel more and more drawn to these things. Today, of course, you are only considered an educated person if you know the four types of arithmetic, at least to a certain extent, and if you are not illiterate. You have to have a certain amount of education if you want to be considered a real person in the right sense; but you can be seized very little by the feeling of being inside a social organism, like a single human limb is inside a natural human organism. Feelings will have to be developed like rules, like the truths of the multiplication table, in the future human being – feelings of how the spiritual life, the legal life, and the economic life express themselves in the social organism. There is more to this than is usually thought. Therein lies the actual, purely human side of the social question.

When the social organism is discussed today, one often gets the impression that there is something like a last remnant of medieval superstition in all this talk about the social organism. This medieval superstition comes to the fore in a certain scene in the second part of Goethe's Faust, where Wagner is preparing the homunculus in the laboratory, wants to prepare the homunculus from mere abstract human ideas, from natural ingredients.

Goethe deals with medieval alchemical superstition in his own way. Of course, modern enlightened humanity does not believe in medieval alchemy; but it does not know that it has often transferred such superstition to a different area. What is being attempted today with regard to the social organism, the social being, with all kinds of socialist theories, and what is sought in what the medieval alchemist does in “Faust” by artificially to create a living being, a human being, artificially, that which is striven for as a social organism, out of all kinds of principles, out of all kinds of impulses, one would also have to say of that: it is artificially conceived. The principle of allowing something to become self-sustaining and natural, of merely giving it the opportunity to become viable, must underlie it – this feeling must become part of humanity with regard to the social organism. People must learn to recognize that one does not have to think theoretically: How should one go about creating a social order? – but that one has to promote reality, through which this social order can continuously be realized.

Those of you who are present today and who approach the study of the social organism from this point of view will find that, as a result of the developments that have taken place over the last few centuries, and particularly during the 19th century, the three limbs of this social organism, each of which requires a certain degree of independence in order to function, have been welded together, so to speak. The best way to understand this is to draw a comparison. But it should not be a scientific gimmick, just a comparison, between the social organism and the natural human organism. I pointed out the truth on which this is based in my last book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Mysteries of the Soul). Today, we have already progressed so far scientifically that what I am about to say can be fully asserted, even if the scientific scholars themselves do not yet recognize it, but they will come to recognize it. The system of the natural human organism actually consists of three parts. One of these is what we can call the nerve-sense system, which encompasses the processes that take place in the nerves and senses. The second link in the natural human organism is what I would call the rhythmic system, which encompasses the activity of the lungs and heart and everything connected with them. And the third system is the metabolic system, which is often perceived as the coarsest, most materialistic system in the human organism.

These three systems of the human organism are not fully centralized; each has a certain independence and each also stands independently in a certain relationship to the outside world. The nervous-sensory system through the senses; the rhythmic system through the respiratory organs; the metabolic system through the nutritional organs. These three organ systems open independently to the outside world.

As I said, not to play a scientific game of analogy, but only to make myself understood, I point out these three independent links of the human organism. The nervous-sensory system has a certain independence, and it is precisely because of this that it can be properly presented and supported by the respiratory and rhythmic systems, which in turn function independently and are connected to the outside world independently. If everything in the human organism were centralized in a single point, the human organism could not exist in the perfect harmony in which it exists. What nature has made of the human organism, a three-part system with three relatively independent individual areas, must become, out of the impulses of modern times, the healthy social organism. Until now it has been so instinctively. Man must work towards it consciously, and every single person must build this healthy social organism. But this requires that we recognize that the welding together of three links in the one state life must cease. And here we touch on one of those attempts at a solution that bears the sole character of a reality thinking, one of those attempts at a solution that present-day humanity in particular thinks least of all. What matters is that one can first bring about in the social organism, by making it viable – but one can only do that by letting certain things drift apart again, which have drifted together over the last four centuries as a result of historical impulses.

The situation is as follows. Initially, the leading classes, through the interests that pushed them towards the state, also drew the spiritual life into this state. The state has increasingly extended its power over the spiritual life. The social entity and many other branches of the spiritual life have been included in the sphere of the state. But anyone who is familiar with the spiritual life, esteemed attendees, its inner structure, anyone who knows what should be at work in this spiritual life if it is to sustain the soul, knows that this soul-sustaining, true reality impulse of the spiritual life must dwindle more and more as the external power of the state makes use of it. Spiritual life can only fully fulfill man if it is based on the direct individual freedom of man, on the free initiative of each individual, on the talents and abilities of each individual. One should not recoil from the thought that spiritual life must be drawn out of the sphere of the state so that it can develop through its own forces.

The modern proletariat is not aware of this – but the very longing that drove it is in fact there in the depths of its soul, in the unconscious depths of its soul: for a liberated spiritual life! Only when this spiritual life is released from the state organism, when it is left to its own devices, will it again have the power to push forward, to push forward through the free initiative of the human being, through the connection of the deepest, innermost interests with the spiritual life, which is necessary to answer the question inwardly to the human being: What do I know as a human being? A spiritual life that is detached from the external state, which in turn is intertwined with the economic and legal life, such a spiritual life will not be materialistic. The state has materialized science. The state has externalized spiritual life. An internalized spiritual life is capable of making a completely different personality out of the proletarian.

This is the first key point in the attempts to solve the social question, even if today the proletarian does not yet know it, he longs for the development that he needs and that he has not been able to receive, even though he has longed for it in this time when he was first put into the factory, in a comprehensive way.

Dear attendees, but then, when intellectual life has been removed from the actual political state, the state will be left with the actual legal life. And it will then be pushed to prove its competence, so to speak. It will then realize that it must be the stronghold of justice. Then the tendency will also arise, just as on the one hand spiritual life has been pushed out of the sphere of the state, economic life has been pushed out, which has also been pushed into the state by the ruling class, they started with the larger transport institutions: post, telegraph, railways and so on, which have become nationalized, socialized. They went further and further. And the modern proletariat wants to draw the final consequences, wants to nationalize everything, and is only imitating what it has received as an inheritance from the bourgeoisie. At the moment when, so to speak, intellectual life has been freed from the sphere of the state, the state itself will realize that it must also push economic life out of itself in the other direction. Then the State will have its own sphere and there will be three constituent parts of a healthy social organism. The first of these, considered relatively, is the life of the State, the public life of the State, and the second is the rounded-off, self-contained economic life, endowed with real substance and having its own laws, just as the life of the law and the life of the spirit have their own laws. Completely independent impulses rest in these three areas. Economic life is completely dominated by what man needs in his everyday and other higher life. Economic life must be built on the satisfaction of needs. And a peculiarity of economic life, ladies and gentlemen – it is a pity that I cannot expand on these things, but time is pressing – a special character of economic life is expressed in that what circulates in economic life must be suited to the most appropriate consumption. Everything that is produced in economic life wants to be consumed in the appropriate way. And if it is not consumed, then it has missed its goal. But if that is the case, then human labor must not be harnessed in this economic life; for it must not be completely consumed, it must be preserved for that which man wants to be as a being that enters the whole world situation in a lawful way. This human being must be able to draw something from mere economic life, must not be completely consumed in economic life. What each person must draw from this economic life is the relationship itself from person to person, and the working relationship is no different than that from person to person in the realm of the political state, which, alongside economic life, is the second link in the healthy social organism. Here it is not interest that is at work, as in economic life, but right. What makes man equal to man. The law before which all men must be equal in a certain respect is at work. But this right can only take effect on human labor power if the consequence, if the destiny of human labor is not regulated by economic processes, but when it is regulated by law; just as other rights must be the subject of the political state, which is separate from economic and intellectual life, so must labor law be decided within this separate political state, not within economic life. And so it will have to be that in a healthy organism the independent economic life will develop, a life that is built on the interests and needs of man, and that will live itself out primarily in associations that are built for the present regulation of consumption and production and other things that are present in economic life. The state, public law, which no longer wants to be an economist, will develop with real matter-of-factness in a healthy social organism. The development dreamt of by the proletariat must take precisely the opposite course and institutions; the state must be separated and excluded from economic life. The state must develop a single public law.

And the third area must be the free spiritual life, which can be built only on human freedom and human talent. Just as the state can only be built on the law, and the economy can only be built on the interest, just as no human organism can survive healthily if the head wants to take over the functions of the lung and heart system or the metabolic system, so no healthy social organism can survive in the future if these three elements are mixed up. They will only support and sustain each other in the right way if each stands independently. Therefore, a relative independence of the three characterized parts must be demanded. If I may express myself this way: the spiritual life must form its administrative body, its law-giving body, out of its own laws. In the state area of law, a democratic order will have to prevail. There the relationship between people will be regulated. But this state system must in turn have its own legislative and administrative body. And the entire social structure of this economic life will arise out of the associations of economic life.

But these three members will, so to speak, each be sovereign in their own right, just as sovereign states stand side by side and are accountable to each other, in order to enter into a relationship with each other similar to that between the three characterized member systems of the human natural organism.

Perhaps today one is somewhat astonished when looking at such a solution to the social question. But, dear ladies and gentlemen, the way of thinking that is presented here is not based on theory but on reality. It does not ask: How should we think in order to solve this or that social problem? Instead, it asks: How should human coexistence be shaped so that people can solve the social question from within, through their own feelings, thoughts and will?

No human being can solve the social question from a one-sided economic life, nor from a one-sided state life, nor from a one-sided spiritual life. Because this social question is not something that has arisen in the world today and will be solved tomorrow - the social question has come to stay. The social question has entered the life of the human soul and will now always be there. Therefore, it will have to be solved again and again. The situation will arise more and more that economic life consumes the human being, that the human being must save himself again, must make himself independent of economic life in order to restore in the state legal life that which is consumed by him in economic life. Just as something is consumed in the human nervous system, which is always restored by the lung-heart system. What is important is not to penetrate one area with the other, but to ensure that these areas stand side by side and thus have the right effect on each other. We must strive for a certain state of the social organism, through which this social organism will become viable.

I have only been able to sketch out what actually follows from the world view represented here; but everything I have said can be scientifically substantiated in full detail today, and it is to be carried out in all its details for the entire life of the social organism. It must be clearly understood that the questions to be considered are not to be solved by one or other side gaining a view on this or that from its deliberations, but that the questions are to be solved by the fact that, on the one hand, economic life is there and produces something that, on the other hand, needs a counteraction through spiritual and legal channels. This does not offer a way out of the social confusions of the present that can bring a solution tomorrow; but it does offer a way out that can make the social organism viable in the future.

One would like to say: what has been discussed here was already instinctive in the souls of modern people when, in the eighteenth, at the end of the eighteenth century, the great, powerful impulses of the French Revolution were heard, clothed in the words: liberty, equality, fraternity. On the one hand, there was already an awareness of what needed to be done to heal the social organism; on the other hand, there was still confusion and the chaotic idea of realizing all of this in a centralized state. Then, clever people of the nineteenth century often wondered how these three impulses, which expressed themselves as freedom, equality and fraternity, could be reconciled with each other in real life. And some extraordinarily astute ideas emerged in the course of the nineteenth century with regard to this. For example, people of great acumen have said: freedom entails that man creates out of his individuality, out of his personality, letting everything that is peculiar to him come to light; he cannot be completely equal to another. Equality contradicts freedom. And on the other hand, fraternity cannot easily be reconciled with mere equality, and so on.

What is the basis for this? The basis is that the true meaning of these three impulses of freedom, equality and fraternity can only come to light not in a one-sided centralized social organism, but only in a healthy threefold social organism. This healthy threefold social organism will have its three relatively independent limbs. That which lives itself out in the realm of spiritual life will be built on freedom, on the individual freedom initiative of human talent and ability. There freedom will be able to be realized, as in the natural organism, in the head, thus in the nervous-sense system, one thing is realized, in another system another. In the actual political state member of the healthy social organism, the equality of all people as human beings will be realized. And in the third link, in the economic link of the healthy social organism, fraternity will be realized. Even if this social organism is constantly being recreated from day to day as a threefold entity, it will be able to live because this threefoldness will then live as a further unity in freedom, equality and fraternity.

All that I have said shows perhaps one thing, dear attendees; it shows that many people today have ideas about the social problem that differ greatly from a real understanding of the social problem through the modern necessity of life. I believe there is still little understanding of this social question, as I have characterized it to you today, which is taken from life itself. For this requires not only that one admits that this or that aspect of the situation must be changed, but that many things in human thinking itself must be changed. If the social movement is to be healthy, one must be willing not only to change things, but also to rethink and relearn. And the facts of the present speak loudly, and for some people they are so shocking that one must indeed relearn. How could we not have to relearn, after it has been shown that what we thought we had learned over decades, over more than half a century, proves to be so unfruitful when we consider history with regard to the social movement, when we consider the facts themselves! Do not the facts show that they demand something completely different from what we have prepared for? Do not these facts demand that we change?

Now, dear ones, anyone who points to this fact will say that it would be necessary for the gap that has opened up between the classes, and about which there is hardly any understanding today, to close; but one thing is necessary: that souls open up, that hearts open and seek such understanding.

But this understanding must go so far as to want to penetrate into the essence of a healthy social organism, to want to penetrate into the essence of such a feeling that tells the human being: I do not place myself worthily in the social organism if I do not empathize with what happens in the threefold social organism.

If we then look at how very different what arises from the observation of real life as an attempt to solve the social question is from what many people imagine such attempts to be, if we look at this correctly, we will, when we realize on the other hand what the loud-speaking facts are like, that is, if he turns his attention to the loud-speaking facts, he will say to himself: Indeed, effort is necessary today, indeed, overcoming the mental discomfort of some feelings and inability to will is necessary today if one wants to gain a position corresponding to a fact in the social life of this present. But perhaps such a person will also be able to think something else: the solution, the real solution to the social question, cannot be found by excluding the human spirit, by excluding the human soul. It must be found not only in the economic life that takes place from person to person, but also in the harmony of souls. If it is not understood in time that such harmony of souls, such socialization of souls, must be striven for through a greater deepening than that sought so far, then it could be, dearest present, that through the misjudgment of the most important facts, it will happen that not social understanding, not social feeling, but the wildest instincts of humanity will assert themselves. And we see a current of development in the present already on this path. This current of development could stand admonishingly before man in spirit and say to him: Today, everyone is basically obliged to take a look at the key points of the social question, because it depends on each individual whether the social organism will become viable as soon as possible or not. And in this field one can only do right if one loses no time in seeking understanding of that which alone can bring healing, that alone can bring a way out of and into chaos. One must feel this: Today, in relation to the social question, different things are necessary for each individual than humanity imagined was necessary just a short time ago. From this insight into the necessity that exists, may everyone sufficiently deepen their thinking and feeling with regard to social life, otherwise wild instincts could take the place of possibilities for understanding, and then, dear attendees, it would be too late.

It is not possible to say everything in the first lecture, and I mentioned many things only as a sort of introduction; later I will present them in more detail. Therefore there may be some questions that I will answer in their full context in subsequent lectures. Nevertheless I would like to ask if you have any questions today. Perhaps you can write your questions down, and I will attempt to answer them in later lectures. That way I can answer them within the full context. It is not at all superfluous to pose such questions today, or perhaps, even better, tomorrow, after you have had some time to think.

I have a written question here asking how to handle a boy in the third developmental stage of childhood, that is, after puberty, who is one-sidedly gifted in mathematics and the natural sciences, but who has absolutely no talent for foreign languages.

That question is related to a great deal that I will discuss in detail later. In the next lectures, I will discuss these special but one-sided talents and show how you can place them in the service of developing the entire human being. I will also show how you can harmonize them by proceeding in a particular way pedagogically. Nevertheless I would like to say something about it now.

There are some girls who have this kind of talent, but it happens so seldom that you can often find complete biographies of these women because they then became famous mathematicians. The one-sided talent for mathematics and natural sciences that we find in boys is generally based upon the fact that an organ that appears quite unimportant is very subtly developed in these young men. Perhaps some of you are aware of such families as the Bernoulli family,1 in which individual members of the family were particularly gifted in mathematics over a period of eight generations. In another famous case, we have the Bach family,2 which produced a large number of “little Bachs” who were extremely talented with regard to music. I should also mention that there are many boys who are highly talented with regard to the physical and mathematical sciences, but whom we cannot observe so well because their talents lie more in the direction of botany and zoology. At the same time, they are also highly talented in the area of mineralogy, but are not particularly gifted in observing the physical characteristics of minerals.

Such things can take on many different nuances. In these boys, the three semicircular canals in the human ear are particularly well developed. It may be that these three tiny vertical bones within the human ear are so arranged that they bring with them a highly developed sense of space and numbers. In other cases, they are much less well developed. These talents are connected with that development. If the human organism is particularly well developed in that way, a special talent arises out of the ear.

Within the organ of hearing are all the organs necessary for hearing, but these are further connected with the organs for speaking, for balance, and for a sense of numbers. In a certain sense, they all meld together. If these small bones that appear as three semicircular canals within the ear are one-sidedly developed within a person, then that development occurs at the cost of the development for hearing the sounds in speech and so forth, namely, for hearing the proper structure of language. This weakens the talent for hearing language, with the result that particularly those children who are very gifted in mathematics have less talent in language. The only thing we can do with such children is to begin teaching them language as soon as we notice that they are particularly gifted in mathematics. We teach them language without placing a strong value upon the intellectual aspect, that is, upon grammar. Rather we teach them language through the rhythm of the language itself. If you have the children memorize things without going into the actual content, but so that they simply enjoy the rhythm of the foreign language in short poems, then teach them the content through the sounds and what the sounds carry within them, you will see, if you begin this early enough, that these children will overcome this one-sidedness.

As we have shown in practice at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, it is absolutely necessary to avoid beginning with an intellectually oriented education when children are seven or eight. Instead we need to work from the more artistic aspect. We do not teach writing in an intellectual way, by working with the forms of the letters. Instead we teach it by beginning with a kind of primitive drawing. In that way, we develop the will more than the intellect, whereas the common way of teaching writing today speaks too strongly to the intellect. Thus we attempt to engage the entire human being. In that way, the individual one-sided talents balance out.

If you ask how to awaken the memory for correct spelling, my answer would be that you need to observe the differences in human strengths during the three periods of human life, that is, until the change of teeth, until puberty, and then after puberty until the age of twenty. You need to develop a sense for observing these three periods of life and the differences in the specific forces of life that develop. Then you will notice that people who, until the age of fifteen, have absolutely no sense of correct spelling or correct grammar will develop it if they are treated in the way I just mentioned. If you draw their attention to the rhythm of the language, they will develop this sense out of the depths of their souls after the age of fifteen.

This is why it would be totally inappropriate to keep children who have well-developed talents from progressing through the grades simply because they do not demonstrate any particular talent for grammar. If you look at what Goethe wrote as a young boy and then see that when he was older, he stood in a very exclusive group with regard to grammar, you will think about him very differently than the way people usually think about a boy or girl who cannot spell properly at the age of thirteen or so. Instead of wringing our hands about how poorly such children spell and continually asking what we should do to teach them to spell, it would be much better to think about what capacities the children actually have, seek out those special talents, and then find a way to teach the children what they need to learn from those talents.

