The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3First of all, I would like to apologize for being unable to talk to you in your native language. Since this is not possible, I will speak in German, which will then be translated for you.

The methods of the Waldorf school, which I have been asked to speak about, owe their existence to the merging of two streams in cultural and spiritual life. The school was founded in Germany during the restless and disturbed times following the war, when efforts were made to create new conditions in the social realm. It all began with the ideas of the industrialist Emil Molt, who wished to begin a school for the children of the employees in his factory. This school was to offer an education that would enable the students to grow eventually into adults, well equipped to participate in social life as rational and full human beings, based on the idea that social change should not be at the mercy of political agitators. This constituted the primary element at first; the other came later.

Emil Molt had been a long-standing member of the anthroposophical movement, which is trying to reintroduce spiritual knowledge into the social life of the present times, a spiritual knowledge equally well grounded in the realities of human truths as the natural sciences, which have reached outstanding prominence and made great achievements during the last few centuries. Mister Molt asked me, in my capacity as the leader of the anthroposophical movement, to introduce pedagogical and practical methods into this new Waldorf school.

The school’s approach is not the product of the current movements for educational reform; it is based instead on a pedagogy drawing on deep concrete knowledge of the human being.

Over the course of our civilization we have gradually lost true knowledge of the human being. We turn our eyes increasingly to external nature and see only the physical and natural foundation of the human being. Certainly, this natural physical foundation must not be considered unimportant in the field of education; nevertheless, the human being consists of body, soul, and spirit, and a real knowledge of the human being can be achieved only when spirit, soul, and body are recognized equally.

The principles of Waldorf pedagogy do not depend in any way on local conditions, because this pedagogy is based on a knowledge of the human being, including that of the growing human being, the child. From this point of view it is immaterial whether one thinks of rural or city schools, of boarding schools or of day schools. Because Waldorf schools are based strictly on pedagogical and pragmatic principles, they can meet and adapt to any possible external social conditions.

Furthermore, the Waldorf school is a school for all types of children. Although at first it was opened for the children of Mister Molt’s factory, today, children from all social classes and backgrounds have been accepted there, because pedagogical and practical impulses based on real knowledge of the human being are universally human; they are international in character and relevant for all classes and races of humanity.

Here I do not want to give a detailed account of the Waldorf curriculum—there is too little time for that. In general, the school is built not so much on a fixed program as on direct daily practice and immediate contact with the children according to their character, therefore, I can give only brief indications of the main principles that underlie the Waldorf school, and I must ask you to keep this in mind.

To know the human being means, above all, to have more than the usual knowledge about how the human being’s life goes through different life stages. Although educational theories have generally considered these stages more or less, in Waldorf pedagogy they are considered in full.

In this context I must emphasize that around the child’s seventh year—at the change of teeth—a complete transformation takes place, a complete metamorphosis in the life of the child. When the second teeth begin to appear, the child becomes an altogether different being. Where does this transformation originate? With the arrival of the seventh year, the forces that had been the forces for physical growth, working in the child’s breathing and blood circulation and building the organism in its nutritive and growth activity, are now released. While leaving a remainder behind to carry on with this organic task, these forces themselves go through an important transformation as they enter the child’s metamorphosing soul life.

Recently, many psychological studies have examined how the soul works into the child’s physical organism. A proper science of the spirit does not float around in a mystical fog, but observes life and the world with clear perception, based on direct experience. Thus, spiritual science does not pose abstract questions about how soul and body are related, but asks instead through direct experience, while observing life itself, as clearly as external scientific experiments are observed.

One finds, therefore, that between birth and the change of teeth, the child’s soul forces manifest as organic forces working in the child’s physical body. These same forces, in a somewhat emancipated form, manifest purely in the soul realm (the child’s thinking and memory) in the following period between the change of teeth and puberty. The teacher’s first prerequisite, which has to become thoroughly integrated into attitude and character, is to sharpen the perception of the metamorphosis in human life that takes place around the age of seven and, further, to be conscious of the immense metamorphosis that occurs at puberty, at fourteen or fifteen.

If the growing child is approached with this viewpoint, one fact looms very large in one’s knowledge—that, until the age of seven, every child is a universal sense organ that relates as an organism to the surroundings, just as the eyes or ears relate as sense organs to the external world. Each sense organ can receive impressions from its surroundings and reflect them pictorially. Until the seventh year, the child inwardly pulsates with intense elemental forces. Impressions are received from the surroundings as if the child’s whole being were one large sense organ. The child is entirely an imitating being.

When studying the child, one finds that, until the seventh year, the physical organization is directly affected by external impressions, and later on this relationship is spiritualized and transformed into a religious relationship. We understand the child up to the change of teeth only when we perceive the forces and impulses that, based on the physical and soul organization, turn the child entirely into homo religiosus. Consequently it is incumbent on those who live close to the young child to act according to this particular situation. When we are in the presence of a young child, we have to act only in ways that may be safely imitated. For example, if a child is suspected of stealing, facts may be discovered that I can illustrate with a particular case: Parents once approached me in a state of agitation to tell me that their young boy had stolen. I immediately told them that one would have to investigate properly whether this was really the case. What had the boy done? He had spent money which he had taken from his mother’s cupboard. He had bought sweets with it and shared them with other children. He had even performed a sociable deed in the process! Every day he had seen his mother taking money from a certain place before she went shopping. He could see only what was right in his mother’s action, and so he imitated her. The child simply imitated his mother and was not a thief.

We must make sure that the child can safely imitate whatever happens in the surroundings. This includes—and this is important—sentiments and feelings, even one’s thoughts. The best educators of children under the age of seven do not just outwardly act in a way that is all right for the child to imitate—they do not even allow themselves any emotions or feelings, not even thoughts, other than what the child may imitate without being harmed.

One has to be able to observe properly how the entire process of education affects the child from the spiritual point of view. During the first seven years of life, everything that happens around the child affects the physical organization of that child. We must be able to perceive the effects of people’s activity in front of children. Let’s imagine, for example, that someone is prone to outbursts of a violent temper. Consequently, a child near that person is frequently subjected to the actions of a violent temperament and experiences shocks caused by an aggressive nature. These shocks affect not only the soul of the child, but also the breathing and blood circulation, as well as the vascular system.

If one knows human nature completely and observes not just particular ages but the entire course of life from birth to death, one also knows that anything that affects the vascular system, the blood circulation, and the intimate processes of breathing through physical and spiritual causes and impressions coming from the external world, will manifest in a person’s organization until the fortieth and fiftieth year of life. A child who is tossed about by confusing impressions will suffer from an unreliable coordination of breathing and blood circulation. We are not necessarily talking about obvious medical problems, but of subtle effects in the blood circulatory system, which must be recognized by those who wish to educate children.

The seventh year brings the change of teeth, which represents the end of a chapter, since we change our teeth only once in a lifetime. The forces that led to the second dentition are now liberated for later life, and now enter the mind and soul of the human being; for during the time of elementary schooling, the forces that had previously been involved in plastically shaping the child’s organism can now be seen working musically, so to speak, in the organism until puberty. Until the age of seven, the head organization works on the rest of the human organism. The human head is the great sculptor that forms the vascular system and the blood circulation, and so on. From the ages of seven to fifteen, the rhythmic system in the widest sense becomes the leading system of the human organism. If we can give rhythm and measure to this rhythmic system in our lessons and in our way of teaching—measure in the musical sense—as well as of giving a general musical element through the way we conduct our teaching in all lessons, then we meet the essential demands of human nature at this stage of life.

Education from the change of teeth until puberty should appeal primarily to the artistic aspect in children. An artistic element definitely pervades the Waldorf curriculum from the students’ seventh to fourteenth years. Children are guided pictorially in every respect. Thus, the letters of the alphabet are not taught abstractly. There is no human relationship to the abstract symbols that have become letters in our civilization. Written symbols are abstractions to children. We allow the letters to evolve from pictures. At first, we let our young students paint and draw, and only then do we evolve the forms of the letters from the drawings and paintings that flowed directly from their human nature. Only after the child’s whole organism—body, soul, and spirit—has become fully immersed in writing, through an artistic activity, only then do we go over to another activity, one involving only a part of the human being. Only then do we go to reading, because reading does not involve the complete human being, but only a part, whereas writing is evolved from the entire human organization. If one proceeds this way, one has treated the human individual according to the realities of body, soul, and spirit. If one’s teaching is arranged so that the artistic element can flow through the children, so that in whatever the teachers do they become artists in their work, something rather remarkable can be observed.

As you know, much thought has gone into the question of avoiding exhaustion in students during lessons. Diagrams have been constructed to show which mental or physical activities tire students most. In Waldorf schools, on the other hand, we appeal to the particular human system that never tires at all. The human being tires in the head through thinking, and also gets tired when doing physical work—when using will forces in performing limb movements. But the rhythmic system, with its breathing and heart system (the basis of every artistic activity) always works, whether one is asleep or awake, whether tired or fresh, because the rhythmic system has a particular way of working from birth until death. The healthiest educational system, therefore, appeals to the human rhythmic system, which never tires.

You can see, therefore, that all teaching, all education, in order to be faithful to a fundamental knowledge of the human being, must be based on the rhythmic system, must appeal to the students’ rhythmic forces. By bringing flexibility and music into all teaching, always beginning with the pictorial, rhythmical, melodious, and a generally musical element, one may notice something rather surprising—that, as the child progresses as a result of artistic activities, a powerful need is expressed in relation to what was developed through this pictorial and musical understanding of the world. It becomes evident that this artistic approach is too rich for permanent inner satisfaction. Soon—by the age of ten or eleven—students feel the need for a more direct approach and for simplification, because the artistic realm becomes too rich for their continued inner enjoyment. The desire for simplification becomes a natural and elementary need in the students.

Only when this process begins, has the right moment arrived for making the transition from an artistic approach to a more intellectual one. Only after the child has been allowed to experience artistic wealth is it possible to introduce the relative poverty of the intellectual element without the risk of disturbing the child’s physical and soul development. This is why we extract the intellectual from the artistic qualities. On the other hand, if one lets the children perform artistic movements, if one has them move their limbs musically, as in eurythmy (which is being performed here in Ilkley), if one encourages a sculptural, formative activity in the child, as well as musical movements that take hold of the entire body, then a remarkable hunger makes itself felt in the child—a spiritual, soulful, and bodily hunger. At this stage the child’s whole organization demands specific physical exercises, a specific physical hygiene, because a physical hygiene is healthy for the development of the human organism only when a mysterious kind of hunger is felt for the kinds of movements performed in gymnastics. In other words, the students’ feeling of a need for intellectual pursuit and for will activities arises from artistic development.

As a result of this, we have education that does not aim to develop only a particular part of human nature, but aims to develop the whole human being. We are given the possibility, for example, to train the child’s memory for the benefit of the physical organization. In this context, I would like to say something that sounds paradoxical today, but will be fully accepted by physiology in the future: Everything that works spiritually in the child affects the physical organization at the same time, and even enters the corporeality, the physical organism itself. For example, we might see people today who, around their fiftieth year, begin to suffer from metabolic diseases, such as rheumatism. If, as educators, we do not limit our observations of students only to the age of childhood, but recognize that childhood is like a seedbed for all of life to come—like the seed in the life of the plant—then one also recognizes that, when we strain the child’s powers of memory, the effect will bear right through the organism, so that in the forties or fifties metabolic illnesses will appear that the physical organization can no longer correct.

When I suggest these interconnections, you may believe me that in the Waldorf school we make every effort to ensure that the soul and spiritual aspect will have a beneficial effect on the student’s physical constitution. Every lesson is looked at from the hygienic viewpoint because we can see how spirit continues to affect the human organism. Because our pedagogy and our methods rest on our insight into the human being, we are in a position to create our curriculum and our educational goals for the various ages from direct observation of the growing child. We take up only what the child reveals as necessary. Our pedagogy is completely based on applied knowledge of the human being.

This approach makes us confident that our education is accomplished not just from the perspective of childhood, but also from the viewpoint of the entire earthly life of any child in our care. There are people who, for example, believe that one should teach a child only what can be understood through the child’s own observation; now, from a different perspective, this may be a valid opinion, but those who make such a statement ignore the value that the following situation has for life.

Between the age of seven and puberty it is most beneficial for students if their attitude toward the teacher results from a natural authority. Just as, until the age of seven, the ruling principle is imitation, so also between seven and fourteen the ruling principle is the teacher’s authority. At this stage, much of what is as still beyond the student’s comprehension is accepted in the soul simply through trust in the teacher’s authority, through a respect and an attitude of love toward the teacher. This kind of love is one of the most important educational factors.

It is important to know that, at the age of thirty or forty, one may remember something that one had accepted at the age of eight or nine on the strength of a beloved teacher’s authority. Now, as it rises up to the surface again in the soul, it permeates one’s adult consciousness. Through one’s powers, which have matured in the meantime, one begins to understand what was accepted at the age of eight or nine based merely on a beloved teacher’s authority. When such a thing happens, it is a source of human rejuvenation. It really revitalizes the entire human being in later life if, after decades, one eventually understands what one had accepted previously through a natural feeling of authority. This is another example of the need to consider the entire vista of human life and not only what is perceptible in a one-sided way in the present condition.

I would like to give another example from a moral perspective. If a child’s inherent religious feelings are nourished during religious education—feelings that live naturally in every child—the following observation can be made: Are there not people who, having reached a certain age, merely by their presence create a mood of blessing in those around them? We have all experienced how such a person enters a gathering. It is not the words of wisdom such people may speak that radiate this effect of blessing; their presence, tone of voice, and gestures are enough to create a mood of blessing in those around them. Such persons can teach us when we look back to their childhood days, at how they achieved this ability to bring grace and blessing to those around them. In childhood they respected a loved authority with almost religious veneration. No one in old age can be a blessing who has not learned in childhood to look up in loving veneration to a revered person of authority. I would like to express this symbolically in this way: If one wishes to be able in later life to lift one’s hands in blessing, one must have learned to fold them in prayer during childhood. Symbolically, the folded hands of prayer during childhood lead to the blessing hands of old age.

At all times and everywhere we must consider the whole human being. During childhood we plant the seeds for an inner religious sense of morality and for an adulthood strong enough to meet life’s demands. This can be done when one tries to build a pedagogy from full knowledge of the human being, knowledge that is the result of observation, from birth to the grave. Striving toward educational renewal has become prominent and intensive in our time because the greatest social question is really a question of education.

I have spoken only briefly here about the deep inner attitude that, permeated with a universal love for humanity, glows throughout Waldorf pedagogy. Therefore, however weak and imperfect our attempts may be, we nevertheless cherish the hope that an education based on a fuller knowledge of the human being can, at the same time, be an education for all of humanity in the best sense. To work at school through observation of human life may be the best way also to work toward the good of life everywhere. This will certainly be the fundamental question inherent in most of the striving for educational reform in our time.

The fact that we have both boys and girls at the Waldorf school seems to serve two purposes. One is to shape the teaching according to the needs of the whole human being, since with either boys or girls alone, education always tends to become one-sided. The other is to work toward the kind of human interrelationship required especially by today’s society, in which women have either gained their place in society or are trying to obtain it. The Waldorf art of education, therefore, deals with modern social struggles. Much that would remain remote from one gender or the other can thus be developed because boys and girls are educated together.

These lectures have shown that we attach great importance to the development of children’s whole being—in spirit, soul, and body, and not just spirit and soul. This is why we engage the children in physical activity—especially activities that enable them to go into life with understanding. During the handwork lessons in the Waldorf school, you find boys and girls sitting together, all knitting and crocheting. This is absolutely natural, which is proved by the fact that the boys learn to knit and even darn socks with some pleasure. It never occurs to them that such work is inappropriate for men. We do not include such things just so the boys know how to do them, but for the sake of a general understanding of life. One of the main faults of present social conditions is that people have so little understanding of what others do. We must really stop isolating ourselves as individuals and groups and face one another with complete understanding. The main purpose of this kind of handwork is to teach practical skill in many different areas.

Though it may seem inconceivable, in my opinion no one can be a real philosopher who is unable to darn socks or mend one’s clothes when needed. How can you have any intelligent concept of grand cosmic mysteries if you cannot even care for your own footwear? Can we really hope to enter cosmic mysteries, in a truly human sense, if we are incapable of dealing with the things right next to us? I realize that this may seem improbable, but I do believe that philosophers should have some understanding of how boots and such are made; otherwise, we simply adopt abstractions. This is an extreme example, perhaps, but I wanted to show that education must include both an ascent to the highest spiritual levels and descent into physical education and treatment.

From this kind of handwork, children can be guided to an ability to do manual work with intelligence and understanding. At the right age, which is relatively early, our children make their own toys and playthings. You have probably seen some on display here. They carve toys from wood, and thus we bring an element of art into their play. To lead play gradually into the creation of artistic forms, and then to the practical work, as just described, is completely in keeping with the needs of human nature. It is absorbing to find that the children’s artistic sculptural activity turns naturally into making toys. Again, we lead from art as such into art as an aspect of industry. Children are shown how to make simple implements for use in the house, and at the same time learn to use saws, knives, and other cabinetmaking and carpentry tools. In addition to their regular lessons, both boys and girls love to be in our workshops, at work with a knife or a saw or other tools, and they are delighted when they succeed in making something useful. Thus, we stimulate all their instincts for the practical side of life. On the one hand, we develop a sense for practicality, and on the other, for the arts.

It is interesting to observe children when they learn something about the human organism—for example, the sculptural formation of skeleton or muscle formation. If they are given an artistic concept of the structure and functions of the human body, they begin to express, in a sculptural way, their ideas of the shape of some limb, not in a strict sense of imitation, but freely and creatively. Our children are allowed great freedom, even in their practical work, and they are allowed to follow their own sense of discovery. Their souls create wonderful forms once they learn to observe certain things in people or in animals with a truly artistic feeling for nature.

We teach this way, so that whatever children know, they know it with their whole being. Our culture is calculated to make us know everything with our heads. Facts rest in the head as though sitting on a couch; they rest in the head as though in bed; they are asleep, “meaning” only one thing or another. We carry them around, stored up in so many little compartments, which we otherwise prefer to leave alone. In the Waldorf school, the children do not merely “have an idea” in their heads; they feel the idea, since it flows into their whole life of feeling. Their souls live in the sense of the idea, which is not merely a concept but becomes a shaped form. The whole complex of ideas eventually becomes the human form, and finally passes into their volition. Children learn to transform what they think into action. When this happens, we do not find thoughts arising in any one part of the human being, with the will in another part nourished only by instinct. Such a person is really like a wasp. There are wasps that have a head, then a long stalk, and below this the rest of the body. Outwardly, it symbolizes not the modern human physical nature, but the nature of soul and spirit. One has a head, then a long stalk, and one’s volition is an appendage to this. From the spiritual point of view, people today present a strange appearance—the head dangles in the air not knowing what to make of its own ideas.

This can be rectified by continually helping children to permeate their faculties of knowledge with feeling and volition. Modern systems of education have known for a long time that teaching has veered into one-sided intellectualism, that the head dangles in the air, and that a beginning must be made on the other side to develop practical skill and dexterity. But this does not really unite the two elements. Such a union is impossible unless knowledge of itself goes into practical skill, which is also permeated with the quality of thinking and inner understanding of the soul and spiritual participation.

Based on these principles, we can bridge the gap to moral and religious education. I already spoke of this and need only add that everything depends on giving all teaching and gymnastics in a form that makes children experience their physical nature as a revelation of spirit pouring willingly and creatively into their bodies. Children must never feel a separation between spirit and body. The moral and religious elements thus truly come to life in their feelings. The important thing to keep in mind is that, between the change of teeth and puberty, we must never indoctrinate morality and religion into children dogmatically, but by working on their feeling and perception according to this period of life. Children must learn to delight in goodness and to loathe evil, to love goodness and hate wickedness. In history lessons, the great historical figures and the impulses of various eras can be presented so that moral and religious sympathies and antipathies develop in the children. Thus we achieve something of supreme importance.

After puberty, around fifteen or sixteen, a change takes place in the children’s inner nature, leading them from dependence on authority to their own sense of freedom and, hence, to the faculty of independent discernment and understanding. This must claim our closest attention in teaching. If we have awakened in children, before puberty, a feeling for good and evil and for what is divine or not, these feelings will arise from their own inner being afterward. Their understanding, intellect, insight, and power of discernment remain uninfluenced, and they form independent judgments out of their own being. If we begin by telling children that they should do this or not do that, it stays with them throughout their life, and they will always think that such things are right or wrong. Convention will color everything. But those who have been educated properly will not stand within convention but use their own judgment, even regarding morality and religion, and this will develop naturally if it has not been engaged prematurely.

In a Waldorf school, children of fourteen or fifteen are allowed to find their own feet in life. We treat them as equals. They develop discernment, but look back to the authority that we represented and retain the affection they had for us when we were their teachers. Their power of discernment has not been limited if we have worked on their life of feeling properly. Therefore, once children reach fourteen or fifteen, we leave their soul nature and spirit free and, in the higher classes, appeal to their power of discernment and understanding. Such freedom in life cannot be achieved if we instill morality and religion in a dogmatic, canonical fashion. We must have worked solely on the children’s powers of feeling and perception at the right age—between the change of teeth and puberty. The main thing is to enable young adults to find their place in the world with real confidence in their own powers of discernment. Thus, they will sense their real humanity, because their education has been completely human. Those who been unfortunate enough to have lost a leg or an arm are conscious of the damage. Children of fourteen or fifteen who have been educated according to modern methods begin to be aware of a sense of injury if they are not permeated with the qualities of moral judgment and religious feeling. Something seems to be missing in their being. There is no better heritage in the moral and religious sense than to raise children to regard the elements of morality and religion as an integral part of their being, so that they feel fully human because they are permeated with morality and warmed by religious feelings.

This can be achieved only when we work, at the proper age, only on the life of feeling and perception, and do not prematurely give the children intellectual concepts of religion and morality. If we do this before twelve to fourteen, we bring them up to be skeptics—men and women who later develop skepticism instead of healthy insight into the dogmas instilled in them—and not just skepticism in their thinking (the least important), but in feeling, which injures their feeling life. And, finally, there will be skepticism of volition, which brings moral error with it. The point is that our children will become skeptics if we present moral and religious ideals to them dogmatically; such ideals should come to them only through the life of feeling. Then, at the right age, they will awaken their own free religious and moral sense, which becomes part of their very being. They feel that only this can make them fully human. The real aim at Waldorf schools is to raise free human beings who can direct their own lives.

The Waldorf school is an organism complete and whole in itself. If one does not think of it this way, many of its educational principles may be misunderstood. People may think, for example, that if they visit the school two or three times and see what is done on those days, this is enough; they have seen how we teach. Of course, this is not the situation. People will see nothing of any significance in this way. What they see is like a fragment of a picture, from which they then form an opinion of the whole. Suppose you take a fragment of some great picture and show it to someone. How can you form an opinion of the whole from a fragment? The essential feature of Waldorf education is that every activity has its place in the school as a whole. People can understand a Waldorf school much better by studying the principles, its structure, and the living connection between the eighth class and the fourth class, for instance, or between the first and the tenth, instead of looking at an isolated fragment of the teaching. The organization of the school is conceived so that each activity has its place and time and fits into the whole. Individual subjects of instruction are introduced into the school from this perspective.

Here is a brief example how, in principle, eurythmy is given a place in the whole work. It is no good setting out to discover things that may then be introduced into the school activities. It is, as a rule, a wrong principle to invent things that are “good” for children—as happened too often in the Fröbel kindergarten system—and then make them an essential part of education. Nothing should be introduced artificially to the school; everything should arise from life itself. Eurythmy was introduced to the Waldorf school not because we thought that children need gymnastic exercises, and thus set out to invent something. No, indeed! Eurythmy did not arise initially as an educational component at all. It came about around 1912 as the result of certain connections of destiny, but mainly as an art, not as an educational measure. We cannot understand eurythmy as applied in education if we think of it as a “educational” eurythmy, as opposed to eurythmy as an art. Consequently, I would have thought it better to give the eurythmy performances as an art here first, since that would have shown the underlying concept. Because eurythmy is an art, it is part of life, and this part of life has been put into a form that is suitable for educational purposes. Nobody can understand the eurythmy performed by children unless they realize what it will one day become as an art—and what it already is, perhaps more than many people think.

The Waldorf school began in 1919, and, because we found that eurythmy could be applied to educating children, we introduced it at the school. But this is secondary. This connection should be realized in everything else if we would understand the Waldorf school in relation to life. Teachers should have a free, unbiased view of life and be able to educate children for life. The more intimately teachers are connected with the life around them, the better it is for the school. Narrow-minded teachers who know nothing of life except the school itself can do little to develop the full humanity of their students. It is not a matter of a special method of teaching painting, for instance; if we want them to learn to paint, the principles of teaching should be drawn from the living art of painting, not from methods that have been invented especially for the purpose of education. The element of true art must be introduced into schools, not an intellectual substitute. And eurythmy makes it possible to again infuse art into human culture.

In addresses given before eurythmy performances, I explained the sense in which eurythmy is visible speech, expressed in movement. I just want to add something here about these figures, since this will further explain the relationship between eurythmy and art. The idea for the figures originally came from Miss Maryon, but they have been made in forms that I think correct according to the principles of eurythmy. Here (showing a figure), you have a picture of the sound “s.” The figure does in a sense represent a human being, but those who think in terms of today’s conventional notions of a beautiful human form will not find much beauty in this figure. They will see nothing of what would seem beautiful in someone they met in the street. When making such figures, we may also have an eye for beauty of the human form, but the purpose is to represent the expression of eurythmy—the human being in movement. And so, in these figures, we have ignored anything that does not belong to the essence and form of movement itself, the feeling corresponding to a particular movement, and penetrating the basic character expressed by and coloring the movement. When you sing, you take into your whole organism—in a physical sense—the elements that move the soul. The movement occurs entirely within the bounds of the skin and remains invisible, flowing fully into the tone one hears.

