The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Report of a lecture by Rudolf Steiner, “Luzifer” No. 5/1903

The following is a brief excerpt of what Dr. Rudolf Steiner (as General Secretary of the German Section of the Theosophical Society) said on July 3 of that year in London at the first meeting of the Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society (see issue 3 of Luzifer, p. 126): The European sections have agreed to meet annually for the common cultivation of the Theosophical movement. On these occasions, the individual contributions that the various regions of Europe are able to make to our great international task will come together, and the representatives of the individual sections will take the stimulus of the congresses back to their home countries to continue to work there. Our German section is not even a year old. It is therefore natural that it can only point to limited successes in the past . But it may be said that we have the best hopes for the future of Theosophy in Germany. For the whole essence of the German national spirit is one that is drawn to Theosophy. Where German intellectual culture has produced its most beautiful blossoms, there a hidden, but no less effective theosophical attitude has always been present among the bearers of this culture. For not only did the deep mysticism of a Meister Eckhart and Tauler, of a Valentin Weigel, Jakob Böhme, Angelus Silesius and of the secret mystical societies arise from this attitude and way of thinking; but also the world views of our more recent German thinkers, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, rest on this foundation. And what was expressed by these outstanding personalities has its roots in the depths of the German national soul. That is why the greatest of the newer German poets, Goethe, was imbued with such an attitude, with such a way of thinking. Goethe can only be fully understood when one sees through the theosophical way of looking at things, which is not to be discovered on the surface but in the depths of his creations. This side of Goethe's work has remained almost completely misunderstood. Once it is understood, what Goethe created will become an important promoter of the theosophical movement in Germany. Goethe's entire view of nature is based on theosophical principles. Much of what he, according to his own saying, “has hidden in his ‘Faust’” are theosophical truths. And in addition, he summarized his world view in his deeply symbolic fairy tale of “the green snake and the beautiful lily”. This fairy tale is almost the “secret revelation” of Goethe. It must be read as one reads esoteric writings, its meaning must be studied as one studies the meaning of secret representations of deeply hidden truths. Until one has done this, one does not know the whole of Goethe. Under the influence of such study, a new light is thrown on many other aspects of Goethe's life and work; and above all, it is proved that in Goethe the Germans have a theosophical poet. And one looks to Novalis, whose “magical idealism” is also theosophical; finally, one looks to Schelling, who in the 1840s appeared at the University of Berlin with his views, gained through long, deep research, in his lectures on “The Philosophy of Mythology” and “The Philosophy of Revelation”. Only one thing is missing in all these theosophical efforts of the Germans: a deeper understanding of the great world laws of reincarnation and karma. For even if Jean Paul advocated the doctrine of re-embodiment out of his intuition, it has never been organically connected with the currents mentioned earlier. The theosophical movement will incorporate these comprehensive truths into German culture. In this way it will bring the Germans closer to their great personalities, indeed to their own national soul; and Theosophy itself will experience the most beautiful fertilization from this side. As true as it is that German life has much to expect from Theosophy, it is equally true that it has much to contribute to the Theosophical world movement.

Anthroposophy, as I have described it for the past two days, is not just a theoretical view intended to help people get past the sorrows, misfortunes, and pains of life, enabling them to escape into a mystical world. Anthroposophy can help people in practical life. It is connected with the practical questions of existence for the simple reason that the knowledge of which I spoke yesterday and the day before is intended to lead to a genuine penetration, to an accurate view, of the spiritual world. That viewpoint does not, in itself, lead to a life cut off from reality, but actually becomes part of all material events. When we look at a living human being, we are faced not only with what we see, what we understand through speech, and perhaps everything else that person’s being expresses that we can perceive with normal consciousness; we also confront the spiritual being living in that person, the spiritual, supersensible being that continually affects that individual’s material body.

We can never comprehend very much of the world through the knowledge we gain through normal sense perceptions and the intellect connected with those perceptions. People delude themselves into thinking that, when we someday perfect conventional science, we will comprehend more of the world through our intelligence, sense perceptions, and experiments. However, those who are able to consider the relationship between the human being and the world as described in my two earlier lectures know that we can understand only the mineral kingdom through sense perception and intellect. Even when we limit ourselves to the plant kingdom, we must understand that our intellect and senses cannot comprehend the very subtle cosmic rhythms and forces that affect the plant kingdom. That is even more true of the animal kingdom and truer still for human beings. The physical constitution of plants (the least so), animals, and human beings is such that the forces active within them act on their substance like ideal magic. People delude themselves when they believe we can perform the same kinds of laboratory experiments on animals or human beings that we perform on minerals. The purely physical processes that occur in animal and human organisms are caught in an ideal magic. We can gain some understanding of human beings if we can penetrate that ideal magic, that is, if we can look at human beings so that we see through material processes into the continuous inner spiritual activity.

We can achieve insight into spiritual magic only through the understanding I spoke of yesterday and the day before. I showed that one of the first stages of understanding human beings indicates that people not only have a relationship to the world in the moment, but that they can move themselves back to any age they have passed through since their earthly birth. You can place yourself back into a time when you were eighteen or fifteen years old and experience what you experienced then. You can experience it not only as shadowy memories, but with the intensity and strength that existed for you at the time it occurred. You thus become fifteen or twelve years old or whatever again. You undergo a spiritual metamorphosis through this process. In doing so, you can perceive a second organism in the human being, a more subtle organism we call etheric because it has neither weight nor spatial dimensions. That more subtle organism is an organism of time. You have before you everything the etheric organism experienced in time. Nevertheless, you can recognize an organism is before you and learn to understand that the human being exists in that more subtle time organism in just the same way he or she exists in the spatial organism.

If you notice someone is suffering a headache, for example, then perhaps you could say a cure could be achieved by acting on some internal physical organ. You would not need to seek the cure by simply treating the head. We might cure it by treating an organ far from the head. In the spatial organism everything we carry with us is interconnected, and the time organism is the same. The time organism is particularly active in early childhood, but is continually active throughout life in much the following way: Suppose someone has an opportunity at age thirty-five to enter a new situation. If that person meets the situation by doing what is right, then such a person may become aware that at around age twelve important things were learned that now make it possible to move quickly into this new situation.

A certain kind of joy occurs at age thirty-five that arises from the interaction that person had as a child with a teacher. What occurred in that etheric body of eight or ten years old, due to the teacher and the instruction given to the child, acts exactly the same way that our treatment of an organ far from the head acts to cure the headache. Thus, the experiences of a young child affect the thirty-five-year-old person later and create a joyful mood or depression. The entire disposition of an adult depends on what the teacher developed in the etheric body of that adult as a child, in just the same way that one organ of the human spatial body depends upon all the others.

If you think about it, you would say that knowledge of how the etheric body develops, about the relationships of its individual aspects, is certainly the proper basis for educating children. If you think it through fully and conclusively, you must admit that, just as a painter or other artist must learn the techniques of their art, teachers must acquire an understanding of the technique of teaching in an ideal sense. A painter must look, not in the way a layman would, at forms, colors, and their harmonies and disharmonies, and the painter must work out the correct way to handle paints and colored pencils from such observations. A painter’s ability to observe properly forms the basis for what must be learned and will permeate his or her entire being. Likewise, a teacher must learn to use the spiritual observation of human beings, to observe what acts on them and unites the entire course of their lives. Teaching cannot be a science, it must be an art. In art, you must first learn a particular capacity for observing, and second learn how to use what you acquire through continuous observation in your continuous struggles with your medium. It is the same with the spiritual science I refer to here, namely, anthroposophical spiritual science that can provide a foundation for a real and true art of education.

Anthroposophy is also basic in another sense. If education is to be truly effective, it must care properly for what will develop from deep within the essence of a young person. Teachers must be able to accept a child as a divine moral task bestowed on them. As teachers, the things that elevate our moral relationship to teaching and permeate our educational activity with a kind of religious meditation, give us the necessary strength to act alongside the children and work with all the inner characteristics that need development. In other words, all educational activities must themselves be moral acts, and they must arise from moral impulses. We must use these moral impulses within the context of the human understanding and human observation just described.

When we consider these things, we will, of course, see how people’s lives clearly progress in developmental stages—much more so than people ordinarily think. People usually observe only superficially, for instance, that children get a second set of teeth when they are about seven years old. People often see the bodily symptoms accompanying that change, but do not look more closely at the transformations occurring in the child during such a change. People who can properly observe a child, before and after the age of seven, can see that, after seven, forces that were previously hidden develop out of the depths of the human being. If we look at things properly, then we must admit that the change of teeth is not simply a one-time, sudden event in human life. The change of teeth at age seven, although we do not repeat it, is something that occurs throughout the period between the time the child receives his or her first teeth until the change of teeth. During that whole time, forces in the human organism are pushing and shoving, and result in the second set of teeth breaking through. The change of teeth simply concludes the processes active during the child’s first period of life. Children do not change teeth ever again, but what does that mean? That means that until age seven, children develop those forces in their physical body that are needed to grow a second set of teeth, but those children will not change teeth again and now no longer need such forces. The question is, what becomes of those forces?

If we look supersensibly at a human being, we can again recognize those forces in the transformed life of the child’s soul between the change of teeth and puberty. The child’s soul is then different. A different capacity for learning has been added to the soul, and the child has a different orientation toward the surroundings. If we see things spiritually and not just physically, then the situation is different. We can then understand that what we can see in the child’s soul from approximately ages seven to fourteen existed previously in the child’s physical organism. Earlier, it was an activity connected with the process inducing the change of teeth, but at age seven it ceases to be physically active and begins to be active in the soul.

Thus, if you want to understand the forces active in the child’s soul between the change of teeth and puberty, you must look at the physical activities between birth until the change of teeth. The forces now active in the child’s soul then acted on the physical body. The result is that when we observe properly, we can see that, in a more subtle sense, the young child is entirely a sense organ. That is true particularly of a baby, but in a certain way still true right until the change of teeth. In a subtle way, a baby is a kind of groping eye. The way the eye looks at things and recreates what exists outside so the child has an inner picture of the external object, gives the child in earliest life a perception, but not a visual picture.

The baby is in its entirety a sense organ, and perhaps I can illustrate this. Let us think of a baby. As adults, we have our sense of taste in the tongue and gums. However, as spiritual science shows us, the baby has a hint of taste throughout the entire body. The baby is an organ of taste throughout. The baby as a whole is also an organ of smell and, more inwardly, an organ of touch. The entire constitution of the baby is sense-like in its nature, and this sense-like nature radiates throughout the whole body. For that reason, until age seven the child tends to recreate inwardly everything happening in the surroundings and to develop accordingly. If you observe children with your more subtle senses and with spiritual-scientific understanding, you will see that they recreate every gesture made in their surroundings, and they attempt to do what people do in their presence. You will thus see that the child is an imitative being until the change of teeth. The most important capacity of the young child becomes apparent from this imitative behavior. The most important capacity is the development of speech. That depends entirely on the fact that children live into what people in their surroundings do and develop speech through imitation—that is, through inwardly conforming to what occurs in their surroundings. Thus, as teachers, when we work with children during their first stage of life, we need to recognize imitation as the most important aspect of teaching. We can teach a very young child only by creating an environment filled with those activities and processes the child should imitate to gain strength in spirit, soul, and body; those things we implant not only in children’s spirits and souls, but also in their bodies, and the way they strengthen the inner organs remain as the children’s constitution throughout life. How I act around a child of four remains with that person into old age. Thus, my behavior determines, in a way, the child’s fate in later life.

That can be illustrated with an example. Sometimes people come to you when you work in this field and say, for example, that their child was always a good child and never did anything wrong, but the child has now done something terrible. If you ask in detail what occurred, you might hear that the child stole some money from the mother. If you are adept at such things, you might ask how old the child is, and receive the reply, “Five.” Thus, such activity is based primarily on imitation. You will then learn that the child had seen the mother take money from the cupboard every day. The child simply imitated and was not concerned with good or evil. The child only imitated what was seen at home. If we believe we can achieve anything by instructing the child about good and evil, we only delude ourselves. We can educate very young children only when we present them with examples they can imitate, including thoughts. A subtle spiritual connection exists between children and those who raise them. When we are with children, we should be careful to harbor only thoughts and feelings they can imitate in their own thoughts and feelings. In their souls, young children are entirely sense receptors and perceive things so subtle that we as adults could not dream they even occur.

After the change of teeth, forces lying deep within the child become forces of the soul. Earlier, children are devoted entirely to their surroundings; but now they can stand as one soul to another and can, compared to their earlier imitative behavior, accept authority as a matter of course. During earliest childhood until the change of teeth, our real desire is to be totally integrated into our surroundings, which is, in a sense, the physical manifestation of religious feeling. Religious feelings are a spiritual devotion to the spirit; the child devotes the physical body to the physical surroundings. That is the physical counterpart of religion.

After the age of seven, children no longer devote the physical body to their physical surroundings; rather, they devote the soul to other souls. A teacher steps forward to help the child, and the child needs to see the teacher as the source of the knowledge of everything good and evil. At this point children are just as devoted to what the teacher says and develops within the children as they were earlier to the gestures and activities around them. Between seven and fourteen years of age, an urge arises within children to devote themselves to natural authority. Children thus want to become what that authority is. The love of that natural authority and a desire to please now become the main principle, just as imitation was earlier.

You would hardly believe that someone like myself, who in the early 1890s wrote The Philosophy of Freedom, would support an unjustified principle of authority. What I mean is something like natural law. From approximately ages seven to fourteen, children view their teacher in such a way that they have no intellectual comprehension of “this is good or true or evil or false or ugly,” but rather, “this is good because the teacher says it is good,” or “this is beautiful because the teacher says it is beautiful.” We must bring all the secrets of the world to the child through the indirect path of the beloved teacher. That is the principle of human development from around the age of seven until fourteen.

We can therefore say that a religious-like devotion toward the physical surroundings fills a child during the first years of life. From the change of teeth until puberty, an esthetic comprehension of the surroundings fills the child, a comprehension permeated with love. Children expect pleasure with everything the teacher presents to them and displeasure from whatever the teacher withholds. Everything that acts educationally during this period should enter the child’s inner perspective. We may conclude that, whereas during the first stage of life the teacher should be an example, during the second period the teacher should be an authority in the most noble sense—a natural authority due to qualities of character. As teachers, we will then have within us what children need, in a sense, to properly educate themselves. The most important aspect of self-education is moral education. I will speak more of that when the first part of my lecture has been translated.

(At this point, Rudolf Steiner paused so that George Adams could deliver the first part of this lecture in English.)

When we say children are entirely sense organs before the age of seven, we must understand that, after the change of teeth, that is, after the age of seven, children’s sense-perceptive capacities have moved more toward the surface of the body and moved away from their inner nature. Children’s sense impressions, however, still cannot effectively enter the sense organs in an organized and regulated way. We see that from the change of teeth until puberty, therefore, the child’s nature is such that the child harbors in the soul a devotion to sense perceptions, but the child’s inner will is incapable of affecting them.

Human intellect creates an inner participation in sense perception, but we are intellectual beings only after puberty. Our relationship to the world is appropriate for judging it intellectually only after puberty. To reason intellectually means to reason from personal inner freedom, but we can do this only after puberty. Thus, from the change of teeth until puberty we should not educate children in an intellectual way, and we should not moralize intellectually. During the first seven years of life, children need what they can imitate in their sense-perceptible reality. After that, children want to hear from their educational authority what they can and cannot do, what they should consider to be true or untrue, just or unjust and so forth.

Something important begins to stir in the child around the age of nine or ten. Teachers who can truly observe children know that, at about the age of nine or ten, children have a particularly strong need. Then, although children do not have intellectualized doubts, they do have a kind of inner unrest; a kind of inner question, a childlike question concerning fate they cannot express and, indeed, do not yet need to express. Children feel this in a kind of half sleep, in an unconscious way. You need only look with the proper eye to see how children develop during this period. I think you know exactly what I am referring to here—namely, that children want something special from the teacher whom they look up to with love. Ordinarily, you cannot answer that desire the way you would answer an intellectually posed question. It is important during this time that you develop an intense and intimate, trusting relationship so that what arises in the children is a feeling that you as teacher particularly care for and love them.

The answer to children’s most important life question lies in their perception of love and their trust in the teacher. What is the actual content of that question? As I said, children do not ask through reasoning, but through feeling, subconsciously. We can formulate things children cannot, and we can say, therefore, that children at that stage are still naïve and accept the authority of the beloved teacher without question. However, now a certain need awakens in the child. The child needs to feel what is good and what is evil differently, as though they exist in the world as forces.

Until this time, children looked up to the teacher, in a sense, but now they want to see the world through the teacher’s eyes. Children not only want to know that the teacher is a human being who says something is good or bad, they also want to feel that the teacher speaks as a messenger of the Spirit, a messenger of God, and knows something from the higher worlds. As I said, children do not say it through reasoning, but they feel it. The particular question arising in the child’s feeling will tell you that a certain thing is appropriate for that child. It will be apparent that your statement that something is good or bad has very deep roots, and, thus, the child will gain renewed trust.

That is also the point in moral education where we can begin to move away from simple imitative behavior or saying something is good or bad. At about the age of nine or ten, we can begin to show morality pictorially, because children are still sense oriented and without reasoning. We should educate children pictorially—that is, through pictures, pictures for all the senses—during the entire period of elementary school, between the change of teeth and puberty. Even though children at that age may not be completely sense oriented, they still live in their senses, which are now more recognizable at the surface of the body.

Tomorrow evening I will discuss how to teach children from the age of six or seven through the time when they learn to read or write. Right now I want to consider only the moral side of education.

When children have reached age nine or ten, we may begin to present pictures that primarily stimulate the imagination. We may present pictures of good people, pictures that awaken a feeling of sympathy for what people do. Please take note that I did not say we should lecture children about moral commandments. I did not say we should approach children’s intellect with moral reasoning. We should approach children through esthetics and imagination. We should awaken a pleasure or displeasure of good and bad things, of just or unjust things, of high ideals, of moral action, and of things that occur in the world to balance incorrect action. Whereas previously we needed to place ourselves before the children as a kind of moral regulator, we now need to provide them with pictures that do no more than affect the imagination living within their sense nature. Before puberty, children should receive morality as a feeling. They should receive a firm feeling that, “Something is good, and I can be sympathetic toward it,” or “I should feel antipathy toward something bad.” Sympathies and antipathies, that is, judgments within feelings, should be the basis of what is moral.

If you recognize, in the way I have presented it, that everything in the human time organism is interconnected, then you will also recognize that it is important for the child that you do the right things at the right time. You cannot get a plant to grow in a way that it immediately flowers; blooming occurs later. First, you must tend the roots. Should you want to make the roots bloom, you would be attempting something ridiculous. Similarly, it would be just as ridiculous to want to present intellectually formulated moral judgments to the child between the change of teeth and puberty. You must first tend the seed and the root—that is, a feeling for morality. When children have a feeling for morality, their intelligence will awaken after puberty. What they have gained in feeling during that period will then continue into an inner development afterward. Moral and intellectual reasoning will awaken on their own. It is important that we base all moral education on that.

You cannot make a plant’s root blossom; you must wait until the root develops into the plant and then the plant blossoms. In the same way, you must, in a sense, tend the moral root in the feeling and develop sympathy for what is moral. You must then allow children to carry that feeling into their intellect through their own forces as human beings. Later in life they will have the deep inner satisfaction of knowing that something more lives within them than just memories of what their teacher said was right or wrong. Instead, an inner joy will fill their entire soul life from the knowledge that moral judgment awoke within them at the proper time. That we do not slavishly educate children in a particular moral direction, rather, we prepare them so that their own free developing souls can grow and blossom in a moral direction, strengthens people not only with a capacity for moral judgment, but also gives them a moral strength. When we want a spiritual foundation for education, this fact reminds us again and again that we must bring everything to developing children in the proper way and at the proper time.

Now you might ask: If one should not provide commandments that appeal to the intellect, what should you appeal to when you want to implant a feeling for moral reasoning in the school-age child? Well, authority in its own right certainly does lead to intangible things in the relationship between the teacher and the child! I would like to illustrate this through an example. I can teach children pictorially—that is, non-intellectually—about the immortality of the human soul. Until the time of puberty, the intellect is actually absent in the child. I must interweave nature and spirit, and thus what I tell the children is fashioned into an artistic picture: “Look at this butterfly’s cocoon. The butterfly crawls out of the cocoon. In just the same way, the soul comes out of the human body when the body dies.” In this way, I can stimulate the children’s imagination and bring a living, moral picture to their souls. I can do that in two ways. I could say to myself: I am a mature teacher and tremendously wise. The children are small and extremely ignorant, and since they have not yet elevated themselves to my stature, I need to create a picture for them. I create a picture for them, even though I know it has little value for myself. If I were to say that to myself, and bring a picture to the children with that attitude, it would not act on their souls. It would just pass quickly through their souls, since intangible relationships exist between the teacher and child. However, I could say to myself: I am really not much wiser than the children, or they are, at least subconsciously, even wiser than I—that is, I could respect the children. Then I could say to myself: I did not create that picture myself; nature gave us the picture of the butterfly creeping from its cocoon. And then, I believe in that picture just as intensely as I want the children to believe. If I have the strength of my own beliefs within me, then the picture remains fixed in the children’s souls, and the things that will live do not lie in the coarseness of the world, but in the subtleties that exist between the teacher and child.

The incomprehensible things that play between teacher and child richly replace everything we could transfer through an intellectual approach. In this manner, children gain an opportunity to freely develop themselves alongside the teacher. The teacher can say: I live in the children’s surroundings and must, therefore, create those opportunities through which they can develop themselves to the greatest possible extent. To do this I must stand next to the children without feeling superior, and recognize that I am only a human being who is a few years older.

In a relative sense we are not always wiser, and we therefore do not always need to feel superior to children. We should be helpers for their development. If you tend plants as a gardener, you certainly do not make the sap move from the root to the flower. Rather, you prepare the plant’s environment so that the flow of sap can develop. As teachers we must be just as selfless so that the child’s inner forces can unfold. Then we will be good teachers, and the children can flourish in the proper way.

(Rudolf Steiner paused again to allow the second part of the lecture to be translated for the audience.)

When we develop morality in the human being in that way, it then develops just as one thing develops from another in the plant. At first, humanly appropriate moral development arises from the imitative desires within the human organism. As I already described, morality gains a certain firmness so that people have the necessary inner strength later in life, a strength anchored in the physical organism, for moral certainty. Otherwise, people may be physically weak and unable to follow their moral impulses, however good they may be. If the moral example acts strongly and intensely on the child during the first period of childhood, then a moral fortitude develops. If children, from the change of teeth until puberty, can properly take hold of the forces of sympathy and antipathy for good and against evil, then later they will have the proper moral stance regarding the uncertainties that might keep them from doing what is morally necessary. Through imitation, children will develop within their organism what their souls need, so that their moral feelings and perceptions, their sympathies and antipathies, can properly develop during the second period of childhood. The capacity for intellectual moral judgment awakens in the third period of the child’s development, which is oriented toward the spirit. This occurs as surely as the plant in the light of the Sun blossoms and fruits. Morality can only take firm root in the spirit if the body and soul have been properly prepared. It can then freely awaken to life, just as the blossom and fruit freely awaken in the plant in the light of the Sun.

When we develop morality in human beings while respecting their inner freedom, then the moral impulse connects with their inner being so that they can truly feel it is something that belongs to them. They feel the same way toward their moral strength and moral actions as they do toward the forces of growth within their body, toward the circulation of their own blood. People will feel about the morality developed within themselves in the proper manner as they feel about the natural forces of life throughout their bodies, that they pulse and strengthen them right up to the surface of the skin.

What happens then? People realize that if they are immoral, they are deformed. They feel disfigured in the same way they would feel if they were physically missing a limb. Through the moral development I have described, people learn. They come to say to themselves that if they are not filled with morality, and if their actions are not permeated with morality, then they are deformed human beings.

The strongest moral motive we can possibly develop within human beings is the feeling that they are disfigured if they are immoral. People only need proper development and then they will be whole. If you help develop people so that they want to be whole human beings, they will of themselves develop an inner tendency toward the spiritual due to this approach to morality. They will then see the good that flows through the world and that it acts within them just as effectively as the forces of nature act within their bodies. To put it pictorially, they will then understand that if they see a horseshoe-shaped piece of iron, someone might then come along and say we could use that horseshoe as a magnet because it has its own inner forces. But, another might say that it is only iron and is unimportant, and would use it to shoe a horse. Someone who sees things in the latter way could not, due to the way their life developed, see that spiritual life exists within the human being. Someone who only sees the superficial, and not how the spirit acts and interacts within the human being, is the kind of person who would shoe a horse with a horseshoe-shaped piece of magnetic iron. In such a case, the person has not been educated to see life properly and to develop the proper strengths. When comprehended spiritually, a proper education, felt and brought to the will, is the strongest motive for social activity.

Today, we are standing under the star of the social problem. This problem exists for a reason, and I would be happy to say more about it, but my time is now coming to an end. However, I would like to mention that the social problems of today have many aspects, and much is needed to approach these questions in all detail. Modern people who look at things objectively want much for the future of humanity and for reforming social life. However, everything we can think of and create in practice for our institutions, everything we can think of in the way of schemes or about the nature of modern social life, demonstrates to those who see morality in the light of spirituality that dealing with today’s social problems without including the question of morality is like hunting for something in a dark room.

We can bring the social question into proper perspective only through a genuine comprehension of morality. Anyone who looks at life with an eye toward the comprehensive connections found there would say that morality is the light that must enlighten social life if we are to see the social questions in a truly human way. Modern people, therefore, need to gain an understanding of the moral question connected with the social question. I believe that it is perhaps possible to show that what I have called spiritual science, or anthroposophy, wants to tackle the great questions of our times, and that it has earnest intentions regarding the questions of morality and developing morality within human beings.

(George Adams completed his English translation of the lecture.)

Rudolf Steiner on “ideal magic,” from lecture of November 17, 1922 (see footnote, page 1):

Along with exact clairvoyance, you must also achieve something I refer to as ideal magic. This is a kind of magic that must be differentiated from the false magic practiced externally, and associated with many charlatans. You must certainly differentiate that from what I mean by ideal magic.

What I mean by ideal magic is the following: when someone looks back over life with ordinary consciousness, one will see how, from year to year and from decade to decade, one has changed in a certain sense. Such a person would see that habits have changed, however slowly. One gains certain capacities while others disappear. If one looks honestly at the capacities that exist during earthly life, one would have to say that, over time, one becomes someone else. Life causes that to happen. We are completely devoted to life and life educates us, trains us and forms the soul.

If, however, people want to enter the spiritual world—in other words, want to attain ideal magic—they must not only intensify inner thinking so that they recognize a second level of existence, as I previously described, but they must also free their will from its connection to the physical body. Ordinarily, we can activate the will only by using the physical body—the legs, arms, or the organs of speech. The physical body is the basis for our will. However, we can do the following: as spiritual researchers we must carry out exercises of the will in a very systematic way to achieve ideal magic along with exact clairvoyance. Such a person must, for example, develop the will so strongly that, at a particular point in life, one recognizes that a specific habit must be broken and replaced with another in the soul.

You will need many years, but if you energetically use your will to transform certain experiences in the way I described, it is nevertheless possible. Thus, you can, as it were, go beyond allowing only the physical body to be your teacher and replace that kind of development with self-discipline.

Through energetic exercise of the will, such as I have described in my books, you will become an initiate in a modern sense, and no longer merely re-experience in sleep what you experience during the day. You will achieve a state that is not sleep, but that can be experienced in complete consciousness. This state provides you with the opportunity to be active while you sleep—that is, the opportunity while you are outside your body to not merely remain passive in the spiritual world, as is normally the case. Rather, you can act in the spirit world; you can be active in the spiritual world. During sleep, people are ordinarily unable to move forward, to progress. However, those who are modern initiates, in the sense I have described, have the capacity to be active as a human being in the life that exists between falling asleep and waking up. If you bring your will into the state in which you live outside your body, then you can develop your consciousness in a much different way. You will be able to develop consciousness in a way that you can see what people experience in the period directly following death. Through this other kind of consciousness, you can experience what occurs during the period after earthly life, just as you will be able to see what occurs in pre-earthly life. You can see how you pass through a life of existence in the spiritual world just as you go through life in the physical world during earthly existence. You recognize yourself as a pure spirit in the spiritual world just as you can recognize yourself as a physical body within the physical world. Thus, you have the opportunity to create a judgment about how long life lasts during what I would refer to as the time of moral evaluation.

It might seem unusual to speak about practical questions in education from the standpoint of a particular philosophy—that is, anthroposophy. In this case, however, the reason for speaking about education arises from the practice of teaching itself.

As you know, I will speak tonight of the way of teaching being practiced at the Waldorf school in Stuttgart. The pedagogical ideas and goals proposed through anthroposophy have been, for the most part, established at the Waldorf school. A few years ago everyone was talking about problems in education, and industrialist Emil Molt decided to create a school for the children of the workers in his factory. He turned to me to provide the pedagogical content and direction for that school.

At first, we dealt only with a particular group of children who came from a particular class—proletarian children connected with the Waldorf Company and with some children whose parents were members of the Anthroposophical Society. However, we soon extended the task of the school. We began originally with about 150 children in eight classes, but we now have eleven classes and over 700 children. Before that, a group of friends within the circle of anthroposophy made a trip to Dornach, Switzerland to attend a conference on education at the Goetheanum at Christmas. As a result, I was invited to lecture at Oxford this past August. Following the Oxford lectures, the Educational Union formed in order to bring the educational principles I will discuss today to a greater application in England.

I need to mention these circumstances so you will not think our discussion this evening is to be theoretical. You should realize that I want to speak about a genuinely practical manner of educating. I need to emphasize this also because this evening we will, of course, be able to mention only a few things. Those things I can bring up will also be rather incomplete compared to the reality of those principles of education, since they are not about “programs” but about practice. When we speak of practice, we can only speak in terms of examples taken from that practice. It is much easier to talk about a program, since you can speak in generalities and about general principles. We cannot do that when speaking of the Waldorf school education due to its own distinctive characteristics. As I mentioned before, our concern is to begin pedagogy and education derived from a spiritual-scientific perspective, a perspective that can lead us to a true comprehension of the human being, and thus to a true comprehension of the nature of a child.

Painters or other artists must learn two things in order to practice their art. In the case of painters, they must first learn a particular skill for observing form and color. The artist must be able to create from the nature of form and color and cannot begin with some theoretical comprehension of them. The artist can begin only by living within the nature of form and color. Only then can the artist learn the second thing, namely, technique. Spiritual science does not comprehend education as an academic or theoretical field. Spiritual science sees it as a genuine art, as an art that uses the most noble material found in the world—human beings. Education is concerned with children who reveal so marvelously to us the deepest riddles of the cosmos. Children allow us to observe from year to year, even from week to week, how physiognomy, gestures, and everything else they express reveal spirit and soul as a divine gift of the spiritual worlds hidden deep within them. The perspective I am speaking of assumes that, just as the painter must learn to properly observe how form and color—the activity arising through the hands, soul, and spirit—result from that understanding, so the artist in teaching must be able to follow the essence of the human being revealed in the child. However, this is not possible if you do not elevate your capacity to observe above the level of common consciousness—that is, if you cannot gain a true observation of soul and spiritual activities in life. That is precisely the objective of anthroposophy. What contemporary people typically call “cognition” addresses only the corporeal—that is, what speaks to the senses. If people have not risen to a genuine comprehension of the spirit, how can they learn to understand the soul? They can gain understanding of the soul only by understanding the expressions and activities of their own soul. Through self-observation, they learn about their own thinking, about their own feeling and willing. Those are aspects of the soul. They comprehend the soul only through reasoning. The senses perceive the sense perceptible. However, such people can understand the soul only by forming a judgment about those characteristics within themselves and then concluding that they have something like a soul.

Anthroposophy does not begin with that ordinary way of thinking. Instead, it seeks to systematically develop those forces sleeping within the human soul so that (don’t be surprised by my expression) a kind of precise clairvoyance results. With precise clairvoyance, you can penetrate the characteristics of the soul to see what is truly the soul. You can perceive the soul through that spiritual vision just as you can recognize colors through the eyes or tones through the ears. Through normal consciousness we can comprehend the spirit active in the world only as a conclusion. If we insist on remaining within normal consciousness, then we can say that we see only the phenomena of nature or of the soul. From that, we conclude that a spiritual foundation exists. Our thinking concludes that spirit and soul are at the foundation of what exists physically. Anthroposophy develops forces sleeping in the soul, organs of spiritual perception through which we can experience the spirit through living thinking, not merely as a conclusion.

You can have a genuine understanding of the human being only when you have seen the soul, and when you can experience the spirit in living thought. A living understanding of the human being arises that can permeate you through spiritual science, so that you can see in every moment of the developing child’s life how the spirit and soul act in the child. You do not see the child only from outside through the senses; you see also the sense perceptible expression of the soul. You do not work with just a revelation of the soul, but with the actual substance of the soul that you can see, just as your eyes see colors. You can begin with how spirit works within the child because, through anthroposophy, you can understand how to comprehend spirit with living thought.

Thus, the art of teaching I am speaking of here begins with a living comprehension of the human being, along with a comprehension of the development taking place in the child at every moment of life. When you understand in that way how the material we work with in teaching is the most noble, when you recognize how your teaching can affect the human being, then you can see many things differently than possible through ordinary consciousness. You can then teach and give educational guidance based on that knowledge. You can, through direct practical interaction with the child, develop what you can see in the soul and experience in the spirit.