You will see that if you emphasize the artistic element when teaching children who are one-sidedly gifted in mathematics, you will always achieve a balance.

To our modern way of thinking, it can be difficult to describe the particular characteristics of spiritual science. It is natural to judge something new according to what we already know. Spiritual science, in the way I mean it here, differs from what we normally call science. It does not give things another content or put forth other ideas, but it speaks about a very different human being. It is because of this other perspective that spiritual science can be fruitful for education. If I were asked to explain this difference, I would give the following preliminary description.

When we study something these days, we think we gain some ideas about this or that. Then, depending upon the strength of our memory, we carry those ideas with us for the rest of our lives. We remember things; therefore we know them. Spiritual science is not to be practiced in that way. Certainly people often see it that way, out of habit, but those who take it up like a collection of notes do not value it properly. They approach reality in a way that is just as foreign to life as our sensory, material manner of consideration is. For instance, if someone were to say that she ate and drank yesterday and having done that, she would not need to eat or drink again the rest of her life, you would think that is nonsense. The human organism must continually renew its connection with those things it needs from external nature. It can do nothing other than enter this process of receiving and working with what it takes in time and again.

In a way, it is the same with spiritual science. Spiritual science gives something that enlivens the inner human being and must be renewed for it to remain alive within the human being. For that reason, spiritual science is much closer to the creative powers of the human being than normal knowledge, and that is why it can actually stimulate us from many directions to work as with this most precious material, the developing human being.

It is not immediately obvious that spiritual science is alive in that regard. However, if you patiently consider those things that our modern habits say must be presented more abstractly, you will notice that they slowly become genuinely alive. We then not only have knowledge of facts, but also something that at each moment, in each hour, we can use to give life to the school. If you are patient, you will see that spiritual science goes in quite a different direction, and that those people who treat it like any other knowledge, like a collection of notes, damage it the most.

I wanted to offer these preliminary thoughts, as you will need to consider the things I need to say today in that light. Yesterday I mentioned that we can genuinely understand the human being from various perspectives, and that these lead us to a unified view of the body, soul, and spirit. I said that in spiritual science we speak of the physical human being, the etheric human being, the astral human being, and the I. Each of these aspects of human nature has three aspects of its own.

Let us first look at the human being from the physical perspective. Here the modern physiological perspective is often inaccurate and does not arrive at a truly mobile view of the nature of the human being. After a thirty-year study, I mentioned these things in my book, Riddles of the Soul, published two or three years ago. At the beginning, I spoke of the natural division of the physical human being into three parts. Now I will present these at this point in our course more as a report to substantiate what I say. If we consider the human being first from the physical perspective, it is important to first look at the fact that it perceives the external world through its senses. The senses, which are, in a way, localized at the periphery of the human organism, are brought further into the human being by the nerves. Anyone who simply includes the senses and nerves with the rest really does not observe the human being in a way that leads to clear understanding of its nature. There is a high degree of independence, of individuality, in what I would call the nerve-sense human being. Because modern people consider the whole human being as some nebulous unity, science cannot comprehend the fundamental independence of the nerve-sense human being. You will understand me better when I describe this further.

A second independent aspect of the physical human being lies within our organism. I call it the rhythmic organism. It is the part of our respiratory, circulatory, and lymphatic systems that is rhythmic. Everything that has rhythmic activity within the human being is part of the second system, which is relatively independent from the nerve-sense system. It is as though these two systems exist alongside one another, independently, yet in communication with one another. Modern science’s vague concept of a unified human being does not exist.

The third aspect is also relatively independent of the whole human being. I call it the metabolic organism. If you look at the activities of these three aspects of the human being, the nervesense being, the human being that lives in certain rhythmic activities, and the human being who lives in the metabolism, you have everything that exists in human nature to the extent that it is an active organism. At the same time, you have an indication of three independent systems within the human organism. Modern science creates quite false concepts about these three independent systems when it states that the life of the soul is connected with the nerves. This is a habit of thought that has established itself since about the end of the eighteenth century.

In order to develop a feeling for these three aspects of the body, I would like to discuss their relationship to the soul. Allow me to state first that everything that is concentrated in the human metabolic system, that is an activity of the metabolic system, is directly connected with human willing. The part of the human being represented by the circulatory system is directly connected with feeling, while the nerve-sense system is connected with thinking.

You can see that modern science has created some incorrect concepts here. It says that the human soul life is strongly connected with the life of the nerves, or with the nerves and senses, and that thinking, feeling, and willing are directly connected with the nerves; through the nerves the soul indirectly transfers its activity to the circulatory, the rhythmic, and metabolic systems. This brings considerable confusion into our understanding of the human being. People become more removed from their own nature instead of being brought nearer to it.

Just as thinking is connected with nerve-sense life, feeling is directly connected with the human rhythmic system. Feeling, as soul life, pulsates in our breathing, blood circulation, and lymphatic system and is connected with these systems just as directly as thinking is with the nerve system. The will is directly connected with the metabolism. Something always happens in the human metabolism when a will activity is present. The nerves are not at all connected to willing, as is usually stated. The will has a direct relationship to the metabolism, and the person perceives this relationship through the nerves. That is the genuine relationship. The nerve system has no task other than thinking. Whether we think of some external object, or whether what we think about occurs in our metabolism in relation to the will, the nerves always have the same task.

Modern science speaks of sense nerves, which it presumes exist in order to provide impressions of the external world from the periphery of the body to the central organ. We also hear that motor nerves exist to carry will impulses from the central system to the periphery of the body. I will speak more of this later. People have created very clever theories to prove that this difference between the sense and motor nerves exists. But this difference does not exist. More important than these clever theories is the fact that you can cut a motor nerve and then connect one end to the end of a sense nerve that you have also cut. This then becomes a nerve of one kind. It shows that we can find no real differences in function between the motor and sense nerves, even in an anatomical or physiological sense. The so-called motor nerves do not carry will impulses from the central organ to the human periphery.

In reality motor nerves are also sense nerves. They exist so that if I, for example, moved a finger, there is a direct relationship between the decision and the metabolism of the finger, so my will can exercise a direct influence upon the metabolism of the finger. The so-called motor nerves perceive this change in the metabolic process. Without this perception of a metabolic process, no decision of the will can follow, since the human being depends upon perceiving what occurs within himself. This is just like our needing to perceive something in the external world if we are to know things and participate in them.

The differentiation between sense and motor nerves is a most willing servant of materialism. It is a servant that could have arisen in materialistic science only because a cheap comparison could be found for it in modern times, namely, the telegraph. We telegraph from one station to another and then telegraph back. It is approximately a picture of the process of telegraphy that people use to describe how the sense and motor nerves communicate between the periphery and the central organ. Of course, this whole picture was possible only in an age like the nineteenth century, when telegraphy played such an important role. Had telegraphy not existed, perhaps people would not have formed that picture. Instead they might have developed a more natural view of the corresponding processes.

It may seem as though I want to trample all these theories into the ground simply for the sake of being radical. It is not that easy. I began to study nerves as a very young man, and it was very earthshaking for me when I noticed that this theory served materialism. It did this by transforming what is a direct influence of the will upon the metabolism into something merely physical, into an imagined physical strand of nerves carrying the will impulse from the central organ to the periphery of the human being to the muscles. People simply imposed material processes upon the human organism.

In an act of will, there is in truth a direct connection between the will impulse of the soul and some process in the metabolism. The nerve exists only to transmit the perception of this process. To the same extent, the nerve also exists to transmit the perception necessary when there is a relationship between the person’s feeling and a process expressed in circulation. That is always the case when we feel. Essentially, the basis is not some nerve process; it is a modification of our circulation. With any feeling, there is a process that does not exist in the metabolism, but in the rhythm of circulation. What happens in the blood, in the lymphatic system, or in the non-metabolic aspects of the exchange of oxygen (the exchange of oxygen is actually metabolic, and to that extent it is a part of the transfer of will)—to the extent that we are dealing with the rhythmic processes of breathing—belongs to feeling. All feeling is directly connected with the rhythmic processes. Again, the nerves exist only to directly perceive what occurs between the feeling in the soul and the rhythmic processes in the organism. Nerves are only organs of perception. In a sense, spiritual science allows us to first see what it really means when time and again we find in textbooks on physiology or psychology: “We can make the hypothetical assumption that human beings have sense and motor nerves.” However, anatomically they are differentiated at most by small differences in thickness; certainly not by anything else. I will return to the speculations made by Tabes and others. Today I wanted only to give some indication of what is shown by an objective observation of the human organism as consisting of three aspects: namely, that the nerve-sense organism is related to the imaginative, thinking life of the soul. We have the rhythmic organism, which relates to the feeling life of the soul, and finally, the metabolic organism, which, in its broadest sense, is related to the willing life in the soul.

To clarify this, we can look at some part of life, say, music. The musical part of life is the best evidence (but only one among many we will encounter) of the particular relationship of feeling to the rhythmic life of the organism. The imaginative, thinking life connected with the nerve-sense organism perceives the rhythmic life connected with feeling. When we hear something musical, when we give ourselves over to a picture presented in tones, we quite obviously perceive through our senses. Those physiologists, however, who can observe in more subtle ways, notice that our breathing inwardly participates in the musical picture; how much our breathing has to do with what we experience; and how that musical picture appears as something to be aesthetically judged, something placed in the realm of art.

We need to be clear about the complicated process continuously going on within us. Let us look at our own organism. The nervesense organism is centralized in the human brain in such a way that the brain is in a firm state only to a small extent. The whole brain swims in cerebrospinal fluid. We can clearly understand what occurs by noticing that if our brain did not swim in cerebrospinal fluid, it would rest upon the blood vessels at the base of our skull and continuously exert pressure upon them. Because our brain does swim in cerebrospinal fluid, it is subject to continuous upward pressure—we know this from Archimedes’ principle—so that of the 1300–1500-gram weight of the brain, only about 20 grams press upon the base of the skull. The brain is subject to a significant pressure from below, so that it presses only a little upon the base of the skull. This cerebrospinal fluid participates in the entirety of our human experience no less than the firm part of the brain. The cerebrospinal fluid continually moves up and down. The fluid moves up and down rhythmically from the brain through the spinal column. Then it radiates out into the abdominal cavity, where inhalation forces it back into the cerebral cavity, from whence it flows back out with exhaling. Our cerebrospinal fluid moves up and down in a continuous process that extends throughout the remainder of the organism; a continuous vibrating movement essentially fills the whole human being and is connected with breathing.

When we hear a series of tones, we encounter them as breathing human beings. The cerebrospinal fluid is continuously moving up and down. When we listen to music, the inner rhythm of the liquid moving up and down encounters what occurs within our hearing organs as a result of the tones. Thus there is a continuous clash of the inner vibrating music of our breathing with what happens in the ear when listening to music. Our experience of music exists in the balance between our hearing and our rhythmic breathing. Someone who tries to connect our nerve processes directly with what occurs in our musical perception, which is filled with feeling, is on the wrong path. The nerve processes exist in musical perception only to connect it with what takes place deeper in our I, so that we can actually perceive the music and transform it into imagination.

I have attempted to follow these questions in all possible directions. There was a time when people in Europe were more interested in such questions. As you probably know, there was quite an argument about the understanding of beauty in music between Richard Wagner and his students and the Viennese musicologist Hanslick.2 There you can find the question of musical perception discussed in all possible nuances. You will also find mention of some experiments we can do to more fully comprehend musical perception. It is particularly in the perception of music that we can find the direct relationship between our circulatory processes and human feeling; at the same time there is a direct relationship between the nervous system and imagination or thinking. However, we find no direct relationship between the nerves and feeling or between the nerves and willing.

I am convinced that the incorrect hypotheses about sense and motor nerves that modern science has incorporated as a servant of materialism (and incorporated more strongly than we may think) have already taken over human thinking. In the next, or perhaps the following generation, it will become the general attitude. I am convinced that this materialistic theory about the nerves has already become the general mentality and that what we find today as theory in physiology or psychology has entered so deeply into our thinking that this attitude actually separates people. If you have the feeling—and many people do—that when we meet another human being, we make only sense impressions upon that person, and the other person upon us; that the other person is a closed entity with its own feeling life, separate from us; and that this person’s feelings can be transmitted only through her own nerves, we create a wall of separation between people. This wall leads to the most peculiar views. Today we hear people say that when they look at another human being, they see only that the other being has a nose in the middle of her face, or that she has two eyes in the same location where I know that I have two eyes. The other human being has a face formed just like my own. Thus, when I see all this, I draw an unconscious conclusion that there is an I just like my own in that organism. There are people today who accept that theory exactly and who understand the relationship between two human beings in such an external way that they think they must come to an unconscious conclusion based upon the form of the human being in order to determine that another human being has an I similar to their own. The perspective that connects the life of the nerves with our ability to creatively picture our thoughts, that connects our living circulation and respiration with feeling, and connects our entire metabolism with willing, will bring people together again once it becomes the general attitude, once it finally becomes actual experience. For now, I can only use a picture to describe this reunion.

We really would be separated in spirit and soul from one another if, when we met, all our feeling and willing developed within our nerves, enclosing us completely within our skin. Modern people have that feeling, and the increasingly antisocial condition prevalent in modern Europe is a true representative of that feeling.

There is, however, another possibility. We are all sitting together in this hall. We all breathe the same air; we cannot say that each of us is going around enclosed in our own box of air. We breathe the air together. If we limit our soul life to the nervous system, then we are isolated. Someone who, for example, connects breathing with the soul makes the soul into something we have in common. Just as we have the air in common, we also have our soul life in common when we reconnect it with the rhythmic organism. Even though in today’s society some people can purchase better things and others must purchase poorer things, a rich person still cannot get his food from the moon, from a different heavenly body, just so he won’t have to eat the same things as a poor person does.

Thus we have a commonality in our metabolism, and our willing takes on a commonality when we recognize the original and direct relationship of our will to our metabolism. You can see the endless effects of recognizing the connection of our feeling life with the rhythm within human nature when you also recognize that the rhythms of our being are connected to the external world. You can see the same thing in regard to our will when we recognize its connection with our metabolism. From this, you can see how well-equipped spiritual science is to understand matter and its processes. Materialism, on the other hand, is destined to not understand anything about matter.

Here you have a preliminary view of the three aspects of human life: the nerve-sense life, life in the rhythmic organism, and life in the metabolism. I will explain this in more detail later. In connection with the life of the soul, we have discussed only physical life. We can consider the simple division of our soul life into what people normally consider as its three aspects: thinking, feeling, and willing. However, we will not understand it well if we make that division, however justified, our primary viewpoint. As you probably know, many psychologists separate the life of the human soul into imagining, thinking, feeling, and willing. For an objective observer of human nature, however, it should become clear that this perspective cannot offer a good picture of soul life. Now there is a phenomenon, or rather a whole complex of phenomena, that is more characteristic of our soul life than these abstractions. To understand the life of our soul in a living way, it is better not to begin with thinking, feeling, and willing. If we instead concentrate on something that permeates our entire soul life, we can recognize it as a primary characteristic of our living soul. We can see that the soul lives alternately in sympathies and antipathies, in loves and hates. Normally we do not notice how the soul swings between loves and hates, between sympathies and antipathies. We do not notice it because we do not properly evaluate certain processes of the soul.

People make judgments, and these judgments are either positive or negative. I could say that a tree is green, and in doing so I connect the two ideas of “tree” and “green” in a positive way. I could say you did not visit me yesterday, and in doing that I connect two ideas or complexes of ideas in a negative way. Something of sympathy or antipathy forms the basis of such judgments in our souls. Positive judgments are always experienced with sympathy and negative judgments with antipathy. The accuracy of the judgment is not based upon sympathy or antipathy; rather the accuracy is experienced through sympathy or antipathy. We could also say that a third situation lies clearly between sympathy and antipathy. That is the situation when someone has to choose between the two. In our souls, we do not merely have sympathy and antipathy; we also clearly have alternation between the two, which is also a positive state. Though this is not as clearly differentiated as in the physical body, since we are dealing with a process and not with clearly defined organs, we can divide our soul life into sympathies, antipathies, and something in between.

We can see these different aspects much more clearly when we look at what is spiritual in the human being. Modern psychology just tosses this in with the soul. We will see that we can gain a genuinely flexible view of human nature only when we can keep these three aspects separate. The physical consists of the nerve-sense processes, the circulatory processes, and the metabolism. The soul aspect of the human being consists of experiencing antipathy, sympathy, and the alternation between those two.

The spiritual aspect of the human being also exists in three parts. When we want to understand the human being spiritually, we must in the first place take note of waking experience, which we all know as a state of spiritual life and which is a part of us from waking until sleeping. Another spiritual state, sleeping life, exists from the time we fall asleep until we awaken. Finally, we have a third state between those two, which we encounter at the moment of awakening, namely, dream life. Waking, dreaming, and sleeping are the three aspects of spiritual life. But we should not associate trivial ideas about these things with a genuine understanding of spiritual life. Instead we need to acquire a sense of how that sleeping spirit actually exists. We can speak of sleep as a state when a human being becomes motionless, when he or she no longer perceives sense impressions, and so forth. But we can also try to see things from a different perspective.

We can acquire some understanding of the meaning of sleep for our life by approaching it in the following way. When we look back upon our life, we usually believe that we are looking at an uninterrupted stream. We collect all our memories into a continuum. However, that is an error. You remember what happened to you today since you awoke, but before that there was a time when your consciousness was asleep. The period of sleep thus interrupts the stream of your memory. Daily life comes again and is then again followed by a period of sleep. What we carry in our consciousness as a uniform stream toward the past is actually always interrupted by periods of sleep. You can see this has a certain significance, even for consciousness. We could say that we are trained to perceive periods when something is missing in just the same way as periods that are filled, but we do not always make that clear to ourselves. If I were to draw a white area here on the board, so that I leave out black circles, you would look at the white area, but actually pay less attention to the white area than to where nothing is, that is, to the black circles. If we have a bottle of seltzer water, in a sense we do not see the water; what we mostly see is the little bubbles of carbon dioxide. We see what is not in the water. In the same way, when we look backward, we do not actually see our experiences. We overlook them much as we overlook the white area here on the board. We directly perceive something else, something that we must understand much more exactly. We realize this when we really try to understand the basis of our actual sense of I. I will discuss the reasons in later lectures, but slowly we come to realize that our perception of these periods of sleep gives us our sense of I. Thus we destroy our feeling of I when we do not properly sleep. The interruptions of sleep must be strewn in among our memories for us to achieve a proper sense of I. If you study those disturbances that can arise in your sense of I through an improper sleep life, you will be able to grasp the idea that an I-sense is based upon these holes in consciousness. Please note that I am not referring to the concept of I, but to the sensing of I.