The figure you see here (another figure) expresses music in movement. The soul’s feeling is released from the human being, becomes spatial movement, and the artistic element is expressed as movement. We see what we otherwise only hear. Thus, these figures are intended only to suggest what a human being becomes while performing eurythmy, completely apart from any natural attributes. Each movement is indicated by the shape of the carving, and the wood is painted with a fundamental color. We have written on the back of these figures the Steiner’s sketch for a eurythmy figure “s” names of the colors that correspond to the movements themselves and to the feeling inherent in the movements. The way eurythmists on a stage manipulate their veils becomes a continuation of the movement. Once eurythmists have learned to do this with skill, the veil will float freely, be withdrawn, caught up, or given a certain form at the right moment. The movement performed by the limbs is behind the feeling that is also expressed by manipulating the veil; the feeling is expressed in the floating veil. If a eurythmist has true feeling for the movement of arms or legs, the quality will naturally pass into the manipulation of the veil, and the feeling that should accompany movement in the veil will be felt.

When this movement (pointing to the figure) is being performed, the eurythmist must be able to sense that the arm is stretched out lightly in this direction, as though hovering in the air with no inner tension. In the other arm, a eurythmist must feel as though summoning all of one’s muscular force and packing it tightly into the arm. One arm (the right) is held lightly upward; the left arm is tense, and the muscles almost throb. This is how the movement is given character, and this character makes an impression on the spectators. They can feel what the eurythmist is doing.

Now, when the people look at these figures, they may ask, where is the face and where the back of the head. But this has nothing to do with eurythmy. You will occasionally find those who are enthusiastic about the pretty face of a eurythmist, but I can assure you that this is not part of eurythmy. The face on this figure, which looks like it is turned to the left, is in fact facing you, and the color is used to emphasize the fact that the eurythmist should feel “eurythmic force” diffused lightly over the right side of the head, while the left side of the head is tense, imbued with inner strength. It is as though the head becomes asymmetrical—relaxed, as if “fluffed out,” on the one side, and taut on the other.

The movements receive their true character in this way. The figures here express what should become visible in eurythmy. The same principles hold true of all artistic work. One should be able to look away from the substance, content, or prose, and enter the artistic element. A beautiful face on a eurythmist really corresponds to the prose quality. The eurythmist expresses the real beauty in eurythmy when the right side of the head is lightly diffused with eurythmic forces and the left side tense. So we can conceive that a plain face may be beautiful in the sense of eurythmy, and a beautiful face ugly.

In eurythmy, then, we have elements that are true of every art form, as all artists will agree. A great artist is not merely one who can paint a beautiful young face in a pleasing way. A true artist must be able to paint an old, wizened, wrinkled face in such a way that it becomes artistically beautiful. This must underlie all art.

I wanted to add these remarks about the eurythmy you have seen performed here. Let me just say that we introduced eurythmy into our Waldorf school because it affords such a wonderful contrast to ordinary gymnastics. As mentioned, physical exercises are carried out adequately in a Waldorf school, but regarding ordinary physical gymnastics, we elaborate them in such a way that, with every exercise, the children are first given a sense of spatial directions, which are, of course, fundamental. The children feel the directions of space, and then their arms follow it. In their gymnastics, they surrender to space. This is the only healthy basis for gymnastic exercises. Space is conditioned in all directions. To an ordinary, abstract concept of space, there are three directions, which we cannot distinguish. They are present only in geometry. In fact, however, the head is above, the legs below, and this gives us above and below. Then we have right and left. We live in this direction of space when we stretch out our arms. The point is not to find some “absolute direction.” Of course, we can turn this way or that. Then we have a forward and backward direction, front and back. All other directions of space are oriented in relation to these. If we understand space in this way, we can discover truly healthy movements for gymnastics, in which a person surrenders to the laws of space.

In eurythmy, the nature of a movement is determined by the human organism, and we can ask what the soul experiences in one movement or another. This is the principle behind the eurythmy movements for various sounds. What happens as one’s forces flow into the limbs? In ordinary gymnastic exercises, we lend ourselves to space; in eurythmy we move in a way that expresses our being, according to the laws of our organism. The essence of eurythmy is to allow the inner to be expressed outwardly as movement. The essence of gymnastics is to fill the outer with the human being, so that one unites with the outer world.

To educate the whole human being, we can thus derive gymnastics from the polar opposite of eurythmy, in which the movements arise entirely from one’s inner being. In any case, however, even when applied to education, the element of eurythmy itself must be derived from a true grasp of its artistic principles.

In my opinion, the best gymnastic teachers have learned from art. The impulses behind the gymnastics of Greek schools and the Olympic Games were derived from art. And if the consequences of what I have said are fully realized, and all schoolwork is based primarily upon the element of art, we will also apply what I have described through the example of eurythmy to other areas of life and activity. We will not try to invent something for teaching, but imbue the school with real life. And then, out of the school, life will grow within society.

I have said that a school should be an organization in which each individual feature is an integral part of the whole. The threads of all the various activities necessary to the whole life of the Waldorf school are drawn together in the frequent teachers’ meetings. Over the year, I myself am present at the majority of these meetings. They are not held merely to prepare school reports, discuss administrative details, or talk about the punishments to be used when rules are broken. These meetings are really a living “higher education,” since the college of teachers is a kind of permanent training academy. This is because the teachers’ every practical experience in school becomes part of their own education. Teachers will always find something new for themselves and for the college of teachers if they educate themselves through their teaching, gaining a profound psychological insight into the practical side of education on the one hand, and on the other insights into the children’s qualities, characters, and temperaments. All the experiences and knowledge acquired from the teaching are pooled at these meetings. Thus, in spirit and soul, the college of teachers becomes a whole, in which each member knows what the others are doing, what experience has taught them, and what progress they have made as the result of their work in the classroom with the children. In effect, the college of teachers becomes a central organ from which the whole life of practical teaching flows, helping teachers to maintain their freshness and vitality. Perhaps the best effect of all is that the meetings enable teachers to maintain their inner vitality, instead of growing old in soul and spirit. It must be the teacher’s constant aim to maintain a youthful freshness of soul and spirit, but this cannot be done unless real life flows through a central organ, just as human blood flows into and out of the heart. This is concentrated as a system of soul and spirit forces in the life that teachers work for in their meetings at the Waldorf school. Those meetings are held each week, and, as I said, sometimes I am present.

Now I want to mention something that seems trivial, but is important. As I said, we have boys and girls together in our classes. It naturally happens that, in some classes, girls are in the majority, in others the boys, and there are others in which the numbers are equal. A rationalist may visit these classes and spout all sorts of intellectual opinions, which nevertheless usually fail to hit the nail on the head regarding real life. If we teach in a class in which girls are in the majority, matters are not at all the same as in those classes where the number of boys and girls is the same, or where boys are in the majority. The classes are not given their individual character according to what the boys and girls do together—perhaps also the silly things they do together—but by intangible elements that wholly escape external, intellectual observation. Very interesting things come to light when we study this intangible life in the class. Of course, the teachers must not enter their classes and, stepping back with folded arms, “study” their students. If teachers bring enough vitality and devotion to their work, then, by simply taking the students with them in the right way in sleep, they wake up the next morning with significant discoveries about the previous day’s events at school; they become aware of this process in a fairly short time, and all that should happen in this way will come about natually.

The very center and essence of the school are the teachers’ meetings; likewise, at the periphery, the parents’ evenings at the Waldorf school are extremely important. At least once a month—or regularly, anyway—we try to arrange evenings when the children’s parents can gather and meet with the teachers, so that a link can be established with the children’s home life. We think that the parents’ understanding of their children’s education is very important. Because we do not make up programs or schedules for our teaching but take it from life itself, we cannot adopt an attitude that claims to do the right thing, based on a schedule devised by some intelligent authority. We must come to sense what is right through our living interaction with the parents who sent their children to us. The echoes of these parents’ evenings touch the teachers and give them what they need to maintain their own inner vitality.

Living beings do not live merely within their skin; nor do human beings exist only within the space of their skin. We always have a certain amount of air within us, and before we breathed in, it was outside and belonged to the atmosphere. And it is soon breathed out again. A living being belongs to the whole as a member of the universe, and our existence is unthinkable apart from it. And human beings are not isolated units in society, but integral members of it. We cannot live unless we are related to society just as intimately as our physical organism is related to the air and water that surrounds it. And, in this sense, it requires little to show how much depends on the school.

To illustrate such things, I generally try to use examples from ordinary life instead of something made up. Two days ago I entered a room here and observed a report from the Sunday school teachers. The first sentence refers to a speech at the yearly meeting of the Sunday School Union, given by a chairperson, an eminent man. He said that the Sunday schools had gradually isolated themselves from other religions in the world—that, in general, there is too little knowledge of religions. I read this on the bulletin board in the next room, and it is an important indication of what society needs for its inner vitalization today. I might as easily find the same sentiments elsewhere or in some leaflet handed out in the street. Everything tells the same story—that men and women today are not brought up with a broad view of life.

A broad view of life is essential to the Waldorf teachers, however, and they must communicate this to their students, so that education leads to broad interests in life. Everyone is so enclosed and confined today. Just consider professional training, which causes people to become almost ashamed of knowing anything beyond the pigeonhole of their own profession. We are always told to seek out experts or specialists, but the most important thing is to be bighearted. People should be able to participate with their hearts and souls in culture and society as a whole. This is what we attempt through the principles of education. First we imbue our teachers—in a Waldorf school, the first thing has been to educate the teachers—and then the students through the teachers. The students are our great hope and goal; our purpose in every measure we adopt is that our students will carry its fruits into life in the right way.

That, my dear friends, is the attitude behind the art of education I have been describing. It is based fully on this principle. Our educational measures must arise from the human being, so that children develop fully in body, soul, and spirit, and as adults find their place in life, having grown, in body, soul, and spirit, within a religious, ethical, artistic, and intellectual life that enabled them to develop the virtues best suited to a life with other human beings. Essentially, every educational ideal must be based on this principle, and I am indeed grateful to those who made it possible for me to speak here on the subject. I am sure you realized now that, although the principles of Waldorf education arose in one country, there is no question of any nationalism; rather, it is a matter of internationalism in the best sense, because it is a matter of the universal human. Our aim is to educate human beings with broad, rich interests—not men and women who belong to a particular class, nation, or profession. So I think you will agree that, although this art of education emanates from one country, it is permissible to speak of it in other lands, too.

It is an even greater pleasure to discover that, in connection with the subject of these lectures, a committee was formed to establish a school and bring Waldorf education to this country in a truly practical way. When such schools are established today, we must create model schools as patterns, and this applies to Waldorf schools. This impulse cannot be truly fruitful until its principles are recognized by the broadest possible public opinion.

I recall that, in my early youth, I once saw in the comics a joke about architectural plans. (I mentioned something of the sort yesterday.) It said that one should not go to an architect, who would make all kinds of drawings and detailed calculations and then work to assemble the materials artistically. Rather, one should go to an ordinary mason who simply lays one brick upon another. This attitude still dominates the educational world. People tend to regard an architect’s work as abstract, and they would like to see bricks laid upon bricks, with no concern about the principles behind the whole structure.

In any case, I am sincerely grateful to find such wonderful understanding and interest among you who have attended these lectures. First, let me thank Miss Beverley and her helpers; then our Waldorf teachers and other friends who have worked so hard and with such deep understanding; and also those who have added an artistic element to our conference. I am indeed grateful to all those whose interest and sincerity have brought this conference into being, which I hope will bear fruit through the new committee. As this interest spreads, we will be better able to serve the true principles of education. Your living cooperation demonstrates the fact that you have this at heart. I have given these lectures not only from the intellect, but also from a profound interest in the principles of true education.

And thus I would like to close these lectures with a parting greeting to you all.

I have already expressed my gratitude to the committee, to Miss Beverley, and to all of you who have devoted the past two weeks to studying our subject. Rest assured that a warm sense of gratitude will remain with me as a pleasant memory of this lecture course. Now, I just want to add a few words to the perspectives expressed in the lectures. Most of you are familiar with the relationship between Waldorf educational principles and spiritual science as it exists in the anthroposophic movement, and perhaps as we close this conference you will allow me to say a few words on this subject.

People today still have an erroneous view of the anthroposophic movement, perhaps because one of my wishes—however impractical—cannot be fulfilled. It is true that the Waldorf movement grew out of the anthroposophic movement, but it is equally true that I would truly prefer to give a different name to that movement every week. I realize that it would be terribly confusing, but I would very much like to do this, because names actually do a great deal of harm today. The confusion this would create in people’s minds is obvious—if letterheads were changed each week, and people were to receive a letter printed with the previous week’s name, “since superseded.” Nevertheless, it would be very good for the anthroposophic movement if it had no permanent name, because most people today are concerned only with names and never get to the subject itself.

People can turn to a Greek lexicon and, in their own language, invent words to express anthroposophy, and thus invent an idea of what spiritual science is and judge us accordingly. People form an opinion about us according to their idea of the name, thus avoiding the trouble of looking into the substance of spiritual science.

The book table at the door of this hall has disappeared, but I assure you that I shuddered every day as I arrived and saw the mass of literature there. I would be happy if there were less of it, but people must study spiritual science, of course—there is that. One cannot look only a name, and this is why it would be such a good thing if we were spared the need to have one. Obviously, that would not work, but in a lecture course about applying spiritual science to life, I think it shows how far we are from any sectarianism or any desire to fill people’s heads with dogma. The only goal of spiritual science is to acquire knowledge of the essence of cosmic truths. And if there is any wish to participate constructively in evolution, it is essential to truly understand the world’s events.

It is sad that there is so little inclination to look into the course of world events today, but this is in fact the purpose of spiritual science. This, too, is why we can speak of special areas such as education without beginning with a scheduled program or the like. In establishing the Waldorf school, we saw that it is not a matter of introducing the rigid dogma that spiritual science is believed to represent; rather, we never introduce anything of spiritual science as it is intended for adults. We realized that spiritual science must live within us as a power that leads to a fresh understanding of human nature and an unbiased observation of the world, which in turn leads to free activity.

Not long ago, I read an extraordinary criticism; it was very antagonistic. There are many such criticisms, and I have no wish to discuss them in detail. This particular critic said that I seem to make efforts to be unbiased—but the words implied a serious criticism. I would have thought it was a common duty today—especially in spiritual matters—to work toward open-minded knowledge, but apparently it can be a matter for severe reproach. Nevertheless, I think that the subject of education in particular can lead to ready understanding between the Continent and England, and when I see what your attitude has been toward these lectures, I consider it as a very good sign. When trying to describe our time, people like to use the abstract phrase, “We are living in an age of transition.” Of course, every age is an age of transition—always from one period to the next. The point is, however, what is it that is in transition? At the present time, all kinds of signs indicate that we are indeed caught up in the process of a grand transition.

Perhaps the best way to explain this is to lead your thoughts back to the stage of spiritual evolution reached in England during the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, those who claimed to be cultured spoke French. English consisted of dialects that did not enter the general culture of the people, and the language of science was Latin. If, for example, we want to study the general nature of education in England during the fourteenth century, around 1364, we can do so from Higden’s Polychronycon, which was published at the time. Written in Latin, the book makes it clear that the medium of culture was Latin. When that book was written, the language of culture was Latin, but schools were being established in which the national language was finding its way into education (and this was also true of other countries in Europe). Schools were established in Winchester and Oxford, in which the national tongue was already in use. In the late fourteenth century, we find the important transition from Latin—an international language—to the national tongue.

Similar transitions occurred earlier or later in other regions of the civilized world, and this phenomenon has great significance. Insofar as England is concerned, we can place it in the late fourteenth century. When Higden wrote his book in 1364, he was able to tell us that the Latin tongue was still the universal medium for education. When a certain Trevisa translated it into English in 1385, we are told that English had been introduced into schools. Thus, we see the transition from the international language of Latin, which cultured people all over the world used to discuss matters of education, to the age when national language rises above the level of dialect to become, for various peoples, the medium for education. This is a significant transition.

According to the anthroposophic view, we can describe it as a transition from the age of the intellectual soul, in which people felt more connected to the universe, to that of the spiritual soul, in which human beings are to become aware of their free inner power of resolve and action. This transition is the essence of modern civilization; this alone could institute the great cosmic process in which we are still immersed today.

The effects of this emerging national language did not enter human souls and hearts immediately. Initially, in England, too, the Renaissance movement, or “Humanist” movement, began to flow north from the south. In its early days, the Humanist movement indeed aspired to the qualities of the spiritual soul, but never reached the point of real understanding. Thus, it was established that, to be truly human, one must absorb the humanist, classical culture. This struggle for human freedom and the exercise of inner, spiritual activity has continued for centuries, right up to our own day. But increasingly, the needs of civilized humanity become obvious.

In the age before this urge toward spiritual soul, language itself gave rise to the element of internationalism, making it possible for the cultured people of every country to work with one another. Language was the international element. We can place the actual transition in the second half of the fourteenth century, when this language could no longer serve as a medium for international understanding. There was an urge within human beings to develop spiritual activity from depths of their own being, and they resorted to national language, which made it increasingly necessary to understand at a level higher than that of language or speech.

We need spirituality that no longer arises from mere language, but issues more directly from the soul. A true realization of spiritual science that connects history with the present time shows that its purpose is to find, throughout the world, an international medium of understanding, through which people can find their way to one another—one that transcends the level of language.

All interaction between human beings is incorporated by the faculty of speech into sounds communicated through the air. In speech, our being is truly active in the material world. If we understand one another at a level beyond speech by means of deeper elements in the soul—through thoughts carried by feeling and warmed by the heart—then we have an international medium of understanding, but we need heart for it to come into being. We must find the path to human spirit at a level beyond speech. The search for a language of thought—and everything related to philosophy, education, religion, and art—is the purpose of the anthroposophic movement during the present period of history.

Ordinary speech lives and moves through the medium of air and exists in the material world. The language that spiritual science looks for will move through the pure element of light passing from soul to soul and heart to heart—and this is not just a figure of speech. Modern civilization will need such a medium of understanding, not just for the matters of high culture, but also for everyday life. Before this can be realized, of course, many different kinds of conferences will be held, but during recent times, the fruitfulness of such congresses for healing human beings has not been very apparent. The anthroposophic movement would like to intercede for a true healing of humankind, which can arise only through mutual understanding. Because of this, we try to understand our own age within the context of history, so that we can become human in the true sense—human beings with a fully aware soul, as was true of another stage of evolution, when Latin was the medium of international understanding. The function once served by Latin must now be taken up by universal human ideas, through which we can find our way to other people all over the earth.

Anything that lives in the world requires soul and spirit as well as a physical body. In the very truest sense, spiritual science would be the soul and spirit of the “body” as it has entered our global civilization as the world economy and the other worldly activities. Spiritual science does not disdain or avoid the most practical areas of life; it would gladly infuse them with the only element that can lead to real progress in human evolution.

I am so infinitely grateful that you wish to understand how, in this sense, our educational attempts are based on the anthroposophic movement as a true expression of the present stage of evolution. I am grateful, too, for your interest in the illuminations and shades of meaning I have tried to introduce, in addition to speaking of the historical significance of the aims of this art of education. And I especially thank you for your cordial feelings toward a course of lectures given with the object of describing the goals of Waldorf education toward the progress of civilization as it confronts today’s needs.

I have tried to describe how Waldorf education points to the deepest needs of humankind in the present age, and, as I say, your sympathetic understanding will indeed remain in my heart and soul as a very good memory of this course.

The Chair was taken by Miss Margaret McMillan, who gave a stirring address, and Dr. Steiner followed on.

My first words must be a reply to the kind greeting given by Miss Beverley to Frau Doctor Steiner and myself, and I can assure you that we deeply appreciate the invitation to give this course of lectures. I shall try to show what Anthroposophy has to say on the subject of education and to describe the attempt already made in the Waldorf School at Stuttgart to apply the educational principles arising out of Anthroposophy. It is a pleasure to come to the North of England to speak on a subject which I consider so important, and it gives me all the greater joy to think that I am speaking not only to those who have actually arranged this course but to many who are listening for the first time to lectures on education in the light of Anthroposophy. I hope, therefore, that more lies behind this Conference than the resolve of those who organized it, for I think it may be taken as evidence that our previous activities are bearing fruit in current world-strivings.

English friends of Anthroposophy were with us at a Conference held at Christmas, last year, when the Goetheanum (at Dornach, Switzerland)—since taken from us by fire—was still standing. The Conference was brought about by Mrs. Mackenzie, the author of a fine book on the educational principles laid down by Hegel, and the sympathetic appreciation expressed there justifies the hope that it is not, after all, so very difficult to find understanding that transcends the limits of nationality. What I myself said about education at the Conference did not, of course, emanate from the more intellectualistic philosophy of Hegel, but from Anthroposophy, the nature of which is wholly spiritual. And indeed Mrs. Mackenzie, too, has seen how, while fully reckoning with Hegel, something yet more fruitful for education can be drawn where intellectuality is led over into the spiritual forces of Anthroposophy.

Then I was able to speak of our educational principles and their practical application a second time last year, in the ancient university of Oxford. And perhaps I am justified in thinking that those lectures, which dealt with the relation of education to social life, may have induced a number of English educationists to visit our Waldorf School at Stuttgart. It was a great joy to welcome them there, and we were delighted to hear that they were impressed with our work and were following it with interest. During the visit the idea of holding this Summer Course on education seems to have arisen. Its roots, therefore, may be said to lie in previous activities and this very fact gives one the right confidence and courage as we embark on the lectures. Courage and confidence are necessary when one has to speak of matters so unfamiliar to the spiritual life of to-day and in face of such strong opposition. More especially are they necessary when one attempts to explain principles that seek to approach, in a creative sense, the greatest artistic achievement of the Cosmos—man himself.

Those who visited us this year at Stuttgart will have realized how essentially Waldorf School education gets to grips with the deepest fibres of modern life. The educational methods applied there can really no longer be described by the word ‘Pedagogy’ a treasured word which the Greeks learnt from Plato and the Platonists who had devoted themselves so sincerely to all educational questions. Pedagogy is, indeed, no longer an apt term to-day, for it is an a priori expression of the one-sidedness of its ideals, and those who visited the Waldorf School will have realized this from the first. It is not, of course, unusual to-day to find boys and girls educated together, in the same classes and taught in the same way, and I merely mention this to show you that in this respect, too, the methods of the Waldorf School are in line with recent developments.

What does the word ‘Pedagogy’ suggest? The ‘Pedagogue’ is a teacher of boys. This shows us at once that in ancient Greece education was very one-sided. One half of humanity was excluded from serious education. To the Greek, the boy alone was man and the girl must stay in the background when it was a question of serious education. The pedagogue was a teacher of boys, concerned only with that sex.

In our time, the presence of girl-pupils in the schools is no longer unusual, although indeed it involved a radical change from customs by no means very ancient. Another feature at the Waldorf School is that in the teaching staff no distinction of sex is made—none, at least, until we come to the very highest classes. Having as our aim a system of education in accord with the needs of the present day, we had first of all to modify much that was included in the old term ‘Pedagogy.’ So far I have only mentioned one of its limitations, but speaking in the broadest sense it must be admitted that for some time now there has been no real knowledge of man in regard to education and teaching. Indeed, many one-sided views have been held in the educational world, not only that of the separation of the sexes.

Can it truly be said that a man could develop in the fullest sense of the term when educated according to the old principles? Certainly not! To-day we must first seek understanding of the human being in his pure, undifferentiated essence. The Waldorf School was founded with this aim in view. The first idea was the education of children whose parents were working in the Waldorf-Astoria Factory, and as the Director was a member of the Anthroposophical Society, he asked me to supervise the undertaking. I myself could only give the principles of education on the basis of Anthroposophy. And so, in the first place, the Waldorf School arose as a general school for the workers' children. It was only ‘anthroposophical’ in the sense that the man who started it happened to be an Anthroposophist. Here then, we have an educational institution arising on a social basis, seeking to found the whole spirit and method of its teaching upon Anthroposophy. It was not a question of founding an ‘anthroposophical’ school. On the contrary, we hold that because Anthroposophy can at all times efface itself, it is able to institute a school on universal-human principles instead of upon the basis of social rank, philosophical conceptions of any other specialised line of thought.

This may well have occurred to those who visited the Waldorf School and it may also have led to the invitation to give these present lectures. And in this introductory lecture, when I am not yet speaking of education, let me cordially thank all those who have arranged this Summer Course. I would also thank them for having arranged performances of Eurhythmy which has already become an integral part of Anthroposophy. At the very beginning let me express this hope: A Summer Course has brought us together. We have assembled in a beautiful spot in the North of England, far away from the busy life of the winter months. You have given up your time of summer recreation to listen to subjects that will play an important part in the life of the future and the time must come when the spirit uniting us now for a fortnight during the summer holidays will inspire all our winter work. I cannot adequately express my gratitude for the fact that you have dedicated your holidays to the study of ideas for the good of the future. Just as sincerely as I thank you for this now, so do I trust that the spirit of our Summer Course may be carried on into the winter months—for only so can this Course bear real fruit.

I should like to proceed from what Miss McMillan said so impressively yesterday in words that bore witness to the great need of our time for moral impulses to be sought after if the progress of civilization is to be advanced through Education.

When we admit the great need that exists to-day for moral and spiritual impulses in educational methods and allow the significance of such impulses to work deeply in our hearts, we are led to the most fundamental problems in modern spiritual life—problems connected with the forms assumed by our culture and civilization in the course of human history. We are living in an age when certain spheres of culture, though standing in a measure side by side, are yet separated from one another. In the first place we have all that man can learn of the world through knowledge—communicated, for the most part, by the intellect alone. Then there is the sphere of art, where man tries to give expression to profound inner experiences, imitating with his human powers, a divine creative activity. Again we have the religious strivings of man, wherein he seeks to unite his own existence with the life of the universe. Lastly, we try to bring forth from our inner being impulses which place us as moral beings in the civilized life of the world. In effect we confront these four branches of culture: knowledge, art, religion, morality. But the course of human evolution has brought it about that these four branches are developing separately and we no longer realize their common origin. It is of no value to criticize these conditions; rather should we learn to understand the necessities of human progress.