Observation that is truly alive shows that spirit exists within the child no less than in the adult. However, that spirit lies hidden deep within the child and must first conquer the body. If we can see that spirit before it speaks to us through language or reveals itself through intellectual thought, we can receive an impression of the marvelous way spirit’s divine gift affects the child’s organism. You will then get an impression of why we certainly cannot say that the physical nature of the human being is one thing, and spirit another. In children you can see how spirit, much more so than with adults, works directly on the physical—that is, how spirit completely permeates the physical. As adults, we have spirit to the extent that we need to think about the world. Children, on the other hand, have spirit to the extent that they need to form their organism through spiritual sculpting. Much more than people believe, the human physical organism throughout all of earthly life is the result of how that spirit hidden within the child develops the physical organism. To avoid speaking abstractly, I would like to present some concrete examples.

If you look at a child only as conventional science does, so that you only perceive what ordinary physiology presents through dissection—that is, if you do not have a spiritual view of the child—you will not see the effect of all the different events on the child’s physical organism. For instance, the child does something and is shouted at by an adult. That makes a very different impression on the child than it would on an adult, if one were to shout at the adult. We must remember that a child functions very differently than an adult. The adult’s sense organs exist on the surface of the body. Adults can control with their intellect what comes through the sense organs. Adults can form fully developed will from within when confronted with sense impressions. However, the child is completely surrendered to the external world. If I may express it pictorially (but I mean this to a certain degree in a literal sense), the child is entirely a sense organ. Allow me to be very clear about this. Look at an infant. If we look with an external understanding at an infant, it appears that the baby feels and sees the world just as an adult does, except that the infant’s intellect and will are not as well developed as in adults. That is, however, not the case at all. Adults feel taste only on their tongue and gums. What takes place only at the surface in adults permeates the child’s organism right into the innermost depths. In a way, children perceive taste throughout their bodies when they eat. They perceive light throughout themselves when light and colors enter their eyes. That is not simply pictorial; this is actually how it is. When light shines on children, the light vibrates not only in their nervous system, it also vibrates in their breathing and throughout their circulatory system. Light vibrates throughout the entirety of the child’s organism in just the same way light acts within the adult’s eye only. The child is, throughout the entire body, a sensing organ. Just as the eye is completely occupied with the world and lives entirely in light, children live entirely in their surroundings. Children carry spirit within themselves in order to absorb everything that lives in their physical surroundings into their entire organism. Because of this, when we yell at a child, our yelling places the entire body into a particular kind of activity. When we yell at a child, a certain inner vibration occurs that is much stronger than that in an adult, who can make certain inner counteractions. What happens then is a kind of stopping short of the spiritual and soul life, which affects the child’s physical body directly. Thus, when we often yell at and frighten a child, we affect not only the child’s soul, but the child’s entire physical body. Depending on how we act around children, we can affect the health of human beings all the way into the final years of old age.

The most important means of teaching a very young child is through the way we, as adults, act when in the child’s presence. If children experience a continuous hustle and bustle, a continuous hastiness in their environment, then they will take up an inner tendency toward haste within their physical body. If you truly understand human beings so that you can observe their spirit and soul, you can see in children of eleven or twelve whether they were brought up in a restless or hurried environment, in a more appropriate environment, or in one where everything moved too slowly. We can see it in the way they walk. If the child was brought up in a hurried environment, one where everything proceeded with extreme restlessness, one where impressions continually changed, then the child will walk with a light step. The kind of environment the child had makes an impression on the child, even in the way of walking, in the step. If a child had insufficient stimulus in the surroundings so that continuous boredom was experienced, we see the reverse in how the child walks in later life with a heavy step. I mention these examples because they are particularly visible, and because they show how we can observe people better. Through this example, you can see what we are able to give to children when we see them properly in early childhood. During early childhood, children imitate their surroundings. They are particularly imitative in learning what they should do in their souls—that is, what is moral. I would like to give an example of this as well.

Those who have had to deal with such things can also experience them. For example, a father once came to me and said that his son had always been a good boy and had always done what the parents had found morally pleasing. But, now he had stolen money. Well, in such a case, anyone who truly understands human nature would ask where the child had taken the money. The father replied, “from the cupboard.” I then asked further whether someone removed money from the cupboard every day. “The child’s mother,” was the reply; thus, the child had seen the mother remove money from the cupboard every day. Young children are imitative beings who dedicate the entire soul to their surroundings, and, therefore, they do what they see happening in the surroundings. The young child does not respond to reprimands, does not respond to “do” and “don’t.” Such things are not strongly connected with a child’s soul. Children do only what they see happening in their surroundings. However, children see things much more exactly than adults do, even though they are unconscious of what it is they see. What children see in their surroundings leaves an imprint on their organism. The entire organism of the child is an imprint of what occurs in the surroundings.

Contemporary understanding overvalues way too much what is called “heredity.” When people see the characteristics of some adult, they often say such traits are inherited by purely physical transfer from one generation to another. Those who truly understand human beings, however, see that children’s muscles develop according to the impressions from their surroundings. They can see that, depending on whether or not we treat a child with tenderness and care, with love or in some other manner, the child’s breathing and circulation develop according to the feelings experienced. If a child often experiences someone approaching with love, who instinctively falls into step with the child and moves at the tempo required by the child’s inner nature, then the child will, in subtle ways, develop healthy lungs. If you want to know where the traits for a healthy adult physical body arise from, you must look back to when the child was affected as one great sense organ. You must look at the words, the gestures, and the entire relationship of the child to the surroundings, and how these things affected the child’s muscles, circulation, and breathing. You will see that a child imitates not just in learning to speak—which depends entirely on imitation, even into the bodily organization that makes speech possible—but you will see that the child’s whole body, particularly in the more subtle aspects of the physical body, reflects what we do in the child’s presence.

To the extent that a person’s physical body is strong or weak, that the physical body can be depended upon, gratitude or blame for the way one walks through life, even in old age, is due to the impressions made on a person as a small child.

What I just said about growing children being imitative beings applies throughout the first period of childhood, that is, from birth until the change of teeth at approximately age seven. At that time, the child goes through many more changes than is generally thought. In order to build a secure foundation for a genuine art of education and teaching, we need to fully penetrate what occurs in the child’s development; that is what I want to discuss in the second part of the lecture after this first part has been translated.

(Rudolf Steiner paused at this point while George Adams delivered the first part of this lecture in English.)

At around age seven, the change of teeth is not just a physical symptom of transformation in human physical nature, but also indicates the complete transformation of the child’s soul. The child is primarily an imitative being until the change of teeth. It is in the child’s nature to depend on the forces that arise from imitation for the physical body’s development. After approximately age seven and the change of teeth, children no longer need to be physically devoted to their environment, but instead need to be able to be devoted with the soul. Everything that occurs in the child’s presence before the change of teeth penetrates the depths of that child’s being. What penetrates the child during the second period of life is due to an acceptance of the authority of the child’s teachers. The child’s desire to learn such adult arts as reading and writing does not arise out of the child’s own nature, but expresses the acceptance of that natural authority. It is a tragic pedagogical error if you believe children have any desire to learn those things, things that serve as communication for adults! What actually acts developmentally on a child are the things that arise from the child’s loving devotion toward an accepted authority. Children do not learn what they learn for any reason found in the instruction itself. Children learn because they see what an adult knows and is able to do, and because an adult who is the child’s accepted educational authority says this or that is something appropriate to be learned. That goes right to the child’s moral foundation.

I would remind you that the child learns morality through imitation until the change of teeth. From the age of seven until about fourteen—that is, from the change of teeth until puberty—the child learns everything through loving acceptance of authority. We cannot achieve anything with children through the intellect, that is, with commandments such as “this is good” or “that is evil.” Instead, a feeling must grow within the child to discover what is good based on what the accepted authority indicates as good. The child must also learn to feel displeasure with what that accepted authority presents as evil. Children may not have any reason for finding pleasure or displeasure in good or evil things other than those revealed by the authority standing beside them. It is not important that things appear good or evil to the child’s intellect, but that they are so for the teacher. This is necessary for true education.

It is important during that period for all morality, including religion, to be presented to the child by other human beings; the human relationship with the teachers is important. Whenever we think we teach children by approaching them through intellectual reasoning, we really teach in a way that merely brings inner death to much within them. Although children at that age are no longer entirely a sense organ, and their sense organs have now risen to the surface of the body, they still have their entire soul within. Children gain nothing through intellectualization, which brings a kind of systemization to the senses, but they can accept what the recognized authority of the teacher brings to them as an ensouled picture.

From the change of teeth until puberty, we must form all our teaching artistically; we must begin everywhere from an artistic perspective. If we teach children letters, from which they are to learn to read and write as is now commonly done, then they will have absolutely no relationship to those characters. We know, of course, that the letters of the alphabet arose in earlier civilizations from a pictorial imitation of external processes in things. Writing began with pictograms. When we teach the letters of the alphabet to the child, we must also begin with pictures. Thus, in our Waldorf school in Stuttgart, we do not begin with letters; we begin with instruction in painting and drawing. That is difficult for a child of six or seven years, just entering school, but we soon overcome the difficulties. We can overcome those difficulties by standing alongside the child with a proper attitude, carried within our authority in such a way that the child does indeed want to imitate what the teacher creates with form and color. The child wants to do the same as the teacher does. Children must learn everything along that indirect path. That is possible only, however, when both an external and an internal relationship exists between the teacher and pupil, which occurs when we fill all our teaching with artistic content. An unfathomable, impenetrable relationship exists between the teacher and child. Mere educational techniques and the sort of things teachers learn are not effective; the teacher’s attitude, along with its effect on the feelings of the child, is most effective; the attitude carried within the teacher’s soul is effective. You will have the proper attitude in your soul when you as a teacher can perceive the spiritual in the world.

I would like to give you another example to illustrate what I mean. This is an example I particularly like to use. Suppose we want to stimulate the child in a moral-religious way. This would be the proper way to do so for the nine- or ten-year-old. In the kind of education I am describing, you can read from the child’s development what you need to teach each year, even each month. Suppose I want to give a child of about nine an idea of the immortality of the human soul. I could tiptoe around it intellectually, but that would not leave a lasting impression on the child. It might even harm the child’s soul, because when I give an intellectual presentation about moralreligious issues nothing enters the child’s soul. What remains in the child’s soul results from intangible things between the teacher and child. However, I can give the child an experience of the immortality of the soul through artistically formed pictures. I could say, “Look at a butterfly’s cocoon and how the butterfly breaks through the cocoon. It flies away and moves about in the sunlight. The human soul in the human body is the same as the butterfly in the cocoon. When a human being passes through the gates of death, the soul leaves the body and then moves about in the spiritual world.”

Now, you can teach that to children in two ways. You can feel yourself to be above children and think that you are wise and children are dumb. You might feel that children cannot understand what you, in your wisdom, can understand about the immortality of the soul, so you will create a picture for them.

If I make up such a picture for the children while feeling myself to be superior to them, that will make an impression on the children that soon passes, but it leaves a withered place within them. However, I can also approach the child differently, with the attitude that I believe in this picture myself. I can see that I do not simply fabricate the picture, but that divine spiritual powers have placed the butterfly and cocoon into nature. The fluttering of the butterfly out of the cocoon is a real picture within nature and the world of what I should understand as the immortality of the soul. The emergence of the butterfly confronts me with the idea of immortality in a simple and primitive way. It was God Himself who wanted to show me something through that emerging butterfly. Only when I can develop such a belief in my pictures is the invisible and supersensible relationship between the child and myself effective. If I develop my own comprehension with that depth of soul and then give it to the child, that picture takes root in the child and develops further throughout life. If we transform everything into a pictorial form between the change of teeth and puberty, we do not teach the child static concepts that the child will retain unchanged. If we teach children static concepts, it would be the same as if we were to clamp their hands in machines so that they could no longer freely grow. It is important that we teach children inwardly flexible concepts. Such concepts can grow just as our limbs do, so that what we develop within the child can become something very different when the child matures.

Such things can be judged only by those who do not merely look at children and ask what their needs are or what their developmental capacities are. Only those who can survey all of human life can judge these things, which then become a rather intuitive way of teaching. I could give you an example of this. Suppose we have a school-age child that has inner devotion toward the teacher. I would like to illustrate the strength that could develop through an example. Those with insight into such things know how fortunate it is for later life when, during childhood, they heard about a respected relative they had not yet seen. Then, one day, they had the opportunity to visit that person. They went to visit that relative with a shyness and with everything that was contained in the picture developed within them. They stood there shyly as the door was opened. That first encounter with a highly respected person is certainly memorable. To have had the opportunity to respect someone in that way is something that takes deep root in the human soul, and it can still bear fruit in later life.

It is the same with all truly living concepts taught to children and not simply stuffed into them. If you can get a child to look up with true respect to you as a teacher, as an accepted authority, you then create something for the child’s later life. We could describe it as follows. We know that there are people who, when they have reached a certain age, spread goodness in their environment. They do not need to say much, but their words act as a kind of blessing; it is contained in their voice, not in the content of their words. It is certainly a blessing for people when, during their childhood, they met such people. If we look back on the life of such a person of fifty or sixty and see what occurred during childhood between the change of teeth and puberty, if we look at what that person learned, we realize that person learned respect, a respect for morality. We realize that such a person learned to look up to things properly, to look up to the higher forces in the world. We might say that such a person learned how to pray properly. When someone learns to pray in the right way, the respect they learn is transformed into powers of blessing in old age, powers that act like a good deed for others in their presence. To express it pictorially, someone who never learned to fold their hands in prayer as a child will never develop the strength later in life to spread their hands in blessing.

It is important that we do not simply stuff abstract ideas into children, but that we know how to proceed with children when we want to create within their souls something fruitful for all of life. Therefore, we do not abstractly teach children to read and write, but begin artistically with writing and allow all the abstraction within letters to arise from pictures. In that way, we teach children to write in a way appropriate to the child’s needs. We do not simply appeal to the child’s capacity to observe, to the head alone, but to the entire human being. First, we teach children to write. When the child has learned to write in this way—so that the child’s entire being, and not simply the head, participates in the picture—then what we give the child is appropriate. After children learn to write, they can learn to read. Anyone caught up in today’s school system might say that such children would learn to read and write more slowly than otherwise. However, it is important that the tempo of learning is proper. Basically, children should learn to read only after the age of eight, so that we can develop reading and writing pictorially and artistically.

Those who have genuine knowledge of human beings through true vision of soul and spirit can observe subtle details and then bring those observations into teaching. Suppose we have a child who walks too heavily. That comes about because the child’s soul was improperly affected before the change of teeth. We can improve the situation by enlivening what previously formed the child by teaching through artistically presented pictures. Thus, someone who truly understands the human being will teach a child who walks too heavily about painting and drawing. By contrast, a child whose step is too light, too dancing, should be guided more toward music. That has a tremendous moral effect on the child’s later character development. Thus, in each case, if we can truly see the human being, we will understand what we need to bring into our pictures.

Until the change of teeth the child’s closest and most appropriate place is within the circle of the family and the parents. Nursery school and play groups follow. We can appropriately develop games and activities when we understand how they affect the child’s physical organism. We need only imagine what happens when a child receives a store-bought doll, a “beautiful” doll with a beautifully painted face. We can see that such a child develops thick blood (these things are not visible in the normal anatomy) and that this disturbs the child’s physical body. We simply do not realize how much we sin in that way, how it affects the child. If we make for the child a doll from a few rags, and if this is done with the child—simply painting the eyes on the rags so that the child sees this and sees how we create the doll—then the child will take that activity into its body. It enters into the child’s blood and respiratory system.

Suppose we have a melancholic girl. Anyone who looks at such a child externally, without any view of the soul, would simply say, “Oh, a melancholic child; inwardly dark. We need to put very bright colors around her and make toys red and yellow for her wherever possible. We must dress the child brightly, so that she awakens in bright colors, so that she will be awakened.” No, she won’t! That would only be an inner shock for the child, and it would force all her life forces in the opposite direction. We should give a melancholic and withdrawn child blue or blue violet colors and toys. Otherwise, the bright colors would overstimulate such an inwardly active child. We can thus bring the child’s organism into harmony with her surroundings and cure what is perhaps too flighty and nervous because of being surrounded by bright colors. From a genuine understanding of the human being, we can gain an idea of what we should teach and do with children, right down to the finest details, and thus gain direct help for our work. You can see that this way of teaching might seem to support current ideas about what children should learn at a particular age—that we should stuff such things into them and about how we should occupy them. However, if you realize that children can take from their environment only what already exists within their bodies, then you might say the following. Suppose we have a child who does not tend to be robustly active, but always works in details—that is, tends to work rather artistically. If you insist that the child be very active outwardly, then just those tendencies within the child that are for detailed work will wither. The tendencies toward activity that you want to develop because you have deluded yourself into thinking that they are common to all humanity, that everyone should develop them, will also certainly wither. The child has no interest in that; the work assigned between the change of teeth and puberty is done, and nothing sticks, nothing grows within the child through forcing things. Throughout the kind of education we are discussing, it is always important that the teacher have a good sense of what lives within the child and can, from what is observed within the child’s body, soul, and spirit, practice every moment what is right through the teacher’s own instinct for teaching.

In this way, the teacher can see the pedagogy needed for the children. In the Waldorf school, we discover the curriculum in each child. We read from the children everything we are to do from year to year and month to month and week to week so that we can bring them what is appropriate and what their inner natures require. The teaching profession demands a tremendous amount of selflessness, and because of this it cannot in any way accept a preconceived program. We need to direct our teaching entirely toward working with the children so that the teacher, through the relationship to the children developed by standing alongside them, provides nothing but an opportunity for the children to develop themselves.

You can best accomplish this between the ages of seven and fourteen—that is, during elementary school—by refraining completely from appealing to the intellect, focusing instead on the artistic. Then, you can develop through pictures what the body, soul, and spirit need. Therefore, we should present morality as pictures when the child is about nine or ten years old. We should not provide moral commandments; we should not say that this or that is good or evil. Instead, we should present good people to the children so that they can acquire sympathy for what is good, or perhaps, present the children with evil people so that they can acquire antipathy toward what is evil. Through pictures we can awaken a feeling for the nature of morality. All of those things are, of course, only suggestions that I wanted to present concerning the second stage of childhood. In the third part of my lecture today, I want to show how we can bring it all together as a foundation for education—not merely education for a particular time in childhood, but for all of human life. We will continue with that after the second part has been translated.

(George Adams delivered the second part of the lecture.)

We can best see how this way of educating can achieve the proper effects for all of human life if we look specifically at eurythmy in education. The eurythmy we have performed publicly in London during the past days has a pedagogical side, also.

Eurythmy is an art in which people or groups of people express the movements in the depths of human nature. Everything expressed in those movements arises systematically from the activity within the human organism, just as human speech or song does. In eurythmy, no gesture or movement is haphazard. What we have is a kind of visible speech. We can express anything we can sing or speak just as well through the visible movements of eurythmy. The capacity of the entire human being for movement is repressed in speech, it undergoes a metamorphosis in the audible tones and is formed as visible speech in eurythmy.

We have brought eurythmy into the Waldorf school for the lowest grades all the way to the highest. The children, in fact, enter into this visible speech just as the soul makes a corresponding expression for the sounds of audible speech. Every movement of the fingers or hands, every movement of the entire body is thus a sound of speech made visible. We have seen that children between the change of teeth and puberty live just as naturally into this form of speech as a young child lives into normal audible speech. We have seen that the children’s entire organism—that is, body, soul, and spirit (since eurythmy is also a spirit and soul exercise) find their way just as naturally into eurythmy speech as they do into oral speech. Children feel they have been given something consistent with their whole organism. Thus, along with gymnastics derived from an observation of the physical body, we have eurythmy arising from an observation of the child’s spirit and soul. Children feel fulfilled in eurythmy movements, not only in their physical body or in an ensouled body, but in a spiritually permeated soul within a body formed by that soul. To say it differently, what people experience through eurythmy acts in a tremendously living manner on everything living within them as tendencies and, on the other side, has just as fruitful an effect on all of life.

Regardless of how well children do in gymnastics, if they perform these exercises only according to the laws of the physical body, these exercises will not protect the children from all kinds of metabolic illnesses later in life. For instance, you cannot protect them from illnesses such as rheumatism, which may cause metabolic illnesses later. What you gain through gymnastics results in a kind of thickening of the physical body. However, what you can effect by developing movements that arise from the spirit and soul makes the spirit and soul ruler of the bodies of the soul and physical for all of life. You cannot keep a sixty-year-old body from becoming fragile through gymnastics. If you educate a child properly, however, so that the child’s movements in gymnastics arise from the soul, you can keep the child’s body from becoming fragile in later life. You can inhibit such things if you teach pictorially during elementary school so that the picture that would otherwise occupy the soul can move into the body.

Thus, this pictorial language, eurythmy, is nothing but gymnastics permeated with soul and spirit. You can see that gymnastics permeated by soul and spirit is directed only toward a balanced development of the child’s body, soul, and spirit; and you can see that what can be ingrained during childhood can be fruitful throughout life. We can do that only when we feel like gardeners tending plants. The gardener will not, for example, artificially affect the plant’s sap flow, but will provide from outside only opportunities for the plant to develop itself. A gardener has a kind of natural reluctance to artificially alter plant growth. We must also have a respectfulness about what children need to develop within their own lives. We will, therefore, always be careful not to teach children in an unbalanced way. The principle of authority I discussed before must live deeply within the child’s soul. Children must have the possibility of learning things they cannot yet intellectually comprehend, but learn anyway because they love the teacher. Thus, we do not take away from children the possibility of experiencing things later in life.

If I have already comprehended everything as a child, then I could never have the following kind of experience. Suppose something happens to me around age thirty-five that reminds me of something I learned from a beloved teacher or a loved authority, something I had learned from that authority through my desire to believe. However, now I am more mature and slowly a new understanding arises within me. Returning in maturity to things we learned earlier, but did not fully comprehend, has an enlivening effect. It gives an inner satisfaction and strengthens the will. We cannot take that away from children if we respect their freedom and if we want to educate them as free human beings. The foundation of the educational principle I am referring to is the desire to educate people as free beings. That is why we should not develop the child’s will through intellectual moral reasoning. We need to be clear that when we develop moral views in the child’s feeling between the ages of seven and fourteen, the child can, after maturing and moving into life, then comprehend intellectual and moral feelings and the will. What permeates the will, and what arises out of the will from the esthetic feeling developed earlier, enlivens morality and, insofar as it arises from freedom, gives people strength and inner certitude.

You see, if you want to use the kind of education we are discussing properly, you will not simply look at childhood, but will also look at people later in life. You will want what you give to children to act just as the natural growth and development of the plant acts to produce a flower that blooms. If we want a blossoming, we do not dare to want the plant to develop too quickly. Instead, we await the slow development from the root to the stem to the leaf to the flower and, finally, to the fruit, unfolding and developing freely in the sunlight. That is the picture we need to keep before us as the goal of education. Our desire is to nurture the root of life in children. However, we want to develop this root so that life slowly and flexibly forms physically, soulfully, and spiritually from our care during childhood. We can be certain that, if we respect human freedom, our teaching will place people in the world as free beings. We can be certain that the root of education can develop freely if we do not enslave children to a dogmatic curriculum. Later in life, under the most varied circumstances, children can develop appropriately as free human beings.

Of course, this kind of education puts tremendous demands on the teacher. However, do we dare presume that the most complete being here on Earth—the human being—can be taught at all if we do not penetrate fully the characteristics of that being? Shouldn’t we believe—concerning human beings and what we do with them—that they hold a place of honor, and that much of what we do is a kind of religious service? We must believe that. We must be aware that education demands of us the greatest level of selflessness. We must be able to forget ourselves completely and plunge into the nature of the child in order to see what will blossom in the world as an adult human being. Selflessness and a true desire to deepen your understanding of human nature, and gaining a true understanding of humanity—these are the basic elements of genuine teaching.

Why shouldn’t we recognize the necessity of devotion to such teaching, since we must certainly admit that teaching is the most noble activity of human life? Teaching is the most noble thing in all human life on the Earth.

That is progress. The progress we achieve through teaching is this: the younger generations, given to us from the divine worlds, develop through what we, the older generations, have developed in ourselves; and these younger generations move a step beyond us in human progress. Isn’t it obvious to every right-thinking person that, in bringing such service to humanity—that is, in bringing the best and most beautiful things of previous generations as an offering to the younger generations—we teach in the most beautiful and humane way?

(George Adams concluded the English translation.)

First of all I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Mrs. Mackenzie for her kind words of greeting, and to all of you who have made the effort to meet again, at Professor Mackenzie’s invitation, to discuss questions of education.

In the short time available little can be said about the educational methods based on anthroposophy, for their essence is in an educational practice that does not have fixed programs, nor clearly defined general concepts to encompass it. The main intention of Waldorf education is that its teachers should be able to look deeply into the nature of the child from a true and genuine knowledge of the human being, and that in the individuality of each child who has come down into the earthly realm, they should be able to experience a wondrous enigma, which the educator and the world can never hope to understand completely. The teacher’s practical task is to discern ways to approach the mystery, the enigma, that divine guiding spirits present us with each child who joins our contemporary society. The teacher’s task begins at the age when the child discards the baby teeth, around the seventh year, and extends until the eighteenth or nineteenth year when, as a young man or woman, the student either goes out into life or enters higher education.

A few years ago, due to the devastating war, many new ideals, and certainly many illusions as well, emerged in Germany. At that time, the industrialist Emil Molt saw an opportunity to do something important for the workers in his factory. He felt that, by opening a school for their children, he could to some extent help reconcile his workers with their destiny as factory workers, and above all do something about what was then the great social demand of the time—he wanted to begin a school for his employees’ children, where the children, although laborers’ children, would get the best possible education imaginable.

This should make it clear immediately that the education I am representing here was not hatched from some ideas or from any plan for reform; it was, instead, born as a direct answer to a practical life situation. Emil Molt simply declared, “My workers have a total of a hundred and fifty children, and these children must be educated in the best way possible.” This could happen within the anthroposophical movement because, as strange as it may sound to you, anthroposophists are neither theorists nor visionary dreamers, but practical people who take the pragmatic side of life seriously; indeed, we like to believe that practical matters are nurtured especially within the anthroposophical movement. In other words, the idea regarding this education was the direct result of a practical need.

In Stuttgart, where all this happened, the necessary conditions for starting such a school were soon created. At that time, a democratic legislation of schools did not yet exist; that came into force only with the subsequent democratically constituted assembly. We came just in time to begin the school before the emergence of a “free” school legislation, which forced a general levelling of all schools in Germany—paying lip service to freedom by enforcing fixed laws. So we were only just in time to open such a school. I must quickly add that the school authorities have always shown great understanding and cooperation ever since the school was founded. It was fortunately possible to begin “The Free Waldorf school” in complete freedom. Its name arose because of its association with the Waldorf-Astoria Factory.

I do not wish to imply in any way that state-trained teachers are inferior, and certainly not that they are poor teachers simply because they have passed a state exam! Nevertheless, I was granted freedom in my choice of teachers, regardless of whether they were state trained or not. It was left to my discretion whether my candidates would make good and efficient teachers, and it happens that most of the teachers at the Waldorf school, based on the educational principles I wish to speak about, are in fact not state trained.

However, the situation did not remain as it was then. The school was begun with a hundred and fifty students. In no time at all, anthroposophists living in Stuttgart also wanted to send their children to this school because the education it offered was supposed to be very good. Since then (only a few years ago) the school has grown to more than eight hundred children. Several grades, like our fifth and sixth grades, have three parallel classes.

A further step, perhaps not quite as practical (I don’t want to judge this) was that Emil Molt, after deciding to open the school, asked me to provide the school with spiritual guidance and methods. It was only possible to give this guidance based on the spiritual research and knowledge of the human being that I represent. Our fundamental goal is to know the complete human being as a being of body, soul, and spirit, as a person grows from childhood, and to be able to read in the soul of the child what needs to be done each week, month, and year. Consequently, one could say our education is a teaching based entirely on knowledge of the child, and this knowledge guides us in finding the appropriate methods and principles.

I can give only general and sketchy outlines here of what is meant by knowledge of the human being. There is much talk nowadays about physical education, about the importance of not sacrificing physical education to the education of the child’s mind and soul. However, to separate the physical aspect from that of the soul and spirit is in itself a great illusion, because in a young child, spirit, soul, and body form a unity. It is impossible to separate one realm from the other in early childhood.

To give an example, let us imagine a child at school; a child becomes more and more pale. The paling of the child is a physical symptom that the teacher should notice. If an adult becomes increasingly pale, one seeks the advice of a doctor, who will think of an appropriate therapy according to an understanding of the case. Teachers of an abnormally pale child must ask themselves whether this child was already that pale when entering the class, or if the child’s complexion changed afterward. Lo and behold, they may realize that they themselves were the cause of the child’s pallor, because of excessive demands on the child’s memory forces. Consequently they will realize that they must reduce the pressure in this respect. Here is a case where physical symptoms reveal problems in the sphere of the soul. The child becomes pale because the memory has been overtaxed.

Then again, teachers may be faced with a different type of child; this time the child does not turn pale; on the contrary, the complexion becomes increasingly ruddy. This child appears to lack good will, gets restless, and turns into what is usually called a “hyperactive” child. The child lacks discipline, jumps up and down and cannot sit still for a moment, constantly wanting to run in and out. It is now up to the teacher to find the cause of these changes, and, lo and behold, it may be found (not always, because individual cases vary greatly and have to be diagnosed individually) that the child had been given too little to remember. This can easily happen because the appropriate amount of material to be remembered varies greatly from child to child.

As it happens, government inspectors visit our school. The authorities make sure that they know what is happening in our school! At the time when socialism was flourishing, one local director of education came to inspect the school, and I took him around to the various classes for three days. I pointed out that our physical education was intended to develop the students’ spiritual capacities, and that we educate their mental-spiritual capacities in such a way that their physical bodies benefit, because the two form a unity. Thereupon the inspector exclaimed, “But in this case your teachers would have to know medicine as well, and that is not possible!” To which I answered, “I do not think so, but if it were indeed necessary, it would have to be done, because a teacher’s training must ensure that the teacher is capable of thorough insight into the physical and spiritual background of the growing child.”

Furthermore, if one has a child of the type just described, a child who becomes increasingly restless and who does not pale but, on the contrary, becomes flushed, one can think of all kinds of things to do. However, to help such a child, one has to make sure of the right treatment. And the right treatment may be very difficult to find, for insight into human nature must not limit its considerations to a certain period of time, such as from age seven to age fourteen, which is the time when the class teacher is with the children. One must realize that much of what happens during these seven years has consequences that manifest only much later. One might choose the comfortable ways of experimental psychology, which only considers the child’s present state of development to decide what to do, but if one endeavors to survey the child’s whole life from birth to death, one knows: When I give the child too little content to remember, I induce a tendency toward serious illness, which may not appear before the forty-fifth year; I may cause a layer of fat to form above the heart. One has to know what form of illness may be induced eventually through the education of the child’s soul and spirit. Knowledge of the human being is not confined to an experiment with a student in the present condition, but includes knowledge of the whole human being—body, soul, and spirit—as well as a knowledge of what happens during various ages and stages of life.

When these matters become the basis for teaching, one will also find them relevant in the moral sphere. You may agree with me when I say that there are some people who, in ripe old age, give off an atmosphere of blessing to those in their company. They needn’t say much, but nevertheless radiate beneficial influence to others merely by the expression in their eyes, their mere presence, arm gestures—saying little perhaps, but speaking with a certain intonation and emphasis, or a characteristic tempo. They can permeate whatever they say or do with love, and this is what creates the effect of blessing on those around them. What kind of people are they?

In order to explain this phenomenon with real insight into human life, one must look back to their childhood. One then finds that such people learned, in their childhood, to revere and pray to the spiritual world in the right way, for no one has the gift of blessing in old age who has not learned to fold his or her hands in prayer between the ages of seven and fourteen. This folding of the hands in prayer during the age of primary education enters deeply into the inner organization of the human being and is transformed into the capacity for blessing in old age. This example shows how different life stages are interrelated and interwoven in human life. When educating children, one educates for all of life—that is, during a person’s younger years one may cultivate possibilities for moral development in old age. This education does not encroach on human freedom. Human freedom is attacked primarily when a certain inner resistance struggles against a free will impulse. What I have been talking about is connected with freeing a person from inner impediments and hindrances.

This should suffice as an introduction to tonight’s theme. When one tries to achieve a more intimate knowledge of human nature, observing it not just externally but also with the inner gaze directed more toward the spiritual, one discovers that human beings pass through clearly defined life periods.

The first three periods of life are of particular importance and interest for education. The first one has a more homogeneous character and lasts from birth to age seven—that is, until the time of the change of teeth. The second period of life extends from the change of teeth to puberty, around age fourteen. The third begins at puberty and ends in the twenties. It is easy to notice external physical changes, but only a trained capacity for observation will reveal the more hidden aspects of these different life periods.