It is not only what we could call the content of waking consciousness that lives in human beings. Sleep also directly affects what exists in the human being, perhaps to an even greater extent. Those who can genuinely observe human subjectivity will find that when they are accurately aware of the waking state, it is present only in thinking. It would be impossible for us to have the same level of wakefulness in our feeling. Feeling is not directly present in our consciousness in the same way as thinking is. In fact, feeling has the same relationship to our consciousness as dreaming. As strange as it may sound, those who can gain clarity about the differences between thinking and feeling as pure phenomena of consciousness will conclude that the same kind of experience occurs when we perceive our dreams as occurs in our feeling.

We also find the same kind of experience in willing that we find in the unconscious state of sleeping, in dreamless sleep. You need only consider for a moment that, when you raise your hand or your arm, you perceive the result of willing. The impulse of willing, that is, the direct spiritual impulse, is connected with the metabolism. You do not perceive the inner process that occurs between the will impulse and the metabolism any more than you consciously experience what occurs within you during dreamless sleep. The conscious experience of the actual processes of will and of dreamless sleep are equivalent. The processes of your feeling life and of dreaming are also the same. True wakefulness exists only in thinking. We do not sleep only between falling asleep and awakening; we also partially sleep when we are awake. We are awake only in regard to thinking, we dream in regard to feeling, and we sleep in regard to willing.

Now please do not assume that willing should remain unconscious. It is notalways unconscious. If I had here a white area with four black circles within it, then where there is nothing, where I left something out, I would perceive something just as I consciously perceive the left-out content, the content of the will that I sleep through in my normal waking life.

If we look at the human being in a more flexible way, we will see the inner activity of clearly separated aspects of three spiritual states. In thinking, the waking spirit is active; in feeling, it is the dreaming spirit, and in willing, the sleeping spirit. We need to be able to differentiate wakefulness and sleeping as more than alternating states in day and night. We need to be able to observe how these states interact in a human being who is awake.

This has an extremely practical implication for education. We need to ask how we can learn to understand the interactions between willing and thinking and how can we learn to best teach a child at the age of six or seven, when we especially need to take this interaction between thinking and willing into account. The answer is to learn to observe the interaction between willing and thinking in other phenomena, the ways it occurs in a concrete form, in a way we can see, namely, in waking and sleeping. If I study waking and sleeping, I will have something I can compare with thinking and willing.

We needed to discuss this at the beginning of this course because it is through spiritual science that our psychology first acquires some genuine content. If you pick up any modern psychology textbook, you will find definitions of willing and definitions of thinking, but they more or less remain mere definitions of words. We need to understand such things in a real way, but we can do that only if we can relate them to things that exist in the world, for example, to study them through the relationship of wakefulness to sleeping. That is something we will do, and in so doing we can also throw some light upon the relationship of thinking to willing. Thus we can penetrate the real world, and that is just what spiritual science tries to do.

Spiritual science does not consider spiritual life out of some purely subjective need, simply because it is nice for people who have nothing else to do, and who, rather than making small talk about some other subject, prefer to chat about the fact that human beings consist of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and an I. Many people have such a superficial attitude. What is important in spiritual science is not to offer material for small talk. What spiritual science can contribute to our understanding of the spirit is, in fact, necessary to illuminate human life so that we can work with it as a practical reality, something we have forgotten how to do. The chaos we now find in Europe, the absurd events of the last five or six years, is the result of that forgetfulness. There is a direct connection between our collective denial of the real content of the world and the distress within our civilization. Those who believe we can keep our old attitudes make a serious error. We are working with the adults of the future, and we must think first and foremost about the future of humanity. It is particularly here, in the area of education, that we should first think about those forces that enable us to give something to the future generation that is more than what we received, and which has brought about the terrible conditions of our society. In this way we open our eyes beyond the somewhat confined realm of education, as wholesome as it may be, onto the entire development of humanity.

I have tried to give you some insight into the nature of the human being and thereby into the nature of the developing child. For pedagogical artists, such insights are quite practical in that they enable us to guide this human material into life in a fruitful way. From what I have already indicated, you can see that the question I posed in the first lecture can be at least partially answered. I believe that question is particularly important for today’s teachers. The question is: How is it that we have, on the one hand, such a wonderful science of teaching, with all its well-thought-out principles and, on the other hand, so much justifiable public criticism of education and current teaching methods?

The reason is that although pedagogical geniuses developed our principles through a kind of instinctive intuition, although we have many theories about how to teach, this recently assembled collection of principles that has permeated our entire worldview is not related to a genuine understanding of human nature. We cannot develop an art of education from the sciences as they are practiced today. I certainly do not want to trivialize the great progress and triumphs of modern science. Nevertheless we must understand the developing human being from a very different perspective. The sciences have remained theoretical and have created a contradiction between external physical existence and the spirit-soul. We can therefore say that they offer no support or help to our pedagogical principles. Putting those pedagogical principles into practice depends upon teachers who are highly skilled at practicing them instinctively.

Pestalozzi, Diesterweg, and others obviously had a marvelous pedagogical instinct and developed an instinctive understanding of the human being. However, we live in a time when we can go no further on instinct alone. In older patriarchal societies, we could survive more or less instinctually. However, we live in a time when we must become more and more conscious of everything, and we therefore need to consciously understand human beings. We can do that only by bringing the practical perspective needed for teaching into a closer connection, a systematized understanding of human nature. What science tells us about human physiology or biology offers us no basis for the development of pedagogical principles. What modern science tells us gives us no direct help in seeing how we can best use a child’s talents when they are unequally developed.

For that to be possible, our understanding of the human being must be different than that of modern science. I have already mentioned some basic goals for such an understanding. We still need to learn what can create a bridge to a genuine art of education. I would like to stress that in this age of materialism, we are less and less in a position of genuinely understanding the physical human organism. On the other hand, we have hardly anything other than language as a means of approaching other human beings. Although illustrative materials can be very useful in certain areas of education, the method of teaching through illustration should not be the only one used. We need to ask whether language, when used as the primary means of communication with growing children, can really bring us closer to the nature of the child. We cannot answer that question without penetrating a little deeper into the nature of the human being.

Everyone who attempts to form a picture of the human being from normal pedagogical texts or texts on psychology, who attempts to fill education with principles from natural science or psychology, ends up with the idea that a human being is just a collection of various forms. Such people would have the perspective that here we have a human organism, and within the skull there is a firm brain (or at least a semi-solid one). They would also think here are the other organs, the liver, the lungs, and so forth. If we look at things superficially or clinically, the drawings we see would convey the idea that these firmly delineated organs are the only things that exist within a human being. But remember that people consist of at least 80 percent fluid, that they are actually a column of fluid; therefore they consist of only a very small amount of something solid. Is it really possible to assume that a human being really consists only of sharply delineated individual organs? The human being is a column of fluid and is moreover filled with gases. Yet these texts describe the nervous system as more or less solid strands, or possibly as a somewhat softer solid. They have no awareness that these are in fact imbedded in liquid or even in gas, a gas that exists in the human organism in the form of vibrations or rhythmic movements.

Aside from the gaseous aspect, the human being is actually a liquid column and the brain is imbedded in cerebrospinal fluid; indeed much of the life of our organs is connected with the up-and- down motion of the cerebrospinal fluid as we inhale and exhale. If we become aware of these things, we will not ascribe parallel organic processes to spiritual and soul facts; we will not assume they are firmly delineated. Instead we will form a picture that describes how while I am thinking, while I am feeling or willing, the moving fluid portions of my organism take on certain liquid structures which again dissolve.

We need to ask ourselves why, for example, we should connect the process of thinking with some vibrations or similar processes in the nerves. Of course they are not. Why shouldn’t they be connected with the vibrations within the liquid portion of the human being? This is a question natural science, under the influence of our materialistic period, have not even asked. We can be satisfied with what science discovers when we accept its common goals. Modern science has brought about numerous practical results in the area of solid or liquid technology where the liquid exists in an external form in space. It has also been very successful in working with gases, such as in steam technology, where the steam exists in space and can be worked with there.

When we are working with the results of conventional science in a technology, working with inorganic substances, we need to take into account how things operate. For that reason, conventional science in this era of materialism has had such great success, since it has had to closely follow advances in technology. Consider this example: if someone constructed a railway bridge using the principles of mechanics incorrectly, we would very soon see how such a bridge would collapse when one or two locomotives went over it. Such a catastrophe would occur because the proven results of conventional scientific testing were not applied; this is how incorrect principles are corrected in practice.

The further we go into areas where inorganic technology can no longer have a correcting effect, the less we can base our practice upon theory. We need think only of how slowly medicine has advanced in comparison with modern technology. You can very quickly see the significance of incorrect principles in the process of building a railway bridge or similar things. However, when a physician treats someone, it is not at all common to try to determine whether the physician has done everything necessary to restore the person’s health, simply because that is impossible to determine. Here the situation is very different; it is simply not possible to correct theories through practice. You will forgive me if I make a comment here, but I think it is important for teachers, since everything in life is important for teachers. In the areas of jurisprudence or economics, for instance, if we followed the way people’s principles were applied, we would very quickly see how lame the concept of control through practice is. What is officially determined in legal matters is then made correct through laws. This is true in all countries. Whether we can justify such things from the perspective of a genuine understanding of human beings is a question that is just as neglected today as it was when Goethe gave Faust the question of which rights we are born with.

Furthermore people have not the slightest interest in finding out how our use of externally superb pedagogical principles relates to what then transpires with the developing generation. That, however, is just what I want to draw your attention to. We hear a great deal about the terrible social things now occurring in the eastern part of Europe and in Russia. The things being done in Eastern Europe under the influence of Lenin’s1 and Trotsky’s2 theories are horrible. However, people today give no thought to what is actually happening. People today have no idea of what the results of those things being done today will be in twenty or twenty-five years, what kind of barbarism will fall upon Europe. It is, however, the task of teachers to observe what will happen to human development.

Now here is something unusual. You see, in Zurich, Avenarius, an honest and upright citizen, once taught philosophy. Somewhat later, Vogt, a student of Ernst Mach, taught together with the philosopher Adler, who was the same Adler who shot the Austrian Minister Stürgkh. We can certainly not say of Adler that he was as honest a man as Avenarius, but Avenarius was an honest, upright man. Nevertheless he taught a philosophy that was possible to teach only because of the materialism at that time. If you now look into the “state philosophy” of Bolshevism, you will find it is none other than that taught by Avenarius. After two generations, what was once taught in Zurich as an appropriate philosophy has become the theory the Bolsheviks put into direct practice.

People pay no attention to the relationships of different periods because they are not at all clear about what happens when the views of one generation are inherited by the following generation. Of course, I do not mean just physical inheritance. The honest and upright Avenarius taught a philosophy which, after a relatively short time, led to the barbarization of Europe. It is important not to simply accept abstract judgments when we want to see what value a viewpoint has for human development. Instead we must look into the way that viewpoint takes effect. An important responsibility of all education is to look at what will become of what we do in the classroom in twenty or thirty years. All education has the task of placing itself consciously in human development, but we cannot do that without a thorough understanding of the human being, an understanding that spiritual science can give to a renewed natural science. A natural science renewed through spiritual science will not be some fantasy or figment of the imagination. Rather it will provide a good understanding of the material human organism as the physical vehicle for the soul and spirit.

Today I want to mention an important aspect of our soul life that you all know well and that will prove particularly important as we move on to the actual pedagogical subject. The phenomenon I refer to is how what we think about as children eventually becomes memory. You all know that to maintain a healthy soul, we must properly transform the ideas we develop from our sense impressions, that result from our judging and so forth—we can discuss the details of this later—and that we must take the results of this thinking into our memory. When we then describe something, we recall from within our souls what we previously experienced in the external world or in our interactions with other human beings. We bring it back into our consciousness. But what actually takes place here?

The general view has moved more and more toward looking at this process in a one-sided, abstract way, as simply a process within the soul. People ask, what becomes of our thoughts once we take them into our soul? What have they become, once they are taken in and returned to us as memory? How does this process take place? We cannot study this process if we have not first looked into the relationship between the spirit-soul and the physical body in some detail. There are some so-called idealists who might say spiritual science is basically materialistic, since it is always referring to physical organs. To believe that, however, would be an enormous error. Spiritual science recognizes the great effects of the soul on the formation of the organs. It sees the soul as having a greater influence than simply working on abstractions, and in fact sees the soul as actually having the power to form the organs. Spiritual science primarily seeks to understand the soul during childhood, when the spirit-soul continues to work upon the formation of the organs after birth.

In my opinion, Goethe’s color theory offers the first beginning of a really reasonable consideration of the soul and physical life, something that has been previously unrecognized. Yet today all one needs to do to be immediately branded a dilettante is speak about it in a positive way. I believe, however, that physicists will soon see it much differently from the way it is seen at present. I do not intend to go on praising Goethe’s theory of color today, I only want to direct your attention to the wonderful chapter where Goethe begins to speak about physiological colors, and to another chapter toward the end, where he speaks about the sensory and moral effects of colors. Physicists have attempted to refute the portion in between. The beginning and the end have been of more interest to people with an artistic nature, and they can more easily understand them. However, for us to develop a scientific foundation of education, we need to accept some of the help offered by Goethe’s considerations of the world of colors. In the beginning, Goethe draws our attention to the lively interaction between the eye and the external world. That lively interaction exists not only while we are exposing the eye to some color process in the external world, but also afterward. Goethe specifically discusses the after-images that result from the direct impression. You all know these after-images, which occur in the eye itself. You need only expose your eye to, say, a green surface and then turn away from this sharply delineated green area. You will see the same area as an after-effect that is subjectively red. The organ is still influenced for a time by what it experienced in the external world. This is the basic process as it occurs in the sense organs. Something happens in the sense organs while they are exposed to a process or to things in the external world, and something else happens afterward, which then slowly subsides. From an external perspective, we also can see a certain similarity between what briefly takes place in a sense organ and what happens in the human organism in regard to memory. Just as the green surface continues for a short time as red, a thought with its associated images resulting from a direct experience exists in our organism, only the time periods are quite different.

There is another difference that brings us closer to an understanding of the difference in duration. If we expose the eye to a color impression and then see an after-image, it is something partial, an individual organ on the periphery of the human organism that brings forth that after-effect. When a memory arises from within the human being, it reproduces something that existed years before. This is something we can feel, that is apparent, that participates in this reproducing—thus it is the entire human being that participates in this after-effect.

What actually occurs within the human being? We can understand this only when we have a detailed understanding of certain interactions within the human being. Here I want to draw your attention to a fact that our modern scientific way of thinking has put into an incorrect light, namely, the function of our heart in connection with the whole human organism. You now find the heart described everywhere as a kind of pump that pumps blood throughout the organism. Actually, the blood circulation is forced upon the heart. The fact that embryology contradicts the standard view and more detailed observations of the heartbeat and such things also offer contradictions is something modern people still do not want to hear. Only a few people have noticed this: for example, the physician Schmid,10 who wrote a treatise about it in the 1880s, and the criminologist Moritz Benedikt. That was not enough, though. There are only a few who have realized that the movements in the heart are a result of the movement of the blood, and that the blood circulation itself is what is fundamentally alive. Thus the heart does not pump; rather its movement is due to the influence of the living movement of the blood. The heart is nothing more than the organ that creates a balance between the two blood circulatory systems, that is, between that of the upper human being, the head, and that of the limbs. These two movements of blood form a pool in the heart. The blood, however, is not something dead; it is not simply pumped like a stream of water. The blood itself has an inner life and is subject to its own movement. It passes that movement on to the heart, which simply reflects the movement of the blood in its own movements. Just as we can say that there is a parallel between the more or less solid organs and processes in the soul, there is also a parallel, which I mentioned yesterday, between the movements of the blood and soul processes.

What is the task of an organ such as the heart in relationship to the soul? I would like to ask that question in the following way. If, under the influence of a genuinely correct science, we say that the blood itself has life and the movements of the heart, the entire activity of that organ results from the blood circulation and are only inserted into the living blood circulation, then what is the task of the heart?

Unprejudiced observation shows that if we expose the eye to the external world, the eye’s experiences create an afterimage that soon disappears. When we develop the world of feeling, that world has a close connection with the circulation of the blood. It has a connection with other things also, but here I am speaking only of the blood circulation. Recall for only a moment that when we feel shame, we turn red. Everyone knows this is because the blood comes to the surface. If we are fearful, we turn pale as the blood moves toward the inside. The physiologist Lange12 from Copenhagen has done a number of good studies about the connection between blood circulation, and other organic processes, and processes in the soul. Just as in the extreme cases where the soul’s experience of fear or shame has an effect upon blood circulation, the normal life of the soul also continuously affects our circulation. Our feeling life is always active, but it influences normal circulation toward one direction or another only when our feelings move toward one extreme or another. Just as we are continuously breathing, we also continuously feel. Just as our blood circulation is uninterrupted, our feeling is uninterrupted. If we were to follow these processes further, you would see that we even feel during sleep.

What circulates in the blood is the external physical expression of our feeling. Furthermore, our feeling is connected with our thinking. What we imprint upon the circulation also vibrates within the heart. Goethe used the word “eye” to mean an inner, living organ, and the heart is just as much a living organ. It does not just move the blood. It has an enormous significance within the entire organism. Whereas the eye is affected for only a short time by light outside it, the heart continuously responds to feeling and thinking as it relates to feeling with small vibrations that are then carried into the blood. After a time, the heart’s vibrations include what lives specifically in feeling and in feeling-related thinking. The heart is a part of the body that influences us when we remember experiences. All human organs that partake of the currents of organic human fluids, that are included in the liquid currents—whether it is the kidneys imbedded in this flow or the liver connected to it in the digestive stream—all these organs vibrate in unison, vibrate with our feeling and willing in circulation and metabolism. Just as an after-image arises in the eye, in the same way a memory arises within the entire human being, though in differentiated and specific ways; it is a memory of experiences in the outer world. The whole human being is an organ that vibrates, and the organs people normally say are placed next to each other are there in reality so that human beings can process and retain spiritual-soul experience in a certain way. We will see that this only appears to be a materialistic perspective. We will see that it is precisely this that allows us to properly recognize the human being as a spiritual being. Today, however, now that I have mentioned this, you can see how we can grasp the entire human being through such a perspective. We can comprehend the human being not only in the way materialistic science does, by placing the individual organs alongside each other, even assuming that they interact mechanically. The spiritual-scientific perspective shows that the entire human being is unified as body, soul, and spirit, but our thinking separates these three perspectives. In reality, body, soul, and spirit are always interconnected within the human being.

You need learn only a little embryology to learn that the heart slowly develops in the organs of the blood circulatory system, in the system of vessels. You can see that the heart is not there first, with the circulatory system developing from it, but that the circulatory system develops slowly, with the heart as the final result. You can see directly from embryology that the situation is just as I have described it. Therefore, when we consider things from a spiritual-scientific perspective, we need to think of the human liver not simply as a liver, the human spleen not simply as a spleen in the way these things appear when we dissect a corpse in the laboratory. Instead we need to try to investigate the significance of these organs in the spirit-soul life. We do not see the eye, or any of the other organs, as merely some physical tool. Although it is commonly believed that the liver is only an organ in the digestive system, it has a great deal to do with human spiritual life.