To-day, therefore, we will remind ourselves of the beginnings of civilization. There was an ancient period in human evolution when science, art, religion and the moral life were one. It was an age when the intellect had not yet developed its present abstract nature and when man could solve the riddles of existence by a kind of picture-consciousness. Mighty pictures stood there before his soul—pictures which in the traditional forms of myth and saga have since come down to us. Originally they proceeded from actual experience and a knowledge of the spiritual content of the universe. There was indeed an age when in this direct, inner life of imaginative vision man could perceive the spiritual foundations of the world of sense. And what his instinctive imagination thus gleaned from the universe, he made substantial, using earthly matter and evolving architecture, sculpture, painting, music and other arts. He embodied with rapture the fruits of his knowledge in outer material forms. With his human faculties man copied divine creation, giving visible form to all that had first flowed into him as science and knowledge. In short, his art mirrored before the senses all that his forces of knowledge had first assimilated. In weakened form we find this faculty once again in Goethe, when out of inner conviction he spoke these significant words: “Beauty is a manifestation of the secret laws of Nature, without which they would remain for ever hidden.” And again: “He before whom Nature begins to unveil her mysteries is conscious of an irresistible yearning for art—Nature's worthiest expression.”

Such a conception shows that man is fundamentally predisposed to view both science and art as two aspects of one and the same truth. This he could do in primeval ages, when knowledge brought him inner satisfaction as it arose in the forms of ideas before his soul and when the beauty that enchanted him could be made visible to his senses in the arts—for experiences such as these were the essence of earlier civilizations.

What is our position to-day? As a result of all that intellectual abstractions have brought in their train we build up scientific systems of knowledge from which, as far as possible, art is eliminated. It is really almost a crime to introduce the faintest suggestion of art into science, and anyone who is found guilty of this in a scientific book is at once condemned as a dilettante. Our knowledge claims to be strictly dispassionate and objective; art is said to have nothing in common with objectivity and is purely arbitrary. A deep abyss thus opens between knowledge and art, and man no longer finds any means of crossing it. When he applies the science that is valued because of its freedom from art, he is led indeed to a marvellous knowledge of Nature—but of Nature devoid of life. The wonderful achievements of science are fully acknowledged by us, yet science is dumb before the mystery of man. Look where you will in science to-day, you will find wonderful answers to the problems of outer Nature, but no answers to the riddle of man. The laws of science cannot grasp him. Why is this? Heretical as it sounds to modern ears, this is the reason. The moment we draw near to the human being with the laws of Nature, we must pass over into the realm of art. A heresy indeed, for people will certainly say: “That is no longer science. If you try to understand the human being by the artistic sense, you are not following the laws of observation and strict logic to which you must always adhere.” However emphatically it may be held that this approach to man is unscientific because it makes use of the artistic sense—man is none the less an artistic creation of Nature. All kinds of arguments may be advanced to the effect that this way of artistic understanding is thoroughly unscientific, but the fact remains that man cannot be grasped by purely scientific modes of cognition. And so—in spite of all our science—we come to a halt before the human being. Only if we are sufficiently unbiased can we realize that scientific intellectuality must here be allowed to pass over into the domain of art. Science itself must become art if we would approach the secrets of man's being.

Now if we follow this path with all our inner forces of soul, not only observing in an outwardly artistic sense, but taking the true path, we can allow scientific intellectuality to flow over into what I have described as ‘Imaginative Knowledge’ in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. This ‘Imaginative Knowledge’—to-day an object of such suspicion and opposition—is indeed possible when the kind of thinking that otherwise gives itself up passively, and increasingly so, to the outer world is roused to a living and positive activity. The difficulty of speaking of these things to-day is not that one is either criticizing or upholding scientific habits of thought which are peculiar to our age; rather does the difficulty consist in the fact that fundamentally one must touch upon matters which concern the very roots of our present civilization. There is an increasing tendency to-day to give oneself up to the mere, observation of outer events, to allow thoughts passively to follow their succession, avoiding all conscious inner activity.

This state of things began with the demand for material proofs of spiritual matters. Take the case of a lecture on spiritual subjects. Visible evidence is out of the question, because words are the only available media—one cannot summon the invisible by some magical process. All that can be done is to stimulate and assume that the audience will inwardly energize their thinking into following the indications given by the words. Yet nowadays it will frequently happen that many of the listeners—I do not, of course, refer to those who are sitting in this hall—begin to yawn, because they imagine that thinking ought to be passive, and then they fall asleep because they are not following the subject actively. People like everything to be demonstrated to the eye, illustrated by means of lantern-slides or the like, for then it is not necessary to think at all. Indeed, they cannot think. That was the beginning, and it has gone still further. In a performance of “Hamlet,” for instance, one must follow the plot, and also the spoken word, in order to understand it. But to-day the drama is deserted for the cinema, where one need not exert oneself in any way; the pictures roll off the machine and can be watched quite inertly. And so man's inner activity of thought has gradually waned. But it is precisely this which must be retained. Yet when once the nature of this inner activity is understood, it will be realized that thinking is not merely a matter of stimulus from outside, but a force living in the very being of man.

The kind of thinking current in our modern civilization is only one aspect of this force of thought. If we inwardly observe it, from the outer side as it were, it is revealed as the force that builds up the human being from childhood. Before this can be understood, an inner, plastic force that transforms abstract thought into pictures must come into play. Then, after the necessary efforts have been made, we reach the stage I have Called in my book, the beginning of meditation. At this point we not only begin to lead mere cleverness over into art, but thought is raised into Imagination. We stand in a world of Imagination, knowing that it is not a creation of our own fancy, but an actual, objective world. We are fully conscious that although we do not as yet possess this objective world itself in Imagination, we have indeed a true picture of it. And now the point is to realize that we must get beyond the picture.

Strenuous efforts are necessary if we would master this inner creative thinking that does not merely contain pictures of fantasy, but pictures bearing their own reality within them. Then, however, we must next be able to eliminate the whole of this creative activity and thus accomplish an inwardly moral act. For this indeed constitutes an act of inner morality: when all the efforts described in my book to reach this active thinking in pictures have been made, when all the forces of soul have been applied and the powers of Self strained to their very utmost, we then must be able to eliminate all we have thus attained. In his own being man must have developed the highest fruits of this thinking that has been raised to the level of meditation and then be capable of selflessness. He must be able to eliminate all that has been thus acquired. For to have nothing is not the same as to have gained nothing. If he has made every effort to strengthen the Self by his own will so that finally his consciousness can be emptied-a spiritual world surges into his consciousness and being and he realizes that spiritual forces of cognition are needed for knowledge of the spiritual world. Active picture-thinking may be called Imagination. When the spiritual world pours into the consciousness that has in turn been emptied by dint of tremendous effort, man is approaching the mode of mode of knowledge known as true Inspiration. Having experienced Imagination, we may through an inner denial of self come to comprehend the spiritual world lying behind the two veils of outer Nature and of man.

I will now endeavour to show you how from this point we are led over to the spiritual life of religion.

Let me draw your attention to the following.—Inasmuch as Anthroposophy strives for true Imagination, it leads not only to knowledge or to art that in itself is of the nature of a picture, but to the spiritual reality contained in the picture. Anthroposophy bridges the gulf between knowledge and art in such a way that at a higher level, suited to modern life and the present age, the unity of science and art which humanity has abandoned can enter civilization once again. This unity must be re-attained, for the schism between science and art has disrupted the very being of man. To pass from the state of disruption to unity and inner harmony—it is for this above all that modern man must strive.

Thus far I have spoken of the harmony between science and art. I will now develop the subject further, in connection with religion and morality.

Knowledge that thus draws the creative activity of the universe into itself can flow directly into art, and this same path from knowledge to art can be extended and continued. It was so continued through the powers of the old imaginative knowledge of which I have spoken, which also found the way, without any intervening cleft, into the life of religion. He who applied himself to this kind of knowledge—primitive and instinctive though it was in early humanity—was aware that he acquired it by no external perceptions, for in his thinking and knowing he sensed divine life within him, he felt that spiritual powers were at work in his own creative activity enabling him to raise to greater holiness all that had been impressed into the particular medium of his art. The power born in his soul as he embodied the Divine-Spiritual in outer material substance could then extend into acts wherein he was fully conscious that he, as man, was expressing the will of divine ordnance. He felt himself pervaded by divine creative power, and as the path was found through the fashioning of material substance, art became—by way of ritual—a form of divine worship. Artistic creation was sanctified in the divine office. Art became ritual—the glorification of the Divine—and through the medium of material substance offered sacrifice to the Divine Being in ceremonial and ritual. And as man thus bridged the gulf between Art and Religion there arose a religion in full harmony with knowledge and with art. Albeit primitive and instinctive, this knowledge was none the less a true picture, and as such it could lead human deeds to become, in the acts of ritual, a direct portrayal of the Divine.

In this way the transition from art to religion was made possible. Is it still possible with our present-day mode of knowledge? The ancient clairvoyant perception had revealed to man the spiritual in every creature and process of Nature, and by surrender and devotion to the spirit within the nature-processes, the spiritual laws of the Cosmos passed over and were embodied in ritual and cult.

How do we “know” the world to-day? Once more, to describe is better than criticism, for as the following lectures will show, the development of our present mode of knowledge was a necessity in the history of mankind. To-day I am merely placing certain suggestive thoughts before you. We have gradually lost our spiritual insight into the being and processes of Nature. We take pride in eliminating the spirit in our observation of Nature and finally reach such hypothetical conceptions as attribute the origin of our planet to the movements of a primeval nebula. Mechanical stirrings in this nebula are said to be the origin of all the kingdoms of Nature, even so far as man. And according to these same laws—which govern our whole “objective” mode of thinking, this earth must finally end through a so-called extinction of warmth. All ideas achieved by man, having proceeded from a kind of Fata Morgana, will disappear, until at the end there will remain only the tomb of earthly existence.

If the truth of this line of thought be recognized by science and men are honest and brave enough to face its inevitable consequences, they cannot but admit that all religious and moral life is also a Fata Morgana and must so remain! Yet the human being cannot endure this thought, and so must hold fast to the remnants of olden times, when religion and morality still lived in harmony with knowledge and with art. Religion and morality to-day are not direct creations of man's innermost being. They rest on tradition, and are a heritage from ages when the instinctive life of man was filled with revelation, when God—and the moral world in Him—were alike manifest. Our strivings for knowledge to-day can reveal neither God nor a moral world. Science comes to the end of the animal species and man is cast out. Honest inner thinking can find no bridge over the gulf fixed between knowledge and the religious life.

All true religions have sprung from Inspiration. True, the early form of Inspiration was not so conscious as that to which we must now attain, yet it was there instinctively, and rightly do the religions trace their origin back to it. Such faiths as will no longer recognize living inspiration and revelation from the spirit in the immediate present have to be content with tradition. But such faiths lack all inner vitality, all direct motive-power of religious life. This motive-power and vitality must be re-won, for only so can our social organism be healed.

I have shown how man must regain a knowledge that passes by way of art to Imagination, and thence to Inspiration. If he re-acquires all that flows down from the inspirations of a spiritual world into human consciousness, true religion will once again appear. And then intellectual discussion about the nature of Christ will cease, for through Inspiration it will be known in truth that the Christ was the human bearer of a Divine Being Who had descended from spiritual worlds into earthly existence. Without super-sensible knowledge there can be no understanding of the Christ. If Christianity is again to be deeply rooted in humanity, the path to super-sensible knowledge must be rediscovered. Inspiration must again impart a truly religious life to mankind in order that knowledge—derived no longer merely from the observation of natural laws—may find no abyss dividing it alike from art and religion. Knowledge, art, religion—these three will be in harmony.

Primeval man was convinced of the presence of God in human deeds when he made his˃ art a divine office and when a consciousness of the fire glowing in his heart as Divine Will pervaded the acts of ritual. And when the path from outer objective knowledge to Inspiration is found once again, true religion will flow from Inspiration and modern man will be permeated—as was primeval man—with a God-given morality. In those ancient days man felt: “If I have my divine office, if I share in divine worship, my whole inner being is enriched; God lives not only in the temple but in the whole of my life.”

To make the presence of God imminent in the world—this is true morality. Nature cannot lead man to morality. Only that which lifts him above Nature, filling him with the Divine-Spiritual—this alone can lead man to morality. Through the Intuition which comes to him when he finds his way to the spirit, he can fill his innermost being with a morality that is at once human and divine. The attainment of Inspiration thus rebuilds the bridge once existing instinctively in human civilization between religion and morality. As knowledge leads upwards through art to the heights of super-sensible life, so, through religious worship, spiritual heights are brought down to earthly existence, and we can permeate it with pure, deep-rooted morality—a morality that is an act of conscious experience. Thus will man himself become the individual expression of a moral activity that is an inner motive power. Morality will be a creation of the individual himself, and the last abyss between religion and morality will be bridged. The intuition pervading primitive man as he enacted his ritual will be re-created in a new form, and a morality truly corresponding with modern conditions will arise from the religious life of our day. We need this for the renewal of our civilization. We need it in order that what to-day is mere heritage, mere tradition may spring again into life. This pure, primordial impulse is necessary for our complicated social life that is threatening to spread chaos through the world. We need a harmony between knowledge, art, religion, and morality. The earth-born knowledge which has given us our science of to-day must take on a new form and lead us through Inspiration and the arts to a realization of the super-sensible in the life of religion. Then we shall indeed be able to bring down the super-sensible to the earth again, to experience it in religious life and to transform it into will in social existence. Only when we see the social question as one of morality and religion can we really grapple with it, and this we cannot do until the moral and religious life arises from spiritual knowledge. The revival of spiritual knowledge will enable man to accomplish what he needs—a link between later phases of evolution and its pure, instinctive origin. Then he will know what is needed for the healing of humanity—harmony between science, art, religion, and morality.

That the subject of education is exercising the mind and soul of all men at the present day is not to be questioned. It is everywhere apparent. If, then, an art of education is advocated here which is derived directly from spiritual life and spiritual perception, it is its inner nature rather than the urgency of its outward appeal which differentiates it from the reforms generally demanded to-day.

There is a general feeling nowadays that the conditions of civilization are in rapid transition, and that for the sake of the organization of our social life we must pay heed to the many new changes and developments of modern times. Already there is a feeling—a feeling which only a short time ago was rarely present—that the child of to-day is a very different being from the child of a recent past, and that it is much more difficult nowadays for age to come to an understanding with youth than was the case in earlier times.

The art of education, however, of which I have here to speak, is concerned rather with the inner development of human civilization. It is concerned with what has changed the souls of men in the course of ages, with the evolution through which, in the course of hundreds, nay even thousands of years, these souls have passed. The attempt will be made to explore the means by which, in this particular age, we may reach the being of man as it lives in the child. It is generally admitted that the successive periods of time in Nature can be differentiated. We need only think of the way in which man takes these differentiations into account in daily life. Take the example nearest to hand—the day. Our relation to the processes of Nature is quite different in the morning, at noon, and at night, and we should think it absurd to ignore the course of the day. We should also think it absurd not to pay due heed to the development revealed in human life itself—to ignore, for instance, the fact that an old man's needs are different from those of a child. In the case of Nature we respect this fact of development. But man has not yet accustomed himself to respect the fact of the general evolution of humanity. We do not take account of the fact that centuries ago there lived a humanity very different from the humanity of the Middle Ages or of the present time. We must learn to know the nature of the inner forces of human beings if our treatment of children at the present time is to be practical and not merely theoretical. We must investigate from within those forces which hold sway in this present day.

The principles of Waldorf School education—as it may be called—are, therefore, in no sense revolutionary. In Waldorf School education there is full recognition of all that is great and worthy of esteem in the really brilliant achievements of all countries during the nineteenth century. There is no desire to cast everything aside and imagine that the only possible thing is something radically new. The aim is rather to investigate the inner forces now ruling in the nature of man in order to be able to take them into account in the sphere of education, and thereby to find a true place in social life for the human being in body, soul and spirit. For—as we shall see in the course of these lectures—education has always been a concern of social life, and still is so at the present time. It must be a social concern in the future as well. In education, therefore, there must be an understanding of the social demands of any given epoch. To begin with, I want to describe to you in three stages the development of the nature of education in Western civilization. The best way will be to consider the educational ideals of the different epochs—the ideals striven for by those who desired to rise to the highest stage of human existence, to the stage from which they could render the most useful service to their fellow-men. It will be well in such a study to go back to the earliest of those past ages which we feel to survive as a cultural influence even at the present time. Nobody, to-day, will dispute the still living influence of the Greek civilization in all human aims and aspirations, and the question, “In what way did the Greek seek to raise the human being to a certain stage of perfection?” must be of fundamental significance to the educationalist. We must also consider the progress of subsequent epochs in respect of the perfecting of the education and instruction of the human being.

Let us see, to begin with—and indeed, we shall have to study this question in detail—what was the Greek ideal for the teacher, that is to say, for the man who desired to develop to the highest stage of humanity not only for his own sake, but for the sake of his being able to guide others along their path. What was the Greek ideal of education? The Greek ideal of education was the Gymnast, that is to say, one who had completely Harmonized his bodily nature and, to the extent that was thought necessary in those days, all the qualities of his soul and spirit. A man able to bring the divine beauty of the world to expression in the beauty of his own body, able to bring the divine beauty of the world into bodily expression in the child, in the boy—this was the Gymnast, the man by whom Greek civilization was up-borne.

It is easy, from a kind of modern superiority, to look down upon the Gymnast's manner of education, based as it was on the bodily nature of man. But there is a total misunderstanding of what was meant in Greece by the word Gymnast. If, nevertheless, we do still admire Greek civilization and culture to-day, if we still regard it as the ideal of highest development to be permeated with Greek culture, we shall do well to remember while we do this, that the Greek himself was not primarily concerned with the development of so-called “spirituality” in the human being. He was only concerned to develop the human body in such a way that as a result of the harmony of its parts and its modes of activity the body itself should come to be a manifestation of divine beauty. The Greek expected of the body just what we expect of the plant; that it will of itself unfold into blossom under the influence of sunlight and warmth if the root has received the proper kind of treatment. And in our devotion to Greek culture to-day we must not forget that the bearer of this culture was the Gymnast, one who had not taken the third step first, so to speak, but the first step first: the harmonization of the bodily nature of man. All the beauty, all the greatness, all the perfection of Greek culture was not directly “sought,” but was looked for as the natural growth of the beautiful, harmonious, powerful body, a result of the inner nature and activity of earthly man. Our understanding of Greek civilization, especially of Greek education, will be one-sided unless our admiration for the spiritual greatness of Greece is linked with the knowledge that the Gymnast was the ideal of Greek education.

Then, as we follow the continuous development of humanity, we see that a most significant break occurs, in the transition from Greek to Roman culture. In Roman civilization we have, to begin with, the emergence of that cultivation of abstractions which later led to the separation of spirit, soul, and body, and placed too a special emphasis on this threefold division. We can see how the principle of beauty in Greek “gymnastic” education was indeed imitated in Roman culture, but how, nevertheless, the education of body and soul fell into two separate spheres. The Roman still set great store by the training of the body, but little by little and almost imperceptibly this fell into a secondary place. The attention was directed to something that was considered more important in human nature—to the element of soul. The training which in Greece was bound up with the ideal of the Gymnast, gradually changed, in Roman culture, into a training of the soul qualities.

This is developed throughout the Middle Ages, an epoch when the qualities of soul were considered to be of a higher order than those of the body. And from this “Romanized” human nature, as we may call it, there arises another ideal of education. Early in the Middle Ages there appears an educational ideal for the men of highest development which was a fruit of Roman civilization. It was in its essence a culture of the soul—of the soul in so far as this reveals itself outwardly in man.

The Gymnast was gradually superseded by another type of human being. To-day we no longer have any strong, historical consciousness of this change, but those who study the Middle Ages intimately will realize that it actually took place. The ideal of education was no longer the Gymnast, but the Rhetorician, one whose main training was the training of speech, that is to say, of something that is essentially a quality of soul. How the human being can work through speech, as a Rhetorician—this was an outcome of Roman culture carried over into the first period of the Middle Ages. It represents the reaction from an education adapted purely to the body to an education more particularly of the soul, one which ^carries on the training of the body as a secondary activity. And because the Middle Ages made use of the Rhetorician for spreading the spiritual life as it was cultivated in the monastic schools and elsewhere in medieval education, it came about, though the name was not always used, that the Rhetorician assumed in the sphere of education the place which had once been held by the Greek Gymnast. Thus, in reviewing the ideals which have been regarded as the highest expression of man, we see how humanity advances from the educational ideal of Gymnast to that of the Rhetorician.

Now this had its effect upon the methods of education. The education of children was brought into line with what was held to be human perfection. And one who has the gift of historical observation will perceive that even the usages of our modern education, the manner in which language and speech are taught to children, are a heritage from the practice of the Middle Ages which had the Rhetorician as educational ideal.

Then, in the course of the Middle Ages, came the great swing over to the intellectual, with all the honour and respect which it paid to the things of the intellect. A new educational ideal of human development arose, an ideal which represents exactly the opposite of the Greek ideal. It was an ideal which gave the highest place to the intellectual and spiritual development of man. He who knows something—the Knower—now became the ideal. Whereas throughout the whole of the Middle ages he who could do something, do something with the powers of his soul, who could convince others, remained the ideal of education, now the knower becomes the ideal. We have only to look at the earliest University Institutions, at the University of Paris in the Middle Ages, to realize that the ideal there is not the knower, but the doer, the man who can convince most through speech, who is the most skilful in argument, the master of Dialectic—of the word which now takes on the colour of thought. We still find the Rhetorician as the ideal of education, though the Rhetorician himself is tinged with the hue of thought.

And now with this new civilization another ideal arises for evolving man, an ideal which is again reflected in the education of the child. Our own education of children, even in this age of materialism, has remained under the influence of this ideal right down to the present time. Now for the first time there arises the ideal of the Doctor, the Professor. The Doctor becomes the ideal for the perfect human being.

Thus we see the three stages in human education: the Gymnast, the Rhetorician, the Doctor. The Gymnast is one who can handle the whole human organism from what he regards as its divine manifestation in the world, in the Cosmos. The Rhetorician only knows how to handle the soul-nature in so far as it manifests in the bodily nature. The Gymnast trains the body, and through it, the soul and spirit, to the heights of Greek civilization. The Rhetorician is concerned with the soul, and attains his crown and his glory as the orator of the things of the soul, as the Church orator. And lastly, we see how skill as such ceases to be valued. The man who only knows, the man, that is, who no longer handles the soul-nature in its bodily-working, but only that which reigns invisibly in the inner being, the man who only knows now stands as the ideal of the highest stage of education. This, however, reflects itself into the most elementary principles of education. For it was the Gymnasts in Greece who also educated the children. It was the Rhetoricians, later on, who educated the children. Finally, in more modern times and in the time of the rise of materialism in civilization as a whole, it was the Doctor who educated the children. Thus bodily, gymnastic education develops into rhetorical, soul-education, and this in turn develops into “doctorial” education. Our modern education is the outcome of the “doctorial” ideal. And those who seek, in the very deepest principles of modern education for those things which really ought to be understood, must carefully observe what has been introduced as a result of this doctorial ideal.

Side by side with this, however, a new ideal has emerged into greater and greater prominence in the modern age. It is the ideal of the “universal human.” Men had eyes and ears only for what belonged by right to the Doctor, and the longing arose to educate once again the whole human being, to add to the doctorial education, which was even being crammed into the tiny child (for the Doctors wrote the text books, thought out the methods of teaching), to add to this the education of the “universal human.” And to-day, those who judge from a fundamental, elementary feeling for human nature, want to have their say in educational matters.

Thus for inner reasons the problem of education to-day has become a problem of the times. We must bear this inner process of human evolution in mind if we would understand the present age, for a true development of education must tend to nothing less than a superseding of this “Doctor” principle. If I were briefly to summarize one particular aspect of the aim of Waldorf School education, I should say, to-day, of course merely in a preliminary sense, that it is a question of turning this “doctorial” education into an education of man as a whole.

***

Now we cannot understand the essential nature of the education which had its rise in Greek civilization and has continued in its further development on into our own times, unless we look at the course of human evolution from the days of Greek civilization to our own in the right light. Greek civilization was really a continuation, an offshoot, as it were, of Oriental civilization. All that had developed in the evolution of humanity for thousands of years in Asia, in the East, found its final expression in a very special way in Greek education. Not till then did there come an important break in evolution: the transition to Roman culture. Roman culture is the source of all that later flowed into the whole of Western civilization, even so far as to America.

Hence it is impossible to understand the essential nature of Greek education unless we have a true conception of the whole character of Oriental development. To one who stood by the cradle of the civilization out of which proceeded the Vedas and the wonderful Vedanta it would have seemed the purest nonsense to imagine that the highest development of human nature is to be attained by sitting with books in front of one in order to get through examinations. And it would have seemed the purest nonsense to imagine that anyone could become a perfected human being after having literally maltreated (for “trained” is not the word) for years if the man be industrious, for months if he be lazy, an indefinite something that goes by the name of the “human spirit” in order then to be questioned by someone as to how much he knows. We do not understand the development of human civilization unless we sometimes pause to consider how the ideal of one epoch appears to the eyes of another. For what steps were taken by a man of the ancient East who desired to acquire the sublime culture offered to his people in the age preceding that of the inspiration behind the Vedas? What he practised was fundamentally a kind of bodily culture. And he hoped, as the result of a special cult of the body, one-sided though this would appear to-day, to attain to the crowning glory of human life, to the loftiest spirituality, if this lay within his destiny. Hence an exceedingly delicate culture of the body was the method adopted in the highest education of the ancient East, not the reading of books and the maltreatment of an abstract “spirit.” I will give you an example of this refined bodily culture. It consisted in a definite and rigorously systematic regulation of the breathing. When man breathes—as indeed he must do in order to provide himself with the proper supply of oxygen from minute to minute—the process is an unconscious one. He carries out the whole breathing process unconsciously. The ancient oriental made this breathing process, which is fundamentally a bodily function, into something which was carried out with consciousness. He drew in his breath in accordance with a definite law; held it back and breathed it out again according to a definite law. The whole process was conditioned by the body. The legs and arms must be held in certain positions, that is to say, the path of the breath through the physical organism when it reached the knee, for instance, must proceed in the horizontal direction. And so the ancient Oriental who was seeking to reach the stage of human perfection sat with legs crossed beneath him. The man who wished to experience the revelation of the spirit in himself must achieve it as the result of a training of the body, a training directed in particular to the air-processes in the human being, but centred, nevertheless, in the bodily nature.