Such observation shows that during the first seven years, roughly from birth to the change of teeth, the child’s spirit, soul, and body are completely merged into a unity. Observe a child entering into this world, with open features still undifferentiated, movements uncoordinated, and without the ability to show even the most primitive human expressions, such as laughing or weeping. (A baby can cry, of course, but this crying is not really weeping; it does not spring from emotions of the soul because the soul realm has not yet developed independently.) All of this makes the child into a unique being, and indeed, the greatest wonder of the world. We observe a baby weekly and monthly; from an undefined physiognomy, something gradually evolves in the physical configuration of the little body, as if coming from a center. Soul qualities begin to animate not only the child’s looks, but also the hand and arm movements. And it is a wonderful moment when, after moving about on hands and knees, the child first assumes the vertical posture. To anyone who can observe this moment, it appears as a most wonderful phenomenon.

When we perceive all this with spiritual awareness, which can be done, it shows us the following: There, in this unskillful little body, spirit is living, spirit that cannot yet control limb movements. This is still done very clumsily, but it is the same human spirit that, later on, may develop into a genius. It is there, hidden in the movements of arms and legs, in questing facial expression, and in the searching sense of taste.

Then we find that, from birth until the second dentition, the young child is almost entirely one sense organ. What is the nature of a sense organ? It surrenders fully to the world. Consider the eye. The entire visible world is mirrored in the eye and is contained in it. The eye is totally surrendered to the world. Likewise the child, though in a different way, is surrendered fully to the environment. We adults may taste sweet, bitter, or acid tastes on the tongue and with the palate, but the tastes do not penetrate our entire organism. Although we are not usually aware of it, it is nevertheless true to say that when the baby drinks milk the taste of the milk is allowed to permeate the entire organism. The baby lives completely like an eye, like one large sense organ. The differentiation between outer and inner senses occurs only later. And the characteristic feature is that, when a child perceives something, it is done in a state of dreamy consciousness.

If, for example, a very choleric father, a man who in behaviors, gestures, and attitudes is always ready to lose his temper, and displays the typical symptoms of his temperament around a child, then the child, in a dreaming consciousness, perceives not only the outer symptoms, but also the father’s violent temperament. The child does not recognize temperamental outbursts as such, but perceives the underlying disposition, and this perception directly affects the finest vascular vessels right into the blood circulation and respiration. The young child’s physical and bodily existence is thus affected immediately by the spiritual impressions received. We may admonish a child, we may say all kinds of things, but until the seventh year this is all meaningless to the child. The only thing that matters is how we ourselves act and behave in its presence. Until the change of teeth, a child is entirely an imitating being, and upbringing and education can be effected only by setting the proper example to be imitated. This is the case for moral matters as well.

In such matters one can have some rather strange experiences. One day a father of a young child came to me in a state of great agitation because (so he told me) his son, who had always been such a good boy, had stolen! The father was very confused, because he was afraid this was a sign that his son would develop into a morally delinquent person. I said to him, “Let’s examine first whether your son has really stolen. What has he actually done?” “He has taken money out of the cupboard from which his mother takes money to pay household expenses. With this money he bought sweets, which he gave to other children.” I could reassure the father that his boy had not stolen at all, that the child had merely imitated what he had seen his mother do several times every day. Instinctively he had imitated his mother, taking money out of the cupboard, because Mother had been doing it.

Whether in kindergarten or at home, we educate the child only when we base all education and child rearing on the principle of imitation, which works until the second dentition. Speaking, too, is learned purely by imitation. Up to the change of teeth, a child learns everything through imitation. The only principle necessary at this stage is that human behavior should be worthy of imitation. This includes also thinking, because in their own way, children perceive whether our thoughts are moral or not. People do not usually believe in these imponderables, but they are present nevertheless. While around young children, we should not allow ourselves even a single thought that is unworthy of being absorbed by the child.

These things are all connected directly with the child as an imitator until the change of teeth. Until then all possibility of teaching and bringing up a child depends on recognizing this principle of imitation. There is no need to consider whether we should introduce one or another Froebel kindergarten method, because everything that has been contrived in this field belongs to the age of materialism. Even when we work with children according to the Froebel system, it is not the actual content of the work that influences them, but how we do it. Whatever we ask children to do without doing it first ourselves in front of them is merely extra weight that we impose on them.

The situation changes when the child’s change of teeth begins. During this stage the primary principle of early education is the teacher’s natural authority. Acceptance of authority is spontaneous on the child’s part, and it is not necessary to enforce it in any way. During the first seven years of life a child will copy what we do. During the second seven years, from the change of teeth until puberty, a child is guided and oriented by what those in authority bring through their own conduct and through their words. This relationship has nothing to do with the role of freedom in human life in a social and individual sense, but it has everything to do with the nature of the child between the second dentition and puberty. At this point it is simply part of a child’s nature to want to look up with natural respect to the authority of a revered teacher who represents all that is right and good. Between the seventh and fourteenth years, a child still cannot judge objectively whether something is true, good, or beautiful; therefore only through the guidance of a naturally respected authority can the students find their bearings in life. Advocating the elimination of a child’s faith in the teacher’s authority at this particular age would actually eliminate any real and true education.

Why does a child of this age believe something is true? Because the authority of the teacher and educator says so. The teacher is the source of truth. Why does something appeal to a child of this age as beautiful? Because the teacher reveals it as such. This also applies to goodness. At this age children have to gain abstract judgment of truth, goodness, and beauty by experiencing concretely the judgments of those in authority. Everything depends on whether the adult in charge exerts a self-evident authority on the child between seven and fourteen; for now the child is no longer a sense organ but has developed a soul that needs nourishment in the form of images or thoughts. We now have to introduce all teaching subjects imaginatively, pictorially—that is, artistically. To do so, teachers need the gift of bringing everything to children at this age in the form of living pictures.

As teachers, we ourselves must be able to live in a world of imagery. For example, let’s imagine that we have to teach a young child to read. Consider what this implies—the child is expected to decipher signs written or printed on paper. In this form they are completely alien to the child. Sounds, speech, and vowels that carry a person’s feelings and are inwardly experienced, are not alien to the child. A child knows the sense of wonder felt at seeing the sun rise. “Ah” (A) is the sound of wonder. The sound is there, but what does the sign that we write on paper have to do with it? The child knows the feeling of apprehension of something uncanny: “Oo” (U).

But what does the sign we write on the paper have to do with this sound? The child has no inner relationship to what has become modern abstract writing. If we return to earlier civilizations, we find that writing was different then. In ancient days, people painted what they wished to express. Look at Egyptian hieroglyphics—they have a direct relationship to the human soul. When introducing writing to the child, we must return to expressing what we wish to communicate in the form of pictures. This is possible, however, only when we do not begin by introducing the alphabet directly, nor reading as a subject, but when we start with painting.

Consequently, when young students enter our school, we introduce them first to the world of flowing colors with watercolor painting. Naturally, this can cause a certain amount of chaos and disorder in the classroom, but the teacher copes with that. The children learn how to work with paints, and through the use of color the teacher can guide them toward definite forms. With the necessary skill, the teacher can allow the shapes of the letters to evolve from such painted forms. In this way, the children gain a direct relationship to the various shapes of the letters. It is possible to develop the written vowels A or U so that first one paints the mood of wonder (or of fright), finally allowing the picture to assume the form of the appropriate letters.

All teaching must have an artistic quality based on the pictorial element. The first step is to involve the whole being of the child in the effort of painting, which is subsequently transformed into writing. Only later do we develop the faculty of reading, which is linked to the head system—that is, to only one part of the human being. Reading comes after writing. First a form of drawing with paint (leading the child from color experience to form), out of which writing is evolved. Only then do we introduce reading.

The point is that, from the nature of the child, the teacher should learn how to proceed. This is the right way of finding the appropriate method, based on one’s observation and knowledge of the child. Our Waldorf school has to do with method, not theory. It always endeavors to solve the wonderful riddle, the riddle of the growing child, and to introduce to the child what the child’s own nature is bringing to the surface. In using this method, one finds that between the second dentition and puberty one has to approach all teaching pictorially and imaginatively, and this is certainly possible. Yet, in order to carry the necessary authority, one has to have the right attitude toward what one’s pictures really represent. For example, it is possible to speak to one’s students even at a relatively early age about the immortality of the human soul. (In giving this example, I am not trying to solve a philosophical problem, but speak only from the perspective of practical pedagogy.) One could say to a child, “Look at the cocoon and its shape.” One should show it to a child if possible. “You see, the cocoon opens and a butterfly flies out! This is how it is when a human being dies. The human body is like the cocoon of a butterfly. The soul flies out of the body, even though we cannot see it. When someone dies, just as the butterfly flies out of the cocoon, so the soul flies out of the body into the spiritual world.”

Now, there are two possible ways that a teacher can introduce this simile. In one instance, the teacher may feel very superior to the “ignorant” student, considering oneself clever and the child ignorant. But this attitude does not accomplish much. If, in creating a picture for the child, one thinks that one is doing so only to help the child understand the abstract concept of immortality, such a picture will not convey much, because imponderables play a role. Indeed, the child will gain nothing unless the teacher is convinced of the truth of this picture, feeling that one is involved with something sacred. Those who can look into the spiritual world believe in the truth of this picture, because they know that, with the emerging butterfly, divine-spiritual powers have pictured in the world the immortality of the human soul. Such people know this image to be true and not a teacher’s concoction for the benefit of “ignorant” students. If teachers feel united with this picture, believing what they have put into it and thus identifying themselves with it, they will be real and natural authorities for their students. Then the child is ready to accept much, although it will appear fruitful only later in life.

It has become popular to present everything in simple and graphic form so that “even children can understand it.” This results in appalling trivialities. One thing, however, is not considered. Let’s assume that, when the teacher stands before the child as the representative and source of truth, beauty, and goodness, a child of seven accepts something on the teacher’s authority, knowing that the teacher believes in it. The child cannot yet understand the point in question because the necessary life experience has not occurred. Much later—say, at the age of thirty five—life may bring something like an “echo,” and suddenly the former student realizes that long ago the teacher spoke about the same thing, which only now, after having gained a great deal more life experience, can be understood fully.

In this way a bridge is made between the person who was eight or nine years old, and the person who is now thirty-five years old, and this has a tremendously revitalizing effect on such a person, granting a fresh increase of life forces. This fact is well-known to anyone with a deep knowledge of the human being, and education must be built on such knowledge.

Through using our educational principles in the Waldorf school in this and similar ways, we endeavor to attune our education of body, soul, and spirit to the innermost core of the child’s being. For example, there might be a phlegmatic child in a class. We pay great attention to the children’s temperaments, and we even arrange the seating order in the classrooms according to temperaments. Consequently we put the phlegmatic children into one group. This is not only convenient for the teachers, because they are always aware of where their young phlegmatics are sitting, but it also has a beneficial effect on the children themselves, in that the phlegmatics who sit together bore each other to death with their indifference. By overcoming some of their temperament, they become a little more balanced.

As for the cholerics who constantly push and punch each other when sitting together, they learn in a wonderfully corrective way how to curb their temperament, at least to some extent! And so it goes. If teachers know how to deal with the various temperaments by assuming, let us say, a thoroughly phlegmatic attitude themselves when dealing with phlegmatic children, they cause in these little phlegmatics a real inner disgust with their own temperament.

Such things must become a part of our teaching, in order to turn it into a really artistic task. It is especially important for students at this age. Teachers may have a melancholic child in their class. If they can look into the spiritual background, in an anthroposophical sense, they may want to find and think through some measure for the benefit of such a child. The education we speak of begins with the knowledge that spirit exists in everything of a physical-bodily nature. One cannot see through matter, but one can learn to know it by seeing its spiritual counterpart, thereby discovering the nature of matter. Materialism suffers from ignorance of what matter really is, because it does not see the spirit in matter.

To return to our little melancholic, such a student can cause us serious concern. The teacher might feel prompted to come up with very ingenious ideas to help the child overcome a particularly melancholic temperament. This, however, can often prove fruitless. Although such a situation may have been observed very correctly, the measures taken may not lead to the desired effect. If, on the other hand, teachers realize that a deterioration of the liver function is at the root of this melancholic nature, if they suspect that there is something wrong with the child’s liver, they will know the course of action necessary. They must contact the child’s parents and find out as much as possible about the child’s eating habits. In this way they may discover that the little melancholic needs to eat more sugar. The teachers try to win the parents’ cooperation, because they know from spiritual science that the beginnings of a degeneration in the liver function connected with melancholia can be overcome by an increased sugar intake. If they succeed in gaining the parents’ help, they will have taken the right step from an educational perspective. It would be necessary to know, through spiritual insight, that an increase of sugar consumption can heal or balance a pathological liver condition.

One must be able to perceive and know the growing child and even the individual organs. This is fundamental in our education. We do not insist on particular external circumstances for our schooling. Whether forest or heath, town or country, our opinion is that one can succeed in a fruitful education within any existing social conditions, as long as one really understands the human being deeply, and if, above all, one knows how the child develops.

These are only a few criteria that I may speak of today, which characterize the nature of Waldorf education and the methods used for its implementation, all of which are based on a spiritual- scientific foundation.

If one can approach the child’s being in this way, the necessary strength is found to help children develop both physically and morally, so that fundamental moral forces manifest also. Barbaric forms of punishment are unnecessary, because the teacher’s natural authority will ensure the proper inner connection between teacher and child. Wonderful things can happen in our Waldorf school to demonstrate this. For example, the following incident occurred a little while ago: Among our teachers there was one who imported all kinds of customary disciplinary measures from conventional school life into the Waldorf school. When a few children were naughty, he thought he would have to keep them in after school. He told them that they would have to stay behind as punishment and do some extra work in arithmetic. Spontaneously, the whole class pleaded to be allowed to stay behind and do arithmetic as well, because, as they called out, “Arithmetic is such fun!” What better things could they do than additional work in arithmetic? “We too want to be kept in,” they declared. Well, here you have an example of what can happen in the Waldorf school where teachers have implanted in their students the right attitude toward work. The teacher of course had to learn his own lesson: One must never use something that should be considered a reward as a punishment. This example is one of many that could be mentioned. It shows how one can create a real art of education based on knowledge of the human being.

I am extremely thankful to Mrs. Mackenzie for giving me the opportunity of at least outlining just some of the fundamentals of education based upon anthroposophical spiritual science. Our teaching is based on definite methods, and not on vague ideals born of mere fantasy. These methods answer the needs and demands of human nature and are the primary justification for our education. We do not believe in creating ideas of what ideal human beings should be so that they fit into preconceived plans. Our goal is to be able to observe children realistically, to hear the message sent to us through the children from the divine-spiritual worlds. We wish to feel the children’s inner affirmation of our picture of the human being. God, speaking through the child, says: “This is how I wish to become.”

We try to fulfil this call for the child through our educational methods in the best way possible. Through our art of education, we try to supply a positive answer to this call.

First I must thank Mrs. MacMillan and Mrs. Mackenzie for their kind words of greeting and for the beautiful way they have introduced our theme. Furthermore, I must apologize for speaking to you in German followed by an English translation. I know that this will make your understanding more difficult, but it is something I cannot avoid.

What I have to tell you is not about general ideas on educational reform or formalized programs of education; basically, it is about the practice of teaching, which stands the test of time only when actually applied in classroom situations. This teaching has been practiced in the Waldorf school for several years now. It has shown tangible and noticeable results, and it has been recognized in England also; on the strength of this, it became possible, through the initiative of Mrs. Mackenzie, for me to give educational lectures in Oxford. This form of teaching is the result not only of what must be called a spiritual view of the world, but also of spiritual research. Spiritual research leads first to a knowledge of human nature, and, through that, to a knowledge of the “human being becoming,” from early childhood until death. This form of spiritual research is possible only when one acknowledges that the human being can look into the spiritual world when the necessary and relevant forces of cognition are developed. It is difficult to present in a short survey of this vast theme what normally needs to be acquired through a specific training of the human soul, with the goal of acquiring the faculty of perceiving and comprehending not just the material aspects of the human being and the sensory world, but also the spiritual element, so that this spiritual element may work in the human will.

However, I will certainly try to indicate what I mean. One can strengthen and intensify inner powers of the soul, just as it is possible to research the sense-perceptible world by external experiments using instrumental aids such as the microscope, telescope, or other optical devices, through which the sense world yields more of its secrets and reveals more to our vision than in ordinary circumstances. By forging inner “soul instruments” in this way, it is possible to perceive the spiritual world in its own right through the soul’s own powers. One can then discover also the fuller nature of the human being, that what is generally understood of the human being in ordinary consciousness and through the so-called sciences is only a small part of the whole of human nature, and that beyond the physical aspect, a second human being exists.

As I begin to describe this, remember that names do not matter, but we must have them. I make use of old names because they are known here and there from literature. Nevertheless, I must ask you not to be put off by these names. They do not stem from superstition, but from exact research. Nevertheless, there is no reason why one should not use other names instead. In any case, the second human member, which I shall call the etheric body, is visible when one’s soul forces have been sufficiently strengthened as a means for a deeper cognition (just as the physical senses, by means of microscope or telescope, can penetrate more deeply into the sense world). This etheric body is the first of the spiritual bodies linked with the human physical body.

When studying the physical human being only from the viewpoint of conventional science, one cannot really understand how the physical body of the human being can exist throughout a lifetime. This is because, in reality, most physical substances in the body disappear within a period of seven to eight years. No one sitting here is the same, physically speaking, as the person of some seven or eight years ago! The substances that made up the body then have in the meantime been cast off, and new ones have taken their place. In the etheric body we have the first real supersensible entity, which rules and permeates us with forces of growth and nourishment throughout earthly life.

The ether body is the first supersensible body to consider. The human being has an ether body, just as plants do, but minerals do not. The only thing we have in common with the minerals is a physical form. However, furnished with those specially developed inner senses and perceptions developed by powers of the soul, we come to recognize also a third sheath or member of the human being, which we call the astral body. (Again I must ask you not to be disturbed by the name.) The human being has an astral body, as do animals. We experience sensation through the astral body. An organism such as the plant, which can grow and nourish itself, does not need sensation, but human beings and animals can sense. The astral body cannot be designated by an abstract word, because it is a reality.

And then we find something that makes the human being into a bearer of three bodies, an entity that controls the physical, etheric, and astral bodies. It is the I, the real inner spiritual core of the human being. So the four members are first the physical body, second the etheric body, third the astral body, and finally the human I-organization. Let those who are not aware of these four members of the human being—those who believe that external observation, such as in anatomy and physiology, encompasses the entire human being—try to find a world view! It is possible to formulate ideas in many ways, whether or not they are accepted by the world. Accordingly one may be a spiritualist, an idealist, a materialist, or a realist. It is not difficult to establish views of the world, because one only needs to formulate them verbally; one only needs to maintain a belief in one or another viewpoint. But unless one’s world views stem from actual realities and from real observations and experiences, they are of no use for dealing with the external aspect of the human being, nor for education.

Let’s suppose you are a bridge builder and base your mechanical construction on a faulty principle: the bridge will collapse as the first train crosses it. When working with mechanics, realistic or unrealistic assumptions will prove right or wrong immediately. The same is true in practical life when dealing with human beings. It is very possible to digest world views from treatises or books, but one cannot educate on this basis; it is only possible to do so on the strength of a real knowledge of the human being. This kind of knowledge is what I want to speak about, because it is the only real preparation for the teaching profession. All external knowledge that, no matter how ingeniously contrived, tells a teacher what to do and how to do it, is far less important than the teacher’s ability to look into human nature itself and, from a love for education and the art of education, allow the child’s own nature to tell the teacher how and what to teach.

Even with this knowledge, however—a knowledge strengthened by supersensible perception of the human being—we will find it impossible during the first seven years of the child’s life, from birth to the second dentition, to differentiate between the four human members or sheaths of which I have just spoken. One cannot say that the young child consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and I, in the same way as in the case of an adult. Why not?

A newborn baby is truly the greatest wonder to be found in all earthly life. Anyone who is open-minded is certain to experience this. A child enters the world with a still unformed physiognomy, an almost “neutral” physiognomy, and with jerky and uncoordinated movements. We may feel, possibly with a sense of superiority, that a baby is not yet suited to live in this world, that it is not yet fit for earthly experience. The child lacks the primitive skill of grasping objects properly; it cannot yet focus its eyes properly, cannot express the dictates of the will through limb movement. One of the most sublime experiences is to see gradually evolve, out of the central core of human nature, out of inner forces, that which gives the physiognomy its godlike features, what coordinates the limb movements to suit outer conditions, and so on. And yet, if one observes the child from a supersensible perspective, one cannot say that the child has a physical, etheric, and astral body plus an I, just as one cannot say that water in its natural state is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. Water does consist of hydrogen and oxygen, but these two elements are most intimately fused together. Similarly, in the child’s organism until the change of teeth, the four human members are so intimately merged together that for the time being it is impossible to differentiate between them.

Only with the change of teeth, around the seventh year, when children enter primary education, does the etheric body come into its own as the basis of growth, nutrition, and so on; it is also the basis for imagination, for the forces of mind and soul, and for the forces of love. If one observes a child of seven with supersensible vision, it is as if a supersensible etheric cloud were emerging, containing forces that were as yet little in control because, prior to the change of teeth, they were still deeply embedded in the physical organism and accustomed to working homogeneously within the physical body. With the coming of the second teeth they become freer to work more independently, sending down into the physical body only a portion of their forces. The surplus then works in the processes of growth, nutrition, and so on, but also has free reign in supporting the child’s life of imagination. These etheric forces do not yet work in the intellectual sphere, in thinking or ideas, but they want to appear on a higher level than the physical in a love for things and in a love for human beings. The soul has become free in the child’s etheric body. Having gone through the change of teeth the child, basically, has become a different being.

Now another life period begins, from the change of teeth until puberty. When the child reaches sexual maturity, the astral body, which so far could be differentiated only very little, emerges. One notices that the child gains a different relationship to the outer world. The more the astral body is born, the greater the change in the child. Previously it was as if the astral body were embedded in the physical and etheric organization. Thus to summarize: First, physical birth occurs when the embryo leaves the maternal body. Second, the etheric body is born when the child’s own etheric body wrests itself free. Due to the emergence of the etheric body we can begin to teach the child. Third, the astral body emerges with the coming of puberty, which enables the adolescent to develop a loving interest in the outside world and to experience the differences between human beings, because sexual maturity is linked not only with an awakening of sexual love, but also with a knowledge gained through the adolescent’s immersion in all aspects of life. Fourth, I-consciousness is born only in the twenty-first or twenty-second year. Only then does the human being become an independent I-being.

Thus, when speaking about the human being from a spiritual perspective, one can speak of four successive births. Only when one knows the condition of the human being under the influence of these successively developing members, can one adequately guide the education and training of children. For what does it mean if, prior to the change of teeth, the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the I cannot yet be differentiated? It means that they are merged, like hydrogen and oxygen in water. This, in turn, means that the child really is as yet entirely a sense organ. Everything is related to the child in the same way a sense impression is related to the sense organ; whatever the child absorbs, is absorbed as in a sense organ.

Look at the wonderful creation of the human eye. The whole world is reflected within the eye in images. We can say that the world is both outside and inside the eye. In the young child we have the same situation; the world is out there, and the world is also within the child. The child is entirely a sense organ. We adults taste sugar in the mouth, tongue, and palate. The child is entirely permeated by the taste. One only needs eyes to observe that the child is an organ of taste through and through. When looking at the world, the child’s whole being partakes of this activity, is surrendered to the visible surroundings. Consequently a characteristic trait follows in children; they are naturally pious. Children surrender to parents and educators in the same way that the eye surrenders to the world. If the eye could see itself, it could not see anything else. Children live entirely in the environment. They also absorb impressions physically.

Let’s take the case of a father with a disposition to anger and to sudden outbursts of fury, who lives closely with a child. He does all kinds of things, and his anger is expressed in his gestures. The child perceives these gestures very differently than one might imagine. The young child perceives in these gestures also the father’s moral quality. What the child sees inwardly is bathed in a moral light. In this way the child is inwardly saturated by the outbursts of an angry father, by the gentle love of a mother, or by the influence of anyone else nearby. This affects the child, even into the physical body.

Our being, as adults, enters a child’s being just as the candlelight enters the eye. Whatever we are around a child spreads its influence so that the child’s blood circulates differently in the sense organs and in the nerves; since these operate differently in the muscles and vascular liquids which nourish them, the entire being of the child is transformed according to the external sense impressions received. One can notice the effect that the moral and religious environment of childhood has had on an old person, including the physical constitution. A child’s future condition of health and illness depends on our ability to realize deeply enough that everything in the child’s environment is mirrored in the child. The physical element, as well as the moral element, is reflected and affects a person’s health or illness later.

During the first seven years, until the change of teeth, children are purely imitative beings. We should not preconceive what they should do. We must simply act for them what we want them to do. The only healthy way to teach children of this age is to do in front of them what we wish them to copy. Whatever we do in their presence will be absorbed by their physical organs. And children will not learn anything unless we do it in front of them.

In this respect one can have some interesting experiences. Once a father came to me because he was very upset. He told me that his five-year-old child had stolen. He said to me, “This child will grow into a dreadful person, because he has stolen already at this tender age.” I replied, “Let us first discover whether the boy has really stolen.” And what did we find? The boy had taken money out of the chest of drawers from which his mother habitually took money whenever she needed it for the household. The mother was the very person whom the boy imitated most. To the child it was a matter of course to do what his mother did, and so he too took money from the drawer. There was no question of his thieving, for he only did what was natural for a child below the age of the second dentition: he imitated. He only imitated what his mother had done.

When this example is understood, one knows that, in the case of young children, imitation is the thing that rules their physical and soul development. As educators we must realize that during these first seven years we adults are instrumental in developing the child’s body, soul, and spirit. Education and upbringing during these first seven years must be formative. If one can see through this situation properly, one can recognize in people’s physiognomy, in their gait, and in their other habits, whether as children they were surrounded by anger or by kindness and gentleness, which, working into the blood formation and circulation, and into the individual character of the muscular system, have left lasting marks on the person. Body, soul, and spirit are formed during these years, and as teachers we must know that this is so. Out of this knowledge and impulse, and out of the teacher’s ensuing enthusiasm, the appropriate methods and impulses of feeling and will originate in one’s teaching. An attitude of dedication and self-sacrifice has to be the foundation of educational methods. The most beautiful pedagogical ideas are without value unless they have grown out of knowledge of the child and unless the teachers can grow along with their students, to the extent that the children may safely imitate them, thus recreating the teachers’ qualities in their own being.

For the reasons mentioned, I would like to call the education of the child until the change of teeth “formative education,” because everything is directed toward forming the child’s body, soul, and spirit for all of earthly life. One only has to look carefully at this process of formation. I have quoted the example of an angry father. In the gesture of a passionate temperament, the child perceives inherent moral or immoral qualities. These affect the child so that they enter the physical constitution. It may happen that a fifty-year-old person begins to develop cataracts in the eyes and needs an operation. These things are accepted and seen only from the present medical perspective. It looks as if there is a cataract, and this is the way to treat it, and there the matter ends; the preceding course of life is not considered. If one were ready to do that, it would be found that a cataract can often be traced back to the inner shocks experienced by the young child of an angry father. In such cases, what is at work in the moral and religious sphere of the environment spreads its influence into the bodily realm, right down to the vascular system, eventually leading to health or illness. This often surfaces only later in life, and the doctor then makes a diagnosis based on current circumstances. In reality, we are led back to the fact that, for example, gout or rheumatism at the age of fifty or sixty can be linked to an attitude of carelessness, untidiness, or disharmony that ruled the environment of such a patient during childhood. These circumstances were absorbed by the child and entered the organic sphere.

If one observes what a child has absorbed during the stage of imitation up to the change of teeth, one can recognize that the human being at this time is molded for the whole of life. Unless we learn to direct rightly the formative powers in the young human being, all our early childhood education is without value. We must allow for germination of the forces that control health and illness for all of earthly life.

With the change of teeth, the etheric body emerges, controlling the forces of digestion, nutrition, and growth, and it begins to manifest in the realm of the soul through the faculty of fantasy, memory, and so on. We must be clear about what we are educating during the years between the second dentition and puberty. What are we educating in the child during this period? We are working with the same forces that effect proper digestion and enable the child to grow. They are transformed forces of growth, working freely now within the soul realm. What do nature and the spiritual world give to the human being through the etheric body’s forces of growth? Life—actual life itself! Since we cannot bestow life directly as nature does during the first seven years, and since it is our task to work on the liberated etheric body in the soul realm, what should we, as teachers, give the child? We should give life! But we cannot do this if, at such an early stage, we introduce finished concepts to the child. The child is not mature enough yet for intellectual work, but is mature enough for imagery, for imagination, and for memory training. With the recognition of what needs to be done at this age, one knows that everything taught must have the breath of life. Everything needs to be enlivened. Between the change of teeth and puberty, the appropriate principle is to bestow life through all teaching. Everything the teacher does, must enliven the student. However, at just this age, it is really too easy to bring death with one’s teaching.

As correctly demanded by civilization, our children must be taught reading and writing. But now consider how alien and strange the letters of the alphabet are to a child. In themselves letters are so abstract and obscure that, when the Europeans, those so-called superior people, came to America (examples of this exist from the 1840s), the Native Americans said: “These Europeans use such strange signs on paper. They look at them and then they put what is written on paper into words. These signs are little devils!” Thus said the Native Americans: “The Palefaces [as they called the Europeans] use these little demons.” For the young child, just as for the Indians, the letters are little demons, for the child has no immediate relationship to them.

If we introduce reading abstractly right away, we kill a great deal in the child. This makes no sense to anyone who can see through these matters. Consequently, educational principles based on a real knowledge of the human being will refer to the ancient Egyptian way of writing. They still put down what they had actually seen, making a picture of it. These hieroglyphics gave rise to our present letters. The ancient Egyptians did not write letters, they painted pictures. Cuneiform writing has a similar origin. In Sanskrit writing one can still see how the letters came from pictures. You must remember that this is the path humanity has gone on its way to modern abstract letters, to which we no longer have an immediate relationship. What then can we do? The solution is to not plague children at all with writing and reading from the time they begin school. Instead, we have them draw and paint. When we guide children in color and form by painting, the whole body participates. We let children paint the forms and shapes of what they see. Then the pictures are guided into the appropriate sounds.

Let’s take, for example, the English word fish. By combining the activity of painting and drawing with a brush, the child manages to make a picture of a fish. Now we can ask the child to pronounce the word fish, but very slowly. After this, one could say, “Now sound only the beginning of the word: ‘F.’” In this way the letter F emerges from the picture that was painted of the fish. One can proceed in a similar way with all consonant sounds. With the vowels, one can lead from the picture to the letters by taking examples from a person’s inner life of feeling. In this way, beginning at the age of seven or eight, children learn a combined form of painting and drawing. Teachers can hardly relax during this activity, because painting lessons with young children inevitably create a big mess, which always has to be cleaned up at the end of the lesson. Yet this inconvenience must be carried by the teacher with understanding and equanimity. The first step is for the children to learn to create resemblances of outer shapes, using color and form. This leads to writing. In learning to write, the child brings the whole body into movement, not just one part. Only the head is involved when we read, which is the third step, after writing. This happens around the ninth year, when the child learns to read through the activity of writing, which was developed from painting.

In doing this, the child’s nature gives us the cue, and the child’s nature always directs us in how to proceed. This means that teachers are forced to become different human beings. They can’t learn their lessons and then apply them abstractly; they must instead stand before the class as whole human beings, and for everything they do, they must find images; they must cultivate their imagination. The teachers can then communicate their intentions to the students in imperceptible ways. The teachers themselves have to be alert and alive. They will reach the child to the extent that they can offer imaginative pictures instead of abstract concepts.

It is even possible to bring moral and religious concepts through the medium of pictures. Let us assume that teachers wish to speak to children about the immortality of the human soul. They could speak about the butterfly hidden in a chrysalis. A small hole appears in the chrysalis, and the butterfly emerges. Teachers could talk to children as follows: The butterfly, emerging from the chrysalis, shows you what happens when a person dies. While alive, the person is like the chrysalis. The soul, like the butterfly, flies out of the body only at death. The butterfly is visible when it leaves the chrysalis. Although we cannot see the soul with our eyes when a person dies, it nevertheless flies into the spiritual world like a butterfly from the chrysalis.

There are, however, two ways teachers can proceed. If they feel inwardly superior to the children, they will not succeed in using this simile. They may think they are very smart and that the children’s ignorance forces them to invent something that gets the idea of immortality across, while they themselves do not believe this butterfly and chrysalis “humbug,” and consider it only a useful ploy. As a result they fail to make any lasting impression on the children; for here, in the depths of the soul, forces work between teacher and child. If I, as the teacher, believe that spiritual forces in nature, operating at the level of the newly-emerged butterfly, provide an image of immortality, if I am fully alive in this image of the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis, then my comparison will work strongly on the child’s soul. This simile will work like a seed, and grow properly in the child, working beneficently on the soul. This is an example of how we can keep our concepts mobile, because it would be the greatest mistake to approach a child directly with frozen intellectual concepts.

If one buys new shoes for a three-year-old, one would hardly expect the child to still be wearing them at nine. The child would then need different, larger shoes. And yet, when it comes to teaching young children, people often act exactly like this, expecting the student to retain unchanged, possibly until the age of forty or fifty, what was learned at a young age. They tend to give definitions, meant to remain unchanged like the metaphorical shoes given to a child of three, as if the child would not outgrow their usefulness later in life! The point is that, when educating we must allow the soul to grow according to the demands of nature and the growing physical body. Teachers can give a child living concepts that grow with the human being only when they acquire the necessary liveliness to permeate all their teaching with imagination.