We can often learn much from language itself. Ancient peoples, who still had a kind of primal, instinctive knowledge, did not always consider things as abstractly as we do. Take, for instance, hypochondria, which in Greek means “below the cartilage of the breast bone,” an anomaly of the soul that has its origins in the human abdomen, which is indicated in the word itself. In the English language, which in comparison to the languages of Central Europe is still at an early stage of development, the word spleen, as an emotional state, has something to do with the soul. However, spleen also refers to an organ, and for good reason, since the spleen of the soul has much to do with the spleen organ. Such things are nearly all lost. Materialism has nearly lost an understanding of the physical organs, particularly those of the human being. How can we work with a human being if we are not in a position to understand what the human being is physically? We must first understand that the human being is built up piece by piece out of the spirit-soul, so that there is nothing physical that is not a revelation of the spirit-soul.

We need to be able to see the physical properly if we are to have a solid foundation for education. When I say such things, some people may think I want to throw out everything in the world that has been learned through hard scientific work. I certainly do not do that light-heartedly, you can be certain of that. In general, it is much more comfortable to play the same tune as everyone else than to counter prevalent views from genuine understanding and from the realization that a true cultural renewal in our decadent times requires such an understanding in the area of spiritual life. Personally, I would much prefer to present all the scientifically recognized perspectives rather than argue against many of them, particularly where the concern is an understanding of the human being.

We also need to resist the standard scientific perspective when we consider human interactions in practice. Instruction and education are essentially a special case of human interaction. We need to differentiate human life before the change of teeth and then again until puberty. I have attempted to characterize how different the forces are during the first period of human life in comparison to the second. It requires a very different kind of soul experience for these two periods, for the simple reason that the forces connected with imaginative thinking are directed toward an inner hardening of the human body during the first period of life. This activity culminates in the change of teeth at about the age of seven. The most important means of communicating with human beings during that time lies in the principle of imitating the surroundings.

Everything a person does during the years before the change of teeth is done out of imitation. What occurs in the surroundings of a child is enormously important, since the child only imitates. Imitation is one of the strengths of children at that age, and that imitation is directly connected with the same forces that produce the second set of teeth. They are the same forces, and, as we have seen, they are the forces of thinking, of inwardly picturing and understanding the world around us. Thus the forces associated with representational thinking are also the forces connected with physical development. These are the forces active in the child’s motive for imitation. Imagine what it means when you grasp that not only intellectually, but when with the entirety of your being, with your soul, when you have a universal, human understanding of it. It means that when I do something in front of a child who is not yet seven years old, not only do I do it for myself, but my doing also enters the child’s doing. My deeds do not exist for me alone.

I am not alone with my deeds, with my willing, with my feeling. I am not alone with my thinking; there are intangibles that also have an effect. There is a difference in whether I live alongside a child with a good attitude and allow the child to grow up alongside of me, or whether I do it with a poor attitude. These intangibles have an effect but they are not yet recognized. If we do not honor the connection between the spirit-soul and individual physical human organs, then we do not honor what exists between human beings as a real force, the spirit-soul itself.

When we look at the period between the change of teeth and puberty, the will begins to predominate in the way that I characterized it. With boys, we experience this eruption of the will in the change in the voice. In girls, this is expressed in a different way that we will discuss later. What is active in children at elementary school age shows us that it is connected with the will. Something wants to enter the physical body from the will; something wants to become firmer. There is more than simply a desire to imitate, although, as we will see, that remains important in the curriculum until the age of nine. Something more than simple imitation wants to develop, and that is the desire to honor authority. If I do not live as an authority alongside a seven- to fourteen- or fifteen-year-old child whom I am to bring up and educate, for the child that would be the same as if I cut off a finger or an arm so that he or she could no longer physically behave in the way natural to children. I would take something from the child that wants to develop, namely, the experience of having older people nearby, people who, as genuine authorities, are to educate and raise the child.

We now come to something we will have to make understandable to growing children in a way other than through example or through language. We now come to the role of love in education and upbringing. One of the intangibles we are justified in exercising in educating a growing child is authority over that child, and that our authority be accepted as a naturally effective force. We will not have that authority if we are not permeated in a certain way by what we have to present to the child. If, as teachers, we carry our knowledge within us just as some dry, memorized facts, if we teach only out of a sense of duty, then we have a different effect upon children than when we have an inner warmth, an enthusiasm for what we are to teach them. If we are active in every fiber of our soul, and identify ourselves with that knowledge, then the love for what we carry in our souls is just as much a means of communication as demonstrations and language. An education made fruitful through spiritual science enables us to understand the importance of this kind of intangibility.

Dr. Steiner(responding to some objection):Today I would like to say only a little about this. It is tremendously tempting to assume, for example, that the drawings made by children are similar to those made by primitive peoples. However, this is based upon the unfounded assumption that the peoples who create such drawings today are the original peoples. Of course, we see that modern children’s drawings are similar to those made by primitive peoples, but these people are not primitive; they are decadent. Anthropology errs in saying that those contemporary peoples who live primitively in the wilds are to a certain extent the same as those from which we all descended. We cannot base education upon such errors in science, for if we were to do that, we would overvalue the childlike peculiarities of today’s primitive people. Such an overvaluation of those characteristics has been quite thorough in modern times. We can certainly acknowledge the facts of the matter, but the attributed significance of such facts is based upon a misunderstanding of the genuine relationship between the development of individual human beings and that of humanity as a whole. It is also not tremendously important that we find children’s rhymes that go back far into the time that I have referred to here as the Fifth Period. Such children’s rhymes do not go back any further. Were we to go back further through spiritual science than is possible through anthropology, we would discover that what we find in children’s rhymes today did not exist during earlier periods of human development.

Anthropology, which follows human development from the present back to its beginnings and finds a resonance of original human beings in contemporary people, must undertake a new path toward a spiritual-scientific consideration of the development of humanity. Along that path we must, of course, develop a feeling for what remains original, instinctive human culture. I would remind you of the Vedantic literature and of the extremely significant Taoist sayings of Lao Tsu. A person who presents a spiritual-scientific perspective of human development will certainly take everything historical into account before arriving at what I have mentioned here.

It is much easier to go with the flow of general opinion than to fight. Today there is a dangerous pedagogical idea that draws a parallel between what children do and what contemporary primitive peoples, or those of earlier times, have done. What is important is that we find genuine sources of spiritual life. and we must actually seek them first in children.

Then there is something else. Remember that I have said we should develop everything out of the child. We hear that today in all its variations and find that people believe they are doing it. But now try to discover what it means not to perceive the nature of a child as some unknown mystery that develops as it should, but rather as something needing to prepare itself through self-education, which is possible only through spiritual science. Try to get an idea through spiritual science for what genuinely lives in children.

I certainly have nothing against the idea that we should not present children with anything from the outside but instead find everything in the child. But first we must learn to see the child. In order to do that, the human being must first become transparent, and what I have presented enables us to truly see human nature from various and differing sides. Through much of what arises from a normal materialistic perspective, many different sides of human nature are obscured. Much of what is now called the spirit or soul is simply an abstraction, an intellectual idea. Of course, much of what is needed to prove what I have just said will be presented only in the later lectures. Nevertheless I am certainly not against people saying that we need to value and develop those things that exist within the child, nor am I against people saying that we should not force into the child what exists within ourselves. On the contrary I consider both of these ideas perfectly obvious. What is important to me is to show how to comprehensively consider both of those ideas.

As you have probably noticed, our previous discussions have differed not only in their content but also in their entire manner of consideration from what we normally find in anthropology or similar areas. Those unwilling to develop the feeling I spoke of at the end of the last lecture will not immediately recognize how such an understanding of the human being can arise in any way other than that which is currently acceptable. It can, however, arise when we comprehend the entire developing human being, that is, the body, the soul, and the spirit, in terms of lively movement. By comprehending the living human being in movement, by placing ourselves in human nature, we can create within ourselves an understanding that is not dead but alive. This understanding is most appropriate if we are to avoid clinging to external materialistic perspectives or falling prey to illusions and fantasy. What I have presented here can be very fruitful, but only when we use it directly, because its primary characteristics first become apparent through direct use.

I would like to mention a few things about our attempts to make this thinking fruitful in the Stuttgart Waldorf School. That school was created because Emil Molt, the director of a factory in Stuttgart, wanted a school based purely upon spiritual-scientific principles for the children of the factory’s workers. The school has long since grown beyond its initial boundaries, and it is the first attempt at forming a school whose curriculum and learning goals have been based upon a spiritual-scientific understanding of the human being. Of course we need to recognize that we are still in the first year of the Waldorf School, and that we have students from all possible classes of other schools. For that reason certain compromises are necessary in the beginning.

In the curriculum, our concern is not simply to come to terms pedagogically with a single child or even with a small class where we could work with individual children(an idea that is commonly held). We want each teacher to be so permeated with understanding that even when standing before a large class, he can represent this type of education. Each teacher should be permeated by a living comprehension of the human being so that he understands that the heart does not simply pump the blood through the organism, but that the human being is living, and the movements of fluids and the heart result from that aliveness. When a teacher has absorbed this way of thinking, particular forces within him become active in regard to the development of children. This activity can result in significant insights, even in regard to a child who is part of a large class and with whom we have worked for only a few months. If you have trained your spirit in this way, and thus created a strong contact with it, your spirit can look somewhat clairvoyantly at the individual child. It is not so important that we know that the heart is not the cause of the circulation of the blood. What is important is that we develop within ourselves the possibility of presenting such things in a way contrary to our modern materialistic thinking. Those who develop this possibility within themselves, who configure their spirit in this way, make themselves alive in a different way in regard to developing children, even in large numbers. They gain the capacity of reading the curriculum from the nature of the developing child.

In Stuttgart I had to compromise, since under present social conditions it is not possible to develop a school purely on the basis of this kind of education. I said we needed to take three stages into account. We need complete freedom in how we present the curriculum during the first, second, and third grades, but we want the children at the end of third grade to have learned the same things as children in other schools. The same is true until age twelve, that is, the sixth grade, and again when they leave the school. All we could achieve was to present the curriculum in these stages: in the first three school years, the second three, and in the third stage, the last two school years. These are simply things that we must accept as compromises under today’s social conditions. Nevertheless, within these three periods, we have been able to achieve some things. We can, for example, base our work upon the sound principle that we do not begin with the intellectual, as modern instruction generally does. We do not need to begin with this one characteristic of developing human beings—the intellect—instead we can begin with the whole human being.

It is important to first acquire a clear concept of what the whole human being actually is. Today, because people cannot observe how thinking relates to human nature, they believe that we learn to think by logically teaching children how to think. I have to admit that during the first six decades of my life I used to consider people in that way. Those who can observe developing human beings, who can compare the developing human being with what a person becomes, can see certain connections spread out over the various periods of life, which go unobserved if a certain kind of insight has not been developed.

I would like to mention something I often refer to because it shows certain connections in human nature in a textbooklike way. In observing children, you can see how, when those around them relate to them properly, they develop a feeling of respect toward people. If you follow what becomes of these children later in life, you will find that this feeling of respect has so transformed these individuals that, through their words or sometimes simply through the way they look at you, their presence is a deed of goodness. This is simply because when you have learned to respect (or, I could say, to pray) later in life you will have the power to bless. No one can bless later in life who has not learned to respect or to pray in childhood.

We need to look at such things. We need to gain such vision through a living science that can become feeling and will, and not through some dead science such as we have today. Thus we can see how to avoid teaching children mere conventional knowledge, instead taking into account the entire human being.

We have, of course, the task of teaching the children to write, but today writing is a kind of artificial product of culture. It has arisen in the course of human development out of a pictorial writing and has become what we now have today, a purely conventional and abstract writing. If we try to gain a feeling for older writing, for instance Egyptian hieroglyphics, and to understand their basic character, we will see how people originally tended to reproduce the external world in their writing through drawing.

Writing and drawing things in the world are, in a way, also the basis of human speech development. Many theories have been put forward about the development of speech. There is, for instance—I am not making this up, they are called this in the technical papers—there is the so-called Ding-Dong Theory that assumes speech is a kind of model of some inner tonal qualities of our surroundings. Then there is the Bow-Wow Theory,3 which assumes that speech is based upon sounds produced by other beings in our surroundings. None of these theories, however, begin with a sufficiently comprehensive understanding of human nature. A sufficient comprehension of human nature, particularly one based upon a trained observation of children’s speech, shows that human feeling is engaged in a much different way when learning the vowels. They are learned through feeling. If we train our own powers of observation, we will see how all vowels arise from certain human inner experiences that are like simple or more complicated interjections, expressions of feeling. Inwardly, we as human beings live in the vowels. People express external events in consonants. People copy external events through their own organs; nevertheless they reproduce them. Speech itself is a reproduction of external events through consonants, and vowels provide the color. Thus, writing is, in its origins, a pictorial reproduction.

If, as is done today, we teach conventionalized writing to children, it can affect only the intellect. For that reason, we should not actually begin with learning to write, but with an artistic comprehension of those forms that are then expressed through writing or printing.

If you are not very clever, you can proceed by taking Egyptian hieroglyphics or some other pictorial writing, then developing certain forms out of it in order to arrive at today’s conventional letter forms. But that is not necessary. We do not need to hold ourselves to such strict realism. We can try to discover for ourselves such lines in modern letter forms that make it possible for us to give the children some exercises in movements of the hands or fingers. If we have the children draw one line or another without regard to the fact that they should become letters, or allow them to gain an understanding throughout their entire being for round or angular forms, horizontal or vertical lines, we will bring the children a dexterity directed toward the world.

Through this approach, we can also achieve something that is extraordinarily important psychologically. At first we do not even teach writing but guide the children into a kind of artistic drawing that we can develop even further into painting, as we do at the Waldorf School. That way the children also develop a living relationship to color and harmony in youth, something they are very receptive to at the age of seven or eight. If we allow children to enjoy this artistically taught instruction in drawing, aside from the fact that it also leads to writing, we will see how they need to move their fingers or perhaps the entire arm in a certain way that begins not simply from thinking, but from a kind of dexterity. Thereby the I begins to allow the intellect to develop as a consequence of the entire human being. The less we train the intellect and the more we work with the entire human being so that the dexterity of the intellect arises out of the movements of the limbs, the better it is.

If you visit the handwork classes at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, you will perhaps find it somewhat paradoxical when you see that both boys and girls sit together and knit and crochet, and further, that everyone not only does “women’s work” but also “men’s work.” Why is that? The success of this approach can be seen in the fact that boys, when they are not artificially restricted from doing the work, take the same joy in these activities as the girls. Why is that? If we know that we do not develop our intellect by simply going directly to some intellectual education, if we know that someone who moves their fingers in a clumsy way also has a clumsy intellect, has inflexible ideas and thoughts, and those who know how to properly move their fingers also have flexible thoughts and ideas and can enter into the real nature of things, then we will not underestimate the importance of developing external capabilities. The goal is to develop the intellect to a large extent from how we work externally as human beings.

Educationally, it is an enormously important moment when we allow the written forms that are the basis of reading to spring out of what we have created artistically. Thus instruction in the Waldorf School begins from a purely artistic point of view. We develop writing from art and then reading from writing. In that way, we completely develop the children in relation to those forces that slowly want to develop out of their nature. In truth we bring nothing foreign into the child. As a matter of course, around the age of nine the children are able to write from what they have learned in drawing and then go on to reading. This is particularly important, because when people work against rather than with the forces of human nature, they damage children for the rest of their lives. If, however, we do exactly what the child’s nature wants, we can help human beings develop something fruitful for the rest of their lives.

When we turn from external toward more internal things, it is important to see that a child at the age of six, seven, or eight has no tendency whatsoever to differentiate itself from its surroundings as an I-being. In a certain way, we take something away from the healthy nature of the human being when we develop this difference between the I-being and its surroundings too early. You need only observe children as they look at themselves in the mirror. Look at them before the age of nine and then again at ten, and train your eye for their physiological form. Your eye for the physiological form will show that as children pass beyond the age of nine (this is of course approximate, for one child it is one time and for another, another time), something extraordinarily important occurs in human nature. We can characterize this important occurrence by saying that until the change of teeth, human beings develop primarily as imitators. In principle, human beings imitate their surroundings. We would not learn to speak if we were not imitators during that period of our lives. This principle of imitation continues on in the following years until about the age of nine. However, during the change of teeth, a principle begins to develop under the influence of a feeling for authority to validate what respected persons in the child’s surroundings recognize as correct. It is important that we really know how to maintain this feeling of authority, which is certainly justifiable during the period from the change of teeth until puberty, because that is what human nature wants.

Some say we should allow children to judge everything, to decide what they need to learn, but such statements ignore the needs of human nature. They ignore what we will carry into later life. Human beings continue to imitate beyond the age of seven up to the age of nine or so, and this principle of imitation affects the feeling for authority. From the age of nine, this principle of authority develops in a purer form. Beginning at the age of twelve, it is again mixed with something new: the capacity to judge.

It is of fundamental significance for all education that we do not force developing human beings to judge at too early an age. Certainly everything we now call illustrative instruction has a certain, though limited, justification. It has great significance in a limited area. However, when we extend illustrative teaching to the point of presenting children only with what can be understood from direct observation, we are ignoring the fact that there are things in the world that cannot be seen but must be presented.

There are things that cannot be seen, for instance, religious things. The same is true of moral things; they also cannot be seen. At best, we can show the effects of these things in the world, but not those things themselves. Aside from that, there is something else that is important. We need to teach children how to properly accept something because an authority presents it or to believe something because an authority believes it. If the children are incapable of doing this, we take something away from them for the remainder of their lives. Just look at what happens then. If someone at the age of thirty or thirty-five looks back on something they were taught in school, they will recognize that they did not understand it at that time. But because they loved their teacher, they accepted it. Such a person had the feeling that she did not learn but that she experienced. She had a feeling that she needed to honor, to respect the teacher, and since the teacher thought something, she should think it also. Thus, at the age of thirty or thirty-five, a person may recall something she did not understand but accepted out of love. Now, however, that person is more mature and looks at what arises out of the depths of her soul as an older person and realizes the following: what was accepted many years before out of love resurfaces later in life and now becomes clear. We need only consider what that means. It means that through such a resurfacing of something that is now understood for the first time at maturity, a feeling for life—which we need if we are to be useful human beings in social life—increases. We would take a great deal away from people if we took away the acceptance of truths through love, through a justifiable feeling for authority. Children must experience this justifiable feeling of authority, and we need to use all the powers of our souls in practicing education to work toward maintaining that justifiable authority for the child between the change of teeth and puberty.