Now what lies at the basis of this kind of training and education? The flower and fruit of a plant live within the root and if the root receives proper care, both flower and fruit develop under the light and warmth of the sun. In the same way, the soul and sprit live in the bodily nature of man, in the body that is created by God. If a man then takes hold of the roots in the body, knowing that Divinity lives within them, develops these bodily roots in the right way and then gives himself up to the life that is freely unfolding, the soul and spirit within the roots develop as do the inner forces of the plant that pour out of the root and unfold under the light and warmth of the sun.

Any abstract development of spirit would have seemed to the Oriental just as if we were to shut off all our plants from the sunlight, put them into a cellar and then make them grow under electric light, possibly because we did not consider the free light of the sun good enough for them. The fact that the Oriental only looked to the bodily nature was deeply rooted in his whole conception of humanity. This bodily development afterwards, of course, became one-sided, had already become so by the time of Jewish culture, but the very one-sidedness shows us that the universal view was: body, soul, and spirit are one. Here, on earth, between birth and death, the soul and spirit must be sought for in the body.

This aspect of ancient oriental spiritual culture may possibly cause some astonishment but when we study the true course of human evolution we shall find that the very loftiest achievements of civilization were attained in times when man was still able to behold the soul and spirit wholly within the body. This was a development of the very greatest significance for the essential nature of human civilization. Now why was the Oriental, for it must be remembered that his whole concern was a quest for the spirit, why was the Oriental justified in striving for the spirit by methods that were really based upon the bodily nature of man? He was justified because his philosophy did not merely open his eyes to the earthly but also to the super-sensible. And he knew: To regard the soul and spirit here on earth as being complete, is to see them (forgive this rather trivial analogy but in the sense of oriental wisdom it is absolutely correct) in the form of a ‘plucked hen,’ not a hen with feathers and therefore not a complete hen. The idea we have of the soul and spirit would have seemed to the Oriental analogous to a hen with its feathers plucked, for he knew the soul and spirit, he knew the reality of what we seek in other worlds. He had a concrete super-sensible perception of it. He was justified in seeking for the material, bodily revelation of man because his fundamental conviction was that in other worlds, the plucked hen, the naked soul, is endowed with spiritual feathers when it reaches its proper dwelling-place.

Thus it was the very spiritual nature of his conception of the world that prompted the Oriental, in considering the earthly evolution of the human being, to bear in mind before all else that within the body when man is born, when he comes forth as a purely physical being, there is soul and spirit. Soul and spirit sleep in the physical body of the little child in a most wonderful way. For the Oriental knew that when this Physis is handled in the truly spiritual way, soul and spirit will proceed from it. This was the keynote of the education, even of the Sage, in the East. It was a conviction which passed over into Greek culture, for Greek culture is an offshoot of oriental civilization. And now we understand why it was that the Greeks, who brought the conviction of the East to its most objective expression, adopted, even in the case of the young, their own particular kind of training of the human being. It was the result of oriental influence. The particular attention paid to the bodily nature in Greek civilization is simply due to the fact that the Greek was the result of colonization from The East and from Egypt, whence his whole mode of existence was derived.

When we look at the Greek palæstra where the Gymnasts worked, we must see in their activities a continuation of the development which the East, from a profoundly spiritual conception of the world, strove for in the man who was to reach the highest ideal of human perfection on earth. The Oriental would never have considered a one-sided development of soul or spirit to be the ideal of human perfection. The learning and instruction that has become the ideal of later times, would have seemed to him a deadening of that which the Gods had given to man for his life on earth. And, fundamentally, this was still the conception of the Greek.

It is a strange experience to realize how the spiritual culture of Greece, which we to-day think of as so sublime, was regarded in those times by non-Greek peoples. An historic anecdote, handed down by tradition, tells us that a barbarian prince once went to Greece, visited the places where education was being carried on and had a conversation with one of the most famous Gymnasts. The barbarian prince said: “I cannot understand these insane practices of yours! First you rub the young men with oil, the symbol of peace, then you strew sand over them, just as if they were being prepared for some ceremony specially connected with peace, and then they begin to hurl themselves about as if they were mad, seizing hold of and jumping at each other. One throws the other down or punches his chin so vigorously that his shoulders have to be well shaken to prevent him from suffocating. I simply do not understand such a display and it can be of no conceivable use to the human being.” This was what the barbarian prince said to the Greek. Nevertheless, the spiritual glory of Greece was derived from what the barbarian prince thought to be so much barbarism. And just as the Greek Gymnast had only ridicule for the barbarian who did not understand how the body must be trained in order to make the spirit manifest, so would a Greek, if he could rise again and see our customary methods of teaching and education (which really date from earlier times) laugh within himself at the barbarian that has developed since the days of Greece and that speaks of an abstract soul and spirit. The Greek in his turn would say: “This is analogous to a plucked hen. You have taken away man's feathers from him!” The Greek would have thought it barbaric that the boys should not wrestle and fall upon one another in the manner described. Yet the barbarian prince could see no meaning or purpose in Greek education. Thus by studying the course of human development and observing what was held to be of value in other epochs, we may acquire a foundation upon which we can also come to a right valuation of things in our own time.

***

Let us now turn our attention to those places where the Greek Gymnast educated and taught the youths who were entrusted to him in the seventh year of life. What we find there naturally differs essentially from the kind of national educational ideal, for instance, that held sway in the nineteenth century. In this connection, what I shall say does not merely hold good for this or that particular nation, but for all civilized nations. What we behold when we turn our attention to one of these places in Greece where the young were educated from the seventh year of life onwards, can, if it is rightly permeated with modern impulses, afford us a true basis for understanding what is necessary for education and instruction to-day. The youths were trained—and the word ‘trained’ is here always used in its very highest sense—on the one hand in Orchestric and on the other in Palæstric. Orchestric, to the outer eye, was entirely a bodily exercise, a kind of concerted dance, but arranged in a very special way. It was a dance with a most complicated form. The boys learned to move in a definite form in accordance with measure, beat, rhythm, and above all in accordance with a certain plastic-musical principle. The boy, moving in this choral dance, felt a kind of inner soul-warmth pouring through all his limbs and co-ordinating them. This experience was simultaneously expressed in the form of a very beautiful musical dance before the eyes of the spectators. The whole thing was a revelation of the beauty of the Godhead and at the same time an experience of this beauty in the inner being of man. All that was experienced through this orchestric was felt and sensed inwardly, and thus it was transformed from a physical, bodily process into something that expressed itself outwardly, inspiring the hand to play the zither, inspiring speech and word to become song. To understand song and the playing of the zither in ancient Greece we must see them as the crown of the choral dance. Out of what he experienced from the dance, man was inspired to set the strings in movement so that he might hear the sound and the tone arising from the choral dance. From his own movement he experienced something that poured into his word, and his words became song.

Gymnastic and musical development, this was the form taken by education in the Greek palæstra. But the musical and soul qualities thus acquired were born from the outer bodily movements of the dances performed in the palæstra. And if to-day one penetrates with direct perception to the meaning of these ordered movements in a Greek palæstra—which the barbarian prince could not understand—one finds that all the forms of movement, all the movements of the individual human being, were most wonderfully arranged, so wonderfully indeed that the further effect was not only the musical element that I have already described, but something else. When we study the measures and the rhythms that were concealed in orchestric, in the choral dance, we find that nothing could have a more healing, health-giving effect upon the breathing system and the blood circulation of man than these bodily exercises which were carried out in the Greek choral dances. If the question were put: How can the human being be made to breathe in the most beneficial way? What is the best way to stimulate the movement of the blood by the breath?—the answer would have been that the boy must move, must carry out dance-like movements from his seventh year onwards. Then—as they said in those times—he opens up his systems of breathing and blood circulation not to forces of decadence but to those of healing. The aim of all this orchestric was to enable the systems of breathing and blood circulation in the human being to express themselves in the most perfect way. For the conviction was that when the blood circulation is functioning properly it works right down to the very finger tips, and then instinctively the human being will strike the strings of the zither or the strings of the lute in the right way. This was, as it were, the crown of the process of blood circulation. The whole rhythmic system of the human being was made skilful in the right way through the choral dance.

As a result of this, one might hope for a musical, spiritual quality to develop in the playing, for it was known that when the individual being carries out the corresponding movements with his limbs in the choral dance, the breathing system is so inspired that it quite naturally functions in a spiritual way. And the final consequence is that the breath will overflow into what the human being expresses outwardly through the larynx and its related organs. It was known that the healing effects of the choral dance on the breathing system would enkindle song. And thus the crowning climax, zither-playing and song, was drawn from the healthy organism trained in the right way through the choral dance. And so the physical nature, the soul and the spirit were looked upon as an inner unity, an inner totality in earthly man. And this was the whole spirit of Greek education.

And now let us look at what was developed in palæstric—which gave its name to the places of education in Greece because it was the common property, so to speak, of the educated people. What was it, we ask, that was studied in those forms, in which, for instance, wrestling was evolved? And we see that the whole system existed for the purpose of unfolding two qualities in the human being. The will, stimulated by bodily movement, grew strong and forceful in two directions. All movement and all palæstric in wrestling was intended to bring suppleness, skill and purposeful agility into the limbs of the wrestler. Man's whole system of movement was to be harmonized in such a way that the separate parts should work together truly and that for any particular mood of his soul he should be able to make the appropriate movements with skill, controlling his limbs from within. The moulding and rounding of the movements into harmony with the purposes of life—this was one side of palæstric. The other side was the radial of the movement, as it were, where force must flow into the movement. Skill on the one side, force on the other. The power to hold out against and overcome the forces working in opposition and to go through the world with inner strength—this was one aspect. Skill, proficiency, and harmonization of the different parts of the organism, in short the development of power to be able freely to radiate and express his own being everywhere in the world—this was the other side.

It was held that when the human being thus harmonized his system of movement through palæstric, he entered into a true relationship with the Cosmos. The arms, legs and the breathing as developed by palæstric were then given over to the activities of the human being in the world, for it was known that when the arm is rightly developed through palæstric it links itself with the stream of cosmic forces which in turn flow to the human brain and then, from out of the Cosmos, great Ideas are revealed to man. Just as music was not considered to depend upon a specifically musical training but was expected as the result of the development of the blood circulation and breathing—and indeed did not express itself in most cases until about the age of twenty—so mathematics and philosophy were expected to be a result of the bodily culture in palæstric. It was known that geometry is inspired in the human being by a right use of the arms.

To-day people do not learn of these things from history, for they have been entirely forgotten. What I have told you is, nevertheless, the truth, and it justifies the Greeks in having placed the Gymnasts at the head of their educational institutions. For the Gymnast succeeded in bringing about the spiritual development of the Greeks by giving them freedom. He did not cram their brains or try to make them into walking encyclopaedias but assisted the trained organs of the human being to find their true relationship to the Cosmos, and in this way man became receptive to the spiritual world. The Greek Gymnast was as convinced as the man of the ancient East of the truth of the spiritual world, only in Greece, of course, this realization expressed itself in a later form.

What I have really done to-day by giving an introductory description of an ancient method of education, is to put a question before you. And I have done so because we must probe very deeply if we are to discover the true principles of education in our time. It is absolutely necessary to enter into these depths of human evolution in order to discover, in these depths, the right way to formulate the questions which will help us to solve the problem of our own education and methods of instruction. To-day, therefore, I wanted to place before you one aspect of the subject we are considering. In a wider sense, the lectures are intended to give a more detailed answer, an answer suited to the requirements of the present age, to the question which has been raised to-day and will be developed tomorrow.

Our mode of study, therefore, must be the outcome of a true understanding of the great problem of education raised by the evolutionary course of humanity and we must then pass on to the answers that may be given by a knowledge of the nature and constitution of the human being at the present time.

When I attempted to bring before you the Greek ideal of education, it was with the object that this ideal should stimulate ideas which ought to prevail in our modern system of education. For at the present stage of human life it is, of course, impossible to adopt the same educational methods as the Greeks. In spite of this, however, an all-embracing truth in regard to education can be learned from the Greek ideal, and this we will now-consider.

Up to the seventh year of life, the Greek child was brought up at home. Public education was not concerned with children under the age of seven. They were brought up at home, where the women lived in seclusion, apart from the ordinary pursuits of social life, which were an affair of the men. This in itself is the reinforcement of a truth of education, without knowledge of which one cannot really educate or teach, for the seventh year of life marks an all-important stage of childhood.

The main phenomenon characteristic of the seventh year of human life is the change of teeth. This is an event to which far too little importance is attached nowadays. For think of it, the nature of the human organism is such that it brings the first teeth with it as an inheritance, or, rather, it brings with it the force to produce these first teeth which are discarded at the seventh year. It is incorrect to imagine that the force which pushes up the second teeth at about the seventh year unfolds for the first time at this age. It is developing slowly from birth onwards, and simply reaches its culmination at about the seventh year of life. Then it brings forth the second teeth from the totality of force in the human organization. This event is of the most extraordinary importance in the course of human life as a whole, because it does not occur again. The forces present between birth and the seventh year reach their culmination with the appearance of the second teeth, and they do not act again within the entire course of earthly life. Now this fact should be properly understood, but it can only be understood by an unprejudiced observation of other processes that are being enacted in the human being at about this seventh year of life Up to the seventh year the human being grows and develops according to Nature-principles, as it were. The Nature-forces of growth, the being of soul and the spiritual functions have not yet separated from one another in the child's organization; they form a unity up to the seventh year. While the human being is developing his organs, his nervous system and his blood circulation, this development betokens the evolution of his soul and spirit. The human being is provided with the strong inner impulsive force which brings forth the second teeth because everything in this period of life is still interwoven. With the coming of the second teeth, this impelling force weakens. It withdraws somewhat; it does not work so strongly from out of the inner being. Why is this? Now suppose new teeth were to appear every seven years. (I will take an extreme illustration for the sake of clarity.) If the same organic forces which we bear within us up to the seventh year, if this unity formed of body, soul and spirit were to continue through the whole of life, new teeth would appear approximately every seven years! The old teeth would fall out and be replaced by new ones, but throughout our whole life we should remain children as we are up to the seventh year. We should not unfold the life of soul and spirit that is separated off from the Nature-life. The fact that the physical force decreases in the seventh year and the bodily pressure and impulses to a certain extent grow less—for the body now produces more delicate forces from itself—makes it possible for the subtler forces of soul life to develop. The body grows weaker, the soul stronger, as it were.

A similar process also takes place at puberty, in the fourteenth or fifteenth year. The element of soul now weakens to a certain extent and the spiritual functions make their appearance. So that if we take the course of the first three life-periods: up till the seventh year man is pre-eminently a being of body-soul-spirit in one, from the seventh to the fourteenth years he is a being of body-soul with a separate nature of soul and spirit, and from puberty onwards he is a threefold being, a physical being, a being of soul and a being of spirit.

This truth opens up deep vistas into the whole evolution of the human being. Indeed, without knowledge of it we really ought not to venture upon the education of children. For unless we realise the far-reaching consequences of this truth, all education must necessarily be more or less a dilettante affair.

The Greek—and this is the amazing thing—knew of this truth. To the Greek, it was an irrevocable law that when a boy had reached his seventh year he must be taken away from his parents' house, from the mere Nature-principles, the elementary necessities of upbringing. This knowledge was so deeply rooted in the Greeks that we do well to remind ourselves of it to-day. Later on, in the Middle Ages, traces of this all-important principle of education still existed.

The modern age of rationalism and intellectualism has forgotten all these things, and, indeed, even takes pride in showing that it places no value on such truths, for the child is usually required to go to school at an earlier age, before the end of the seventh year. We may say, indeed, this departure from such eternal principles of human evolution is typical of the chaos obtaining in our modern system of education. We must rise out of this chaos. The Greek placed so high a value on this truth that he based all education upon it. For all that I described yesterday was carried out in order to ground education upon this same truth.

What did the Greek see in the little child from birth to the time of the change of teeth? A being sent down to earth from spiritual heights! He saw in man a being who had lived in a spiritual world before earthly life. And as he observed the child he tried to discover whether its body was rightly expressing the divine life or pre-earthly existence. It was of importance for the Greek that in the child up to the seventh year he should recognize that a physical body is here enclosing a spiritual being who has descended. There was a terribly barbaric custom in certain regions of Greece to expose and thus kill the child who was instinctively believed to be only a sheath, and not expressing a true spiritual being in its physical nature; this was the outcome of rigid regard to the thought that the physical human being in the first seven years of life is the vesture of a divine-spiritual being.

Now when the child passes its seventh year—and this, too, was known in Greece—it descends a second stage lower. During the first seven years the child is released from the heavens, still bearing its own inherited sheaths, which are laid aside at the seventh year, for not only the first teeth but the whole body is cast off every seven years—cast off for the first time, that is to say, in the seventh year. In the first seven years of life the bodily sheaths revealed to the Greek what the forces of pre-earthly life had made out of the child. The child was thought to bear its earthly sheaths proper, its first earthly sheaths, only from about the seventh to the fourteenth years onwards.

I am trying now to express these things as they were conceived of by the highest type of Greek. He thought to himself: I reverence the Divine in the little child, hence there is no need to concern myself with it in the first seven years of life. It can grow up in the family in which the Gods have placed it. Supersensible forces from pre-earthly life are still working in it. When the seventh year is reached it behoves man himself to become responsible for the development of these forces. What must man do, then, when he knows how to pay true reverence to the Divine in the human being? What must he do as regards education? He must develop to the highest extent the human faculties that have unfolded in the child up to the seventh year. The Divine power, the way in which the spiritual expresses itself in the body—this must be developed to the greatest possible extent. Thus the Gymnast had perforce to be convinced of the necessity to understand the Divine power in the human body and to develop it in the body. The same healing, life-sustaining forces which the child possesses from pre-earthly existence, and which have been fostered in an elementary way up to the change of teeth—these must be preserved from the seventh to the fourteenth year by human insight, by human art. Further education must then proceed wholly in accordance with Nature. And so all education was ‘gymnastic’ because the divine education of the human being was seen as a ‘gymnastic.’ Man must continue the ‘divine gymnastic’ by means of education.

This was more or less the attitude of the Greek to the child. He said to himself: If through my intuition I am able to preserve in freshness and health the forces of growth which have developed in the child up to the seventh year, then I am educating in the very best way; I am enabling the forces which are there by nature up to the seventh year to remain throughout the whole of earthly life, right up to death. To see that the “child” in the human being was not lost till death—this was the great and far-reaching maxim of Greek education. The Greek teacher thought: I must see to it that these forces between the seventh and fourteenth years—the forces of childhood—remain living throughout the whole of his earthly life, right up to death. A far-reaching and deeply significant principle of education! And all gymnastic exercises were based on the perception that the forces present up to the seventh year have in no way disappeared, but are merely slumbering within the human being and must be awakened from day to day. To waken the slumbering forces between the seventh and the fourteenth years, to draw forth from the human being in this second period of life what was there by nature in the first period—this constituted Greek gymnastic education. The very glory of his culture and civilization arose from the fact that the Greek, by a right education, was at pains to preserve the ‘child’ in the human being right up to death. And when we wonder at the ‘glory that was Greece,’ we must ask ourselves: Can we imitate this ideal? We cannot, for it rests upon three factors, without which it is unthinkable.

These three factors must be remembered by the modern educationalist when he looks back to Greece. The first thing to remember is the following:—These principles of education were only applied to a small portion of mankind, to a higher class, and they presuppose the existence of slavery. Without slavery it would not have been possible to educate a small class of mankind in this way. For in order to educate thus, part of man's work on the earth fell to the lot of those who were left to their elemental human destiny, without education in the true Greek sense. Greek civilization and Greek education are alike unthinkable without the existence of slavery. And so the delight of those who look back with inner satisfaction on what Greece accomplished in the evolutionary history of mankind is tempered with the tragic realization that it was achieved at the cost of slavery. That is one factor.

The second factor is that of the whole position of woman in Greek social life. The women lived a life withdrawn from the direct impulses at the root of Greek civilization, and it was this secluded life that alone made it possible for the child to be left, up to the seventh year, to the care of the home influences, which were thereby given full scope. Without any actual knowledge, but merely out of human instincts, the child was led on by the elemental forces of growth to the time of the change of teeth. One may say it was necessary that the child's life up to this point, should, despite its different nature, proceed just as unconsciously in the wider environment of the family, detached from the mother's body, as when the embryonic life had proceeded through the forces of Nature. This was the second factor.

The third is really a paradox to modern man, but he must, none the less, grow to understand it. The second point—the position of women in Greece—is easier to understand, for we know from a superficial observation of modern life that between the Greek age and our own time women have sought to take their share in social life. This is a result of what took place during the Middle Ages. And if we still wanted to be as Greek as the Greeks were, with the interest in conscious education confined exclusively to men, I wonder how small this audience would be if it were only made up of the men who were allowed to concern themselves with education!

The third factor lies deeper down, and its nature makes it difficult for modern civilization to acknowledge that we have to attain our spiritual life by human effort, by work. Anyone who observes the spiritual activities of civilized life will be obliged to admit that as regards the most important domain of civilized life, we must count upon what we shall achieve in the future by effort. Observing all the human effort which has to be spent on the attainment of a spiritual life in present-day civilization, we look with some astonishment at the spiritual life of the ancient Greeks and especially of the ancient Orientals. For this spiritual life actually existed. A truth such as that of the part played in human life by the seventh year, a truth which modern man simply does not realise, was deeply rooted in Greece. (Outer symptoms indicate its significance but modern culture is very far from understanding it.) It was one of the mighty truths that flowed through ancient spiritual life. And we stand in wonder before this spiritual life when we learn to know what wisdom, what spiritual knowledge was once possessed by man.

If, without being confused by modern naturalistic and materialistic prejudices, we go back to early civilization, we find, at the beginning of historical life a universal, penetrating wisdom according to which man directed his life. It was not an acquired wisdom, but it flowed to mankind through revelation, through a kind of inspiration. And it is this that modern civilization will not acknowledge. It will not recognize that a primal wisdom was bestowed spiritually upon man, and that he evolved it in such a way that, for instance, even in Greece, care was still taken to preserve the ‘child’ in man until the time of earthly death. Now this revelation of primeval wisdom is no more to be found—a fact deeply connected with the whole evolution of man. Part of man's progress consists in the fact that the primal wisdom no longer comes to him without activity on his part but that he must attain to wisdom through his own efforts. This is connected in an inner sense with the growth of the impulse of human freedom which is at present in its strongest phase. The progress of humanity does not ascend, as is readily imagined, in a straight line from one stage to another. What man has to attain from out of his own being in the present age, he has to attain at the cost of losing revelation from without, revelation which locked within itself the deepest of all wisdom.

The loss of primeval wisdom, the necessity to attain wisdom by man's own labours, this is related to the third factor in Greek education. Thus we may say: Greek education may fill us with admiration but it cannot be dissociated from these three factors •; ancient slavery, the ancient position of woman, and the ancient relationship of spiritual wisdom to spiritual life. None of the three exist to-day nor would they now be considered worthy of true human existence. We are living at a time when the following question arises: How ought we to educate, realizing as we do that these three a priori conditions have been swept away by human progress? We must therefore observe the signs of the times if we desire to discover the true impulse for our modern education from inner depths.

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The whole of the so-called mediaeval development of man which followed the civilization of Greece and has indeed come right down to modern times, proved by its very nature that in regard to education and methods of teaching, different paths had to be struck from those of Greece, which were so well-fitted to that earlier age. The nature of man had, indeed, changed. The efficacy and reliability of Greek education were an outcome of the fact that it was based upon ‘habit’—upon that which can be built into the very structure of the human body.

Up to the change of teeth in the seventh year, the development of man's being is inwardly connected with the body. The development of the bodily functions, however, proceeds as though unconsciously. Indeed it is only when the faculties work unconsciously that they are right; they are reliable only when what I have to do is implanted into the dexterity of my hands and is accomplished of itself, without need for further reflection.

When practice has become habit, then I have achieved securely what I have to achieve through my body. The real aim of Greek life was to make the whole earthly existence of man a matter of ‘habit’ in this sense. From his education onwards until his death, all man's actions were to become habitual, so habitual that it should be impossible to leave them off. For when education is based on such a principle as this, the forces which are natural to the child up to the change of teeth, up to the seventh year, can be maintained; the child forces can be maintained until earthly life ends with death.

Now what happened when through historical circumstances new peoples pouring over from the East to the West founded a new civilization during the Middle Ages, and established themselves in Middle Europe and in the West, even in America? These peoples assimilated the qualities natural to the Southern regions but their coming brought quite different habits of life to mankind. What was the result of this? It set up the conditions for a totally different kind of development, a development of the individual. In this time, for example, men came to the conscious realization that slavery ought not to be; to the realization that women must be respected. At this time it also became apparent as regards the evolution of the individual, in the period between the seventh and fourteenth year, when development is no longer of a purely bodily nature but when the soul is to a certain degree emancipated from the body that the child in this period was not now susceptible of being treated as in earlier times. In effect, the conservation of the forces of early childhood in the boy between the ages of seven and fourteen that had been practised hitherto was no longer possible.

This is the most significant phenomenon of the Middle Ages and right up to modern times so far as this second period of life is concerned. And only now for the first time do we see the powerful forces of revolt which belong to the period when the fourteenth and fifteenth years have been passed, the period during which human nature rises up most strongly in revolt, when indeed it bears within itself the forces of revolt.