We need education that enlivens the human being during the years between the change of teeth and puberty. The etheric body can then become free. For example, take the word mouth. If I pronounce only the first letter, “M,” I can transform this line as picture of a mouth to this:

Similarly, I can find other ways to use living pictures to bridge the gap to written letters of the alphabet. Then, if the intellect (which is meant to be developed only at puberty) is not called on too soon, the ideas born out of the teacher’s imagination will grow with the child. Definitions are poison to the child. This always brings to mind a definition that once was made in a Greek philosophers’ school. The question, “What is a human being?” received the answer, “A human being is a creature with two legs and no feathers.” The following day, a student of the school brought a goose whose feathers had been plucked out, maintaining that this was a human being—a creature with two legs and without feathers. (Incidentally, this type of definition can sometimes be found in contemporary scientific literature. I know that in saying this I am speaking heresy, but roughly speaking, this is the kind of intellectual concept we often offer children.)

We need rich, imaginative concepts, that can grow with the child, concepts that allow growth forces to remain active even when a person reaches old age. If children are taught only abstract concepts, they will display signs of aging early in life. We lose fresh spontaneity and stop making human progress. It is a terrifying experience when we realize we have not grown up with fantasy, with images, with pictures that grow and live and are suited to the etheric body, but instead we grew up merely with those suited to abstraction, to intellectualism—that is, to death.

When we recognize that the etheric body really exists, that it is a living reality—when we know it not just in theory but from observing a developing child—then we will experience the second golden principle of education, engraved in our hearts. The golden principle during the first seven years is: Mold the child’s being in a manner worthy of human imitation, and thus cultivate the child’s health. During the second seven years, from the change of teeth to puberty, the guiding motive or principle of education should be: Enliven the students, because their etheric bodies have been entrusted to your care.

With the coming of puberty, what I have called the astral body is freed in a new kind of birth. This is the very force that, during the age of primary education until the beginning of puberty, was at the base of the child’s inmost human forces, in the life of feeling. This force then lived undifferentiated within the latent astral body, still undivided from the physical and etheric bodies. This spiritual aggregate is entrusted to the quality of the teachers’ imaginative handling, and to their sensitive feeling and tact. As the child’s astral body is gradually liberated from the physical organization, becoming free to work in the soul realm, the child is also freed from what previously had to be present as a natural faith in the teacher’s authority. What I described earlier as the only appropriate form of education between the change of teeth and puberty has to come under the auspices of a teacher’s natural authority.

Oh! It is such great fortune for all of life when, at just this age, children can look up to their teachers as people who wield natural authority, so that what is truth for the teacher, is also very naturally truth to the students. Children cannot, out of their own powers, discriminate between something true and something false. They respect as truth what the teacher calls the truth. Because the teacher opens the child’s eyes to goodness, the child respects goodness. The child finds truth, goodness, and beauty in the world through venerating the personality of the teacher.

Surely no one expects that I, who, many years ago, wrote Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path: A Philosophy of Freedom, would stand for the principle of authoritarianism in social life. I am saying here that the child, between the second dentition and puberty, has to experience the feeling of a natural authority from the adults in charge, and that, during these years, everything the student receives must be truly alive. The educator must be the unquestioned authority at this age, because the human being is ready for freedom only after having learned to respect and venerate the natural authority of a teacher. Only after reaching sexual maturity, when the astral body has become the means for individual judgments, can the student form judgments instead of accepting those of the teacher.

Now what must be considered the third principle of education comes into its own. The first one I called “the formative element,” the second one “the enlivening element.” The third element of education, which enters with puberty, can be properly called “an awakening education.” Everything taught after puberty must affect adolescents so that their emerging independent judgment appears as a continual awakening. If one attempts to drill subjects into a student who has reached puberty, one tyrannizes the adolescent, making the student into a slave. If, on the other hand, one’s teaching is arranged so that, from puberty on, adolescents receive their subject matter as if they were being awakened from a sleep, they learn to depend on their own judgments, because with regard to making their own judgments, they were indeed asleep. The students should now feel they are calling on their own individuality, and all education, all teaching, will be perceived as a stimulus and awakener. This can be realized when teachers have proceeded as I have indicated for the first two life periods. This last stage in education will then have a quality of awakening. And if in their style, posture, and presentation, teachers demonstrate that they are themselves permeated with the quality of awakening, their teaching will be such that what must come from those learning will truly come from them. The process should reach a kind of dramatic intensification when adolescents inwardly join with active participation in the lessons, an activity that proceeds very particularly from the astral body.

Appealing properly in this way to the astral body, we address the immortal being of the student. The physical body is renewed and exchanged every seven years. The etheric body gives its strength as a dynamic force and lasts from birth, or conception, until death. What later emerges as the astral body represents, as already mentioned, the eternal kernel of the human being, which descends to Earth, enveloping itself with the sheaths of the physical and etheric bodies before passing again through the portal of death. We address this astral body properly only when, during the two previous life periods, we have related correctly to the child’s etheric and physical bodies, which the human being receives only as an Earth dweller. If we have educated the child as described so far, the eternal core of the human individuality, which is to awaken at puberty, develops in an inwardly miraculous way, not through our guidance, but through the guidance of the spiritual world itself.

Then we may confidently say to ourselves that we have taken the right path in educating children, because we did not force the subject matter on them; neither did we dictate our own attitude to them, because we were content to remove the hurdles and obstacles from the way so that their eternal core could enter life openly and freely. And now, during the last stage, our education must take the form of awakening the students. We make our stand in the school saying, “We are the cultivators of the divine-spiritual world order; we are its collaborators and want to nurture the eternal in the human being.” We must be able to say this to ourselves or feel ashamed. Perhaps, sitting there among our students are one or two geniuses who will one day know much more than we teachers ever will. And what we as teachers can do to justify working with students, who one day may far surpass us in soul and spirit, and possibly also in physical strength, is to say to ourselves: Only when we nurture spirit and soul in the child—nurture is the word, not overpower—only when we aid the development of the seed planted in the child by the divine-spiritual world, only when we become “spiritual midwives,” then we will have acted correctly as teachers. We can accomplish this by working as described, and our insight into human nature will guide us in the task.

Having listened to my talk about the educational methods of the Waldorf school, you may wonder whether they imply that all teachers there have the gift of supersensible insight, and whether they can observe the births of the etheric and astral bodies. Can they really observe the unfolding of human forces in their students with the same clarity investigators use in experimental psychology or science to observe outer phenomena with the aid of a microscope? The answer is that certainly not every teacher in the Waldorf school has developed sufficient clairvoyant powers to see these things with inward eyes, but it isn’t necessary. If we know what spiritual research can tell us about the human being’s physical, etheric, and astral bodies and about the human I-organization, we need only to use our healthy soul powers and common sense, not just to understand what the spiritual investigator is talking about, but also to comprehend all its weight and significance.

We often come across very strange attitudes, especially these days. I once gave a lecture that was publicly criticized afterward. In this lecture I said that the findings of a clairvoyant person’s investigations can be understood by anyone of sane mind who is free of bias. I meant this literally, and not in any superstitious sense. I meant that a clairvoyant person can see the supersensible in the human being just as others can see the sense-perceptible in outer nature. The reply was, “This is what Rudolf Steiner asserted, but evidently it cannot be true, because if someone maintains that a supersensible spiritual world exists and that one can recognize it, one cannot be of sane mind; and if one is of sane mind, one does not make such an assertion....” Here you can see the state of affairs in our materialist age, but it has to be overcome.

Not every Waldorf teacher has the gift of clairvoyance, but every one of them has accepted wholeheartedly and with full understanding the results of spiritual-scientific investigation concerning the human being. And each Waldorf teacher applies this knowledge with heart and soul, because the child is the greatest teacher, and while one cares for the child, witnessing the wonderful development daily, weekly, and yearly, nothing can awaken the teacher more to the needs of education. In educating the child, in the daily lessons, and in the daily social life at school, the teachers find the confirmation for what spiritual science can tell them about practical teaching. Every day they grow into their tasks with increasing inner clarity. In this way, education and teaching in the Waldorf school are life itself. The school is an organism, and the teaching faculty is its soul, which, in the classrooms, in regular common study, and in the daily cooperative life within the school organism, radiates care for the individual lives of the students in all the classes.

This is how we see the possibility of carrying into our civilization what human nature itself demands in these three stages of education—the formative education before the change of teeth, the life-giving education between the change of teeth and puberty, and the awakening education after puberty, leading students into full life, which itself increasingly awakens the human individuality.

Formative education—before the change of teeth.
Life-giving education—between the change of teeth and puberty.
Awakening education—after puberty.

When we look at the child properly, the following thoughts may stimulate us: In our teaching and educating we should really become priests, because what we meet in children reveals to us, in the form of outer reality and in the strongest, grandest, and most intense ways, the divine-spiritual world order that is at the foundation of outer physical, material existence. In children we see, revealed in matter in a most sublime way, what the creative spiritual powers are carrying behind the outer material world. We have been placed next to children in order that spirit properly germinates, grows, and bears fruit. This attitude of reverence must underlie every method. The most rational and carefully planned methods make sense only when seen in this light. Indeed, when our methods are illuminated by the light of these results, the children will come alive as soon as the teacher enters the classroom. Teaching will then become the most important leaven and the most important impulse in our present stage of evolution. Those who can clearly see the present time with its tendency toward decadence and decline know how badly our civilization needs revitalization.

School life and education can be the most revitalizing force. Society should therefore take hold of them in their spiritual foundations; society should begin with the human being as its fundamental core. If we start with the child, we can provide society and humanity with what the signs of the times demand from us in our present stage of civilization, for the benefit of the immediate future.

Whatever may arise in course of time from anthroposophy, in regard to the sphere of medical knowledge, it will not be found to be in any disagreement whatsoever with that which is understood to-day as the orthodox scientific study of medicine. It is easy, in looking at the question from the scientific standpoint, to be deceived about this, because from the outset it is supposed that any study which is not founded upon so-called exact proof, must be of the nature of sectarianism, and cannot therefore be taken seriously by the scientific observer.

For this reason it is necessary to remark that it is just that point of view which seeks to support medicine upon an anthroposophical basis, which is the most appreciative of, and the most sympathetic towards all that is best and greatest in modern medical achievements.

There cannot therefore be any question that the following statements are merely the polemics of dilettantism, or unprofessionalism, leveled against recognised methods of healing. The whole question turns solely upon the fact that during the last few centuries our entire world-conception has assumed a form which is limited by investigation only into those things which can be confirmed by the senses—either by means of experiment, or by direct observation—and which are then brought into relation with one another through those powers of human reasoning which rely upon the testimony of the senses alone.

This method of research was nevertheless entirely justifiable during several hundred years, because if it had been otherwise, mankind would have become immersed in a world of dreams and fantasies, would have been forced to a capricious acceptance of things, and to a barren weaving of hypotheses.

That is connected with the fact that man, as he lives in the world between birth and death, is a being who cannot truly know himself by means of his physical senses and his reason alone—because he is just as much a spiritual as a physical being.

So that when we come to speak of man in health and in disease we can do no less than ask ourselves: Is it possible to gain a knowledge of health and disease only by those methods of research which concern the physical body; purely with the assistance of the senses and the reason, or by the use of instruments which extend the faculties of the senses and enable us to carry out experiments?

We shall find that a real, unprejudiced, historical retrospect shows us that the knowledge which mankind has gained originated from something totally different from these mere sense-observations. There lies behind us an immense development of our spiritual life, no less than of our physical.

Some three thousand years ago, during the flowering of the most ancient Greek culture, there existed schools that were very different from those of to-day. The basis of these ancient schools consisted in the belief that man had first of all to develop new faculties in his soul before he could become capable of attaining to true knowledge concerning mankind.

Now it was just because, in these ancient times, the more primitive soul-faculties did not incline towards the fantastic, that it was possible to experience, in the so-called mysteries, the spiritual foundations from which all forms of learning arose.

This state of things came to an end more or less contemporaneously with the founding of our Universities—during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. Since that time we learn only in a rationalistic way. Rationalism leads on the one hand to keen logic, and on the other hand to pure materialism.

During the course of centuries a vast store of external knowledge has been accumulated in the domain of biology, physiology, and other branches of research which are introductory to the study of medicine; indeed an amazing mass of observations, out of which an almost immeasurable amount may yet be obtained!

But during these centuries all knowledge connected with man which could not be gained without spiritual vision, sank completely out of sight.

It has therefore become actually impossible to investigate the true nature of health and disease.

In order to emphasise this remark, I may mention that even at the present time, according to the descriptions given in my books Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and An Outline Of Occult Science, it is possible so to raise the faculties of the soul that the spiritual nature of man may be clearly distinguished from the physical, This spiritual part of man is, for the spiritual observer, just as visible as the physical part is for the man who observes with his outer senses; with this difference, however, that our ordinary senses have been and are incorporated into our bodily organism without our co-operation, whereas we must ourselves develop the organs of spiritual sight.

This can be brought about if one unfolds within oneself an earnest life of thought. Such a state of living, of resting in quietude—in thought—must, however, be carried out so as to bring about a methodical education and transformation of the soul. If one can, so to say, experiment for a time with one's own soul, allowing it to rest within an easily grasped thought, at the same time permitting neither any traces of auto-suggestion nor any diminution of consciousness to arise, and if one in this way exercises the soul as one would exercise a muscle, then the soul grows strong. Methodically, one pursues the exercises further and further; the soul grows stronger, grows powerful, and becomes capable of sight.

The first thing that it sees is that the human being actually does not consist merely of physical body, which can be investigated either with the naked eye or with a microscope, and so forth, but that he also bears an etheric body. This is not to be confused with that which, in earlier scientific times, was somewhat amateurishly described as “vital forces.” It is something that can really be perceived and observed; and if I were to distinguish qualitatively between the physical body and the etheric body, I should choose, out of all the innumerable qualitative distinctions that exist, the following:—The physical body of man is subject to the laws of gravity; it tends to be drawn earthward. The etheric body tends to be drawn towards the periphery of the universe; that is to say, outwards, in all directions. As a rule, our investigations are concerned with the relative weight of things, but that part of the human organism which possesses weight is the direct opposite of that which not only has no weight but which strives to escape from the laws of gravitation. We have in us these two opposing forces.

This is the first of our super-physical bodies. We may say, then, that we have within us first of all the physical man, whose orientation is centripetal and tends earthwards, and another man, whose orientation is centrifugal and tends to leave the earth. It will be seen that a balance must be maintained between these two configurations of the human being—between the heavy physical body, which is subject to the laws of gravity, and the other, the etheric body, which strives outwards towards the farthest limits of the universe.

The etheric body seeks, as it were, to imitate, to be an image of the whole Cosmos; but the physical body rounds it off, and keeps it within its own limits.

Therefore, by contemplating the state of balance between the physical body and the etheric body, our perception of the nature of the human being becomes real and penetrating. Once we have succeeded in recognising these outward-streaming centrifugal forces in man, we shall be able to perceive them also in the vegetable kingdom. The mineral kingdom alone appears purely physical to us. In it we can trace no centrifugal forces. Minerals are subject to the laws of gravity. But in the case of plants we recognise their outer form as being the result of the two forces. At the same time it becomes apparent to us that we cannot remain at this point in our investigations if we wish to observe anything that is higher in the scale of organic life than the plants. The plant has its etheric body; the animal, when we observe it, possesses life, and also sensation. It creates, inwardly, a world; this fact arrests our attention, and we see that we must make yet deeper researches. Hence we realise that we must develop our ordinary state of consciousness still further.

Already, as I have shown, a certain stage will have been reached when we are able to see not merely the physical body of man, but the physical body embedded within the etheric body, as though in a kind of cloud. But that is not all; the more we strengthen our souls, the more we find greater and greater reality in our thoughts, and it then becomes possible to arrive at a further stage, which consists in suppressing these strong thoughts which have been made so powerful by our own efforts.

In ordinary life if we blot out by degrees our faculties of sight, of hearing, of sensation, and of thinking—we fall asleep. That is an experiment which may easily be carried out. But if one has strengthened the soul in the manner described by the training of thought, of the whole of one's life of concept and feeling, then one can actually learn to suppress the life of the senses. One then arrives at a condition where, above all things, one is not asleep but is very much awake. Indeed, it may even be that one has to guard against losing the power to sleep, while one is striving to reach this condition. If, however, one sets to work in the way I have indicated in my books, every precaution is taken to prevent any disturbances in the ordinary life.

One succeeds then in being completely awake, though one cannot hear as one hears with the ears. The ordinary memory, too, and ordinary thinking cease. One confronts the world with a perfectly empty but perfectly waking consciousness. And then one sees the third human organism—the astral.

Animals also possess this astral organism. In man it bestows the possibility of unfolding a real inner life of experience. Now this is something which is connected neither with the innermost depths of the earth nor with the wide expanse of the universe, but rather it is connected with a state of being inwardly penetrated by forces which are “seen” as the astral body. So now we have the third member of the human organisation.

If one learns to perceive this third member in the manner indicated above, one finds that from the scientific point of view it is indescribably illuminating. One says to oneself—the child grows up and becomes the man; his vital forces are active. But he is not only growing physically, his consciousness is developing at the same time; he is unfolding within himself an image of the outer world.

Can this be the result of physical growth? Can this be accomplished by the same forces that underlie nutrition and growth?

When the organic forces that underlie the latter gain the upper hand, the consciousness becomes dimmed. We need, therefore, something which is connected with these forces, and which is actually opposed to them. The human being is always growing and always being nourished. But he has within his astral body, as I have described it, something which is perpetually suppressing, inhibiting the forces of growth and nutrition.

So we have in man a process of construction through the physical body in conjunction with the earth; another process of construction through the etheric body in conjunction with the Cosmos, and through the astral body a continuous destruction of the organic processes in the cell-life and the glandular life.

That is the secret of the human organism.

Now we understand why it is that man possesses a soul. If he were to grow continuously like the plant, he could not have a soul. The process of growing must first be destroyed, for it expels the soul. If we had nothing in our brain but the process of building up, and no processes of breaking down and destruction, we could not contain the soul.

Evolution does not proceed in a straight line. It must retreat in one direction; it must give way. Herein lies the secret of humanity—of the ensouled being.

If we go no further than the consideration of the organisation of the animal, we find ourselves concerned only with its three principles—the physical, etheric, and astral. But if we proceed to the observation of man, we find, when we have progressed yet further with the training of our souls, that we spiritually perceive yet another principle.

Our spiritual perception of the animal discloses that its thinking, feeling, and willing are, in a certain sense, neutral in regard to one another; they are not clearly distinct. One cannot speak of a separate thinking, a separate feeling, and a separate willing, but only of a neutral blending of these three elements. But in the case of man, his inner life depends just upon the fact that he lays hold of his intentions by quiet thought, and that he can remain with his intentions; he can either carry them out in deeds, or not carry them out. The animal obeys its impulses. Man separates thinking, feeling, and willing from one another.

How this is so, can only be understood when one has carried one's power of spiritual perception far enough to observe the fourth principle of man's organisation—the “I am I”—or the Ego.

As we have just seen, the astral body breaks down the processes of growth and nutrition; in a sense, it introduces a gradual dying into the whole organism. The Ego redeems, out of this destructive process, certain elements which are continually falling away from the combination of the physical and etheric bodies, and rebuilds them.

That is actually the secret of human nature.

If one looks at the human brain, one sees—in those lighter parts which lie more below the superficial structures, and which proceed as nerve fibres to the sense organs—a most complicated organisation which, for those who can perceive it in its reality, is in a continual state of deterioration, although so slowly does this take place that it cannot be observed by ordinary physiological means. But, out of all this destruction, that which differentiates man from the animals, namely, the peripheral brain, is built up. This is the foundation of the human organisation. With regard to man, naturally, the central brain (the continuation of the sensory nerves and their connections) is more perfect than the peripheral brain, which is, as a matter of fact, more akin to the metabolic processes than the deeper portions of the brain are.

This peripheral brain, which is peculiarly characteristic of man, is organised for these metabolic functions by the Ego-organisation—organised out of what otherwise is in a state of deterioration.¹ And so the activity of the Ego permeates the entire organism.

The Ego redeems certain elements out of the ruin worked by the astral body, and builds out of them that which underlies an harmonious co-ordination of thinking, feeling, and willing.

I can of course only mention these things, but I wish to point out that one can proceed with the same exactitude when making observations spiritually as one can in any branch of external experimental science and with a full sense of responsibility; so that in every case one seeks for the agreement between what is spiritually observed and what is discovered by empirical physical methods of research. It is exactly the formation of the physical brain which leads one on to apprehend the super-physical, and to attain knowledge by spiritual investigation.

Thus we have these four members of the human organisation. These, in order to maintain health, must be in quite special relation to one another.

We only get water when we mix hydrogen and oxygen in accordance with their specific gravity. In the same way there is a determinative which brings about a normal relationship—if I may say so—between the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the Ego.

We not only have four, but 4x4 relative states. All these can be disturbed. An abnormal relation may arise between the etheric and the physical bodies, or between the astral and etheric, or between the Ego and one or another of these. All are deeply connected with one another and are in a special relation to one another. The moment this is disturbed, illness arises.

But this relationship is not uniform throughout the human being; it differs in the different individual organs. If we observe, for instance, a human lung, the physical, etheric, astral, and Ego constituents of this lung are not the same as those of the brain or of the liver. Thus, the entire human organisation is so complicated that the spiritual and the material are differently related in every organ. Therefore, it will be understood that, just as one studies physical anatomy and physical physiology in accordance with external symptoms, so—when one admits the existence of this spiritual investigation, and practises it—one must study with the greatest exactitude the health and disease of every separate organ. In this way one always arrives at a complete and comprehensive knowledge of the human organism. It cannot be so understood if it is observed solely from the physical standpoint. It can only be known through a knowledge of its four principles. One is only clear about any illness when one is able to say which of these four principles either predominates too strongly or is too much suppressed. It is because one is able to observe these things in a spiritual manner that one actually places a spiritual diagnosis alongside the material diagnosis. Therefore what is gained by anthroposophical methods in seeing through the fourfold constitution of man, is gained in addition to all that it is possible to observe of health and disease by ordinary methods.

And further, it is not only possible to behold man spiritually but also the whole of Nature. One is now, for the first time, in a position to find man's relation to the various kingdoms of Nature, and, in medicine, his relation to the healing properties which these kingdoms contain.

Let us take an example. There is a substance which is most widely distributed over the whole earth, and not only over the whole earth, but also, in its finest form, throughout the air. This is silicic acid. It is an enormously important constituent part of the earth. But for those who are able to see these things with higher faculties, all this silicious substance is revealed as the external manifestation of something spiritual; and an immense and almost overpowering difference is seen to exist between that which ordinary physical methods of observation disclose with regard to silicic acid, or, for example, carbonic acid gas, and that which spiritual investigation discloses.

By the latter method we see that quartz, or rock-crystal, such as we find in the mountains—in fact, all forms of silicious substance—provides a free path for something spiritual. Just as any transparent substance allows light to stream through it, so all silicious substance allows what is spiritually active in the entire world to stream through it.

But we find quite a different relationship towards the spiritual when we come to carbonic acid. Carbonic acid has this peculiarity (for there is something spiritual in every physical substance), that the spiritual that is in contact with carbonic acid becomes individualised. Carbonic acid retains the spiritual in itself with all its force. The spiritual “selects” carbonic acid as a dwelling-place. In silica it has a transcending tendency—a consuming tendency—but it inheres in carbonic acid as though it felt itself “at home” there.

Carbonic acid processes are present in the breathing and circulation of animals. The former are especially connected with the astral body. The carbonic acid processes are related to the external physical of the animal, while the astral body is that which is inwardly spiritually active. The astral is therefore the spiritual element, and the carbonic acid process is its physical counterpart and underlies the animal's expirations.

The Ego-organisation is the spiritual inner element in man of that which takes place in man as silicic acid processes. We have silicic acid in our hair, our bones, our organs of sense, in all the extremities and periphery of our bodies—in fact, everywhere where we come into contact with the outer world—and all these silicic acid processes are the external counterpart, the expression from within outwards, of the Ego-organisation.

Now it must be borne in mind that the Ego must, in a certain sense, be strong enough to manipulate, to control, the whole of this silicic acid activity. If the Ego is too weak, the silicic acid is separated out—that is a pathological condition. On the other hand, the astral body must be strong enough to control the carbonic acid process; if it cannot, carbonic acid or its waste products are separated out, and illness results.

It is possible, therefore, in observing the strength or weakness of the astral body to find the cause of an illness rooted in the spiritual. And in observing the Ego-organisation one discovers the cause of those disturbances which either bring about a morbid decomposition of the silicic acid processes in. the body, or which one must deal with therapeutically by the administration of silicic acid. What happens then is that the spiritual, which is never retained in the material substance itself, passes through it and affects the silicic acid deposited in the body. It takes the place of the Ego itself. In the administration of carbonic acid as a healing agent, it must be so prepared that the spiritual is present in it in the right manner; in using it as a remedy one must be aware that the astral body works in it.

Therefore: One can conceive of a form of therapy which does not only make use of chemical agents, but which is quite consciously administering a cure, in the knowledge that, if a certain quantity of physical substance is given, or a particular solution is prepared as a bath, or if an injection is given, at the same time something of a spiritual nature is quite definitely introduced into the human organism.

So it is perfectly possible to make a bridge from a knowledge of purely physical means of healing to a knowledge which works with spiritual means.

That was the characteristic of the medicine of ancient times; some tradition of it still lingers; it lingers even in some of the recognised cures to-day. And we have to get back to this. We can do so if, without in any way neglecting physical medicine, we add to it what we can gain in spiritual knowledge, not only of man, but of Nature also. Everything can be carried out with the same exactitude as is the case with regard to physical natural science.

Anthroposophy does not seek to correct modern medicine, but to add its own knowledge to it, because ordinary medicine makes demands upon itself only.

What I have just briefly indicated is merely the commencement of an exceedingly wide spiritual knowledge, in which, at present, people have very little faith. One can quite well understand that. But some results have already been attained in the sphere of medicine, and these can be studied in practice at Dr. Ita Wegman's Clinical Institute in Arlesheim, Switzerland. And I am convinced that if any person would investigate this advancement and enlargement of the medical field with the same goodwill with which, as a rule, they investigate physical medicine, they would find it not at all difficult to accept the idea of the spiritual in man, and the spiritual in methods of healing him.

Quite briefly, I will give two examples that illustrate what I have said. Let us suppose that by means of this kind of spiritual diagnosis (if I may use such an expression) it is seen that in a patient the etheric body is working too strongly in some particular organ. The astral body and the Ego-organisation are not in a position to control this super-activity of the etheric body, so that we are faced with an astral body that has become too weak, and possibly also with an Ego which is too weak, and the etheric body therefore predominates. The latter thereby brings about in some particular organ such a condition of the growing and nourishing processes that the whole organism cannot be properly held together, owing to the lack of control by the other two principles.

At this point, then, where the etheric body predominates, the human organism appears as though too much exposed to the centrifugal forces of the Cosmos. They are not in equipoise with the centripetal forces of the physical body. The astral body cannot control them. In such a case we are confronted on the one hand by a preponderance of the silicic acid processes, and on the other by an impotence of the Ego to control them.

This fact underlies the formation of tumours, and it is here that the way is indicated for the true understanding of the nature of carcinomatous processes (cancer). Researches into this matter have had very good results and have been carried out in practice. But one cannot understand carcinoma unless one realises that it is due to the predominance of the etheric body, which is not suppressed by a corresponding activity of the astral and the Ego,

The question then arises, what is to be done in order to strengthen the elements of the astral body and the Ego which correspond to the diseased organ, so that the superabundant energy of the etheric organisation can be reduced? This brings us to the question of the therapy of carcinoma, which shall be dealt with in due course.

Thus, through an understanding of the etheric body we are enabled gradually to become acquainted with the nature of that most terrible of all human diseases, and at the same time, by investigating the spiritual nature of the action of the remedies, we shall discover the means to combat it. This is just one example of how illnesses can be understood through the etheric body.

But supposing that it is the astral body whose forces predominate—supposing that they are so strong that they predominate practically throughout the entire organism, so that there arises a kind of universal stiffening of the whole astral body due to its excessive inner forces; what does such a state of things bring about? When the astral body is not under the control of the Ego—which is to say, when its disintegrating forces are not cancelled by the integrating forces of the Ego—then symptoms appear which are connected with a weakened Ego-organisation.

This results, primarily, in an abnormal activity of the heart. Further, another occurrence due to a weakened Ego-activity, as described above, is that the glandular functions are disturbed. Since the organisation of the Ego is not sufficiently prominent and cannot exercise enough control, in greater or less degree the peripheral glandular organs begin to secrete too actively. Swollen glands appear—goitre appears.

And we see further how, through this stiffening of the astral body, the silicic acid processes, which should have a reaction inwards, are being pressed outwards, because the Ego is not able work strongly enough in the sense-organs, where it ought to work strongly. So, for instance, the eyes become prominent; the astral body drives them outwards.

It is the task of the Ego to overcome this tendency. Our eyes are actually retained in their right place in our organism by the equipoise that should exist between the astral body and the Ego. So they become prominent because the Ego element in them is too weak to maintain the balance properly. Also, one observes in such cases a general condition of restlessness. One sees, in a word, because the Ego cannot drive back those organic processes which are worked upon by the astral body, that the activity of the whole astral body predominates. In short, the symptoms are those of exophthalmic goitre.

Knowing, therefore, that a disturbance of the balance between astral body and Ego-organisation produces exophthalmic goitre, one can apply the same principles in effecting a cure.

Hence it can be seen with what exactness one can pursue these methods as regards both pathological conditions and therapeutical agencies, when one investigates the human being in a spiritual way.

Before we pass on from the pathological to the therapeutical—and particularly in connection with the two examples mentioned—it would be well to touch upon some of the principles underlying the assimilation of various substances by the human organism.

One only recognises the entire connection that exists between so-called “Nature” and the human being when one perceives not only that the latter is a physico-psychic-spiritual being consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and Ego, but also when one further perceives that the basis of all natural substances and processes is a concrete and comprehensible spiritual one. But one must first be able to penetrate into this concrete spiritual existence.

Just as, in the natural world, one must distinguish between minerals and plants, so one must distinguish quite definitely between the spiritual elements and beings that express themselves through them.

Suppose we take first the mineral kingdom.

A considerable part of our healing agents are taken from this kingdom, and therefore what can be made use of in medicine out of spiritual bases emanates from minerals to a very large extent. We find that the spiritual element is connected in such a way with minerals that it establishes a particular relation between them and the Ego-organisation. It is credible that if a mineral substance is administered, either by mouth or by injection, it works principally upon the human organism itself, and makes for either health or ill-health. But what really takes place is that the physical mineral, as such, as it is regarded and handled by the chemist or the physicist, actually does not work upon the organism, but remains as it is. The physical substance itself, when seen by spiritual observation, shows scarcely any metamorphosis when it is absorbed. On the contrary, what is spiritual in the substance works with extraordinary strength upon the Ego.

So one can say that the spirit, for instance of a rock crystal, affects the Ego. The Ego controls the human being when it contains something silicious—that is, the spiritual element of silicic acid. That is what is so remarkable.

Again, if we take the vegetable kingdom, plants do not only possess a physical form, they possess also what I have characterised as an etheric body. Suppose we administer some plant substance, either by mouth or by injection, what is in the plant works as a rule solely upon the astral body. (These things are described in a general sense; there are always exceptions, which may also be studied.)

Everything derived from the animal kingdom, in whatever way it may be manufactured—out of fluids or solids—when it is administered, works upon the etheric body. This is most particularly interesting, because in this spiritual-medical work results have been attained by using for instance, in certain cases, animal products derived from the secretions of the hypophysis cerebri. These have been used successfully on rickety children or in cases of child-deformity, and so on.

There are also other animal products that work upon the human etheric body, either strengthening it or weakening it. In short, this is their principal function.

Anything injected out of one human being into another affects only the physical body; here there is solely a working of the physical upon the physical. For example, if human blood is transfused, nothing comes into consideration save what can take place as a purely physical phenomenon by means of the blood. A remarkable example of this could be observed when, in vaccinations against smallpox, a change was made from using human lymph to using calf-lymph. It was possible to observe then how the human lymph worked only upon the physical body, and how the effect went, so to speak, a stage higher when calf-lymph was introduced, by its becoming transferred to the etheric body.

Thus it becomes possible to see, by developing spiritual powers of observation, how Nature works, as it were, in degrees, or steps, upon human beings—the mineral being made use of in a certain sense by the Ego, the plant by the astral body, the animal by the etheric body, and the human physical body by the human physical body. In the latter case there is no longer anything spiritual to be described. Indeed, even as regards the animal kingdom, we can no longer speak of the “spiritual” in the animal product, but only of the “etheric.”

It is only through all these various connections that one can gain a true conception of how man—in both health and disease—is really immersed in the whole natural order. But one attains also to an inner perception of a still further continuation of the workings of nature in the human organism.