The fact that we must divide elementary school into three periods gives us the basis of discovering the curriculum and the learning goals. During the first years of elementary school, imitation is affected by the principle of authority. From the ages of nine until twelve, the principle of authority becomes more and more important and imitation recedes. After the age of twelve, the power of judgment awakens. At the age of nine, children begin to separate their I from their surroundings in their inner experiences, and it is the I that awakens the child’s power to judge at about the age of twelve.

In this realm there is a strong connection between the way we think and feel about life and the way we think about the proper way to teach. You have, perhaps, heard of the philosopher Mach, whose views arise out of a natural-scientific perspective. He was a very honest and upright man, but throughout his life he represented the modern materialistic attitude. Because he was so honest, he also lived the inner structure of materialistic thinking. Thus he tells with a certain kind of naive honesty how once, when he was very tired, he jumped onto a bus. Now, just as he entered the bus, at the same time someone who looked like a schoolmaster jumped on the bus from the opposite side. This person made quite a special impression upon him. He first realized what it was after he had sat down. He realized that there was a mirror opposite the entrance to the bus and that what he had seen was himself. That is how little he knew his external form. The same thing happened to him another time. There was a mirror placed behind a display window, and he looked at himself but did not recognize himself. There is a connection between the fact that this man had so little capacity to recognize himself and the fact that he was a fanatical representative of certain pedagogical principles. In particular, Mach was a fanatical enemy of working with children’s youthful fantasy. He did not want any fairy tales told to children, or to teach children anything other than scientific trash about external sense-perceptible reality. That is how he brought up his own children, something he told me with a naively honest openness.

People can think what they want about the spiritual content of external, sense-perceptible reality, but it is poison for developing human beings when, from the ages of six or seven until the age of nine, their capacity for fantasy is not developed through fairy tales. If a teacher is not some radical, then he or she will present everything concerning the surroundings of a human being to a child, everything that is to be taught about animals, plants, or other things in nature to the children in the form of fairy tales. Children do not yet differentiate between themselves and their surroundings; that occurs only later, at the age of nine. If only people would learn what an enormous difference it makes whether children are read fairy tales or if you create such fairy tales yourself. No matter how many fairy tales you read or tell your children, they do not have the same effect as when you create them yourself and tell them to your children. The process of creation within you has an effect upon children; it really is conveyed to them. These are the intangible things in working with children.

It is an enormous advantage for the child’s development when you attempt to teach children certain ideas through external pictures. For example, if I want to teach the child at the earliest possible age to have a feeling for the immortality of the soul, I could attempt to do that by working with all the means at my disposal. I could attempt to do that by showing the child how the butterfly emerges from the cocoon and by indicating that in the same way the immortal soul flies off from the body.

Now certainly that is a picture, but you will only succeed with that picture when you do not present it as an abstract intellectual idea but believe it yourself. And you can believe it. If you genuinely penetrate into the secrets of nature, then what flies out of the cocoon will become for you the symbol for immortality that the creator placed into nature. You need to believe these things yourself. What you believe and experience yourself has a very different effect upon children from what you only accept intellectually. For that reason, during the children’s first years of school, we at the Waldorf School attempt to imaginatively present everything connected to the surroundings of the human being. As I said, a teacher who is not lost in dreamland will not cause the children to become lost in fantasy no matter how many stories about bugs or plants, about elephants or hippopotami they are told.

It is important to begin artistically, with a genuine enthusiasm for artistic writing. Allow writing to develop out of drawing, and for these first years of elementary schools, allow it to have an effect upon the imagination. Everything you teach in the way of scientific descriptions is damaging before the age of nine. Realistic descriptions of beetles or elephants or whatever, in the way we are used to giving them in the natural sciences, are damaging for children before this age. We should not work toward a realistic contemplation, but toward imagination.

We need to genuinely observe students when we stand before a class. It does not seem to me to be so bad if classes are very large as long as they are healthy and well ventilated. What we might call individualization occurs of itself if the teacher’s work arises out of a living comprehension of human nature and the nature of the world. In that case, the teacher is so interesting for the students that they become individualized by themselves. They will become individualized and do it actively. You do not need to work with each individual student, which is a kind of passive individualization. It is important that you always attempt to work with the entire class, and that a living contact with the teacher is present. When you have shaped your own soul to comprehend life, life will speak to those who wish to receive it.

If you develop a genuine talent for observation, you can perceive something when standing even before a large class. You can see that when you artistically present things that will become abstract and intellectualized only later, the physiognomy of the children changes. You will see how small changes in physiognomy occur, and that between the ages of seven and nine the children understand themselves. You can see how their faces express something healthily and not nervously active. It is of enormous import for the remainder of the children’s lives that this takes place. If the physiognomy develops healthily and actively, later in life people can develop a love of the world, a feeling for the world, an inner power of healing for hypochondria and superfluous criticism and similar things. It is terrible if you as teachers do not achieve that, for children after the age of nine have externally a quite different physiognomy than before.

I also think it is best for the teacher to not change classes throughout the entire elementary school period. I believe it is best for a teacher to begin with a class in the first grade of elementary school and continue moving up with the class through the grades until the end of elementary school, at least as far as this is possible. While I am aware of all the objections to this approach, I believe it can create an intimate connection with the students that outweighs all the disadvantages. It will counterbalance all the problems that can occur at the beginning because the teacher is unacquainted with the individuality of the class or the students. The teacher and students will achieve a balance over the course of time. They will grow together more and more with the class and will learn in that connection. It is not easy to see the subtle changes in the physiognomy of the children.

For me it is not important to describe some theoretical basis for following the spiritual and soul forces of human beings in such a way that you can see their connection with the physical body. What is important is understanding that the human being is a unity and actually being able to see this in individual cases. By developing these skills, you can train yourself to observe how people become different. Perhaps you will even develop a talent for observing how a person will listen later in life. You can read in the physiognomy whether people listen as a whole, that is, whether take in what they hear with thinking, feeling, and will, or whether they only allow what they hear to affect their wills, as a choleric might. It is good for teachers to develop such a talent for observation for life in general. Everything we learn in life can help us when we want to teach children. When you see, as I can see at the Waldorf School, how the teacher works in a way appropriate to her own individuality, you will notice how each class becomes a whole together with the teacher. Out of that whole arises the development of the child. This process can be very different with each individual teacher, since these processes can always be individualized. One teacher who instructs nine-year-old boys and girls could do something very well in a particular way and another who teaches quite differently could teach them just as well. In that way there is complete individualization.

I also believe it is possible to determine the curriculum and learning goals for each grade in the elementary school out of the nature of the human being. For that reason it is of great importance that the teacher be the genuine master of the school, if I may use the term “master.” I do not mean that there should be any teaching directives. Instead the teacher should be a part not only of the methods but also of the plans of the school. Whether she is teaching the first grade or the eighth, the teacher should be totally integrated with the whole of the school, and should teach the first grade in the same manner that the eighth grade will be taught.

In my lecture the day after tomorrow, I want to characterize the curriculum in more detail and also justify the learning goals for each year. Today, of course, since we are stuck in a materialistic culture that also has an effect upon our curriculum and learning goals, we can view such things only as an ideal for the future and put them into practice only to a limited degree. If there is a loophole in the law somewhere, as there is in the elementary school law in Württemberg, it is possible to make some compromises. Nevertheless such things need to be taken up since I believe they are connected with what must occur for us to move beyond the misery of the past five or six years.

I would now like to answer a few questions. To begin with, I would like to go into the question of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a child of our materialistic times. In our time, people do not try to seek the harmony between the sleeping spirit, which I might refer to as the artist of the body, and the physical organization of our bodies. Both of these aspects stand next to one another. Psychological theories attempt to form bridges between them. Just think of all such bridges we have seen in modern times that were to be formed between the spirit-soul and the physical body, beginning with the views of Descartes,1 psychophysical parallelism, and so forth. All these theories have essentially been born out of an incapacity to view the human being as a whole. People do not see how the physical is formed out of the spiritual and how the spiritual is revealed simultaneously in the physical body. We need only to understand how the one has been separated from the other through abstractions. Thus certain things have been totally misunderstood in modern times, even though they are understandable when we recognize the harmony between the physical and the psychological.

Take, for example, a young person who has had a traumatic experience. Every traumatic experience that occurs before the age of twenty has an effect upon the physical body. Even in later years such an effect is present, though to a much lesser extent. Today the only thing that is seen in that regard plays out only at the most extreme, superficial level. People see, for example, how a person reddens when he or she is ashamed, or turns pale when afraid. They do not see how a traumatic experience that perhaps over a period of several weeks pushes human feeling in a particular direction also causes the physical body to develop in a different direction than it would have otherwise taken. The body begins with a normal structure, but this structure changes as a result of traumatic experience.

Since human life follows a rhythm, after a particular number of years a special kind of repetition of the original organic trauma will occur. If you meet a person who is thirty-eight years old and has some anomalies in his or her soul, you understand that this anomaly indicates an earlier experience that must have occurred as many years before the age of thirty-five as the recurrence does after that age. Thus the psychic anomaly that we observe in the thirty-eightyear- old can be connected with an experience that person had at about the age of thirty-two. We can also understand the recurrence of this experience at the age of thirty-eight when we recognize the relationship between the traumatic experience at the age of thirtytwo and certain physical organs. In other cases, the present experience may be related to an experience that occurred just as many years before the age of twenty-eight as the number of years that have passed since that age. We need to acquire a capacity of observation in order to recognize the connections between experiences in the spirit-soul and their relationship to the organs.

But what is done in modern times? If you are a physician, regardless of how materialistically you think, you still cannot deny that there is some life of the soul. Materialism is characterized by the fact that it understands nothing of the material, and in our time of materialism we experience the tragedy of how materialism does not even understand material processes. It is just for that reason that people do not relate things experienced in the soul to material things. On the contrary, they erroneously say that an isolated experience that has been hidden for many years now suddenly has risen to the surface and we must become conscious of it. What is important is to study the person’s organic state of health rather than poking around in that person through psychoanalysis.

The same is true with regard to the use of psychoanalysis in education. People do not understand the interaction between the spirit-soul and the physical body. Only for this reason do they speak about the use of psychoanalysis in education. We cannot simply work one-sidedly with the spirit-soul.

I would now like to say something about the difficulties that arise during puberty. These arise only when children have not been properly brought up. If children have the kind of introspection and inner experience that I described today, then that will have an effect upon the entire physical body and soul of the child. The child will have different perceptions and a different relationship to the external world than it would have had had it developed it too intellectually or with too little experience in art when the child was about seven or eight years old. The errors made in teaching children when they are seven or eight years old reappear in their problematic feelings during puberty. If we were to speak about the things that we often hear mothers and fathers tell about their children, we would be able to see how materialism has taken control of our feelings. People come to me and tell me about their five- or six-year-old child who has undesirable sexual behaviors. This shows only that people can no longer differentiate. If a knife has been made into a razor blade, then it is no longer a pocketknife. In the same way, activities that occur with children and which at a superficial level appear to expose some sexual desires are in fact not actual sexual activities, but simply demands that the child be brought up according to his or her own nature. When that is done, then abnormal feelings will not occur during puberty. It is no more a sexual act if a child scratches herself in the region of the sexual organs because there is a small sore (which may be easy to miss) than it would be if she were to scratch herself on the nose or cheek.

If we understand this, we will not fall into the craziness of Freud.2 Instead of recognizing that it makes no difference whether a child scratches herself on the cheek or somewhere else, he claims that it is a sexual act when a child enjoys sucking on a pacifier. Freud’s perspective puts everything into one hat. This is something that Goethe tried to do with one of his most humorous poems, “The World Is a Sardine Salad,”3 in which he attempted to counter the argument that the world consists simply of so-and-so-many different atoms and the views of the world according to which will and unconscious existence are simply constructs. Gustav Theodor Fechner, the humorist, did something really funny in his book, The Moon Is Made of Iodine, which appeared in the early nineteenth century. He proves through formal logic that the moon is made up simply of iodine. We could use that little book as an example of the way people think of the world today.

Steiner replies to an objection that he has referred only to Freud and has not mentioned other directions.

To fully answer your question, I would need to hold a whole series of lectures. Since that is not possible, I would like to say only the following. How strongly the fanaticism for particular views is in our time is especially clear with supporters of psychoanalysis. In answering a question, I used an example indicating the Freudian position with regard to sexuality. It is, of course, correct that other psychoanalysts have a view different from that onesidedly sexual interpretation. In recent months, some psychiatrists have strongly distanced themselves from the original Freudian direction, and even from Jung’s5 direction. However, those who can judge psychoanalysis in connection with the development of civilization in modern times will never be able to see something new, not even a seed of something new, in psychoanalysis. They will always see only the final consequences of materialism.

It is characteristic of materialism that instead of examining the relationship of the spirit-soul with the physical, in a living way it attempts to characterize the physical in only the most superficial ways, in the ways that are valid for physics and chemistry. On the other hand, it remains an abstract characterization of the spirit- soul, which has been carried to an extreme in the way that psychoanalysis simply follows the path of the status of the soul throughout the life of the human being. I certainly do not deny the positive things that some people have in mind when they speak of psychoanalysis today when those things are correct. It is certainly correct that certain experiences in the soul have a lasting effect and can be recognized and observed as causing a particular change. What is important here, though, is that during the period lying in between, an interaction occurs that psychoanalysis considers to be something isolated in the soul. The effects upon the physical organism that become apparent as a strong one-sidedness are not recognized.

Such theories, of which psychoanalysis is one, have something unusual about them at the present. I have studied these things intensely. What is important to recognize here is that there is a tendency today to take theories that are correct for a particular and limited situation and extend them into general laws. Psychoanalysis exemplifies that. Summarizing theories into a law is justifiable only when they can be used in all practical situations. This is not true of psychoanalytical theory. Since the psychoanalyst does not understand the true relationship between the physical and the psyche, he or she tends to relate the psychic facts only to earlier psychic states. This is something that is quite strongly apparent with Jung. Jung is quite far from a comprehensive consideration of events in the world. We should, however, recognize that Jung has understood certain complexes and has traced them back in the evolution of the soul. The so-called Oedipus complex is, in the way that some psychoanalysts have described it, something that is very interesting and captivating. The problem lies in the way that the described series of symptoms does not comprehensively include all other symptoms connected with it.

What I mean here can be demonstrated through a simple picture. If you place a rose and a crystal on a table, you can say that both are objects. Equating a rose and a crystal through the concept of “object” is, however, only justified in an extremely superficial way. A rose is not simply an object alone, and you cannot consider it in the same way as you would a crystal, which is,in a certain way, something complete. (Of course, we should not forget that a crystal also needs to be considered in relationship to its normal surroundings.) Thus we need to seek the full context of symptoms in which we place a complex. We cannot simply take the most obvious things into account. The blossom of a tree, for example, cannot be simply considered as an object in itself. The tree must also be taken into account. Looking still further, we would need to take into account the qualities of the soil and of the air and so forth as well.

The primary error of psychoanalysis is that it considers symptoms in isolation that can only be explained in connection with other symptoms. I previously referred to the sexual example because psychoanalytic literature declares the fish symbol to be the symbol for the male sexual organ, and this is proven in a completely unscientific way. Such declarations are simply grotesque. Nor should the so-called Oedipus complex and its symptoms be considered in isolation. Instead we need to bring it into relationship with the entire development of humanity.

What is most important for me in these lectures is to show to what extent spiritual science can make education more fruitful. Of course it is not possible to develop a complete system of pedagogy in fourteen lectures. In these first considerations, I have already indicated that I do not believe a renewal of education is necessary, since present educational principles contain many good things. I believe that primarily a refreshing of education is necessary. Spiritual science is certainly appropriate for bringing new life into educational practice based upon many of the wonderful educational theories thatalready exist, because spiritual science attempts to comprehend the living spirit. Such comprehension of the living spirit, which is a source of enlivening for both the will and the feeling, is particularly necessary in pedagogy. Furthermore, spiritual science is a source of a genuine understanding of the human being that is particularly appropriate for working with children.

I would like to remark that it is clear that alongside of any form of education, whether it is oriented more toward the intellect or toward the soul, the human being must also be educated in feelings, primarily in a moral and religious sense. Particularly in the development of ethical and moral attitudes and of a religious sense, we need to work with the entire human being. Whenever we wish to have an effect upon the attitudes or will of the entire person, we must take into account the transformation and changes that human beings undergo both as children and in later life. To such changes in later life it is necessary that we give the proper impulse, particularly during the time of education.

But it is impossible to teach anything in connection with morals, attitudes or religion if, during the course of education, we do not first create some way of accessing the human soul and spirit. It would be a major error to believe that we can simply set up rules that people should do this or that in regard to their attitudes or religion or morality. The situation is actually quite different, and we can describe it in the following way.

If in my teaching, particularly with children up to the age of nine, I can create a connection with the child’s soul, the child will allow me to guide her in a moral or religious connection. If I cannot create such a relationship, if I teach in such a way that the child closes her feelings off from me, the child will be unreachable by even the best moral or religious guidance. It is particularly unhelpful to give in to illusions, even if we are doing so on the grounds that we are overcoming some of the cultural damage of our times. We cannot, for example, allow ourselves to be influenced by doctrines that understand the immortality of the human soul only in one sense.

In this area we chiefly try to make sure that people have a good understanding and a healthy feeling in regard to going through the gates of death, in regard to the further life of the soul after death. Such knowledge might seem to be merely theoretical, but it is not. Every action that we undertake in life, everything we do or say, particularly how we do or say it, depends upon a person’s view of this major life question. Although the various confessions of the immortality of human soul are absolutely correct, they nevertheless arise out of egotism in a certain number of people. They have developed out of human egotism. While it is necessary to speak to people (and to children in particular) about life after death—a truth that is certainly well-anchored in spiritual science—when we speak about this by itself, we reflect only the egotism of human nature that wants to continue to live after the body has been given over to the earth. But in doing so, we shut people out from the tasks of their earthly life. In particular, we as teachers shut ourselves out from the task of developing human beings when we think and act under the influence of such one-sided perspectives.

We need to recognize that earthly life is the continuation of a supersensible life. We need to look at what lives in us as spirit-soul as something that has moved from a supersensible world and connected itself with our physical bodies. It is very important to look at growing children in that way. If you look without prejudice, every child is a riddle to be solved, particularly for educators. If you look in this way at a growing child and say to yourself that what is presented here in earthly life is a continuation of the spiritual life, and it is our responsibility to guide what that divine being wanted in being incarnated in a human being, then we will be overcome by a feeling of holiness without which it is not possible to educate. We will have a feeling of solving a riddle when we are confronted with a developing human being. To imbue life here in the physical world with the character of a continuation of a spiritual life is something very important when we recognize it.

This is an important example of how differently an educator will act depending on his attitude. In external life, what is of primary importance is how a person acts. However, in being confronted by developing human beings, by children, we are also confronted with the innermost aspect of human nature. Our attitudes will inevitably affect theirs, and what is important here is the influences which lie at the basis of our attitude. An attitude of reverence will encourage a sense of responsibility toward the task of education. And without that sense of responsibility, we can achieve nothing in teaching. Everything must be permeated by it. I particularly hope that you will be permeated by this feeling, even though it appears to be so distant from the topic we are here to discuss.