How did this revolt in human nature express itself? The old primeval wisdom which flowed down naturally to the Greeks came to be in Roman and Mediaeval tradition something that was only preserved through books, through writing. Indeed it was only believed on the authority of tradition. The concept of Faith as it developed during the Middle Ages did not exist in very ancient civilizations, nor even in the culture of the Greeks. It would have been nonsense in those times. The concept of Faith only arose when the primeval wisdom no longer flowed directly into man, but was merely preserved. This still applies fundamentally to the greater part of humanity to-day. Everything of a spiritual, super-sensible nature is tradition. It is ‘believed,’ it is no longer immediate and actual. Nature and the perception of Nature this is an actuality, but all that refers to the super-sensible, to super-sensible life, is tradition. Since the Middle Ages man has given himself up to this kind of tradition, thinking at times it is true that he does in fact experience these things. But the truth is that direct spiritual knowledge and revelation came to be preserved in written form, living from generation to generation as a heritage merely on the authority of tradition. This was the outer aspect. And what of the inner aspect? Let us now look back once again to Greece. In Greece, faculties of soul developed as of themselves because the whole human being acquired habits of life whereby the ‘child’ was preserved in man till death. Music proceeded from the breathing and blood circulation, intellect from gymnastic. Without being cultivated, a marvellous memory evolved in the Greeks as a result of the development of the habits of the body. We in our age have no longer any idea of the kind of memory that arose, even among the Greeks, without being cultivated in any way, and in the ancient East this was even more significant. The body was nurtured, habits formed, and then the memory arose from the body itself. A marvellous memory was the outcome of a right culture of the body.

A living proof of the fact that we have no conception of the kind of memory possessed by the Greeks, a memory which made it so easy for the spiritual treasures to be handed down and become a common good, is the fact that shorthand writers have to attend when lectures are given which people want to remember! This would have seemed absurd in Greek civilization, for why should one wish to keep that which one has manifestly thrown away? It was all preserved truly in the memory, by the proficiency of the body. The soul developed itself out of this bodily proficiency. And because of this self-development she stood in contrast to that which had arisen from revelation—the primeval wisdom. And this primal spiritual wisdom disappeared, grew to be mere tradition. It had to be carried from generation to generation by the priesthood who preserved the traditions. And inwardly man was forced to begin to cultivate a faculty which the Greek never thought of as a necessity. In education during the Middle Ages it became more and more, necessary to cultivate the memory. The memory absorbed what had been preserved by tradition.

Thus, historical tradition outwardly and remembrance and memory inwardly, had to be cultivated by education. Memory was the first soul quality to be cultivated when the emancipation of the soul had taken place. And those who know what importance was attached to the memory in schools only a short while ago can form an opinion of how rigidly this cultivation of the memory—which was the result of an historical necessity—has been preserved.

And so through the whole of the Middle Ages education tosses like a ship that cannot balance itself in a storm, for the soul of man is the most hard of access. To the body man can gain access; he can come to terms with the spirit, but the soul is so bound up with the individuality of man that it is the most inaccessible of all.

Whether a man found the inner path to the authorities who preserved the tradition for him, whether his piety was great enough to enable him to receive the words in which the mediaeval priest-teacher inculcated the tradition into humanity, all this was an affair of the individual soul. And to cultivate the memory, without doing violence to another man's individuality, this needs a fine tact. What was necessary for the soul-culture of the Middle Ages was as much heeded by tactful men as it was ignored by the tactless. And mediaeval education swung between that which nourished the human soul and that which harmed it in its deepest being. Although men do not perceive it, very much from this mediaeval education has been preserved on into the present age.

Education during the Middle Ages assumed this character because, in the first place, the soul no longer wished to preserve the ‘child;’ for the soul itself was to be educated. And on account of the conditions of the times the soul could only be educated through tradition and memory. Between the seventh and the fourteenth years the human being is, as it were, in a certain state of flux. But the soul does not work in the same condition of security as is afforded by the bodily constitution up to the seventh year and the direction imparted by the spirit has not yet come into being. Everything is of a very intimate character, calling for piety and delicacy.

All this brought it about that for a long period of human evolution education entered upon an uncertain and indefinite course in which, while tradition and memory had to be cultivated, there were extraordinary difficulties. To-day we are living at a time when, as a result of the natural course of development, man desires a firm foundation in place of the insecurity obtaining in the Middle Ages. And this search for other foundations expresses itself in the innumerable efforts towards educational reform in our time. It is out of recognition of this fact that Waldorf School education has arisen. Waldorf School education is based upon this question: How shall we educate in a time when the revolt in the soul between the seventh and fourteenth years of life against the conservation of ‘childhood’ is still going on? How shall we educate now that man, in addition to that, has in the modern age lost even the old mediaeval connection with tradition? Outwardly man has lost his faith in tradition. Inwardly he strives to be a free being, one who at every moment shall confront life unhampered. He does not wish to stand on a memory foundation all his life long. Such is modern man, who now desires to be inwardly free of tradition and of memory. And however much certain portions of our humanity to-day would like to preserve ancient customs, this is not possible. The very existence of the many efforts for educational reform indicates that a great question is facing us. It was impossible in the Middle Ages to educate in the Greek way, and in our times education can no longer be based on tradition and memory. We have to educate in accordance with the immediate moment of life in which man enters upon earthly existence, when he, as a free being, has to make his decision out of the given factors of the moment. How, then, must we educate free human beings? That is the question which now confronts us for the first time.

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As the hour is getting late, I will bring these thoughts to a conclusion in a few words and postpone until tomorrow's lecture the consideration of the methods of education that are necessary at the present day.

In Greek education, the Gymnast must be recognized as one who preserved the forces of childhood on into the second period of life between the seventh and the fourteenth or fifteenth years. The ‘child’ must be preserved, so said the Greeks. The forces of childhood must remain in the human being up to the time of earthly death; these forces must be conserved. It was the task of the Greek educator, the Gymnast, to develop the fundamental nature, the inherited fundamental nature of the child in his charge, on into the period between the seventh and the fourteenth years of life. It was his task to understand these forces out of his spiritual wisdom and to conserve them. Evolution in the Middle Ages went beyond this, and, as a result, our present age developed. Only now does the position of a modern man within the social order become a matter of consciousness. This fact of conscious life can only come into being after the age of puberty has been reached, after the fourteenth or fifteenth year. Then there appears in the human being something which I shall have repeatedly to describe in the following lectures as the consciousness of inner freedom in the being of man. Then, indeed, man ‘comes to himself.’ And if, as it sometimes happens to-day, human beings believe themselves to have reached this consciousness before the fourteenth or fifteenth years, before the age of puberty, this is only an aping of later life. It is not a fundamental fact. It was this fundamental fact, which appears after the age of puberty, that the Greek purposely sought to avoid in the development of the individual man. The intensity with which he invoked Nature, the child, into human existence, darkened and obscured full experience of this glimpse of consciousness after puberty. The human being passed in dimmed consciousness through this imprisoned ‘Nature,’ this reality. The historical course of human evolution, however, is such that this is no longer possible. This conscious urge would burst forth with elemental, volcanic force after the age of puberty if attempts were made to hold it back.

During what we call the elementary school age, that is to say, between the seventh and fourteenth years, the Greek had to take into consideration the earliest Nature-life of the child. We in our day have to take account of what follows puberty, of that which will be experienced after puberty in full human consciousness by the boy or girl. We may no longer suppress this into a dreamlike obscurity as did the Greeks, even the highest type of Greek, even Plato and Aristotle, who, in consequence, accepted slavery as a self-evident necessity. Because education was of such a kind that it obscured this all-important phenomenon of human life after puberty, the Greek was able to preserve the forces of early childhood into the period of life between the seventh and fourteenth years.

We must be prophets of future humanity if we would educate in the right way. The Greek could rely upon instinct, for his task was to conserve the foundations laid by Nature. We, as educationalists, must be able to develop intuitions. We must anticipate all human qualities if we would become true educators, true teachers. For the essential thing in our education will be to give the child, between its seventh and fourteenth years something which, when the consciousness characteristic of the human being has set in, it can so remember that with inner satisfaction and assent it looks back upon that which we have implanted within its being. We educate in the wrong way to-day if, later on, when the child has gone out into life, it can no longer look back on us and say, “Yes!”

Thus there must arise teachers with intuition, teachers who enter once again upon the path along which the spiritual world and spiritual life can be attained by man, who can give the child between the seventh and fourteenth years all those things to which it can look back in later life with satisfaction. The Greek teacher was a preserver. He said: All that lived within the child in earlier life slumbers within him after the seventh year, and this I must awaken. Of what nature must our education be to enable us to implant in the age of childhood that which later on will awaken of itself in the free human being? We have to lead an education into the future. This makes it necessary that in our present epoch the whole situation of education must be different from what it was in the past. In Greece, education arose as the result of a surrender to the facts of Nature. It was a fact of Nature which, as it were, played into human life, but as a result of the whole of life up to our time, it has worked itself cut of its natural foundations.

As teachers in schools, this is what we must realize: We must offer to the child before us something to which it may be able to cry “Yes!” when in later life it awakens to independent consciousness. The child must not only love us during schooldays, but afterwards too, finding this love for us justified by mature judgment. Otherwise education is only a half-education—therefore weak and ineffective. When we are conscious of this we shall realize to what a great extent education and instruction from being a fact of Nature that plays into the human being must also become a moral fact.

This is the deep inner struggle waged by those who from their innermost being have some understanding of the form which education must assume. They feel this, and it is expressed in the question: How can we ourselves transform education for the free human being into a free act in the very highest sense, that is to say, into a moral act? How can education become out and out a moral concern of mankind? This is the great problem before us to-day, and it must be solved if the most praiseworthy efforts towards educational reform are to be rightly directed on into the future.

Education in any given epoch is naturally dependent on the general form of civilization prevailing at the time. What the general form of civilization has to offer, that can be passed on to the child in its education by the teacher. When I was speaking of the Greeks, I told you that they possessed an intimate knowledge of the whole human being, and from this intimate knowledge were able to educate the child in a way that is no longer possible for us to-day. The knowledge of the whole human being possessed by the Greek was derived entirely from the human body. The body of man was in a certain sense transparent to him. The body revealed both soul and spirit in so far as the Greeks comprehended these. And we have seen how the Greeks educated the whole human being by taking the body as the starting-point. All that could not be made to proceed from the body, in the sense in which I showed that music proceeded from it, was imparted to the human being comparatively late in life, indeed only after his bodily education had been completed, at about the twentieth year or even later.

We to-day are in quite a different position. The very greatest illusions in human evolution are really due to the belief that ancient epochs, which had to do with a totally different humanity, can be renewed. But particularly in this present age it behoves us to turn with practical commonsense to reality. And if we understand this historical necessity, we can only say: just as the Greeks had to direct their whole education from the standpoint of the body, so must we direct our education from the standpoint of the spirit. What we have to do is to find the way to approach even bodily education from out of the spirit. For whether we like it or not, mankind has now come to a point where the spirit must be grasped as spirit and attained to by human effort as the true essence of the human being.

Now it is just when we desire to educate in accordance with the needs of our epoch, that we feel how little progress has been made by civilization in general, in respect of this permeation by the spirit. And then there arises precisely in respect of education the longing to make the spirit more and more man's own possession.

Where do we find, let us say at a comparatively high level, the conception of the spirit possessed by modern humanity? You must not be shocked if I characterize this by examples from the height of modern spiritual life. That which appears at the top merely symbolically, and within the limits of the cultural life, rules, in reality, the whole of civilization. In the course of our endeavour to grasp what ‘spirit’ is, we have to-day only reached the stage of apprehending the spirit in ideas, in thinking. And perhaps the best way to understand human thinking in our age in its greatest scope is to observe this modern thought as it appears, let us say, in John Stuart Mill or in Herbert Spencer. I asked you not to be shocked by the fact that I point to the highest level of culture. For that which in John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer appears merely, so to say, as an outstanding symptom, in reality dominates every sphere, and is the characteristic thinking of our civilization. When, therefore, we ask to-day: How do men come to understand the spirit from which education should proceed just as the Greek educated the body? We have to answer that men conceive of the spirit just as John Stuart Mill or Herbert Spencer conceived of it. Now what was their conception? Let us think for a moment of the idea people have to-day when they speak of the spirit. I do not here mean a nebulous and absolutely indefinite image hovering somewhere ‘above the clouds.’ This is something that tradition has imparted and there is no actual experience connected with it. We can only speak of the spirit in humanity when we observe the attitude men have towards it, how they work and what they do with it. And the spirit in our present civilization is the spirit which John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer had already worked into their philosophies. There indeed it is and there it had to be sought. What we must observe is the way in which men apply the spirit, not the way in which they speak about it in the abstract.

And now let us consider this ‘thought out’ spirit, for in our time the spirit is really only a mental conception—a spirit that can at most think philosophically. Compared with the full content perceived by the Greek when he spoke of man, of Anthropos, the element of spirit in which we whirl around when we think, is something—well—distilled, unsubstantial to the highest degree. When he spoke of man, the Greek had always the picture of bodily man before him and the bodily man was at once a revelation of soul and spirit. This man was somewhere, at some time; this man had limits to his being; he was bounded by his skin. And those who trained this man in the Greek gymnasia covered his skin with oil in order to emphasize this boundary. Man was strongly outlined. He was a wholly concrete entity, existing at some particular point in space and time, with some particular form.

And now think of the kind of thought we have about the spirit to-day. Where is the spirit, what is its form? It is all indefinite, there is never a ‘how’ or ‘when;’ never any definite form, never any imagery. People do try indeed to build up some kind of image, but let us look at John Stuart Mill's idea of imagery, for instance. He said: When a man thinks, one idea is followed by a second and a third. Man thinks indeed in ideas—which are the inward images of words. He thinks in ideas and the ideas get associated with one another. This really is the essence of the discovery: one idea leads to a second, fourth, and so on. The ideas associate themselves. And modern psychology speaks in the most varied ways of associations of ideas as the real inner essence of spiritual life. Now suppose we were to ask: What kind of feeling and perception of our own being should we have if this association of ideas were indeed our spirit? We stand in the world; now the ideas begin to move; they associate themselves. And now we look back upon ourselves, upon what we really are, as spirit, in these associated ideas. This leads to a consciousness of the self that is exactly like the consciousness a man would have if he were to look at himself in a mirror and see a skeleton and moreover a dead skeleton. Think of the shock you would have if you were to look in the mirror and see a skeleton! In the skeleton, the bones associate, they are held together by external means and are fixed one above the other, according to mechanical law. Our idea of the spirit, therefore, is merely a copy of mechanics. To those who have a full sense of manhood, who feel healthy and are healthy, it is actually as though they were to look at themselves in a mirror and see their spirit composed of bones; for in the books describing association-psychology one sees oneself as in a mirror. We may have this pleasure constantly (not of course in the external, bodily sense) for it arises whenever we compare the modern state of affairs with that of the Greeks. Spiritually, we have this experience again and again. We go to our philosophers, thinking that they may be able to give us self-knowledge, and they place their books before us as a mirror in which we see ourselves as a bony spectre in associations of ideas.

This is what a man experiences to-day when he tries to think in a practical way about education and to approach the real essence of education from the standpoint of general civilization. No indication of what education ought to be is given him but he is shown how to find a heap of bones and how to piece together a skeleton. This is how the ordinary man feels to-day. He longs for a new education, and everywhere the question arises: How ought we to educate? But where can he turn? He can only turn to the general form of civilization and this civilization shows him that all he can build up is a skeleton. And now a strong feeling for this civilization overwhelms the human being. If his feeling is healthy he should be able to feel himself permeated by this intellectualistic nature of modern thought and ideas. And it is this that confuses him. He would like to think that what the mirror reveals is sublime and perfect; he would like to be able to make something of it, above all, he would like to make use of it in education—but he cannot. One cannot educate with this.

If we are to have the necessary enthusiasm as educationalists, therefore, we must learn in the first place to perceive all that is not living, but dead, in our intellectualistic culture—for the skeleton is a dead thing. And if we saturate ourselves with the knowledge that our thinking is dead we very soon discover that all death proceeds from the living. If you were to find a corpse, you would not take it as the original. You would only think of a corpse as something in itself if you had no conception of a human being. If, however, you have a conception of what a human being is, you know that the corpse is something that has been left behind. From the nature of the corpse, you do not only infer the human being, buy you know also that the human being was there. If you recognize the kind of thinking that is cultivated to-day as being a thing dead, as being a corpse, you can relate it to something living. Moreover you then have the inner impulse to make this thing living and so to re-vitalize the whole of civilization. It will then be possible once more for something practical to emerge from our modern civilization, something that can reach the living man, just as the Greeks reached him in their education.

Let us not undervalue perceptions with which a teacher can set out and, indeed, must set out. The teachers at the Waldorf School were first of all given a Seminary Course. It was not merely a question of following the points of a given programme, but of imparting an understanding in the soul of how to bring back all that is the most treasured heritage of our age into relation with the innermost being of man, in order to make dead thinking, colourless thinking into thinking full of character—primitive, inorganic thinking into truly ‘human’ thinking. In the first place, then, thoughts must begin really to live in the teacher.

Now when a thing lives, something follows from this life. The human being who has definite place in space and time, who has spirit, soul, body, a definite form and boundary, does not merely think; he also feels and wills. And when a thought is communicated to him, this thought is the germ both of a feeling and of an impulse of will; it becomes a complete thing. The ideal of our modern thinking is to be what people call ‘objective,’ as passive and calm as possible, in short to be a passive reflection of the outer world and a mere handmaiden of experience. It contains no force; no impulse of feeling and of will arises from it.

The Greek took his start from the bodily man who was there before him. We must take our start—and everyone feels this to be true—from ideal man, but this ideal must not be merely theoretical; it must live and it must contain the force of both feeling and will. The first thing needful when we think about reform in education to-day is that we grow beyond abstract and theoretical ideals.

Our thoughts do not become gestures and they must become so once more. They must not only be received by the child who sits passively, but they must move his arms and hands and guide him when he passes out into the world. Then we shall have unified human beings, for we must again educate unified human beings; we shall have human beings who experience their bodily education as a continuation of what we have given them in the schoolroom. People do not think like this nowadays. They think that what is given in the schoolroom is so much intellectualism, something that it is necessary to give. But it fatigues and strains the human being, perhaps even causes nervous troubles. Something else must be added, so it is felt, and then follows physical training. And so to-day we have two separate branches: intellectualistic education and bodily training. The one does not promote the other. We have two human beings in point of fact, one nebulous and hypothetical and the other real, and we do not understand this real man as the Greek understood him. We squint, as it were, when we observe a human being, for there seems to be two in front of us. We must again learn to ‘see straight,’ to see the whole being of man as a unity, a totality. This is the most important thing of all in education.

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What we must do, therefore, is to press forward beyond the more or less theoretical maxims of education in existence to-day to an education that is practical in the real sense of the word. From what I have said, it follows that much depends upon how we again bring the spirit which we really only grasp intellectually, to the human being, how we make the spirit human in the true sense, so that this nebulous spirit by means of which we observe men, shall become human. We must learn how to behold man in the spirit, as the Greeks beheld him in the body.

As a preliminary to-day, let me give an example which will explain how, from out of the spirit, we can begin to understand the human being right down into the body. As an example I will choose the way in which the spirit may be connected with a definite organ in the human being. I choose the most striking example, but merely provisionally. These things will become more definite in the following lectures. Let me show you the connection between the spirit and a process which the Greeks too considered to be deeply symbolical and of extraordinary significance in the development of the child: the coming of the teeth. The time of the change of the teeth was, in Greece, the age at which the child was given over to public education. And now let us try to envisage this contact of the spirit with the human being, the relation of the spirit to the human teeth. It will seem strange that in discussing man as a spiritual being, I speak first of the teeth. It only seems strange because as a result of modern culture, people are quite familiar with the form of a tiny animal germ when they look through the microscope, but they know very little about what lies before them. It is realized that the teeth are necessary for eating; that is the most striking thing about them. It is known that they are necessary for speech, that sounds are connected with them, that the air flows in a particular way from the lungs and the larynx through the lips and palate, and that certain consonants have to be formed by the teeth. It is known, therefore, that the teeth serve a useful purpose in eating and speaking.

Now a truly spiritual understanding of the human being shows us something else as well. If you are able to study man in the way I described in the first lecture, it will dawn on you that the child develops teeth not only for the sake of eating and speaking, but for quite a different purpose as well. Strange as it sounds to-day, the child develops teeth for the purpose of thinking. Modern science little knows that the teeth are the most important of all organs of thought. For the child, up to the time of the second dentition, these teeth constitute the organ of thought. As thinking arises spontaneously in the child in its interplay with its environment, as the life of thought rises from the dim sleeping and dreaming life of very early childhood, this whole process is bound up with what is happening in the head where the teeth are pressing through; it is bound up with the forces that are pressing outwards from the head. The forces that press the teeth out from the jaw are the same forces that now bring thought to the surface from the dim, sleeping and dreaming life of childhood. With the same degree of intensity as it teethes, the child learns to think.

Now how does the child learn to think? It learns to think because it is an imitative being and as such is wholly given up to its environment. Right into its innermost being it imitates what is going on in its environment and what happens in this environment under the impulses of thoughts. In exactly the same measure as thought then springs up in the child, in exactly the same measure do the teeth emerge. In effect, the force that appears in the soul as thinking lies within these teeth.

Let us now follow the further development of the child. At about the seventh year, the child undergoes the change of teeth. He gets his second teeth. I have already said that the force which produces the first and second teeth has been present in the whole organism of the child—only it shows itself in the strongest form in the head. The second teeth only come once. The forces which drive the second teeth out from the organism of the child do not work again as physical forces in the course of earthly life up till death. They become powers of the soul, powers of the spirit; they vivify the inner being of the human soul. Thus, when we observe the child between the seventh and fourteenth years of life, with particular regard to his characteristic qualities of soul, we find that what now appears between the seventh and fourteenth years as qualities of soul, namely in the child's thinking, worked up to the seventh year upon the organs. It worked in the physical organism, forced out the teeth, reached its culmination as physical force with the change of teeth and then changed itself into an activity of soul.

These things can, of course, only be truly observed when one presses forward to the mode of cognition which I described in a previous lecture as the first stage of exact clairvoyance, as Imaginative Knowledge. The abstract intellectual knowledge of the human being that is common to-day does not lead to this other kind of knowledge. Thought must vivify itself from within so that it becomes imaginative. Nothing whatever can really be grasped by intellectualistic thinking; with it everything remains external. One looks at things and forms mental images of what one sees. But thinking can be inwardly re-enforced, it can be made active. Then one no longer has abstract intellectualistic thoughts but imaginative pictures which now fill the soul in place of the intellectual thoughts. At the first stage of exact clairvoyance, as I have described it, one can perceive indeed how, besides the forces of the physical body, there is working in man a super-sensible body, if you will forgive the paradoxical expression. One becomes aware of the super-sensible in man, and one of its characteristics in comparison with the physical is that it cannot be weighed. This super-sensible body I call the etheric body, which strives away from the earth out into cosmic spaces. It contains the forces that are opposed to gravity and strives perpetually against gravity.

Just as ordinary physical knowledge teaches us of the physical body of man, so does Imaginative Knowledge, the first stage of exact clairvoyance, teach us of the etheric body that is always striving to get away from earthly gravity. And just as we gradually learn to relate the physical body to its environment, so do we also learn to relate the etheric body to its environment.

In studying the physical body of man, we look outside in Nature, in material Nature, for the substances of which it is composed. We realize that everything in man which is subject to gravity, his heaviness, his weight, all this has weight in outer Nature as well. It enters into man through the assimilation of nourishment. In this way we obtain, as it were, a natural conception of the human organism in so far as the organism is physical. Similarly, through Imaginative Knowledge we obtain a conception of the relationship of the individual etheric body or body of formative forces in man to the surrounding world. That which in Spring drives the plants out of the soil against gravity in all directions towards the Cosmos; that which organizes the plants, brings them into relation with the upward-flowing stream of light, with that part of the chemistry of the plant, in short, which works upwards, all this must be related to the etheric body of man, just as salt, cabbage, turnip and meat are related to the physical body. Thus in the first stage of exact clairvoyance, this rich, comprehensive, unified thought is able to approach the etheric body or body of formative forces of man, this ‘second Man,’ as it were. Up to the change of teeth, this body of formative forces is most intimately bound up with the physical body. There from within, it organizes the physical body; it is the force which drives out the teeth. When the human being gets his second teeth, the part of the etheric body that drives the teeth out has no more to do for the physical body. Its activity is emancipated, as it were, from the physical body. With the change of teeth the inner etheric forces which have pressed the teeth out, are freed and with these etheric forces we carry on the free thought that begins to assert itself in the child from the seventh year onwards. The force of the teeth is no longer a physical force as it was in the child during the time when the teeth are the organs of thought; it is now an etheric force. But the same force which produced the teeth is now working in the etheric body as thought. When we perceive ourselves as thinking human beings and feel that thinking seems to proceed from the head (many people only have this experience when thinking has brought on a headache), a true knowledge shows us that the force with which we think from out of the head is the same as the force which was once contained in the teeth.

Thus our knowledge brings us near to the unity of the being of man. We learn once again how the physical is connected with what is of the soul. We know that the child first thinks with the forces of the teeth and this is why teething troubles are so inwardly bound up with the whole life of the child. Think of all that happens when the child is teething! All these teething troubles arise because the process of teething is so intimately connected with the innermost life, with the innermost spirituality of the child. The growth-forces of the teeth are freed and become the forces of thought in the human being, the free, independent force of thought. If we have the necessary gift of observation, we can see this process of becoming independent; we see how with the change of teeth, thinking emancipates itself from bondage to the body. And what happens now? In the first place the teeth become the helpers of that which permeates thought, speech. The teeth, which had, at first, the independent task of growing in accordance with the forces of thought, are now pressed down one stage, as it were. Thinking, which now no longer takes place in the physical body but in the etheric body, descends one stage. This already happens during the first seven years, for the whole process goes on successively, merely reaching its culmination with the coming of the second teeth. But then, when thought seeks expression in speech, the teeth become the helpers of thought.