One may now ask, what is to be one's attitude towards cancer! We have seen how the etheric body is able to develop over-strong forces from itself in some particular organ. The centrifugal forces—that is, the forces that tend outwards into the Cosmos—become too powerful; the astral body and the Ego are too weak to counteract them. Spiritual knowledge now comes to one's aid. One can now try either to make the astral body stronger, in which case one administers something from the plant kingdom, or one must restrain the etheric body, and in that case one makes use of the animal kingdom.

Spiritual investigation has led to the adoption of the former course—that which relates to the astral body. In order to cure cancer, the forces of the astral body must be made stronger. And it may now be admitted that the remedy has really been discovered in the plant kingdom.

We have been accused of dilettantism and so forth, because we make use of a parasitic plant—the mistletoe (which has been used in medicine mainly for epilepsy and similar conditions)—and because we prepare it in a very special manner, in order to discover the way which will lead to the healing of cancer.

If you have observed trees which bear a remarkable outgrowth upon the trunk, resembling swellings, especially if you have seen them in section, you will notice that the whole tendency of growth, which usually has a vertical direction, has at these places a deflection at right angles, becoming therefore horizontal. It presses outwards as though another trunk were beginning to grow; and you find something that is as though drawn out of the tree itself—something parasitic. More closely studied, one discovers that any tree which has such an outgrowth is somewhere or other suppressed, restrained, in its physical development. Sufficient physical material has not been available everywhere, in order to keep pace with the growth forces of the etheric body. The physical body remains behind. The etheric body, which otherwise strives centrifugally to project the physical substance out into the Cosmos, is, as it were, left alone in this portion of the tree. Too little physical substance passes through it, or, rather, matter that has too little physical force. The result is, that the etheric body takes a downward direction to the lower part of the tree, which is connected with stronger physical forces.

Now let us imagine that this does not happen, but, instead, the mistletoe appears; and now there occurs through this plant, which has also its own etheric body, what otherwise takes place through the etheric body of the tree.

From this there results a very special relationship between the mistletoe and the tree. The tree, which is rooted directly in the earth, makes use of the forces which it absorbs from the earth. The mistletoe, growing on the tree, uses what the tree gives it; the tree is, in a sense, the earth for the mistletoe. The mistletoe, therefore, brings about artificially that which, when it is not present, results in the “swellings” which are due to a hypertrophy of the tree's etheric organisation. The mistletoe takes away what the tree only gives up when it has too little physical substance, so that its etheric element is excessive. The excess of the etheric passes out of the tree into the mistletoe.

When the mistletoe is prepared in such a way that this superabundant etheric quality which it has taken from the tree is administered to a person under certain conditions, by injection (and, since we are observing all these facts in a spiritual manner), we gain the following information: that the mistletoe, as an external substance, absorbs what is manifest in the human body as the rampant etheric forces in cancer. [i.e. it becomes a vehicle for the excessive etheric forces.—TRANS.] Through the fact that it represses the physical substance, it strengthens the working of the astral body, which causes the tumour, or cancer, to disintegrate and break up. [The astral body being the destructive principle.—TRANS.]

Therefore we actually introduce the etheric substance of the tree into the human being by means of the mistletoe, and the etheric substance of the tree, carried over by means of the mistletoe, works as a fortifier of the human astral body.

That is one method which can only be known to us when we gain an insight into the way in which the etheric body of the plant acts upon the astral body of the human being—an insight into the fact that the spiritual element in the plant, which in this case is drawn out of it by the parasitic growth, works upon the human astral body.

Thus it can be seen how concretely what I have said may be verified—namely, that it is a question of not merely administering remedies in the manner of the chemist—in the sense in which the chemist speaks and thinks of remedies—but it is a question of administering the spiritual, the super-physical, which the various substances contain.

I have also referred above to the fact that in exophthalmic goitre (Graves' disease) the astral body becomes stiffer, and that the Ego-organisation is unable to deal with this condition. The symptoms are as I have described. This is a case in which it is necessary to strengthen the forces of the Ego. We must consider for a moment something which plays quite an unimportant part in our ordinary associations with the external world; but it is just such apparently unimportant substances which, as regards their spiritual element, have the greatest effect upon the spiritual in the human being. For example, one finds

that oxide of copper has the greatest imaginable effect upon the Ego-organisation of man; it really strengthens it. So, if one gives oxide of copper to a person suffering from Graves' disease, the effect is that one creates a strong Ego-organisation that dominates the stiffened astral body; the oxide of copper comes, as it were, to the rescue of the Ego, and the correct balance is thus restored.

I have quoted these two examples especially in order to show how every product in all the expanse of Nature may be studied, and the question asked: “How does this or that product work upon the physical body of man? how does it work upon the etheric body? and how upon the astral body and the Ego-organisation?”

It all rests, therefore, upon our penetration into the profound secrets of Nature. This search into Nature's secrets—into the mysteries of Nature—is the only possible way to combine the observation of human disease with the observation of the healing agencies. If I know how, let us say, a magnet will affect iron filings, then I know what is taking place. Similarly, if I know in what respect oxide of copper is “spiritual,” and on the other hand what is lacking in the human being when he has the symptoms of exophthalmic goitre, that is to permeate what is called medicine with spiritual knowledge.

One can look back upon the evolution of humanity, that is to say upon the evolution of the spirit of humanity which has given birth to the various civilisations, and which brought forth knowledge also and science; and if, in such a retrospect, one looks into a past so remote that it is only possible to reach it by means of the spiritual vision which I have described, one comes upon centres of knowledge quite unlike our present-day schools, wherein men were led to penetrate into a knowledge of Nature and of humanity, after their souls were first prepared in such a way that they could perceive the spiritual in all the external world.

These centres of knowledge, which we have become accustomed to speak of as the “mysteries,” were not just merely “schools,” but fundamentally they were representative of certain things which are regarded quite separately from one another in the life of to-day. They were centres of religion and of art, as well as of knowledge concerning all the various departments of human culture.

They were so organised that those who were set apart as teachers did not instruct their pupils by means of mere abstract concepts, but by means of pictures—of imagery. These pictures, by reason of their inner characteristics, represented the living relationships and connections between all things in the world. Therefore this imagery was able to produce its effects through ceremonial, as we should call it to-day. In its further development this imagery became permeated with beauty. Religious ceremony became artistic. And later, when what had been gained—not from arbitrary fantasies, but from out of these images or pictures, which had been extracted from out of the world-secrets themselves—was expressed in ideas, it became, at that time, science. The same pictures when presented in such a way that they called forth an essential quality of the human will that could be expressed as goodness—that was religion. And again, presented so that they ravished and exalted the senses, touched the emotions, and lifted the soul to the contemplation of beauty—that was art.

The centres of art were indissolubly linked with the centres of religion and of science. There was no one-sided appreciation of anything through the human reason alone, or through sense-perception alone, or through external physical experiment alone, but the whole human being was involved—body, soul, and spirit.

There was penetration into the profoundest nature of all things—to those depths where reality revealed itself; on the one hand stimulating to goodness, on the other hand to the true expression of ideas. To follow this path, which leads to truth, to beauty, and to goodness, was spoken of, and is still spoken of, as the way of initiation—to the knowledge of the “beginnings” of things. For men were aware that they indeed lived in these beginnings when they conjured them forth in religious ceremonial, in the revelations of beauty, and in the rightly created world of ideas; and so called this attitude which they bore towards the things of the world, “initiation-knowledge”—the knowledge of the beginnings from out of which alone man is able to grasp the true nature of things, and so use them according to his will.

So men sought for an initiation-science which could penetrate into the mysteries of the world—to the “beginnings.”

A time had to. come in the course of human development when this initiation-science withdrew; for it became necessary for men to direct their spiritual energies inwards in order to attain to greater self-consciousness. Initiation-science became as though dreamlike—instinctive. It was not at that time a matter of developing human freedom, for such a development towards freedom has only come about because mankind has been for a time driven away from the beginnings; he has lost the initiation-vision, and turning away from the beginnings, contemplates what is related more to the endings of things—to the external revelations of the senses, and to all that, through the senses, may be discovered by experiment concerning the ultimate, concerning the endings.

The time has now come when, having achieved an immeasurably extensive science of the superficial—if I may call it so—which can have only quite an external connection with art or religion, we must once again seek an initiation-science; but we must seek it with the consciousness which we have evolved in ourselves by means of exact science; a consciousness which, in respect of the new form of initiation-knowledge, will function no less perfectly than it does in connection with the exact sciences.

A bridge will then be built between that world-conception which links the human soul with its origins by means of inwardly conceived ideas, and the practical manipulation of the realities contained in those ideas.

In the ancient mysteries, initiation-knowledge was especially bound up with all that was connected with the healing of humanity. There was a real art of healing. For indeed, the mystery-healing was an art, in that it aroused in man the perception that the process of healing was at the same time a sacrificial process.

In order to satisfy the inner needs of the human soul, there must once again be a closer bond between healing and our philosophical conception of the world. And it is this which a knowledge of the needs of the age seeks to find in the Anthroposophical Movement.

The Anthroposophical Movement, whose headquarters are in Dornach, Switzerland, does not interpose anything arbitrary into life; neither does it stand for any sort of abstract mysticism. It desires rather to enter in a wholly practical way into every sphere of human activity. It seeks to attain with complete self-consciousness what was striven for in ancient times instinctively.

Even though we are only making a beginning, at any rate we are creating the possibility of a return to what, in the ancient mysteries, was a natural, a self-evident thing—medicine existing in closest communion with spiritual vision.

• 1. The “Ego-organisation” denotes the whole of those attributes of the human being by means of which he attains his “sense of I am”. As hearing, sight, taste, etc. each have their “organs” of expression, so also has the Ego. In this case the “organ” is the entire physical body in its self-conscious contact with the outer world.

Whatever may arise in course of time from anthroposophy, in regard to the sphere of medical knowledge, it will not be found to be in any disagreement whatsoever with that which is understood to-day as the orthodox scientific study of medicine. It is easy, in looking at the question from the scientific standpoint, to be deceived about this, because from the outset it is supposed that any study which is not founded upon so-called exact proof, must be of the nature of sectarianism, and cannot therefore be taken seriously by the scientific observer.

For this reason it is necessary to remark that it is just that point of view which seeks to support medicine upon an anthroposophical basis, which is the most appreciative of, and the most sympathetic towards all that is best and greatest in modern medical achievements.

There cannot therefore be any question that the following statements are merely the polemics of dilettantism, or unprofessionalism, leveled against recognised methods of healing. The whole question turns solely upon the fact that during the last few centuries our entire world-conception has assumed a form which is limited by investigation only into those things which can be confirmed by the senses—either by means of experiment, or by direct observation—and which are then brought into relation with one another through those powers of human reasoning which rely upon the testimony of the senses alone.

This method of research was nevertheless entirely justifiable during several hundred years, because if it had been otherwise, mankind would have become immersed in a world of dreams and fantasies, would have been forced to a capricious acceptance of things, and to a barren weaving of hypotheses.

That is connected with the fact that man, as he lives in the world between birth and death, is a being who cannot truly know himself by means of his physical senses and his reason alone—because he is just as much a spiritual as a physical being.

So that when we come to speak of man in health and in disease we can do no less than ask ourselves: Is it possible to gain a knowledge of health and disease only by those methods of research which concern the physical body; purely with the assistance of the senses and the reason, or by the use of instruments which extend the faculties of the senses and enable us to carry out experiments?

We shall find that a real, unprejudiced, historical retrospect shows us that the knowledge which mankind has gained originated from something totally different from these mere sense-observations. There lies behind us an immense development of our spiritual life, no less than of our physical.

Some three thousand years ago, during the flowering of the most ancient Greek culture, there existed schools that were very different from those of to-day. The basis of these ancient schools consisted in the belief that man had first of all to develop new faculties in his soul before he could become capable of attaining to true knowledge concerning mankind.

Now it was just because, in these ancient times, the more primitive soul-faculties did not incline towards the fantastic, that it was possible to experience, in the so-called mysteries, the spiritual foundations from which all forms of learning arose.

This state of things came to an end more or less contemporaneously with the founding of our Universities—during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. Since that time we learn only in a rationalistic way. Rationalism leads on the one hand to keen logic, and on the other hand to pure materialism.

During the course of centuries a vast store of external knowledge has been accumulated in the domain of biology, physiology, and other branches of research which are introductory to the study of medicine; indeed an amazing mass of observations, out of which an almost immeasurable amount may yet be obtained!

But during these centuries all knowledge connected with man which could not be gained without spiritual vision, sank completely out of sight.

It has therefore become actually impossible to investigate the true nature of health and disease.

In order to emphasise this remark, I may mention that even at the present time, according to the descriptions given in my books Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and An Outline Of Occult Science, it is possible so to raise the faculties of the soul that the spiritual nature of man may be clearly distinguished from the physical, This spiritual part of man is, for the spiritual observer, just as visible as the physical part is for the man who observes with his outer senses; with this difference, however, that our ordinary senses have been and are incorporated into our bodily organism without our co-operation, whereas we must ourselves develop the organs of spiritual sight.

This can be brought about if one unfolds within oneself an earnest life of thought. Such a state of living, of resting in quietude—in thought—must, however, be carried out so as to bring about a methodical education and transformation of the soul. If one can, so to say, experiment for a time with one's own soul, allowing it to rest within an easily grasped thought, at the same time permitting neither any traces of auto-suggestion nor any diminution of consciousness to arise, and if one in this way exercises the soul as one would exercise a muscle, then the soul grows strong. Methodically, one pursues the exercises further and further; the soul grows stronger, grows powerful, and becomes capable of sight.

The first thing that it sees is that the human being actually does not consist merely of physical body, which can be investigated either with the naked eye or with a microscope, and so forth, but that he also bears an etheric body. This is not to be confused with that which, in earlier scientific times, was somewhat amateurishly described as “vital forces.” It is something that can really be perceived and observed; and if I were to distinguish qualitatively between the physical body and the etheric body, I should choose, out of all the innumerable qualitative distinctions that exist, the following:—The physical body of man is subject to the laws of gravity; it tends to be drawn earthward. The etheric body tends to be drawn towards the periphery of the universe; that is to say, outwards, in all directions. As a rule, our investigations are concerned with the relative weight of things, but that part of the human organism which possesses weight is the direct opposite of that which not only has no weight but which strives to escape from the laws of gravitation. We have in us these two opposing forces.

This is the first of our super-physical bodies. We may say, then, that we have within us first of all the physical man, whose orientation is centripetal and tends earthwards, and another man, whose orientation is centrifugal and tends to leave the earth. It will be seen that a balance must be maintained between these two configurations of the human being—between the heavy physical body, which is subject to the laws of gravity, and the other, the etheric body, which strives outwards towards the farthest limits of the universe.

The etheric body seeks, as it were, to imitate, to be an image of the whole Cosmos; but the physical body rounds it off, and keeps it within its own limits.

Therefore, by contemplating the state of balance between the physical body and the etheric body, our perception of the nature of the human being becomes real and penetrating. Once we have succeeded in recognising these outward-streaming centrifugal forces in man, we shall be able to perceive them also in the vegetable kingdom. The mineral kingdom alone appears purely physical to us. In it we can trace no centrifugal forces. Minerals are subject to the laws of gravity. But in the case of plants we recognise their outer form as being the result of the two forces. At the same time it becomes apparent to us that we cannot remain at this point in our investigations if we wish to observe anything that is higher in the scale of organic life than the plants. The plant has its etheric body; the animal, when we observe it, possesses life, and also sensation. It creates, inwardly, a world; this fact arrests our attention, and we see that we must make yet deeper researches. Hence we realise that we must develop our ordinary state of consciousness still further.

Already, as I have shown, a certain stage will have been reached when we are able to see not merely the physical body of man, but the physical body embedded within the etheric body, as though in a kind of cloud. But that is not all; the more we strengthen our souls, the more we find greater and greater reality in our thoughts, and it then becomes possible to arrive at a further stage, which consists in suppressing these strong thoughts which have been made so powerful by our own efforts.

In ordinary life if we blot out by degrees our faculties of sight, of hearing, of sensation, and of thinking—we fall asleep. That is an experiment which may easily be carried out. But if one has strengthened the soul in the manner described by the training of thought, of the whole of one's life of concept and feeling, then one can actually learn to suppress the life of the senses. One then arrives at a condition where, above all things, one is not asleep but is very much awake. Indeed, it may even be that one has to guard against losing the power to sleep, while one is striving to reach this condition. If, however, one sets to work in the way I have indicated in my books, every precaution is taken to prevent any disturbances in the ordinary life.

One succeeds then in being completely awake, though one cannot hear as one hears with the ears. The ordinary memory, too, and ordinary thinking cease. One confronts the world with a perfectly empty but perfectly waking consciousness. And then one sees the third human organism—the astral.

Animals also possess this astral organism. In man it bestows the possibility of unfolding a real inner life of experience. Now this is something which is connected neither with the innermost depths of the earth nor with the wide expanse of the universe, but rather it is connected with a state of being inwardly penetrated by forces which are “seen” as the astral body. So now we have the third member of the human organisation.

If one learns to perceive this third member in the manner indicated above, one finds that from the scientific point of view it is indescribably illuminating. One says to oneself—the child grows up and becomes the man; his vital forces are active. But he is not only growing physically, his consciousness is developing at the same time; he is unfolding within himself an image of the outer world.

Can this be the result of physical growth? Can this be accomplished by the same forces that underlie nutrition and growth?

When the organic forces that underlie the latter gain the upper hand, the consciousness becomes dimmed. We need, therefore, something which is connected with these forces, and which is actually opposed to them. The human being is always growing and always being nourished. But he has within his astral body, as I have described it, something which is perpetually suppressing, inhibiting the forces of growth and nutrition.

So we have in man a process of construction through the physical body in conjunction with the earth; another process of construction through the etheric body in conjunction with the Cosmos, and through the astral body a continuous destruction of the organic processes in the cell-life and the glandular life.

That is the secret of the human organism.

Now we understand why it is that man possesses a soul. If he were to grow continuously like the plant, he could not have a soul. The process of growing must first be destroyed, for it expels the soul. If we had nothing in our brain but the process of building up, and no processes of breaking down and destruction, we could not contain the soul.

Evolution does not proceed in a straight line. It must retreat in one direction; it must give way. Herein lies the secret of humanity—of the ensouled being.

If we go no further than the consideration of the organisation of the animal, we find ourselves concerned only with its three principles—the physical, etheric, and astral. But if we proceed to the observation of man, we find, when we have progressed yet further with the training of our souls, that we spiritually perceive yet another principle.

Our spiritual perception of the animal discloses that its thinking, feeling, and willing are, in a certain sense, neutral in regard to one another; they are not clearly distinct. One cannot speak of a separate thinking, a separate feeling, and a separate willing, but only of a neutral blending of these three elements. But in the case of man, his inner life depends just upon the fact that he lays hold of his intentions by quiet thought, and that he can remain with his intentions; he can either carry them out in deeds, or not carry them out. The animal obeys its impulses. Man separates thinking, feeling, and willing from one another.

How this is so, can only be understood when one has carried one's power of spiritual perception far enough to observe the fourth principle of man's organisation—the “I am I”—or the Ego.

As we have just seen, the astral body breaks down the processes of growth and nutrition; in a sense, it introduces a gradual dying into the whole organism. The Ego redeems, out of this destructive process, certain elements which are continually falling away from the combination of the physical and etheric bodies, and rebuilds them.

That is actually the secret of human nature.

If one looks at the human brain, one sees—in those lighter parts which lie more below the superficial structures, and which proceed as nerve fibres to the sense organs—a most complicated organisation which, for those who can perceive it in its reality, is in a continual state of deterioration, although so slowly does this take place that it cannot be observed by ordinary physiological means. But, out of all this destruction, that which differentiates man from the animals, namely, the peripheral brain, is built up. This is the foundation of the human organisation. With regard to man, naturally, the central brain (the continuation of the sensory nerves and their connections) is more perfect than the peripheral brain, which is, as a matter of fact, more akin to the metabolic processes than the deeper portions of the brain are.

This peripheral brain, which is peculiarly characteristic of man, is organised for these metabolic functions by the Ego-organisation—organised out of what otherwise is in a state of deterioration.¹ And so the activity of the Ego permeates the entire organism.

The Ego redeems certain elements out of the ruin worked by the astral body, and builds out of them that which underlies an harmonious co-ordination of thinking, feeling, and willing.

I can of course only mention these things, but I wish to point out that one can proceed with the same exactitude when making observations spiritually as one can in any branch of external experimental science and with a full sense of responsibility; so that in every case one seeks for the agreement between what is spiritually observed and what is discovered by empirical physical methods of research. It is exactly the formation of the physical brain which leads one on to apprehend the super-physical, and to attain knowledge by spiritual investigation.

Thus we have these four members of the human organisation. These, in order to maintain health, must be in quite special relation to one another.

We only get water when we mix hydrogen and oxygen in accordance with their specific gravity. In the same way there is a determinative which brings about a normal relationship—if I may say so—between the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the Ego.

We not only have four, but 4x4 relative states. All these can be disturbed. An abnormal relation may arise between the etheric and the physical bodies, or between the astral and etheric, or between the Ego and one or another of these. All are deeply connected with one another and are in a special relation to one another. The moment this is disturbed, illness arises.

But this relationship is not uniform throughout the human being; it differs in the different individual organs. If we observe, for instance, a human lung, the physical, etheric, astral, and Ego constituents of this lung are not the same as those of the brain or of the liver. Thus, the entire human organisation is so complicated that the spiritual and the material are differently related in every organ. Therefore, it will be understood that, just as one studies physical anatomy and physical physiology in accordance with external symptoms, so—when one admits the existence of this spiritual investigation, and practises it—one must study with the greatest exactitude the health and disease of every separate organ. In this way one always arrives at a complete and comprehensive knowledge of the human organism. It cannot be so understood if it is observed solely from the physical standpoint. It can only be known through a knowledge of its four principles. One is only clear about any illness when one is able to say which of these four principles either predominates too strongly or is too much suppressed. It is because one is able to observe these things in a spiritual manner that one actually places a spiritual diagnosis alongside the material diagnosis. Therefore what is gained by anthroposophical methods in seeing through the fourfold constitution of man, is gained in addition to all that it is possible to observe of health and disease by ordinary methods.

And further, it is not only possible to behold man spiritually but also the whole of Nature. One is now, for the first time, in a position to find man's relation to the various kingdoms of Nature, and, in medicine, his relation to the healing properties which these kingdoms contain.

Let us take an example. There is a substance which is most widely distributed over the whole earth, and not only over the whole earth, but also, in its finest form, throughout the air. This is silicic acid. It is an enormously important constituent part of the earth. But for those who are able to see these things with higher faculties, all this silicious substance is revealed as the external manifestation of something spiritual; and an immense and almost overpowering difference is seen to exist between that which ordinary physical methods of observation disclose with regard to silicic acid, or, for example, carbonic acid gas, and that which spiritual investigation discloses.

By the latter method we see that quartz, or rock-crystal, such as we find in the mountains—in fact, all forms of silicious substance—provides a free path for something spiritual. Just as any transparent substance allows light to stream through it, so all silicious substance allows what is spiritually active in the entire world to stream through it.

But we find quite a different relationship towards the spiritual when we come to carbonic acid. Carbonic acid has this peculiarity (for there is something spiritual in every physical substance), that the spiritual that is in contact with carbonic acid becomes individualised. Carbonic acid retains the spiritual in itself with all its force. The spiritual “selects” carbonic acid as a dwelling-place. In silica it has a transcending tendency—a consuming tendency—but it inheres in carbonic acid as though it felt itself “at home” there.

Carbonic acid processes are present in the breathing and circulation of animals. The former are especially connected with the astral body. The carbonic acid processes are related to the external physical of the animal, while the astral body is that which is inwardly spiritually active. The astral is therefore the spiritual element, and the carbonic acid process is its physical counterpart and underlies the animal's expirations.

The Ego-organisation is the spiritual inner element in man of that which takes place in man as silicic acid processes. We have silicic acid in our hair, our bones, our organs of sense, in all the extremities and periphery of our bodies—in fact, everywhere where we come into contact with the outer world—and all these silicic acid processes are the external counterpart, the expression from within outwards, of the Ego-organisation.

Now it must be borne in mind that the Ego must, in a certain sense, be strong enough to manipulate, to control, the whole of this silicic acid activity. If the Ego is too weak, the silicic acid is separated out—that is a pathological condition. On the other hand, the astral body must be strong enough to control the carbonic acid process; if it cannot, carbonic acid or its waste products are separated out, and illness results.

It is possible, therefore, in observing the strength or weakness of the astral body to find the cause of an illness rooted in the spiritual. And in observing the Ego-organisation one discovers the cause of those disturbances which either bring about a morbid decomposition of the silicic acid processes in. the body, or which one must deal with therapeutically by the administration of silicic acid. What happens then is that the spiritual, which is never retained in the material substance itself, passes through it and affects the silicic acid deposited in the body. It takes the place of the Ego itself. In the administration of carbonic acid as a healing agent, it must be so prepared that the spiritual is present in it in the right manner; in using it as a remedy one must be aware that the astral body works in it.

Therefore: One can conceive of a form of therapy which does not only make use of chemical agents, but which is quite consciously administering a cure, in the knowledge that, if a certain quantity of physical substance is given, or a particular solution is prepared as a bath, or if an injection is given, at the same time something of a spiritual nature is quite definitely introduced into the human organism.

So it is perfectly possible to make a bridge from a knowledge of purely physical means of healing to a knowledge which works with spiritual means.

That was the characteristic of the medicine of ancient times; some tradition of it still lingers; it lingers even in some of the recognised cures to-day. And we have to get back to this. We can do so if, without in any way neglecting physical medicine, we add to it what we can gain in spiritual knowledge, not only of man, but of Nature also. Everything can be carried out with the same exactitude as is the case with regard to physical natural science.

Anthroposophy does not seek to correct modern medicine, but to add its own knowledge to it, because ordinary medicine makes demands upon itself only.

What I have just briefly indicated is merely the commencement of an exceedingly wide spiritual knowledge, in which, at present, people have very little faith. One can quite well understand that. But some results have already been attained in the sphere of medicine, and these can be studied in practice at Dr. Ita Wegman's Clinical Institute in Arlesheim, Switzerland. And I am convinced that if any person would investigate this advancement and enlargement of the medical field with the same goodwill with which, as a rule, they investigate physical medicine, they would find it not at all difficult to accept the idea of the spiritual in man, and the spiritual in methods of healing him.

Quite briefly, I will give two examples that illustrate what I have said. Let us suppose that by means of this kind of spiritual diagnosis (if I may use such an expression) it is seen that in a patient the etheric body is working too strongly in some particular organ. The astral body and the Ego-organisation are not in a position to control this super-activity of the etheric body, so that we are faced with an astral body that has become too weak, and possibly also with an Ego which is too weak, and the etheric body therefore predominates. The latter thereby brings about in some particular organ such a condition of the growing and nourishing processes that the whole organism cannot be properly held together, owing to the lack of control by the other two principles.

At this point, then, where the etheric body predominates, the human organism appears as though too much exposed to the centrifugal forces of the Cosmos. They are not in equipoise with the centripetal forces of the physical body. The astral body cannot control them. In such a case we are confronted on the one hand by a preponderance of the silicic acid processes, and on the other by an impotence of the Ego to control them.

This fact underlies the formation of tumours, and it is here that the way is indicated for the true understanding of the nature of carcinomatous processes (cancer). Researches into this matter have had very good results and have been carried out in practice. But one cannot understand carcinoma unless one realises that it is due to the predominance of the etheric body, which is not suppressed by a corresponding activity of the astral and the Ego,

The question then arises, what is to be done in order to strengthen the elements of the astral body and the Ego which correspond to the diseased organ, so that the superabundant energy of the etheric organisation can be reduced? This brings us to the question of the therapy of carcinoma, which shall be dealt with in due course.

Thus, through an understanding of the etheric body we are enabled gradually to become acquainted with the nature of that most terrible of all human diseases, and at the same time, by investigating the spiritual nature of the action of the remedies, we shall discover the means to combat it. This is just one example of how illnesses can be understood through the etheric body.

But supposing that it is the astral body whose forces predominate—supposing that they are so strong that they predominate practically throughout the entire organism, so that there arises a kind of universal stiffening of the whole astral body due to its excessive inner forces; what does such a state of things bring about? When the astral body is not under the control of the Ego—which is to say, when its disintegrating forces are not cancelled by the integrating forces of the Ego—then symptoms appear which are connected with a weakened Ego-organisation.

This results, primarily, in an abnormal activity of the heart. Further, another occurrence due to a weakened Ego-activity, as described above, is that the glandular functions are disturbed. Since the organisation of the Ego is not sufficiently prominent and cannot exercise enough control, in greater or less degree the peripheral glandular organs begin to secrete too actively. Swollen glands appear—goitre appears.

And we see further how, through this stiffening of the astral body, the silicic acid processes, which should have a reaction inwards, are being pressed outwards, because the Ego is not able work strongly enough in the sense-organs, where it ought to work strongly. So, for instance, the eyes become prominent; the astral body drives them outwards.

It is the task of the Ego to overcome this tendency. Our eyes are actually retained in their right place in our organism by the equipoise that should exist between the astral body and the Ego. So they become prominent because the Ego element in them is too weak to maintain the balance properly. Also, one observes in such cases a general condition of restlessness. One sees, in a word, because the Ego cannot drive back those organic processes which are worked upon by the astral body, that the activity of the whole astral body predominates. In short, the symptoms are those of exophthalmic goitre.

Knowing, therefore, that a disturbance of the balance between astral body and Ego-organisation produces exophthalmic goitre, one can apply the same principles in effecting a cure.

Hence it can be seen with what exactness one can pursue these methods as regards both pathological conditions and therapeutical agencies, when one investigates the human being in a spiritual way.

Before we pass on from the pathological to the therapeutical—and particularly in connection with the two examples mentioned—it would be well to touch upon some of the principles underlying the assimilation of various substances by the human organism.

One only recognises the entire connection that exists between so-called “Nature” and the human being when one perceives not only that the latter is a physico-psychic-spiritual being consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and Ego, but also when one further perceives that the basis of all natural substances and processes is a concrete and comprehensible spiritual one. But one must first be able to penetrate into this concrete spiritual existence.

Just as, in the natural world, one must distinguish between minerals and plants, so one must distinguish quite definitely between the spiritual elements and beings that express themselves through them.

Suppose we take first the mineral kingdom.

A considerable part of our healing agents are taken from this kingdom, and therefore what can be made use of in medicine out of spiritual bases emanates from minerals to a very large extent. We find that the spiritual element is connected in such a way with minerals that it establishes a particular relation between them and the Ego-organisation. It is credible that if a mineral substance is administered, either by mouth or by injection, it works principally upon the human organism itself, and makes for either health or ill-health. But what really takes place is that the physical mineral, as such, as it is regarded and handled by the chemist or the physicist, actually does not work upon the organism, but remains as it is. The physical substance itself, when seen by spiritual observation, shows scarcely any metamorphosis when it is absorbed. On the contrary, what is spiritual in the substance works with extraordinary strength upon the Ego.

So one can say that the spirit, for instance of a rock crystal, affects the Ego. The Ego controls the human being when it contains something silicious—that is, the spiritual element of silicic acid. That is what is so remarkable.

Again, if we take the vegetable kingdom, plants do not only possess a physical form, they possess also what I have characterised as an etheric body. Suppose we administer some plant substance, either by mouth or by injection, what is in the plant works as a rule solely upon the astral body. (These things are described in a general sense; there are always exceptions, which may also be studied.)

Everything derived from the animal kingdom, in whatever way it may be manufactured—out of fluids or solids—when it is administered, works upon the etheric body. This is most particularly interesting, because in this spiritual-medical work results have been attained by using for instance, in certain cases, animal products derived from the secretions of the hypophysis cerebri. These have been used successfully on rickety children or in cases of child-deformity, and so on.

There are also other animal products that work upon the human etheric body, either strengthening it or weakening it. In short, this is their principal function.

Anything injected out of one human being into another affects only the physical body; here there is solely a working of the physical upon the physical. For example, if human blood is transfused, nothing comes into consideration save what can take place as a purely physical phenomenon by means of the blood. A remarkable example of this could be observed when, in vaccinations against smallpox, a change was made from using human lymph to using calf-lymph. It was possible to observe then how the human lymph worked only upon the physical body, and how the effect went, so to speak, a stage higher when calf-lymph was introduced, by its becoming transferred to the etheric body.

Thus it becomes possible to see, by developing spiritual powers of observation, how Nature works, as it were, in degrees, or steps, upon human beings—the mineral being made use of in a certain sense by the Ego, the plant by the astral body, the animal by the etheric body, and the human physical body by the human physical body. In the latter case there is no longer anything spiritual to be described. Indeed, even as regards the animal kingdom, we can no longer speak of the “spiritual” in the animal product, but only of the “etheric.”

It is only through all these various connections that one can gain a true conception of how man—in both health and disease—is really immersed in the whole natural order. But one attains also to an inner perception of a still further continuation of the workings of nature in the human organism.

One may now ask, what is to be one's attitude towards cancer! We have seen how the etheric body is able to develop over-strong forces from itself in some particular organ. The centrifugal forces—that is, the forces that tend outwards into the Cosmos—become too powerful; the astral body and the Ego are too weak to counteract them. Spiritual knowledge now comes to one's aid. One can now try either to make the astral body stronger, in which case one administers something from the plant kingdom, or one must restrain the etheric body, and in that case one makes use of the animal kingdom.