Human beings derive their activities from two sources, as I said yesterday. One source is an indication more of what a human being brings into physical life from superphysical life. The other source is more an indication of what the human being should create out of life here. When we realize this, we will also be able to see the difference between what a human being brings into life and what is to be developed through this life. When I said how the intellect is born with the change of teeth and how the will moves into a human being with puberty, I characterized these two sources from two standpoints, although there are many others. When we focus upon the intellect, we are looking more at what a person brings into physical existence through birth. When we turn our attention to the will, we should be aware that we are primarily dealing with what a person should take in from the physical world in order to embed it into his higher nature. Inevery disharmony and harmony with the world that occurs through physical life, the human will is developed; that, in a certain sense, becomeshuman will. What is present as the intellect in human nature we must attempt to coax out.

In simply stating that, we can see many misunderstandings that arise in stating educational truths. People always want to say things in one-sided ways when these things actually have two sides in life. They either say that we must draw everything out of the human being or that we must put everything into it. Both are incorrect, of course. It is true that to a certain extent we need to draw everything that is naturally imaginative out of human nature. On the other hand, for everything concerned with the will, the experiences that we present to a human being are what is formative. People draw upon life for their will. For this reason it is important how we are connected to the children’s developing will, so that they can imitate us, seeing that what we say we also do. At around the age of seven, these patterns become authority for them. We need to place the child in such an environment so that she herself can draw upon as many experiences as possible to develop the will.

Here you can see how much of what people call the question of education is actually a question about the qualities of the teacher. Before I continue in this consideration, which I began yesterday, I would like to characterize the element that should permeate all of instruction, at least from one perspective.

Once again, it is possible to be very one-sided. Because of your own nature, you could fill your instruction with seriousness, with a face that can never laugh, that can only reprimand. It is also possible, if you have the tendency, to bring very little seriousness into your teaching. Both of these lead to extraordinarily damaging results later in life. It is as if someone were to think about whether inhaling is better than exhaling. Of course what is important is that human beings must both inhale and exhale; when a person who should exhale wants to inhale, that goes against nature. Just as there is a strict rhythm in the human being according to which there are on the average eighteen breaths taken in a minute, the entirety of human life is based upon rhythm. One part of that rhythm is the interplay between humor and seriousness.

Humor is based upon people getting away from themselves in a certain way. With humor, we move onto the path toward dreaming. Although we remain completely conscious, moving toward humor is the beginning of the path to dreaming. This loss of self is expressed through smiling or laughing. In these acts, the spirit-soul—or what we in spiritual science call the I and the astral body—moves out in a certain way from the physical and the etheric, although people still remain in control. Through humor, people expand in their soul and spirit aspects.

Let us now look at extreme examples of seriousness, such as crying and becoming sad. In these cases people are more compressed. The spirit-soul is more closely connected with the physical body than it is when we are in a neutral mood. A humorous attitude is an expansion of the soul and spirit, whereas a serious mood brings the spirit-soul aspect of human nature into closer contact with the physical body. We could also say that through laughing, a human being becomes more altruistic, and through seriousness, more egotistic.

An objection could be made to this assertion. If I say that seriousness makes people egotistical, then we can certainly preach that human beings should fight egotism. But what would happen if people fought egotism out of their own egotism, so that they perceived themselves as being unegotistical, as being unselfish? So that when they thought about the situation, they realized that they had created within themselves a passion for unselfishness? When someone satisfies her egotism by taking pleasure in loving many people, that is a much better gift than being unselfish in order to earn selfpraise. We need to consider such things in a way that corresponds to human nature rather than interpreting them in a way that leads to an increase of passion within the soul. What is important here is that the rhythm in the human being between humor and seriousness supports the soul-spirit life in the same way that inhaling and exhaling support physical life. Just as exhaling is a kind of turning toward the external world and becoming more foreign to oneself, while inhaling gives physical pleasure to a person’s egotism, humor is something whereby the human being expands and seriousness is something whereby the human being collects himself egotistically. Children need to move between these two moods through a teacher’s guidance.

Now it is of course extraordinarily difficult if, when you enter the classroom with a kind of self-imposed responsibility, you say to yourself that you should alternate between being humorous and serious. To give yourself such a task is impossible. It’s silly. It is something that cannot be. No one could expect me to include humorous things in my instruction immediately after a difficult personal experience. However, such an abstract feeling of responsibility is not necessary if you determine the content of what you should be enthusiastic about in the instruction in spiritual science. If you prepare for the class in a spiritual-scientificway, you will live in the individual portions of what you are to teach in an objective and impersonal way. If I come into a classroom at three in the afternoon to present something to the children and if I have schooled myself in the material in the same way I have learned to school myself in spiritual science, the material will be something through which I no longer need to take the external world into account. My own attitudes will disappear. The material itself will provide me with humor and seriousness at the right times, and things will just go by themselves.

This is an example of how spiritual science can help in practical education, right down to affecting the attitude of the teacher. It is necessary to see a doctor if I cannot properly breathe in order to restore the breathing process if possible. So the health-giving influence of a spiritual-scientific education is necessary for those people who are to have a healthy influence upon children. It is quite possible, of course, that on the way to school you may be justified in hanging your head in thinking about some terrible things that have happened to you. However, when you enter the classroom, you will become aware of what the task is for today, and you yourself no longer speak. It is not joy and sorrow that speaks. The things we teach are what speak; they move our fingers when we draw with chalk or when we write or do something else.

This shows that what is important at present is not to create new principles of education. Instead what is needed is a new spiritual structure that enables us to carry out our tasks without subjective influences. The teachers at the Waldorf School attempt to train themselves in this or at least to draw it out of human nature. During the short time we have worked there, we have in fact achieved something I could describe in the following way. For the sake of discretion, I will describe it as abstractly as possible.

Some have disagreed with my selection of teachers. They have told me that one teacher or another may not be very good, he may be too pedantic. I have not allowed myself to be influenced by that. But if a person has correct spiritual moral and feeling capacities, it is not necessary to consider whether that person is pedantic or not. What is important is to show the person how his or her pedantic tendencies can be properly brought into the service of humanity. If we had to remove all pedantic tendencies in people, we would certainly see how little is left over. If you take up spiritual science in a living way, it makes it easier to explain a specific, concrete area of life in an objective way, because the subjective characteristics of pedantry cease to be effective. In fact those people who were described as pedantic have become very exciting teachers after they found their way into teaching through a spiritual-scientific attitude. It is not at all important to act according to one or another preconceived idea. Instead we should act according to life. That is something we need in the present. Socialism wants to reform the entire world according to a theory. With regard to the development of humanity, the task of the present is to act according to life.

Everything I have said today is, in a way, the flip side of what I said yesterday about teaching languages, eurythmy, gymnastics, and so forth. What I discussed yesterday can be properly achieved by the teacher only when the teacher behaves in the way I have described today.

This leads me into a particularly interesting question that I was asked and which is closely connected with what I have just now described. It was indicated to me that a twelve-and-a-half-year-old girl had a B in behavior. While discussing an essay, she mentioned that in a private school, she always had good grades, but always a B in behavior. She told me that she then had a teacher she liked very much and never had a B, but that later his son taught the class and these bad grades in behavior started up again and continued in our school until the present time.

Much of what we have said today could have an extraordinarily high impact upon this question. You see, there are two things that are necessary in teaching. One is that we understand how to draw as much as possible out of the child, something we do at first through imagination. The other is that we work with the children in such a way that the child can like us.

There are all kinds of things in which we can, with some effort, try to train ourselves so that they become instinct. This is a complicated psychological problem into which we really cannot enter today. It is, however, true that many things that may require much effort to learn will come to others so simply, almost instinctively. One such thing is that a group of children just loves the person. That is very beautiful when it happens. What is important in regard to the development of culture and civilization, though, is that we achieve something similar through a certain kind of selftraining. We can achieve that if we try to relate to the world in the way that we must if we are to take up spiritual science. As I mentioned before, we cannot take up spiritual science as though we were sitting in the theatre and watching a film. We can only take it up when we are inwardly active. As I said before, you should read my book An Outline of Esoteric Science, but if you read it without any inner experience and take what I say there simply as a guide for your own thoughts, then the entirety of spiritual science will be just like straw. For that reason, spiritual science is for many people simply straw. If, however, you read it so that it is like an orchestral score that you first only understand when you have drawn all the details out of yourself, then, through drawing that out of yourself, you will develop those forces that otherwise remain hidden in human nature.

It is just those forces that develop relationships, particularly in children, that in a sense draw children’s attention to us. If we have gone through the process of drawing out those spiritual forces within us, then we can create a direct connection from one soul to another between ourselves and the child. That connection has tremendous significance in attitudinal and moral guidance as well as in training the child’s will. It would be hardly possible for you to keep a class that is made up of 40 percent uncontrollable children simply through moral reprimands that come out of you like abstract rules. Often, through the tone of your voice or the energy you put into your voice, you can achieve that for a short period. But you can achieve nothing lasting in that way.

Perhaps, however, you could attempt to have some experiences with the following. When preparing for your classes, in addition to your normal preparation, try to add a kind of meditative preparation. Add something that has not the least to do with the material you are to present, but has more to do with raising your own soul, that has something to do with imbuing some material or some feeling that opens the world to you. When in the evening you have gone through such a meditative inner view, and you enliven that view so that on the next morning you can recall it and in a sense reexperience it, then you will notice an effect when you go into the classroom. This may sound as though I am telling you some superstition, but these are things that cannot be comprehended through any theory. You need to see them. When you observe them you will find them confirmed. Most people today are not particularly interested in observing such things. But we will have to become accustomed to such observations if we are to come out of the misery of the present time. From them corresponding convictions will arise, particularly for a type of education that is meant to include all of humanity. With the student I described before, it is quite clear that when she said she loved the teacher, her training in will was under the direct influence of that personal relationship. Although we can philosophize about this as much as we want, all training in will is always under the sway of personal relationships until children are past the age of puberty.

Now I come to another extremely interesting question. In every elementary school, particularly in boys’ schools, you will find at least one boy who, although not in any way weak-minded, appears to be extraordinarily dumb in every subject, but who has a considerable talent for drawing. He has a certain instinct for observing and a genuine feeling for art. The remaining dumbness is nearly always connected to a kind of moral weakness and a brooding egotism. Such a boy does not seem to have the energy to come out of himself. What insight can a spiritual-scientific consideration of such a situation give? How should a teacher treat such a student in order to develop his intellectual capacities as well as the moral strength to carry out his own decisions?

When confronted with so concrete, so personal a question, I have the feeling of standing before unscalable walls. If you attempt to penetrate facts in the world through spiritual science, you can no longer consider such things superficially. At first you will have an uneasy feeling when working from the spiritual-scientific perspective in regard to such basic questions, even though you may have a great deal to say about them based upon all the many theories. You know, however, that regardless of how much you philosophize, you cannot find anything that will lead to an answer because life nearly always shows individual facts in individual situations and with special nuances, and you must first understand those nuances. With spiritual science you will almost always be led to the experience. Out of that experience you will work to find an answer.

I would now like to show you how you can attempt to find a way of overcoming to an extent the insurmountable hindrances that life may present. I knew a boy who I could also continue to observe as a young man who had a remarkable weakness in the will. It was so acute that he could stand in the street, for instance, and decide to take a given streetcar to go somewhere. But when the streetcar came, he was unable to sufficiently gather his will together and board it. He thought about going to his destination with the streetcar, but he was unable to board it, so he stood there after the streetcar had gone by. I knew just such a boy who as a young man was an extraordinarily intelligent and progressive person, and that was a real riddle for me at first. I solved the riddle in a rather remarkable way. I was aware that the boy’s father, whom I also knew, held the view that it was unnecessary to develop the will.1 His thoughts were thus concentrated upon, in a sense, talking away the will as a characteristic of the soul. Now I had a path. The father’s perspective was not actually a part of his nature; it had not actually affected his own organs. But what was a thought with the father had become habitual with the son. Possibly what the son had received from the father through heredity was strengthened by hearing similar thoughts expressed. Maybe the father did not always say explicitly that the will was not a part of the soul, but this was the perspective implied. People grow into life through very complicated situations.

It lies in human nature to develop the three capacities of the soul, namely, thinking, feeling, and willing. But some feeling also enters into our thoughts. We never actually have pure thinking unless we strictly train ourselves to do it, or when we devote ourselves to the ideals of morality or religion. In normal life, however, in thinking about the external world or when thinking together with other people, we are always using thoughts that contain some degree of feeling. We can therefore say that our thoughts are related to our feelings. Our feelings are reflected in our thoughts because they are stimulated by those thoughts, by the kind of thinking we do. On the other hand, our will also interacts with our feeling. There is quite a difference between will and will. The will can be what I would call a more neutral impulse or it can contain the warmth of feeling. Some people have a tendency to strengthen feeling at the cost of willing so that feeling is overemphasized and the will comes up short. With such people during childhood, what should actually enter the will is held in feeling. Thus they are satisfied with the picture of an action and never actually go on to act. That is the sort of person I am talking about here. We need to see how the feelings of such children react to one thing or another. Then we should not be satisfied only with what we see, but we should try to direct them toward the things that bring them into movement.

With children who exhibit this kind of moral weakness, an ensouled gymnastics of the sort I have described as eurythmy has a healthy effect. This is assuming that eurythmy, where human beings draw not only with their hands but with their entire bodies in space, is taught to them by the age of nine.

It is important to look at the interactions between human capacities. If you have learned to observe life, you will learn to guide the influences that act upon the child in such a way that the forces of the soul and those of the entire human being are brought into appropriate interaction. Spiritual-scientific training, when properly carried out, guides a person toward observing life. In general, people forget the most important facts of life, or they do not find the proper rhythm between humor and seriousness. You have not found the proper rhythm if you simply laugh at a young person who allows the streetcar to pass by. Such a person is certainly an object of humor, but you need to be able to move from humor into seriousness. We cannot remain merely with one or the other. This view of life is particularly necessary for teachers, and this is what is developed in us through a proper spiritual-scientific training.

I have attempted to indicate from various perspectives how we can base curriculum and teaching goals upon human development. I have particularly tried to show that we can characterize the period that begins around the age of six or seven with the change of teeth, and continues until puberty, about age fourteen or fifteen, as one stage of life. I also attempted to show that there is a shorter stage within the earlier stage that lasts until approximately the age of nine. There is another important change around the age of twelve. We should view these three times, that is, about the age of nine, then about twelve, and then again around fourteen or fifteen, which is approximately when the students leave school, as important when we create the whole curriculum and teaching goals. You can easily see the importance of comprehending the development of the human being when you realize that what is important in education is that we completely develop those forces that lie buried in human nature. If we look at things in the proper way, we have to admit that we need to use all our teaching material and education to reveal those forces. It is not nearly so important to use the forces within children to teach them one detail or another. What is important is that we use the material the children are to learn in such a way that the effects of what they learn develop the natural forces within them. That is something we fail to do if we do not take into account how different the child’s physical and soul nature is before the age of nine, and then again before the age of twelve, and so forth. We must be aware that the power to differentiate through reason, which enables human beings to reason independently, in essence occurs only at puberty and that we should slowly prepare for it beginning at the age of twelve. We can therefore say that until the age of nine children want to develop under authority, but their desire to imitate is still present as well. At nine, the desire to imitate disappears, but the desire for authority remains. At about the age of twelve, while still under the guidance of authority, another important desire, namely, to reason independently, begins to develop. If we use independent reasoning too much before the age of twelve, we will actually ruin the child’s soul and bodily forces. In a certain sense, we deaden human experiencing with reason.

To anyone not completely devoid of feeling, it is not insignificant that we say yes or no to something through making a judgment. Depending upon whether we need to say yes or no, we have feelings of liking or disliking, joy or sorrow. As much as modern people tend to have egotistical feelings of liking or disliking those things that they judge, they have hardly any feelings, whether of joy or sorrow, about the world and life as a whole. That is precisely why people miss so much today. Aside from that, their incapacity to experience the world influences social desires as a whole. That is why our teaching should not only emphasize the development of proper concepts, but it should also develop a proper feeling for the world, a proper feeling for a person’s place in the world.

Today people have one overriding judgment in regard to social issues. They say to themselves that we must make the world into an earthly paradise for all human beings. In the end, what do the extremists, the radical socialists of Eastern Europe, want other than to develop a kind of earthly paradise out of some theories, even though the paradise that results is a hell? But that is something else again. Where does this come from? We need only replace that judgment with another, and we will immediately see the problem in wanting to create an earthly paradise through enforced socialization.

I don’t really want to discuss Nietzsche here, but I do want to mention the following in order to explain something else.1 Nietzsche’s first work was entitled The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. Among the many thoughtful ideas contained in that work (even though you could argue against them), Nietzsche suggests that the Greek people were not the eternally happy, laughing folk many people say they were, but instead the life of the Greeks was rooted in tragedy, in a kind of sadness. The Greeks felt that our life here upon earth between birth and death could not always be one of great happiness, and that the task of human beings lay beyond this earthly life. Nietzsche thought the Greeks had a particularly strong feeling of this and needed a strong solace for the disharmonies of earthly life, which they found in art. Nietzsche’s view of the rise of art was that art, particularly Greek art, was a solace for earthly disharmonies. Nietzsche sees music in particular as something that leads people beyond earthly disharmonies. There is certainly a contrast between what we experience in our dry, calculating thinking and what we experience through music, but these contrasts relate to one another in a quite peculiar way. Consider that we can compute tones and the relationships of tones in terms of numbers; the result is musical physics, or acoustics. However, those who give themselves over to the musical world of tones leave what we can compute completely behind. They leave the intellectual aspects of music aside. What is intellectual sleeps in music. Nietzsche had a particular feeling for what he called the tragedy of music. The tragedy of music is that people can feel in music what they should otherwise feel throughout the world. Now Nietzsche was a man who could feel throughout his body what the materialism of the nineteenth century had brought to humanity. He was the kind of a teacher who dreamed of educational institutions based upon ideas such as I just described, which could have been the source of a genuine solace for life. Someone like Nietzsche revealed through his own life what was needed by the nineteenth century. The problem is, he collapsed under the experiences of those disharmonies. If we read between the lines, we will see that fate in a way determined that this man could deeply experience things that others of his century passed through in a more or less sleepy state of soul. We can also see that he always points to those things that were missing in his own education, specifically the education he had to go through in school. In Nietzsche youhave the feeling that the forces within him remained deeply buried, that they were never developed. Surely such an insightful person as he felt the tragedy of that much more strongly than others. You could easily say that here and there he had some awareness of the three main stages of childhood, particularly the stage between the ages of six or seven and fourteen or fifteen, but he never brought that understanding into the service of education. That is something that must happen now.