And so, we look at the human being; we see his head; in the head the growth-forces of the teeth free themselves and become the force of thinking. Then, pressed down, as it were, into speech, we have all the processes for which the teeth are no longer directly responsible, because the etheric body now takes over the responsibility. The teeth become the helpers of speech. In this, their relationship with thought is still apparent. When we understand how the dental sounds find their way into the whole process of thinking, how man takes the teeth to his aid when through sounds like d or t, he brings the definite thought-element into speech, we again see in the dental sounds, the particular task performed by the teeth.

I have shown you by this example of the teeth—which may perhaps seem very grotesque—how we come to understand the human being from out of the spirit. If we proceed in this way, thinking gradually ceases to be an abstract drifting in associated ideas, but connects itself with man, it goes into the man. Then we no longer see merely physical functions in the human being, such as biting by the teeth or at most movement in the dental sounds of speech, but the teeth become for us an outer picture, a Nature Imagination of the process of thinking. Thinking points to the teeth and says to us, as it were: There in the teeth is my outer countenance! When we really come to understand the teeth, thought that is otherwise abstract and nebulous assumes definite picture-form. We see how thought is working in the head at the place where the teeth lie and how thought develops from the first to the second teeth, The whole process again takes on definite form. A real image of the spirit begins to arise in Nature herself. The spirit is once again creative.

We need something more than modern anthropology, for modern anthropology studies the human being in a wholly external way, and associates the elements of his being just as the different properties of ideas are associated. What we need is a kind of thinking that is not afraid to press onwards to the inner being of man nor to speak of how the spirit becomes teeth and works in the teeth. This indeed is what we need, for then we penetrate into the being of man from the spirit. And then the element of art arises. The abstract, theoretical and unpractical mode of observation, which merely evolves a human being with a skeleton-like thinking must be led over into imaginative thought. Theoretical observation passes over into artistic feeling and becomes artistic, creative power. To see the spirit actively at work within one must, to begin with, mould the teeth. The element of art, then, begins to be the guide to the first stage of exact clairvoyance—that of Imaginative Knowledge. Here we begin to understand man in his real being. Man is only an abstraction in our thinking to-day.

Now in education, the being with whom we find ourselves confronted is the real man. He stands there, but there is an abyss between us. We stand here with our abstract spirit, and we must cross this abyss. We must before all else show how we can cross it. All we know of man to-day is how to put a cap on his head! We do not know how to put the spirit into his whole being, and this we must learn to do. We must learn how to clothe the human being inwardly, spiritually, just as we have learned how to clothe him externally, so that the spirit is treated just as the outer vesture is treated. When we approach the human being in this way, we shall attain to a living Pedagogy and a living Didactic.

***

Just as the period of life at about the seventh year is significant in earthly existence on account of all the facts which I have described, so, similarly, is there a point in the earthly life of man which on account of the symptoms which then arise in life, is no less significant. The actual points of time are, of course, approximate occurring in the case of some human beings earlier in others later. The indication of seven-yearly periods is approximate. But round about the fourteenth or fifteenth year, there is once more a time of extraordinary importance in earthly existence. This is the age when puberty is reached. But puberty, the expression of the life of sex is only the most external symptom of a complete transformation that takes place in the being of man between the seventh and fourteenth years. Just as we must seek in the growth-forces of the teeth, in the human head, for the physical origin of thought that frees itself about the seventh year of life and becomes a function of soul, so we must look for the activity of the second soul-force, namely feeling, in other parts of the human organism.

Feeling releases itself much later than thinking from the physical constitution of the human being. And during the time of tutelage from the seventh to the fourteenth year, the child's feeling-life is really still inwardly bound up with its physical body. Thinking is already free; feeling is, between the seventh and fourteenth years, still bound up with the body. All the feelings of joy, of sorrow and of pain that express themselves in the child still have a strong physical connection with the secretions of the organs, the acceleration or retardation, speed or slackening of the breathing system and so on. If our perception is keen enough, we can observe in these very phenomena the great transformation that is taking place in the life of feeling, when the outer symptoms of the change make their appearance. Just as the appearance of the second teeth denotes a certain climax of growth, so at the close of the subsequent life-period, when feeling is gradually released from its connection with the body and becomes a soul function, these processes are expressed in speech. This may be observed most clearly in boys. The voice changes; the larynx reveals the change. The head, therefore, reveals the change which lifts thinking out of the physical organism, and the breathing system, the seat of the organic rhythmic activity, expresses the emancipation of feeling. Feeling detaches itself from the bodily constitution and becomes an independent function of soul. We know how this expresses itself in the boy. The larynx changes and the voice gets deeper. In the girl different phenomena appear in bodily growth and development; but this is only the external aspect.

Anyone who has reached the stage of exact, imaginative clairvoyance, knows, for he perceives it, that the male physical body transforms the larynx at about the fourteenth year of life. The same thing happens in the female sex to the etheric body, or body of formative forces. The change occurs in the etheric body and the etheric body of the female takes on, as etheric body, a form exactly resembling the physical body of the male. Again, the etheric body of the male at the fourteenth year takes on a form resembling the physical body of the female. However extraordinary it may appear to a mode of knowledge that clings to the physical, it is nevertheless the case that at this all-important point of life, the male bears within him the etheric female and female the etheric male from the fourteenth year onwards. This is expressed differently through the corresponding symptoms in the male and female.

Now if one reaches the second stage of exact clairvoyance (it is described in greater detail in my books), if beyond Imagination, one attains to Inspiration—the actual perception of the purely spiritual that is no longer bound up with the physical body of man—then one becomes aware of how in actual fact at this important time round about the fourteenth and fifteenth years a third human member develops into a state of independence. In my books I have called this third member the astral body according to an older tradition. This astral body is more essentially of the nature of soul than the etheric body; indeed the astral body is already of the soul and spirit. It is the third member of man and constitutes his second super-sensible being.

Up to the fourteenth or fifteenth years, this astral body works through the physical organism and, at the fourteenth or fifteenth year, becomes independent. Thus there devolves upon the teacher a most significant task, namely to help the development to independence of this being of soul and spirit which lies hidden in the depths of the organism up to the seventh or eight years and then gradually frees itself. It is this gradual process of detachment that we must assist, if we have the child to teach between the ages of seven and fourteen. And then, if we have acquired the kind of knowledge of which I have spoken, we notice how the child's speech becomes quite a different thing. The crude science of to-day—if I may call it so—concerns itself merely with the obvious soul qualities of the human being and speaks of the other phenomena as secondary sexual characteristics. To spiritual observation, however, the secondary phenomena are primary and vice versa.

This metamorphosis, the whole way in which feeling withdraws itself from the organs of speech, is of extraordinary significance. And as teachers and educationalists it is our task, a task that really inspires one's innermost being, gradually to release speech from the bodily constitution. How wonderful in a child of seven are the natural, spontaneous movements of the lips which come from organic activity! When the seven-year-old child utters the labial sounds, it is quite different from the way in which the child of fourteen or fifteen utters them. When the seven-year-old child utters the labial sounds, it is an organic activity; the circulation of the blood and of the fluids into the lips is entirely involuntary. When the child reaches his twelfth, thirteenth or fourteenth years, this organic activity is transferred into the organism proper and the soul activity of feeling has to emerge and to move the lips voluntarily, in order that the element of feeling in speech may come to expression.

Just as the thought-element in speech, the hard thought-element is manifested in the teeth, so is the soft, loving element of feeling manifested in the lips. And it is the labial sounds which impart warmth and loving sympathy to speech, sympathy with another being and the conveying of it. This marvellous transition from an organic functioning of the lips to a functioning conditioned by the soul, this development of the lips in the organic soul nature of the human being is a thing in which the teacher can take part and thereby a most wonderful atmosphere can be brought into the school. For just as we see the super-sensible, etheric element that permeates the body emerging at the seventh year of life as independent thinking-power, so do we see the element of soul and spirit emerging at the age of fourteen or fifteen. As teachers we help to bring the soul and spirit to birth. What Socrates meant is seen at a higher level.

In the following lectures I shall explain the new elements that appear in walking, in movement, even when the human being is twenty or twenty-one years old in the third period of life. It is enough to-day to have shown how thinking emancipates itself from organic activity and how feeling goes on emancipating itself from organic activity until the fourteenth or fifteenth year; to have shown how this gives us insight into man's development and how an otherwise merely abstract mode of thinking becomes a picture, an ‘imagination;’ to have shown also how that which finds expression in human speech, in words, actually appears in its true form as soul and spirit when the human being reaches his fourteenth or fifteenth year.

Hence it can be said that if we would reach the human being from the standpoint of living thought, we must soar into the realm of art. If we would bring the living spirit, the spiritual essence of feeling to the human being, we must not merely set about this with an artistic sense as in the former case, but also with a religious sense. For the religious sense alone can penetrate to the reality of the spirit.

Education between the seventh and fourteenth years, therefore, can only be carried on in the truly human sense when it is carried on in an atmosphere of religion, when it becomes almost a sacramental office, not of course in a sentimental, but in a truly human sense. And so we see what happens when a man brings life and soul to his otherwise abstract thinking, thinking that merely arises from the association of ideas. He finds the way to an artistic apprehension of man; to an apprehension of man within the religious life. Art and religion are thus united in education. Light is thrown not only on the question of the pupil, but on that of the teacher as well when we realize that pedagogy should become so practical, so clear and so living a knowledge that the teacher can only be a true educator of youth when he is able inwardly to become a thoroughly religious man.

In yesterday's lecture I tried to show how thinking and feeling become independent at about the seventh and fourteenth years of life respectively and release themselves from the bodily constitution of the human being. To-day I want to show how the will in the being of man gradually presses on to its independence during the process of growth.

The human will really remains bound up with the organism longest of all. Until about the twentieth or twenty-first year of life, the will is very largely dependent on organic activity. This organic activity is generated in particular by the way in which the breathing is carried over into the blood circulation, which then in its turn, by the inner fire or warmth thus engendered in the organism, takes hold of the functions of movement. It lays hold of the force arising in legs, feet, arms and hands when man moves and transforms it into a manifestation of the will.

It may be said that everything of the nature of will in the child, even including “children” between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, is dependent upon the manner in which the forces of the organism play over into movement. The teacher especially must cherish the power for unprejudiced observation of such things. He must be able to notice that a child has a strong will or the predisposition to a strong will if, when he walks, he places the back of his foot, his heel, firmly on the ground and that he is endowed with a less energetic will if he uses the front part of his foot and has a tripping gait.

All this however, the way in which the legs move, the capacity to prolong the movement of arms into dexterity of the fingers, all this is still an outer, physical manifestation of the will in the boy or girl, even after the fifteenth year. Only at about the twentieth year does the will release itself from the organism in the same way as feeling releases itself at about the fourteenth year and thinking at about the seventh year at the change of teeth. The external processes that are revealed by the freed thinking, however, are very striking and can readily be perceived: the change of teeth is a remarkable phenomenon in human life. The emancipation of feeling is less so; it expresses itself in the adjustment of the so-called secondary sexual organs—their development in the case of the boy, the corresponding transformation in the girl—the change of voice in the boy and the change of the inner life habits of the girl, and so forth. Here, the external symptoms of the metamorphosis in the human being are less striking. Feeling, therefore, becomes independent of the physical constitution in a more inner sense.

The outer symptoms of the emancipation of the will at about the twentieth or twenty-first year are still less apparent and are therefore practically unnoticed by an age like ours, which lives in externalities. In our time, in their own opinion, human beings are “grown-up” when they have reached the age of fourteen or fifteen. Our young people do not recognise that between the fifteenth and twenty-first years they should be acquiring not only outer knowledge but inner character and, above all, will power. Even before the age of twenty-one they set up as reformers, as teachers, and instead of applying themselves to what they can learn from their elders, they begin to write pamphlets and things of that kind. This is quite understandable in an age that is directed to the externalities of life. The decisive change that takes place at about the twentieth or twenty-first year is hidden from such an age because it is wholly of an inner kind. But there is such a change and it may be described in the following way.

Up to his twenty-first year of life, approximately of course, man is not a self-contained personality; he is strongly subject to earthly gravity, to the earth's force of attraction. He struggles with earthly gravity until about the twenty-first year. And in this connection, external science will make many discoveries that are already known to the “exact clairvoyance” of which I spoke yesterday.

In our blood, in the blood corpuscles, we have iron. Until about the twenty-first year, the nature of these blood corpuscles is such that their gravity preponderates. From the twenty-first year onwards, the being of man receives an upward impulse from below; an upward impulse is given to all his blood. From the twenty-first year he sets the sole of his foot on the earth otherwise than he did before. This, indeed, is not known to-day but it is a fact of fundamental importance for the understanding of the human being in so far as this understanding has to be revealed in education. From the twenty-first year onwards, with every tread of the foot there works through the human organism from below upwards, a force which did not work before. Man becomes a being complete in himself, one who has paralysed the downward-working forces by forces which work from below upwards, whereas before this age all the force of his growth and development flowed downwards from the head. This downward stream of forces is strongest of all in the little child up to the seventh year of life. The whole process of bodily organization during this period has its start in the head-organism. Up to the seventh year the head does everything and only when thinking is set free with the change of teeth, does the head also release itself from this strong downward streaming force.

A great deal is known to-day about positive and negative magnetism: a great deal is known about positive and negative electricity, but very little indeed is known about what is going on in man himself. The fact that the forces streaming from the head to the feet and from the feet to the head are only organized in the course of the first two decades of life, is an anthroposophical truth of great significance, fundamentally significant, indeed, for the whole of education. It is a truth of which people to-day are wholly unconscious. And yet all education is really based on this question. For why do we educate? That is the great question.

Standing as we do within the human and not in the animal kingdom, we have to ask ourselves: Why do we educate? Why is it that the animals grow up and carry out the functions of their lives without education? Why is it that the human being cannot acquire what he needs in life merely through observation and imitation? Why has a teacher to intervene in the child's freedom? This is a question that is practically never raised because these things are taken as a matter of course. But one can only become a true teacher when one ceases to take this question as a matter of course, when one realises that it is an interference with the child to stand in front of him and want to educate him. Why should the child put up with it? We regard it as our obvious business to educate our children—but not their subconscious life. And so we talk a great deal about the children's naughtiness and it never occurs to us that in their subconscious life—not in their clear consciousness—we must appear very comic to the children when we teach them something from outside. They are quite justified in their immediate feeling of antipathy. And the great question for education is this: How can we change what at the outset is bound to be unsympathetic to children into something sympathetic? Now the opportunity to do this is given between the seventh and fourteenth years. For at the seventh year, the head, which is the bearer of thinking, becomes independent. It no longer generates the downward-flowing forces so strongly as it did in the child up to the seventh year. It settles down, as it were, and looks after its own affairs.

Now only when the fourteenth or fifteenth year has been reached do the organs of movement assume a personal nature of will. The will now becomes independent in the organs of movement. The forces flowing from below upwards, forces which have to become those of will, begin to work for the first time. For all will works from below upwards; all thought from above downwards. The direction of thought is from heaven to earth; the direction of will from earth to heaven. These two functions are not bound up with each other, not enclosed one within the other, between the seventh and fourteenth years. In the middle system of man, where breathing and circulation live and whence they originate, there lives also the feeling-nature of man which frees itself during this period. If we rightly develop the feeling-nature between the seventh and fourteenth years we set up a true relationship between the downward-flowing and the upward-flowing forces. It comes to no less than this, that between the child's seventh and fourteenth years, we have to bring his thinking into a right relationship with his will, with his willing. And in this it is possible to fail. It is on this account that we have to educate the human being, for in the animal this interplay of thinking and willing—in so far as the animal has dreamlike thought and will—comes about of itself. In the human being, the interplay of thought and will does not come about of itself. In the animal, the process is natural; in the human being it must become a moral process. And because here on earth man has the opportunity of bringing about this union of his thinking with his willing, therefore it is that he can become a moral being. The whole character of man, in so far as it proceeds from the inner being, depends upon the true harmony being established by human activity between thinking and willing. The Greeks brought about this harmonization of thinking and willing by again calling into play in their gymnastics the stream of forces flowing from the head into the limbs which is there naturally in the earliest years of life and allowing the arms and legs so to move in dancing and wrestling that the head-activity was poured into the limbs. Now we cannot return to Greek culture nor have that civilization over again. We must take our start from the spirit. And so we must understand how in the twenty-first year, the will of man is freed as a result of the inner processes in the organs of movement which have been described, just as feeling was freed at the fourteenth year and thinking at the seventh year.

Modern civilization is not awake to this. It has slept away its insight into the fact that education must consist in bringing the will, which appears in full freedom as a quality of soul about the twentieth year, into union with the thinking that is already released at the seventh year. We only acquire true reverence for the development of the human being when we bring the spirit into contact with the bodily nature of man, as we showed yesterday with regard to thinking and feeling and as we have just tried to show with regard to the will. We must see the will at work in the organs of movement, in the quite distinctive movement of fingers and arms, in the individuality of the tread of the feet when the twentieth or twenty-first year is reached. Preparation for this has, however, been going on since the fifteenth year. If we can thus get back the spirit that is no more a mere association of ideas, a skeleton spirit, but a living spirit which can now even perceive how a man walks, how he moves his fingers, then we have again come back to the human being and we can educate once more.

The Greeks still had this power of perception instinctively. It was gradually lost but only very slowly. It continued as a tradition down to the sixteenth century, and the most conspicuous thing about the sixteenth century is that civilized humanity as a whole loses an understanding of the relation between thinking and willing. Since the sixteenth century people have begun to reflect about education and yet have no regard for the weightiest problems of the understanding of man. They do not understand man and they want to educate him. This is the tragedy that has existed since the sixteenth century and has continued up to our present age.

People feel and realize nowadays that alteration must be made in education. On all sides educational unions and leagues for educational reform are springing up. People feel that education needs something but they do not approach the fundamental problem, which is this: How can one harmonize thinking and willing in the human being? At most they say: “There is too much intellectualism; we must educate less intellectually, we must educate the will.” Now the will must not be educated for its own sake. All talk as to which is best, the education of thought or the education of will, is amateurish. This question alone is really practical and pertinent to the nature of man: How can we set up a true harmony between the thinking that is freeing itself in the head and the will that is becoming free in the limbs? If we would be educators in the true sense, we must have neither a one-sided regard to thinking nor a one-sided regard to willing, but we must envisage the whole being, in all its aspects. This we cannot do with the associated ideas to which we are accustomed when we speak of spirit to-day: it is only possible to do so when we regard the thinking which dominates the present age as the corpse of a living thinking and when we understand that we must work our way through to this living thinking by self-development.

In this connection let me here place frankly before you one fundamental principle of all educational reform. I must ask your forbearance if I state this truth quite frankly, because to utter it seems almost like an insult to modern humanity and one is always reluctant to be insulting. It is a peculiarity of present-day civilization that people know that education must be different. Hence the innumerable unions for educational reform. People know quite well that education is not right and that it ought to be changed; but they are just as firmly convinced that they know very well indeed what education ought to be, that each one in his union can say how one ought to educate. But they should consider this: If education is so bad that it must be fundamentally reformed, they themselves have suffered from it and this bad education has not necessarily made them capable of knowing that they and their contemporaries have been badly educated but they equally assume that they know perfectly well what really good education ought to be! And so the educational unions spring up like so many mushrooms.

The Waldorf School method did not take its start from this principle but from the principle that men do not yet know what education ought to be and that first of all one must acquire a fundamental knowledge of the human being. Therefore the first seminary course for the Waldorf School contained fundamental teaching concerning the being and nature of man, in order that the teachers might gradually learn what they could not yet know—namely, how children ought to be educated. For it is only possible to know how to educate when one understands the real being of man.

The first thing that was imparted to the teachers of the Waldorf School in the seminary course was a fundamental knowledge of man. Thus it was hoped that from an understanding of the true nature of man they would gain inner enthusiasm and love for education. For when one understands the human being the very best thing for the practice of education must spring forth from this knowledge. Pedagogy is love for man resulting from knowledge of man; at all events it is only on this foundation that it can be built up.

Now to one who observes human life as expressed in present-day civilization in an external way, all the educational unions will be an outer sign that people know a great deal nowadays about how children ought to be educated. To one who has a deeper perception of human life, it is not so. The Greeks educated by instinct; they did not talk very much about education. Plato was the first who spoke a little, not very much, about education from the standpoint of a kind of philosophical mis-education.

It was not until the sixteenth century that people began to talk a great deal about education. As a matter of fact people speak as a rule very little of what they can do and much more of what they cannot! To one possessed of a deeper knowledge of human nature, a great deal of talk about any subject is not a sign that it is understood; on the contrary, human life reveals to him that when in any age there is a tendency to discuss some subject very much, this is a sign that very little is known about it. And so for one who can truly see into modern civilization, the emergence of the problem of education lies in the fact that no longer is it known how the development of man takes place.

In making a statement like this one must of course ask pardon, and this I do, with all due respect. Truth, however, cannot be concealed; it must be stated.

The following is interpolated from a source that the Editor cannot trace. It is not in his original German text.—Ed.:—

If the Waldorf School method achieves something, it will achieve it by substituting for ignorance of the human being, knowledge of the human being, by substituting for mere external anthropological talk about man, a true anthroposophical insight into his inner nature. And this is the bringing of the living spirit right down into the bodily constitution, the bodily functions.

Some time in the future it will be just natural to speak of the human being with knowledge as it is mostly natural nowadays to speak with ignorance. Some day it will be known, even in general civilization, how thinking is connected with the force which enables the teeth to grow. Some day people will be able to observe how the inner force of feeling is connected with that which comes from the chest organs and is expressed in the movement of the lips. The change in the lip movements and the control of them by feeling which sets in between the seventh and fourteenth years will be an outer significant sign of an inner development of the human being. It will be observed how the consolidation of the forces flowing from below upwards, which occurs in the human being between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one, takes place and is checked in the human head itself. Just as the quality of thought is made manifest in the teeth and that which comes from feeling in the lips, so a true knowledge of man will see in the highly significant organism of the palate which bounds the cavity of the mouth at the back, the way in which the upward-flowing forces work and, arrested by the gums, pass over into speech. If at some future time people do not only look through the microscope or the telescope when they want to see the most minute or the greatest, but observe all that confronts them outwardly in the world—and this they do not see to-day, in spite of microscope and telescope—then they will perceive how thinking lives in the labial sounds, willing in the palatal sounds which particularly influence the tongue, and how through the labial and palatal sounds, speech, like every other function, becomes an expression of the whole human being.

Attempts are made to-day to ‘read’ the lines of the hand and other external phenomena of this kind. People try to understand human nature from symptoms. These things can only be rightly understood when it is realized that one must seek for the whole human being in what he expresses; when people perceive how speech, which makes man as an individual being into a social being, is in its inner movement and configuration a reflection of the whole man. Dental sounds, labial sounds, palatal sounds do not exist in speech by accident; they are there because in the dental sounds the head, in the labial sounds the breast system, in the palatal sounds the rest of the being of man wins its way into speech.

Our civilization must therefore learn to speak about the revelation of the whole human being and then the spirit will be brought to the whole man. Then the way will be found from the spirit of man into the most intimate expressions of his being, namely of his moral life. And out of this there will proceed the inner impulse for an education such as we need.

The most significant document that can reveal to us how different must be our conception of the world and its civilization from that of olden times, is the Gospel of St. John—the deepest and most beautiful document of Greek culture. This marvellous Gospel shows, even in the first line, that we must rise to ideas of quite a different nature, to living ideas, if we would learn from ancient times something for our present age. In the Gospel of St. John, Greek thought and feeling were the vesture for the newly arising Christianity. The first line runs: ‘In the beginning was the WORD’—in Greek LOGOS. But in the ordinary recital of ‘word’ there remains nothing of what the writer of the Gospel of St. John felt when he wrote ‘In the beginning was the WORD.’ The feeble, insignificant meaning we have when we express ‘word’ was certainly not in the mind of the writer of his Gospel when he wrote the line. He would mean something quite different. With us, the ‘word’ is a feeble expression of abstract thoughts; to the Greeks it was still a call to the human will. When a syllable was uttered, the body of a Greek would tingle to express this syllable even through his whole being. The Greek still knew that one does not only express oneself by saying ‘It is all one to me.’ He knew how, when he heard the phrase ‘It is all one to me,’ he tingled to make those corresponding movements (shrugging the shoulders). The word did not only live in the organs of speech but in the whole of man's organism of movement. But humanity has forgotten these things.

If you want to realize how the word—the word that in ancient Greece still summoned forth a gesture—how the word can live through the whole being of man, you should go to the demonstration of Eurhythmy next week. It is only a beginning, just a modest beginning, this effort to bring will once again into the word; to show people, at any rate on the stage if not in ordinary life, that the word does actually live in the movement of their limbs. And when we introduce Eurhythmy into our schools, it is a humble beginning, and must still be regarded as such to-day, to make the word once more a principle of movement in the whole of life.

In Greece there was quite a different feeling, one that came over from the East. Man was urged to let the will reveal itself through the limbs, with every syllable, with every word, every phrase, with the rhythm and measure of every phrase. He realized how the word could become creative in every movement. But in those days he knew still more. Words were to him expressions for the forces of cloud formations, the forces lying in the growth of plants and all natural phenomena. The word rumbled in the rumbling waves, worked in the whistling wind. Just as the word lives in my breath so that I make a corresponding movement, so did the Greek find all that was living in the word, in the raging wind, in the surging wave, even in the rumbling earthquake. It was the word that pealed forth from the earth.

The paltry ideas which arise in us when we say ‘word’ would be very much out of place if one were to transfer them to the primal beginning of the world. I wonder what would have happened if these words and ideas—these feeble ideas of the ‘word’—had been there at the beginning of the world and were supposed to be creative? Our present-day intellectualistic word has, to be sure, little in it that is creative.