Spiritual investigation has led to the adoption of the former course—that which relates to the astral body. In order to cure cancer, the forces of the astral body must be made stronger. And it may now be admitted that the remedy has really been discovered in the plant kingdom.

We have been accused of dilettantism and so forth, because we make use of a parasitic plant—the mistletoe (which has been used in medicine mainly for epilepsy and similar conditions)—and because we prepare it in a very special manner, in order to discover the way which will lead to the healing of cancer.

If you have observed trees which bear a remarkable outgrowth upon the trunk, resembling swellings, especially if you have seen them in section, you will notice that the whole tendency of growth, which usually has a vertical direction, has at these places a deflection at right angles, becoming therefore horizontal. It presses outwards as though another trunk were beginning to grow; and you find something that is as though drawn out of the tree itself—something parasitic. More closely studied, one discovers that any tree which has such an outgrowth is somewhere or other suppressed, restrained, in its physical development. Sufficient physical material has not been available everywhere, in order to keep pace with the growth forces of the etheric body. The physical body remains behind. The etheric body, which otherwise strives centrifugally to project the physical substance out into the Cosmos, is, as it were, left alone in this portion of the tree. Too little physical substance passes through it, or, rather, matter that has too little physical force. The result is, that the etheric body takes a downward direction to the lower part of the tree, which is connected with stronger physical forces.

Now let us imagine that this does not happen, but, instead, the mistletoe appears; and now there occurs through this plant, which has also its own etheric body, what otherwise takes place through the etheric body of the tree.

From this there results a very special relationship between the mistletoe and the tree. The tree, which is rooted directly in the earth, makes use of the forces which it absorbs from the earth. The mistletoe, growing on the tree, uses what the tree gives it; the tree is, in a sense, the earth for the mistletoe. The mistletoe, therefore, brings about artificially that which, when it is not present, results in the “swellings” which are due to a hypertrophy of the tree's etheric organisation. The mistletoe takes away what the tree only gives up when it has too little physical substance, so that its etheric element is excessive. The excess of the etheric passes out of the tree into the mistletoe.

When the mistletoe is prepared in such a way that this superabundant etheric quality which it has taken from the tree is administered to a person under certain conditions, by injection (and, since we are observing all these facts in a spiritual manner), we gain the following information: that the mistletoe, as an external substance, absorbs what is manifest in the human body as the rampant etheric forces in cancer. [i.e. it becomes a vehicle for the excessive etheric forces.—TRANS.] Through the fact that it represses the physical substance, it strengthens the working of the astral body, which causes the tumour, or cancer, to disintegrate and break up. [The astral body being the destructive principle.—TRANS.]

Therefore we actually introduce the etheric substance of the tree into the human being by means of the mistletoe, and the etheric substance of the tree, carried over by means of the mistletoe, works as a fortifier of the human astral body.

That is one method which can only be known to us when we gain an insight into the way in which the etheric body of the plant acts upon the astral body of the human being—an insight into the fact that the spiritual element in the plant, which in this case is drawn out of it by the parasitic growth, works upon the human astral body.

Thus it can be seen how concretely what I have said may be verified—namely, that it is a question of not merely administering remedies in the manner of the chemist—in the sense in which the chemist speaks and thinks of remedies—but it is a question of administering the spiritual, the super-physical, which the various substances contain.

I have also referred above to the fact that in exophthalmic goitre (Graves' disease) the astral body becomes stiffer, and that the Ego-organisation is unable to deal with this condition. The symptoms are as I have described. This is a case in which it is necessary to strengthen the forces of the Ego. We must consider for a moment something which plays quite an unimportant part in our ordinary associations with the external world; but it is just such apparently unimportant substances which, as regards their spiritual element, have the greatest effect upon the spiritual in the human being. For example, one finds

that oxide of copper has the greatest imaginable effect upon the Ego-organisation of man; it really strengthens it. So, if one gives oxide of copper to a person suffering from Graves' disease, the effect is that one creates a strong Ego-organisation that dominates the stiffened astral body; the oxide of copper comes, as it were, to the rescue of the Ego, and the correct balance is thus restored.

I have quoted these two examples especially in order to show how every product in all the expanse of Nature may be studied, and the question asked: “How does this or that product work upon the physical body of man? how does it work upon the etheric body? and how upon the astral body and the Ego-organisation?”

It all rests, therefore, upon our penetration into the profound secrets of Nature. This search into Nature's secrets—into the mysteries of Nature—is the only possible way to combine the observation of human disease with the observation of the healing agencies. If I know how, let us say, a magnet will affect iron filings, then I know what is taking place. Similarly, if I know in what respect oxide of copper is “spiritual,” and on the other hand what is lacking in the human being when he has the symptoms of exophthalmic goitre, that is to permeate what is called medicine with spiritual knowledge.

One can look back upon the evolution of humanity, that is to say upon the evolution of the spirit of humanity which has given birth to the various civilisations, and which brought forth knowledge also and science; and if, in such a retrospect, one looks into a past so remote that it is only possible to reach it by means of the spiritual vision which I have described, one comes upon centres of knowledge quite unlike our present-day schools, wherein men were led to penetrate into a knowledge of Nature and of humanity, after their souls were first prepared in such a way that they could perceive the spiritual in all the external world.

These centres of knowledge, which we have become accustomed to speak of as the “mysteries,” were not just merely “schools,” but fundamentally they were representative of certain things which are regarded quite separately from one another in the life of to-day. They were centres of religion and of art, as well as of knowledge concerning all the various departments of human culture.

They were so organised that those who were set apart as teachers did not instruct their pupils by means of mere abstract concepts, but by means of pictures—of imagery. These pictures, by reason of their inner characteristics, represented the living relationships and connections between all things in the world. Therefore this imagery was able to produce its effects through ceremonial, as we should call it to-day. In its further development this imagery became permeated with beauty. Religious ceremony became artistic. And later, when what had been gained—not from arbitrary fantasies, but from out of these images or pictures, which had been extracted from out of the world-secrets themselves—was expressed in ideas, it became, at that time, science. The same pictures when presented in such a way that they called forth an essential quality of the human will that could be expressed as goodness—that was religion. And again, presented so that they ravished and exalted the senses, touched the emotions, and lifted the soul to the contemplation of beauty—that was art.

The centres of art were indissolubly linked with the centres of religion and of science. There was no one-sided appreciation of anything through the human reason alone, or through sense-perception alone, or through external physical experiment alone, but the whole human being was involved—body, soul, and spirit.

There was penetration into the profoundest nature of all things—to those depths where reality revealed itself; on the one hand stimulating to goodness, on the other hand to the true expression of ideas. To follow this path, which leads to truth, to beauty, and to goodness, was spoken of, and is still spoken of, as the way of initiation—to the knowledge of the “beginnings” of things. For men were aware that they indeed lived in these beginnings when they conjured them forth in religious ceremonial, in the revelations of beauty, and in the rightly created world of ideas; and so called this attitude which they bore towards the things of the world, “initiation-knowledge”—the knowledge of the beginnings from out of which alone man is able to grasp the true nature of things, and so use them according to his will.

So men sought for an initiation-science which could penetrate into the mysteries of the world—to the “beginnings.”

A time had to. come in the course of human development when this initiation-science withdrew; for it became necessary for men to direct their spiritual energies inwards in order to attain to greater self-consciousness. Initiation-science became as though dreamlike—instinctive. It was not at that time a matter of developing human freedom, for such a development towards freedom has only come about because mankind has been for a time driven away from the beginnings; he has lost the initiation-vision, and turning away from the beginnings, contemplates what is related more to the endings of things—to the external revelations of the senses, and to all that, through the senses, may be discovered by experiment concerning the ultimate, concerning the endings.

The time has now come when, having achieved an immeasurably extensive science of the superficial—if I may call it so—which can have only quite an external connection with art or religion, we must once again seek an initiation-science; but we must seek it with the consciousness which we have evolved in ourselves by means of exact science; a consciousness which, in respect of the new form of initiation-knowledge, will function no less perfectly than it does in connection with the exact sciences.

A bridge will then be built between that world-conception which links the human soul with its origins by means of inwardly conceived ideas, and the practical manipulation of the realities contained in those ideas.

In the ancient mysteries, initiation-knowledge was especially bound up with all that was connected with the healing of humanity. There was a real art of healing. For indeed, the mystery-healing was an art, in that it aroused in man the perception that the process of healing was at the same time a sacrificial process.

In order to satisfy the inner needs of the human soul, there must once again be a closer bond between healing and our philosophical conception of the world. And it is this which a knowledge of the needs of the age seeks to find in the Anthroposophical Movement.

The Anthroposophical Movement, whose headquarters are in Dornach, Switzerland, does not interpose anything arbitrary into life; neither does it stand for any sort of abstract mysticism. It desires rather to enter in a wholly practical way into every sphere of human activity. It seeks to attain with complete self-consciousness what was striven for in ancient times instinctively.

Even though we are only making a beginning, at any rate we are creating the possibility of a return to what, in the ancient mysteries, was a natural, a self-evident thing—medicine existing in closest communion with spiritual vision.

• 1. The “Ego-organisation” denotes the whole of those attributes of the human being by means of which he attains his “sense of I am”. As hearing, sight, taste, etc. each have their “organs” of expression, so also has the Ego. In this case the “organ” is the entire physical body in its self-conscious contact with the outer world.

Of course, my first words must be, dear assembled guests, that I apologize for not being able to speak to you in your language, but that I will speak to you in German, which will have to be translated, and therefore the listening will have to be somewhat laborious for the esteemed audience. But since I do not speak English well enough to give a lecture, it will have to be like this. I am very grateful to some friends, especially Mrs. Larkins, that I am now able to speak to you on these evenings about something that has emerged in our spiritual scientific movement has emerged as a kind of medical movement, not, I would ask you to bear this in mind, in any sense of opposition to official science or official medicine, but with the intention of furthering the great insights and great advances in present-day science by means of spiritual-scientific contemplation. Even within the spiritual science movement, which, before such scientific currents came into their own, was more concerned with general human, artistic, religious, moral, educational questions and the like, it was not the case that the intention to become active in the medical field in an agitative way, but that doctors were also to be found in this spiritual-scientific movement on the continent who, despite their thoroughly scientific convictions, initially believed that they could satisfy their soul needs within this spiritual-scientific movement. And what they encountered there as a kind of exploration of the spiritual world beyond the physical-sensory world simply led them, little by little, to believe that many of the great doubts, many of the great questions that arise for the practical doctor within contemporary medical science can find satisfactory, I will not say immediate solutions, but satisfactory continuations precisely in this field.

And so a medical movement on the continent has grown out of our so-called anthroposophical spiritual scientific movement. I must say that I do not really speak with particular fondness about this part of our spiritual scientific movement, because you will see from the course of the descriptions that it is more important to me to produce remedies that are actually effective than to talk about them a lot. But what I want to assert here is based, above all, on foundations that need to be pointed out, that need to be pointed out to the scientifically educated people of today.

I can well imagine – and I am familiar with all the sources from which such things arise – that you are indeed experiencing opposition after opposition to what I will have to say. I fully understand these contradictions. And actually it cannot be otherwise today, when it comes to the scientific convictions of a physician, that such contradictions arise. Therefore, our first concern was not to advocate anything theoretically, but to start with practical work. And so the wishes of physicians and other scientific physicists, chemists and biologists were taken into account by founding scientific institutes, scientific research institutes. The most important of these is the Chemical-Pharmaceutical Laboratory in Arlesheim. And in connection with this, there is a biological and a physical institute within our movement. The fact that we are really concerned with serious research may be gathered from the fact that, for example, very important work has already been done in our biological institute, although the existence of this institute is actually only a very short one.

We have, in my opinion, succeeded in the Biological Institute, which is under the direction of Dr. and Mrs. Kolisko, at least to a high degree of probability, in elucidating the functions of the spleen , and in fact in the direction that we must see in the spleen function a regulation of those irregularities that arise in the rhythmic digestive process, in that man cannot eat completely in rhythm. And even if, for my part, he were to organize his meals in a very pedantic, exactly pedantic way, there would still be an interruption of the digestive rhythm due to the different choice of food and the like.

And then the remarkable thing turns out to be that the function of the spleen consists precisely in balancing the rhythmic disturbances of the human digestive process, which must be produced precisely by the life of the human being.

Recently, we have succeeded – as described in a paper that has just been published – in providing real proof at the Biological Institute that the smallest entities of different substances do in fact have effects.

This is not intended to advocate for any particular school of medical thought. Precisely when one proceeds exactly in this field, one finds that one area must be treated in the corresponding manner with correspondingly larger quantities, but the other area of the human organism must be treated with the smallest quantities. So far, there has basically only been the homeopathic belief in this field, no exact research.

It now seems that we have actually succeeded in proving in a very exact way that certain substances, for example antimony compounds, act on the growth of wheat grains in a different way when they are very highly diluted than when the dilution is further increased. If you continue to further dilute, you always end up with a rhythmic pattern of maxima and minima. We have done everything to prove, with full responsibility in this area, that dilutions even in the ratio of one to a trillion have vital effects. We germinated grains of wheat, which we had very carefully selected according to their germination intensities, in liquids in which we had the appropriately diluted substances, so that through the very conscientious way in which, I believe, Mrs. Kolisko works, what previously, I would like to say, could only have been presented as an amateur belief has actually been put on a scientific basis.

I mention this only in the introduction for the reason of showing that we do not want to proceed in an unscientific way, as happens in an amateurish way. The spiritual-scientific insights are indeed gained through spiritual vision, which I will not talk about in detail; this happens in the discussions that I give elsewhere. The great guidelines are indeed gained through spiritual insight, and through this spiritual insight I believe that I have succeeded in bringing about the possibility of being able to formulate the connection of the inner human organization with the constitution not only of natural substances not only of natural substances but, above all, of natural processes, so that the deep gulf that really exists today between pathology and therapy can be bridged by this method. So that in the future we will actually be able to have a pathology that merges into therapy by itself, because by looking at both the healthy organism and, in particular, the diseased organism, we will be able to discover exactly how – I will explain this today in a few examples explain in a few examples – not only of substances that have arisen outside the human organism, but also of processes that have taken place outside the human organism, whether in nature or in the laboratory, can be used to heal within the human organism. And it is the therapeutic aspect that is most important to us. We know very well that pathology is actually more advanced today than it itself knows. Today, pathology is something that can be taken up at any of its points and taken a step further. While there is indeed a deep gulf between the insight that exists with regard to the structure, the histology of organs, and how the actual remedy works in the human organism. Today we do not even fully understand the ordinary process of nutrition, which, I believe, is much more wisely designed by instinct than it could ever be designed by a scientific theory, let alone the exact relationships that exist between substances and between the functioning of these substances within the human organism, and outside both in nature and in those processes that can be carried out in the laboratory.

I have been led to believe that after more than thirty years of research, I have been able to determine that the most important thing in order to understand the human being in his or her entire constitution is to determine the fundamental difference between three different ways of functioning in the human organism. So I have learned to distinguish between three ways in which the human organism functions.

I have divided this threefold functioning – I would like to say that, of course, all things are in a state of becoming – first, in the broadest sense, into the nerve-sense process. I include everything that is connected with the functioning of the senses in the broadest sense and the nerves that are connected with them in some way in this first part. I now distinguish from this all those processes that are rhythmic in the human organism. And again, as a third step, I distinguish from these two processes those that are metabolic and motional processes. The metabolic and motional processes are, of course, intimately related; every internal and external movement of the human organism is in intimate contact with a metabolic process and can actually only be considered in connection with this as a function.

These three types of function in the human organism are fundamentally different from each other, so much so that what I understand to be the processes of the nervous-sensory life is even polar oppositely opposed to the processes that can be summarized as motor and metabolic processes. So that, for example, if we have any process in the metabolism, this process - and in fact every process in the metabolism - gives rise to a polar opposite process in the nerve-sense apparatus. The rhythmic processes are then the balance between the two. Now it is a matter of finding the real differences between these processes.

First of all, I would like to point out that a more precise insight into the human organism shows – I can of course only sketch these things in the short time available – that when we are dealing with the nerve-sense organization, we are essentially dealing with the effect of the substantial, the various substances in the human organism. So if we are considering something that is purely within the sense organization or the nerve organization, the essential thing for our consideration is that we know the relationship between some substance that we have in the world around us and that which, in turn, is found substantially in the course of the nerve-sense process.

If we are dealing with a metabolic process that is connected with a movement process, then what comes into consideration above all is not the substantial of what we find in the human environment, but the processes at work in the substantial. I would like to look at this from the other side. If it is a matter of being able to determine that there is a focus of disease in the nerve-sense apparatus, then I will have to investigate which substances can be considered as healing factors – we will discuss the details later. If, however, the aim is to heal a disease process in the musculoskeletal or digestive system, then it is important to investigate which process must be present, either as a natural process or as a laboratory process in the processing of substances, in order to transform the substances in question into remedies.

To give a specific example, which I will discuss in more detail later, let us assume that we are trying to determine the healing power of antimony. We will have to distinguish the healing power of antimony in relation to everything that has its source in the human nervous-sense apparatus. In this case, we would be dealing with the substance of antimony. If we are concerned with observing the healing effect of antimony on the motor system and the associated metabolic system, then we are concerned with subjecting antimony to such processes, combustion processes, oxidation processes, where the antimony rises as smoke and the smoke settles as a mirror*, and we will have to expect the success of this remedy from the correct execution of these processes. So that we can actually always say, quite fundamentally: we should seek the substances, the healing factors in the environment of the human being for the nerve-sense system. We should look at the processes that we either bring about ourselves or that nature brings about, as the healing ones for the metabolic and movement processes in the human organism. Since these two processes are polar opposites, the rhythmic, everything rhythmic, above all the respiratory rhythm, the circulation rhythm, the digestive rhythms, the other rhythms in the human being, the rhythm of sleeping and waking in the human being, these now have a mediating, balancing effect, so that in those processes that relate to the organs of the rhythmic organization of the human being, it is now also seen again in the production of remedies, in the interaction that will result from the preparation of the effective substance and the effective processes that one lets nature bring about or brings about oneself.

This only discusses a few fundamentals. I would then like to discuss the spoken word. After discussing the fundamentals today, I will take the liberty tomorrow of discussing some of our remedies that are produced in the pharmaceutical laboratory in Arlesheim and that are tried out in the associated clinic, which is under the excellent direction of Dr. Wegman, who is also present. From the very beginning, I was in favour of spiritual science only providing the guidelines, but not producing remedies, otherwise we would have our laboratories in connection with the clinic, so that it could actually be verified at the bedside in the clinic.

If we consider the differentiation of the human being in the processes of the nervous-sensory system, the rhythmic system and the metabolic-movement system, we must then find out how the human being is constituted in such a way that these three systems, although quite distinct from each other in terms of their functioning, permeate every part of the human organization. This is a less convenient way of looking at the human being than the usual one. In the usual approach, one takes any organ or part of an organ, looks at it histologically or in terms of cell anatomy, and so on.

Here it is necessary to distinguish, for each organ, the extent to which the nerve-sense process, the rhythmic process, and the metabolic-movement process are involved in the functioning of that organ. For all three forms are now involved in every human organ. Only when we go more to the actual sensory tools of the human being, then the nerve-sense process predominates, and the rhythmic process and the metabolic-movement process recede into the background. But if we are dealing with the metabolic-movement process, then only this metabolic process actually predominates in it. But there is nothing in the metabolic and locomotor system that is not permeated by the processes of the nervous sense system, which are subordinate here. And it is the same in the rhythmic system.

Now one can see through the whole human organization if one can have before one, for a really inner observation, the corresponding functioning in the organ. Let us say, for example, that we are dealing with some part of the brain. It must now be possible to see whether the two opposing activities of the organ are present in the right proportions: nerve-sense activity, metabolic-movement activity, and whether the rhythmic system functions in a corresponding way between the two, balancing them out. Roughly speaking, this is quite different in the case of the head organs than, for example, in the case of the digestive organs. But on the other hand, it can be seen how, precisely through this, a more exact knowledge of the human being is attained, both in a substantial and in a functional sense, in relation to his environment, and thus a connection between pathology and therapy.

Let us consider this with a single example. A disease that is perhaps less appreciated among serious illnesses, but which can be quite troublesome for some people, and for many people it really is troublesome – I would like to highlight it as an example – is catarrhus aestivus, which affects a great many people during a particular season. And to understand the underlying process, the following is actually necessary.

First of all, it must be clear that in childhood, and especially in early childhood, the whole structure of the three systems just mentioned is different than in later life. In childhood, we are dealing with a human organization in which the nerve sense organs engage with the other two systems in a much more intense way than in later life. In a sense, the child is entirely sensory organ. All processes take place in such a way that events occur throughout the whole organism, albeit in an intimate, delicate way, as they would otherwise take place at the periphery of the human being in the sensory organs. The child is actually a sensory organ in a more intimate, delicate way. In this way the whole organism of the child is more exposed to the outer world than is the case with the human organism in later life, in a similar way to the way in which the sense organs are exposed. For it is the case that everything that is connected with the nerve-sense organization is directly exposed to the outer world and is directly subject to the influence of the outer world. The entire organization of the child is therefore subject to the influence of the external world – in the broadest sense, of course, much more than at a later age, when one is entirely dependent on the internal processes of the organs, including the metabolic processes in connection with the movement process. Movements take place in the external world, but the underlying organization of these movements tends inwards, just as the nerve-sense organization tends outwards. We therefore find that under the influence of the predominant nervous-sensory organization, the child may experience processes that can be summarized under the name of exudative diathesis, loosening of the tissues, which in children can actually occur quite generally in the organism.

Later, when the metabolic-motoric process counteracts this preponderance of the nerve-sense process in the whole organism in the correct proportion for the later age of life, then, if the child has been carefully raised, the tendency to such exudative diathesis generally recedes and can later become specialized, so that the troublesome catarrhus aestivus can occur.

This catarrhus aestivus has been traced back – I need only mention this here – to certain substances that are said to be contained in the pollen of grasses. This only corresponds to the tendency of our time to trace pathology back to the immediate material exterior. If we look at the human organism spiritually and at the same time at the processes that take place in the environment of the human being when the grasses are in bloom, then we can definitely say: the whole natural process in the season when the flowering of the grasses, does not just take place around the grasses, but also around the human being, who is exposed to the same atmospheric influences under which the grasses are flowering.

Now, in humans, I would say, because they have specialized in their organization, especially in their noses and eyes, which then leads to catarrhus aestivus, when that which, under the preponderance of the nervous-sensory process, has led to exudative diathesis in childhood, specialized in the beginning of the respiratory organs inwards, then this annoying catarrh can occur. It arises from the fact that the human being is now also exposed to the same natural processes to which the gramineae must be exposed when they bloom and is particularly sensitive to these natural processes.

Because the sensory process is not sufficiently paralyzed by the metabolic process, because the sensory process remains predominant in the periphery, we have exposed man to the same atmospheric influences, the influences of his surroundings, that are favorable when grasses are flowering.

If you look at this process from the outside, if you really engage with the way in which it occurs as a natural process when grasses and gramineae flower, then you ask yourself how you can account for the sensitivity that occurs in catarrhus aestivus. And now, with this insight that one has gained, one tries to paralyze this process, which one has with the gramineae in such a way that it also takes place completely outwards, completely peripherally, I might say, into the air – because it is then also present in the human being, when the human being has precisely the has catarrhus aestivus – by looking for the fructification process, the rush towards the fructification process, which in the grasses, I would say, in complete nakedness, looks out towards the atmosphere, where it occurs, not peripherally directed outwards, but pushed centrally inwards. This is how it is found when you take fruits that are surrounded by leathery shells and in which the fructification process now takes place centrally inwards, centripetally, in some kind of tissue.

And if the opposite process to fructification is formed in the laboratory in the case of the gramineae, it is formed into a remedy, and if one tries to make this remedy effective by applying it by means of vaccination, vaccination, that is to say, by introducing it directly into the organism by vaccination, then one can indeed counteract this hypersensitivity to the same atmospheric influences that are favorable for the gramineae but that cause a disease process in humans. We have actually seen with this remedy, which we make as “Gencydo” and which has proven to be extraordinarily effective in the vast majority of cases of catarrhus aestivus, how it is possible to arrive at remedies through the appropriate formation of processes, which nature actually demonstrates to us. We just need to know in which case we need to work against the natural process. This is the case, for example, when the sensory nervous system is predominant, and we will see later when we need to work with the natural process. You just need to know how to proceed in each case. So that we not only use what has to happen in the laboratory, either chemically in the sense of the natural processes or against them, which we have as healing factors and not just as substances, but above all pay attention to the method of preparation, by looking at what in turn brings about the process as such in the outer nature, what constitutes the dynamic aspect of the process. We try to imitate this dynamic in a technical way, in order to extract the healing factors from nature.

In accordance with such principles, a large number of remedies have now been produced at the Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim. They are all produced according to this principle, but all of them are thoroughly specialized.

I would like to mention the following remedy as an example. I must say that I understand every form of opposition and protest, since I know that the matters arise from a way of thinking that is not at all common or familiar. I would just like to state for us that the guidelines are given in this way and then thoroughly verified in our clinics, and that this is done in the same way and with the same sense of responsibility as is usual in clinical practice. Therefore, I may perhaps also, I would like to say, give somewhat more daring descriptions, in that I absolutely assume that, as I said, I understand all the opposition and it is perfectly understandable to me that even a kind of unease could assert itself in the face of these things, which could even seem fantastic.

It is extremely interesting to observe the remarkable process that takes place in the plant itself. In addition to the substances that make up the plant, we also find all kinds of other substances in the plant: salts, metallic substances, and so on. Now, for a therapy that is to work directly and rationally, it is less important to look at the composition of the plant than to look at the way, for example, let us say, some metal compound or salt goes through the whole process of growing and fructifying the plant.

Take any plant, for example Cichorium intybus. Anyone who really wants to study Cichorium intybus in a spiritual scientific way will first of all study the peculiar way in which the substances that are particularly important in Cichorium intybus are contained: silicic acid and alkaline salts.

However, silicic acid and alkaline salts are contained in Cichorium intybus in very different forms, under very different processing conditions in the root, leaves and flowers.

Anyone who studies this process in Cichorium intybus and sees how the processes that are attached to silicic acid on the one hand and to alkaline salts on the other are interwoven and intertwined in a unique way, will then be led back to the human being in a spiritual scientific way.

Now, as I said, in our body, in every organ system, three systems live, but one always predominates. Each, in turn, is active for the whole person; for example, if we consider the function of the gallbladder in the human organism in connection with all the other digestive organs, we find above all that, in addition to all the other functions of the bile, it is extraordinarily important for the health of the nerve-sense system that the bile functions, and functions properly. For if we attribute digestive disorders to disorders of the bile function, we can always see that there are also extremely great disorders in the organs of the nerve-sense system.

If we follow the process of bile secretion, it only becomes really interesting when we can see it in the context of the human constitution as a process that starts in the digestive system and supplies the nervous and sensory systems.

On the one hand, this process is present in the bile functions of the human being, quite apart from the substances that play a role in it. On the other hand, it works in almost exact imitation of the root of Cichorium intybus, in the bile secretion of humans, up towards the stalk and the flower. If we see how the silicic acid and alkaline salts are processed, we find in it an exact imitation of what the bile secretion process is in the human organism in its effect on the nerve-sense system.

Let us now imitate the process that takes place in Cichorium intybus. There are lay doctors who use Cichorium intybus directly when there are digestive disorders. But although they may achieve undeniable success, their results are seldom permanent, because the process that takes place in Cichorium intybus is linked to the lability of the plant itself and, when introduced into the human organism, undergoes such a change that it is no longer the same. But it is so related to the human process that when we process it in the laboratory, namely silicic acid, we make a preparation that contains silicic acid and alkaline salts in such a way that , not actually chemically, but only by pulverization, a loose connection is formed between silica and alkaline salts, more of a fine, natural, I would say, adhesion is present. And when we then introduce this through the alimentary canal, we are not actually introducing the same substances into the human organism, but we are introducing the same process that takes place during the secretion of bile, insofar as the secretion of bile is related to the functioning of the nerve-sense system. So what we are trying to do in the laboratory is to imitate, I would say to reproduce, what the plant itself does. For example, if we can recognize in the plant's formative process can be seen to be in some way polar or synchronous with some process in the human organism, so that in this way there arises a real interworking of pathology and therapy. One can see in the organ what is irregular in the interaction of the three processes.

And by listening to nature, as it were, to take over from the organism for a time what it cannot perform, by trying to explore this, one virtually introduces – I would say cichorium intybus proves to be the growing gall – the gall function in humans for a time because the organism itself cannot carry it out, until the organism has become accustomed to the foreign bile, to what has been produced according to the pattern of Cichorium intybus, to exercising the gall function. Then, so to speak, it works properly again.

The only problem is that the mere plant healing method cannot achieve the right result because nature works much more perfectly, because the plant process is in turn destroyed when it is introduced into the organism in any way.

Since time is getting on a bit and I do not want to take up too much of your time for this one occasion, I will just mention a few words about a remedy that has proved particularly successful and that our doctors have called “Biodoron”.

This Biodoron has come about through the fact that a comprehensive, spiritual-scientific view of the whole complex of symptoms of so-called migraine has been put forward. This migraine is also an extremely troublesome disease for many people, occurring in the most diverse forms. Migraine is now based on an irregular preponderance of the metabolic process where it does not belong, within that region of the human organization where the nerve-sense process, in conjunction with the rhythmic process, should actually have a preponderantly preferential effect.

Now my aim was once more to find this whole process in its entirety, as it expresses itself in the synopsis of the symptom complex of migraine, as a process out there in nature.

He now expresses himself in a wonderful way, in such a way that you have the symptom complex on the one hand and an opposing process in the way in which silicic acid is activated by the sulfuric acid salts in the process of Equisetum arvense. Equisetum arvense contains about ninety percent silicic acid. Tomorrow we will discuss the very important function of silicic acid for the nerve-sense system and everything related to it. However, the silicic acid in Equisetum arvense is processed in a certain way for the process, so that only in such a compound, as it is produced there with a resinous binder, can the formation process occur within plant growth through the interaction of the silicic acid with the sulfuric acid salts.

If you simply have the picture of Equisetum arvense in front of you and now see how this plant forms itself in a stiff way, with the silicic acid formation process prevailing everywhere, holding back all its growth from the flower being, which in turn can be found in connection with the normal metabolic processes, then you immediately get a real intimate view of the two processes, real intimate view of the two processes, the process that expresses itself in the symptom complex of migraine, and the whole process that takes place in such a wonderful way between silicic acid and sulfuric acid salts in Equisetum arvense, the idea arises: there are two opposing processes.

But that is not why equisetum arvense, used directly in any way, does not help against migraine. Because now the peculiarity arises, which becomes quite clear, that although certain vegetative processes in the human organism are similar to plant processes, they are radically different from the inside. It is therefore not a matter of merely taking up the process that takes place in Equisetum arvense and introducing it into the human organism, but rather of first, I might say, animalizing it.

Such things can be done if one imitates the process in the laboratory in the appropriate way, but inwardly in a living way, so that one uses silica on one side and sulfur on the other. One can use sulfur directly, because it is the actual active ingredient in Equisetum arvense. But now, by introducing the iron process, the binding is achieved alongside other binding agents, which are of secondary importance. Now the whole process of equisetum arvense has been animalized, and you get a preparation for which it is essential how you make it. Because the way the process is carried out, the way the preparation is finally obtained, shows that it represents the result of a process that takes place between silica, iron and sulfur. And what we have obtained as a preparation, which is now, I might say, first brought to rest in the preparation, is in turn called upon to enter into the process, set in motion, when it is introduced into the human digestive process and used — as I said, our physicians have called it “Biodoron” — precisely for combating troublesome migraines.

This migraine remedy has actually proved to be extraordinarily successful in almost all cases.

So we are trying to achieve the healing factors in a more dynamic way by establishing the appropriate processes for the remedies that you get from the Clinical Pharmaceutical Institute in Arlesheim. It is about what processes they contain, what processes they trigger in the human organism.

In this way, we have at least succeeded – the things have been verified in numerous cases – in finding about a hundred remedies for the various forms, for the various branches of tuberculosis, for the most diverse diseases of the digestive system, and so , as I said, about a hundred remedies; and we are in the process of putting the finishing touches on the process that we want to use to heal carcinomas internally with a certain plant-based natural product. However, I will speak about these remedies in detail tomorrow: tuberculosis remedies, carcinoma remedies, remedies for typhoid fever and so on.

It will have become clear that the essential thing for us is not what is in the preparation, but how the preparation was created in the laboratory. As a result, the preparation contains a certain process, which in turn is triggered within the organism in the same or a different form and lies within the course of an organic process or forms its polar opposite.

And in this way, by observing natural processes and the processes that can be recognized in pathology, it is possible to bring about the mutual relation between natural processes and processes in the human organism, the interaction that must exist if the natural processes in question are to be introduced into the human organism as healing processes. What is important is to induce healing processes by means of the functions we perform in our laboratories. Therefore, it is also of particular importance how these remedies are used, again in accordance with the differentiation of the human organism. The effect is fundamentally different depending on whether a remedy is introduced through the digestive process, or directly into the circulatory process by vaccination, or whether, as I will show tomorrow, it is applied more closely related to the sense process, to the nerve-sense process, as in the form of baths or washes and the like with our remedies.