At the age of nine, the child experiences a truly complete transformation of her being that indicates an important transformation of her soul life as well as her physical experience. At that time, the human being begins to feel separated from her surroundings and learns to differentiate between the world and herself. If we can observe accurately, we have to admit that until that transformation, the world and the I are more or less conjoined in human consciousness. Beginning at the age of nine (of course I mean this only approximately), human beings can differentiate between themselves and the world. We must take that into consideration in what and how we teach children starting at the age of nine. Until then, it is best not to confuse them with descriptions and characterizations of things that are separate from the human being, or that we should consider separate from the human being. When we tell a child a story or a fairy tale, we describe the animals and perhaps the plants in the way we would speak about people. In a certain sense, we personify plants and animals. We can justifiably personify them because the child cannot yet differentiate between herself and the world. That is why we should show the child the world in a way similar to the way he or she experiences it. You should be clear that what I am suggesting does not diminish childhood before the age of nine, but enriches it.

My last statement may seem quite paradoxical to you. But much of what people say about the child’s life is said in such a way that the child’s life does not actually become richer but rather poorer. Think for a moment of what modern people often say when a child injures himself on the corner of a table and hits the table in rage. Today people say that children’s souls have something called animism. In a certain sense, the child makes the table alive by pushing his or her soul into the table. This is an impossible theory. Why? Because children do not directly perceive themselves as something living, something that can put itself into the table and personify it. Rather, children do not think of themselves as any more alive than the table. Children look at the table and experience no more of themselves than they do of the table. It is not that the child personifies the table but, if I can express it this way, the child “tables” his or her own personality. Children do not make their personality anything more than the table. When you tell a child a fairy tale or story, you speak only of what the child can comprehend of the external world. That is what must occur until the age of nine. After that, you can count upon children’s ability to differentiate themselves from the world. At that time, we can begin to speak about plants and animals from the perspective of nature. I have put a lot of effort into studying the effects upon children of teaching about nature too early. Teaching about nature too early really does make children dry; so dry, in fact, that a well-trained observer can see in the changes of someone’s skin that that person was taught about the concepts of nature at too early an age.

When they are nine we may begin to teach children the concepts of nature, but only through living thoughts. Wherever possible, we should avoid teaching them about minerals, about dead things. What is living, what lives outside the human being, exists in two areas, that of animals and that of plants. However, if we attempt to present the popular descriptions of animals, their scientific characteristics and the scientific descriptions of plants, we will not really be able to teach children about them. You can see in nearly every natural history book that the content is nothing more than a somewhat simplified academic natural science—that is horrible. Of course, people have also attempted to create an illustrative teaching of nature. There are numerous books about that method too, but they suffer from the opposite mistake. They contain a great deal of triviality. In that case, the teacher attempts to discuss nothing with the children, nothing more than what they already know. As people say, the teacher tries to create a picture of nature solely out of the nature of the children themselves. We easily fall into triviality that way. We can only throw our hands up in frustration about so many of those method books because they are so terribly trivial. We may feel that if schools use such things, only triviality will be implanted in children. This triviality will come to expression later as many other things I have already mentioned, as a kind of aridness in later life, or at any rate it will make it impossible for people to look back upon their childhood with joy.

That is, however, precisely what human beings need. Throughout life, we need to be able to look back upon our childhood as something like a paradise. It is not just that we had only happy experiences then; it is really not so important that as children we had only happy experiences. Many people may have gone hungry during their childhood or have been beaten by their teachers out of a lack of understanding or were treated unkindly. Of course, nothing other than an intent to fight against all such things in the best possible way should ever form the basis of education. Nevertheless such things can occur, and even so thinking back upon childhood can still be a source of enlivening when, in one way or another, we gained a relationship to the world during childhood. As children, we need to develop that relationship by being taught about nature in the proper way. It is of no help whatsoever when we describe the various classes of animals or types of plants and so forth to children and then, in order not to be too dry, we go on a walk with the children to show them the plants outdoors. That is not at all useful. Of course, through certain instinctive tendencies, one teacher will be able to accomplish more and another less. A teacher can, through his or her own love of nature, enliven a great deal for children. However, what spiritual science can give to people’s feeling is something really quite different, something that gives people a feeling for the connections living between the human being and the remainder of the world.

In the first third of the nineteenth century, many people still felt that the entire animal world was an extended human being. In this model, we have different groups of animals. One group is one-sidedly developed in one direction, another in another direction. We can create an overview of the various groups and kinds of animals for ourselves. The human being contains all those forces, all the inner forms that are distributed among the animals. That was, for example, the view of nature that someone like Oken took. At that time people looked for the lower animals in nature. Today’s materialistic natural science says that these lower animals existed in very early times and that they slowly developed and become more complete. The result was today’s human being, a completely developed physical being. We do not need to go into all the details today, since our concern is not with conventional science, but with education. However, can’t we see that the human head, which is a bony structure outside with the softer parts inside, looks similar to that of certain lower animals? Look at a snail or a mussel and see how similar they are to the human head. If you look at our more or less developed birds, you would have to admit that they have adjusted to the air, they have adjusted their entire life to something that corresponds to the inner form of the lungs and such things in human beings. If you remove from your thoughts all those aspects of the human being contained in the limbs and imagine the entire human inner organization as adjusted to living in air, the result will be the form and function of a bird. You could also compare the organic form of a lion or a cat with that of a bovine.

Everywhere you will see that in one group of animals, one part of its form is more developed and in another group, a different part. Each group of animals is particularly well-developed in one direction or another. We can say a snail is almost entirely head. It has nothing other than the head aspect, only it is a simple and primitive head. The human head is more complicated. Of a bird we can say that it is, in a certain sense, entirely a lung developed in a particular way because all other aspects are rudimentary. Of a lion we can say that it is, in a certain sense, primarily the blood circulation and the heart. We could say cattle are entirely stomachs. Thus in external nature we can characterize the various groups of animals by looking toward individual human organs. What I have just said can be said very simply, in a primitive way. If we look at the world of animals and look at the great diversity there, then compare that with the human organism and see how in the human being everything is well-rounded—how no part of the human being is one-sidedly developed, but each part complements the other—then we can see that in animals the various organs are adapted to the external world, whereas in human beings the organs do not adapt to the external world, but rather one organ complements another.

The human being is a closed totality.

Now imagine that we used everything available to us, the nature exhibits in the school, each walk with the children, everything the children have experienced, to show in a living way how the human being is, in a certain sense, a summary of the animal world. Imagine showing children that everything in the human being is formed harmoniously, is well-rounded, and that the animals represent one-sided developments and, for that reason, are not fully blessed. We can also show that the human being represents an adaptation of one system of organs to the other and for that reason has a possibility of complete being. If we are completely convinced of this relationship of the human being to the world of animals, if it fully permeates us spiritually, we can describe that relationship in a lively way so that the description is quite objective, but at the same time children can feel their relationship to the world.

Think how valuable it is for modern people to be able to say, in our materialistic times, that they are the crown of earthly creation. People do not really understand it—they look at themselves, and they look at individual animals. However, they do not look at each individual animal and try to understand how one system of organs is one-sidedly developed in one animal and another in another animal. They also do not consider how that all comes together in the human being. If we do that, our knowledge will directly become a feeling, a perception of our position relative to the world. We will then stop experiencing ourselves only egotistically, and our feelings will go out into the universe.

You need only attempt to teach in that sense once, and you will see what value such teaching has for the feelings of the child. Such knowledge is transformed completely into feeling, and people slowly become more modest under the influence of such knowledge. In that way, the material to be taught becomes a genuine means of education. What is the use of saying we should not teach in a dry way, we should not teach the children only facts, if we have no possibility of transforming the material to be taught so that it becomes a direct means of education? Sometimes when people stress that teaching children too many facts hinders their proper development, we want to ask, “Why don’t you throw out all the material you teach if it is of no use?” We cannot do that, of course. We must make the material we teach into educational material. Teaching about nature, particularly in connection with the animal world, can become educational material when we shape it in the way I described, and when we do not teach it to children before the age of nine.

With the plant world, we cannot take the individual plants or kinds of plants, present them one-sidedly, summarize everything we find there, and expect to see it again in the human being. The approach that is so fruitful with animals and gives us such a good basis for an artistic and living presentation of the nature of animals fails with plants. We cannot consider them in the same way; it does not work. With plants, we need to use a very different approach. We need to consider the entire nature of plants in relationship to the earth as something that enlivens the entire earth.

Materialism has brought us to the point where we consider the earth only as a ball made of stones and minerals in which plants are simply placed. We cannot use the same principle with, for instance, the human head and hair. We need to consider the growth of hair as something connected with the human head. In the same way, we must consider plants as belonging to the organism of the earth. We create an abstract picture if we only think of the earth as a stone, which can at most call gravity its own. We speak of the real earth when we think of the earth as an organism with plants that belong to it just as the hair on our heads belongs to us. When we consider it that way, our picture of the earth grows together with our picture of plants, and we get the proper feeling for how to think of the earth in connection with the plant world. We can do that when we look at the earth in the course of the year. If we are to really teach children about plants, we should not compare one class or group of plants with another. Instead we need to use all the fresh plants we have, the nature exhibits in the school, walks, everything the children remember, and everything we can bring into the classroom as fresh plants. Then we can show the children how spring magically draws the plants out of the earth. We can show them how plants are magically drawn out, then go on to May, when the earth becomes somewhat different. We then continue on into summer, and the earth looks different again.

We try to consider flowers and plants in the same way children understand the development of the earth throughout the course of the year. We tell the children how, in the fall, the plant seeds return to the earth and the cycle begins anew. We consider the earth an organism and follow the sprouting and dying back of the plants. We call everything by its proper name (which of course is only convention) only after we have taught the child by saying, “Look, here is a plant (under a tree or perhaps somewhere else). We have this little plant because this kind of plant grows so well in May. It has five little petals. Remember, these plants with five little yellow petals are part of the life of the whole earth in May. It is a buttercup.” You can go on in that way and show them how the world of plants is connected with the yearly cycle of the earth. You can then go on further to more hidden things, how, for example, some plants bloom at Christmastime, and some plants can live through winter and others much longer. You go from the life of one plant that decorates the earth for one year and leaves, to others, such as the growth of a tree and so forth. You would never consider simply comparing one plant with another; you always relate the earth to its plant growth and how the growth of plants arises out of the living earth.

You now have two wonderful points in the life of nature. Everywhere in the animal realm you find things that point to the human being. People can feel how they are a synthesis of all the one-sided aspects of the animal realm. We do not take up any species of animals without indicating which aspect of the human being that animal species has developed one-sidedly. The animal kingdom becomes, therefore, a picture of the human being spread out before us—the human being unfolded like a fan. As I said, modern people laugh about such things, but during the first third of the nineteenth century that sometimes took on grotesque forms. People such as Oken have said such grotesque things as “the tongue is a squid,” and I certainly do not want to defend them. Oken had the right principle in mind. He looked at the human tongue and then sought something among the animals which he then compared with that human organ. He found the greatest similarity to the human tongue in the squid; thus the tongue is a squid. He went on to say that the stomach is a cow. All that is, as I said, an extreme presentation. We certainly do not need to go that far. At that time, people were really unable to find the proper things. Today, however, we can certainly present the entire animal world as a spread-out human being and the human being as a synthesis of the entire animal world. We thus connect everything the children observe in the animals with the human being. We therefore have a possibility of placing all the aspects of a human being in front of the child’s eyes by directing the child’s eyes outward.

In the plant world we have just the opposite. There we completely forget the human being and consider the world of plants as entirely growing out of the earth itself, out of the planet upon which we wander. In the one case we bring the animal world into a close relationship to the human being, and in the other case we bring the plant world into the same close relationship to something that exists outside the human being. In other words, on the one hand we bring forth a feeling understanding of the world of animals and the human being by observing the animal world itself. On the other hand, we teach children to objectively consider the earth as an organism upon which we run about and from which we live, and where we see in the growth of plants, in the life cycle of plants, particularly in how plants live from year to year, something that is separate from ourselves. Through these two ways of looking at things, we can bring a tremendous amount of balance between the intellect and feeling into the human soul. We will leave mere intellectualism, which is so boring and arid, behind.

Once people comprehend annual plants, green plants that grow out of the earth with their roots in the earth, leaves, and stems above it, and the green leaves that then go on to form the flower and seed; once people perceive a living connection with the earth and have enlivened that through their experiences of the yearly cycle; once they have experienced how the blossom comes forth when sunlight has connected itself in love with what pours forth out of the earth; once that is felt throughout people’s entire being as a felt knowledge; once people have felt the growth from the root through the leaf to the flower and finally to the seed from spring until fall; once people have felt all that, then they will realize something else. Here is the earth, here is a plant, an annual. This plant that lives only one year is rooted in the earth. Now let us look at a tree. Here it is wood. Here are the branches. What appears on the tree during the course of one year appears similar to an annual plant and sits on the tree in a way similar to an annual plant sitting in the earth. In a certain sense the earth and the part of the tree that is wood are the same. Through that we can create a picture that will have an enormously strong effect upon us. In the same way a tree grows into wood, the earth is built upon what lies under the surface. Where no trees, but only annual plants grow, the forces that are otherwise in the trunk of the tree is in the earth itself. We can achieve a living feeling about how to seek the flowing of the sap in the tree trunk under the surface of the earth. Just as the sap that flows within a tree brings forth the blossoming of the year, the sap flowing beneath us, which we can see is identical to the sap flowing in the tree, brings forth annual plants. What I want to say is that we can intimately connect what we see in trees with our view of the earth. We therefore gain an understanding of what is living.

Through such a living characterization of the earth, plants, animals, and human beings, you can directly enliven something in the children that they would otherwise feel as only dead, specifically, in the period from about the age of nine until twelve. During the time when children are particularly interested in gradually differentiating themselves from the world and unconsciously want to learn about the relationship between the human being and the world of animals, on the one hand and, on the other hand, the earth and earthly life separate from the human being, something will grow within children that gives them the proper relationship to the historical life of humanity on Earth. In this way the appropriate feelings develop that allow children to learn about history properly. Before the age of ten or eleven, we have told children about history only in the form of stories or biographies. At about the age of ten or eleven, we include history within the teaching of natural history, so that everywhere a feeling develops in the child through the teaching of natural history that is, in a certain sense, also held in all the concepts and ideas and feelings that can enliven the teaching of history. Only at the age of twelve can we begin to go on to actual reasoning. We will speak more of that tomorrow.

For centuries, no one has been educated in a way appropriate to human nature, which makes it quite impossible to accurately look at human life and compare it with the life of the earth. People express themselves through their view of the world. Quite understandably, people say, for example, that spring is the morning of the year, summer the day, fall the evening, and winter the night. But in reality it is quite different. When we are sleeping, everything that differentiates us from plants slips out of our human form. When we are sleeping, we are not at all justified in looking as we do. Actually, we look the way we do only because we are shaped in accord with our soul and spirit. While sleeping, we are actually more at the level of plants. At that time, as individual human beings, we are no different from the earth with its plant growth. But to which season does our sleep correspond? When we are sleeping, that corresponds to summer, that is, to that period of the year in which the plants are here. To which season does our wakefulness correspond? That is like winter, when plant life ceases and, in a sense, recedes deep within the earth. In the same way, plant life recedes into the human being and is replaced by something else during the period of awakening until falling asleep again. If we do not follow some vague analogy but follow reality, we would have to say that we need to compare human sleep with summer, and the period of human wakefulness with the earth’s winter. Thus the reality of the situation is actually just the opposite of some vague analogy.

At this point I need to say something rather unusual. I have attempted to determine if anyone working in conventional science has even the slightest idea of what I have spoken of as a result of spiritual-scientific research, namely, that the earth is actually awake in winter and asleep in summer. The only small hint I have found which, if properly developed, would lead to what I have just described, I found in the Basel school program developed in the 1840s or ’50s. In that school program there is a discussion about human sleep that is treated in a manner contradictory to normal considerations. I think it is important to make mention of that school program in Basel. At the moment, I have forgotten the name of the person who created it, but I hope I will remember it by tomorrow.

The question I was posed after yesterday’s lecture is directly connected with what I explained in the previous days. It can also be considered today in connection with what we have been talking about. Yesterday I attempted to sketch out a description of how the content of the teaching material may actually not be the most important thing. I said we cannot make directly out of the material we obtain through science or from something else a popularized form adjusted for children, as often is done with biology or zoology, so that a simplified content is taught the children. I drew your attention to how the task of teaching can only become a task of education when we are in a position of being able to transform the material we have to present, regardless of what form it has, into an educational experience. Yesterday, I gave some indication of how to do that for biology and zoology. In education, we need to work more and more toward presenting everything, particularly with children from the ages of six or seven until puberty, in such a way that the forces that are trying to develop in a child can actually be brought to development.

If we are going to be able to do that, we must also be capable of properly using everything the child brings into school. I also mentioned that a large number of children bring into school something that we can well use in teaching, namely, their dialect. The children speak in dialect, and they speak in such a way that the dialects have developed in them under the influence of the instinct for imitation. If we have a talent for observing such things, we can recognize that those children who speak in dialect have a much more intimate relationship to language than those children who do not speak in dialect. The question I was asked yesterday was connected with how we can use the capacity of the children to speak in dialect in school, in teaching them to speak the so-called standard language.

We certainly cannot overlook the fact that the intimate relationship that children who speak in dialect have to their languages exists because the dialect as such, in its words and sentences, has been formed out of a much more intense feeling and willing than standard language, which is based more upon thinking or upon a thinking derived primarily from feeling. In any event, emotion is much less present in standard language when a child learns standard language originally than it is in dialect. The same is also true in regard to the will impulse.

Now this points us at the very beginning to something extremely important for teaching and education, namely, that human beings, more than we normally assume, develop themselves from two sources that are really related to one another like the North and South Poles. If we work in one direction or the other in education or in forming our teaching, if we work to primarily base everything upon visualization so that the child reasons visually and thus slowly develops through a comprehension of the pictures presented, we are going to one extreme. If, on the other hand, we educate the child through using the child’s capacity of memory or count upon the child’s acceptance due to obedience to our authority, we are going to the other extreme.

It is particularly clear in language that these two extremes always belong together in human nature. Language itself has a clearly perceptible musical element, an element which is closely connected with that innermost aspect of the human being. Language also has at the same time a sculptural or drawing element. As very small children, we attempt to imitate, though unconsciously, in our language what we perceive through the senses. It is especially clear in language how the musical and sculptural elements work in two diverging directions. If we educate children more according to the musical element, which in school is expressed primarily through a feeling for authority, we will destroy what exists in the child as a sculptural desire. The musical element of language develops under the influence of authority such that the child continuously has an instinct or a desire to speak, even in the details of the tones, in the same way that a person who is felt to be an authority speaks. A conformity to the authority’s musical element is, whether we want to believe that it is right or wrong, simply there because of the nature of the child. If you have a talent for observing such things, you will quickly notice how the musical element of the child’s language conforms to that of the person educating the child.