Thus above all, we must rise to what the Greek perceived as a revelation of the whole human being, a call to the will, when he spoke of the WORD, LOGOS. For he felt the Logos throb and pulse with life through the whole Cosmos. And then he felt what really resounds in the line: ‘In the beginning was the WORD. ...’ In all that was conjured up in these words there lived the living creative force not only within man but in wind and wave, cloud, sunshine and starlight. Everywhere the world and the Cosmos were a revelation of the WORD. Greek gymnastic was a revelation of the WORD. And in its weaker division, in musical education, there was a shadowy image of all that was felt in the WORD. The WORD worked in Greek wrestling. The shadowy image of the WORD in music worked in the Greek dances. The spirit worked into the nature of man even though it was a bodily, gymnastic education that was given.

We must realize how feeble our ideas have become in modern civilization and rightly perceive how the mighty impulse pulsating through such a line as ‘In the beginning was the WORD’ was weakened when it passed over into Roman culture, becoming more and more shadowy, until all we now feel is an inner lassitude when we speak of it. In olden times, all wisdom, all science was a paraphrase of the sentence ‘In the beginning was the WORD.’ At first, the WORD, LOGOS, lived in the ideas that arose in man when he spoke these words, but this life grew feebler and feebler. And then came the Middle Ages and the LOGOS died. Only the dead LOGOS could come forth from man. And those who were educated were not only educated by having the dead LOGOS communicated to them, but also the dead word—the Latin tongue in its decay. The dying word of speech became the chief medium of education up to the time of the sixteenth century, when there arose a certain inner revolt against it.

What then does civilization signify up to the sixteenth century? It signifies the death of human feeling for the living LOGOS of the Gospel of St. John. And the dependence on dead speech is an outer manifestation of this death of the LOGOS. If one wants briefly to characterize the course of civilization in so far as it fundamentally affects the impulses of education, one really should say: All that humanity has lost is expressed above all in the fact that understanding of what lives in the Gospel of St. John has disappeared step by step.

The course of civilization through the Middle Ages up to the sixteenth century in its gradual loss of understanding of such writing as the Gospel of St. John fully explains the failure of present-day humanity to grasp its significance. Hence the clamour for educational reform.

The question of education in our age will only assume its right bearing when people, seeking to understand the Gospel of St. John, realize the barrenness of the human heart and compare this with the intense devotion arising within man in times when he believed himself to be transported from his own being out into all the creative forces of the universe as he allowed the true content of this first sentence of the Gospel to ring within him—”In the beginning was the Word.” We must realize that the cry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for a different kind of education arose because the most devout people of that time, those who felt most deeply the need for a renewal of education, also sensed the loss of the inner elementary life-force which enables man to have also a living understanding of the spirit. For it is the spirit to which the Gospel of St. John refers when it speaks of the Logos.

We have reached a point where we do indeed long for the spirit but our speech is composed of mere words. And in the words we have lost the spirit that still existed for the Greeks inasmuch as then the whole human being in his activity in the world rose up into the ‘word’ when it was uttered; man indeed ascended to cosmic activity when, in the world-creative ‘words’ he expressed the idea of the Divinity, which lies at the foundation of the universe. And this must become living in us too if we would be men in the full sense. And the teacher must be a ‘whole’ man, for otherwise he can only educate half men and quarter men. The teacher must again have an understanding of the ‘word.’

If we would bring before our souls this mystery of the WORD, the WORD in its fullness, as it worked and was understood in the age when the full significance of the Gospel according to St. John was still felt, let us say to ourselves: In the old consciousness of man, spirit was present in the WORD—even in the feeble ‘word’ that was used in speech. Spirit poured into the ‘word’ and was the power within it.

I am not criticizing any epoch, nor do I say that one epoch is of less value than another. I merely want to describe how the different epochs follow one another, each having its special value.But some epochs have to be characterized more by negative, some more by positive characteristics.

Let us picture to ourselves the dimness, the darkness, that gradually crept over the living impulse in the ‘word’ when the sentence “In the beginning was the WORD” was spoken. Let us now consider civilized mankind in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries and how it had to prepare for a growth of the inner impulse of freedom. You see one has also to value elements that were not present in certain periods. Consider, then, that humanity had to win its freedom with full consciousness and this would not have been possible if the spirit had still poured into and inspired the WORD as in earlier times. Then we shall understand how education in its old form became an impossibility as soon as Francis Bacon, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, came forward with a significant statement which, when we face it honestly, implies an annihilation of what is contained in the phrase “In the beginning was the WORD.” Before this time there was always a shadow of the spirit in the WORD, in the LOGOS. Bacon asks mankind to see in the ‘word’ only an idol, no longer the spirit but an idol, no longer to hold fast by the ‘word’ with its own power but to guard against the “intellectualism” of the ‘word.’ For if one has lost the real content of the ‘word’ out of which, in earlier times, knowledge, civilization and power were created—one is clinging to an idol—so thinks Francis Bacon. In the doctrine of idols which appears with Bacon lies the whole “swing-away” from the ‘word’ which took place during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Whither then does man tend? Towards the things of sense. Man was taught to hold fast to all that the senses can perceive.

Thus there was once an age when man was not only aware of the ‘word’ in itself but also of the world-creative spirit living in the WORD, in the LOGOS. Then came the age when the ‘word’ became an idol, a misleading thing, an idol that misleads one into intellectualism. Man was taught to hold fast by the outer, sensible object lest he fall a prey to the idol in the ‘word.’ Bacon demands that man shall not now hold fast to that which pours into him from the Gods but to that which lies in the outer world in lifeless objects or at most in external living objects. Man is directed away from the ‘word’ to outer sensible objects. This feeling alone remains in him: he must educate, he must approach human nature itself. The spirit is there within the human being but the ‘word’ is an idol. He can only direct the human being to look with his eyes at what is outside man. Education no longer makes use of what is truly human but of what is outside the human.

And now there exists the problem of education in the form we have to-day bringing fierce zeal but also fearful tragedy. We see it arising very characteristically in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Michel de Montaigne, in John Locke and—parallel with what was happening here in England—we see it in Comenius over on the Continent. In these three men, Montaigne, Locke, Comenius, we can see approximately how the departure from the Logos and the turning towards the things of sense becomes the strongest impulse in civilization. Fear of the idol in the ‘word’ arose in men. The Logos disappears. What is called perception or observation, a function which is quite justifiable as we shall see in the following lectures, but which is now understood in the sense of material perception, becomes the decisive factor. And we see how anxiously Montaigne, John Locke and Comenius desire to divert man from all that is super-sensible, all that is living in the LOGOS. John Locke and Montaigne always point to what is outside the human and try expressly to avoid all that is not the direct object of the senses, to bring as much of the sense-world as possible to the young through education. Comenius writes books the object of which is to show that one ought not to work through the ‘word’ but through artificially created sense-perceptions. And thus the transition is accomplished; we see mankind losing the feeling of all connection of the spirit with the ‘word.’ Civilization as a whole can no longer accept the inner sense of “In the beginning was the WORD,” and grapples on to outer facts of sense. The WORD, the LOGOS, is only accepted at all because it forms part of tradition.

Thus the longing arises, with intense zeal but also with fearful tragedy, only to educate by means of sense-perception, because the ‘word’ is felt to be an idol in the Baconian sense. And this longing appears in its most symptomatic form in Montaigne, John Locke and Comenius. They show us what is living in the whole of humanity; they show us how the mood which finds expression to-day as our deep longing to bring the spirit once again to the human being arose just when men could no longer believe in the spirit any more but only in the idol of the ‘word,’ as did Bacon. From that which has lived in all educational unions until the present, beginning with Montaigne and Comenius, fully justified as it was in those times, there must develop for the sake of the present age something which is able to bring the spirit, the creative spirit, the essential spirit, the will-bearing spirit to the human being, something which can recognize in the body of man and in his earthly deeds a revelation of that spirit which reveals itself in super-sensible worlds.

With this pouring of the super-sensible into the sensible, with this rediscovery of the spirit which has been lost in the WORD, in the LOGOS since the ‘word’ became an idol, begins a new era in education. Montaigne, John Locke, and Comenius knew very well what education ought to be. Their programmes are just as splendid as those of modern educational unions and all that people demand for education to-day is already to be found in the abstract writings of these three. What we have to find to-day, however, are the means which will lead us to reality. For no education will develop from abstract principles or programmes; it will only develop from reality. And because man himself is soul and spirit, because he has a physical nature, a nature of soul and a spiritual nature, reality must again come into our life; for reality will bring the spirit with it and only the spirit can sustain the educational art of the future.

The previous lectures have indeed in no way attempted to formulate new educational theories, but rather to create a true feeling for education. My aim has been to speak to the human heart rather than to the intellect. This is most essential for the teacher because, as we have seen, the art of education must develop from a deeper knowledge of man's whole being.

For a long time now it has been usual to hear in educational circles that this or that method should be used in teaching. Very frequently the training of teachers consists in little besides the assimilation of certain rules and theories as to the treatment of the child. This, however, will never make the teacher fully aware of the greatness of a task which he cannot approach with true devotion unless he has a deep insight into the whole nature of man as body, soul and spirit. A living conception of the human being develops into pure will in the teacher when, from hour to hour, he has learned to give really practical answers to the eager questions of the child he has to instruct. The first essential is that he himself shall understand the child, and this he can only do in the truest sense if he has a real and concrete knowledge of man in body, soul and spirit.

It is for this reason difficult to describe the education given at the Waldorf School. It is not a thing that can be ‘learnt’ or discussed; it is purely and simply a matter of practice, and one can only give examples of a practical way of dealing with the needs of particular cases. Such practice must be the outcome of actual experience and it is always essential that the requisite knowledge of the human being should be available. But education is a social concern in the widest sense for it begins immediately after birth. It is the concern of the whole of mankind, of each individual family, of each community. This is most significantly brought home to us by a knowledge of the child's nature before the change of teeth at about the seventh year. A German writer, Jean Friedrich Richter, spoke words of great truth v/hen he said that in the first three years of life man learns more than in all his subsequent student years. In his time there were only three academic years.

The first three years, and from then onwards to the seventh year, are much the most important in the whole development of a man, for the child is not at all the same being as in later life. In his earliest years the child is one great sense-organ. The scope of this truth is not generally understood; indeed it is a question of using very emphatic words if the whole truth is to be expressed.

In later years, for instance, man tastes his food in his mouth, tongue and palate. The sense of taste is, as it were, localized in the head. But with the child, and especially so during these early years, this is not the case. Taste then works throughout the whole organism; the child tastes its mother's milk and first food right down into its very limbs. The processes that in later life are localized in the tongue, extend over the whole organism in the young child who lives, as it were, in this sense of taste. There is a strong element of animality here, but we must never compare this element in the child with the ordinary animal nature. The animality of the child exists on a higher level. The human being is never an animal, not even in the embryonic state—in fact, at that period least of all. A comparison may help to make this clearer.

Those who have a true insight into the processes of nature may have the following impression of these processes in the animal, if they look at a herd of cows grazing in a meadow. As each cow lies down to digest its food, it gives itself up in a most wonderful way to the Cosmos. It is as though cosmic forces were active in the digesting animal, inducing the most marvellous visions. The digesting process in the animal is a mighty act of wisdom. While the cow digests it is given up to the Cosmos in an imaginative, dreamlike existence. This may seem an extravagant statement, yet strange to say it is absolutely true.

If we now raise this process one stage higher, we can understand how the child experiences the functions of its bodily organism. All these physical functions are accompanied by a kind of tasting, and, moreover, the other processes that in later life are localized in eye and ear, also extend over the whole organism of the child. Think of the wonder of the eye, of how the eye takes in colour from outside and makes an inner picture. This process is localized, separated off from our conscious experience of life as a whole. The intellect takes hold of what the eye forms in so wonderful a way and makes of it a shadowy, mental image. Equally wonderful are those processes which, in the adult, are localized in the ear. But all that is localized in the several senses of the adult is spread out over the whole organism in the child. In the child there is no separation between spirit, soul and body. Everything from without is mirrored in his inner being. He imitates his whole environment. And now, bearing this in mind, we must observe how three faculties, conditioning the whole of life, are acquired by the child during his earliest years—the faculties of walking, speaking, and thinking.

‘To walk’ is but the limited expression for something far, far greater. We say that the child learns to walk because this is the most evident feature of the process. But this learning to walk is in reality the bringing of man into a right equilibrium in the world of space. The child strives for the upright posture, he strives to relate his legs to the law of gravity in a way that will give balance. He does the same with the arms and hands. The whole organism finds its orientation. Learning to walk means to set the whole organism in a right orientation with the directions of space.

Now it is important to perceive in the right way that the child is an imitative being, for during the first years of life everything must be learnt from imitation of the environment. Now it is evident that the forces of orientation must inhere in the organism itself; the organism is adapted from the very beginning to attain the vertical and not to remain in the horizontal position. The arms must also find their right relation to the laws of space. All this inheres in the very nature of the child and is brought about by the impulses of the organism itself.

If in education we coerce the impulses of human nature, if we do not know how to leave this nature free, and to act only as helpers, then we injure the organism of the child for the whole of its later earthly life. If we wrongly force the child to walk by external methods, if we do not merely help but urge him to walk or to stand, we do the child an injury which lasts till death and is especially harmful in advanced age. In true methods of education it can never be a question of considering the child as it is at a given moment, but the whole of its journey through life from birth to death must be taken into account, for the whole earthly life is already present from the first.

Now because the child is a most delicately balanced organ of sense, he is not only sensitive to the physical influences of his surroundings, but also to the moral influences, especially of those of thought. However far-fetched it may appear to the modern materialistic mind, the child does, nevertheless, sense all that those in his environment are thinking. As parents or teachers we must not only refrain from actions that are outwardly unseemly, but we must be inwardly true, inwardly moral in our thought and feeling, for the child senses our moods and absorbs them. He does not merely shape his nature according to our words and actions, but in accordance with our whole attitude of heart and mind. The environment, then, is the most important thing of all in the first period of the child's education, up to the seventh year.

And now the question will arise: ‘What kind of help are we to give in this process of orientation and learning to walk?’ Here it must be remembered that the connections of life can be observed by a science that is spiritual in character, but not by a science that is materialistic and dead.

Let us take a child who has been forced on to walk and to adjust himself in space by all kinds of coercive measures, and then look at him in his fiftieth year, or between the fifties and sixties. If nothing else has intervened, we shall find him suffering from all manner of metabolic diseases which he cannot throw off, from rheumatism, gout, and so on. Everything of the nature of soul and spirit that we do to the child—for we are exercising forces of the soul and spirit if we urge him to adopt the vertical position, or to walk—everything comes to the stage where the spiritual works right down into the physical. For the forces that have been called into play by the use of highly questionable methods remain for the whole of the earthly life, and reappear later in the form of bodily diseases.

As a matter of fact, all education of the child is at the same time physical education. We cannot speak of a specifically physical training of the child, for soul and spirit are always at work upon his bodily nature. We observe how the child's organism adjusts itself to attain the upright position, and to walk, and we lovingly watch this wonderful mystery enacted by the human organism as it passes from the horizontal to the vertical position. Piety and reverence must pervade us as we observe how the divine powers of creation are adapting the child to the laws of space, and then we must lovingly help him to walk and to acquire balance. If with inner devotion we observe every expression of human nature in the child and hold out a helping hand, we generate health-bringing forces which can then re-appear as healthy metabolic activities between the ages of fifty and sixty, a time of life when we especially need control of the processes of the metabolism.

Herein lies truly the mystery of human evolution: All that is of the nature of soul and spirit at one stage of life becomes physical, manifests itself physically in later life. Years later it makes itself evident in the physical body.

So much then as regards learning to walk. A child who is lovingly guided to walk develops into a healthy man, and to apply this love in the process of learning to walk is to add much to the healthy education of the body.

Now from this process of orientation in space there develops speech. Modern physiology knows something of this, but not very much. It knows that the movements of the right hand correspond to a certain activity of the left side of the brain, which is related to speech. Physiology admits the connection between the movements of the right hand and the so-called convolutions of Broca at the left side of the brain. As the hand moves and makes gestures, forces pour into it; all this motive force passes into the brain, where it becomes the impulse of speech. Science knows only a fragment of the process, for the truth is this: Speech does not arise merely because a movement of the right hand coincides with a convolution in the left portion of the brain; speech arises from the entire motor-organism of the human being. How the child learns to walk, to orientate himself in space, to transform the first erratic and uncontrolled movements of the arms into gestures definitely related to the outer world, all this is carried over by the mysterious processes of the human organism to the head, and appears as speech.

Anyone who is able to understand these things realizes that children who shuffle their feet as they walk pronounce every sound, and especially the palatal sounds, quite differently from those whose gait is firm. Every nuance of speech is bound up with organic movement; life to begin with is ail gesture and gesture is inwardly transformed into speech.

Speaking, then, is an outcome of walking, that is to say, of the power to orientate the being in space. And the degree to which the child is able to control speech will depend very largely upon whether we give him really wise, loving help while he is learning to walk.

These are some of the finer connections revealed by a true knowledge of man. Not without reason have I described in detail the process of guiding the spirit to the human organism. With every step that is taken, the body follows the spirit, if the spirit is brought into the child in the right way.

Again, it is a fact that to begin with the whole organism is active when the child is learning to speak. First there are the outer movements, the movements of the legs corresponding to the strong contours of speech; die more delicate movements of the arms and hands correspond to the inflection and plastic form of the words. In short, outer movements are transformed into the inner movements of speech.

Just as the element of love should pervade the help we give to the child as he learns to walk, so while we help him to speak we must be inwardly true. The strongest tendencies to untruthfulness in after life are generated during the time when a child is learning to speak, for in those years the element of truth in speech is taken into the whole bodily organism. A child whose teachers are filled with inner truthfulness will, as he imitates his environment, so learn to speak that the subtle activity constantly generated in the organism by the processes of in-breathing and out-breathing will be strengthened. Naturally, these things must be understood in a delicate and not in a crude sense. The processes are highly rarefied but are nevertheless revealed in every manifestation of life. We breathe in oxygen and exhale carbonic acid. Oxygen has to be changed into carbonic acid in the body by the breathing process. We receive oxygen from the cosmos, and give back carbonic acid. Truth or untruth in those around us while we are learning to speak determines whether, in the more subtle functions of life, we are able to change the oxygen within us into carbonic acid in the right way. This process consists in a complete transformation of the spiritual into the physical.

One of the most common and untruthful influences brought to the child is the use of “baby-language.” Unconsciously the child does not like this; he wants to listen to true speech, the speech of grown men and women. We should speak in ordinary language to the child and avoid the use of this “baby-language.” At first the child will naturally only babble in imitation of words, but we ourselves must not copy this babbling. To use the babbling, imperfect speech of the child to him is to injure his digestive organs. Once more the spiritual becomes physical, and works directly into the bodily organs. And everything that we do spiritually for the child constitutes a physical training, for the child is not all individual. Many later defects in the digestive system are caused by a child's having learnt to speak in a wrong way.

And just as speech arises from walking and grasping, in short from movement, so thought develops from speech. Just as in helping the child as he learns to walk we must be pervaded by love, so in helping the child to gain the power of speech we must be absolutely truthful; and since the child is one great sense organ and his inner physical functions are also a copy of the spiritual, our own thinking must be clear if right thinking is to develop in the child from out the forces of speech.

No greater harm can be done to the child than by the giving of orders and then causing confusion by reversing them. Confusion set up in the child's surroundings as the result of inconsequent thinking is the actual root of the many so-called nervous diseases prevalent in our modern civilization.

Why have so many people ‘nerves’ to-day? Simply because in childhood there was no clarity and precision of thought around them during the time when they were learning to think after having learned to speak. The physical condition of the next generation, as evinced by its gravest defects, is a faithful copy of the preceding generation. When we observe the faults in our children which develop in later life, we should gain self-knowledge. All that happens in the child's environment expresses itself in the physical organism—though in a subtle and delicate way. Loving treatment while the child is learning to walk, truthfulness while he learns to speak, clarity and precision as he begins to be able to think, all these qualities become a part of the bodily constitution. The vascular system and organs develop after the models of love, truth and clarity in the environment. Diseases of the metabolic system are the result of coercive treatment while the child is learning to walk. Digestive disturbances may arise from untruthful actions during the time at which the child is beginning to speak. Nerve trouble is the outcome of confused thinking in the child's environment.

When we see the prevalence of nervous disease in this third decade of the twentieth century, we cannot but conclude that there must have been much confused thinking on the part of the teachers about the beginning of the century. Many diseases of the nerves to-day are really due to confused thinking, and again the nerve troubles from which people suffered at the beginning of the century were equally the result of the confused thought of the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

Now these matters can be handled in such a way that physiology, hygiene, and psychology no longer need to remain shut off from each other as specialized branches of knowledge, so that to-day the teacher must call in the doctor the moment any question of health arises. Physiological education, school hygiene and the like can be united in such a way that the teacher's work will come to include an understanding of the activity of the soul and spirit in the physical organism. But since everyone has in a certain sense to train children from birth up to the seventh year, a social task stands before us, inasmuch as a true knowledge of man is absolutely necessary if humanity is to follow an ascending, and not a descending, path.

***

Quite rightly has our “humane” age attempted to do away with a certain educational measure very frequently applied in earlier days, I mean the habit of caning. The last thing I wish to do is to speak in favour of such punishment, but this I must say, that the reason why our age has made some attempt to get rid of corporal punishment is because it very well knows the evil results of this; the moral consequences of injury to the physical body are very evident. But, my dear friends, one terrible form of punishment has crept into the educational methods of to-day, when all eyes are so concentrated on the physical and material and there is so little comprehension of the soul and spirit. I am here referring to a form of punishment that is never realized as such because men's minds are not directed to the spiritual.

Parents often think it desirable to give their little girl a beautiful doll as a plaything. This ‘beautiful’ doll is a fearful production because for one thing it is so utterly inartistic, in spite of its ‘real’ hair, painted cheeks and eyes which close when it is laid down or open when it is lifted up! We often give our children toys that are dreadfully inartistic copies of life. The doll is merely one example. All modern toys are of the same type and they constitute a form of cruel punishment to the child's inner nature. Children often behave well in the presence of others merely from a fear of conventional punishments; equally they do not always express aversion from toys like the ‘beautiful doll,’ although this dislike is deeply rooted in their souls. However strongly we may suggest to children that they ought to love such toys, the forces of their unconscious and subconscious life are stronger, and the children have an intense antipathy to anything resembling the beautiful doll. For, as I will now show you, such toys really amount to an inner punishment.

Suppose that in the making of our toys we were to take into consideration what the child has actually experienced in his infant thought up to the age of six or seven in the processes of learning to walk after learning to stand upright and then we were to make a doll out of a handkerchief, for instance, showing a head at the top with two ink-spots for eyes. The child can understand and, moreover, really love such a doll. Primitively this doll possesses all the qualities of the human form, in so far at any rate as the child is capable of observing them at this early age. A child knows no more about the human being than that he stands upright, that there is an ‘upper’ and a ‘lower’ part of his being, that he has a head and a pair of eyes. As for the mouth, you will often find it on the forehead in a child's drawings! There is as yet no clear consciousness of the exact position of the mouth. What a child actually experiences is all contained in a doll made from a handkerchief with ink-spots for eyes. An inner, plastic force is at work in the child. All that comes to him from his environment passes over into his being and becomes there an inner formative power, a power that also builds up the organs of the body.

If the child has a father who is constantly ill-tempered and irritable, and the child as a result of this lives in an environment of perpetual shocks and unreasonableness, all this turmoil expresses itself in his breathing and the circulation of the blood. The lungs, heart and the whole venal system are affected by such a condition. Throughout the whole of his life the child bears within him the inner effects upon the organs of his father's ill-temper.

This is merely an example to show you that the child possesses a wonderful plastic power and is perpetually at work as a kind of inner sculptor upon his own being. If we give the child the kind of doll made from a handkerchief, these plastic, creative forces that arise in the human organism from the rhythmic system of the breathing and blood circulation and build up the brain, flow gently upwards. They mould the brain like a sculptor who works upon his material with a fine and supple hand, a hand permeated with the forces of the soul and spirit. In the child's perception of the handkerchief-doll these plastically creative elements are called upon and healthy forces are generated which then flow upwards from the rhythmic system and work upon the structure of the brain.

If, on the contrary, we give the child one of the so-called ‘beautiful’ dolls, with moving eyes and painted cheeks, real hair and so on—a hideous, ghostly production from the artistic point of view—then the plastic, brain-building forces that are generated in the rhythmic system have the effect of the constant lashing of a whip. All that the child cannot as yet understand works upon the brain like the lashings of a whip. The whole brain is lashed to its very foundations in a terrible way.

Such is the secret of the ‘beautiful’ doll, and it can be applied to many of the playthings given to the child to-day.

If we would give loving help to the child at play we must realize how many inner, formative forces are active in his being. In this respect our whole civilization is on the wrong road. For instance, modern culture has evolved the concept of ‘Animism.’ A child bumps against the table and strikes it in anger. We say to-day that the child imagines the table to be a living thing, he endows it with imaginary life and strikes it. Now this is not true. The child does not imaginatively endow the table with life, or with anything at all, but feels as though the living were lifeless. When he hurts himself, a kind of reflex movement makes him strike the table. He does not think of the table as living, for everything is as yet lifeless for him; he treats the living and the lifeless exactly in the same way.

These false ideas show that our civilization does not know how to approach the child. The first great essential is to learn to deal with children wisely and lovingly and give them what their own being needs. We should not inflict inner punishment by giving the child toys of the type of the beautiful doll. Rather should we be able to throw ourselves into the child's inner life and give him such toys as he can himself inwardly understand.

Thus play also is something that calls for true insight into the nature of the child. If we prattle like a little child and think to bring our speech down to his level, if we model our words falsely, we bring an untruthful influence to bear upon him. On the other hand, however, we must be able to descend to the stage of the child's development in everything that has to do with the will-nature in play. We shall then realize that intellectuality, a quality so much admired in this age, simply does not exist in the child's organic nature, and should therefore have no place in his play.