So whether the remedy is applied externally or semi-internally, as in vaccination, or internally, it depends on how it affects the human organism. For I would like to say that the particularly significant thing about these remedies is that we do not want to heal through substances, but we want to heal through processes. And we administer remedies in the hope – that is to say, the things have been verified – that the processes that we can carry out from the overall view of nature and the human being are, as it were, preserved in the preparation and can be triggered again in the human organism as healing processes. This is the essentially new thing about the things we are dealing with. We want to heal through processes, through the how of production.

Therefore, for us it is not of such great importance to say what exactly is in the preparation, but rather it depends on how things unfold in the intimate sphere.

I will take the liberty of going into the therapeutic aspect tomorrow, and in particular into individual remedies and external applications.

Question: How long ago were the remedies for migraine and hay fever tried out?

Dr. Steiner: Well, it has been a number of years since the cases were tried out, especially in a large number of cases. The fact that our methods are verification methods means that they have this peculiarity: on the one hand, just as with a mathematical problem, success is, so to speak, foreseen and then verified. In this way, we are not dealing with a mere empirical method, but rather, as in the case of an experimental laboratory test, the fact that what can be assumed is verified naturally gives the verification a higher value than in the case of mere empirical testing. The methods are, of course, still young, and the thing at issue is that we would naturally be glad if they were tried out on the widest possible scale.

For Biodoron, verifications have been available for about three to four years, in a large number of cases, precisely verifications that are extremely important, for example in cases where the migraine was an old chronic condition that had been there for decades, and this remedy worked.

Of course, I would like to mention explicitly that it is extremely important to make the correct diagnosis, especially with this remedy. Therefore, the remedy can only serve as a verification if the diagnosis has been made correctly. Of course, it is not desirable to use this biodoron for every headache, because then negative cases can occur very frequently.

So the diagnosis must be correct; but then we place a great deal of emphasis on it. The percentage is extraordinarily high in the three to four years, because we do it clinically. In individual cases, however, it has also been tried out earlier by private doctors.

I would also like to mention that there are reports, both initial disputes about the methods and reports about the treatment and its success, specifically for Biodoron. They are published by the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute in Stuttgart: “Migraine”, compiled by Dr. Knauer, a report that contains a number of cases - of course, not all of them can be listed - but a number of characteristic cases, and also a corresponding case study. I believe that these reports and descriptions can be obtained from the Clinical Therapeuticic Institute. Unfortunately, they are only available in German at the moment, but they can be translated into other languages at any time if requested.

I have been told that a more extensive theoretical foundation is desired for what I presented yesterday. Now it is always the case for me that the doubts and inner opposition that must quite understandably be asserted against the way of looking at things today are driven out even more strongly, I would say, from the inner being when this spiritual foundation is given, and that I with regard to medicine, I have a little hope that it is indeed the case in this field that if the remedies help when used and it can be seen from the remedies that there is something behind the matter, we will be forgiven for the theoretical basis. So in this area in particular, if it is not expressly requested, I am somewhat reluctant to provide the theoretical basis. For the time being it must sound even more fantastic, although it is as exact as mathematics, as that which can be said about the practice of remedies. Nevertheless, since it is desired, I will not only give a brief explanation at the end, as I had intended, but I will say something about this theoretical justification right at the starting point today.

The point is that, through the admirable progress of our natural science, infinite things have been achieved in relation to the knowledge of the external physical-sensual world, but that precisely this extraordinarily significant knowledge of the external physical-sensual world has led away from grasping the human being in his total entity.

What can be grasped with the laws of nature that are being explored out there in nature today, whether through observation or experiment, does not go further in the case of man than to comprehend the sensory organization, namely that which is incorporated into man like physical apparatus as senses, and that which is the mechanics of movement. The further one really penetrates into the nature of man, the more everything else recedes, so that the external laws of nature apply less and less. Of course, I still have to be brief, so I can only hint at things in aphorisms.

But it is well enough known that a human being actually consists, let us say, of at most ten percent or a little more of the physical and mineral substances that we know in a solid state, and that a human being is, by far, the largest part, let us say, of liquid.

In this liquid column, the impulses are again effective, which, mediated, for example, by the breathing process but also by other processes of the human organization, are processes that we actually only find in nature in freely moving air. And then, as a fourth factor, there are the heating processes. The laws of nature, with which we believe we can recognize the whole human being, can only be applied to that which is present in man in the same way as we find the sharply contoured, mineral-physical substances out in nature. Curiously enough, with these laws of nature we only recognize part of the sensory organization, or rather, because the sensory organization is mainly organized in the human head, part of the human head organization. The human head organization is namely the one that most closely resembles the physical world, the constitution of the physical world.

The human nervous system originates partly from the head. In any case, it is connected with the head organization in the human being, this nervous system. Now today we believe that the entire nervous system is connected with what we call the spiritual abilities in the human being. If you look at even a psychology that is only physiologically colored today, you will see that these psychologies actually only deal with the world of thoughts, the world of thoughts in connection with the brain and nervous system. The world of feelings and the world of will in man are, so to speak, only mentioned as something incidental, and it is believed that feeling and will are just as much connected with the nervous system as the world of ideas. This is not the case.

If I go back to the threefold human being, as I characterized it yesterday, I can say that only the actual faculty of imagination is connected with the human nervous system; the life of feeling is only indirectly connected with it. On the other hand, the life of feeling is directly connected with the rhythmic system.

And here we already have one of the points where, precisely because of its admirability in other fields, today's natural science has completely blocked the path from the physical organization of man to his spiritual organization.

The truth of the matter is that the entire emotional world directly engages the rhythmic organization, in the broader sense as I characterized it yesterday. And the nervous system serves only to mediate our feelings so that we can have ideas and thoughts about them. So the emotional impulses directly engage the breathing and blood circulation. The nerves are the organic mediators only for what we have as perceptions of our feelings. And just as the human being's emotional world intervenes in the rhythmic system, so the will intervenes directly and completely in the metabolic-motor system. And what we have in the nerves or through the nerves are only the perceptions of what we will, the perceptions of what we have willed. |

Now you will say: that need not interest the physician any further. It is a theory about the human being, and one could disregard it in medical terms. But that is not the case at all. It is not the case when one sees the consequences for today's medical view that arise from the prejudice that the nervous system is directly associated with the entire soul life.

Today, as is well known, a distinction is made between the so-called sensitive nerves, which are said to go from the center to the senses and convey sensory perceptions, and the so-called motor nerves, which are said to have something to do with the will.

In truth, there are anatomically and physiologically metamorphosed nerves, but there is only one kind of nerve. Each nerve is only a physical mediator of perception. And those nerves that we today call motor nerves are no different in function from the so-called sensitive nerves. While the sensitive nerve goes to the senses in order to perceive the outer world, the so-called motor nerve, which is also nothing other than an inner sensitive nerve, goes inward and conveys the perceptions that I have, for example, when I move a limb, that I have when I have to somehow carry out an unconscious inner movement. The nerve is only the mediator of perception for something external or internal. There are not two types of nerves, non-sensitive and motor nerves. For my part, the terminology is then unimportant to me, whether they are then called sensitive or motor, that is unimportant, but there is only one type and anatomically and physiologically something metamorphoses, there is only one type of nerve.

Of course I know that obvious objections can be raised against this view. But since I have been working on the development of this view of man for thirty-five years, I have really carefully examined all these objections. Every single fact that can be taken from the functioning or non-functioning of the nervous system, for example in the case of tabes dorsalis, every one of these facts, if it is really interpreted without prejudice, fits into the theoretical system that I have just explained to you. If you take today's interpretation of, say, tabes dorsalis, you will see contradictions everywhere. You can only come to terms with it if you know that there is only one kind of nerve and that the emotional world is not directly but only indirectly connected with the nervous system, that the emotional world directly influences the respiratory and circulatory systems and circulatory systems, and in the rhythmic system in general, that the will acts directly as a kind of metabolism, that unconscious will within us that underlies the overall metabolic process and which in turn metamorphoses into the conscious will that underlies the external conscious movements.

This was the first, I might say, the most overwhelming result that I have actually had for thirty years from the insights I have been able to gain about man. I did not dare to express it until 1917, because it is actually relatively easy to express any scientific result that differs little from the habits. On the other hand, it is really not easy, I might say, to go against the judgment, which seems so well-founded that there are two kinds of nerves, to proceed somehow in the world. And only when I could be certain that there is no scientific fact today that would contradict this, that could not be categorized within this view of the uniformity of the nerves, did I dare to express it in 1917, after three years of working on the development of this view.

But this view has a completely different consequence. Take just this fact: that the emotional impulses directly intervene in the rhythmic system, the will impulses directly intervene in the metabolic-movement system, then you have in the will system and in that which then further affiliated to the will system, in the human being's feeling system, we can only grasp this in a spiritual way, in that we can only grasp feelings as spiritual entities. And in these you have the impulses for, for example, circulation. And you get away from something that is really not easy to get away from.

Today, physiology, on which our entire medical way of thinking is based, seeks the actual motor for blood circulation in the heart, and the heart is seen as the organ that sends out the impulses to drive the blood through the organism. The opposite is true. The blood is moved through the organism by the spiritual being of the person, which directly engages the metabolism through the will organization, the circulation through the feeling impulses, and the breathing through the rhythmic system. This entire inner movement, this entire inner rhythmic activity comes directly from the spiritual being, and the heart, the activity of the heart is not the cause of the blood circulation, but it is the result of the blood circulation, the result of the movement of the fluids. The heart actually only expresses itself in its own movements, as it is inwardly stimulated and moved by the movement that actually comes from the spiritual being.

These are two things that must gradually be laid at the foundation of medicine as the basis of physiology: the view of the uniformity of the nerves and of the fact that the entire nervous life is only related to the life of the mind, and then, on the other hand, the movement of the liquid and air-shaped elements in the human being directly from the spiritual, so that the movement of the heart appears as a consequence of the rhythmic movement in the human being, not as its cause.

I still vividly remember the wild passions that I once aroused in a railway carriage on the line between Trälleborg and Stockholm when I expounded this heart theory to a Swedish doctor. The man was plunged into a terrible turmoil of passions. I can well understand how these things fit into what we are accustomed to thinking. But only in this way does one open the door from the physical human being to the spiritual human being. For in the moment when you have two kinds of nerves, one kind of nerve goes from sensory perception to the center, as a physical organization from the sense to the center. From the center the will nerve goes. The motor nerve also materially transmits that which now appears as will. You do not get out of the material at all. By constructing two kinds of nerves that do not exist — there is only one kind of nerve — you have closed the door to the spiritual in man. And that is what the admirable natural science, which is so great for the outer man, has brought for the human being. It has gone so far as to replace reality with a purely imagined theory, the purely imagined theory that there are two kinds of nerves, while the motor nerves are also sensitive nerves and are only there to perceive the inner movements. On the other hand, it makes the heart into a kind of pump, a physical apparatus that causes the rhythmic circulation of the human being through a kind of automatism. Then it deletes itself by transferring the entire cause of the rhythmic movements of the human being into this physical automaton, the heart, erasing the connection between the rhythmic system and also between the metabolic system and the spiritual essence of the human being.

This has been the shutting of the gate to the spiritual man, to the spiritual essence of man, that on the one hand the theory of the twofold nerves has been established, and on the other hand the heart theory, which does not allow the heart to be what it is, but makes it a physical motor for blood circulation, while in truth it is only the expression of the blood that is really moved by the spiritual human being.

This has significant consequences. Because only by seeing in this way, how the nervous organization is actually incorporated into the human being, can you relate the nervous organization in the right way, let us say, for example, in relation to the organization of the digestive system. The digestive system belongs to the system of the human being, which I have called the metabolic-movement system, and the nervous system is polar opposite to it.

Now let us look at the human being in relation to the one and the other system. In relation to the metabolic system: external substances are absorbed. The essential thing for the digestive system is the activity that is now triggered when external substances are introduced into the body. What the human organism is compelled to do because a foreign body enters it, which it has to transform, which it has to metamorphose, what the human being must therefore do: that is what is important, that is what this process comes down to in digestion, and this process stops at a certain stage. At the moment when this process, which initially progresses, comes to a standstill in the process of overcoming the forces of the external food, the impulse of excretion occurs. And the excretion occurs here in relation to the metabolic system in such a way that this excretion takes place directly outwards. We must therefore understand the metabolic-movement system in such a way that, firstly, the impulses of the human organism that are related to the will, the will directly intervenes in the metabolism, that these impulses, which are related to the will, the overcoming, the constitution of matter as it is outside, push it to such an extent that it reaches a certain point. Then it is excreted, excreted in all the ways that are known. But the excretion takes place outwards.

But that part of the digestive activity that is driven by the whole organic process into the head organization, that is, into the organization where the nerve-sense system is not exclusively, but preferably localized, not only goes only to this point in the human organism, to which the process goes in the metabolism-movement system, but what digestion is for the head organization is carried further, in that excretion no longer takes place externally, but internally. And what is the result of this internal elimination, which is deposited in the human being itself? That is the nervous system. The nervous system is the system in the human organism that actually owes its substantial content to an internal elimination, but which remains in the organism, is not expelled outward, and of course only remains in the organism up to a certain point, and there, through the plastic plastic forces of the first invisible entity of the human being, the first supersensible entity of the human being, the so-called etheric or life body, through the plastic forces, through the formative forces of this etheric or life body.

So that one has to distinguish, in addition to the physical body of the human being, this first supersensible entity, the etheric or life body, which is actually only dynamic, not material, only dynamic. These dynamic effects are present throughout the world in the same way, in the human being in a special way.

This formative body contains the formative forces that now shape those excretion products into the wonderfully constructed brain, indeed into the wonderfully constructed nervous system.

Dear attendees, I call upon you to examine without prejudice everything that can be said histologically, embryologically, or in terms of developmental history or evolution about the description, I mean, for example, of an embryonic cell and a nerve cell, to examine all this without prejudice and you will find that it cannot be in agreement with any other theoretical basis than the one I have just discussed.

And so one can really be, I would say, a very conscientious skeptic about what spiritual research, which I represent, says otherwise. It says that one can come to a kind of exact clairvoyance, an exact examination of this supersensible. I have described how to examine the supersensible exactly in my book, which has been translated into English as Initiation. It is precisely through such investigations of the supersensible that one comes to the conclusion that what no longer follows the physical laws of nature, but is actually a kind of artistic activity in nature, that one pursues these plastic, these plasticizing forces, which are primarily active in the human head organism, and which form those material entities in this head organism that would otherwise be driven outwards as excretory impulses.

So the strange thing that emerges from this approach is that we actually see a sum of degradation processes in our nervous system, and that the function of our nervous system actually consists of nothing more than degradation processes, because it is excretion that has been driven beyond a certain point and is plastically formed matter that has been formed after excretion.

This gives the fundamental difference between an organ that belongs to the nerve-sense organization and an organ that belongs to the digestive organization. An organ that belongs to the nerve-sense organization is much more advanced in evolution, is in a descending evolution. An organ that belongs to the metabolic-limb organization is only in an ascending evolution, goes to a certain point and from that point on promotes excretion.

These are the things that show us what the organs are like in their healthy state, but they are also the basic conditions for recognizing how the organs behave in their diseased state. And finally, these are the foundations that lead to the realization of the remedies in their connection with the disease process in reality. Let us make this clear with an example.

The process that takes place in our brain or, one could say, in the entire nervous system, this process, which develops matter up to a certain point, then breaks it down and in turn forms the breakdown products, so to speak the impoverished products, this process takes place in our nervous system. And this process of degradation, not assimilation, this process of dissimilation, not assimilation, this process of degradation, is the basis of our ideas. Our ideas are actually based on the fact that, with regard to our nervous system, we undergo a kind of atomic dying in every moment of our lives, which is only ever suspended by the building processes. One might say that in the moment of dying, everything that is distributed throughout a person's entire life on earth is compressed in the ongoing process of decomposition of the nervous system.

If one can study these processes, whereby one is dealing with a functioning of material forces up to a certain point, then with a breakdown, then one says the following: How do we actually think as human beings? How are we spiritual beings? Through the same forces through which we, say, enter into life through embryonic development? Not at all! Our physical system cannot develop in a straight line in order for us to be human, but from a certain point on it must undergo a living development, a devolution must occur. And it is in this devolution, not in evolution, that the basis is given for our spiritual activities.

Consider the consequences of such a view. It is believed that something like the nervous process is an ascending process, and as such, as an ascending process, like the growth process or like the nutrition process, it is the basis of thinking, of imagining. That is not possible at all. The basis of imagination is a process of decomposition. Matter must first be destroyed and the products of destruction must be formed plastically so that they can provide the basis for the functioning of the spiritual in us, for thoughts. We must first destroy our material basis; we must, so to speak, first make holes in the brain so that we can think. So it is not that the ability to think is based on the organic forces of growth, but rather that in order for the spirit to move into our organization, it is necessary that this organization first undergo a process of degradation, a process of destruction, a partial killing process.

Then, when you see this clearly, you come to the conclusion that here is a road, it has rained, it has a soft ground, cars drive over it; I see the ruts. But let us now assume that some being came down from Mars, had never seen a car, the cars were gone, and it only saw the ruts. He examines the furrows, goes into the earth and says: Below the surface of the earth, in the interior of the earth, there are forces that have made the furrows from below. — We cannot blame the being for seeking the reasons for the furrows in the earth's interior, only they do not lie therein, but in the wagons that have driven over them and made the furrows.

It is more or less the same with our brain. You believe that this is an organizational process of our organs outwards; while the furrows of our brain are diggings of mental and spiritual life. And we now come to the conclusion that we only use our physical body in relation to its nervous-sensory organization as the counterforce, as the resisting force, in order to carry out spiritual activity. Just as you can trace every track of the car up there that has driven here or there – and you can deduce a lot from it, there is always a trace of something the car has done – so you can, of course, explain all thinking from the brain. That is precisely the wonderful illusion of materialism: one should not say that one should not explain it from the brain; on the contrary, one can explain all thinking and the life of imagination from the brain, but because it is buried by the spiritual life.

If you follow this process, which is a process of decomposition, and then go from the human being out into the great cosmic process, you have the same processes out there. And you have the process that takes place in man today, but only remains - if I may express it this way - in the status nascendi, in the moment of its origin, this process, which takes place in the degradation of the material underlying the nervous system, this process, which is only arrested in the status nascendi, you have it cosmically present in nature in the formation of silicic acid, everywhere it occurs in nature. Therefore, if you prepare a remedy from silicic acid in the right way, which presents the same process out in the cosmos, only that there the process continues and then comes to a halt at a later point, while in the human head it is suspended in the nascency state, if you out there in the corresponding way for the preparation and administer it to the person in the appropriate way, then you take this process away from a body that has become weak in its etheric body in such a way that it cannot carry out this process, through the remedy. Now, the remarkable thing about silicic acid is that when we bring it through the substances we add to it and through the processes by which we process it, when we bring it to the head in the entire human organizational process, it can actually take from the human being that which he cannot do through his inner organizational powers because of an organic weakening.

So you are looking directly at what is going on in the human head. But you have to see the human head in connection with the spiritual impulses. And you look at what is going on outside in the cosmos in the formation of silicic acid, and you recognize that in the silicic acid process, fixed in silicon, in Silicea, you have something that you can organize into the human being, thereby relieving him of what he cannot do without it. But in so doing, you call upon the innermost organization of the person, so that it can do on its own what has been taken from it for a period of time.

Thus, spiritual insight reveals what function silicic acid actually performs in the human organism when the organism itself cannot perform this function. This is the fundamental insight that arises when one sees through the entire human organization and also its connection with external nature. One need only ask: What does not happen in any part of the human organism and what should happen?

If you then know from nature what the process is that is missing in that part of the human organism, pathology is immediately the real basis of therapy. And answering each question in the pathology correctly is immediately the therapeutic answer.

This is what the possibility of proceeding in such a way means that one says: Now, I am producing a remedy. By seeing the context, I can predict how the remedy will work. If it actually works that way, then it is a verification, not mere empiricism, but a verification.

Look everywhere to see how the external sciences do it. If one is able to predict what should happen through some theoretical view, then one does not look at the multitude of cases that verify, but if one sets up the conditions correctly and what was predicted comes true, then one initially considers what one assumed to be verified. And particularly in practical work it is important that such a verification occurs, because practice in this field always shows whether our predictions are right or not. So what can be achieved by directing human knowledge from mere physical nature to spiritual nature is that we learn to foresee the processes we observe in pathology in a therapeutic treatment in the same way that we would otherwise foresee an external natural process in the laboratory or in a physics cabinet. If it occurs as we have predicted, then we have understood the matter. Thus, we extend what is truly scientific in the way we are accustomed to doing in physics, while in the biological sciences, and especially in their practical therapeutic application, we can clearly see today that a mere empiricist method is at work. It is therefore not a matter of having less science, but of having more science in order to arrive at a truly rational, that is, also transparent, understanding of the connection between pathology and therapy.

It is already alarmingly late. Therefore, I will be obliged to summarize some things in a shorter, final part, which may shed some light on the therapeutic side of what I have said.

If we consider this organization of the sensory nervous system, which is mainly concentrated and localized in the human head, we find, in view of what has been said, that it essentially underlies the life of thought, the life of imagination. But what is it that man calls his life of thought? It is that which plays into consciousness from the actual power of thoughts, and that which the human being actually perceives in such a way that he speaks quite instinctively and involuntarily of how the thought is not actually a reality. The thought that is experienced is powerless. The thought that is experienced is basically only present in an imagistic existence.

On the other hand, this life of thought has another side, an essentially different side, and we can, I would say, easily bring before our soul what other side this life of thought has if we merely bear in mind that this phenomenon, after consciousness, is not yet present in the very young child. On the other hand, the other side of this life of thought is very much present in the very young child. This is the real dynamizing, plasticizing power of the life of thought. We have one side of the life of thought, which comes to manifestation in ordinary consciousness in the forms of images, thoughts and concepts, and we have, as it were, the power of thoughts directed backwards, which is identical with the plasticizing power I mentioned earlier. So that when we look at the life of human thinking in its connection with the whole human organism, we must actually say: what we perceive and directly experience of the life of thought is like a mirror image in relation to a real object. The real thing about the life of thought is the inward-going formative forces.

And we see these inwardly active formative forces at work most powerfully in the very young child, who does not yet have a conscious life of thought. It is precisely when a person is still a child that the greatest work is being done on the development of the organ that will then become the basis of the life of imagination itself.

We dare to speak of a latent warmth and of a warmth that appears, of an appearing warmth. We know that through certain processes a bound warmth can be released, coming out of the substance in which it was bound, was latent. We dare only not yet to speak in the same way of the fact that in the child the conscious life of imagination is gradually driven out of the unconscious life of imagination, and that this unconscious life of imagination in the child works most vividly on the plastic material that has been excreted in order to bring about the nervous system through its plasticizing power. This plasticizing power then lasts for the whole human life, being strongest in childhood. And thus we see the first supersensible in man.

Supersensible are the thoughts, but they are actually only the images that are experienced; but supersensible are also the forces that now form the actual organ of thought, the forces working on the nervous system.

But one would like to say that this is only the part of the supersensible human being that is closest to the physical event, to the physical process. It is something that looks at itself, I would say, like that which stands between the physical body and the soul. But if we look at the rhythmic system, which, as I said, is directly related to the emotional life of the human being, we see something higher at work in this rhythmic system, and we see in the rhythmic system not just an etheric plastic at work, so to speak, but an etheric plastic that is ensouled. And in its innermost part, rhythm is precisely this remarkable interweaving of the process that we have seen on the one hand in the digestive-motor system, in the metabolic-motor system, where the evolution of the material process is brought to a certain point, where the material process then wants to excrete, while in the nervous process it excretes inwardly.

If we now imagine the whole process in such a way that it is, as it were, guided as a metabolic process up to a certain point, then excretion arises, but is immediately repressed, so that the whole process constantly oscillates back and forth between a metabolic process and a degrading nervous process, then you have the basic type of that rhythmic process that underlies all rhythmic processes. It is connected with an activity of the human being, of the supersensible, of the spiritual human being, which emanates from the ensouled etheric process, from the ensouled ether life, so to speak.

And if we look at breathing, at blood circulation, at something that takes place in the sphere of rhythmic processes, we have this, as it were, in contrast to the mere etheric process, higher activity of an ensouled etheric process in our rhythmic processes. These can now in turn be assessed in connection with the processes in the cosmos.

We see how, where it should not go beyond its limits, the metabolism goes beyond its limits, so that it becomes a nervous process in the wrong place, so to speak, in the wrong organ of the human being. It certainly looks fantastic, but it corresponds to reality. If, within the metabolic system, the actual metabolic system, the metabolic process leads beyond the point that I have characterized, where it should lead to excretion, and, as it were, passes over into the nerve process in the wrong place, then the disease arises, which appears in the various forms of typhoid fever. So we have to say: typhoid diseases are nervous processes occurring within the metabolic process, nervous processes that naturally only occur as processes and cannot lead to the actual formation of a nervous system. The question now is: how do we approach such a process?

Here we again look out into the cosmos, and we find in the cosmos that remarkable substance which is naturally contained in the cosmos as a process but is retained in antimony ore. Actually, the minerals, the ores, are processes that have been firmly retained.

This antimony is a remarkable mineral, a remarkable ore. It always begins to crystallize, as it were, forming shapes that are spiky, wire-shaped figures. It almost looks like a plant or moss trapped in the mineralization. But it also has other properties. If we subject this antimony to a certain electrolytic process and apply what we obtain from it to the cathode, it only needs a very light touch with a metal tip to produce a small explosion.

And again, if we cause this antimony to burn under certain circumstances, and collect the smoke on certain surfaces, we obtain the wonderful antimony mirror, a deposit of the antimony ore that has passed through a certain type of combustion process, producing smoke, and has deposited the smoke. We get, through a process to which we can subject the antimony, a kind of continuation of the process that we see in the antimony as it occurs in nature.

When we now obtain this antimony level – and the extraction of the antimony level* is something very important within our pharmaceutical laboratory – when we obtain this antimony level, we approach those forces that have a regressive effect on such processes, which lead from within the metabolic system into the nerve formation processes. I would like to say that the antimonizing forces turn this process in the metabolism, which wants to overshoot its target, back to its target. And we get a reproduction of the rhythmic process by driving back the organic process that goes too far, through the antimony that has been brought to the antimony level.

In this way, if we use this antimonizing power correctly, we can directly destroy this, I would like to say nerve-forming process at the wrong place, stop it, return it to its correct place and, by grasping the actual typhoid process, by looking at nature, we can see which process leads back this pathological process, the corresponding therapeutic process.

So that we are always able, by simply observing the pathological processes in nature, to find either the supportive or, as I said yesterday, the counteracting processes and thus in fact to bring about the remedies in a very rational way.

We can truly hope that what has already brought us success to a very great extent, but which is only now actually in its completion, namely the search for a cure for carcinomas, can also be brought to an end.

If one has to say that the metabolic process can be driven beyond its goal, so that it leads to the nervous process, so to speak, carries out the nervous process, the nerve-forming process, in the wrong place, something else can occur. Not only can the tendency to form nerves arise in the human organism in the wrong place, but the tendency to cause processes that otherwise only occur in the sensory organs can arise in the wrong place. There the metabolism is driven even further than just to the point where it wants to occur as nerve formation; there the metabolic process is driven to the tendency to form a sensory organ in the wrong place in the human organism. And this tendency underlies carcinoma.

However skeptical one may still be about this today, the more and more one proceeds, especially if one proceeds, I would say, with this guideline histologically and so on in the examination of carcinoma, one will see that carcinoma is based on a sense organ that wants to develop in the wrong place. Of course, this is very approximate and rough, but the process that should actually only be active during the formation of the sensory organ underlies it.

And now the question is: how can we drive this process back to the point where the metabolism should actually end and immediately lead not to deposition but to immediate excretion?

And here the healing process presents itself to us by using the sap of various types of Viscum, and not, as some have objected, because it is based on an amateurish idea, but on the contrary, because it is based on a real understanding of the process that actually takes place when mistletoe forms as a parasitic plant here or there, say, on one tree or another. There is something extraordinarily complicated at work here.

If we examine the process that, roughly speaking, underlies the formation of wood, the emergence of the tree from the common herbaceous plant, from the plant that is not yet lignified internally, if we can see this process of becoming a tree from the plant in the right way, then this process is cosmically a very, very strange process. We are dealing with the earth's surface when we have an ordinary herbaceous plant that has not yet become woody, that is not becoming a tree. The root actually grows intimately together with the earth's surface; it belongs, so to speak, to the earth's surface, because there is also a continuous metabolism with the earth's surface. Then the herb grows with the leaves and the flower grows out of it. It then passes into the atmospheric influences and so on.

Now, today we are looking at - I have to draw on a kind of biological geology here - the inorganic part of the earth's soil as if it were something absolute. But everything that we have as mineralized in the earth's soil is originally a secretion. If we proceed as today's geology does, then we certainly do not come to any knowledge of the earth's formative process, because we abstract out of the earth's formative process the mere mineral basis. It is as if we were to present geology today as a finished system, as if we were to present the mere human skeleton and claim that it can have an existence in itself. The human skeleton can only have an existence as a separate, I would say mineralized, entity. A skeleton cannot arise by itself. Nor can a skeleton be considered in isolation, only in connection with the human being as a whole.

Thus, what geology gives can only be considered in connection with the living organic and spiritual earth. We do not have something original in the geological formations before us, but we have something before us that is isolated. In fact, the process of coal formation is only the simplest, most elementary process of mineralization. But everything, all the slate formations, all the crystalline formations, everything is secreted, is excreted, is, so to speak, that which is mineralized out of an originally undifferentiated organic spiritual substance.

These things are so difficult to defend today because, one might say, the counter-arguments are so obvious. They are almost self-evident, the counter-arguments, and they are so easy to see through, the counter-arguments. It is actually so terribly easy today to calculate – approximately, of course, no one claims that it is certain – how many millions or hundreds of millions of years one has to go back to this or that geological formation. This is a method that seems to be extraordinarily exact, but it is a method just as if I observe the small changes my heart undergoes within a month; now I try to calculate how much that is in three years. It is exactly the same thing. I can now calculate what my heart will be like in three hundred years, and I can calculate a state in which my heart was three hundred years ago, only that I myself was not yet there! The calculation is quite correct, the conclusion is correct, impeccable logic, only it is not realistic. Likewise, the calculations of geology are flawless, completely logical, only they are not realistic, because the earth was just as little there millions of years ago as when I calculate my own formation as a physical human being three hundred years ago. The calculation is correct in geology, but the earth was just not there before these three hundred million years.

And so a higher way of looking at things must be adopted. It sees something deposited in everything that is mineral. When the plants emerge from the ground, we have the mineral. When the tree arises instead of the usual herbaceous plant, the development of the tree trunk with its lignification is a throwback, an atavism to an earlier state in which the whole earth was. So just as we have other atavistic organs, we see in the development of the tree an atavism to an earlier state of the earth.

If now Viscum grows on the tree, then we have something growing inside the soil that is not the immediate soil, because that is a late product, it is a product of deposition, a product of separation. Instead, in the Viscum we have something that grows in an earlier state of the earth. But then again, if we pursue the matter further, we must also find that man has taken up the tendency to form a sense in his evolution last. We find that by observing the mistletoe formation process, we find a process from a very early period of the earth.

If we introduce this process into the human organism, namely by injecting it directly into the circulation process, then we transport the person to an earlier stage of their existence on earth, of their evolution, and in this way we work against these processes, which are the latest processes.

However, it must be quite clear that these are first of all the abstract thought-constructions or at the most also the abstract constructions of clairvoyant seeing. It is seeing, but it is not yet complete overview.

If we take directly what is active in mistletoe in the mistletoe process and introduce it to human beings, it changes too much, as I said yesterday for other things. And so we are now trying to process what is alive in the mistletoe formation process using a very complicated machine that develops a centrifugal and a radial force, develops a centrifugal force at a tremendous speed. The construction was not that easy. So that one can actually transform that which is effective in the mistletoe process into a completely different aggregate process and thereby use the tendencies in the mistletoe-forming force in a more concentrated way than it appears today, when the mistletoe process is a decadent process.

And so we will try to make more and more progress with this anti-carcinogenic agent in particular, which has already been developed to a certain degree of perfection and has also already produced certain results. However, it will only be fully developed and can only be given its final verification when this, I would like to say, laboratory process with the centrifuge – it is now ready – is fully developed to its end. And in this way, too, we will try to get at the carcinoma disease in an ever better way.

In a similar way, we are trying to get at the tuberculosis processes, the various organ processes, and so on, with our various means – the time has gone too far for me to explain this in more detail, but I will discuss the principles. We use the remedies in different ways, as I have already indicated, by introducing them directly into the metabolic system or by injecting them into the circulatory system, where they act differently again, or by adding them to baths and the like, where they act more on the sensory process from the outside.

We also use, for example, so-called eurythmy therapy, where we allow movements that lie within the human organism to be carried out. If you look at a human hand without prejudice, you will never say that this human hand can ever be at rest; the shape of the hand itself is only the movement that has been held. The hand is movement. In fact, every human limb is designed for movement. If I carry out the individual movements that correspond to its formal qualities, I may be able to use the movement to have a healing effect on the formal qualities. This is the kind of eurythmy therapy that is related to artistic eurythmy, an artistic presentation of which will take place tomorrow at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. But this eurythmy is thoroughly developed in the physiological sense in eurythmy therapy. Such eurythmy therapy in turn leads to what I would now like to call the external therapeutic measures practised in the Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim.