A one-sided development of the musical element in language destroys language’s sculptural element. When people only follow the musical element, they are forced more and more to make language an inner experience, to follow their feelings in a certain way by recreating the tone, the intonation, and particularly the nuances of the vowels to conform to those of the people whom they perceive as authorities. This is most certainly true when a child enters elementary school. It is less true for a child in that age between birth and elementary school, when he or she first learns language. During that time, the child is an imitator and develops language out of the entirety of human nature and with a continuous adjustment of the remainder of the human organism to the environment. At that point much enters into speaking which guides language into a more sculptural form. However, because human beings are imitators and imitate right into the innermost activities of their nature, the sculptural element also forms during this time in an inner way. Here we can see one major difference in language development. From birth until the change of teeth, children develop their language sculpturally. If a child has the good fortune to be able to adjust to a dialect during that period of life, one that is more inwardly connected to the human being than standard language, then the child is, in regard to willing and authority aspects of language development, more intimately connected to language than it is with standard language.

Upon entering elementary school, the musical element then replaces the sculptural element, as I mentioned before, and the inner feelings have an effect. However, since the musical element as such counteracts the sculptural element, it is necessary for us to appropriately use in teaching elementary school what the children bring with them, what they have developed in language through their own forces until the age of six or seven.

In language, broadly speaking, the unconscious has had a great effect on the child. We should also learn from the fact that primitive peoples have often developed a much richer grammar than those present in the languages of more civilized peoples. This is seldom taken into account outside of spiritual science, but it is something we should consider as a result of a genuine observation of human beings, namely, that the human being develops a logic from within so that language is actually logically formed. Thus we do not need to teach grammar in a way other than by bringing what already exists as a completely developed language structure into consciousness. When teaching and learning grammar, we need only to follow the general tendency of awakening the child and of bringing that into consciousness. We need only to develop those forces that can be developed until the age of nine, in the sense that I described before. We need to use the instruction in language in order to continue to awaken the child. We can best do that if we use every opportunity that occurs to work from dialect. If we have a child who before the age of seven has already learned a more educated informal language, the socalled standard language, it will be extremely difficult to reach the aspect of the child’s unconscious that has a natural relationship to the logical formation of language, since that has already withered. Thus if we have children who speak dialect and others who do not in the same class, we should always connect our instruction in grammar with what those children who do speak in dialect already provide us.

We first want to try to find the structure of a sentence and then a word from the perspective of dialect. We can do that if we proceed by having a child say a sentence, for example, one that is as simple as possible. The main thing the sentence will always contain is something that is an inner enlivening of an activity. The more often we begin with an inner enlivening of an activity, the more we will be able to achieve an awakening of consciousness in the child while teaching language.

There is a very extensive and clever literature about so-called subjectless sentences, for instance, “It is raining,” “It is lightning,” “It is thundering,” and so forth. The most important point about this is hardly mentioned in all of that research, however. What is most important is that these sentences correspond to the child’s actual understanding. The sentences correspond to that feeling in children that exists in people who are not educated, and where the soul feels itself to be at one with the external world. A differentiation between the I and the external world has not yet been developed. If I say, for example, “It is raining,” this is based upon an unconscious feeling that what is occurring as an activity outside of myself continues in that space within my skin, and that my I does not confront the external world. When saying something like “It is raining” or “It is lightning,” we do not feel ourselves separate from the world. In a certain sense, these subjectless sentences are the original sentences of human nature. They are simply the first step of language development which arrests an activity. Originally, we perceived all of the world as an activity, something we do not consider enough. In a certain sense, in our youngest childhood, we see everything substantial as a substantiated verb and accept it simply as it is. Later, what we become aware of, what is active, is what is active and then occupies our own activity. Now you might say that contradicts the fact that children first say “Papa” or something similar. That is not at all a contradiction, since in speaking the series of sounds, the child brings into life that activity which the corresponding person presents to the child.

Learning to speak is at first the enlivening of an activity whose substantiation occurs only afterwards. This is something that, when we look at dialect, we can certainly take into account. You can attempt to feel that by having a child say something and then trying to feel that within yourself. The words in dialect are such that they are extremely close to what lives in the gesture that accompanies the word in dialect. To a much greater extent dialect words require the person to participate, to live into the word. By feeling the word in dialect you can determine what is an abstraction, and what the subject and the predicate are. The predicate is derived from the activity, whereas the subject is actually more of an intellectual abstraction of the activity. When we have children speak sentences in dialect and we then consider the pictures they provide us with, and we can see those as representing what human beings actually feel when we go on to develop the rules of grammar, we are using instruction in grammar and sentence structure to help the child to awaken.

We can now allow these two things to interact in a wonderful way. We can translate what has been presented in dialect into standard language and then show, through a direct feeling and with a lively interaction with the children, how a certain “aroma” of language is given to the so-called educated informal language, to standard language. From there we can go on to the inner characteristics of standard language. This creates a certain development of thinking. In standard language we need to give much more attention to the development of the thoughts that are its basis than we do with dialect.

Dialect shows us directly that human beings did not develop speech from thinking. Instead they learned to think from language, so it was language that first developed out of the human unconscious. As human beings thought about language, thoughts first arose from language. If we can properly feel this, then we can connect a living feeling with what I would call the genius of language. In many regards language is much more clever than individual human beings. In earliest childhood we can in fact find our way through the complicated organism of language. Only later do we discover those remarkable connections that only a sharp logic can reveal and which exist in language out of our unconscious nature. The spirit has an effect upon language. However, we will not understand that spiritual aspect if we only consider how the spirit, in an abstract form, has an effect upon human beings, in the way that people in our materialistic age like to do.

Perhaps I can again touch something which is often said to be the basis of psychoanalysis but which needs to be understood in a quite different sense than psychoanalysts often do. Let us take something that often occurs in life. A lady is invited to a home where guests have been invited, but the lady of the house is absent that evening because of illness. This lady now attends the party. On the same evening, the lady of the house needs to leave. The party breaks up because the man of the house needs to take his wife to the train. The group of people now go along the street, and a coach comes around the corner. At first the carriage is going very quickly and the group of people move to the left and right of the street to make way. However, the one lady who had been invited that evening runs in front of the horses. She runs and runs, and in spite of all the coachman’s shouting, he is unable to get her to move to one side. She keeps on running in front of the coach, and as they come to a bridge, she recognizes the situation and jumps into the water. She needs to be rescued. The group of people who were at the party don’t know what to do with her except bring her back to the house where they had been invited that evening.

The psychoanalyst would say that this lady was mentally isolated, that she had been startled as a child by a horse that had chased her or something similar, and that this experience was carried in the depths of her mind. Now, on this evening, this experience surfaces again. This is a very clever theory. But those who have learned to observe reality and who have learned to place themselves into reality through spiritual science will not see this as valid.

The truth is quite different. The lady is infatuated with the man of the house, and is quite happy to have been invited to the party on just that day when the lady of the house has to leave. Of course, this lady would not admit this, since she is a very correct person. She could be, in fact, a very correct lady in her consciousness, but what she does not admit has an effect in her subconscious. For that reason, she arranges everything so that all of the guests invited that evening will bring her back to the house when the lady of the house has left. That is what she wanted from the very beginning, but was not at all conscious of it.

Here you can see how thinking, cleverness, and intelligence work without having an effect through the human consciousness. Those who can observe life know that there are people who can arrange things from a distance to achieve what they want without having any conscious idea that they are doing so. Nevertheless everything is all very systematically arranged toward a particular goal. We need to be aware that reason is not only something that we develop, it is also something that acts within us in our nature, something which is active within us long before we become aware of it.

What we want to teach children about language has an effect upon them long before they become aware of it. We should therefore avoid trying to teach them the rules for speaking or writing, but instead enable them to awaken and become aware of what subconsciously acts within. Whether we have one intention or another in our instruction is tremendously important. We should always pay attention to the intention behind teaching.

Speaking a dialect has an intimate connection with the subconscious, so we can develop real grammar and rules for sentence structure from the dialect language by basing our work upon the reason that lives within human nature. If, however, we need to work with children who already speak the standard language, we should whenever possible not work in such a way to develop a kind of grammar through the intellect, and not direct our work by teaching about the dative and accusative and how we write, how periods and commas are placed at particular locations and so forth. We instead need to work in a different way. When we need to teach children who do not speak in dialect, then we must create our instruction and grammar in an artistic way and appeal to a feeling for style.

Children bring an instinct for language with them into elementary school, and we need to develop this feeling wherever possible until the child reaches the age of nine. We can only do this by developing a feeling for style in an artistic way. That is something we can achieve—although in this age where authority is being undermined everywhere this may be laughed at—by using the natural desires of children to follow authority, and thus to form those sentences that we present to the children in the most artistic way. We need to artistically form the sentences so that we draw from the child a feeling for their artistic form. That is something we can do when we make the children aware of the difference between an assertion or a question, or perhaps a statement of feeling, and have the child speak it in such a way that a statement with feeling is spoken with the intonation of an assertion. We can then make the children aware of how an assertion is spoken in a neutral, objective way; whereas a statement of feeling is spoken with certain nuances of feeling. We can work with this artistic element of language, then out of that element develop grammar and syntax.

If we use dialect in order to develop the natural human instinct for language while using standard language in order to awaken an inner feeling for style, we can achieve what is necessary in teaching language. I will speak about this in more detail later, however; for now I simply want to indicate the principles.

This principle shows that we must keep the developing child in mind at all times. We need to ask what is developing at this particular age. If we do not have the feeling that with the change of teeth children are, in a certain sense, born a second time, then we will not have the proper enthusiasm for our teaching. Of course, the physical birth is much more obvious than what occurs at around the age of seven. At birth the physical body of a human being is separated from that body of the mother. With the change of teeth, the human etheric body becomes separate from the physical body, with which the etheric body was intimately connected. The etheric body worked within the physical body to develop the second set of teeth, but now it becomes free. What children bring to school in terms of capacities are actually the free and newborn capacities of the etheric body. This is the first spiritual aspect that a child presents.

When we have a child younger than seven before us, we have it before us only as a physical body. All the child’s spiritual and soul aspects are active within that physical body, and we can reach the child only through the fact that the child itself has a desire to imitate. At the age of seven, the etheric body, that is, all those aspects of human nature which have an etheric component in their substance, now become free and have a life for themselves. I have already mentioned that the human being is more than 75 percent composed of water. Why do people in physiology and anatomy always speak as though the human being consisted of a solid body? What occurs within a human being works in just the same way in fluids. It also occurs in the gaseous state. What develops in a child in regard to spiritual and soul capacities after the change of teeth occurs neither in a solid nor in liquid nor in gaseous state. It occurs instead in what we carry within our body as the etheric, what we carry within us in the form of heat, light, chemical, and life ethers.

It is nonsense to say that thoughts are only processes within the nervous system, imagining the nerves as semi-solid or at least soft forms. No, thoughts occur through direct development, by not being transformed into memories. Thoughts occur in such a way that they do not even have contact with the physical body after the age of seven.

When people think, they think only in their etheric element, which fills their physical bodies. You might, however, object by saying that thoughts become memories and thus remain within the human being. The etheric element is very volatile; all thoughts would dissolve if they were to live only in it. Memory is a much more complicated process than people normally think. Often they have the idea—which is based upon materialism—that when people think, the thoughts they have seek out a place to live somewhere in the human soul, and that we bring them forth again when we recall them. But that is not how it is. If you can observe the process of thinking, you will find that when you see something through your senses in the outer world, you connect thoughts with it. But when you recall something and form a thought, then what you have is something that otherwise comes from the external world but now arises within your own inner world. Just as you comprehend thoughts connected with the external world, you also comprehend thoughts which arise within you. Memory does not occur because thoughts sink down into the soul, but because what physically acts upon the eye and the ear is continued within the physical body. Thinking is a parallel process. This process leaves behind a rhythmical element which can be brought forth inwardly at a later time, so it can be perceived in the same way that external perceptions are.

Probably all of you have observed how young children help themselves so that they can better bring up their memories. They do everything possible in order to strengthen thinking through the senses if they are to remember something. Recall how many children study, how they seek to include within their physical body what they are to learn as a thought, how a physical inclusion occurs in parallel with thinking. When children simply think, they often do not remember. They only remember when they again hear what they have memorized, or are in some other way physically reminded of what they have memorized.

In order for us to remember, there must be some process that works in parallel to thinking. For thinking, it is totally unimportant whether it is developed through the external world or through a memory that arises within. Thinking is something that is fleeting. Thoughts are not retained. It is something else which is retained that then each time gives rise to a new thought. There is no difference between whether I remember something and then create a thought and when I see something in the external world that gives rise to a thought. In the one case, there is a process connected with the external world and in the other case there is a process connected with an inner experience. In any event, when I recall something, my organs go into a rhythmic movement and repeat what they carried out under the impression of the experience. When I have the experience for the first time, that is, while I observe it in the external world, my thoughts develop only in connection with the external world. When I remember something, my thoughts are ignited from within by my organs, which begin to vibrate in the same way as when I first had the experience.

Such things cannot be directly proven in the same way that external processes can be proven. These things must be slowly comprehended so that they become a certainty through a genuine observation of life. When we look at this particular kind of thinking that actually occurs within the volatile element of the etheric and when we determine how the physical organs must be capable of vibrating in the same sense as the etheric vibrates, we will properly comprehend the enormous transformation that human life undergoes through the change of teeth. Up to this point the entire etheric body is active. The heat, chemical, light, and life ethers are active in the organs, forming them in such a way that they can vibrate in material along with the etheric. The etheric body is the architect and sculptor of the physical body. Once the physical body is developed to this degree, under the influence of the etheric body—which actually thinks—the intellect is emancipated from the physical body so that the physical body can vibrate like a violin string when another string is struck. Thus when the physical body has developed to the point that the change of teeth has begun, we can then count upon developing the etheric body as such. We form the physical body at the same time as we form the etheric body. But we need to have a feeling for this birth of the etheric body at the time of the change of teeth.

Going on, we again need to sense that something still higher in human nature is born at puberty, something that previously had been working on a further formation of the human organism. Whether we call what is born at the age of fourteen or fifteen in a human being the astral body and whether we are pleased with that description or not is unimportant. What is important is to realize that just as the intellectual element is born through the etheric body around the age of seven, the entire non-physical soul aspect is born around the age of fourteen or fifteen. Prior to that, feeling and willing are closely connected with the physical organism. Just as thinking is connected with the physical organism until the age of seven, feeling and willing are closely connected with the physical organism, that is, until puberty.

We must therefore be aware that before the age of puberty, which is also when the students graduate from elementary school, we do not under any circumstances bring into thinking—which is slowly developing with the etheric body—anything that could lead to an independence of the will or feeling too early. When the child is educated with love under the guidance of authority—when the child learns feeling and willing under the guidance of others, under the guidance of adult instructors—then at the proper moment, namely at puberty, the child’s own independent feeling and willing will be born. We can only properly develop our feeling and willing in that we allow them to develop under the authority of other people. If we achieve an independent development of will too early, if we achieve what I might call certain secret functions of the will too early, that will damage us for the remainder of our lives. We achieve a subtle functioning of the will too early if we are tempted to subject our moral and religious impulses to our own judgment at too early a time.

Until puberty, children should learn morality and religion through the influence of moral and religious authorities. Only at puberty does the spiritual and soul nature of the human being begin to become free of the body so that we can allow it to make its own judgments. When you say such things today, you have the prejudices of our times against you. As I mentioned this question of a natural feeling for authority in a more or less public lecture in Germany at a time when everything seemed to be under the influence of a revolution (though it did not turn out to be), everyone objected to this because they all wanted to keep the authorities away from children. What they really wanted was that teachers cease to exist and that the children would teach and raise themselves in a democratic way.

I had to answer that this is something that children do not want at all. Children want to be guided, they want to love and learn from authority. What develops within children as a love of authority is connected with their own nature.

When human beings reach sexual maturity, there, of course, develops a love for the other sex. This then becomes individualized into the love of a man for a woman. However, what is thus individualized is at the same time an individual expression for a general love for humanity, for a love for humanity in general. The general love of humanity as well as a love for particular persons develops in the same way as love for the other sex does at sexual maturity. This love that one person has for others develops as an independent force only with sexual maturity, since love must be freed of authority. This kind of love is genuine devotion. Until sexual maturity, love is a need. It is something that the child’s own being demands egotistically. We must recognize that children in elementary school egotistically demand to be able to love. They need to have that person of authority near them on whom they hang, to whom they are devoted because they find pleasure in devotion, into which they are forced by their own nature. That is the primary element in love, whether it be love of humanity or love of nature, love of the stars, or love of supersensible beings and God. It is what lives in the human beings as love, and it is essentially the content of the astral body.

Only when you have thoroughly accepted these things will you be able to develop a proper understanding of how language, at least to the extent that the child brings language to school in the form of a dialect, has developed under the influence of the physical body itself. In contrast, from the age of seven onward, we no longer have a possibility of bringing style into the imaginative element of language if we do not develop a feeling for style itself through our own individual personal relationship, our love for the child. Out of this loving relationship, a feeling for style in more educated, standard language, can grow.

A child that learned a dialect just as it learned to walk already has a feeling for the dialect. It is something we can develop out of the child itself. But it is also useful to make children aware of dialect even if they have not had the good fortune of learning it. Compared to standard language, a dialect is more artistic. Standard language is more related to reason and adheres more to convention. In doing this, we are using something we need to use in education—the artistic element. In a certain sense, we use something existing in the child’s blood that forms the dialect.

I still need to speak about the actual teaching of grammar, about what is, in my opinion, the proper method of teaching arithmetic and so forth. In teaching arithmetic it is important to be able to look closely at what occurs in a young person between the ages of seven and fourteen or fifteen. If we develop a person contrary to what occurs naturally, we will damage that person for his or her entire life.

It is very easy to teach a person in a way that is against human nature because human nature is split. We thus need to be aware that we damage people when we do something that is correct but take it to an extreme: one side always needs to be rounded off by the other. In language, we need to round off the sculptural element with the musical element. We will see what the situation is with arithmetic. What damages people so much is often the result of their instruction in arithmetic. The way that we learn to do arithmetic generally goes against human nature. Everything that occurs in many people today as a tendency toward materialism is essentially the result of improper instruction in arithmetic around the age of nine. Another thing that is so destructive for the later development of the soul in many people is that they begin to reason too early, and we present the material there to learn in a way for which they are not yet mature enough. They take in a large number of predetermined judgments that then continue to affect them. People often speak about the fact that in human beings one concept or idea associates itself with others. There is nothing more unfortunate than this talk about the association of ideas. When ideas associate with one another in us, when they clump and we run after them, then in our thinking, we are under their control and no longer have power over ourselves. Through education, we must protect people from allowing these associations to gain the upper hand over the will. I will speak more of that tomorrow.