The child at play will naturally imitate what is going on in his surroundings, but it will seldom happen that a child of four expresses a wish to be a philologist, let us say, although he may say he would like to be a chauffeur! Why? Because everything about a chauffeur makes an immediate sense-impression. It is different with a philologist, for what he does makes no impression on the senses; it simply passes unnoticed by the child. Everything intellectual leaves the child unaffected, he passes it by. What, then, must we do if we are to help the child to the right kind of play?

Now when we plough, or make hats, or sew clothes, and so on, all these things are done with a certain purpose and have a certain intellectual quality. But everything in life, no matter whether it be ploughing, building carriages, shoeing horses, or the like, besides having a definite purpose, contains another element in outward appearance. At the sight of a man guiding his plough over the field one can feel, apart from the object of ploughing, the plastic quality of the picture; it is a picture which arises. If we can feel this pictorial element quite apart from its purpose (and it is the æsthetic sense that enables us to do this) then we can begin to make toys that really appeal to the child. We shall not aim at intellectual beauty as in the modern doll, but at something expressed in the whole content, in the whole feeling of the human being. Then, instead of the beautiful doll, we shall produce for the older children a primitive, really enchanting doll something like this one. [Dr. Steiner here showed a doll made by pupils of the Waldorf School]

In true education therefore the essential thing is to be able to bring an artistic element into our work and to apply it in the making of toys, for then we begin to satisfy the needs of the child's own nature.

Our civilization has made us almost exclusively utilitarian, intellectualistic, and we offer even our children the result of what we have ‘thought out’ with our brains. But we ought not to give them what adult life has ‘thought out,’ but what our maturer life feels and perceives. This is the quality the toy ought to exhibit. If we give a child a toy plough, the essential thing is that it should express the aesthetic quality of form and movement in the plough, for this will help to unfold the natural forces in the child.

Certain Kindergarten systems, in other ways worthy of all respect, have made great mistakes in this direction. Froebel's system, as also others, have arisen from a true inner love for children, but they have failed to realize that although imitation is a part of the very nature of the child, he can only imitate that which is not yet permeated by an intellectual quality. We must therefore not introduce into the Kindergarten such various forms of handiwork as have been ingeniously ‘thought out.’ The stick-laying, plaiting, and so on, that often play so large a part in modern Kindergarten methods, have all been ingeniously thought out. Kindergarten work ought rather to be so arranged that it contains an actual picture of what older people do, and not mere inventions. A sense of tragedy will often arise in one possessed of a true knowledge of man when he goes into these modern Kindergartens, for they are so full of good intentions and the work has been so conscientiously thought out. They are based on infinite goodwill and a sincere love of children, yet on the other hand it has not been realized that all intellectualism ought to be eliminated. Kindergarten work should consist simply and solely of imitative pictures of what grown-up people do.

A child whose intellectual faculties are developed before the fourth or fifth year bears a dreadful heritage into later life. He is being educated for materialism. To the extent that an intellectual education is given to the child before the fourth or fifth year, will he become materialistic in later life. The brain can either develop in such a way that the spirit dwells within it and gives birth to intuition, or on the other hand the whole nature can tend towards materialism if at this early age the child's brain is intellectually forced.

If we would so train the child that as man he may comprehend the spirit, we must delay as long as possible the giving of mental concepts in a purely intellectual form. Although it is highly necessary, in view of the nature of our modern civilization, that a man should be fully awake in later life, the child must be allowed to remain as long as possible in the peaceful, dreamlike condition of pictorial imagination in which his early years are passed. For if we allow his organism to grow strong in this way, he will develop in later life the intellectuality needed in the world to-day.

If the child's brain has been punished in the way I have described, permanent injury is done to the soul. The use of ‘baby-language’ injuriously affects the digestion; unloving, mistaken coercion in the process of learning to walk has an unfavourable effect upon the metabolic system in later life. Soul and body alike suffer if the inner being of the child is injured in these ways, and it must be the first aim of education to do away with such inner punishments as are represented, for instance, by toys like the beautiful doll. These do not only lacerate the soul of the child, but also harm his bodily constitution, for in childhood body, soul and spirit are one. The essential thing, therefore, is to raise the games and play of children to their true level.

In these lectures I have tried to indicate how false forms of spirituality must be avoided when we are dealing with the child, so that a true spirituality, in short, the whole individuality, may come to full expression in later life.

The transition from early childhood to the school age is marked by the change of teeth at about the seventh year, and in studying this period it must above all be remembered that up to the seventh year the child is working, as it were, as an inner sculptor and with the creative forces of the head is organizing and moulding his whole being. All that has been present in his environment, including the moral qualities, now plays a part in the development of the vascular system, the circulation of the blood and the processes of the breath, so that as a physical being man bears within him throughout his earthly life the results of the imitative period of his childhood from birth up to the time of the second dentition.

It cannot, of course, be said that he is conditioned only by this, for naturally much can be rectified in the body later by the exercise of moral forces and by inner activity of soul. Still we should realize with what a wonderful heritage we can endow the child on his path of life if we are able to prepare his physical organism to be the bearer of moral and spiritual qualities, if we help the work of the sculptor within him up to the age of seven by ourselves living a moral and spiritual life at his side.

Certain details and other matters of which I spoke yesterday, will come to light as the lectures proceed.

The teacher, then, must understand that when the child has passed his seventh year and comes then to actual school age, these plastic forces are transformed into an activity in the soul which must be reckoned with by his teacher. The child longs for pictures, imagery, and this fact should indicate to us the fundamental principle of his education at this age. From the time of the second dentition up to the age of adolescence, the development of the rhythmic system, i.e., the breathing and the circulation of the blood and also the digestive functions, is all-important. The soul of the child during that period longs for pictorial imagery and his rhythmic system is there to be dealt with by the teacher in an organic bodily sense. And so a pictorial, imaginative element must dominate all that the child is given to do; a musical quality, I might even say, must pervade the relationship between teacher and pupil. Rhythm, measure, even melody must be there as the basic principle of the teaching, and this element demands that the teacher must himself feel and experience this ‘musical’ quality.

It is the rhythmic system that predominates in the child's organic nature during this first period of school life, and the entire teaching must be pervaded by rhythm. The teacher must feel himself so inwardly living in this musical element that true rhythm may prevail in the class-room. He must be able to feel this instinctively.

It thus becomes evident that during the early years of school life (that is to say after the age of seven) all true education must develop from the foundation of art. The reason why education in our day leaves so much to be desired is because modern civilization is not conducive to the development of artistic feeling. I am not here referring to the individual arts, but to the fact that sound educational principles can only arise from a civilization penetrated with artistic quality. This has very great significance.

And if we can imbue our whole teaching with artistic quality, we influence the rhythmic system in the child. Such lessons actually make the child's breathing and circulation more healthy. On the other hand, our task is also to lead the child out into life, to develop a sound faculty of judgment for later life, and so during this age we must teach him to use his intelligence, though never by constraint. There must also, naturally, be some physical training and exercise, for it is our duty to help the child to have a healthy body in later life, in so far as his destiny permits. But to accomplish all this we need a deeper insight into the whole nature of man.

In our modern civilization, where all eyes are concentrated on outer, material things, no attention is given to the consideration of the state of sleep, although man devotes to it one-third of his earthly life. This alternating rhythm of our waking and sleeping is of the greatest possible significance. Never should it be thought that man is inactive while he sleeps. He is inactive only in so far as the outer, external world is concerned, but as regards the health of his body, and more especially the welfare of his soul and spirit, sleep is all-important. True education can provide for a right life of sleep, for the activities which belong to man's waking hours are carried over into the condition of sleep, and this is especially the case with the child.

At the base of all artistic creation lies in reality the unceasing activity of the rhythmic system. Breathing and the action of the heart continue without intermission from birth to death. It is only the processes of thought and will that induce fatigue. Thinking and movements of the body cause fatigue, and since they everywhere come into play, we may say that all life's activities cause fatigue. But in the case of the child we must be especially watchful to guard against over-fatigue. The best possible way to do this is to see that throughout the all-important early school years our teaching has a basic artistic quality, for then we call upon the child's rhythmic system where he tires least of all.

What then will happen if we make too great a demand on the intellect, urging the child to think for himself, forcing him to think? Certain organic forces that tend inwardly to harden the body are brought into play. These forces are responsible for the salty deposits in the body and are needed in the formation of bone, cartilage and sinew, in all those parts of the body in short that have a tendency to become rigid. This normal rigidity is over-developed if intellectual thinking is forced. These hardening forces are normally active during our waking consciousness, but if we make undue claims upon the intellect, if we force the child to think too much, we are sowing the seeds of premature arterial sclerosis.

Thus here too it is essential to develop by means of a true observation of the nature of the child a fine sense of the degree to which we may call with safety upon the different forces at work. A most vital principle is here at stake. If I allow the child to think, if I teach him to write, for instance, in an intellectual way, saying: ‘Here are the letters and you must learn them,’ I am overstraining the mental powers of the child and laying the germs of sclerosis, at any rate of a tendency to sclerosis. The human being as such has no inner relationship whatever to the letters of modern script. They are little ‘demons’ so far as human nature is concerned, and we have to find the right way to approach them. This way is found if to begin with we stimulate the child's artistic feeling by letting him paint or draw the lines and colours that flow of themselves on to the paper from his innermost being. Then, as the child's artistic sense is aroused, one always feels—and feeling is here the essential thing—how greatly man is enriched by this artistic activity. One feels that intellectuality impoverishes the soul, makes a man inwardly barren, whereas artistic activity makes him inwardly rich, so rich in fact that this richness must somehow be modified. The pictorial and artistic tends of itself to pass into the more attenuated form of concepts and ideas, and must in a measure be impoverished in this process of transference. But if, after having stimulated the child artistically, we then allow the intellectuality to develop from the artistic feeling, it will have the right intensity. The intellect too will lay hold of the body in such a way as to bring about a rightly balanced and not an excessive hardening process.

If we force intellectual powers in the child we arrest growth; but we liberate the forces of growth if we approach the intellect by way of art. For this reason at the Waldorf School value is placed upon artistic rather than upon intellectual training at the beginning of school life. The teaching is at first pictorial, non-intellectual; the relation of the teacher to the child is pervaded by a musical, rhythmic quality, so that by such methods we may achieve the degree of intellectual development that the child needs. The mental training in this way becomes at the same time the very best training for the physical body.

To the more sensitive observer there is abundant evidence in our present civilization that many grown-up people are too inwardly rigid. They seem to walk about like wooden machines. It is really a characteristic of our day that men and women carry their bodies about like burdens, whereas a truer and more artistically conceived educational system so develops the human being that every step, every gesture of the hand to be devoted later to the service of humanity brings to the child an inner sense of joy and well-being. In training the intellect we free the soul from the bodily activities, but if we over-intellectualize, man will go through life feeling that his body is “of the earth earthly,” that it is of no value and must be overcome. Then he may give himself up to a purely mystical life of soul and spirit, feeling that the spirit alone has value. Right education, however, also leads us by ways of truth to the spirit that creates the body. God in creating the world did not say: Matter is evil and man must avoid it. No world would have come into being if the Gods had thought like this. The world could only emanate from the Divine because the Gods ordained that spirit should be directly and immediately active in matter.

If man realizes that his highest life in every sphere is that which is directed according to divine intention, he must choose a form of education that does not alienate him from the world, but makes him a being whose soul and spirit stream down into the body throughout his whole life. A man who would deny the body when he immerses himself in thought, is no true thinker.

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The waking life is beneficially affected if we develop the intellect from the basis of the artistic, and all physical culture has a definite relation to the child's life of sleep. If we wish really to understand the form that healthy culture and exercise of the body should take, we must first ask this question: ‘How does bodily exercise affect the life of sleep?’

All bodily activity arises supersensibly from the will, is indeed an out-streaming of will-impulses into the organism of movement. Even in purely mental activity the will is active and is flowing into the limbs. If we sit at a desk and think out decisions which are then carried out by others, our will-impulses are, nevertheless, streaming into our limbs. In this instance we simply hold them back, restrain them. We ourselves may sit still, but the orders we give are really an in-streaming of the will into our own limbs. We must therefore first discover what is of importance in these physically active impulses of the will if their unfolding is to have the right effect upon the state of sleep; and the following must be taken into account.

Everything that is transformed into action by the human will sets up a certain organic process of combustion. When I think, I burn up something in my organism, only this inner process of burning up must not be compared with the purely chemical combustion of the science of physics. When a candle is alight there is an external process of combustion, but only materialistic thinking can compare this inner process of combustion with the burning of a lighted candle. In the human organization the processes of outer Nature are taken hold of by forces of the soul and spirit, so that within the human body, and even within the plant, the outer substances of nature are quite differently active. Similarly the burning process within the human being is altogether different from the process of combustion we see in the lighted candle. Yet a certain kind of combustion is always induced in the body when we will, even though the impulse does not pass into action.

Now because we generate this process of inner combustion, we bring about something in our organism that sleep alone can rectify. In a certain sense we should literally burn up our bodies if sleep did not perpetually reduce combustion to its right degree of intensity. All this must again be understood in a subtle sense and not in the crude sense of Natural Science. Sleep regulates the inner burning by spreading it over the whole organism, whereas otherwise it would confine itself to the organs of movement.

Now there are two ways of carrying out bodily movements. Think of the kind of exercises children are often given to do. The idea is (everything is “idea” in a materialistic age in spite of its belief that it is dealing with facts) that the child ought to make this or that kind of movement in games or in gymnastics, because only so will he grow up to be a civilized human being. As a rule movements which grown-up people practice are considered the best, for since the ideal is that the child should grow up an exact copy of his elders, he is made to do the same kind of gymnastics. That is to say, a certain opinion is held by ordinary people and must apply also to the child.

As a result of this abstract public opinion, outer influence is brought to bear on the child. He is given this or that exercise merely because it is customary to make these movements. But this sets up processes of combustion which the human organism is no longer capable of adjusting. Restless sleep is the result of mere external methods of physical culture.

These things cannot be observed by the methods of ordinary physiology, but they take place nevertheless in the finer and more delicate processes of the human body. If we give children these conventional gymnastic exercises, they cannot get the deep, sound sleep they need, and the bodily constitution cannot be sufficiently refreshed and restored in sleep.

If on the other hand we can give cur educational methods an artistic form (and remember, in artistic activities the whole nature comes into play) a certain hunger for physical activity will arise quite naturally in the child, for, as we have seen, the excessive richness of the artistic sense reacts as an impulse towards the more sobering element of the intellect. Nothing so easily induces a craving for bodily exercise as artistic activity. If the child has been occupied artistically for about two hours—and the length of time must be carefully arranged—something that longs for expression in movements of the body begins to stir in the organism. Art creates a real hunger for true movements of the body.

Thus gradually we should lead over into games, into free movements in space, what the hands have expressed in painting and drawing, or the voice in singing. Also the child should be encouraged to learn some kind of musical instrument at the earliest possible age, for this involves direct physical activity. The inner forces must be allowed to stream out into movements in space, which should be a continuation, as it were, of the inner organic processes called up by the artistic work in the school. Physical training is then a natural development from the methods of teaching that are right for this age of life, and there is an intimate connection between the two.

If the child is given only such physical exercises as his artistic work creates a need for, he will get the kind of sleep he needs. A right provision for the waking life can thus cause a right life of sleep in which all the organic processes of combustion are harmonized. Bodily and mental training alike must develop from the artistic element. Thus especially so far as the body is concerned, nothing is more essential than that the teacher himself should be an artist through and through. The more joy the teacher can experience in beautiful forms, in music, the more he longs to pass from abstract words into the rhythms of poetry; the more the plastic sense is alive in him the better will he be able to arrange such games and exercises as offer the child an opportunity for artistic expression. But alas! our civilization to-day would like the spirit to be easy of access, and people do not feel inclined to strive too strenuously for spiritual ideals.

As I said in a previous lecture most people, while admitting the inadequacy of their own education, claim at the same time to know what education ought to be and are quite ready to lay down the law about it. And so it comes about that there is little inclination to take into consideration the finer processes of the human organism, as to how, for example, an artistic conception of gymnastic is determined by the artistic activity itself. What are the movements demanded by the human organism itself? No artistic feeling is brought to bear on the solution of these problems. The reading of books is the main occupation of the modern intellectual class; people study Greek ideals and a revival of the ‘Olympic Games’ has become a catch phrase, though this ‘revival’ is of a purely external nature. The Olympic Games are never studied from the point of view of the needs of the human organism, as they were in Greece, for the modern study of them is all book-learning, based on documents or outer traditions that have been handed down.

Now modern men are not ancient Greeks, and they do not understand the part played by the true Olympic Games in the culture of Greece. For if one penetrated fully into the spirit of ancient Greece, one would say: the children were instructed by the gymnasts in dancing and wrestling, as I have described. But why were they thus instructed? This was due to the Olympic Games, for these were not only artistic but also religious in their nature—a true offspring of Greek culture. In their Olympic Games the Greeks lived wholly in an atmosphere of art and religion, and with a true educational instinct they could bring these elements into the gymnastic exercises given to children.

Abstract, inartistic forms of physical culture are contrary to all true education, because they hinder the development of the human being. It would be far better to-day if, instead of trying to find out from books how to revive the Olympic Games, people made some attempt to understand the inner nature of man. For then they would realize that all physical education not based on the inner needs of the organism sets up an excessive process of combustion. The result of performing such exercises in childhood will lead in later life to flabbiness of the muscular system. The muscles will be incapable of carrying out the behests of the soul and spirit.

While on the one hand a false intellectual education inwardly so hardens the body that the bones become burdensome instead of moving with resilience in harmony with the soul, on the other hand the limbs are weakened through too strong a tendency to the process of combustion. Man has gradually become a creature who is dragged down on the one hand by the burden of the salts that have formed within him, and on the other hand is always attempting to escape, to free himself from those organic processes which are due to faulty combustion. An intimate knowledge of man is necessary before a true relationship can be established between these two processes of combustion and salt-formation. Only when we lead over artistic feeling into the intellectual element can the tendency to over-rigidity be balanced by the right degree of combustion. This right balance then affects the life of sleep, and the child sleeps deeply and peacefully. The restlessness and fidgetiness caused by most modern systems of bodily training are absent. Children who are forced to practise the wrong kind of physical exercises fidget in soul during sleep, and in the morning, when the soul returns to the body, restlessness and faulty processes of combustion are set up in the organism.

Our conceptions must therefore be widened by knowledge, for all this will show you that a profound understanding of human nature is essential. If in this earthly existence we hold man to be the most precious creation of the Gods, the great question must be: What have the Gods placed before us in man? How can we best develop the human child entrusted to us here on earth?

Up to the seventh year the child is through and through an imitative being, but from the time of the change of teeth onwards, his inner nature longs to shape itself according to the models set up by a natural authority.

A long time ago now I wrote The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, and in view of what I said there, I do not think you will accuse me of laying undue stress upon the principle of authority in any sphere of social life. Although man's self-expression is directed by an impulse of spiritual freedom, it is just as fully subject to law as the life of Nature. It is therefore not for us to decide according to our likes or dislikes what kind of education should be given to our children between the time of the change of teeth and adolescence. Education should rather be dictated by the needs of human nature itself. Up to the second dentition, at about the seventh year, the child imitates in every gesture, nay, even in the pulsations of the venal blood and in the rhythms of the breath, everything that goes on around him. From birth to the age of seven, the environment is the model which the child copies. But from the seventh to the fourteenth or fifteenth years, to the age of puberty, he must unfold a free spiritual activity under the influence of natural authority. This must be so if development is to be healthy and free and if the child is rightly to use his freedom in later life.

The faculty of personal judgment is not ripe until the fourteenth or fifteenth year. Only then has the child developed to a point at which the teacher is justified in appealing to his faculty of judgment. At the age of fourteen or fifteen he can reason for himself, but before this age we injure him, we retard his development if we enter into “the why and wherefore.” The whole of later life is immeasurably benefited if between the seventh and fourteenth years (approximately, of course) we have been able to accept a truth not because we see its underlying reason—indeed, our intellect is not mature enough for this—but because we feel that the teacher whom we revere and love feels it to be true. Our sense of beauty grows in the right way if we are able to accept the teacher's standard of the beautiful—the teacher to whom we give a spontaneous, and not a forced respect.

Our feeling for the good will also be a guide in later life if we have not been forced to observe petty rules, but have realized from the teacher's own warm-hearted words how much he loves a good deed and hates a bad one. His words can make us so warmly responsive to the good and so coldly averse from evil that we turn naturally to the good because the teacher himself loves it. Then we grow up, not bound hand and foot by dogma, but filled with a spontaneous love for what the teacher declares to be true, beautiful and good. If during the first period of school life we have learnt to adopt his standard of truth, beauty and goodness because he has been able to express them in artistic imagery, the impulse for these virtues becomes a second nature, for it is not the intellect that develops goodness. A man who has over and over again been told dogmatically to do this, or net to do that, has a cold, matter-of-fact feeling for the good, whereas one who has learnt in childhood to feel sympathy with goodness and antipathy to evil has unfolded in his rhythmic nature the capacity to respond to the good and to be repelled by what is evil. He has a true enthusiasm for the one and power to resist the other. In later life it is as though under the influence of evil he cannot breathe properly, as if by evil the breathing and the rhythmic system were adversely affected.

It is really possible to achieve this if after the child has reached his seventh year we allow the principle of natural authority to supersede that of imitation which, as we have seen, must be pre-dominant in the earlier years. Naturally authority must not be enforced for this is just the error of those methods of education that attempt to enforce authority by corporal punishment.

I have heard that what I said yesterday in this connection seemed to suggest that this form of punishment had been entirely superseded. As a matter of fact, what I said was that the humanitarian feelings of to-day would like to do away with it. I was told that the custom of caning in England is still very general and that my words had created a wrong impression. I am sorry that this should have been so, but the point I want now to make is that in true education authority must never be enforced and above all not by the cane. It must arise naturally from what we ourselves are. In body, soul and spirit we are true teachers if our observation of human nature is based upon a true understanding of man. True observation of man sees in the growing human being a work of divine creation. There is no more wonderful spectacle in the whole world than to see how definiteness gradually emerges from indefiniteness in the child's nature; to see how irrelevant fidgeting changes into movements dominated by the inner quality of the soul. More and more the inner being expresses itself outwardly and the spiritual element in the body comes gradually to the surface. This being whom the Gods have sent down to earth becomes a revelation of God Himself. The growing human being is indeed His most splendid manifestation. If we learn to know this growing human being not merely from the point of view of ordinary anatomy and physiology, but with understanding of how the soul and spirit stream down into the body, then as we stand with pure and holy reverence before that which flows from divine depths into the physical form our knowledge becomes in us pure religion. Then as teachers we have a certain quality that is perceptible to the child as a natural authority in which he places spontaneous trust. Instead of resorting to the cane or using any form of inner punishment such as I mentioned yesterday we should arm ourselves with a true knowledge of man, with the faculty of true observation. This will grow into an inner moral sense, into a profound reverence for God's creation. We then have a true position in the school and we realize how absolutely essential it is in all education to watch for those moments when the child's nature undergoes certain changes. Such a metamorphosis occurs, for instance, between the ninth and tenth years, though with one child it may be earlier with another later. As a rule it occurs between the ages of nine and ten.

Many things in life are passed by unperceived by the materialist. True observation of the human being tells us that something very remarkable happens between the ninth and tenth years. Outwardly, the child becomes restless; he cannot come to terms with the outer world and seems to draw back from it with a certain fear. In a subtle way this happens to almost every child, indeed if it does not occur the child is abnormal. In the child's life of feeling, a great question arises between the ninth and tenth years; he cannot formulate this question mentally, he cannot express it in words. It lies wholly in his life of feeling, and this fact intensifies the longing for its recognition. What does the child seek at this age?

Till now, reverence for the teacher has been a natural impulse within him, but at this age he wants the teacher to prove himself worthy of this reverence by some definite act. Uncertainty rises in the child, and when we observe this we must by our demeanour respond to it. It need not be something specially contrived. We may perhaps be especially loving in our dealings with the child—make a special point of speaking to him—so that he realizes our affection and sympathy. If we watch for this moment between the ninth and tenth years and act accordingly, the child is saved as it were from a precipice. This is of far-reaching significance for if this sense of insecurity remains it will continue through the whole of later life, not necessarily in this particular form, but none the less expressed in the character, temperament and bodily health.

At all times we must understand how the spirit works in matter and hence upon the health of the body and how the spirit must be nurtured so that it may rightly promote the health. A true art of education unmistakably shows us that we must conceive of this co-operation of spirit and matter as harmonious and never as in opposition. Modern civilization with its tendency to separate everything is guilty in regard to educational questions. Its conceptions of Nature are materialistic, and when people are dissatisfied with the results of this conception of nature they take refuge in spiritualism, attempting to reach the spiritual by methods that are anything but scientific.

This is one of the tragedies of our day. A materialism which intellectualizes everything is now only able to understand the concepts itself has evolved about matter; materialism however can never reach the heart of matter. And modern spiritualism? Its adherents want the spirits to be tangible, to reveal themselves materially by means of table-turning, physical phenomena and so on. They must not be allowed to remain spirits, and so invisible, intangible, because men are too lazy to approach them in a super-sensible form.

These things are really tragic. Materialism speaks only of matter, never of the spirit. But as a matter of fact materialism does not even understand matter, but speaks of it only in empty abstractions, while spiritualism, imagining that it is speaking of the spirit, is concerned only with matter.

Our civilization is divided into materialism and spiritualism—a strange phenomenon indeed! For materialism understands nothing of matter and spiritualism nothing of spirit.

Man is both body and spirit, and true education must bring about a harmony between the two. It can never be too strongly emphasized that the goal of education must be to give man an understanding of the spirit in matter and a spiritual understanding of the material world. We find the spirit if we truly understand the material world, and if we have some comprehension of the spirit we find, not a materialized spirituality, but a real and actual spiritual world.

If humanity is to find a path of ascent and not be led to its downfall, we need the reality of the world of spirit and an intelligent comprehension of the world of matter.