And so it is precisely in this Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim, which, as I mentioned yesterday, is under the excellent direction of Dr. Wegman, who is present here today, that we are trying to use everything that can be known about the spiritual human being, in addition to what science currently knows about the physical human being, for therapy in a rational sense.

And for this we had to incorporate the Clinical Pharmaceutical Laboratory into the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim, so that it can produce remedies in the same way as they arise from a true knowledge of the human being.

Now, I have tried, as best I could, to give a few brief aphorisms to show how, in this way, I do not want to oppose modern medicine, as I said, but how this medicine, in an equally scientific sense as it works in its present field, can be further extended into those areas of the human organism where the spiritual intervenes in this human organism. And the irregularity that arises as a form of illness through the incorrect intervention of the spiritual, through the intervention of the unconscious spiritual that does not correspond to the organism, must also be included in the thinking that must be total medical thinking. Little by little, medical thinking must come to see in man not only a physical being, not only physical processes in his activities, but purely physical processes only in one part of the human being, and in the far greater part of the human organism, to see something in the human organism in which the spiritual directly intervenes, which the human being has in him from the spiritual world just as he takes his material from the physical material world in the form of food and other things. Only then, when the whole human being is looked at in this way in a physiological sense, will it also be possible to look at the whole human being in a pathological sense. But this holistic view of the human being in its pathological context, inseparably linked with pathology, provides a real therapy, because one gets to know the relationship between the human being and his cosmic environment, and one can then find the healing remedies from the cosmic environment not just through empirical trial and error, but through a proper insight and understanding of the connection between the human being and the cosmos. This will create a form of therapy that will not have an abyss between itself and the pathology, but will form a whole with the pathology.

And that was what many physicians longed for in the anthroposophical movement and which this detailed approach, I might say, within this spiritual-scientific movement, which has made its mark in the field of medicine, was intended to remedy.

I hope my aphoristic remarks have not become too unclear. But when one has to present something briefly, one still wants to present the overarching principles. Sometimes the individual suffers as a result. But hopefully I have at least been able to provide some individual inspiration in these remarks.

Since I was asked to speak about the therapeutic principles which have developed out of the anthroposophical view of the world, I will gladly meet this request. However, it is difficult to be brief, especially about this kind of subject matter which is so extraordinarily extensive. In one brief lecture, which can only be aphoristic, one can hardly develop correct ideas of what is important. In addition, certain deliberations must be undertaken in such an attempt which are quite removed from what people generally think about. Nevertheless, this evening I will attempt to present the relevant issues in as generally comprehensive a manner as possible.

The fact that within our anthroposophical movement there is also a medical-therapeutic endeavor is certainly not based upon our desire as anthroposophists to participate in everything and to stick our noses, so to speak, into everything. That is absolutely not the case; but as the anthroposophical movement sought to make its way through the world, physicians too found their way to this movement. They are seriously striving physicians; and a relatively large number of such physicians had come to a more or less clear awareness of how uncertain, how vacillating the views of contemporary, official medicine actually are, of how in many cases the foundations for the actual comprehension of processes of illness and healing are lacking. These foundations are lacking in official medicine because today the claims for scientific validity are actually based exclusively upon generally accepted natural science. This natural science in turn believes itself to be moving with certainty only with what it can determine in a mechanical, physical or chemical manner from outer nature. It then applies the discoveries made through physics and chemistry about outer natural processes in order to come to an understanding of the human being. But even if there is a kind of concentration, a microcosmic concentration of all world processes within the human being, nevertheless, the outer physical and chemical processes never proceed within the human organism in the same form in which they proceed outside in nature. Man takes the substances of the earth into himself, substances which are not merely passive, but which are actually always permeated by nature processes. A substance only appears outwardly as if it were resting within itself. In reality, everything lives and weaves in the substance. Thus man also takes into his organism these processes, this living and weaving activity, proceeding chemically and physically in nature; but he transforms it immediately in his organism—he makes it into something different.

This something different, which develops out of the nature processes in the human organism, can only be understood if one attains a comprehensive observation of the human being based on reality. But contemporary natural science actually excludes from its realm what proceeds in the human being as intrinsically human. Even, for example, what proceeds as intrinsically human in the physical body is attributed exclusively to physical and chemical processes; for in the physical body of man nothing takes place which is not at the same time subject to the influences of etheric processes, of astral processes, of ego processes. But as natural science totally ignores these ego processes, these astral processes, this etheric living and weaving, it actually does not at all approach the human being. Therefore this natural science can not really look into the inner activities of the human being in order to comprehend how the outer chemical and physical processes continue to work in him: how they continue to work when he is healthy, and how they continue to work when he is diseased.

How shall it then be possible to properly judge the effects of medicaments, of a remedy, if one has not acquired an understanding for how some substance of nature which we introduce into the human organism, or with which we treat the human organism, continues to work in that organism.

It could indeed be said that the greatest progress imaginable in medicine in more recent times has actually only been made in the area of surgery where one is dealing with external mechanical manipulations, as it were. In contrast, in the area of actual therapy, there reigns great confusion—(this is not my judgment, but the judgment of those physicians who have become conscious of all this). The reason for this confusion is that the connection between any object of nature and its effect upon illness cannot be understood if, by virtue of a specific point of view which one has about natural science, one actually excludes the human being from scientific considerations.

Since anthroposophy strives to know the human being comprehensively—insofar as he is a super-sensible as well as a material being—it is also possible that anthroposophy can yield knowledge concerning the treatment of illnesses with various natural substances.

Fundamentally speaking, we are already confronting today a kind of boundary in medicine if we ask only for the actual nature of illness. What is illness? This question cannot be answered out of contemporary scientific knowledge. For, what, according to these natural scientific views, are all the processes which proceed in the healthy human being? From the head to the tip of the toes these are processes of nature. But then what are the processes which take place during illness in the liver, kidney, head, heart, wherever? What kind of processes are these? These are also natural processes! All healthy processes are processes of nature; all processes of illness are also processes of nature. Why then is the human being healthy with one sort of natural process and ill with the other sort of natural process?

It is not a matter of speaking in vague generalities: well, yes the healthy processes of nature are normal, but the sick processes of nature are not. One can get the impression that, if one doesn't know anything, there arises “at the proper time,” a word, a label for our ignorance.

What is actually going on when customary natural science is applied in approaching the human being? The predominant practice is not to look at the living being, but at the corpse; here and there a piece of the organism is sampled and then various abstractions are made about what kind of healthy or sick natural processes proceeded within it. Thus it actually doesn't matter whether one takes some kind of tissue out of the head, out of the liver, out of the big toe, or the like. Everything is finally reduced to the cell. Gradually histology, the study of tissues and cells, has actually become the most highly developed teaching of the human being. Of course, if one goes into the smallest parts and ignores all other forces, all other relationships, then, as at night all cows are grey, all organs are the same. The result is a benighted “grey cow science,” not a true science which acquaints itself with the uniqueness of the separate organs in man.

What must provide the basis there I actually dared to express only a few years ago. Although it is generally imagined that it is easy for spiritual science to come to its results, this matter has occupied me for more than thirty years. It is thought that one only needs to look into the spiritual world to find out everything, while it is difficult if one has to work in laboratories or in a clinic—there one must really struggle. In spiritual science it is only a matter of looking into the world of the spirit and then one finds out everything. It really isn't that simple. Thorough and responsible spiritual investigation demands more effort and above all more responsibility than the manipulations in the laboratory or in the clinic or observatories. And so it is that the first conception of what I will now briefly indicate in principle stood before me approximately thirty-five years ago. I was only able to speak about it a few years ago after everything was worked through and, above all, verified completely on the findings of the entire contemporary official natural science. It was under the influence of these principles of the membering of the human being that what I just told you about developed—this medical-therapeutic endeavor within our anthroposophical movement.

Even if we confront the human being as a solely physical being, we must definitely distinguish three members which differ one from another. These three different members can be labeled in the most varied ways, but we can best approach them if we characterize them by saying that one system of the physical being is the nerve-sense system which is primarily localized in the head. The second system is the rhythmic system, which encompasses respiration, blood circulation, the rhythmic activities of the digestive system, and so forth. The third system is represented in the interconnection between the movement system, the system of the limbs, and the actual metabolic system, This interconnection becomes immediately evident to you if you think of the fact that the metabolism is enhanced especially through the movement of the limbs and that inwardly the limbs are organically connected with the metabolic organs. That is directly evident also in anatomy. Just look at how the legs are continued inwardly into the metabolic organs and, similarly, how the arms are continued inwardly. Thus we can now distinguish the nerve-sense system, located primarily in the head; the rhythmic system, located primarily in the chest; and the metabolic limb system, located primarily in the limbs and the attached metabolic organs.

This membering, however, may not be done as a professor once did who wanted to ridicule the anthroposophical movement. He did not attempt to penetrate into what is actually meant with this membering. He said: these anthroposophists maintain that man consists of three systems: a head, a rump consisting of chest and abdomen, and limbs. Of course, in this manner it is easy to ridicule the matter.

What matters is not that the nerve-sense system is only in the head. It is primarily in the head, but it extends over the entire organism. The head organization spreads out through the entire organism. Similarly, the rhythmic system extends upwards and downwards through the entire organism. Spatially speaking the human being is entirely metabolic-limb system. If you move the eyes, the eyes are limbs. So these systems are not spatially next to one another; instead they interpenetrate one another. They totally interpenetrate and one must accustom oneself a little to an exact thinking if one wants to evaluate this membering of the human being in the right way.

Now both these systems, the first and the third, the nerve-sense system and the metabolic-limb system, are placed polarically opposite each other. What the one creates destroys the other. What destroys the other is created by the one. They thus work in completely opposite ways. And the middle system, the rhythmic system, establishes the connection between the two. There is a kind of vacillation, oscillation, between them, so that a harmony can always exist between the destruction of the one system and the construction of the other system. If, for example, we look at the metabolic system, we recognize that it naturally works with its greatest intensity in the lower body of the human being; but that which goes on within the human abdomen, or the lower body, must call forth the polar opposite activity in the head, in the nerve-sense system, when the person is healthy.

Imagine now that the activity actually inherent in the human digestive system intensifies so much that it extends right up to the nerve-sense system, so that the activity which should actually remain in the metabolic-limb system reaches over to the nerve-sense system. Then you have a natural process, so to speak, but you can see immediately how that natural process becomes an abnormal one. It should remain in the metabolic system, but breaks through, so to speak, upwards into the nerve-sense system.

That results then in the various forms of the illness treated by medicine today as insignificant, but not treated in that way by a large part of humanity because these various forms of illness are known everywhere. What develops is known as the various forms of migraine. In order to understand migraine in its various forms we must comprehend this process which ought only to take place in the metabolic system but which breaks through to the nerve-sense system so that the nerves and senses are so affected that the metabolism shoots into them instead of remaining in its own place.

The reverse can also take place. The process which ought to be most intensive in the nerve-sense system, and which is completely opposite to the metabolic process, can in a certain sense also break through to the metabolic system. Consequently an enhanced nerve-sense process takes place in the metabolic system where normally a merely subordinated nerve-sense process should be active. Thus what belongs to the head, as it were, breaks through into the lower body. If this happens then the dangerous illness develops which is known as typhoid fever.¹

Thus we can see how a fundamental understanding of this three-fold human being makes it possible for us to understand how a process of illness develops out of a healthy process. If our head, with its nerve-sense system, were not organized as it is, then we could never have typhoid fever. If our lower body were not organized as it is, we could never have migraine. The head activity should remain in the head, the lower body activity in the lower body. If they break through then such forms of illness develop.

And just as we can point to two especially characteristic forms of illness, so can we point to other forms of illness which always develop when an activity which belongs to one organ system asserts itself in another place, in another organ system.

If one proceeds only anatomically one merely observes the status of the smallest parts in the tissues of the organism. But one does not see the working of polar opposite activities. When studying the nerve cell you can only study that its organization is opposite to that of the liver cell, for example. If, however, you were able to look into the totality of the organism in such a way that it appears to you in its three-foldness, then you will also notice how the nerve cell is a cell which continually tends to dissolve, which continually tends to be broken down if it is healthy: and how a liver cell is something which continually tends to be built up if it is healthy. Those are polar activities. They work in the right way upon one another if they are appropriately distributed in the organism; they work incorrectly within one another if they penetrate into one another.

The rhythmic system is in the middle and always strives to create the balance between the two opposed polar activities of the nerve-sense system and the metabolic-limb system.

I would now like to select a special example to let you have insight into how one can find the relationship of a remedy which has been taken from nature with its forces to the health-giving and illness-generating forces active within man.

Let us direct our gaze to an ore which can be found in nature, so-called antimony. As soon as we look at it externally we see that it has an extraordinarily interesting property. Its form in nature is such that certain rods develop—stem-like, lance-like structures which lie next to one another—so that if we were to draw the ore schematically we could draw the following:

It grows almost like a mineral moss or a mineral lichen. One can see that this mineral wants to order itself into threads. One can see this even more clearly if we subject it to a certain physical-chemical process. Then the thread-like crystals become even thinner. It orders itself into clusters of very fine threads. Especially important, however, is what occurs when this antimony is subjected to a certain kind of combustion process. You get a white smoke which can then condense on the walls and becomes mirror-like. That is called the antimony mirror. It is hardly respected at all today but in older medicine it was widely used. This antimony mirror, which first arises out of the combustion process and condenses on the walls so that it shines like a mirror is something exceptionally important.

In addition there is another property. I will emphasize only this: if antimony is subjected to certain electrolytic processes and it is brought to the so-called electrolytic cathode, then it is only necessary (after the antimony was subjected to the electrolytic process on the cathode), to exert a slight action on it and a small antimony explosion will occur. In brief, this antimony has the most interesting properties.

If antimony is introduced into the human organism in a moderate dose one can study various processes which show how in fact the same forces which behave as I have just described experience a kind of continuation in the human organism and how they take on all kinds of forms of forces and effects within it.

I can naturally not explain all the details and proofs to you: I only want to briefly sketch for you what is inherent in these forms of activity. These processes which arise in the human organism occur especially strongly wherever blood coagulates. Therefore they strengthen or enhance the coagulation of blood. However, if we use those methods of study which are consistent with an understanding of the threefold human organism, we are permitted to gradually look into the human being and gain knowledge of how the separate systems behave in the different organs. If we look into the human organism in this way, we find that what lives in antimony lives not only outside in the mineral antimony, but also is active as a force-system in the human organism. This force system is always present in the healthy human organism. In the sick human organism it takes on forms of the kind which I have just explained to you.

This antimony process existing in the human organism is opposed in a polar way to another process. It is opposed to that process which arises where the plastically active forces, for example, the cell-forming forces occur. These are the forces which round out the cells, which form the cellular substance of the human organism. I would like to call these forces, because they are primarily contained in protein substance, the albuminizing forces. Thus we have in the human organism the forces which we find outside in human nature in antimony if we subject antimony, for example, to combustion, and bring about an antimony mirror. In addition we also have the opposing forces active, the albuminizing forces, which immobilize, which take away the antimonizing forces.

These two force systems, albuminizing and antimonizing, work against one another in such a way that they must be in a certain state of equilibrium in the human organism. One must now recognize that the process which I have described to you before in principle, and which lies at the basis of abdominal typhus, is essentially based on a disturbance of the balance between these two force systems.

In order to look properly into the human organism one must be able to take recourse to that which I have described to you from the most varied—although not medical—points of view in these morning lectures.

In them we have seen how man has not merely his physical body, but also an etheric body—a body of formative forces, an astral and an ego organization. And just yesterday I was able to explain to you how there is an intimate connection on the one hand between the physical body and the formative force body, and on the other, between the ego and the astral body. There is a looser connection between the astral body and the formative force body, for they separate every night.

This interconnection, which consists of a working into one another of the forces of the astral and etheric bodies, is radically disturbed in typhoid fever. In this illness the astral body becomes weak and is unable to work with a corresponding intensity into the physical body because it works for itself thereby bringing about that excess which presses downward, so to speak, the nerve-sense organization, which is primarily subject to the astral body. Instead of transforming itself into metabolic activity, it remains active as astral activity. The astral body works for itself. It does not work properly into the etheric body. The consequences are the symptoms of illness which give us the symptomatology of typhus.

Now that which occurs as antimony is active in such a way that antimony denies its mineral nature. It gets crystalline threads, so that even the antimony mirror, wherever it deposits, appears like ice-flowers in the window, thereby showing the inner force of crystallization as in nature. This force of crystallization, which becomes active in antimony, if it is properly incorporated into a remedy and introduced into the organism, works in such a way that it supports this organism enabling it to insert its astral body with its forces into the etheric body in the right way, so that it can bring these bodies again into the right connection.

With antimony prepared in a proper way into a remedy we support that process which opposes the typhus process. And just with this antimony remedy, to which other substances are added, one can battle against the illness by stimulating and supporting processes in the organism so that it unfolds its own, I would like to say, antimonizing force which has as its goal to call forth the proper rhythm in the working together of astral body and etheric body. Other substances must be mixed in to establish a proper connection to the organism depending on whether an illness takes one or another course.

Thus an anthroposophical consideration leads to the recognition of a relationship between what is active in the objects of nature, as I have shown you with the example of antimony, and that which is active within the human organism. You will be able to follow up this albuminizing, this plastically rounding force, and the other force which works linearly right into the germ cell.

Whoever has truly gained knowledge in this field—however uncomfortable it may be for him to say so, because he knows he will call forth hate and antipathy in certain people—and who thus looks into the operation of the human organism will consider the otherwise amazing and wonderful microscopic studies about the germ cell, exceptionally dilettantish. There people look externally at the egg cell, observe the development of the so-called centrosomes—you can read about that in any textbook about embryology,—without knowing how these albuminizing forces, which also rule throughout the entire human organism, are opposed, polarically opposed, to the antimonizing forces. The rounding of the egg cell as such is brought about by the albuminizing forces; the centrosomes, after fertilization, are called forth by the antimonizing forces.

That, however, goes on in the entire human body; and by preparing remedies in the right way, and knowing through the diagnosis where one must support the human organism, one introduces into this organism the forces which can work against a process of illness.

By bringing anthroposophical points of view into medicine a connection is established between the macrocosm and the human being. Naturally I would have to say much more about antimony if I wanted to scientifically explain it in detail, but I only want to point out general principles here. In addition I wanted to tell you about the processes which antimony is able to bring forth out of itself, which it has in itself, depending on how one treats it.

I could also show you now, as an example, the entire behavior within nature and its processes for that which we call quartz, or silicic acid. It is one of the constituents of granite. It is transparently crystalline and so hard that you can't score it with a knife at all. If we treat this substance in the proper way and administer it to the human organism—in the proper doses that are determined from the diagnosis—then it gains the characteristic of being able to support that which is to be active in the nerve-sense system, which the organism through the nerve-sense system is to bring forth as the intrinsic forces of this system. So what, by rights, the senses actually should do is supported by the remedy, which is prepared in the right way from quartz, or silica and administered in the proper doses. It is necessary then, depending upon the accompanying symptoms, to add still other substances, but here it is primarily a matter of the effect of that which lies in the silicic acid formation process. Thus if one brings this silicic acid formation process into the human organism, then a weak activity in the nerve-sense system is supported so that it then works with the proper strength. Now if this nerve-sense activity becomes too weak, then the digestive activity is able to penetrate through to the head and the migraine-like symptoms develop.

If one then supports the nerve-sense activity in the right way with a remedy which is produced in the proper manner out of silicic acid, the nerve-sense system becomes so strong in the person suffering from migraine that it can again press back the digestive process which broke through.

Naturally I am characterizing these matters somewhat crudely, but you will see what is significant here. What matters is to really be able to see through the healthy or ill human organism, not merely in accordance with its cellular composition but according the forces active in it, whether they work co-operatively, rhythmically or in opposition. Then one can look in nature for what in the human organism can fight against this or that process of illness.

Thus one can find, for example, how the process which is contained in phosphorus is in outer nature a process which, if introduced into the human organism, works in a supportive way upon a certain kind of inner disability of the human organism; namely, when the human organism becomes incapable of allowing to act in the right way certain forces, which should always work in the healthy organism. This is when a person has too little strength and cannot let certain forces be active within him which are a kind of organic combustion process which is always present in the transformation of substances in the human organism. This takes place in every movement, in all that man does, and also in what is active within organic combustion processes. Now the human organism can become too weak to regulate these organic combustion processes in the proper way, for they must be inhibited in a certain manner. If they are insufficiently inhibited, they develop an excessive activity. The organic combustion processes in themselves actually always have an immeasurable, unlimited intensity. If that were not so, an excessive fatigue would arise immediately, or one would be unable to keep moving. However, the organism must also continuously have the possibility of inhibiting the boundless intensity of the organic combustion processes.

If now these inhibiting forces are neither in an organ system nor in the entire organism, if the organism has become too weak to inhibit its organic combustion processes in the proper way, then there develops something which manifests itself as tuberculosis in the most various forms. The suitable nutrient soil for the bacilli is created through this organic loss of strength, through the inability of the organism to inhibit the combustion processes.

Nothing will here be said against the bacterial theory which to a certain extent is very useful. In the various ways by which bacilli arise here or there one can naturally find out many things; for purposes of diagnoses one can generally get a lot of information. In no way do I want to say anything against official medicine, except that it needs to be augmented and developed further when it arrives at certain boundaries—and it can be developed further when the points of view of anthroposophy can be applied to it.

If phosphorus is then introduced into the human organism, then these capacities of containing the organic combustion process are supported. But one must see to it that this containment can emanate from the various organ systems. Let us begin by looking at the system which primarily works in the bones. There the activity of phosphorus in the human organism must be supported in that one directs it towards the bones. That can happen when one combines the remedy phosphorus—in a way which becomes clear through a more exacting study of the matter—with calcium or a calcium salt. When dealing with tuberculosis of the small intestine one will mix some kind of copper compounds in the right dosage with the phosphorus. When dealing with a pulmonary tuberculosis, one will add iron to the phosphorus. But still other additions come under consideration since pulmonary tuberculosis is an exceedingly complicated disease. Thus you see that the possibility of a true therapy is based on how the chemical and physical processes continue to work on in the human organism.

Official medicine often starts out from the opinion that the working of the antimony forces outside in nature is the same as it is in the human organism, but that is not the case. One must be clear about how these processes work on in the human organism, and this can be seen if one applies actual anthroposophical insights to the experiments which must be done.

We have seen how antimony establishes the rhythm between the astral body and the etheric body. Now we can see how the forces which are active in quartz are especially suitable to reestablishing the proper relationship, when it has been disturbed, between the ego and the astral body, in order thereby to work in a healing way upon the nerve-sense system. We can also see how calcium—especially that calcium which is obtained from the calcium excretions of animals—provides remedies which establish the proper relationship between the body of formative forces, the etheric body and the physical body.

Thus one can say that a correct view of the human being leads to the use of calcium or something similar, namely, what is secreted from the animal organism,—oyster shells, for example—in order to establish the proper relationship between the etheric body and the physical body, which, if out of balance, always expresses itself in physical processes of illness. That is what one must reflect upon when preparing remedies from such calcareous or similar excretions.

When dealing with an arhythmic working together of the body of formative forces and the astral body, one must look for what is present in antimony, and also in numerous other metals. If one wants to use remedies prepared from plants, one must also look especially into those constituents which are contained in the middle parts of the plants, those which are particularly present in the leaves and stem, whereas those forces which correspond to the phosphorus process are contained primarily in the blossom organs of the plants. Those processes which correspond to the silicic acid process are contained in the root organs of the plant. Thus one finds relationships between the forces which are in the various parts of the plant and the human organism. The root forces have a definite relationship and connection to the human head and to the nerve-sense system; the leaves and the stem organs have a specific connection to the rhythmic system; the blossom organs have a special connection to the metabolic system.

If one therefore wants to give assistance in a simple way to the digestive, metabolic system, that can often successfully be done—after having made the diagnosis in the correct way—by choosing certain blossoms of which one makes a tea. In this way one can assist the digestive organs. If one wants to gain a remedy which works especially upon the nerve-sense processes, upon the head organization, one would have to extract the salts from the roots by a special extraction process.

Thus it is necessary to penetrate into nature on the one hand and into the human organism on the other. Then it is possible to really find the remedies in nature so that one can see how the two are connected. Otherwise one does things by trial and error in order to find out how something works only to discover that it is not valid, or to write up a number of cases where 90% or 70% showed a favorable result, but 40% were unsuccessful. Then the matter is statistically treated, and depending on what result the statistics yielded, a determination is made whether or not a particular remedy should be used.

Because of the brief time available I can only speak about these matters aphoristically in order to indicate how in fact, without succumbing to dilettantism or medical sectarianism, one can proceed strictly in accordance with science in approaching illness processes through remedies which come out of a full perception of man.

Just as the correct knowledge of natural substances and natural processes is important in order to create a remedy, so it is equally important to know the specific manner of application of the remedy.

One can either work upon the nerve-sense system in bringing about, in the right manner, the process of healing, or one can work on the rhythmic system, or on the metabolic-limb system. In order to work on these different systems it is essential to know how the method of treatment must be initiated, for almost every remedy can be used in three different ways. To begin with it can be taken orally. This makes it possible for a person to take up the remedy through the metabolic system, which then in turn works upon the other systems. Some remedies are meant to be used in just this way.

There are also, however, remedies which can be used in a way which allows them to work directly on the rhythmic system. (In this connection antimony will provide a good example for finding the proper method of treatment.) This is where administration by injection must be introduced. Injecting the remedy intravenously or sub-cutaneously is the mode of administration which can best work upon the rhythmic processes in man.

In those remedies used in ointments, or in baths, or even wherever there is a question of treating the human organism in an external, mechanical way, for example in massage, then one can count upon this method of treatment as working primarily upon the nerve-sense system.

One can thus work through every organ system in the most varied ways in an effort at working towards a healing process. Let us assume we have silica, or quartz. It makes quite a difference whether we prepare this remedy to be taken by mouth or to be injected. If we count upon the fact that it will be taken by mouth then we will be preparing it to work through the digestive system, and the digestive system in turn can send forces into the nerve-sense system. We are then introducing the quartz processes by detour through the digestive system. If, however, we see that more quartz processes need to be transmitted to the nerve-sense system by introducing them via the rhythmic system, via the blood and breath, then we inject the remedy and thereby attempt to heal by way of the rhythmic system.

If we want to work therapeutically by way of the digestive organs with aromatic ether substances contained in the blossom of the plant, then we will prepare a tea and introduce it into the gastro-intestinal tract by having the patient drink it. If we want to bring etheric oils which, through their aromatic properties, work directly upon the nerve-sense system—or working first upon the nerve-sense system and then into the rhythmic system—then we could make some kind of bath to which we add the juices of the blossoms. In this manner we work upon the nerve-sense system.

Thus we see how the healing effect of the different substances brought into a relationship to man depends on the various methods of application and treatment. This will become transparently clear if anthroposophical knowledge is more and more applied to bringing about a connection between nature processes and the human being. It can then become evident through anthroposophy which remedies one needs to apply and how one needs to apply them.

In this way something can be brought about in the laboratories within our clinical-therapeutic institutes and other endeavors in which physicians are involved making it possible that on the one hand, remedies and therapeutic methods can be tried out, and on the other hand, the remedies themselves can be prepared. We have such clinical institutes as well as chemical-pharmaceutical laboratories in Arlesheim, near Dornach, as well as in Stuttgart.

I must point here especially to the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim (now the Ita Wegman Klinik) which is under the exceptional direction of Frau Dr. Ita Wegman, who unfolds an activity full of blessing for that institute because she has that which I would like to call “the courage to heal.” It is evident that this courage to heal is necessary, especially if you look on the one hand into the complexity of natural processes out of which healing processes must be drawn forth, and on the other hand into the immense complexity of processes of illness and health in man.—If a physician confronts this vast field even if he only has a certain number of patients, then she or he is required to have courage in order to heal.

Attached to this Arlesheim Institute is the International Pharmaceutical Laboratory (now the Weleda) in which remedies are produced. They can be used today in the entire world. The pharmacy produces the remedies and it is up to others to find the ways and means to make use of them. That is the essential point. People must find the right ways and means to arrive at the right remedies without being dilettantes. Then contemporary science will not be negated; rather, it will be taken further, extended.

If this knowledge becomes widely known, the success of such an endeavor as the International Pharmaceutical Laboratory in Arlesheim will not be a problem. But it is difficult in the face of the prevalent, purely materialistic direction of medicine to bring into the world effective therapeutics which are based upon a full knowledge of man. To bring about a change one would have to count upon the insight of every person who has a heartfelt interest in the health of his fellow man.

In pointing to that which can be achieved through natural remedies and their appropriate application, I certainly do not want to exclude what can be achieved by more soul-spiritual processes of healing. In this realm one can make especially fruitful observations. If we now carry hygienic-therapeutic considerations—as always must be the case in a proper pedagogy—into the school, one can see how the manner in which one works upon the children in a soul-spiritual manner in instruction can have an effect on the health and illness of a person—if not immediately, then certainly in the course of life. When I give pedagogical lectures I naturally speak about these matters in greater detail. I will mention only one example: the teacher can proceed properly in relation to the memory of the child only if he expects neither too much nor too little. If he proceeds improperly, if he places too many demands on the memory in the eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh years of life, then he does not have the proper pedagogical tact. What the soul must go through in an excessive activity of memory, or artificially nurtured activity of memory, will live itself out later in life as all kinds of physical illnesses. It is possible to establish a connection between diabetes and erroneous methods in education in relationship to memory. So too can the use of memory in education to the opposite extreme also have unfavorable effects upon a child.

I can mention this only in principle, but one can see from it not only how the natural remedies work in health and illness, but also how the special manner in which the soul itself works can be significant to health and illness.

Starting from there one can also find one's way to those methods whereby we attempt, through purely soul-spiritual influences, from person to person,—which I naturally cannot describe in detail any more today—to bring about processes leading to healing. Especially in this realm, however, it is very easy to get into dilettantism. One can, for example, harbor the belief that the so-called mental illnesses can be most easily healed through spiritual influences (for example by discussion). However, mental illnesses especially distinguish themselves by the fact that one can hardly approach the ill person with rational discussion. As a matter of fact it is just that impossibility of rational exchange which closes off the soul against outer influences in the so-called mentally ill. But one will find over and again that especially in so-called mental illness—which actually has been, as such, incorrectly named—physical processes of illness are present in a hidden way somewhere. Before one wants to meddle in a dilettantish way with mental illness, one ought actually, with the proper diagnosis, to determine which physical organ is involved in the illness. Only then will one be working beneficially through a corresponding healing of the physical organism.

One can help physical illnesses much sooner through all kinds of soul-spiritual (mental-psychological) influences, This is being done today but generally in a dilettantish way. I will not go into that now, Especially in physical illness much benefit will come in this way and the outer process which is brought about through remedies and the like will be supported in different ways.

I can only indicate this, Those methods which are based on the foundation of anthroposophy certainly do not exclude therapeutic soul-spiritual influences; rather, they include them. You have evidence of this in the Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim-Dornach. Besides the physical-therapeutic methods you also find curative eurythmy.

This curative eurythmy consists in taking what you have seen here as artistic eurythmy and transforming it into health-giving movements for the person moving them, The vowel aspect is transformed so that the person makes healthy movements which are drawn out of eurythmy and are applied specifically in support of those forces which earlier I have called the albuminizing forces in man, while the consonant forces in many ways support the antimonizing forces, Thus it is possible through the working together of consonant and vowel eurythmy to bring about a balance between these two kinds of forces, And it can show there, if things are done properly, not in a dilettantish manner, how other healing processes, also in chronic illnesses, can be immensely supported through this curative eurythmy.

This curative eurythmy is actually based upon the fact that soul-spiritual processes are awakened through that which man does with his limbs. If one knows which movements want to come directly forth out of the healthy human organism, then one can also find the corresponding movements which will work in a healing way if one works back from the limbs, i.e. from the human movement, upon the processes of the inner organs.

In the Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim the possibility exists to look at this curative eurythmy and to see how it, as a therapy, can be a specialized branch within the entire therapeutic process, a therapy which can be discovered out of true anthroposophical knowledge of man. It would naturally be going too far to discuss details in this area. The principles are actually given in what I have presented to you.

Thus it has happened that in the most varied ways we have had to develop this therapeutic endeavor within the anthroposophical movement because those involved in therapy have approached us. It has been a demand arising from the condition of the times. It was so-to-speak demanded by contemporary civilization. Anthroposophy has only given the answers to questions which were posed to it.

I really could only present the principles aphoristically to you today. More has not been possible during the available time. If I wanted to present matters in their totality, then I would have to do what I refused to do two days ago during the lecture on eurythmy. I would have to invite you to stay here through the night and listen to me till tomorrow morning, until the morning lecture. But that is something that would make you sick, and it would certainly be inappropriate for someone who wants to speak about bringing health to make people sick in this way. Therefore I must send you home for a healthy sleep following this sketchy presentation.

• 1. A febrile illness of prolonged duration which is marked by hectic fever, delirium, enlargement of the spleen, abdominal pain, and a variety of systemic manifestations such as headache, diarrhea, skin lesions, and more.